Love & Friendship

I'm in catch-up mode: we screened this film at the beginning of last month but I'm only now getting round to updating my blog.

One of the advantages of this time of year is that there are so many good films on release as the awards season comes into view, but the disadvantage is that with everything else going on it means that other jobs have to slip.

The film was far better than I expected and VERY different from any other adaptation of a Jane Austen Novel that I'd seen either on TV or the big screen.

Here are my notes:

Love & Friendship

Ireland/Netherlands 2016         93 minutes

Director:                                  Whit Stillman

Starring:                                    Kate Beckinsale, Xavier Samuel, Chloe Sevigny, Morfydd Clark, Tom Bennett and Stephen Fry

Awards and Nominations

• 3 wins and 32 nominations, including Film of The Year, Best Adapted Screenplay (Whit Stillman), Best Actress (Kate Beckinsale) and Best Supporting Actor (Tom Bennett) 

“What audacity, what elegance! Here is a hilariously self-aware period comedy polished to a brilliant sheen. Whit Stillman was probably born to direct a Jane Austen movie. But he has found a new way of dramatising Austen – or just found a new Austen, an Austen who appears to have pre-emptively absorbed 21st-century satire and inoculated herself against it. This Stillman has done by lighting on an early, posthumously published novella, Lady Susan, bringing it to the screen, and renaming it after a quite separate piece of juvenilia, thus playfully echoing the classic noun balances of her more famous titles.”

Peter Bradshaw

Lady Susan Vernon (Kate Beckinsale), a beautiful but penniless widow, comes to the estate of her in-laws to absent herself from the colourful rumours about her past dalliances. While staying at their estate she decides to find husbands for both her debutant daughter Frederica (Morfydd Clark) and herself.

In her short life Jane Austen completed six novels: four of these were published to acclaim during her lifetime, two were published posthumously and all have been adapted many times for the stage, TV and cinema. Of these the most successful have been Andrew Davis’s superb TV adaptation of Price and Prejudice (1995), which gave Colin Firth the role of a lifetime as Darcy, Ang Lee’s Sense and Sensibility (1995), with an Oscar winning screenplay by Emma Thompson and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless (1995), which updated the action of Emma to contemporary Beverley Hills. But Austen had been writing from an early age and her Juvenila included the epistolary novels Love and Freindship (sic) and Lady Susan, and it is the latter work which Whit Stillman has adapted, although he borrowed the title (with corrected spelling) from the former.

The first three films which Stillman wrote and directed – Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994) and The Last Days of Disco (1998) – are all comedies of manners based on his own early life, and in a recent retrospective of his work it was suggested that his films all have a sort of costume drama sensibility, but without the costumes, and now with Love & Friendship he had made a costume drama, period dress and all. However Stillman rejected this view of his film:

"Love & Friendship doesn’t loom as a costume drama, because it’s a pretty funny comedy, so it’s really not what you might anticipate. It’s not Downton Abbey in any way, shape or form. There are a lot of very good English comic actors who have done the supporting parts and really shine… I love Jane Austen. I sort of wanted something of my own to work on between paid script writing assignments. It’s good that I had so much time with no producer or studio executive wanting delivery quickly because it’s an incredibly funny novella she wrote, but hard to read and hard to dramatize. It’s an epistolary form from the 18th century and there are all these very funny ideas and lines buried within. It’s kind of an inaccessible format and it was a long process of adaptation”

The film had its premiere at the 2016 Sundance Festival before going on release in the US in May 2016 and within three months it had taken over $18 million against an estimated budget of $3 million. It is early in the current awards season but in December 2016 at the Evening Standard Film Awards Kate Beckinsale won the award for Best Actress and Tom Bennett the award for Best Supporting Actor, and in The Guardian review of the Best Films of 2016 Love & Friendship appeared in sixth place.

Here's the trailer:

 

Life of Pi

And so we reach the end of another season and it's time for our AGM.  We generally try to choose a film that is going to be popular and this year our choice is Ang Lee's Life of Pi.

Here are my notes:

Life of Pi

USA 2012                    127 minutes

Director:                      Ang Lee

Starring:                        Suraj Sharma, Tabu, Gerard Depardieu and Rafe Spall

Awards and Nominations

• Won four Oscars including Best Director and Cinematography, and nominations for seven further Oscars including Best Film and Best Adapted Screenplay
• Two Golden Globe nominations including Best Film and Best Directior
• A further 52 wins and 70 nominations

“[Ang Lee’s] magnificent new film is a version of Yann Martel's Booker prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, adapted by an American writer, David Magee, whose previous credits were films set in England during the first half of the 20th century, Finding Neverland and Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.  From its opening scene of animals and birds strutting and preening themselves in a sunlit zoo to the final credits of fish and nautical objects shimmering beneath the sea, the movie has a sense of the mysterious, the magical.  This effect is compounded by the hallucinatory 3D, and in tone the film suggests Robinson Crusoe rewritten by Laurence Sterne.”

Philip French

The film is based on the best-selling novel by Yann Martel, a fanatasy about an Indian boy called Piscine (“Pi”) Patel who survives 227 days after a shipwreck while stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger called Richard Parker as his companion.  The book became a global best-seller – although many of its readers must have thought it was unfilmable.

Several other directors had planned to direct the film before Ang Lee took on the project.  The initial plan was for M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) to direct, but after he chose to direct Lady in the Water, the studio discussed the project with Alonso Cuaron (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Gravity).  He passed on the opportunity in order to direct Children of Men, and there were subsequently discussions with Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie and Alien Resurrection), who began work on his own screenplay but made no further progress.  In 2009 Fox Pictures finally hired Ang Lee to direct, and although the projected budget of $120 million caused a further delay, filming finally started in January 2011.

One of the costly elements of the budget was Lee’s decision to film in 3D.  He explained this choice in an interview:

"I thought this was a pretty impossible movie to make technically. It's so expensive for what it is.  You sort of have to disguise a philosophical book as an adventure story.  I thought of 3-D half a year before Avatar was on the screen.  I thought water, with its transparency and reflection, the way it comes out to you in 3-D, would create a new theatrical experience and maybe the audience or the studio would open up their minds a little bit to accept something different."

The film opened to widespread critical acclaim, with the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes stating:

 “A 3D adaptation of a supposedly ‘unfilmable’ book, Ang Lee's Life of Pi achieves the near impossible—it's an astonishing technical achievement that's also emotionally rewarding.”

Here's the trailer: