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:
