Mr. Turner (2014)

Directed by Mike Leigh.

Leigh is best known for his marvellously idiosyncratic social dramas and his intense, innovative workshopping of his scripts with exceptional actors.  Although he had made one period film (Topsy Turvy, 1999), Mr. Turner is his first full-blown biopic.  In other hands the biopic is too often the bastard child of the great man theory of history labouring to uphold the legitimacy of its parent.  Instead of the common, heroic struggle-against-obstacles narrative, Leigh opts for the slice-of-life approach, albeit the life of a genius.  Instead of creating narrative tension Leigh simply shows us the man, in his carefully recreated milieu, over the last decades of his life.

Turner surely was a great artist, but Leigh is not concerned with establishing the fact – his standing is already beyond doubt at the beginning of the film. There is no struggle for recognition, just the day-to-day of a successful artist as he paints, sells, hobnobs with the Royal Academy and his patrons and awkwardly manages his personal relationships.

Leigh has paid more than usual attention to the look of this film, and his regular cinematographer, Dick Pope, captures a Turneresque glow in landscape after landscape.  We see what Turner sees, and because we know his work, we see it as he sees it.

In one marvellous sequence, Turner, sitting in a boat on the Thames, sees the Trafalgar warship, the Temeraire being towed to the breaking yard, from the same angle depicted in his famous painting.  We then see the painting and grasp the transformation Turner has effected, turning the Temeraire into a ghost ship and emphasising the tug that tows it, the triumph of steam and iron as the sun sets on sail and wood.  The fact that this scene could not possibly have taken place as shown is irrelevant to its effect.

Leigh really ought to write a management text on quality control in cinema.  Over the last twenty-five years, his record of critical success as a writer-director is reflected in an average Rotten Tomatoes rating of 91%, and the key to this is his ability to draw outstanding performances from the best British character actors.  Timothy Spall has been the mainstay of Leigh’s ship through

Dorothy Atkinson

the years, and he delivers a Turner who is unlikeable, sympathetic and engrossing.   One expects the superlative from Spall, but as his housekeeper Hannah Danby and his inamorata Sophia Booth, Dorothy Atkinson and Marion Bailey are exceptional.  Atkinson’s Hannah is self-effacing and, despite Turner’s indifference and sexual exploitation, utterly devoted to him.  At the end, old and ailing, she goes to visit Turner and, realising he is with Mrs Booth, turns away from his door.  It is a moment of profound pathos and a reflection on the price of greatness.

We see Turner striding though the Royal Academy in his pomp, greeting his friends and acquaintances, exchanging the stiffest of courtesies with Constable.  He is the honoured guest of wealthy patrons, but with one eye on his legacy he refuses a very substantial offer for all his works, intending as he does to leave them to the nation.  The times and fashions change, however, and on a visit to the Academy he sees early Pre-Raphaelite paintings on display.  He is chagrined to recognise them as an utter repudiation of his own work, tugboats towing his career to the breaking yard; but the work has long outlived the man.

Human Capital (2014)

 

Directed by Paolo Virzi.

It’s the same the whole world over,                                                                         It’s the poor that get the blame,                                                                                 It’s the rich that get the pleasure,                                                                           Ain’t it all a bloody shame. 

Behind the titles some sort of awards dinner has just finished and the waiters are tidying up.  One of them departs for home on a bicycle, pedalling through the dark streets.  The camera follows – travelling shots from behind, like the track-in on a young woman’s back in a teen slasher movie, or the sequence following a minor character through the streets in Kill the Messenger – the “something bad is about to happen” convention.   And it does, a Jeep swerves to avoid another car and knocks him off the road.

This is the setup for a narrative that traces events leading up to the accident, following characters through parallel, interweaving timelines up to the focal event and then into a denouement.  This is a familiar trope, traceable to Losey’s Accident (1967), reworked by Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs) and van Sant (Elephant).  It’s even turned up in a  cheap but charming monster horror flick (Big Ass Spider, 2013).  In Human Capital it provides a whodunit element – who was driving the Jeep? – and one of the recognisable anchor points that tell the audience where they are in the time-line, but the mystery is secondary to the major concerns of the film.

Dino is driving his daughter Serena to visit her boyfriend Massimiliano at his family home, a palatial mansion on a large estate.  Carla wants him to drop her at the gate but Dino insists on driving up to the house because he’s a greedy, ingratiating, transparent opportunist who later proves to be a blackmailing sleaze.  Dino seizes the opportunity to introduce himself to  Massimiliano’s father, Giovanni, a rich investor who leads a consortium who have bet a lot of money on wrecking the national economy.  He also meets Giovanni’s trophy wife Carla, an unhappy, impulsive creature with artistic aspirations some way beyond her intellectual capacity.

Serena is an unhappy girl with a Good Heart, but she has not as yet seen through Massimiliano, who is a self-centred, overbearing, spoiled rich boy who owns a Jeep.  In due course she will meet a handsome young man, poor, artistic, penniless – an anti-Massimiliano to represent all the dispossessed victims the ruling class exploit.

While they are off together, Dino sucks up to Giovanni, making himself useful by partnering him a tennis doubles; Dino happens to be a good tennis player, and Giovanni does like to win.  On a subsequent visit, Dino cajoles Giovanni into letting him invest in a large fund which Giovanni directs, borrowing much more than he can afford because he confidently expects up to 40% return.  Not hard to see how this will end.  Dino is a greedy lemming, dressed like a schmuck, Giovanni is all disdain and bella figura, and the way Virzi has set this up it’s easy to despise Dino but don’t we envy Giovanni even a little, although he’s busy driving the world to hell?

In the midst of all this, Giovanni’s wife Carla discovers a derelict theatre that he was about to turn into apartments, and she handily persuades him to pay for its renovation.  She assembles a board to run the theatre, a Monty Python caricature of a committee of arts intellectuals.  The board meeting is a farce, Carla presiding over it like a stunned kindergarten teacher.  I’m not sure why this scene was included, but at least it’s funny.

The film provokes a  degree of indignation concerning greed and financial manipulation, but Dino’s envy of the possessions of the very rich wouldn’t make so much sense if we couldn’t take a good long look ourselves.  There’s a long tradition of leftist Italian political cinema, but in this instance Marx has been swamped by Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Human Capital is glossy, schematic, and although it’s never boring, nor is it engaging.

 

 

 

 

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005)

Directed by Jacques Audiard.

Audiard is a screenwriter who came fairly late to directing.  Six movies by his mid-sixties is not a big output, but a filmography that includes Read My Lips, A Prophet, and Rust and Bone speaks for itself.  The Beat That My Heart Skipped is a remake of James Toback’s Fingers (1978), but Audiard has taken the skeleton of Toback’s plot and reworked it into something vastly more interesting.

Two men are talking.  Sami (Gilles Cohen) speaks vehemently about the difficulty of caring for his invalid father while Tom (Romain Duris) listens, rolling a cigarette lighter between his fingers.  Hand-held, the camera bears in on each in turn, following Sami as he walks about the room, holding for a moment on Tom’s suppressed agitation.  We have no distance from these men; shortly after, they drive through the night-time streets with a third man, Fabrice, and the camera sits in the car, switching in close-up from one to the other, glimpsing the street as as they pass.  They are engaged in shady property deals, and are on there way to chase out some tenants by releasing a bag of rats in their building.

Tom also does strong-arm work for his father, Robert (Niels Arestrup), a slum landlord.  Tom is saturnine, tense, restless, listening to headphones as he drives around, his fingers constantly moving.  They drum, clench, play air piano – Tom is living to a staccato beat only he can hear.  He is violent, cynical, amoral, utterly ill at ease with himself.  His father is domineering and demanding, but in fact dependent, and the relationship is very like the one Sami described at the beginning.  He is looking for a way out, if he knows it or not, and it’s the memory of his mother that stirs him to action.

While driving, he notices a man standing outside a concert hall.  Tom’s late mother was a concert pianist, and the man was her agent.  Tom runs in to speak with him; it transpires that Tom had a promising talent, and the agent urges him to come for an audition.  At home, Tom plays a tape made by his mother, rocking back and forth as he listens.

He wants to audition, but he isn’t ready.  He is introduced to Miao Lin (Linh Dam Phan), a Vietnamese piano teacher who speaks no French, and they begin lessons.  The relationship that develops is edgy, at times irritable, but increasing in strength, rather like the unlikely, uncomfortably intimate couples in Read My Lips and Rust and Bone.

Audiard employs a visual style which in other hands might be annoying; in The Beat it is simply a perfect match to Tom’s frantic, intense reality.  The camera never stands back from him, we see close-ups, tight two-shots, rapid editing, quick pans in close-up, and off-centre irises.  Prowling tracks, zip pans, restless even in the midst of a conversation.  Action sequences are fragmented, impressionistic, swiftly cut  – the audience is placed at the centre of the maelstrom, able to sense what is happening without seeing it clearly.

The whole thing is kept from flying apart by Romain Duris’ jittery, tight-wound performance as Tom.  We are drawn into identification even as we are repelled by his behaviour.  When Robert makes a bad deal with Minskov, a Russian gangster, and demands that Tom get his money back, Tom seduces the gangster’s girl but advises Robert to let it go.

The night before his audition Tom’s partners bang on his door, demanding that he come with them while they finalise a property deal.  He refuses, but they force him to accompany them and when they arrive at the building they discover that squatters have moved in.  There is a brawl and the next morning Tom, frazzled and tired, botches the audition and storms out. He goes to Robert’s apartment only to find his father brutally murdered, presumably at Minskov’s orders.

The narrative leaps two years.  Tom and Miao Lin are together; she is a concert pianist, about to give a performance, and he appears to be her manager.  As she begins to play, Tom is outside in the street, but before he can enter the concert hall he notices Minskov across the street.  He follows him into a hotel bathroom:

The dynamic, audacious visual style of The Beat recalls early Godard, but in its central concern it is closer to the Bresson of A Man Escaped, Pickpocket and L’Argent.  In the guise of a thriller, The Beat is a quest for redemption, but not the conventional redemption of American cinema where a flawed protagonist is redeemed through a selfless action, usually violent, and reintegrates with the good, established social order.  Tom’s flaw is in fact a split between the using and abusing father for whom he nevertheless cares and the lost, loving mother whose death left him abandoned.  The resolution he achieves at the end is partial at best, but the pain is still visible in his damaged hands.