Review: JUDY & PUNCH

If you take almost any folk tale or traditional entertainment and think of it happening in real life you never have to delve deep to find its horror. While some form of Cindarella or Snow White might well be told today it's hard to imagine anyone getting away with a Punch and Judy puppet show now without exhaustive surgical remodelling. The link to domestic violence is not even allegorical, it's just there in the action. The closer you get between the violence of an old story and its surface the deeper you are going to have to think about how you do it if you are going to render it as more or less recognisable drama. This is pretty much why magical realism exists, that dark ferry ride between the realm of the impossible and the face-slapping other one we know from every day of our lives. So, if you use Punch and Judy in a fiction you are going to need a firm hand at the helm.

Punch and Judy are a theatrical duo who perform a well loved marionette show in a rowdy medieval mishmash of an inland town called Seaside. Punch has a problem with alcohol and, while initially seems a loving husband and father, can turn darkly narcissistic with a drop or two. It might well explain why, as Judy observes, the show is getting more violent. He pleads public appeal but we already know better.

The basic set up of a Punch and Judy show is that the short tempered and violent Punch is left with responsibilities he can't handle and disaster ensues for which he is punished despite a self-defence riddled with lies. This forms the climax of the first act and in a test for the production, we are shown what happens when this flesh and blood Punch does when asked to mind the baby and do some other chores. We are taken so close to horror in this sequence that it elicits the same response to children watching a puppet version on a seaside holiday, we gasp or just hold our breath with popping eyes. And then it gets worse.

Act two changes pace as it might but, even though it does introduce some engaging elements and some strong filmmaking, begins to drag when it ought to start tightening and accelerating. Punch tries to make do with what's left of his life to build another like it as Judy slowly returns to life in a kind of fairyland bootcamp peopled by women who describe themselves as heretics. We have already seen what the folk of Seaside do with anyone accused of difference in an early stoning scene that is not played for laughs.

The problem which will plague this film until its coda is one of pacing. When we need the conflict and action of the third act we get exploration of themes we are already familiar with. The climactic action is passably carried off but is allowed to slow down too much to regain momentum. As said, there is a coda and it is effectively creepy.

What brings us repeatedly back to focus through these lapses is performance. Everyone's go-to Charles Manson Damon Herriman (that needs to change) gives us a complex monster in Punch. An early shot of him looking at his own reflection after being chided for his drinking shows someone who doesn't like what he sees but later, darkly sophisticated by his own extremity, it's an affimation of his talent at facade. The puppet Punch is a trickster, even cheating the hangman, using charm and guile in the path to violence. Not one or the other but both. Herriman's Punch knows his failings but also the delicate balance of public opinion. His initial capacity for love colours his quickly rising brutality with horror. Mia Wasikowska finds the gravity under Judy's initial complanency to emerge as credibly vengeful. It is a nuanced and tough performance.

The trailer for this film plays up the lighter ironical moments that might suggest a contemporary Princess Bride but the gravity sets in early and, while there are a few Pythonesque gags here and there they are not allowed too much weight. The setting might as well be anywhere but, puzzlingly, there are references to London and Wales in the dialogue and the accents for this landlocked village are character-based (Cockneys for common folk, Irish for the showbiz title characters, Scottish brogues for the tugs etc.) all of which contribute to the tension between pantomime and drama that must be kept taut throughout.

While this doesn't always work I'm going to give it credit for its commitment. In times of revised public figures, the Roman Polanskis, Woody Allens or Michael Jacksons, a public repentance with a sorry-not-sorry tone sounds, appropriately like a sports figure trying to get past a difficult public faux pas. With the horrifying figures on domestic violence nationwide there is no better time to haul such a story from the puppet booth into live action cinema, especially with a plea to consider its victims and survivors over the power of its perpetrators. And then, crucially, how airing the issue in public life in a fictive medium can have a double edge. This film's coda includes itself in this equation. Now that's commitment!

Review: PAIN & GLORY

Salvador Mallo, prominent film auteur, is ageing. The medical conditions that have followed him from childhood are ramping up and preventing him from concentrating on creative work. His mother, centre of his life's gravity, is recently deceased. And then the national Cinemateque has revived his old breakthrough hit and demands he front up for a Q&A at the screening. He pursues its star, Alberto from whom he has been estranged ever since, some three decades to join him on stage at the event. As Salvador smooths over the initial hostility from Alberto, on a whim he asks to join the actor in a spot of heroin. It's the drug habit that split the pair as creative partners back in the day but Salvador's pain is getting the better of him and he likely sees it as a bonding opportunity. He loves it. Welcome to the slippery slide.

Actually, no, welcome to Pedro Almovodar's strongest film for years. Salvador is his stand-in and Alberto is the stand-in of Almodovar's old dependable Antonio Banderas. Antonio Banderas is playing Salvador. Confused? You won't be. Almovodar wants us to delight in the meta casting but really leaves it there and just gets on with telling the story. And that's what we do get; a tale of interlocking lives backed by an autobiography that celebrate the bonds between colleagues, mother and son, friends, old flames and the past and present incarnations of one's own self. Almodovar keeps all these elements so elegantly defined that there is no space for confusion and precious little time for guessing.

Banderas' Salvador is fragile from pain, he shudders from touch and takes time to speak as though the act of it was burdensome. In picking something up from the floor he will first drop a cushion there for his knee. Just as we confidently assume his testimony of medical conditions (delivered in a 3D animated sequence) is a confession of hypochondria we do see him in physical difficulty. His taste of heroin is not just curiosity. Banderas almost makes us see the emotional diving bell Salvador carries around him in the company of others. The fragility in contrast with the ferocity of his creative thoughts let us in on the raging figure he has been.

As his mother in flashback, Penelope Cruz shows us the hardening of a woman whose life has become a swing between the weakness of a war-damaged husband and her devotion to a son she sees as the sole possibility of goodness to emerge from their lives. Julieta Serrano, as her older self shows a woman who has learned a lighter touch to a laborious life and even to an impending death. Her dialogues with the older Salvador are of grave matter but given with such levity we have to remember what they were about. Asier Etxeandia as the movie actor Alberto is like a mid-career De Niro but lost without his best director. That might make him sound overly dependent but the relationship is a complex one that requires a lot of impromptu tinkering.

This is set against a non-nostalgic past and unromantic present yet it still charms and engages. And even if it doesn't there are always the visuals which are among Almodovar's richest and most nutritious. If that's too purple you might more plainly enjoy the poignancy of a great cinematic artist celebrating what he loves about his life and however fancy of image or lofty of thought that might be it must always come back to the work. The work is where this film ends and what it has always been about and where its heart and beauty live.