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hart_keith
Reviews
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003)
Globalization Mark 1
The first world war was fought between the British and the French in the 18th century culminating in Napoleon's defeat in 1815. The decades around 1800 saw the world opened up as never before. It was a time of political, economic and intellectual revolutions. Capitalism found in the whaling industry its first genuinely global enterprise. This is the setting for Patrick O'Brian's series of twenty novels about the exploits of the sailor, Jack Aubrey and his doctor friend, Stephen Maturin. O'Brian was born in 1914 in London of Anglo-German parents with the surname Russ. After the second world war, he abandoned his wife and two children to settle with the wife of Count Nikolai Tolstoy in a French Catalan village, where he reinvented himself as an Irish novelist.
He was 55 years old when he wrote the first in the Aubrey-Maturin series, Master and Commander, and was in his seventies when he became famous. He died soon after his second wife, Mary, in 1999. His example interests me because I am from Manchester and settled in France seven years ago with the aim of reinventing myself as a writer in what many people regard as late middle age. I began my first novel a year ago and saw this movie in a Paris cinema with a mainly French audience.
It's not a great movie, but the story had resonance enough for me. The protagonists represent the man-of-action and the intellectual. The author lines himself up squarely with the Irish-Catalan doctor-naturalist-spy, Maturin, whom he represents as a proto-Darwin or perhaps successor to the great scientist, Joseph Banks, whose biography he wrote. But the hero of course is Lucky' Jack Aubrey, the Royal Navy captain, whose military priorities systematically undermine his friend's pursuit of scientific knowledge in this film. I was also struck by how it echoes the themes of Moby Dick, as interpreted by the West Indian writer, C.L.R. James in his masterly Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953). James argues that whaling (an integral part of this story) was the leading sector of early industrial capitalism, the whaling ship a mobile factory whose voyages connected all parts and peoples of the world. Melville wrote his masterpiece on the eve of the American civil wat which ushered in a new phase of state capitalism. We need to gain some perspective on these antecedents of our own era of globalization and Patrick O'Brian's novels have some claim to being one of the best introductions to that first phase. Peter Weir has done us all a great favour by translating some parts of them into the medium of the movies.
The only cinema still showing Master and Commander in Paris was the Grand Pavois at the end of Métro line 8. The name has nautical connotations. The journey back home gave me time to reflect on my own first round-the-world trip in 1972. I was flying to Australia from London in order to do a job in Papua New Guinea. I'll never forget the shock when the British Airways captain announced our flying time to New York. I had assumed we would be flying east, but it turned out that our journey was the other way round, via New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu and Fiji to Sydney. A baggage truck hit our plane's fuselage in Kennedy airport and we were delayed 19 hours there. The crew plied their truculent passengers with lots of booze, especially on the Los Angeles-Honolulu leg where we were allowed free champagne.
My traveling companion was an Australian film-maker of my age. He tried to tell me how lively his country's cinema was at that time, but I was more impressed by the information that his brother was the lead guitarist in the super-group Procul Harem, whose A Whiter Shade of Pale has to be prime contender for the most pretentious and meaningless rock song of all time. We were tired, drunk and not a little rebellious. My new friend and I devised a competition to see who could fill in the Hawaii immigration form with the most outrageous address. He won hands down with `Notre Reve, Fandango Avenue, Moony Ponds, Victoria.' The flight was 30 hours late by the time we reached Australia and, as a final insult, the plane was diverted to Melbourne.
We must have exchanged names at some point, but the two of us were content to make the limbo of that nightmare journey our self-contained world for a couple of days. Later I told myself that my companion was Peter Weir.
14th March 2004
The Pianist (2002)
Fascism, then and now
I saw this movie only recently on video, while I am spending three months in the USA.. I have been coming here for thirty years and I am a great fan of this mysterious society and its warm people. Lately, I have been disturbed by a discernible shift to autocracy, even brutality in public life at home and abroad. Much of this is justified as the need for security in response to "terrorism". We all depend on impersonal society, call it law, bureaucracy, the market or whatever. And the quality of face-to-face interaction with other human beings is still our measure of the standards we set for personal society. The balance between the two is a thin line we tread daily. Personal society can mean feudalism or criminal mafias and no-one wants that, whatever we may think about the tendency of bureaucrats to trample on simple human interests.
The other day I left my wife crying at the airport where her personal goods had been systematically ripped apart by officials claiming to be just following orders. She said she had never been treated that way in the Soviet Union. There is no question that people who travel through US airports these days expose themselves to harassment and humiliating treatment that would have been unthinkable two years ago. All in the name of security, of course. Black young men have suffered much worse from the police for much longer. But it does seem as if American society could be sliding imperceptibly towards instituted inhumanity of a sort we once called fascism. The present government's indifference to law, whether in Iraq, at Guantanamo or in the domestic detention of suspects, and its apparent ability to lie with impunity merely reinforce the impression that we are witnessing something new here or perhaps rather something old that we thought we put behind us after 1945.
These thought were brought to life and made relative by watching The Pianist. The first half of the movie is harrowing. It shows a decent middle class family shuffling down the slippery slope to destruction by a fascist society that had trained some of its members to behave with the most callous brutality imaginable. At every step, normal people could doubt the plausibility of what was happening to them. By the time they tried to resist, it was too late. The second half is a chase whose outcome is already known (it wouldn't be a movie if the hero died before the end). This reduces the suspense and contributes to a feeling that the film lasts too long. The main character and his relationships don't develop at all in a protracted sequence marked by historical dates, the Warsaw uprising, the arrival of the Russians and so on. But the movie did provide a useful way of placing disparate phenomena along a continuum we might label 'fascist'.
Could I claim that roughing up the belongings of a French woman with a baby at the airport is analogous to picking eight men out of a line at random and shooting them in the head? My answer was and is Yes. Because Nazism started out with the acquiescence of ordinary people in brutality that escalated imperceptibly over time. And because all nationalisms are implicitly a racist assertion of superiority over foreigners who lack any claim to human rights.The critique has to start with the inhumanity of normal society -- harassed women slapping kids in supermarkets, men in their 50s being thrown on the scrap heap because the terms of trade dictate it, a teenager being strip searched because she fits a drug runner's profile. I think this makes me a liberal, as does the belief that we can't return to the Warsaw ghetto or the Gulag, not that far. Why so? We are witnessing an attempt to put the lid on a popular uprising that was continuous since 1945 and peaked in the 90s. The resistance is not obvious today because people are fearful about losing more than they think they can afford to. And they are right to be afraid. But I don't think the repressive classes can get away with as much as they did in mid-century. And here I rely on the classic liberal idea, that people know too much these days.
So I wonder what this fine movie provokes in the minds of the audience: that this couldn't happen to us again or that it could, if we forget the history it brings alive for us.
Sleepers (1996)
disclaimers, present and absent
At the end of this film, two disclaimers were posted -- one by the New York department responsible for juvenile detention saying that nothing like this ever happened in their system, the other by the Justice Department saying that no trial like this had ever taken place. The Roman Catholic church, however, did not issue a disclaimer saying that no priest had ever perjured himself in the way the de Niro character did.
Kagemusha (1980)
Better than Shakespeare
I saw the director's cut about twenty years after I first saw the film. Kagemusha is as magnificent now as before, but what has changed in the meantime is my appreciation of the meaning of Shakespeare's plays. The history plays and most of the tragedies were about the political dilemmas facing the new Tudor state. The Elizabethan audience sat on the edge of their seats waiting to see how political order might be restored once it had been set in disarray. The Wars of the Roses sequence culminates in the late political tragedies -- Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet and Lear. The question is always the same. How is an impersonal modern state possible when its leader is a person, the King? Or is rule by office compatible with the human flaws of the person occupying it? Shakespeare was the client of a conservative aristocratic faction, no rabble-rousing democrat he. But he went so deep into this political question in the course of writing all his plays that he dug deeper into this core issue of modern politics than anyone since.
Kurosawa approaches the same question through the notion of a double,"the shadow of a warrior", Kagemusha. Here the contrast between the office of the political leader and its personal incumbent is brought vividly to life in so many ways. The period is the Japanese equivalent of England's War of the Roses, the transition from feudalism to the beginnings of the modern state. The losing side in this case is the one that tries to resolve the contradiction of personality and office by a subterfuge, a thief masquerading as a lord. The winning side and founder of the Japanese state is the Tokugawa clan. The climactic battle symbolises the passage from traditional to modern warfare, as the horses of the losers are mown down by fusillades of gunfire. The credits run as the corpse of the double crosses a submerged flag whose abstract symbolism shows us which aspects of feudalism the modern state will borrow. Personality is vanquished.
The aesthetic vision animating this movie is incredible. There is so much to look at and admire, perhaps interpret. One striking feature for me was the persistent strong breeze ripping through the banners, a symbol of the winds of change running through 16th century Japan, contemporary to Shakespeare's period. Because this drama was made by and for the modern cinema, in many ways Kurosawa's masterpiece is better than Shakespeare.
Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)
the play goes on
I saw this in a Paris cinema on a Sunday afternoon. The French audience loved it, as did I. They clapped at the intermission and they clapped to the music while the credits were running. I thought the song and dance routines were great, providing the perfect bridge to a semi-mythologised narrative. The audience sometimes laughed at the exaggeration and coincidence of the plot, especially at the end -- the rain, the Englishwoman who never married. Astonishingly they even got the joke about 'this country will be the future of this game'. It seems that lack of knowledge of cricket and subtitles with words like 'runs', 'overs' and 'no ball' were not a handicap. Of course the pillorying of the British didn't go down badly here. I especially liked the representation of the Raj, not as a moderrnising influence, but as straight agrarian civilisation, extraction of the food from peasants' mouths.
I was on the edge of tears throughout. Why? Because this was the first Indian production that to my knowledge has won a world audience. And it provided a new sentimental bridge to the world for my own trajectory. I could see how Bollywood is the only film-making centre that actually could do what Hollywood does, but in its own distinctive way, with a much more universal human interest. And the music of course. The plot and characters were caricatured, but that made it all that more accessible and touching, like a medieval passion play. I loved the symbolic roles contrived for the Muslim, the Untouchable, the Sikh, the collaborator, the headman, the intellectual etc.
Above all, the plot of learning the game and beating the masters was perfect. It was CLR James to the tee. Beyond a Boundary indeed , with society in the shape of the crowd as much of the action as the players. And the idea of the bet! Play comes from an Old English word whose first meaning is to wager. The idea of life as a game of negotiated risks is very widespread among hunter-gatherers, where people have to be trained to respond instantly to the flash of white tail in the bush. Obviously it sometimes pays for peasants (and citydwellers) to pick up these skills. The play goes on.
Gosford Park (2001)
a tragic satire of British society
I saw this film yesterday in Paris. Experiencing it with a French audience no doubt enhanced its power to reinforce the feeling of being in voluntary exile from Britain. Today I have been haunted by recurrent images of the servants' domain, a warren of low corridors, cramped rooms and frantic industry that I had never seen before. The grandeur of life upstairs we have all seen many times, but never in such a context of servants' lives. The image was of a workhouse or factory jammed into the basement of a palace. Factories play a significant role in the story: the lord of the manor owns several and a number of the servants started out in them. Imagine what life in the factories was like (the film is set in the 1930s) if domestic service of this kind was a step up.
The overwhelming tenor of the society is one of brutality. The owners behave savagely towards the servants and to each other. The servants reproduce this in their own hierarchies. Only Americans could have made this movie, since the British are still seduced by the national glory the lifestyle represents. The plot is eventually a murder mystery, but no-one pays much notice to the victim, since it seems to be a natural expression of the culture he embodied. Gosford Park is so parodic of the Agatha Christie genre invented in this period as to point up the bitterness of the social satire. There are not many jokes.
What then is this magnificent cast of British actors doing in such a movie? Many of the greatest of them on show perform as servants: the superb Helen Mirren, Derek Jacobi, Alan Bates, Eileen Atkins. Some of the others create memorable upper class monsters: Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Kristin Scott-Thomas. Does this express what they feel about their role in a British society dependent on Americans to make films? The creaking plot device of an invasion of Hollywood types doesn't quite work, but it does allow us to see the British as others see them.
What makes this film tragic for me is that it depicts the appallingly recent source of a contemporary Britain that has not shaken off the loss of an empire it made in the image of the society revealed here. I grew up after the war, but my journey from the provincial lower classes to Oxbridge and beyond constantly exposed me to the residue of this brutal class hierarchy. It is the mark of a great movie to make us feel that we are seeing something new. Altman has done us all a favour by exposing upstairs/downstairs without any hint of mystique. I wonder if, when seen through the cultural blinkers of London's suburbs, it provokes nostalgia, not pity, if only to witness so many of our greatest actors as servants looking their age.
Barton Fink (1991)
a writer's life is hell
This film is a sequence of variations on the theme that a writer's life, the life of the mind, is hell. Barton Fink, a New York social realist playwright in the style of Clifford Odets, goes to Hollywood to cash in on a short-term success. Hell is first the literary scene in New York, then Hotel California (unpeeling wallpaper, the living dead as help), writer's block, a movie studio mogul, a drunken Fitzgerald-type novelist, murder, the dance floor, a blazing inferno (starring John Goodman as the devil - he even wrestles!) and finally Califonia and the beach itself. Throughout the film our attention is drawn to a picture on the hotel room wall, of a girl in a bikini looking out to the ocean. Turturro/Fink staggers onto the beach with a box probably containing the severed head of a woman. He meets a pretty girl and asks her if she is in pictures, which she denies. The last frame is a real life reproduction of the picture in his room. California is the last stage of hell, at least for a New York writer who is so wrapped up in his own mind that, as John Goodman tells him, he never listens.