A Little Chaos

I'm finally back on track in terms of writing my notes for films: the hours of daylight are getting shorter with a consequent reduction in the time I can spend on gardening leave - everything outside has never looked better.

This week's film is all about gardening, and I even managed to add a quote from Simon Schama to add an extra layer of cultural reliance.

Here are my notes:

A Little Chaos

UK 2014                      117 minutes

Director:                      Alan Rickman

Starring:                        Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Matthias Schoenaerts, Alan Rickman and Stanley Tucci

“Even before the first chateau [at Versailles] by Louis Le Vau, the park was made the setting for entertainments that catered to the king’s hunger for self-aggrandisement. Whether they were ostensibly performed in honour of military victories, the king’s latest mistress, or both, they used bodies of water as theatrical platforms on which spectacles that flattered his omnipotence could be performed.”

Simon Schama

Landscape and Memory

After being appointed by King Louis XIV (Alan Rickman) on a project in the gardens of Versailles Andre Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) employs Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet), a woman with an unconventional sense of gardening, to help him complete the work.

Allison Deegan is an actor and wrote an initial version of the screenplay 17 years ago while on maternity leave.  She had admired Alan Rickman after seeing him on stage in Les Liaisons Dangereuses and sent an unsolicited copy of the screenplay to him; he responded favourably and announced that he wanted to direct it.  However despite his support his other work commitments, especially his ongoing role as Snape in the Harry Potter films, meant that the film had to wait.  Initially Deegan had written the role of Le Notre for Rickman, but the extended delay in its production meant that his age made him more suited for the role of Louis XIV, a character who perhaps echoed his responsibilities as director of the film.

On its release the film received generally positive reviews with Tim Robey in The Telegraph commenting:

“If you see only one film about 17^th century landscape gardening this year, it ought to be A Little Chaos, a heaving bouquet of a picture.”

Carnage

One of my jobs within our Film Club is to email our members to let them know what we will be screening and to send them copies of my notes to give them some background to the film.

My usual email title is [film title] at Village Hall but this week, as we're screening Carnage, I had to make sure I had inverted commas in the right places:

"Carnage" at the Village Hall

Here are my notes:

Carnage

USA 2011                    79minutes

Director:                      Roman Polanski

Starring:                        Christolph Waltz, Jodie Foster, John C Reilly and Kate Winslet

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated for two Golden Globes (Jodie Foster and Kate Winslet as Best Actress)
• A further four wins and 13 nominations

“Carnage is a film about four people who hate each other and are unable to leave the room. Sometimes they make it far as the door and once or twice to the lift, though on each occasion they are pulled back by the unfinished business of their exquisite loathing and bitter contempt. With this stealthy adaptation of the Yasmina Reza stage play, director Roman Polanski has rustled up a pitch-black farce of the charmless bourgeoisie that is indulgent, actorly and so unbearably tense I found myself gulping for air and praying for release. Hang on to your armrest and break out the scotch. These people are about to go off like Roman candles.”

Xan Brooks

Following an incident in  a playground in which one boy hits another with a stick and knocks out several of his teeth the two sets of parents meet up to discuss the matter.  Over the course of an evening the meeting disintegrates as each set seeks to assign guilt for an event that seems to have arisen as a result of an accident.

The film is based on the play God of Carnage by the French writer Yasmina Reza which won an Olivier Award for Best Play for its London production and a Tony for Best Play in 2009 following its production on Broadway.  Reza worked on the screenplay with Polanski who kept the American setting of the play, although the film was made entirely in Paris because of Polanski’s legal status: the script does not open out the original script and the main action takes place entirely in the apartment of Penelope and Michael Longstreet (Jodie Foster and John C Reilly).

It is interesting that Polanski has cast the film as a US actor couple versus a non-US actor couple, but all four performers are superb: Foster, Waltz and Winslet have all won Oscars and Reilly has been Oscar nominated, and in the course of a relatively short film Polanski allows all four actors to hurtle through a whole gamut of emotions.

At the age of 79 Polanski shows little signs of slowing down.  In the last ten years he has directed The Pianist (2002), Oliver Twist (2005), The Ghost (2010) and Carnage (2011).  Following the release of Carnage to wide critical acclaim he is currently filming Venus in Furs, based on a play by David Ives, in which a young actress tries to convince a director that she’d be perfect for a role in his forthcoming production.

Here is the trailer:

Revolutionary Road

These are the film notes for last night's screening:


Revolutionary Road

USA 2009 (119 minutes)
Director: Sam Mendes
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Richard Easton and Jay O Sanders

Awards and Nominations
* Nominated for three Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor (Michael Shannon)
* Won Golden Globe for Best Actress (Kate Winslet)
* A further five wins and 21 nominations including BAFTA nominations for Best Actress (Kate Winslet) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Justin Hayes)

In 1950s Connecticut Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) works discontendely for a Manhattan computer company while his wife April (Kate Winslet) once had ambitions to be an actress but is now a housewife who takes part in amateur theatricals. In the throes of a quarter life crisis they plan to move to Paris to retrieve their lives, but while April becomes hooked on her pipe dream Frank gets cold feet.

There had been several earlier unsuccessful attempts to film the 1961 novel by Richard Yates, but it was only after Kate Winslet told her husband Sam Mendes that she would like to play the part of April Wheeler that he agreed to direct it, and only when DiCaprio had been cast as Frank Wheeler that the film actually went into production. Winslet and DiCaprio made their names in Titanic (1997), and since then both actors have had successful careers in a number of high profile films although this is the first time that they had worked together again. Nonetheless the friendship that they had developed while making Titanic endured, and this helped them portray a couple so convincingly in this film. Both actors received praise for their performances, but it was Winslet who won the awards (although as she had been nominated for Best Actress Oscar for her performance in The Reader she was ineligible for a nomination for her performance in this film, and she competed against herself in the BAFTAs, winning the Best Actress award for her performance in The Reader). The shoot was so emotionally and physically draining for DiCaprio that he postponed his next film for two months.

Revolutionary Road was Yates’ first novel, and was a finalist in the National book Award of 1961 (Catch-22 was also shortlisted). Despite being championed by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Parker, William Styron and Tennessee William and receiving almost universal critical acclaim for his work, none of his novels sold well and all went out of print after he died in 1992. However in recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in his work: in the UK Nick Hornby made one of the suicidal characters in his 2005 novel A Long Way Down carry a copy of Revolutionary Road so that it could be discovered on his corpse.

Sam Mendes made his name as a stage director with award-winning productions in both the UK and the USA. In 1999 as a novice film maker he directed American Beauty which won five Oscars, including Best Director and Best Film. He followed this with Road to Perdition (2002) which included Paul Newman’s final screen appearance in a major role. It has just been announced that Mendes will direct the as-yet-untitled next Bond film, which is due for release in 2011.