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:

The Ghost

Here are my notes for our screening this week: 

The Ghost

UK 2010                      128 minutes

Director:                      Roman Polanski

Starring:                        Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall

Nominations and Awards

• Won Silver Bear (Best Director) at the Berlin Film Festival
• Won Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Ewan McGregor), Best Screenplay (Roman Polanski and Robert Harris), Production Design and Music at the European Film Awards
• A further 11 wins and 21 nominations

“The Ghost is Roman Polanski's best film since Tess 30 years ago, and as immaculately crafted a thriller as we're likely to see this year. It may not be in the very first rank of his pictures, of which Chinatown remains the peak. But in every respect it's a characteristic work, with echoes of those stories of intruders breaking into troubled relationships (Knife in the Water, Cul-de-sac), savvy innocents getting out of their depth (Chinatown), people losing touch with their own identities (Repulsion, The Tenant), and the operation of a malevolent fate in a world where, like Oliver Twist, the trusting hero of Polanski's last film, you need to be suspicious of the kindness of strangers.”

Philip French

Ewan McGregor plays an anonymous ghost writer hired to work on the dull memoirs of a former British Prime Minister Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) in order to justify a $10 million advance.  When he arrives in New England to begin work with Lang he discovers that his predecessor had died in mysterious circumstances, and then it seems that history might be about to repeat itself as he begins to discover alarming clues about Lang’s past in his predecessor’s notes.

 The film is based on the best-selling novel by Robert Harris, who also worked with Polanski on the screenplay which skilfully distils the complexities of the plot into a fast paced thriller.  In his novel Harris quotes Evelyn Waugh’s epigraph from Brideshead Revisited (“I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they”) but it is clear that the Langs are inspired by a recent British Prime Minister and his wife.  Pierce Brosnan gives a superb performance as Lang, and although he displays many of Blair’s characteristics he makes him a distinct character (quite unlike Michael Sheen’s uncanny impersonation of Blair in The Queen).  In a similar vein Olivia Williams turns Ruth Lang, despite her initial superficial resemblance to Cherie Blair, into a far more complex character.

Roman Polanski achieved international success with Knife in the Water (1962) and subsequently has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and most recently in Europe. In the USA his most successful film was Chinatown (1974) which received 11 Oscar nominations.  After leaving the USA in 1978 to avoid arrest he has lived and worked in Europe where his films have included Tess (1979), Death and the Maiden (1994) and The Pianist (2001), which won both the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Director. 

Following the success of The Ghost, which he shot in Germany with the bleak desolation of the North German coast standing in for Martha’s Vineyard, Polanski has recently directed Carnage, from the play God of Carnage by Yasmina Reza, which was set in New York but which he filmed in studios in Paris.

Here's the trailer: