Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

This is our last screening before Christmas.  I've not had a chance to read the book or to see the film so my notes - of necessity - are somewhat briefer than usual.  Hopefully they will provide enough of an incentive to bring in an audience.

 

Here are my notes:

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

UK 2011                      112minutes

Director:                      Lasse Halstrom

Starring:                        Amr Waked, Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor, Kristin Scott Thomas and Rachael Stirling

 

“Salmon Fishing in the Yemen has a similarly soft-tummied feel to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel; it’s perhaps best described as a second-tier Ealing Comedy shot by the Boden catalogue.”

Robbie Collins

 

Dr Alfred Jones (Ewan McGregor), a salmon expert in the British fisheries is engaged by Sheikh Muhammed (Amr Waked) to introduce 10,000 salmon into a river in the Yemen so that he can go fly fishing in his own country.  Jones sets to work with Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt) a management consultant employed by the Sheikh, and as the project progresses they become emotionally entangled.

The screenplay by Simon Beaufoy is based on the debut novel by Paul Torday which was an unexpected best-seller in the UK.  However Beaufoy, who also wrote the scripts for The Full Monty (1997) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008) loses the eccentricity of the source novel and refashions the central relationship into one familiar from other romantic comedies: it is clear from their first meeting what is destined to happen between Jones and Chetwode-Talbot.

Director Lasse Halstrom made his international name with My Life as a Dog (1985), made in his native Sweden, although prior to that he had directed more than 30 music videos for the pop group ABBA.  Following the success of My Life as a Dog Halstrom has worked in the US where his films have included The Cider House Rules (1999), from the novel by John Irving and Chocolat (2000) from the novel by Joanne Harris; both of these films received Oscar nominations for Best Film.  His next film is a thriller called The Hypnotist which is to be made in Sweden.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

Fargo

Apparently it is mandatory for every film society to show Fargo.  We fulfilled this obligation several years ago, and when I was researching for my notes I found the wonderful extract from a piece by David Thomson which I was able to quote in full:

 

Fargo

USA 1996       (98 minutes)

Director:          Joel Cohen

Starring:          Frances McDormand, William H. Macy and Steve Buscemi

 Awards and Nominations

Won                Oscar for Best Original Screenplay

                        Oscar for Leading Actress (Frances McDormand)

Nominated for five further Oscars

Won                BAFTA for Best Original Screenplay

Won                Best Director (Joel Coen)

Nominated for a further five baftas

Won                Best Director (Joel Coen) at Cannes Film Festival

Nominated for Golden Palm

An overall total of 49 wins and 19 nominations

In Minnesota a small-time business man with severe financial problems hires two inept hoodlums to kidnap his wife in an attempt to obtain ransom from his father-in-law.  However the plot goes murderously wrong and a heavily-pregnant sheriff arrives from Minneapolis to solve the string of unexpected deaths in her jurisdiction.

The film claims to be based on a true story, but in his introduction to the published screenplay Ethan Coen undermines this:

“The story that follows is about Minnesota.  It evokes the abstract landscape of our childhood – a bleak, windswept tundra, resembling Siberia except for its Ford dealerships and Hardee’s restaurants.  It aims to be homey and exotic, and pretends to be true.”

Subsequently it emerged that the Coens’ inspiration was a 1986 murder in Connecticut where a husband used a wood chipper to dispose of his wife’s body – the Coens moved the location to Minnesota because they had been born and brought up on the outskirts of Minneapolis. 
 
The film was launched to universal acclaim and secured many awards.  It has secured its place in cinema history and recently David Thompson included it as one of only three films released in 1996 in his book “Have You Seen?” A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films where he summarised its appeal as follows:

“Fargo is just 97 minutes long, compact and efficient (cost $7 million; earnings $24.5 million), a sort of “the gang’s all here” of American independent film, and a quiet knockout.  When the snow is that thick, you won’t hear a body or a Douglas fir fall, just the hush being underlined.  But the tonal range of the film is what is leaving puffs of breath in the air.  From one moment to the next this film is gruesome, bloody and “Oh no!” as well as so funny you wish those starchy voices would stop talking for a second.”

In a career of nearly 25 years the Coen brothers have produced a series of brilliant films that have been successful with both festival and multiplex audiences.  Fargo is arguably their greatest film and until No Country For Old Men (2007) it was their most successful in terms of nominations and awards.

 

In case you need any more encouragement, here's the trailer:

 

 

The Woman in Black

We seem to have established a tradition of showing a horror film around the time of Halloween.  In past years we've screen Let The Right One In and 30 Days of Night, and this year we're screening The Woman in Black.

 

My wife is a great fan of Susan Hill's writing and has seen the play (via school trips) more than a dozen times, so we decided to watch it at home.  We started the film quite late - inevitably - and were quite enjoying it.  Then just as we were getting to the scary part in Eel Marsh House there was a powercut.  Fortunately there was no rocking chair in a locked room upstairs and no visit from the Woman in Black herself.

 

Here are my notes:

 

The Woman in Black

UK 2011                      94 minutes

Director:                      James Watkins

Starring:                        Daniel Radcliffe, Ciaran Hinds, Janet McTeer, Roger Allam, Shaun Dooley, Sophie Stuckey

 “Her face, in its extreme pallor, her eyes, sunken but unnaturally bright, were burning with the concentration of passionate emotion which was within her and which streamed from her.  Whether or not this hatred and malevolence was directed towards me I had no means of telling – I had no reason at all to suppose that it could possibly have been, but at that moment I was far from able to base my reactions upon reason and logic.  For the combination of the peculiar, isolated place and the sudden appearance of the woman and the dreadfulness of her expression began to fill me with fear.”

Susan Hill: The Woman in Black

 Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe), a young solicitor, visits the remote coastal village of Crythin Gifford to obtain the paperwork to sell the remote, bleak and desolate Eel March House after the death of Mrs Drablow, an elderly client of his firm.  While staying at the house, Kipps sees the mysterious figure of a woman dressed in black and from letters he discovers he finds out who she is.  From the locals he learns that the appearance of the Woman in Black always leads to the death of a child.

 The film is based on the classic novel by Susan Hill which was previously filmed in 1989 with a screenplay by Nigel Kneale (of Quatermass fame), which has also been dramatised for the stage and has been running in London for more than 20 years.  The novel consciously echoes the style of the great ghost stories of M R James (one of the chapters has the title “Whistle and I’ll Come to You”), but the skillful adaptation by Jane Goodman, while retaining the key elements of Hill’s novel and remaining true to its spirit, reorders and compresses them to make them more immediate – and more chilling.

 The film received much publicity through the astute casting of Daniel Radcliffe in his first post-Potter role, with his performance as the young solicitor receiving generally good reviews.  It is also worth noting that the film is the most successful production to date of the relaunched Hammer Film Productions, the company dominated the horror film market from the mid-1950s to the 1970s with innumerable cycles of films featuring Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy. 

The Woman in Black has been the most successful Hammer film ever in the USA as well as the highest grossing UK horror film for 20 years. Hammer Films has subsequently announced that there will be a sequel to the film, currently called The Woman in Black: Angels of Death.  Susan Hill will provide an original story set during the Second World War: Eel Marsh House has been converted to a military mental hospital and the arrival of disturbed soldiers re-awakes its darkest inhabitant.

 

Here's the trailer:

 

 

The Descendants

Our plan was to screen The Descendants, but a mix up over the DVD meant that we had to screen an alternative.  The screening of a film with George Clooney had attracted a certain demographic, so we offered everyone a freee glass of wind and screened The American instead.

We will screen The Descendants at a later date, but here are my notes anyway:

The Descendants

USA 2011                    115minutes

Director:                      Alexander Payne

Starring:                        George Clooney, Amara Miller, Beau Bridges, Judy Greer, Matthew Lillard, Michael Ontkean, Nick Krause, Robert Forster, Shailene Woodley

Awards and Nominations

·         Won Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay and four further nominations including Best Director, Best Film and Best Actor (George Clooney).

·         BAFTA nominations for Best Film, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Actor (George Clooney).

·         A further 47 wins and 66 nominations.

“Nothing gives me more pleasure than to welcome a new film by the gifted writer-director Alexander Payne, especially as The Descendants, his first movie since Sideways eight years ago, is so good, and in so many ways.”

 Philip French

After his wife has been left comatose by an accident while water skiing Matt King (George Clooney), a rich landowner in Hawaii, discovers that she has been having an affair.  The accident forces him to face up to his responsibilities as a (failed) husband and father and he sets off on a scenic tour of his life.

The film received its first screenings at the Telluride, Toronto and New York film festivals and was then scheduled to have a limited release in December 2011.  However the positive critical response from its initial screenings resulted in its release date being brought forward.    The film subsequently appeared in many critics’ lists of the best films of 2011 and won many awards for George Clooney, Alexander Payne (as writer and director) and as Best Film.

 In his four star review of the film Roger Ebert was particularly impressed by George Clooney:

 “And George Clooney? What essence does Payne see in him? I believe it is intelligence. Some actors may not be smart enough to sound convincing; the wrong actor in this role couldn't convince us that he understands the issues involved. Clooney strikes me as manifestly the kind of actor who does. We see him thinking, we share his thoughts, and at the end of The Descendants, we've all come to his conclusions together.”

Alexander Payne made his name as Director/Screenwriter of films such as Election (1999), About Schmidt (2002) and Sideways (2004).  George Clooney lobbied Alexander Payne unsuccessfully for a part in this latter film, being turned down by Payne on the basis that he was too big a star for a role in such an ensemble cast.

	Here's the trailer:

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Here are my notes for this week's screening.  As the film is set in India we'll be serving a selection of Indian snacks and beer to get the punters in the mood.

Despite some of the UK reviews the film seems to have been a sleeper hit, and we have had many requests to screen it, so hopefully we will have a good audience. 

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

UK 2011                      118 minutes

Director:                      John Madden

Starring:                        Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Tom Wilkinson, Ronald Pickup and Dev Patel

 “How can I suggest what a delight this film is? Let me try a little shorthand. Recall some of the wonderful performances you've seen from Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy and the others, and believe me when I say that this movie finds rich opportunities for all of them.  Director John Madden ("Shakespeare in Love") has to juggle to keep his subplots in the air, but these actors are so distinctive, they do much of the work for him.”

Roger Ebert

A group of seven British ex-pats leave the UK to travel to the Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, a retirement destination for “the elderly and beautiful”, in India.  All the characters have their own reason for making the move, but the most urgent is that local prices make retirement possible for all of them.

In the first half of the 1980s there was a cycle of films and television productions about Britain’s preoccupation with India and its imperial history, ranging from the early Merchant Ivory film Heat and Dust (1983), the TV series The Jewel in the Crown (1982) to David Lean’s epic version of A Passage to India (1984), all based on novels that explored aspects of the Anglo-Indian experience and life in the Raj.  The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is also based on a novel (by Deborah Moggach), but one that explores the English experience of India in the twenty-first century, as a place of off-shoring, outsourcing and call centres.

John Madden made his name with the TV film Mrs Brown (1997) and the Oscar-winning Shakespeare in Love (1998), of which starred Judi Dench and Tom Wilkinson, before moving to Hollywood where his subsequent films have included Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (2001) and more recently a thriller called The Debt (2011), which starred Tom Wilkinson with Helen Mirren.  He had originally cast Peter O’Toole and Julie Christie to play Norman and Madge before replacing them by Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie, and subsequently confirmed that he had also considered Eileen Atkins and John Hurt for roles in the film.

 The film has not yet won any awards but there are rumours in the US of a likely nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Maggie Smith.

Here's the trailer:

 

The Artist

It's the beginning of the new season for our film club, and each year we try to start the programme with a screening that will pull in the punters.

This year we chose The Artist: it had long been on my "must see" list and I was not in the least disappointed.

Here are my notes:

The Artist

France 2011                 100 minutes

Director:                      Michel Hazanavicius

Starring:                        Berenice Bejo, Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, Malcolm McDowell, Penelope Anne Miller

 Awards and Nominations

• Won five Oscars including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Original Score and Best Costume Design.
• Nominated for five more Oscars including Best Supporting Actress (Berenice Bejo) and Best Original Screenplay (Michel Hazanavicius)
• A further 109 wins (including Best Actor for Jean Dujardin at the Cannes Film Festival) and 68 further nominations.

“The Artist is a formally daring and sublimely funny movie about the end of silent movies in 1920s Hollywood.  It is itself silent and in black and white, with inter-titles and a full, continuous orchestral score.  Endlessly inventive, packed with clever sight gags and rich in stunningly achieved detail The Artist is a pastiche and passionate love affair to the silent age; it takes the silent movie seriously as a specific form, rather than as an obsolete technology, and sets out to create a new movie within the genre.”

Peter Bradshaw

In 1927 George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent movie star insists on casting Peppy (Berenice Bejo), an unknown dancer, in his next film.  Peppy becomes a huge star as talking pictures arrive in Holly wood, but George continues to make silent films and his career is ruined.  Eventually Peppy comes to his rescue and persuades the studio to allow her to make a musical with him.

Michel Hazanavicius had wanted to make a silent film for many years as a tribute to his heroes of the silent era, but he was only able to secure funding after the financial success of two spoof spy films that he directed.  He studied silent films to identify techniques to make his screenplay comprehensible without using too many intertitles and also calibrated lighting, lenses and camera moves to get the period look right.  The film was actually shot in colour and then converted to black and white, with a slightly lower frame rate than usual to mirror the slightly speeded up look of 1920s silent films. 

The film received its first screening at the Cannes Film Festival, initially out of competition but then moved to the competition a week before the Festival opened.  Subsequent to its success here the film won many awards around the world and also appeared near the top of many critics’ lists of the best films of 2011.

 Here's the trailer:

 

 

A warning to the curious...

Over the past few weeks I've been re-reading all of Jasper Fforde's novels and am currently enjoying The Woman Who Died A Lot, his most recent story Thursday Next. For reason to this see the precdeing entry.

However I think I must have been overdoing it - or rather I must have overdosed - as today I seem to have read myself into the Book World and ended up in the Well Of Lost Plots.  I did not spend much time there, but I was atleast able to take a few photos as evidence.

Hopefully the Men in Plaid cannot operate in the Outland.

I've started so I'll finish...

This is all my own fault.  I've always watched Mastermind and inevitably the thought that came to mind was: I could do that.

Then earlier this year I found the Mastermind website which contained a selection of quizzes, which I tried and found that I was in the top [n]% of the population, where [n] is a reassuringly small number.  There was also a link to follow if you wanted to apply to take part - so I followed it, filled in the form, and then forgot all about it.

Several weeks ago I had a call out of the blue from the production team: an invitation to  meet up so that they could ask me some questions.  I think I answered quite well, as within a week I had another call offering me a place on the programme.  There were some further exchanges while we hammered out the detail of my specialist subject choices, but eventually we finalised a list of three subjects that were OK.

For the first round my subject is the novels of Jasper Fforde:

http://www.jasperfforde.com/

I follow this with the life of HH Asquith:



And for the final I've chosen Doctor Who (2005 to the present):

And now the hard work begins as I'm slowly realising what I've committed myself to: as a first step I'm currently re-reading all of Jasper Fforde's novels  (always a great pleasure) and listening to as many of them as I can find as audio books while I'm driving.

In addition there are two biographies of Asquith on my desk, even as I write this, but I've decided not to start re-watching Doctor Who until nearer the time.

The likely timescales for filming are September, October and November but with no indication yet as to broadcast dates.

This is an ongoing project, so watch out for further updates.



Belated Thoughts on the Jubilee

In all the excitement of the Jubile I missed another opportunity to blog about Doctor Who.  In one of those spooky coincidences that seem to happen a lot (note to self: keep an eye on entropy levels) our current trawl through New Who we last week arrived at The Idiot's Lantern  which as any fule kno is set at the time of the Coronation.

Here's the trailer:

Lighting the Beacons

We saw that there would be a Diamond Jubilee Beacon being lit on the Downs above our village, so we decided to go and watch it being lit.

Needless to say the location we had found on the website was incorrect, but a large cardboard sign directed us several hundred yards up the road, where the cars parked on the verge made us realise that something was happening.

There was a small crowd present, some of whom had been present for the Silver and Golden Jubilee Beacons, and we waited together and looked out over the dark plains below.  There was a wonderful sense of timelessness there, a feeling that we were sharing in something that stretched back at least to the Armada - or even earlier as there are so many ancient earthworks in our area. 

We did our best to ignore the signs of 21st Century Berkshire, and as we watched we spotted several beacons spread out across the landscape beneath us.

At 10.00pm the signal was given for someone to light ours: there was a countdown, a flash of flame, and then a great cheer.

We drove home listening to the soundtrack of the beacon sequence in The Lord of The Rings:

My Week with Marilyn

It's our AGM early next month, and we've decided to screen My Week with Marilyn.

Here are my notes:

My Week with Marilyn

UK2011                       101 minutes

Director:                      Simon Curtis

Starring:                        Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh, Eddie Redmayne, Emma Watson and Judi Dench

 Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for Oscars for Best Actress (Michelle Williams) and Best Supporting Actor (Kenneth Branagh)
• Nominated for six BAFTAs including Best British Film, Best Actress (Michelle Williams), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench) and Best Supporting Actor (Kenneth Branagh)
• A further 14 wins and 26 nominations

“In 1956, Marilyn Monroe came to Britain to make a movie at Pinewood Studios with Laurence Olivier. This was the tense and ill-fated light comedy The Prince and the Showgirl, scripted by Terence Rattigan, a film that became a legend for the lack of chemistry between its insecure and incompatible stars.  One was a sexy, feminine, sensual and mercurial diva.  The other would go on to make Some Like It Hot.  ... My Week With Marilyn is light fare: it doesn't pretend to offer any great insight, but it offers a great deal of pleasure and fun, and an unpretentious homage to a terrible British movie that somehow, behind the scenes, generated a very tender almost-love story.”

Peter Bradshaw

Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne) is the Third Assistant Director on The Prince and the Showgirl which Marilyn Monroe (Michelle Williams) is filming in the UK with Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh) as both director and leading man.  Monroe has been accompanied to the UK by her husband Arthur Miller (Dougray Scott), but when he leaves her to return to the US she spends an intimate romantic week alone with Clark.  The film is based on a memoir that Colin Clark (son of Lord Clark of Civilisation and younger brother of Alan Clark, Conservative MP and famous diarist) wrote from the diaries that he kept about his time working with Olivier as a general dogsbody on The Prince and the Showgirl. 

Michelle Williams and Kenneth Branagh secured both critical praise and award nominations for their performances, but the film has casting in depth and includes established performers such as Judi Dench (as Sybil Thorndike), Julia Ormond (as Vivien Leigh) and Zoe Wanamaker (as Paula Strasberg, Marilyn Monroe’s acting coach) as well as relative newcomers such Eddie Redmayne (recently seen in Birdsong on TV) and Emma Watson (moving on from her role as Hermione in the Harry Potter films).

The screenplay is by Adrian Hodges who has worked extensively in television where, amongst his work, he has adapted two of Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockheart novels for TV as well as creating and writing episodes for Primeval and writing episodes for the BBC remake of Survivors.  Simon Curtis as director had worked extensively in theatre before making his television debut with Cranford.  He followed the success of this series with the widely acclaimed film A Short Stay in Switzerland, which starred Julie Walters in a true story of a woman who decided to take her own life in a Dignitas clinic.

Here's the trailer:

Films for the Jubilee

Everyone seems to be getting excited about the Cultural Olympiad linked to the Olympic Games (apparently they're happening in London and other venues around the country during the summer).  But to date I've not seen much about any cultural events to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee.

Following her success in Elizabeth Cate Blanchett returned to the role in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which was set at the time of the Spanish Armada.  Despite a number of inaccuracies and liberties with history I enjoyed it very much and it went down well when we screened it for our Film Society.  On this basis I wonder if there is any mileage in Helen Mirren returning to the role of Elizabeth II in a sequel to The Queen.  In the first film Michael Sheen was uncannily brilliant portraying Blair in his early pomp, but I'd be struggling to cast either Cameron or Clegg.

Here are my notes for The Golden Age:  

ELIZABETH: THE GOLDEN AGE

UK, 2007 (114 minutes)

Director:          Shekhar Kapur

Starring:          Cate Blanchett, Clive Owen and Geoffrey Rush

Awards and Nominations

Oscars

Won                            Oscar for Best Costumes
Nominated                  Cate Blanchett (Actress in a Leading Role)

BAFTAS                     Four nominations, including Cate Blanchett for Best Leading Actress

A further three wins and seven nominations

In 1585 Catholic Spain, the most powerful country in Europe, is plotting to invade England and overthrow the heretic Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett).  Philip II has built an Armada and the execution of Mary Queen of Scots gives him the excuse he needs to launch it.  A combination of the naval skills of Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen), Spanish miscalculation and the English weather allow a numerically inferior English fleet to destroy the Armada and save both Queen and country.

 In the four centuries since her death Elizabeth I has become a chameleon figure who can reflect the cultural and political concerns of the age which chooses to portray her – especially in films and on TV.  In The Sea Hawk (1940) Flora Robson portrayed Elizabeth vigorously defending her Kingdom against foreign invasion, a situation with obvious parallels to the events of the Second World War; in the early 1970s Glenda Jackson gave a performance with a distinct feminist flavour in Elizabeth R; and in Shakespeare in Love (1998) Judi Dench transformed Elizabeth into a drama-loving deus (dea?) ex machina who resolved the complexities of the plot, while at the same time providing Shakespeare with an abundance of source material for his future plays.  Elizabeth I has also appeared memorably in both Black Adder and Doctor Who.

Cate Blanchett’s portrayal of Elizabeth in Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) offers a very different view of the queen, but one which again has similarities with our own recent history.  The first film shows the real dangers that Elizabeth faces both during the reign of her half-sister and after gaining the crown herself, when she has to overcome attempts to dethrone her by disaffected courtiers as well as defeating external rebellions, eventually realising that in order to consolidate her power and retain the throne she needs to remain unmarried.  In the later film Elizabeth is still receiving suitors from across Europe, but at the same time Catholic powers in Europe are plotting to overthrow her: she survives an unsuccessful assassination plot by religious zealots and then unites her subjects by portraying herself as a moderate who will defend English Protestants and Catholics against the fundamentalist practices of the Spanish Inquisition that would follow a successful invasion by the Spanish Armada.

Shekhar Kapur has rejected claims that his film is anti-Catholic; he sees it rather as a conflict between Philip who had no ability to encompass diversity or contradiction and Elizabeth who had a feminine ability to do precisely that.  This perspective compels him to interpret history with a significant degree of artistic licence: in 1585 Elizabeth was 52, although the film shows her still receiving suitors; Fotheringay Castle, where Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded, is situated on the flat plains of Northamptonshire rather than on the banks of a picturesque loch; and Sir Walter Raleigh played only a minor in the defeat of the Spanish Armada.  In Alan Bennett’s memorable phrase this is histrionics rather than history, but it follows in a glorious tradition that we can trace back to Shakespeare.  Did anyone ever expect Richard III to give an accurate picture of pre-Tudor history?

Here's the trailer:

From The Archives...

We screened Volver in our first season, some time before I started this blog.

I have to own up to a massive whole in my film watching history: this was the first film by Almodóvar that I had ever seen, although I'd been aware of his work for many years.  Needless to say it blew me away and I now have my own copy of DVD as well.

this is one of the fist examples of me committing to produce notes on a film I had not seen.  Having just re-read the notes I hope they stand the test of time:

VOLVER/COMING HOME

Spain 2006, 121 minutes

Director:          Pedro Almodóvar

Starring:          Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura etc

Awards and Nominations:  

Cannes Film Festival: 

Winner:                                   Ensemble Cast (Joint Winners of Best Actress)

                                                Pedro Almodóvar (Best Screenplay)

Nomination:                            Golden Palm

Oscar Nominations:                Penélope Cruz (Best Actress in a Leading Role)

                 
BAFTA Nominations:            Best Film Not in the English Language

                                                Penélope Cruz (Best Actress in a Leading Role)       

Volver, which translates into English as Coming Home or Coming Back, is an intriguing melodrama inspired by the trash TV that is the soundtrack to its characters’ lives.  Penélope Cruz is Raimunda, a hard-working woman with a teenage daughter and a feckless, lazy husband.  With her sister Sole she tends the graves of her parents and visits her ailing aunt Paula, who is in the final stages of dementia.  There is a sudden act of violence which destroys Raimunda’s family life and a secret about her late mother Irene that emerges when Irene returns from beyond the grave to contact her astonished daughters.

Almodóvar is the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation.  He started making films in 1980, but did not have his first international success until Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 1988.  He followed this with Live Flesh (1997), based on a novel by English crime writer Ruth Rendell, All About My Mother (1999), which won an Oscar for Best Foreign film and a Best Director Award for Almodóvar and which has just been staged as a play at the Old Vic in London, and Talk To Her (2002) which won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.  All his films are marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture and irreverent humour.  He describes Volver as a cross between Mildred Pierce, in which a career woman takes the rap for a murder that her daughter has committed, and Arsenic and Old Lace, which involves a pair of old ladies involved in homicide, and in it he somehow manges to connect the various narrative strands into a lucid pattern of generational conflict and female bonding that remains psychologically convincing.

Penélope Cruz gives a brilliant performance as Raimunda, and in a superb female ensemble cast Carmen Maura, outrageous star of Almodóvar’s earlier films, as Irene also stands out.  Penélope Cruz was deservedly nominated for a Best Actress Award for her performance, but not for the fist time the Cannes Jury decided to go one better: having decided that it was impossible to choose between all the performances, they uniquely awarded the Best Actress Award to the Ensemble Cast.

Here's the trailer:

How to write film notes

We have a couple of techies in our film club who set up the projector and sound system for each screening, and an accountant who is our treasurer.  As I'm neither technical nor an accountant I'm happy to leave all that to them: my job is to buy the wine, run the bar - and produce the film notes.
The challenge here is to produce some interesting notes about a film which (for the most part) I have not seen and to put in some form of context.  Once of the best films we have ever screened was Downfall, about the last days of Hitler in the bunker, although I did receive one complaint about a spoiler in the following notes:

DOWNFALL (DER UNTERGANG)

Germany 2005, 156 minutes

Director:          Oliver Hirschbiegel

Starring:          Bruno Ganz, Alexandra Maria Lara, Juiliane Kohler and Ulriches Matthes

Awards and Nominations

• Oscar Nomination for Best Film Foreign Language Film, plus another 13 nominations and 14 wins.

In April 1945 the war in Europe is reaching its final stages, and as the Red Army approaches Berlin Hitler and his entourage take refuge in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery.  As Hitler celebrates his birthday he spends the final ten days of his life increasingly isolated from reality as he orders his entourage to uses non-existent battalions of the Wehrmacht to stage a glorious counter-attack.  While they are in Hitler’s presence his officers politely maintain this fantasy, but when they are alone there is just one topic of conversation: how best to commit suicide while Berlin burns around them.

 The script is based closely on information from Inside Hitler’s Bunker (2002) by Joachim Fest, a German historian of the Nazi period who was able to use material only recently made available from the archives of the former Soviet Union, as well as first-hand accounts of those who had actually been in the bunker with Hitler, including Albert Speer and Traudl Junge, who as Hitler’s secretary was able to provide a uniquely intimate perspective on the death throes of the Third Reich. 

In Germany the treatment of any aspect of the Third Reich is still a sensitive issue and Downfall broke one the last taboos in its depiction of Hitler by a German-speaking actor; until this point German films had only used newsreel film to depict Hitler.  In English language films on this subject there seems to have been a convention that a portrayal of Hitler requires classical training and Alec Guinness, Derek Jacobi, Anthony Hopkins and Alec McCowen have all given their own impersonation of the Führer.  However Bruno Ganz, who was actually born in Switzerland, has a German-speaking authenticity that blows away all earlier portrayals by showing that even in private Hitler shouted and raved: there was never a charming statesman or brilliant visionary.

Concern about the portrayal of Hitler ensured that the film received international coverage.  In the UK Ian Kershaw, a biographer of Hitler, commented:

“Knowing what I did of the bunker story, I found it hard to imagine that anyone (other than the usual neo-Nazi fringe) could possibly find Hitler a sympathetic figure during his bizarre last days. And to presume that it might be somehow dangerous to see him as a human being — well, what does that thought imply about the self-confidence of a stable, liberal democracy?

Of all the screen depictions of the Führer, this is the only one which to me is compelling. Part of this is the voice. Ganz has Hitler's voice to near perfection. It is chillingly authentic.”

 The film ends with a brief extract from the documentary Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary in which an elderly Traudl Junge, one of the few survivors from the bunker still alive, speaks of her youthful infatuation with Hitler and recognises that her young age was no excuse for not asking crucial questions about either Nazism or its victims.  She died shortly after the release of the documentary and in one of her final interviews is reported to have said “Now that I’ve let go of my story I can let go of my life.”

Here's the trailer: