Il Divo

The American journalist and satirist H.L Mencken once said “Opera in English is, in the main, just about as sensible as baseball in Italian.” The operatic tone of Il Divo and the frustratingly impenetrable world of Italian politics (both in being able to understand and to be prominent in it) create a chilling and disquieting atmosphere in what might have been turned into a political thriller or self-serving documentary by lesser film makers than Paolo Sorrentino.

Mencken’s quote also resonates with the film in that its subject matter and question – was three-time Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti involved with the Mafia? – includes exploration of an American connection to the cosa nostra. However don’t be put off by thinking this film is filled with discussion of obscure (to an English audience) events and characters in the alleged massive scandal in the government.

I made the mistake of trying to follow the complex network of politicians, criminal groups and political development’s in Andreotti’s reign but this is not a film attempting to persuade or even inform the audience about the situation. This is a character based film in the guise of Citizen Kane or Downfall with its obsessive focus on a potent but flawed authority figure. The immovable lynchpin of Andreotti is the spider in this film’s confusing web.

Resembling Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s Truman Capote, the brilliant Toni Servillo creates a fascinating portrayal of Andreotti despite inhabiting a body that speaks seldomly and moves even less so. This gives the impression of a lazy boss who has no need to show fragrant emotion and motion. But Servillo is more akin an iguana on a immaculate branch, absolutely static but with the implication he could stick out a spiralling tongue and suck a fly inwards towards its doom.

This language is perhaps too hyperbolically elusive than necessary. However the underlying fact is that Andreotti is a very hard character to pin down with even the central question of film left dangerously open by the film’s conclusion. The oft-silent Andreotti breaks out in a searing monologue in the final section of movie in a diatribe resembling Waiting for Godot’s Lucky. Just as Lucky is a slave to Pozzo, Andreotti is in someway a slave to Italian politics, or is he the autocrat pulling all the strings? That the movie leaves these questions unanswered is as much down to a fear that overt criticism of the mafia could mean reprisals to Sorrentino as it is that Andreotti has been acquitted and convicted of involvement countless times, with seemingly no jail sentence forthcoming.

But the Sopranos-like death sequences and exuberant Romanic architecture give Andreotti of an emperor consumed by power, leaving him an empty husk of a man.

It has art direction and visual innovation to rival the most flamboyant movie and this coupled together with a wonderfully diverse soundtrack with everything from belting orchestras to whining guitars makes this film an intricate and intoxicating watch.

If you make the wise decision to see it, please approach it as a character piece on Andreotti and don’t struggle to swallow every nugget of information about the scandal and Italian politics itself. The hypnotic cavalcade of supporting characters, the masterly Servillo and the eye of Sorrentino ensure this is a memorable if slightly intangible motion picture.

Gran Torino

The Clint Eastwood project, in more ways than one, clearly is trying to emulate something of what Streetcar Named Desire was with Eastwood’s cantankerous lead character called Mr. Kowalski and his smarmy salesman son called Mitch. Like Stanley in Tennesse Williams’ seminal work, Walt Kowalski is touchy about issues of race and somewhat of a misogynist. But Marlon Brando’s angry young man is now a grouchy world-weary Eastwood.

Walt is a Korean war-veteran in Michigan, irritable and lonesome after his wife’s death, who lives next door to a southeast Asian family in a Hmong neighbourhood. Hmong is a non-derogatory term for immigrants into America from nations such as Laos, Vietnam, Thailand and so on. The film explores the tensions within Walt related to his rejection of his wife’s church and his racial prejudices and the tensions in the suburb where he lives between the respectable Asian family and Asian gangs.

There is no doubt Eastwood is perfect as the complaining old neighbour, even uttering the unintentionally amusing line “Get off my lawn!” which becomes something of a catchphrase. However the main crux of the film relies on Walt’s relationship with two teenagers from the family next door, reclusive Thao (Ben Vang) and his gregarious sister Sue Van Lor (Ahney Her). While Ahney Her is excellent as the feisty youth who brings Eastwood onto the side of the family, the film focuses heavily on Walt’s efforts to make Thao into what he perceives a young man to be, brash, hard working and with a woman on his side.

This is also an attempt from Walt to try and get Thao to stay away from his cousin’s gang which initially try to recruit him and then begin to trouble his family when he rejects. The problem is Thao’s portrayal by Ben Vang turns what is simply a shy character into a boring one and dialogues with Eastwood feel clunky and without any kind of narrative spark. Another rather lead-footed aspect to the film is between Walt and the priest of the church he and his late wife used to attend before Walt left, Father Janovich (Christopher Carney).

The writing for this character feels very woolly with the focal point being that Janovich believes as a religious leader he understands death with Walt shunning this as the Father has no insight into his horrific experiences in the Korean war. The whole atmosphere of a member of the clergy trying to get an arrogant man to attend church has echoes of There Will Be Blood with Janovich even saying, while discussing the gangs, without any hint of tongue in cheek that “There will be bloodshed.”

The rising conflict between Walt and his neighbours on one side and the gang on the other culminate in the dénouement of the film which while not obvious on paper become very apparent before the pivotal scene, lessening any impact it has. I can’t imagine this is intentional on the part of Eastwood but if it is then there seems little reason to make it so.

The film seems to try and resonate with Eastwood’s famous Western characters in the Dollars trilogy and in Unforgiven and in sense it pulls this off quite neatly but a lack of strong performances from the supporting case, predictable plot turns and character developments and a lack of narrative punch mean it does not compare favourably to Eastwood’s other recent directorial efforts.

Slumdog Millionaire

When producer Christian Colson accepted the Best Picture Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire he said they had a script that inspired mad love in everyone and it is perhaps this wave of mad love that has carried Slumdog Millionaire from a struggling unanticipated British/Indian collaborative effort to arguably the biggest film of the last year.

It was a story maybe not quite as unlikely as the tale of the film where an Indian teenager from the slums wins ‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’ but the huge rise and momentum Danny Boyle’s movie has created were not expected by anyone when the film premiered last Autumn.

Nonetheless, it is fully deserved with Boyle confirming his huge talent in directing a diverse range of films from zombie infected London in 28 Days Later to the sentimental family film Millions to Trainspotting’s druggies in Edinburgh in probably his most noted film before now. Indeed Slumdog does include an amusing if scatological homage to a famous scene from his 1996 work.

The film follows Jamal, played by TV sensation Skins’ Dev Patel, and his brother Salim (Anil Kapoor) as they try to break free from the slums of India. Along the way they encounter Lathika (the beautiful Freida Pinto’s first film) who becomes Jamal’s love interest. They meet as children in what appears to be a sanctuary for poor street kids in India but turns out to be more sinister and the first half the film tells Jamal’s story with two sets of young actors playing Jamal, Prem and Lathika as children and then as young teenagers before the film brings us to Jamal’s present situation –questions away from winning 20 million rupees.

The child performers are superb, perhaps at least due in part to the fact that some of them are children of the slums, but the younger trio through themselves into the role with enthusiasm, mischief and humour which is another tribute to Danny Boyle’s masterly direction. The young teenager actors that then depict the middle section of the story are also excellent but Boyle never lets the audience escape from the danger the children are always in with the struggles of slum life and the unsympathetic characters they meet on the way.

Jamal’s story is told through each of the questions he is asked in the show with the answers known by him not through education and reading but by a coincidence that each question relates to a life experience he’s had where he’s come across the answers such as being threatened by a type of gun, seeing children dressed as Indian gods or catching televised cricket while working as a servant.

This sounds very contrived and of course in a sense it is. But the magic the film creates and the Bollywood-ised nature of it mean the unrealism of the plot is not really a major problem and perhaps to the contrary helps to make the film the spellbinding spectacle that it is. Jamal’s quest to find Lathika who is separated from as a child fuels the story creating the mad love which has captured audience’s in a very un-Hollywood way of captivating audiences.

The mix of Boyle’s innovative and immersive film-making coupled with the beauties and warm heart of Bollywood make this a fantastic watch and a confirm the globalised nature of modern cinema.

The Class

In Laurent Cantet’s creation of The Class, he organised regular classroom meetings of the actors playing the students in order that they would gradually immerse themselves in the roles. This was not so much an embrace of method acting but it did have the result of plenty of improvisation and a very naturalistic feel to the class dynamic which is the centre-point of the film.

In this sense, the somewhat gritty realism that this helps to create is an echo of documentary cinema and in particular, as admitted by the film-makers, the wonderful 2002 documentary, Être et avoir, which follows life in a provincial French primary school under the tutorship of a single teacher. The themes, though obviously less stark, remain on the same lines. Disputes between pupils, the ‘penny dropping’ moment when an idea clicks with a kid and perhaps most significantly the uncontrollable outside world’s influence on the classroom, beyond the teacher’s control.

The Class’s subjects are secondary school pupils aged 13-15 as opposed to children but like Être et avoir these are children of mixed abilities and mixed ethnicities. The teacher in this case, François Marin, (François Bégaudeau, who penned the semi-autobiographical novel on which the film is based) attempts to peddle the ins and outs of the French language to his students.

It is as much a tribute to the French school system as it is a criticism with the sheer powerlessness of the teacher brought to the fore and a valid concern that the modern education frequently leaves pupils behind who can’t integrate into the environment but with a proviso that this structure can work under the right circumstances. This serious sounding ideology should not be taking as a indication that the film is a depressing watch, the scenes of the lessons which provide the film’s platform are often filled with laughs which is often not the immediate reaction when confronted with dialogue discussing the construction of verb conjugation.

The film manages to avoid educational clichés typified in motion pictures of an urban resistant class suddenly embracing Shakespeare or a subdued school suddenly rocked by a stabbing or a shooting and its moment of narrative shift comes when an off-the-cuff remark by Marin sparks of a chain of events which have significant consequences for one of the pupils. However the film never takes the opportunity to do anything over the top and the sense of inevitability it portrays as the events take their course are food for thought for anyone with a view on school approaches to discipline.

Another thing that distinguishes itself from Être et avoir is to keep the entire location of the film within the school, a tie-in with its original French title; Entre les murs (Between the walls). The frustrations of only being able to witness student activity in the educational surroundings translate mean insights into the students' home lives give an intangible sense of something inaccessible, both for the audience and for Marin.

The slow pace of the film may frustrate some cinema goers but this is no doubt a thought-provoking piece of work with excellent performances from young actors and nuanced free-flowing dialogue. This is a more traditionalist work than has won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in recent years but that is certainly not a criticism, indeed it is its admirable nod to naturalistic traditions that make this an engaging and thoughtful piece.

Revolutionary Road

Many people have said that Sam Mendes’ latest forage into dark American suburbia in Revolutionary Road is how Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet’s characters from Titanic would be like had they have married in that film and Jack Dawson not met his effusive watery grave.

The film explores, from the very start, a broken relationship between the two brought on by banal life on the quiet Connecticut Revolutionary Road and both of them leaving behind the idealistic dreams of youth with DiCaprio’s Frank Wheeler in an uninspiring sales job and Winslet’s April Wheeler locked into the position of a housewife, briefly flirting with the world of theatre.

It is perhaps fitting that the opening scenes, culminating in a blazing row on an interstate roadside between the two, come after April feels she has failed in an amateur theatrical production. The movie feels like it has been adapted from a stage play rather than Richard Yates’ novel with bulleted delineated locations and intense dialogue.

But it is the smouldering argumentative scenes between the Wheeler’s that perhaps lead to a lack of fulfilment from the movie. While the feel is very Ingmar Bergman-esque with gloomy and dark emotions bubbling under the surface, the movie does not portray the wider framework of the marriage strongly enough to carry these off.

The focal point of the film comes when April seizes on a former conversation between the two when Frank describes Paris in passionate terms, discussing his presence there in the World War II. In an attempt to reignite their lives, April suggests they set about moving to the European city so Frank can discover his true calling in life.

This provides an interesting pathway and allows the story to grow through the reactions of Frank’s colleagues, a couple they’re friends with, their former estate agent (Kathy Bates in her element as an interfering matriarch) and the Wheeler’s two children.

It may come as a surprise that I had not referred to the children previously, especially as they fuel the destruction in Frank and April’s marriage with Frank questioning whether April actually loves her children at all. The children themselves barely feature, merely used as plot tools to bring the narrative forward. This would not be such a problem but without any form of internal narration from either of them the sense of the true relationship between April and her kids is unclear and makes this aspect feel isolated.

The cold hard realities of the failing marriage are spotted by the estate agent’s son, a mentally unstable man temporarily allowed out of an asylum, a notable performance from Michael Shannon, who frankly and with spite notices the hypocrisies and deterioration within the Wheelers romance.

The film uses set-pieces and the supporting cast to attempt to heighten the magnitude of admittedly bravely performed sequences between DiCaprio and Winslet, eventually reaching an engaging, though predictable, climax. While the movie is certainly not revolutionary in terms of its portrayal of a declining marriage (the television series Mad Men set in a similar suburban setting does this with much more care and intricacy), it is a solid piece of work from Mendes but cannot approach his seminal American Beauty. However, one is left longing for a greater insight into why and how the relationship has reached this point to provide much needed groundwork to the frequent marital disputes.