Film: Hoard (dir. Luna Carmoon) at London Film Festival 2023

The makers of The Taste of Mango, a very moving documentary, after which my sister was in floods of tears (thanks, Chloe Abrahams), gave us all a rather cute mango pin as a keepsake. Started to think a souvenir from each film would be cool. Then I saw Hoard and thought, perhaps not!

Luna Carmoon's first feature, Hoard has been nominated for, and won, several awards. It doesn't flinch from the unpalatable and that's partly why it succeeds. But it's not for the faint-hearted. There are moments that will make you cringe or want to look away. But I think it's this way because it comes from the director's heart. She doesn't want to sugarcoat it. The lives are the lives of those of us who exist on the margins, outside convention, making up our own rules, creating our own codes.

First off, I’d like to say that, if any members of the audience/cast/crew, etc, really were from South East London, let’s hope that LFF stumped up for cars home or they would have had to hotfoot it out of there once the questions were over to climb the 78 steps to Waterloo East for the last train home. We got there and discovered the whole station was closed. 

Two of the films I saw at the Festival this year have had uncanny parallels to my real Grey Gardens* life. It's been a bit mind-blowing.

My name is Chantal and I’m a hoarder.

Hostage to a frugal upbringing and a vivid imagination, my sister and I (just to make us even odder, we’re twins) were the original recyclers, finding a new purpose for everything. More likely to collect from skips than add to them. I remember that immortal line of my Dad's: 'Don’t let Lyn look in the skip!' But then who puts teddies in skips? Lots of people it turns out.

But, after seeing Hoard, I hereby vow never to save another bit of used tinfoil. You know when you're thinking of collecting shiny, translucent, coloured sweet wrappers from your Quality Street or Roses chocolates to use to make Christmas decorations, don't. It’s a slippery slope and I’m already quite near the bottom. I will not pick up every lost toy in the street. [A month on I’ve taken a two-bus journey to pick up a teddy-bear that had been appearing on Freecycle for a month. A week on from that and sister has brought home a teddy as tall as I am from another skip. And don't even mention the panda! And that's not even the one I ended up taking to a friend's wedding because he was the last toy left at a jumble sale.] I blame my inclination to empathise with the inanimate as well as animate. It is incredibly difficult when you can see an alternative use or place for something and even harder when you don’t because then it’s down to you to adopt whatever mislaid, discarded item you come across. Of course, I know why I identify with the lost and/or unwanted. But knowing that doesn’t stop me.

The chaotic home environment in Hoard, as well as looking frighteningly like our house reminded me a little of the TV version of Jacqueline Wilson’s The Illustrated Mum,  brilliantly brought to life by Michelle Collins, Holliday Grainger and particularly, Alice Connor. This is a bit more than that and possibly a bit too much.

Before I go further, I have to admit that I have come back to review this a long time after seeing the movie as life got in the way (a cancer curveball) so I don't remember every character and trying to find them on IMDb ain't easy. Why aren't there more pictures?

In Hoard, the mother, Cynthia (brilliantly played by Hayley Squires) and daughter, Maria (Lily-Beau Leach) are everything to each other but Cynthia is a hoarder who sometimes loses touch with reality, or rather her reality is different from everyone else's. 

The world inside the home is in some ways, make-believe and magical but in others, a minefield. And as the child, Maria, grows older, the glitter starts to look tarnished and the home environment seems to be more a tawdry collection of other people’s rubbish than an enchanted kingdom of found treasure. It's also a lesson in how bit by bit, a situation worsens and you adapt to things like having to kick through piles of newspapers as you come in the door (at this point, I whisper to sis, ‘Better tidy up when we get home’). The disadvantages of this way of life start to outweigh the advantages. 

Hoarding is not the only issue here. Nor is it ever. It’s a symptom. There’s love too but it’s a selfish, excluding kind of love. We were too stupid as children to realise that ‘us against the world’ was not a battle we could win. Maria starts to understand too, that her life is not like other people’s and, just perhaps, it’s not as good. Sometimes children need stability and normality as well as excitement. 

You sense that something’s gotta give. Social workers become involved and Maria is removed from her mother's care and placed with a foster family, in which Samantha Spiro handles with aplomb the thankless task of being the responsible mother figure, Michelle.

Teenage Maria (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) has a wild friendship with kindred spirit, Laraib (Deba Hekmat). This madcap sorority of two seems to work although you sense that things could spiral out of control quite quickly. 

Then, a former foster son turns up, Michael (Joseph Quinn) and sets the cat among the pigeons. His involvement with Maria seems to turn into a pissing contest (though luckily only metaphorically as Michael would be an also-ran, you'll find out why when you see the movie) where they try to out-extreme each other. What was it they were spitting on and then licking up? Yuck.

Joseph Quinn* I first noticed in Howard’s End. Usually I’m annoyed when the BBC wastes my licence fee on an adaptation that has already been pretty successfully realised as a film but I was totally won over by his portrayal of Leonard Bast. The exquisite torture of his embarrassment, his injured pride, over the lost umbrella. I'd also seen him in the brilliant, Wishlist, playing second fiddle to the incredible Erin Doherty. And then there was Dickensian, in which he managed to invest his portrayal of Arthur Havisham with so many layers, that, although we should have despised him, we still felt sympathy with him.

The trouble with the Maria/Laraib, Maria/Michael relationships is that they're a little too similar. Saura Lightfoot-Leon is a find and she invests each step closer to looney with amazing, convincing gusto that makes what seems incredible, credible. She and Michael have a weird sort of magnetic attraction, that the actors make real for us. My caveat would be that sometimes it's hard to unravel the motivation for the action. But, you know, life's like that, families are like that. People do things and sometimes we never learn why. And sometimes we have to be ok with that.

Meanwhile, Cathy Tyson stole onto the screen to steal every scene as as Michelle's lascivious friend.

It's a wild-ish trip but one worth taking.

* Saw this a few years ago. A documentary on some eccentric relatives of Jackie Onassis. Sort of compelling.

* Has found fame or infamy in Stranger Things, which I haven't seen.

Film: The Way We Were, with Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford

I realise that most of my secretsquirrelsays reviews are negative with the exception of some books about Frank Sinatra and a couple of single episodes of TV series, such as Law & Order: Skate or Die and Cold Case: Honor. For some reason, I am easily provoked to ridicule and criticism by bad media although admittedly some of the films do fall into the 'so-bad-they're-good' category, eg Ferocious Planet and Dark Storm. 

So, now for something completely different. For some time now, Sony Movies Classics has been showing The Way We Were (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1973), the Barbra Streisand/Robert Redford masterpiece, with the heart-rending theme (written by Marvin Hamlisch, sung so beautifully, emotionally, by Ms Streisand) and I've been torn between a) really wanting to watch it again but being frightened it might be too upsetting and b) avoiding it in case I found it disappointing. I must have watched it on TV I don't know how many years after it was made. Finally, I took the plunge and this review is the result.

Incidentally, Hamlisch also wrote the music for The Sting, another Redford vehicle and Pollack also directed Redford in Out of Africa, which had its own hauntingly pretty theme by the unsurpassable John Barry. 

What can I say? They simply don't make movies like this any more. I realise that's American speak (and they would also make ‘any more’ one word, which is simply wrong) and I should write 'They no longer make movies like this' but it just doesn't have the same oomph. And they don't make movie stars like this any more either. All of it is perfect. But let's start with the song. From the first notes on the piano, Barbra humming, within seconds, my sister and I are in floods of tears. Transported to a different time. We nearly have to give up watching, we're so distraught. Some people will know the Gladys Knight version of the song but that's about as different as you can get. When Barbra sings 'If we had the chance to do it all again/Would we?/Could we?', the 'Could we?' is a teasing, genuine proposal. Why not?

This is the power of music, the power of film, whose effects, when combined adroitly, as they are here, and in Born Free (John Barry again) and A Summer Story (Georges Delerue), increase exponentially. Even, I don't know, ten/fifteen years since we last watched it, it's so laden with our memories of watching the film, the first time, the last time, the incredible love affair, knowing the progress of it and its denouement, what we know happens in the film and everything that has or hasn't happened in our own lives in the intervening years, all the way through to Carrie (Sarah-Jessica Parker) and Mr Big (Chris Noth) in Sex and the City, when Carrie quotes Barbra as Katie: 'Your girl is lovely, Hubbell.'

This is evidence of how pervasive, persuasive, this type of storyline is, how it's repeated in other dramas, that most of Carrie's friends immediately know what she's referencing although I think it does have to be explained to one if I remember correctly. The characters and the situation have entered a sort of universal lexicon of love stories. It is a love story, and unashamedly so. A rom without the com.

Ok, Redford and Streisand as college students when she was 36 and he over 40, is a bit of a stretch.

BUT Barbra Streisand is simply outstanding as Katie, utterly on point throughout. I don’t think anyone else could have played this part. She has the mix just right and her face is so expressive. Rumour has it that she had a crush on Redford at the time, which could only have helped.

And Redford is perfect for Hubbell, embodying the all-American male, preppy, what we would now call WASP, a jock, a prom king type (with his queen played by Lois Chiles), for whom 'everything comes easy', as he tells it in a story he wrote that he is forced to read out in class. This type of character has become part of Redford's persona. Jocular, witty, warm but also a little too perfect to be approachable. His charm is effortless, his charisma magnetic.

Incidentally, also re-watched Redford in The Great Gatsby (a 1974 adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel), in which he plays, on the surface, a similar type, and this I found incredibly tedious. The characters are unremittingly shallow.

My favourite part of the movie is the motif that recurs when they re-encounter each other. A deja vu shot of a particular gesture. Katie reaches to guide Hubbell's fringe out of his eyes with such tenderness and love. The first time is before anything has begun between them, the second near the end of the film. Their relationship has died but the affection they feel for each other remains. 

This film does what Evelyn Waugh's and TV's Brideshead Revisited did so consummately, conjures up nostalgia for a certain relationship and a certain time. The days of our collective youth, whenever they occurred. Think E. M. Forster's Maurice (the book and the film) and this sentence from the last page.

"Out of some eternal Cambridge his friend began beckoning to him, clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of the May Term."

It's what I call a 'what-could-have-been' moment. A dream, a fantasy. A road not taken.

* * * *

[Arthur Laurents adapted his own novel for the screenplay and the film is also about politics, the fear of Communism, manifesting itself in the blacklist; the HUAC and activism but a bit like Hubbell, you can tire of causes, however worthy. It's still a love story first and foremost.]

Book: A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

His struggle! How about mine? I was misled by the great reviews and all the plaudits that this book (most of them reprinted in the prelims) has garnered into borrowing it from the library. I've got to say, I just don't get it. The author/protagonist (as it's a memoir) is solipsist in the extreme. He has no empathy for nor understanding of others but seems to believe he has or that he at least recognises when he hasn't. It's hard to identify with such a misanthropist. The book, reasonably interesting to begin with, eventually degenerates into a version of `How Clean Is Your House' and that's not a programme I like: page after page on which bleach or detergent he's using on which part of the house and so on. Why would anyone find this interesting?

Then, very occasionally, something is described adequately, ok except that it's usually completely arbitrary and sometimes rather dull so in a way kind of pointless. He goes into details about some weird fantasy he had as a child without ever really explaining what's behind it. It's like if two people came into your house and you spent three pages describing one but said nothing about the other.

I think we're supposed to have sympathy for him because his father drank but if he were my son, I think I'd drink too and this book could drive anyone to the bottle.

Not sure how to explain all the praise it's received. Can only conclude that it's a peculiarly virulent case of the emperor's new clothes.

Film: Dark Storm

A movie starring a lesser Baldwin (Stephen, they’re all ‘lesser’ to Alec since he’s been around the longest) who spends the whole film looking vaguely pissed off, or as if he’s trying to do mental arithmetic (like Joey, Matt LeBlanc, in Friends is advised to do when required to show emotion), an expression that probably originates from his manful struggle to spout scientific gobbledegook like ‘I’ve never seen so much dark matter in one place’ as if it actually meant something.

He plays that disaster movie cliché, the one sensible person in the possibly (inevitably) catastrophic scenario battling whatever constitutes the powers that be (the mayor/the government/the corporation/the other scientists), questioning their refusal to act in the face of this certain calamity, usually for reasons of the bottom line, insisting that the town/beach/world be evacuated while there’s still time (time is always of the essence) because there’s going to be a tidal wave/earthquake/tornado/shark attack/solar flare/alien invasion (delete as appropriate).

He will probably be the one to deliver possibly the most used line in any horror/thriller/scifi movie: ‘Let’s get the hell outta here!’ as if anyone would contemplate staying put while the sky falls in.

To top it all, he’s absorbed some ‘dark matter’ himself, as you do, been electrocuted then struck by lightning. No wonder he looks a little peeved.

The plot is nonsensical but the film’s a trip. See the image on the front of the box – that’s the expression Stephen Baldwin wears throughout. Perplexed. Or maybe that’s just his ‘intelligent scientist’ face.

Book: Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver

I've got to admit that this book was a bit of a disappointment after The Poisonwood Bible, which I loved. In fact, the title itself is a little off-putting. It certainly doesn't grab you - Flight Behaviour. Something seems to be missing and this is the case with the book too. I ended up feeling short-changed. First of all, I thought the beginning was excellent and was excited at the prospect of Dellarobia's affair so I felt a little misled when that didn't materialise. I have a feeling that this young man would have been the most interesting character.

Then I gradually lost respect for and belief in the protagonist and don't feel she was very well realised. I would have liked to identify with her but too often, things are signposted in advance and she behaves in a weak or childish way, for instance when she first encounters Ovid Byron and talks to her friend Dovey about him. They sound like tittering teenagers. Then when he comes to the house and she and Cub talk up her expertise on the butterflies. You know that Byron is going to be the real specialist. It's too obvious. And it seems out of character to drag the reporter into Byron's lab without any warning.

The other thing I'd take issue with is the way she seems to first recognise how many toys her kids have in comparison to Josefina but then bleats on about having to shop in the dollar store or the new second-hand emporium. It seems she has no perspective. She resents people shopping there who she thinks could afford to shop elsewhere and pay full price and the implication is that, if she had the money, she would rather not economise. What's wrong with buying nearly new stuff at rock-bottom prices? I would love to find this store. She's not exactly hypocritical but inconsistent and full of self-pity, not particularly attractive traits.

I applaud her stand on the butterflies and have nothing against the message of the book. I only think that more time should have been spent on characterisation and dialogue. Her exchanges with Dovey don't ring true at all and Ovid is not well drawn enough to be convincing so ends up as merely a cipher, the scientist from somewhere exotic to Dellarobia. 

Book: The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway

I did not get this book and was misled by the blurb and cover quotes to think that it would be `grand and powerful', `accomplished and gripping', `lyrical'. It was none of these things. The writer has managed to create three very detached and unlikeable characters. His style is to have them wonder a lot about pointless, uninteresting questions that he seems to think are deep and he seems to believe that this will increase our identification with them, e.g. `Do you think it's worse to be wounded or killed?'

First Arrow: `But then she begins to wonder about this. Do the men on the hills hate her? Or do they hate the idea of her ...?' and on and on. You're tempted to ask `Who cares?'


Then Kenan. He's the brainbox who kindly takes his neighbour's bottles to fill them with water when he does his own. It's a long and dangerous route, complicated by the fact that her bottles don't have handles. He has two spare bottles that do have handles and carry more than hers. Instead of taking hers from her, leaving them at his apartment and using his more manageable ones (and filling hers from these when he returns), he navigates snipers and hills and unsafe bridges with these hard-to-hold bottles while constantly whingeing about it. Didn't have very much respect for him after this. In a terrible situation like this, when it's a life or death deal, you would use your head to negotiate your own safety and not be led by the whims of a neighbour for whom you're doing a favour.

When the author uses incidental details to fill out his characters' lives and homes, this is too obvious and doesn't sound authentic.

I suppose what I'm saying is it purports to realism but doesn't deliver. This means that the reader can't identify with or care about the characters, which turns out to be a major flaw. 

TV Series: Close to the Enemy (2016)

Unlike another reviewer, I didn't make it to the half hour mark. I only lasted twenty-five minutes. In my defence, each minute felt like an hour.

Jim Sturgess has the lead and is particularly awful, putting on an accent and a tone that are horrible to listen to, phony and irritating at once, as if he were copying a Cockney doing a bad imitation of a toff. His voice in this is completely unbearable – and as he was heavily featured in most of the first twenty-five minutes, you'll see why I had to give up.

There are so many actors out there who could achieve a posh accent or already have one (George Blagden, Alex Vlahos,  Clive Standen to name a few) that it seems stupid to cast one who can't deliver (although maybe anyone who could, read the script and said 'No thanks'). And is it me or is Alfred Molina always exactly the same?

It's not all his fault though as I often persevere longer with dramas where there's one annoying character, if the script, plot, other characters hold my interest. This is not the case here.

I've enjoyed Poliakoff in the distant past (certainly not recently) but perhaps he's had his day. It annoys me that the BBC has spent our money on something else so turgid and tiresome.