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.

Film: Inside Llewyn Davis by Joel and Ethan Coen

At least the cat's made it onto the poster

Decided to post a review on this after seeing a page of plaudits in an old magazine: THE BEST FILM OF THE YEAR, A PERFECTLY PITCHED MASTERPIECE, AN INSTANT MUST-SEE TRIUMPH, BEAUTIFUL, HEARTFELT AND UTTERLY ENTHRALLING. Huh? Did I watch a completely different movie?

Other reviewers on Amazon and so forth have suggested that people don't like this film because there's not enough action and pointed out that it's not an action movie. But mate, if I wanted to watch an action movie, I wouldn't pick one about a singer-songwriter wandering about 1960s New York. One guy does his girlfriend a disservice by implying she's simply too low-brow to appreciate it, that there's not enough action for her. It's not that she only likes action movies, it's that she doesn't like bad movies or movies without a plot. People have written that it's darkly comedic. It isn't. The protagonist played by Oscar Isaac (who has also starred as another arrogant, pretentious character in another movie that was dull beyond belief, Mojave), admittedly he's not supposed to be likeable, is aimless in a completely charmless way and really rude to his two benefactors, simply as an excuse to flex his artistic temperament.

John Goodman

As usual, the Coens have stuck in John Goodman as a completely over-the-top caricature. They like to stretch credulity. He must surely tire of these roles (like in Death Sentence) but it's all money in the bank I guess. Carey Mulligan does her usual hard-to-like girlfriend act. Justin Timberlake is worth watching as a wholesome folk singer and Garrett Hedlund is wasted as the enigmatic Johnny Five. I'm not sure that Hedlund makes good career choices as he was also in another Carey Mulligan movie that turned out to be pretty unwatchable, Mudbound although I love the theme song from the latter: Back from the Fire by Gold Brother. And in Mojave. See above.

The Coen brothers still think swearing is hilarious when it hasn't been funny since the beginning of Four Weddings and a Funeral, a film that boasted Hugh Grant at his charismatic, endearing best. They also wrote a movie directed by George Clooney, that was absolutely dire and had a totally ridiculous storyline: Suburbicon. How Julianne Moore and Matt Damon were convinced to participate in this is a mystery. I'm not saying that movies have to be realistic but we have to be believe in the movie's world in order to be persuaded to suspend disbelief. Oh my God, poor Oscar Isaac was also in this. I didn't realise till I looked it up. I have nothing against the guy but he's now been involved in three truly dire projects. This will not deter him though because he can't lose with the Coens who, for some reason, can do no wrong as far as the critics are concerned.

The cat is by far the best thing in it and doesn't even get credited in the cast. Sensibly, he spends all his time trying to disassociate himself from this ideas vacuum of a movie and disappear from the frame. The cat should get an award, the rest was awful. Fargo was ok, although even that had a bit of a hackneyed theme but the rest of their oeuvre has left me cold and I particularly hate The Big Lebowski. For another aside on the Coens, see my blog Eagles and Glenn Frey: Beyond Cool, in which I speculate on what others seem to believe.

‘The Coen brothers are cool, therefore their films are cool, their characters are cool, therefore the Dude must be cool (and Jeff Bridges of course), and the Dude doesn’t like the Eagles therefore the Eagles can't be cool, therefore, in order to be cool, I have to dislike the Eagles’.

I'm not sure why the Coen Brothers are deemed the ultimate arbiters of cool.

So I'd like to ask: When does the Dude cease to be 'cool'? And surely, if everybody thinks he's cool, he's now too mainstream to actually be so.

For more film reviews, see 12 Hours to Live and Three Peaks.

Glenn Frey, effortlessly cool, RIP

TV Series: Taken on 5USA

Neeson as Bryan Mills

This is a spin-off from the Liam Neeson film franchise. I gather the films are pretty formulaic, with Neeson’s protagonist, the ordinary-sounding Bryan Mills, a name that is also used in the TV series, but which sounds more like a mail-order catalogue from the 1970s than a moniker for an action hero, tooling up with weapons prior to encountering some cartoon-like baddies and somehow despatching them one by one. You know the sort of thing I mean, the films your Dad and brother love and love partly because they know what to expect. It’s only ever gonna go one way.

Rollo, never without a weapon

The only possible justification for this series is the sex appeal and presence of Clive Standen (who I loved as Rollo in Vikings, let’s face it, he’s not hard to look at) but it’s a poor vehicle for his talents. He does his best, much like Patrick Swayze (Rest in Peace) in The Beast* (I’ve got to say that Travis Fimmel was far better in Vikings than in the latter), with a poorly scripted, poorly plotted show.  I can't fault Standen. Because of his physique, he’s a much more credible ‘special ops’ guy than Neeson, for instance, or even Bruce Willis. He delivers his lines, no matter how nonsensical, with absolute conviction. 

Bryan Mills, ditto

It’s just so hackneyed, the storyline from IMDb says Mills is coping with a personal tragedy as are all the heroes in these shows, from Leroy Gibbs (Mark Harmon) in NCIS to Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) in The Mentalist, to Walt (Robert Taylor) in Longmire. Feel free to comment and add your own.

Jennifer Beals, who is the source of all the missions this elite team take on and for some reason ends up looking like a man in drag, asks to see Clive alone to say: ‘I just wanted to check in with you’. He’s bemused: ‘Ok. Why?’ We say: ‘Because you’re sexy?’  I can completely understand why Standen took the role – a lead in a TV series seems too good to resist, especially when you’ve been playing second fiddle to Ragnar for a while but he’s capable of much more than this.

Carrie Mathison

It’s sort of Homeland without, oh, everything that Homeland has – real suspense, fully developed and engaging leads, believable storylines, quickfire and natural-seeming dialogue and a character you root for even when she's really annoying you in Claire Danes's Carrie Mathison (like Buffy, 'she saved the world, a lot'). For more on Homeland, see Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend) and Peter Quinn in Homeland.

What we get is a whole load of on-the-nose dialogue (i.e. dialogue that explains a character’s back-story or tells us what they’re like), something like ‘So you’ve been sent here after your actions in the whatever when this and this happened’. See my review of Ferocious Planet for some good examples. The characters are stereotypes. There’s always a nerdy computer whiz (a boffin, I love that word), often Jewish for some reason, who has trouble making small talk or relating to others.

Patrick Swayze, Travis Fimmel, The Beast

*My favourite line was Swayze’s character, Charles Barker’s comment on a mysterious band of baddies:  ‘It doesn’t  have a name. Sometimes they call it the Outfit.’ Ok, so that would be a name, Patrick.

For more on Travis Fimmel,Clive Standen, etc., see Ragnar and Athelstan. For more on Ragnar, see Travis Fimmel is Ragnar Lothbrok.

Film: My Cousin Rachel

Daphne Du Maurier

I’d only just read Daphne Du Maurier’s book and really liked it so I looked forward to seeing the movie.

This film has the distinction of not only being the worst adaptation of a novel that I’ve ever seen [for how to make a successful adaptation, see ITV’s Vanity Fair, which was near perfect] but is also one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. To put this in perspective, I’m talking The Killing of a Sacred Deer bad (oh, Nicole! oh, Colin!), I’m talking Wonder Wheel bad (oh, Kate!). It’s as if the director Roger Michel took his script from an abridged edition or perhaps the Cliffs Notes of the novel, and even then one with several random pages torn out, so that the gist and thrust of the narrative are lost.

Because of this, the film version lacks the heart, the logic, the mystery and therefore the believability of the original story.

The Illustrated Mum

Everything Michel adds grates and jangles with inauthenticity, for instance he has someone who is evidently a lady, played with verve by the always excellent Holliday Grainger (I first saw her in the amazing The Illustrated Mum),* talk about dog ‘shit’ when a woman in her position just wouldn’t have. Then we have a servant say of another: ‘You fucking prickwit’. It’s completely unnecessary.

What’s annoying about this is that Du Maurier’s book is full of dialogue and description. In the film, everything is exaggerated and/or conflated till it makes no sense. In the book, Ambrose’s letters disclose the course of his connection with Rachel, with several mentions of the laburnum tree in the courtyard of Rachel’s villa in Italy, under which Ambrose would sit while suffering from some recurring unnamed malady and there are many scenes that show the development of the relationship between Rachel and Philip so that it seems natural.

Everything Michel chooses to omit is vital to any understanding of the story or empathy with the characters, for instance the book conveys the life of Ambrose and Philip as a male idyll, with no real need of a woman’s input, happy and carefree. But Michel barely acknowledges this, having the same actor play both roles, allowing the impression that there was something wrong with their bachelor life before she arrived.

Rachel Weisz

I’m sure Rachel Weisz, who plays the eponymous Rachel can act (she usually can) but she fails to make her Rachel either bewitching or sinister but merely seems a little unhinged, one minute shouting (which doesn’t happen in the novel and is totally out of character), the next seductive. I’m not at all sure about Sam Claflin. He’s incredibly unconvincing as Philip, evincing neither boyish naivety (it comes across as petulance) nor enthusiasm. Together they create a charisma vacuum that sucks the life out of the rest of the film.

The scenes seem to chop and change pointlessly so a single conversation jumps from an interior to two or three exterior shots, giving us the uneasy sensation that the characters are for some reason having the same conversation over and over again in various locales.
Watching the film with the subtitles on makes it seem even sillier as Rachel and Philip are forever ‘chuckling softly’ over nothing. These chuckles are supposed to indicate the characters’ rapprochement but they are without foundation if you leave out the dialogue.

 

Aidan does it better

There’s an obligatory, shirtless sequence (post-Aidan Turner’s Ross Poldark) that, although it has source in the novel, seems a weird thing to include when you plan to leave out so much else and the cinematography showcases the beautiful Cornish countryside much like Poldark. But one of the BBC series' virtues is that it incorporates a lot of Winston Graham's original dialogue thus we get witty repartee and barbed retorts.

Of course, I completely understand that a film might have to concertina and alter a story a bit (the garden design/landscaping element is left out altogether – that’s fine) for its own purposes but what we’re left with is people behaving really oddly for no apparent reason.

By the end of the novel, the reader is certain that Rachel is poisoning Philip just like she poisoned his cousin, with her eyes firmly fixed on the prize of his inheritance. Michel decides to leave this one absolute open-ended as a ‘did she? didn’t she?’, no doubt to try to pique the viewer’s interest but it turns out to be too little too late.

What Du Maurier has depicted with the skill of an Old Master, Constable, for instance, with nuance, subtle detail and depth, Michell has rendered bold and simple in the brush strokes of a painter decorator.
 

* A brilliant adaptation itself of Jacqueline Wilson's book, in which all three actresses are outstanding: Alice Connor, Michelle Collins and Holliday Grainger.

For more film reviews, see secretsquirrelsays.

Film: Irene’s Ghost/Iain Cunningham at the London Film Festival

Happy days

Ok I have to admit that when the film started, I had a sinking feeling. Oh no, not one of those documentaries along the lines of Nick Broomfield/Jacques Peretti where there’s a toneless narration by the film-maker/subject, expressing no emotion at all. But this turns out to be a false first impression. Plus I’d expected the film to be American (poor research on my part) because, I’ve worked out, of the image in the programme of the director and his mother in which they both looked perfect and perfectly happy and so rather unBritish. I’m glad I assumed wrong though because I may have felt less intrigued by a British documentary (see above) and chosen something else and it would have been my loss.

Then there’s the initial focus on the adorable poppet of a daughter and the assertion that it was only when Iain Cunningham had his own child that he became determined to unravel the mystery surrounding his mother, Irene. I have a problem with the notion that only when you become a parent do you acquire empathy with, compassion for or curiosity about your own parents.

‘And watching my own child grow through her early years helped me see the impact my loss had on me. A three-year-old has a huge capacity for love.’

This implies he's more concerned with how the loss of his mother affected the child he was, although it's probable she only existed as a vague idea in his head as he was very young when she died, than what caused her disappearance. His father did what he thought was best for both of them at the time, he remarried and his wife, June, became to all intents and purposes, Iain’s mother so let's hear it for June, may she rest in peace.

With these misgivings, it’s remarkable how soon and how easily the film won me round. Here's the trailer.

Iain and his father

Iain starts his brave undertaking by interrogating his relatives, encountering some initial reluctance particularly on the part of his father. Undeterred, he sets about knocking on doors, following clues and meeting his mother’s friends, who share many fond and sometimes quite detailed recollections of Irene and their collective past, for instance, of her sitting on a gate singing ‘King of the Road’ by Roger Miller. Their memories bring her alive. It appears she was well loved and one friend in particular, Lynn, is demonstrably glad of the chance to reminisce about the best friend who no one ever mentions now, who she lost so long ago. There’s a very real sense of sadness and confusion over what happened and why.

The extreme close-ups on the interviewees’ faces mirror and exacerbate for the viewer the discomfort they feel in talking about an awkward subject.

Gradually we come to realise that Irene was hospitalised after the birth of her son, then allowed out for a while (when the gloriously happy picture was taken) then rehospitalised when her illness recurred. There’s an unspoken consensus that it was some physical complication during childbirth that led to Irene’s death, a heavy burden for a child to carry and so a very good reason to keep a secret. Iain gains some insight when he finds his baby book in amongst some old boxes of photos. There are strange scrawlings about God, baby, etc., not exactly the pride and joy a new mother might express. This suggests that there was something awry with Irene’s thought processes.

Lynn and Irene

We learn that when Lynn went to visit Irene in hospital (which she didn’t first time around because she and other friends were led to believe that Irene was in a coma, the truth being unsayable), Irene didn’t recognise her and had started seeing things that weren’t there, becoming paranoid and loud, acting out of character.

Even when Irene is at home, she doesn’t feel the same, saying ‘I’m not Irene, you know, I’m Irene’s ghost.’ And there’s no doubt that to her family she must have seemed like a different person.

As was common in those days, any hint of mental instability was hushed up. It turns out that Irene suffered from post-partum psychosis (as it is called today) that led her to behave in a way that would have been quite frightening to all who knew her.

When the psychosis returned, she was readmitted to hospital and died soon after. Her death certificate records the cause of death as ‘cardiac arrest’. No one seems to question – maybe it’s too difficult (and certainly too late) to consider – whether the electric shock treatment she was given affected her heart.

So Iain’s persistence pays off and the film’s slow reveal helps us to comprehend the true horror of what happened to Irene.

It’s quite probable that Iain’s father felt guilt, fear, confusion and helplessness when faced with something that no one really had any idea about (not even the doctors), that even today carries a stigma, that people felt could (and should) not be talked about.

Symptoms of post-partum psychosis usually start suddenly within the first two weeks after giving birth. More rarely, they can develop several weeks after the baby is born and include hallucinations, delusions, mania, depression, loss of inhibitions, paranoia, restlessness, confusion, out of character behaviour.

BFI London Film Festival 2018

The film, as well as being an investigation into the mystery behind Irene’s death and her complete eradication from their family history, also acts to rehabilitate her memory, so that she can take her place in the lives of her descendants, as a vital, normal, caring young woman who suffered an illness that inevitably hastened her end but need not define her.

Irene's Ghost is profoundly affecting. Many of us were in tears by the end. And you can't say better than that. Art should move you. I hope that the producer, Rebecca Mark-Lawson is able to procure a wider release as this sensitive film raises awareness about a devastating condition that is still not in common parlance. It deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.