Graphic Journey Blog

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Greta Gerwig: Christmas cracker

Following on from her Oscar-nominated Lady Bird, Greta Gerwig has adapted and directed Louisa May Alcott’s classic American novel Little Women. 

The production is on an entirely different scale to Gerwig’s early films. This has a huge cast of characters, headed by Saoirse Ronan, Emma Watson, Florence Pugh, Eliza Scanlen, Laura Dern, Timothée Chalamet and Meryl Streep, backed up with hundreds of extras and a vast crew. But Gerwig has grasped it with a steady hand and delivered a faithful rendition, with a few minor dramatic changes, of this much-loved story based on the impossible, goody-goody, close-knit, loving family of four daughters (Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy) and their matriarchal, socially conscious mother, Marmee (Laura Dern). All kitted out in wonderful costumes by Jacqueline Durran. The family’s father is off involved with the civil war for 95% of the film. I’m sure you all know the story.

For the main protagonist, Jo March, Gerwig has turned again to her Lady Bird star Saoirse Ronan to play an almost identically argumentative main character: the feisty, emancipated, pushy, would-be writer Jo March, but transported back to the 19th century. Rather than running the tale in a conventional linear form, Gerwig effortlessly inserts flashbacks and forwards to great effect. It is sumptuously shot by Yorick le Saux on 35 mm in glorious Massachusetts through the seasons, all lovingly captured.

It reminded me of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), also set in the 19th century, with its frantic tracking shots and overlapping dialogue – all used by Gerwig in this film.

At times Little Women, it’s like flicking through a Montgomery Ward & Co mail-order catalogue; at other times, it’s like looking at the most beautiful Victorian Christmas card.

It is a charming film, and its release date of 25th December will make it the Christmas movie.

Terrence Malick: Poetry in motion

After sharing a slice of life through the eyes of Ken Loach's Sorry We Missed You last week, with his uncanny ability to hold up a mirror to the ‘have-nots’ in our society, my latest film experience was far removed from that modern-day reality.

I attended a pre-release screening of Terrence Malick’s latest work: A Hidden Life. At two and a half hours long, it is a magnificent, towering piece of cinema, harking back to the sweep of his early masterpiece Days of Heaven. 

 

Malick’s beautifully crafted script, of which 70% is delivered in voiceover, is based on the true story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), a WW2 conscientious objector. With his wife Franziska (Valerie Pachner), he lives in an Austrian alpine farming village where time has stood still for generations. In a series of visual vignettes, we are shown the first meeting of the couple and their immediate attraction and deep love for each other. Hot summers, village festivals, snowy peaks, dancing and cascading waterfalls pass by. Children are born to the couple, and Franziska’s sister comes to live with them. Working the land is hard but the villagers are close-knit and help each other, and they seem unaffected by the distant war.

But, inevitably, the war creeps up on them, and with it the spreading cancer of Nazism. The young men of the village, including Franz, are called up for a few months of military training, after which they return to their idyllic village in the mountains. Gradually, allegiance to the fatherland permeates through the community and the sound of “Heil Hitler” becomes commonplace, but Franz cannot bring himself to utter the words. Because of his refusal to show allegiance to Hitler, he and his family are increasingly ostracised by the villagers. But Franz and Franziska’s strong family bond enables them to battle on together against the villagers’ contempt for them. The local postman gradually delivers call-up papers to all the young men, including Franz. He leaves his family and smallholding to join the war in the hope that he can secure a non-combatant post. On his first day at the barracks, the new intake is addressed by the salute “Heil Hitler”. Everyone responds in kind except Franz. He is arrested and sent to a conscientious objectors’ prison, where foreign nationals and the mentally deranged are also kept. It is here that Franz is humiliated and brutalised on a daily basis. 

 

The film is then conveyed through an exchange of letters between Franz and Franziska. We see them living their separate lives: Franziska with her sister, children and mother-in-law up in the mountains, battling against the increasing hostility of the villagers. With no help to toil the land, the two sisters knuckle down to work alone through the seasons. As with all Malick films, the themes of nature, family, love and tenderness are ever present and beautifully expressed through the stunning cinematography of Jörg Widmer, greatly helped by the stunning Austrian mountain location. 

The production design by Sebastian T. Krawinkel and the costume design by Lisy Christl seem so authentic. Malick’s direction of the two main protagonists, Franz and Franziska, is amazing. The film is punctuated with original wartime footage showing the population’s chilling euphoria for Hitler and Nazism. Malik’s preoccupation with the natural environment and its ability to renew itself is given full rein in the majestic mountain location, seen through the varying seasons – from the hot, golden summers to the snowiest, most bitter winters. As with most of Malick’s films, much of the music is selected from existing works for the emotional underscoring; this film features a lot of Henryk Górecki’s and Arvo Part's compositions to great effect.

For me, this is cinema at its most stunning and thrilling. It is beautiful, poetic and moving. Malick is 100% back on form. And it’s wonderful that films like this are still being made. I found it mesmerising.

 

Then & Now

An occasional series linking past design thinking with the present, without comment.

Past

1979

Present

2019

 

A Chinese cracker: The Farewell

It amazes me at just how often trailers can put you off a film. I caught one for the 'The Farewell' last week at my local, and in those three minutes of a smorgasbord of scenes it alluded to a cute, sentimental, feelgood, saccharine looking tale. So, I avoided it.

But I went after all last night and it turned out to be a beautifully crafted, funny, tender and thought-provoking story, written and directed by Lulu Wang, and is an autobiographical tale about her grandmother.

It centres on Billi, excellently played by Awkwafina, a first-generation Chinese immigrant having moved from China to New York as a six-year-old with her parents, leaving behind her much loved grandmother Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen).

Now in her mid-twenties Billi is a feisty, opinionated, free-spirited American, far removed from the Chinese culture of her parents. All three have embraced American citizenship with few Chinese friends. But Billi maintains close links with her grandmother Nai Nai via regular phone calls to China during which Nai Nai fields endless directives, " - are you wearing a hat, eating properly, wrapped up warm, is there a special person in your life?" These calls are a way for Billi to hold on to those special memories shared at her grandmothers as a six-year before being whisked away by her parents to the US to find work.

This is how we are introduced to the two main characters, with Billi striding through the frenetic streets of New York chatting on her mobile, while in Changchun, China Nai Nai sits with her mobile in a hospital waiting area, something that she doesn't let on to Billi. But we see that she has undergone tests for something sinister.

Later Billi walks into a silent atmosphere of her parents flat and finds her dad sitting motionless with his head facing the wall. She demands to know what is going on, thinking it must be divorce on the cards. Her emotional father tells Billi that his aunt has phoned to inform him that Nai Nai has cancer with 6 months to live. But the diagnosis has been kept from Nai Nai, common practice in China not to reveal this sort of information to an elderly parent.

Meanwhile, in Changcurn, the wider family members have concocted a fake wedding to get the whole family together to see Nai Nai before she dies. She is oblivious to the subdiffusion, believing she is fine health. And so as the matriarch of the family, Nia Nai takes on the responsibility of negotiating and organising the marriage party, just the way she wants it in true Chinese fashion.

Billi's parents have agreed to fly to Changcurn to take part in the fake marriage event and attempts to dissuade Billi from going, for fear that she will spill the beans to Nai Nai about her condition. But they fail in their attempt and there is no stopping her.

From then on the action transfers to the sprawling mass of Changcurn, with its endless concrete shoddily built highrise dwellings. Lulu Wang uses the camera to make non-verbal criticisms about the country of her distant childhood where there were once trees, gardens and fields, now long swept away by so-called progress and an ever-expanding population.

We are thrown into Chinese family life with the endless round of gargantuan eating, with all the women sharing the task of preparing food in the ingrained collective fashion, while the men drink beer and smoke. Nia Nai is at the centre of things fussing over Billi, forcing her to eat more and take exercise, something she does herself every day. The family chat, laugh and argue but all the time suppressing their truce sadness for being there. The finale is the most vulgar wedding party, with karaoke, emotional speeches, dancing, party games and morose drunkenness. and another of Lulu Wang non-verbal comments. throughout the party we see a small obese boy wandering around the party glued to his mobile, completely disengaged from those around him.

And all the time Billi has the bursting urge to tell Nia Nia the truth. She takes the microphone and instead makes an emotional statement of love for her grandmother. The next day Nia Nia is rushed to hospital. Everyone attends and she shrugs it off as a slight cold.

Eventually it is time for Billi and her parents to return to the US and there is a touching scene where Nia Nia wishes them a safe journey and Billi silently holds on to her, head buried in her shoulder, The family drives away and Billi watches Nia Nia standing upright and proud in the road, as she fades away in the rear window. We momentarily see Nia Nia bowing her head in a very controlled display of emotion. Lulu Wang manages to avoid the film falling into sentimentality.

But there is a delightful twist in the tail, that I won't spoil for you. Go and see it yourself, and whatever you do, don't watch the crappy trailer.

 

We Are Animals: Childhood imaginings

From the opening of this film you are propelled into the vibrant world of its main protagonists, three pre-teenage mixed race brothers. Their energy is palpable, so skilfully and beautifully captured by the handheld 16mm cinematography of Zack Mulligan, echoing the visual style of Emmanuel Lubinski. Its director, Jeremiah Zager, has clearly been inspired by the work of Terrence Malick and uses dreamy voice-over narration, and many scenes captured during the golden dappled light of the magic hour.

But the film has a wonderful addition, the use of scratchy hand-drawn stop frame animation. It punctuates the story and is derived from the youngest brother's personal journal that he secretly writes and draws each night, hiding it under the springs of the mattress.

His jottings and drawings express his inner feelings about his life, family, brutality, dreams, sexual awakenings and his imaginings. And it is through him that the story of this close-knit family is told.

Set in a poor rural area of New York in the 90s, the three brothers are the product of a white mother and macho Puerto Rican father who takes any job he can to hold the family together. But the endless tension of poverty regularly ignites into arguments and violence with his wife, causing him to leave and return after a few months. During these periods the boy's mother takes to her bed depressed, and everything slides. The boys are left to fend for themselves becoming ever more feral, stealing from the local store and farms. And in hyped up with anger they throw rocks at passing cars. Their father, as always, eventually returns home and takes a job as a night watchman at a local factory. But there are occasions when he has to cart the boys along with him as their mother works nights at the local bottling factory. The inevitable happens, he is caught and fired. Their pickup truck breaks down. They are towed home and the boys witness their strong macho father reduced to a sobbing wreck. It is a painful moment and the realisation that their dad is not their great hero, but just an ordinary man.

If for a moment, you think beyond the end of this film, it would seem inevitable that these three boys will be trapped in an endless world of poverty and ultimately through all the golden sunlight and wild freedom of these three, 'alive' young boys, the future is very bleak.

This is documentary film-maker Jeremiah Zagar's first feature and he has managed to convincingly capture a genuine feeling of childhood with a poetic quality, helped by staggering performances from the three young non-actors who are just incredible. And the drive of the film is greatly enhanced by the music of Nick Zammuto.
See the trailer here.

Eighth Grade: School's out

"You must go and see Eighth Grade, in fact, every dad with a teenaged daughter should go and see it", said my daughter. So, ever the interested and dutiful father I did.

Sitting comfortably in my local cinema, the lights dimmed and from the off, I was propelled into the world of Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher), a bright, seemingly self-assured, acne covered teenager conducting a podcast from her bedroom on one of her daily topics to help boost the confidence to those subscribing to her sparsely populated channel. But we quickly discover that behind the iPhone the truth about Kayla is a very different matter.

Her life is dominated by the blast of social media from every which way, effectively used by writer-director Bo Burnham throughout the film. As a child of the internet age, Kayla is never without her earphones plugged into all of the external pressures and influences, so important to the teenager's world. She is the only child in a single parent family, and living with her father, Mark (Josh Hamilton), who gives a beautifully nuanced performance in trying to keep a connection with his daughter but is constantly thwarted by Kayla. Mark's concern for her is palpable.

We follow Kayla in her last week of middle school and witness her attempts to fit in with the cool members of the class, where she is mostly shunned of interest or friendship. All of the embarrassment, bravado, fear, heartache and the sheer stress of being a pubescent teenage girl and one, who at heart, feels under-confident with her appearance and personality, but is desperate to be noticed as an individual, such is the cruelty of the teenage world, so perfectly captured in this funny, sad and moving film.

There is a very touching scene where Kayla says goodbye to her unhappy experience at middle school by burning her collected time capsule box, made three years earlier. She asks her dad to light a fire in the garden and in the warm night, illuminated by the flickering fire, with crickets merrily chirping, Kayla and Mark gaze at the boxed items, as the contents disintegrate. Free of internet disruption, they talk, and at last, there is a beautiful connection between them.

You could say that Eighth Grade is a pre, pre-cursor to Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird (2017) and also has a link with Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton's Little Miss Sunshine (2006), all three have sensitively trodden similar paths.

I was very pleased I went to see Eighth Grade. My daughter was right, all dads should catch it.

Take a look at the trailer

Stanley Kubrick: Don't look back

Trying to recall my feelings about a film I first saw some 48 years ago is a little tricky. I was 26 at the time and around six years into what would develop into a lifelong passion for serious cinema. Anyway, last Wednesday, all those years later, I went to see the very film I had watched back then: A Clockwork Orange (1971).

Like so many devotees of cinema, I am a big fan of Stanley Kubrick, and at the moment in London, there’s a major BFI retrospective, along with an exhibition at the London Design Museum. Meanwhile, back in the cinema, sitting among a surprisingly sparse audience for the screening, the lights faded and the opening titles started. Two things immediately struck me. The aspect ratio was 1.66:1. My memory had tricked me into remembering a much wider format. It wasn’t.

The second thing was the opening title design. Large, bold, clunky, oddly spaced, slightly out of register, white, sans serif type pinging out of primary solid-coloured backgrounds. After this initial shock, I became hyper-aware of everything wrong with the film, including very patchy cinematography – started by Geoffrey Unsworth and midway handed over to his old assistant John Alcott, and even Kubrick shot a number of handheld sequences on his trusty Arriflex 35 (below). This may explain the erratic overall quality.

The Allen Jones table sculpture (1969) was a major inspiration for the furniture in the Droogs milk bar (below).

But Kubrick's copies are rather crude.

The ragged edges on the fibreglass pods.

A very unconvincing colour of claret.

The heat of the studio lights have bubbled up the silver wallpaper squares.

There were many badly made props, especially the phoney Allen Jones-style provocative tables, ragged-edged fibreglass pods, clumsy set dressing, widely varied performances, stock music running far too noisily over so much of the dialogue and some very naff graphics and type, badly imitating what was going on in the real design world at the time.

Bookcover Designed by Johnathan Miller 1966

Above type designed by Charles Front for the Beatles Rubber Soul album from 1965.

If you like, this was just the packaging of the film. But the content is shamefully and grotesquely misogynistic, so much so that I found it difficult to watch in parts.

That coupled with the violence made for an unsettling experience. It links with another film released the same year: Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs’– also a pretty horrid and misogynistic exploration into sexual violence. Clockwork Orange also has a lot in common and is much closer in tone to Lindsay Anderson’s If (1969). 

At the time of its release, A Clockwork Orange was criticised over the influence it may have had in a manslaughter case where a 14-year-old had been accused and the prosecution argued that the film A Clockwork Orange had relevance to the case. It was also linked with further cases, with ‘copycat’ crimes reported. Kubrick’s family home was raided by protesters. After its initial run in UK cinemas, it was pulled at the request of Kubrick himself. In true style, Kubrick never publicly explained why. But having watched the film again last night, I have a sneaking suspicion that it had nothing to do with concern about the gratuitous sex and violence but more to do with the production values, especially in comparison to his obsessively driven production design on 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). 

Ridley Scott's famous Hovis commercial (1973) was helping to change the look of film.

Also, this was a time when British advertising was beginning to shine and young commercials directors were investing a lot of innovation and higher creative standards in production design, in particular cinematography. The London advertising agency Collett Dickenson Pearce (CDP) had amassed a stable of highly creative talent who were upping the ante, and the 60-second commercials emanating from the Young Turks at the time were outstripping the over-lit, predictable production of mainstream cinema. I think this must have had an effect on Kubrick because his next film after A Clockwork Orange was Barry Lyndon (1975), shot by John Alcott, and was a major shift in the ‘look’ of his films. And the look of feature films was being heavily influenced by British commercials at the time, with directors like Ridley Scott, Alan Parker and Hugh Hudson.

Kubrick’s meticulous attention to detail and overall production quality of 2001: A Space Odyssey made the look of A Clockwork Orange more akin to the polystyrene and Bacofoil-wrapped constructed sets of the early ‘Dr Who’ TV series. I’m only too aware that there are many Kubrick devotees who feel that A Clockwork Orange is his masterpiece. Well, I beg to differ. I put it with Eyes Wide Shut as his most disappointing films. The others are all genius.

If you are a lover of the furniture you spot in films, pop over to Paula Benson’s wonderful Film and Furniture website, where you will find a wealth of fantastically well-researched stuff and where to purchase.

 

Walking in Van Gogh's shoes: At Eternity's Gate.

Willem Dafoe as Vincent Van Gogh

Following on from his beautiful 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' (2007), Julian Schnabel brings us 'At Eternity's Gate', an intense portrait of the painter Vincent Van Gogh, played brilliantly by Willem Dafoe.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Like his earlier film, Schnabel's has used his considerable visual sensibilities to get behind the eyes of his main protagonist. In the case of 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, it was Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a catastrophic stroke leaving him totally paralysed save only for his left eye. This was conveyed by very sensitive and inventive use of the camera and lenses.

In 'At Eternity's Gate' you are not only seeing through Van Gogh's eyes, but you are inside his head, and walking in his shoes. This, captured by cinematographer, Benoît Delhomme, via a relentless use of handheld camera work in following Van Gogh's frantic footsteps through mud, rocky terrain and the long wild grasses of Provence accompanied by the intense blinding glow of the beating sun. Schnabel's has attempted to express the euphoria and excitement that Van Gogh felt about nature and his urgency to interpret and capture it on canvas.

Often when an actor is trying to 'act' the painter it is, more often than not, rather naff, but Dafoe pulls it off magnificently, apparently having been coached by Schnabel's on how to hold and paint with a brush. And even the spoof Van Gogh paintings and sketches are very passable. No need to go too deeply into the story, as we all know what finally happened to poor Van Gogh. I thoroughly enjoyed this intensely visual film. Here is the trailer.

Making it real.

I went to see Charlotte Rampling in Andrea Pallaoro's 'Hannah', made in 2017, but only just released in the UK. Rampling gives the most astonishing performance of her career. She goes to places that other actors would fear to tread, deep, heart-wrenching, dark emotional hells. And often achieves it with such understated subtlety.

Set in Belgium it opens on a close up of Hannah (Rampling) making strange animal-like squeals and cries. It becomes clear that she is involved in a Stanislavski style acting class, at which she appears to be the oldest member by several decades - having taken an identical course myself when in my 60s, I can swear to its accuracy. We see Hannah travel home in a menacing metro where a couple is having a full-scale argument about their relationship. All the while Hannah appears isolated in her own thoughts. At home she prepares supper and we watch as she places the food on the table and sits in silence with her husband (André Wilms) in their tiny kitchen, with an undercurrent of tension. It transpires that the next day is when her husband is to be imprisoned for a crime that is not clear at this point.

When needs must, Rampling as domestic help.

The wonderful thing about Pallaoro's direction is that nothing is heavily underscored, there are subtle clues leaving the viewer to piece together the story in their own way. Interestingly I think this film has a lot of parallels with Alfonso Cuarón's 'Roma' (2018).

Cleo in her daily drudgery.

Rampling is also a domestic help to a wealthy couple living in a modernist house with a pool, hot and cold running everything and a young son seemingly lacking in human contact, and there is an exquisite moment where the boy, clearly very fond of Hannah, asks her to scratch his head like she used to. He snuggles into her lap and as she runs her finger through his hair while telling him a story, he drifts into sleep.

A moment away from the psychological mayhem.

It was a moment of escape from their respective worlds, evocative of the relationship Cleo has with the children in 'Roma'.

A tender moment from Roma.

This is a film about, transferred guilt, denial, and discovery that the person you have loved, lived with, had children with and cherished has catastrophically shattered your life forever.

The high emotional commitment that Rampling has given to the film is staggering. There is one particular scene where after visiting her husband in prison where she rushes to a lavatory, locks the door, and the dam of internal emotion brakes through in a series of strangulated cries, that she attempts to stifle with her hands, but there is no stopping. It was primeval and one of the most truthful and heart-wrenching scenes I have seen in cinema. This is a slow reveal film, you have to engage and work to be part of the story. It is intelligent, uncompromising cinema at its best, and I salute both Rampling and director Pallaoro for their bravery.

See the trailer here