NO LOVE FOR JOHNNIE (Ralph Thomas, 1961)

In a phenomenal performance that brought him best actor prizes at Berlin and from the British Academy, Peter Finch plays 42-year-old Johnnie Byrne, a just-reëlected Labour Party member of Parliament the reason for whose exclusion from his prime minister’s Labour Government takes time in coming to light. When he is finally told, it seems as though the explanation should have been obvious from the start—one of the few head-scratchers in an otherwise absolutely brilliant script. Mordecai Richler and Nicholas Phipps adapted the 1958 novel by former MP Wilfred Fienburgh. There isn’t a political moment in this film that fails to either absorb the viewer’s interest or convince. One isn’t left to wonder why the New York Daily News named No Love for Johnnie one of 1961’s ten best films.

There are two dovetailing main strands to the narrative, one political, the other romantic. Byrne considers publicly opposing his  prime minister regarding a rumored intention of foreign adventurism, on the grounds that the outcome might betray Labour principles; in this, the film’s most remarkable aspect, we “see” something of the mental process by which Byrne, who is ambitious in his career, convinces himself (and perhaps us) he is proceeding on the basis of principle. It is a nebulous and gray area in a black-and-white film which, keyed also to London weather, appropriately favors light gray tonalities.

Once his wife walks out on him, Byrne advances on a neighbor (played by a younger, more vulnerable Billie Whitelaw than we are used to seeing) and then a lovely model half his age, with whom he has a passionate affair and seems genuinely to fall in love. But each in turn is sacrificed to his career ambition, for the sake of which he plans on reconciling with his estranged wife—that is, until a blow of irony makes her, too, an impediment to his ambition. The title of the film is ironic; Byrne may bemoan that there’s “no love for Johnnie,” but it is Johnnie, himself, who ruins or chucks every opportunity for love in his life.

There is a sex scene between Byrne and Pauline West, the young model, that is wildly unconvincing owing to its satin-smooth body movements and camera movements which take into account none of the gap in the pair’s ages and contrasting levels of experience. One, especially today, cringes at the hokiness.

Ralph Thomas directed—the same Ralph Thomas responsible for those Doctor comedies in the fifties starring Dirk Bogarde.

 

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THE SUN IN A NET (Štefan Uher, 1962)

Voted by critics in the 1990s as one of the ten best films from the former Czechoslovakia, Slnko v sieti—alternately translated as The Sun in a Net or Sunshine Caught in a Net—derives from three short stories by Alfonz Bednár, which he himself adapted. Brilliantly directed by Štefan Uher (like Bednár, a Slovak), the film may be considered, depending on one’s point of view, as either an immediate antecedent of the Czech New Wave or, itself, the launch of the movement. Reflecting a loosening of the Communist grip on the country’s cultural and artistic expression, it departs from officially mandated “socialist realism,” both in its fluid, radical, associative style and its scathingly honest, unblinking social amd political content. Call it cinema’s first hurled hunk of spit of the gathering Czech New Wave.

The black-and-white film, consisting mostly of monotonous light grays, opens outdoors in a drab urban setting with abrasive sounds, including those of a screeching bird and demolishing equipment; cut from the same aural cloth, “Bullshit” is the first word we hear—spoken, aloud to himself, by student Oldrich “Fajolo” Fajták in response to what he hears said on the radio. Fajolo thus expresses his attitude towards the conformist, restrictive state in which he finds himself in the prime of his youth.

His utterance “Bullshit” also opposes state hypocrisy, which under penalty of official reprisals he must bend to, thereby becoming a hypocrite himself. Fajolo thus leaves his girlfriend Bela Blažejová to work in a summer “volunteer” farm camp; the tension achieved between the sheer, abundant beauty of the country and, essentially, the disdained forced labor accounts for striking passages. (One also takes in how poorly functioning the collectivized farm is—a strike at the heart of Soviet- and Soviet-satellite mythology.) During their separation, both Bela and Fajolo, moreover, couple with new partners.

This is a film ripe with surprising, inventive camera angles and dazzling imagery. Perhaps the centrifugal image—I confess: I wept—positions the camera to give the appearance that the sun itself has been caught in a fisherman’s wide net. The shattering effect, a commentary on the unnaturalness of repressive states, is cumulative; throughout the film there have been glimpses of people shot through “the net” and net-like structures. The entrapment of the sun is, of course, a metaphor for the entrapment of people; but more: it represents the light, enlightenment and freedom, obstructed by the state, from which human beings are being cut off.

Another theme pertains to the contagious nature of the lies of the state. Both a beclouded solar eclipse and a dropped water level, leaving behind only dry land, lead Bela and younger brother Milo to lie to their blind mother about these, presumably for the sake of the woman’s own delight and happiness.

Regrettably, the sure, tough poetry of this remarkable film is eventually defeated by an exposure of the material’s literary mechanics; but, until that relatively late point, how the film soars.

 

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EXTREMELY LOUD & INCREDIBLY CLOSE (Stephen Daldrey, 2011)

Excruciating, farfetched sentimental melodrama, closer to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird than to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, about a child’s traumatic response to his father’s death in the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The funeral, where an empty coffin is buried because his father’s body was never recovered, encapsulates how little sense the whole event of his irrevocable loss strikes Oskar Schell. A year later, the precocious 9-year-old schoolboy begins an odyssey to find the lock opened by a key that he has found in a blue vase he discovered in his father’s closet. Oskar is convinced that his father has left him a final message, and he is determined to learn what it is to regain their spiritual connection. Only then, he feels, “The Worst Day” will be redeemed.

Stephen Daldrey directed from a stupid script that Eric Roth based on Safran Foer’s novel, where, I understand, Oskar is a gentle innocent. In the film, Oskar is a nasty know-it-all who runs roughshod over everyone else’s feelings, including those of his mother. Thomas Horn, who plays Oskar (Oskar, to emphasize the odyssey that gives shape to his ordeal, his instrumental security blanket a tambourine rather than a tin drum), is insipid, but he sufficiently resembles Jamie Bell, Daldrey’s Billy Eliot (2001), that we keep hoping for superlative acting. Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock are no better as the idealized parents, although Max von Sydow and Zoe Caldwell do much better as Oskar’s paternal grandparents, and Viola Davis and Jeffrey Wright—remember Robert Altman’s Streamers (1983)?—are wonderful as a couple whom Oskar meets along the way of his search, right at the moment that their marriage ends amidst ambiguous commotion. Wright convinces as an anomaly: a humane businessman. Von Sydow was Oscar-nominated; Wright should also have been nominated.

But, apart from these fine performances, this is a terrible movie—a heartless tearjerker that exploits the heartache of countless real people.

ASHES (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2012)

Advertising their 35mm camera, the LomoKino website invites potential customers to “go back to the early days of motion picture” while awakening their own “analogue cinematic fantasies”—as Thailand’s reigning auteur, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, has done (except for a digital finale) with his exquisite, haunting “Ashes.” This short work—since its premiere at Cannes last Friday it has been available for free viewing on the MUBI website (http://mubi.com/)—weaves together surrealism and (at least seemingly) ordinary reality, dream and waking political protest and dark prophecy. Thailand’s fate hangs in the balance.

In a rural setting, a scene of tranquility: a man walks his dog down an unpaved path down which, also, a boy—perhaps an earlier version of the man—bicycles, the camera at their backs. With visual wit, the film thus introduces the concept of the backward glance, that is to say, memory. (The staccato presentation of much of the film, shutter to shutter, suggests snapshots of memory.) Closeups of a confined oinking pig nudge memory, that is, a dream, in the direction of particularity and immediacy. Now the man is resting on the ground, the dog close by, and the entire passage, reddish, resembles hand-tinted frames in certain black-and-white silent films: part of our collective memory: the magic of cinema. A contrasting bluish passage of highway traffic cancels much of the memory and the magic.

Signs and posters of protest appear; we catch on these repeated views of the number 112. In the Law of Thailand, Article 112 of the Criminal Code articulates the offense of Lèse majesté: “Whoever defames, insults or threatens the King . . . shall be punished [with] imprisonment of three to fifteen years.” This prohibition, all the more frightening for remaining largely undefined, has been in effect since 1908; not even the 1932 replacement of Thailand’s absolute monarchy with a constitution, and the series of revised constitutions since, has derailed the prohibition. Since the military coup in 2006, in fact, prosecutions under Article 112 have increased, from a handful a year, by 1500%. The vague language has helped make possible a widened application that has stricken the heart of freedom and assumed the form of a waking political nightmare.

Apichatpong presents this brilliant film as a looking back; the man with the dog, a filmmaker, has turned his attention to drawing buildings from his home town, Khon Kaen, as he remembers them. (This character and Apichatpong share the same home town.) He tells us, “I kept drawing and looking back.” He also tells us we are watching a dream—if you will, a dream of the past. But how can this be? The point of reconciliation, of course, is that the die has been cast on Thailand’s political future, which in fact Apichatpong has imagined, has dreamt, as having already occurred. The finale, an outdoor scene of intense celebration, with spinning wheels of fireworks and other fireworks in the nighttime sky, is more beautiful than one can even imagine. The beauty is devastatingly ironic. In the throes of expiring glitter, ashes descend: by metaphorical extension, the ashes of the celebrants themselves. Into twenty minutes of screen time, a master filmmaker has compressed his monumental concern for the fate of the country he cherishes.

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SHAME (Steve McQueen, 2011)

Intensely lonely and forlorn in an impersonal urban environment (ah, the cliché of it all), yuppie Brandon Sullivan is addicted to sexual pornography and to sexual encounters of his own that conform to the impersonality and meaninglessness—in both senses, the rush—this pornography provides. However, none of this is the “shame” to which the title of Shame refers; rather, it is all the cover-up of Brandon’s shame.

What at root eats this young man are his feelings for Sissy, his equally neurotic adoring younger sister who, without anyplace else to go, moves into his New York apartment, thereby invading his secret life and his need for privacy. A major source of Sissy’s overcompensating dependency is her lifelong frustration and incomprehension regarding her brother’s hostility for her; she asks about this, and in the film’s most revealing shot, with the camera aimed at the back of her brother’s couch, when Sissy moves closer to him Brandon immediately pulls away. Through his choice of pretty blonde one-night companions, we realize (unless we are dense) that the distance thatBrandonhas labored to create between himself and Sissy has originated in his desire to elude his too-close feelings for her. His sex partners strike us as Sissy-substitutes—with one exception: an African-American co-worker to whom he is more healthily drawn but with whom he cannot complete their sexual intercourse.

There is a significant problem with the tack that scenarists Abi Morgan and Steve McQueen, and director McQueen, have taken: a confounding and crippling indecision as to whether Brandon is at all conscious of his incestuous attraction to Sissy. Moreover, audiences may be divided between incest and homosexuality as Brandon’s secret shame, as both elements seem to be tumbling around inside his psyche. Stressing the latter, prior to Brandon’s gay encounter, is the Greek attention that McQueen gives his felinely graceful male protagonist, such as when Brandon is roaming his apartment, naked, in the early morning hours, and Sissy herself—consider her boyish haircut and her name—may be a maladroit attempt to blend the two “outsider” categories. The filmmakers’ indecision as to the degree of consciousness that Brandon brings to his lifelong flight from Sissy makes a bloody mess of their film.

It may also be what prompts the film’s most objectionable aspect: McQueen’s determination to so convert his audiences into voyeurs ofBrandon’s sex life that they also begin to feel a sense of shame. This is not the usual movie manipulation, but manipulation it is nonetheless.

Yet there is also undeniable formal beauty to Shame. For example, in lieu of a chronology of scenes McQueen has created a series of elaborate set-pieces that cumulatively express both the repetitiousness ofBrandon’s sexual existence, hence, his insatiable appetite, and his need to manufacture self-contained playlets where he can bury his shame.

The lead acting is a draw. Michael Fassbender is an inept embarrassment throughout as Brandon; Carey Mulligan ranges between being poignant and absolutely heartbreaking as Sissy. Every man of a certain age will want to protect and comfort Sissy with all his paternal tenderness and strength.

This British film won lots of awards, including Black Reel Awards for McQueen’s direction and his and Morgan’s script, Fassbender, best actor, London critics and British Independent Film Award, and Mulligan, best supporting actress, Hollywood Film Festival. McQueen won the prize of the international critics at Venice, where Fassbender won as best actor.

 

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