AMELIE @ 25

Amelie Poulain's father was so hands-off that he didn't touch her until he (as her doctor) ran the annual home checkup. The sensation of the parental touch was so powerful that her heart rate went skyward which concerned her father so much that he insisted she be home schooled. By the time she was in her twenties, her view of the world and how she might enact with life was skewed toward a child's whimsy and driven by a young adult's mischief. Seeing so much sadness around her, she wants to create happiness, preferably by stealth. Also, it would be nice to see if she can feel real love along the way.

She accidentally finds a boy's toys and effects box in her apartment and vows to track him down and return it. She enacts the urban myth of sending one of her father's garden gnomes around the world so that he receives self made postcards from everywhere (that her flight attendant friend goes). She brightens the life of the reclusive invalid painter downstairs who repeatedly copies a Renoir picture which he treats as though he is experiencing the scene for real. Through more accidents she meets a young man who is obsessed with the torn up selfies from a photo booth of a plain looking older man. It's a mystery that unfolds after an extraordinary campaign by Amelie to pursue and land the questing lad. These are just a few strands of the weave. 

Jean-Pierre Jeunet began his directorial career in close collaboration with Marc Caro. Their approach involved giving breathtaking whimsy a solid narrative base and a pallet that would make David Lynch envious and a design sense as rich as the best of the contemporary steampunk graphic novels. the extraordinary Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children wowed everyone who saw them. The spat, when it came, was over whether to take Mammon's shilling and make an Alien sequel and the rift did not mend. 

So that when Jeunet got together with writer Guillaume Laurant to create a multi-threaded celebration of life in Paris that took in nostalgia, desire, love, invention, loneliness, jealousy, cruelty and so on, they put a girl made of purest quirk at the centre, wound her up and pointed her at different characters. And at a time when Oliver Stone was still trying to pass his feature films off as student films and Tarantino was still pretending his ever-longer cinematic karaoke was the most vital cinema could get, Amelie moved at a clip, looking only like itself that used anything they could find to show it all in tones so golden and scenes so fast that you didn't have time to swoon.

If Fellini cast his more extravagant pieces from faces alone to create his beautiful nightmares of Rome, Jeunet did the same with Paris, collecting a multitude that resembled everything between Tintin and Pieter Breughel the Elder. At the centre they put Audrey Tautou whose range at first appears to bang against both ends of the whimsy barrier but soon enough displays depth and gravitas. The light-generating smile and huge-eyed gasp are soon joined by the darkness streaming through the failure at the bottom of every possibility in every thread. 

She is called to show pain and allows us access to it without cloying. Is that a relief after the onslaught of her beauty and cuteness? The scene of her restraint in outing herself to her would be lover in the cafe as they stand, separated by a glass pane on which she pretends to write the day's menu has an ache too familiar to anyone who has hesitated when confronted with a life-heavy opportunity. We remember that she came from loving but undemonstrative parents and was kept away from the world until adulthood. She's not a Snow White, she's a Parisian.

This is, despite the impression I've probably created here, a feast of Gallic twee. Jeunet's handling of the myriad expressions of a few themes and managing to ground it in a sense of real life is a success. This film is joyful because it remembers the alternative to joy, the same way that Harold and Maude never lets its audience forget the dark smoke of Maude's life and how she came to be so life affirming (that happens in a single shot without dialogue). I was going to go on a tirade against the adoration of Wes Anderson by his fans when all he does is turn Pinterest pages into flat kitsch but anyone who knows me on the topic is sick and tired of hearing it and anyone new to it will probably just get annoyed.   

Jeunet still gets work in his industry. There were two other features after this but the sadness of the times to come were not so friendly to paying his expensive visions. My hope is that there is more to come and that, however horrible things become we can be touched by a joy as thrilling, solid and geniune as Amelie.

Viewing notes: I watched my old Blu-Ray of Amelie which presents it as beautifully as it's ever going to be beyond my first viewing at the cinema in 2001 (Jeunet is a grump when it comes to 4K). The only problem with this is that it forces about four trailers for other French movies on you before you get to the main menu,. You can chapter-skip through these but what a horrible hangover from the 2000s! It's available with subscriptions to Prime and Stan and, these days, the BD out of print, only on DVD through retail. 

2025 at the Cinema

In a year already beset by worldwide crap news and cultural strain I made a few decisions. I wouldn't go to anything I knew I wouldn't like unless it was free and I went with someone happy to disagree with me. If MIFF kept playing corporation I would break decades of tradition and ignore it. This was easier than I expected as the prices went up again for what was effectively two weeks of MUBI for several years' worth of subscription. I took a week off and went to the movies and caught up with friends. The festival has fallen to enshitificaiton. I'd get more serious about 31 nights of horror in October and make sure to dig around for unfamiliar material. I'd continue doing anniversary reviews. These became more enticing than seeking out new stuff at the cinema. I missed out on so many but it's just a hobby blog in the first place. If you're still with me, let's try and mix it up a bit more with looking back and forward. Happy new, folks!

HIGH

BRING HER BACK    In which the bros Philippou show that adding depth and warmth to a severe story can be done without sacrificing scares or horror action. Not the pop song package of Talk to Me but has its own strength.

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER    Paul Thomas Anderson makes his own film in light of what he has watched his nation become. It's too long but it's solid, constantly engaging and features one of the best car chases in decades. One of his good ones.

ANORA    Roots in gritty New Hollywood and the best of 90s indy with a powerhouse central performance.

SINNERS    Intimidatingly accomplished spectacle of culture and horror. So exciting and committed, it grabs its audience by the collar and doesn't let go. Feels a lot briefer than its over two hour running time.

FLOW    So heartening and warm it dares you to care about the cracks in the animation style. A reward of a film.

MIDDLE

WEAPONS    Perfectly adequate horror fable from Zach Barbarian Cregger. Aided by a mounting sadness and good performances.

DANGEROUS ANIMALS    Does what it says on the tin and constantly engaging for all that. Just didn't feel like anything afterwards.

FRIENDSHIP    Very smart and muscular comedy of edge. Didn't change my world but better than most new comedies I've seen this decade.

TOGETHER    Worthy sci-horror with relationships in its sights. Didn't quite pop.

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE    The best kind of bait and switch is when you start with high concept cute whimsy and end with profundity. Won me.

MICKEY 17    When Bong Joon Ho wins he wins big. When he wanders he wanders big. It's very hard to keep in touch with this epic sci fi that beat me down rather than engaged me.

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN    A notch above most rock biopics. World heart throb Timothee Chalamee channels Bob Dyanto better effect than the script which does not resist the temptation to telescope great moments of history in otherwise casual scenes. 

THE LAST SHOWGIRL    This was hurt by comparisons, however clueless, with the previous year's The Substance. Pamela Anderson was given the condescending accolade brave despite how brave her performance actually was. The film does not attempt to outgrow its intimacy which is more than I can say of too many.

WOLF MAN    Everyone who'd seen Leigh Whannell's Invisible Man wanted more exciting hot takes. Instead, he went intimate and tragic which disappointed many.

CAUGHT STEALING    Intentionally difficult auteur surfaces to deliver a solid, muscular crime thriller with heart. Nice to see.

EDDINGTON    Ari Aster's credit has all but drained for me. When he can make a ninety minute movie (as this should have been) I'll come back.

40 ACRES    Serviceable post apocalyptic thriller with strong action and morality themes. Does its job.

FRANKENSTEIN    Classic sci-horror scrubbed for Netflix but perfectly watchable for that. Jacob Elordi is a revelation.

LOW

THE MONKEY    Humour so arch it tries to make its audience feel stupid for not laughing. Expected a lot better from the make of The Blackcoat's Daughter and Longlegs.

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU    Misery fests can work even if they're unrelenting as long as the character has any will to break through and put a dent in the suffering. A final shot almost redeems this but it's far too late to work. You just keep remembering what you've lived through watching it.

CLOWN IN A CORNFIELD    In which a film squarely targetted at its YA audience left me feeling detached. This was made as a gateway to genre. It works but not everyone's invited.

QUEER    Luca Guardagnino makes a film of a thin novella last all afternoon. He has clear talent just insufficient self-restraint. Very fine turn by Daniel Craig as Burroughs' alter ego Bill Lee.

28 YEARS LATER    I liked the first two thirds of the original. This one didn't surpass that one.

NOSFERATU    1922 original still scarier. No point in making this.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST @ 50

R.P. McMurphy engineers himself out of a prison stay for what he thinks is an easier way of doing his time, in psychiatric custody. He spends the first few days sussing out the navigation but comes up against Nurse Ratched who leads the troubled therapy circles. A little testing and error later he pits himself against the nurse to the point where things just have to bend or break. Who's going to win?

Milos Forman's first Anglophone and Hollywood feature after his defection from then Czechoslovakia (how's that for exposition stuffing) is an adaptation of a popular novel of the same title by Ken Kesey. The 1962 book of authority and dissent, of institutionalism and individuality appealed to a generation waking to the controls and state paranoia of their parents' generation. Kesey avoids overcooking his characters' fealty to these sides to provide a more difficult story for deeper reading. Between the book and the film, Cuckoo's Nest also succeeded as a play. This took Broadway with its star powered Kirk Douglas as McMurphy and visionary casting of the young Gene Wilder as chronically twisted Billy Bibbit.

Forman's adaptation of the book and play was the end of a decades long attempt by rights owner Kirk Douglas to bring it to the screen. This is a good story and worth your time. It involves Douglas' son Michael taking the production reins and Forman's defection to get a movie made (not that simple but you get the idea). The thing that Forman brought to the table was his life experience of Soviet oppression that allowed him to not just pit but understand the authority of Nurse Ratched. That made the difference. Even the once touted Hal Ashby as a director could not provide such comprehension.

With this, we don't just get the breakthrough of Jack Nicholson as JACK but a counterpart that is not only solid but rounded and more difficult to battle. This won Louise Fletcher her Oscar and the film its reputation. Without it, the film would have collapsed into the kind of schmalz of Dead Poet's Society in the next decade (which thinly veiled populist authoritarianism). The daily constraint in the beige world of the hospital, the paternalism of its bosses and the intimidating gentleness of Nurse Ratched create a quietly terrifying world that, with a very few tweaks, had been Forman's. I know that most commentary about this film centres on the performances and their impressive dynamics from warmth to violence but my most recent viewing brought out so clearly what Forman added.

One such is the meticulous feed of the score. The diegetic Mantovani strings music intended to calm the patients (but really to mask their sound) rolls out like the whitewash of the walls. Glass panels might add sunlight to the ward but they also promote observation. And then when rebellion and violence break the score tap gets suddenly shut off and we mostly hear a documentary cacophony. It's unsettling. 

Oh, of course I have to talk about the central opposing performances. 

Jack Nicholson had already found the screen persona that he moved into permanently. There are hints in his Roger Corman roles but Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces in 1970 saw the finishing touches applied to the agent of danger he became. Cuckoo's Nest was where that emerged for the biggest audience he ever had. To criticise him for adopting a single career-long performance is to criticise Christopher Walken or Laura Dern. When Nicholson works as JACK it's because he's in a role that exploits that (as opposed to an absorber like De Niro). The difference here is that the Jack role is given more than its usual two dimensions. It's not the constant crazy on 11 that we get in The Shining (which works there, to be honest) but a constant, restless self-restraint that is sure to disintegrate into explosion. It works as a complex role because we know (even if retrospectively) that he's making JACK! Jack.

In the blue corner, Louise Fletcher is what Americans call a character actor and what all other cultures call a good actor. She gives Nurse Ratched the deceptively pleasant control mania that serves middle managers the world over, a kind of fragile benignity that masks incurable contempt. Fletcher said that she based her performance on the way white matriachs treated black people in her native Alabama. There is an extra chill that comes from this knowledge but it's gravy when you see it play out in this film. She pegs MacMurphy as a disruptor and, as scenes progress, she learns to play the others against him, recognising that his success is entirely dependent on their approval. By the time chaos pushes this strategem off the screen she is left unmasked and cruel, her drive to control in command despite herself. It is a performance which you temporarily bypass your apathy to industry awards and start cheering with the rest. It wasn't just an Oscar; she got a BAFTA and a Golden Globe to boot. (I had the same reaction to F. Murray Abraham's big win for Forman's Amadeus a decade later). 

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is a cuckoo's egg of a film, one that, amidst a decade of disruption during the New Hollywood of Scorsese and Coppola etc., it quietly reset a Young Turk bravado through values like dignity and individuality. These qualities frame Forman's big canvas The Fireman's Ball but even there he exercised restraint this time, knowing it was more important than making a loud entrance. It did more than just forge a good movie, it made his career.

Viewing notes: For this watch I gladly put my recently bought Warner's steelbook of the film and watched it is splendid 4K. Don't want to pay that much? It's streaming for rent on four services. You need this one among your notches.

TOMMY @ 50

All of The Who mime to the audio of Elton John's band in the
Pinball Wizard scene. That's Elton in the background.

Tommy suffers a childhood trauma so profound that his senses shut down. Doesn't end there. He's bullied by his cousin and molested by his uncle. None of the gurus, psychedelic shamen or medical experts can draw him from his sensory isolation. Then again, he's developed an inner life that none of them could dream of. He travels and plays inside his head, past all the abuse, and finds that his skill at pinball can connect him to the world. Is there hope for him to find his way back? What will happen if he meets the world again, strengthened by his inner vision but seeing and hearing the world of his abusers?

Pete Townshend's rock opera changed The Who's career from its place as a second tier British rock players to the heroes of festivals and stadium tours. They toted the song cycle for years of touring. There were theatrical adaptations with casts and music rearranged rearranged for orchestra and the mystique of the opera, aided by the trend that entered similarly esoteric territory like Jesus Christ Superstar or Godspell. The original album and the adaptations sold by the million. The next step of putting it on the big screen was not only inevitable, it had already been written and rewritten by co-manager Kit Lambert but relations between him and the band had deteriorated and his screenplays were adjudged failures.

Enter Ken Russell, enfant terrible of British Filmmaking, whose biographies of great composers could turn geefully anachronistic or vulgar and whose adaptations of literature like Women in Love pushed the by-then D.H. Lawrence back into the public imagination. And that's before you get to The Devils. Russell liked the messianic story of the second half and imported ideas from his own unproduced Poppy Day into the adaptation. He also plugged the many holes in the narrative that Townshend had left in the too hard box to keep the narrative flowing. 

Russell did not like rock music but threw himself into what he did understand which was opera. And just as Wagner or Verdi did, he stuffed this opera full of pop and classical references and as much colour as he could throw at the screen. From Frankenstein to Teddy Boys, from Warners cartoons to sombre animation, from mimed rock performance to proto music videos, all he knew and much he didn't made it, brick by brick into this extravaganza. If Jesus Christ Superstar had Roman soldiers in U.S. issue helmets, Russell put Tommy in a hang glider in a scene of ascension. If King Herod could sing a ragtime number, the pinball champion could play a small keyboard at his machine while wearing gigantic Doc Martens lace-ups. TV commercials, dream sequences, hallucinatory set pieces and even, poignantly, a minutes-long cut to black as Tommy is sexually assaulted by his uncle. If Townshend wanted justice for his brainchild he could not have chosen better.

But does it, reaching through five decades, still appeal the way it did as a mega hit at the cinema on first release? In parts admirably with use of physical effects like the Cousin Kevin sequence or (more simply and affectingly) the image of the boy Tommy swirling playfully in the shallows with his head literally boxed in. The iron maiden drug injection machine that the Acid Queen confines him to is saved from a contemporary drugs-are-bad tone because of its clear ritualistic purpose. The Healer's church of Marylin is as creepy as that sounds. Ok, it's time to talk about the cast.

The Acid Queen is played by a possessed Tina Turner either dominating the attic room or her trade or spasming with a decidedly non-sexual energy. Elton John's turn as the pinball champ shows him shining in the role, in a costume that constains him to standing still (one wrong move in those boots would have ended in hospital for months). Even Eric Clapton whose impassive delivery as the Healer (with the Gibson guitar and The Who playing around him) gives him a duplicitous sincerity. Arthur Brow's screaming assistant at least seems to believe in the garbage he's spewing. As for Uncle Ernie, Keith Moon was form fit for the role of the leering reprobate, being disgusting and funny. And that's just the rock stars!

Oliver Reed struggles with his pitch but provides us with a modern Neanderthal Man whose brutality is more than masked by an innate sexiness. Anne Margaret is, against type, the providor of gravitas, adding pathos and fury to her torchy vocals. Of all of them, she is probably the one we get closest to. Paul Nicholas, at the time an actor with aspirations to pop stardom, overplays Cousin Kevin to perfection as an overgrown school bully.

And it is Roger Daltrey, the central and title role, who does manage to make the mostly impassive Tommy emote from within his closed self. He had described the character and his performance of the music as being the point at which he stopped just being the singer in the band and proceeded to build characters from a solid stage persona. His vocal performance throughout is, of course, stellar and goads his on screen incarnation to something like real acting. His is a poignant presence, placed fragilely at the peak of the story and its operatic claims. There might well have been singing actors who could take the role into more lofty places but Daltrey as the one who embodied the role in front of the Woodstock crowd and the masses at American mega venues, feels right and ready.

Ken Russell brought cinema to serve to fans and curious cinemagoers but was held aloft with great rock music, reimagined by Townshend to the kind of synthesiser-rich mid '70s rock without a note of nostalgia. It was a triumph and remains so. The band's second continuous narrative was realised a few years later when Quadrophenia came out. It was a different film more interested in the social drama of subculture than Townshend's grand scheme (more puzzling that Tommy). No one sang on screen and the sound of the tracks chosen for the score underlined rather than wove. Tommy, Townshend and Russell had probably already said as much as could be said for the collision of rock and opera. What was left to say? Grease? I'll take Tommy.

Oh, yes, I am aware that Cousin Kevin and Fiddle About were written by John Entwistle, not Pete Townshend. 

Viewing notes: I watched my Umbrella Blu-Ray of the film with a surround audio (not the quadrophonic original that had appeared on the old Superbit DVD). I think it's still available. Not available on local streaming, though. 

THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW @ 50

After an opening when a pair of red lips against a black background sings Science Fiction Double Feature we jump straight into Brad and Janet who introduce themselves in song. A friend's wedding has inspired Brad to propose and she accepts. They then set off on a trip to visit their old high school science teacher (in whose class they met). The night is stormy and the road screams with motorcycles speeding past. Brad's car tyre bursts and they get out to find a phone. But where? Well, there is a light over at the Frankenstein place which is where they head to be changed irrevocably from the clean cut, Nixon voting suburbanites they are to .... Now, that would be telling.

Richard O'Brien's brainchild stage musical ran with sustained success for seven years on the London stage with continued performances from significant cast members. And that was the state of the cast and director (also from the original production) when the time to turn it into a movie came around. This was after the show flopped on Broadway and while the original run galloped on. Considering the fragile state of those circumstances, the production went ahead. Maybe, just maybe, a movie would do better in the land of movies than a stage play with roots in London glam rock.

Because of the glam kitsch and camp of the science fiction/horror approach (the opening song namechecks the stars of the '50s B-movie-verse freely) the setting is an ambiguous 50s/70s middle America but one where a character can casually mention a castle they passed while driving on a stormy night. Most of the stage cast were British but Brad and Janet needed to convince as American. Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon fronted up and the casting was done. The production was entirely U.K. based. The manor house was real (but constantly hazardous) and in two months of shooting, they had the makings of one of the most durable cult hits in cinema history.

With Bowie's Ziggy persona still in memory and the arrival of Queen, the Brit rock culture diaspora (which included Australia) was ready to peep around the curtain at something like this. The music fits perfectly into the era with its clear glam derivations flaunted and then dangerous gender notions front and centre. And, strangest thing, it worked. It took its time but, by the next two years, were getting requested on local radio. There was a series of display cards I remember from record shops that played on the eras megahits with slogans like "A Different Kind of Jaws" and "Another Kind of Rocky". This solidly flamboyant taunt of a flim had penetrated the "no p**fters!" epoque of Australian culture (heavily distilled in my native North Queensland) and it was here to stay.

I saw it at the drive-in toward the end of 1976 when my sister and her Uni friend Penny thought I'd like to come along. This was about a year after the initial release (strictly arthouse) muletrained its slow way up north to where we were but we knew of it from Penny's original cast recording from the London Show. A small disparate group also went along to the Norline to witness and we raved about it at school, with the conversational notes of elder siblings strudied to the syllable. We were months away from punk's horizon. This would feel like a do-what-thou-wilt appetiser for the coming times.

Brad and Janet are a '50s couple who seem airdropped into the '70s. They might have seen Disney but not Taxi Driver. They are more than primed for the shock of Frankenfurter, given all the stage force and more by Tim Curry who remains principally known for this one role. But it's a corker of a performance that gleefully draws from the best of rock frontmen from Jagger to Bowie and further. His corsets and fishnets and raven black bouff as well as his Cleopatra clownface ran a direct current to the future Siousxie Sioux. His vocal performance was modelled on QEII, recognisable as a Regan-like disconnection for all of his audiences. Rock Horror, is of course an ensemble show and we cannot omit kudos for the lilkes of Little Nell, Patricia Quinn, a pre-fame Meatloaf and Richard O'Brien himself whose Riff Raff makes for a meaner kind of Alice Cooper. 

The film shows clear benefit from years of stage success and the transition to the cinema feels effortless. Whether it's the splendour of Frankenfurter's entree in drag that feels more rockstar than stripshow and his gleefully baritone declaration of being a sweet transvesite from transexual Transylvania is so commanding I would bet that any Northerner like the ones that surrounded our car who would have roared off in his panelvan was so captured by Curry's command that the magnetism alone kept them there at the speaker stand, perhaps feeling without registration, a drop of something other than recognition for the art of acting. 

Yes, the farcical scenes inject a bawdy note that the threats of the dinner scene renders vague. The middle act does spread out more than it should to the point where it's hard to tell motivations from identities but by the end credits there are some clear thinking points among the reeds of the comedy and campiness that spoke to their time. Now, we might baulk at terms like transvestite or transexual but they were the ones to use before the dialogue was culture-wide and the syllables to sing for maximum effect.

By the end of the decade the songs and scenes were better known than the ones in Grease and the phenomenon of sing and play along screenings (evenmaking it into a scene in the hit Fame) was a regular event. I didn't go to any of those because by then I was too cool for school and deep into the mire of the post punque demi-monde. But they did happen and might even still happen. There was, I was delighted to observe the other phenomenon of fellow NQ-er boys, who were better known for their turns in the cricket and rugby teams, happily doing the time warp at parties, knowing the identifications in the movie. It might have happened but I don't recall any card carrying bogan storming out of such a sight. A movie won't change any ingrained reaction to difference in culture but the sighs, the preens and sheer force of this one can remind us that it can die trying. If you haven't seen it for awhile, put it on again. Drink something. Nibble something. And yell along.

Viewing notes: I have a DVD of this which features the option of the originally intended first act in black and white (turning to colour for The Time Warp) but I wanted to keep it as original as I could and chose the HD one on Disney (current subscription) but it's available for rent or ownership on a few streamers.There is a 4K available but you'll have to but that one online.

BARRY LYNDON @ 50

Naive Irish boy Redmond Barry is swindled into leaving town so that his rival can claim the woman they both fancy, then he is victim to highwaymen who strip him of all the wealth on his person, so he joins the army, doing well enough in it to desert and impersonate an officer whose meeting with a Prussian counterpart ends in exposure and back to the ranks of the Prussian army and .... you get the idea. It's the 18th century and Stanley Kubrick wants to take you for a holiday there as you watch a figure rise and then fall in such a way that you will feel caressed by the art of it and engaged by its lessons for the late 20th century. How'd that go?

Well, the reason this title is condemned, along with Lolita, to the bottom of the pile, below the early noirs and even his debut which he himself derided, is largely due to his great faithfulness to his source and its era. He added plot points and altered the person of the narrator but the real star was, having convinced us he'd shot a film out near Juptier, the journey back to 18th century Europe. Kubrick was expected to get that right. If wooden cameras with supersonic oil paint masters inside them had been possible that's how he would have done it. But what we get is an intriguing mix of contemporary technology (including from NASA again) and an appreciation of the look of the era as evidenced in the painting of the time, served, as always with music of place and perfection.

It's important to remember (or be informed) that Thackeray's original novel was itself in fancy dress. It was done in the style of a Fielding or Smollet, a beefy mix of fortune soldiery, knavery and gentility for a readership eager for the lot. By setting his story among the high born powdered wigs when he'd never worn one himself allowed him to indulge in a near endless judgement of both noble and humble players after their death. Thackeray wasn't born until the 18th century was dead eleven years. He could thus take literary pot shots at anyone contemporary with the distraction of a wildly unreliable narrator (Barry himself) moving among a costumed cast of characters. Who'd care to sue?

For Kubrick, the themes beckoned of frustrated sons and father figures, self aggrandisement and the old stalwart of fate and opportunism that filled the pages of Tom Jones and Roderick Random back i' the day. Also, he was charged with outdoing the massively successful Tony Richardson adaptation of Tom Jones. He not only did that, he might well have killed it as a setting.

For his vehicle-in-chief Kubrick chose the celebrated fence post Ryan O'Neal, an actor who needed an extraordinary director to draw him out beyond his native beauty. O'Neal's counter in the role of Lady Lyndon was Marissa Berenson, one of the ubermodels of the mid-70s. The rest of the cast is almost entirely every British RADA graduate from the previous decade up to the production year who serve as strongly as the massive paintings in the lofty halls of the rich in many scenes of this film.

The music would be a series of adaptions of the works of the composers of the Late Baroque/Classical period like Handel and the only-just anachronistic Franz Schubert. With the harpsichord piece Sarabande expanded to an orchestral scale for the voice of fate and the aching lilt of Schubert's piano theme from a his trio in E-flat to celebrate love among the syllabubs and candles, as well as a host of less modest blarings of fanfares and symphonic movements, the constant music of the time, blanding with the more poignant bucolic folk for the rustic scenes, the sound stage is set.

And, of course, this film doesn't just look good it is almost constantly as gorgeous as a gallery of period correct landscapes and opulent interiors. The latter are often served by the use of the NASA-developed lenses that offered the widest aperture in film history so that the candlelight is just that, candlelight, not electric lighting  supplemented by a host of pretty wax sticks. It took a moon landing to make the 18th century convince us.

So, pretty scenes and powerful music aside, is it any good? Well, those themes of fatherhood and aggradnisement persist and always work. The scenes of military fighting feel documentary as do scenes of emotional and physical violence. When the peaks are reached, they impress. The problem is that there are too few peaks. There's a lot of ogling of beautiful landscapes and ostentatious houses but so little of anything else to allow us to forget we are in for three hours of this.

Ryan O'Neal's impassivity is deliberate, his face's perfection can allow us to write upon it what we get from a particular scene, remembering, as Barry does, his class predicament. He does allow enough through to show us a performance but he is intended, though the title character, to be one to whom things happen more than driving his own story through his strengths and weaknesses. Kubrick's gamble on our draining empathy with Redmond Barry does not pay off. If we then accept the slog of over half the film watching him scoundrelise his fortunes, knowing full well where he is headed, then it works. But we don't accept it, it's too hard to care. Even his enemies who might at least give us something to emote against, fall into their positions as narrative cogs and we just wait for the credits.

If you are unfamiliar with this film, perhaps making your way through Kubrick's ouvre, I will recommend splitting it up into hour long episodes, a kind of limited event television. This won't drive away its problems but it will serve to bright the highlights into greater focus and allow a richer experience. 

That said, later excursions into similar territory like Peter Greenaway's The Draughtsman's Contract and Milos Forman's Amadeus are very much the beneficiaries of Barry Lyndon's splendour and Kubrick's determination toward authenticity. The film is also illserved by its place between the incendiary A Clockwork Orange and the solidly creepy The Shining (at least the shorter cut, the longer bores almost as badly as Barry). If you are going film by film this one might well be your last. But if you make it through, its tale of a disintegrating ethical being attaining power despite not deserving a skerrick of it, might have a more contemporary appeal.

Viewing notes: I watched Barry Lyndon in Warner's 4k steelbook package and was rewarded with sumptuous visuals and audio. As aforesaid, I split the experience into managable episodes of about an hour each. This has also been well served on Blu-Ray. Even the initial DVD is a good presentation. The expensive steelbook is the only edition available in Australia. It has both 4K and Blu-Ray copies. There are several online outlets for purchase or rent, but only SBS on Demand offers it for free (with ads).

Review: IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

Linda is a psycho therapist with problems of her own. Her husband is always away on his job captaining a ship. Their daughter has a condition that requires a high maintenance care routine that involves an intestinal tube and an eating regime that is not working. One of Linda's patients is a depressed mother who abandons her infant during a session and disappears, literally leaving Linda holding the baby. The roof of her rental collapses and floods the place, forcing her and her daughter to a fleabitten hotel. Her own therapy sesions with a colleague are grdinging into difficulty. I could go on like this movie does but my commitement to mercy is vetoing that. It's this and more for almost two hours.

Linda and other characters are almost always shot in closeup and kept to the centre of the widescreen frame, forbidding the visual freedom of the aspect ratio. It creates an unsettling claustrophobia. There are a few jump scares to agitate your popcorn but the film plays without an act structure, rendering the constant series of stressful scenes exhausting to watch. It's not a comment on the pressure being exhausting, it really is draining to sit through. A late moment of a character throwing herself against more powerful waves works as a poignant symbol, or would if we hadn't already sat through almost two hours establishing the same thing in a virtual loop. There is no relief until the final image.

But even that last life affirming shot feels more like an "ok" rather than an "oh right". The onslaught of tightening oppression for the running time is unrelenting. This means that Eraserhead, Come and See and Martyrs offer more relief. Think about that.

It makes me think that this is a writer's film, an exercise in devising a constant series of cruel challenges but little to keep them in a coherent thread. The symbolism - a birth canal hole in the roof that gushes like water breaking, an umbilical scene involving that tube, the tide of the nocturnal beach standing in for an unfeeling nature and all of modern life. Through this, through a multitude of expressions and actions lived and done by Linda, we get to know her only very slightly. She deals with each challenge in turn, some more effectively than others. We get the overall arc of her resiliance but almost nothing of the origin of her drive. In one scene she dirupts a support group by turning its mantra around before fleeing the scene. This plays a little like black comedy but I could only register it as bleakness. Linda should be well enough established to buy her way out of most of this, even if only to dent the pressure. She seems to opt into it with no suggestion of mental damage that might prevent her from it.

What works is an assured helming with effective cinema skills to at least evoke all this in style. Also, this is Rose Byrne's career best performance. However little my regard for the conception of this constant barrage of woes that Linda faces, Byrne provides everything from tempests of fury to a visible struggle against implosion and carries her place at the near constant centre of the screen with solid compulsion. All the cast do well but all are in her shadow.

My exhaustion from seeing this film left me baffled. Did writer/director Mary Bronstein (impressive in a significant role on screen here) have an explosive urge to construct this repetitive torment? I don't expect Pollyanna but some character constructing space would have welcomed me in more and allowed me to travel with it rather than constantly keep from resisting it. If you see it, see it for Rose Byrne. She's a revelation.