1972@50: SOLARIS

In a future setting psychologist Kris Kelvin is sent to the distant planet Solaris with a mission to shut it down and bring the trio of scientists left on the space station orbiting the weird ocean world. He watches a filmed account of a pilot who had flown over the surface of the planet, describing bizarre and frightening visions that the pilot swears are real (though his film of the incident shows only clouds). Kris doesn't buy the visions story which upsets the pilot who leaves in a huff. But the strange reports persist and the notion that the planet's swirling surface is trying to communicate. Time to bring the boys home.

When he gets there it is to a reception of none of the three scientists. Did I say three. Dr Gibarian, a personal friend of Kris's has committed suicide. The other two are aloof and unwelcoming, both are accompanied by human figures which they shoo away before Kris can get too nosey. Dr Gibarian's suicide recording is rambling and cautionary. Kris picks a cabin and rests. When he wakes it is to find his wife has joined him. He'd be pleased except she poisoned herself years before. He is already living in interesting times.

See, a plot summary of the opening of this extraordinary film does it no favours. When cinephiles utter the name Tarkovsky it is with such reverence that it should be set to Gregorian chant. The reason he deserves it has to do with something I saw him say in a filmed lecture where he put to his audience that there were two types of filmmaker: one who brings you the best version of the world around you and the other who brings you their own world. He cited Bresson as an example but then also included himself. He wasn't being immodest, just accurate.

As early as his debut feature Ivan's Childhood with its opening dream of flying and any number of scenes of warfare that seem to have been drained from a stunned reverie. If that upgrade of a neorealist war film wasn't enough, his next Andrei Rublev gave us a medieval Russia that was so barely earthly that it even started with a balloon flight and then took us through the kind of bare bones civilisation that Breughel was recording in Flanders. Already uncontainable, Tarkovsky's next feature tackled the universe itself, humankind's ambitions for it, our craving to fashion ourselves again among the starfield and the hopelessness of fighting with time. So, not quite This Island Earth, then.

Solaris begins on Earth with rich images of our natural environment, weeds underwater, a fallen bough sogging into fertilizer, happy children meeting each other in play, and rain, lots of rain. This contrasts stridently with the imagined future video, the gravity of the pilot's interrogation and the technology on show: tiny little pagers in breast pockets that light up small square screens and beep with high purpose; the video is controlled by a small console built in to furniture. A lengthy sequence of driving through tarffic which goes from sparse highways to a gigantic system of automotive veins might remind us both of the business of the human body and the interminability of space travel.

The space station itself reminds me of something it inspired, Peter Carey's short story The Chance in which an alien race invades Earth and rules by a gambling dependence, offering full body changes chosen at random by machines. Their machines are effective but sloppy with wires bursting out or repaired with gaffer tape. The beauty or terror they offered, though, by this chance is straight out of the mind of Stanislaw Lem who wrote the novel Solaris. So, corridors look unrepaired and are cluttered with casings and discarded packaging. The padding on the walls was lifted for Alien but the casual clothes of the scientists, and Kris himself, tells us that we shouldn't settle back for a joyride into future world; we've travelled across constellations to meet more like us.

In contrast, the restless waves and swells of the ocean of Solaris below change colour and even nature, now like seawater, now like liquified animal fat. The planet keeps its secrets deep beneath this tireless motion but it does seem to be trying to say something. With none of the budget of American sci-fi Tarkovsky knew he would be more effective epxloring inner space. So, when Kris's apparently resurrected wife Hari appears, she's just there, in a dress that looks like it could have been designed by Andrei Rublev. And their dialogue is the special effect. She reveals that she knows his name and that they're married  but everything else ... seems to have come from his memory: she has been made from someone looking at her. Like the other extra entities on board (often called guests) Hari is not considered human but a system of stablised neutrinos. If that doesn't make you head explode...

Most of the film is given to dialogue aimed at understanding what is happening on the station and what might. Hari (through some very unfortunate incidents) develops her own self and the result is subdued but eerie. Kris's difficulty of letting go of the Earthly original and being confused about this new one feeds much of this dialogue and whether it is in those messy corridors or rooms that look as Earthly as their wood panelling we are invited to think about what experience does to fashion us, what a rejection of it might do to change that and what Earth would feel like once back there.

The film that Solaris is most compared to is Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Oddysey from four years prior. Solaris was meant to be the Soviet answer to the decadent running dog American popcorn fest (there is no shortage of the sci-fi in the glorious Sovyet Union!) but instead of that we got two great movies. Kubrick's adaptation of Clarke's morphing quest forward took his film into cosmic realms to get to the intimate level. Tarkovsky's vision started little and let the cosmos appear in shades of conversation until the gut punch of the ending gave us both at once.

I've said nothing of performance here as it can very easily bend under the weight of the dialogue but the sense of wonder, fear and curiosity all at once does allow a lot of expression. Also, whatever the rest of them are doing it is Natalya Bondarchuk who commands the attention of every eye that sees her. Her baffled awe at her sudden existence develops into such wise assertion that even though her exit if offscreen we feel as though we've seen it. In constrast, she is also playing the original Hari in home movies and memories which feed her copy with vital information that is then used as counter reference uh huh, heap big self and other going on). 

Tarkovsky is the filmmaker he described himself to be, a maker of worlds, his own worlds. Going from celebrity to rejection, defecting from the USSR in frustration to finally find a form of reverence in his final years, Tarkovky's life demanded the films he directed and the worlds he made with them. Are they long? Even the short ones feel long. Are they talky? Interminably. Are they beautiful? Dependably. IF you are curious about this one you may be relieved to know that presentations of it at cinemas and home video usually divide it into two parts which make it quite digestible. For my part most recently rewatching it, I found it far more engaging and narratively strong than I remembered. I had far less trouble following the often deep and dark exchanges than when younger. And, as I always do with Tarkovsky, I stepped into a strange world new again. You should, too. When you're ready.

Short Film Review: AMISSA ANIMA

What do you do when your living involves trauma that might haunt you all your days? Do you weather it out until you can escape or do you take action? If you take action how far do you take it? This brittle, impressionistic film makes the most of its fifteen minutes, keeping the dialogue spare and the observation sharp. Aided by deep black and white cinematography and rich use of location as well as a light touch with performance, Amissa Anima works. It's cold but it works.

Disclosure: I personally know the director and co-writer of this film.

Amissa Anima will  be available online and in cinemas at film festivals throughout 2022. Check your closest. https://www.amissaanimafilm.com/screenings

Review: STATION ELEVEN

You might be surprised to see me reviewing a tv series here but this one called out to me as I read the novel and this treatment looked promising. So, how did it do?

Premise first. A recognisably contemporary world is plunged into a pandemic which erased most of the Earth's population and a great deal of its culture. We follow a handful of characters in the first stages, some of whom don't make it, and then leap back and forward in time over a twenty year period into the future where events occuring around the Great Lakes region of the U.S. where settlements of various stages of progress are visited by a troupe of travelling players. Through sudden time shifts we learn personal histories and connections, telling us how this came to be and the existential threat that faces it from a cult leader.

Got all that? The show contains most of this and makes some significant changes from the source novel, as might be expected. A lot of those are practical: it's nothing for a novelist to start her story in Toronto, leap over to Chicago and Malaysia etc but the logistics of putting all that on the screen take a distant ticket when a more compressed setting still tells the story. Other changes vary in impact and success.

What they got right:

First and foremost, they shaved the character Arthur Leander down to essentials. Arthur is a love child of the author and the author and his boorish narcissism drags every single page he's on and then toward the end of the novel we get his presence rising like the least interesting zombie in history that we have to read to death until the end. While the casting of Gael Garcia Bernal promised to put some sparkle into this bore the faithfulness of the dialogue to the novel could not save his grating nature. Having a lot less of him is a massive improvement.

The opposite was done with the character Jeevan whose earnest humanity is missed through much of the novel but here is happily on screen with a much expanded role. His brother Frank and their time in Frank's apartment are also expanded and add some real heart and weight to the events as the plague turns the end of the world into the beginning of the new one.

The casting of the child and adult Kirstens is stellar. It's very easy to see how the young, serious and concentrated survivor that Matilda Lawler could turn into the expert knife throwing and more worldly thirty-something she becomes as McKenzie Davis. If you've seen the woefully undersung Halt and Catch Fire series or the more recent feature film Tully you'll know her intensity and depth. She is perfect as Kirsten.

The realised Shakespeare productions with found materials costuming and credible staging machinery are a wonder. The Severin City Airport in its panicked form in year zero and then as a centre of persistent civilisation is taken a few well-judged steps towards cinema. The wholly imagined maternity centre earns its place, making Jeevan's journey more profound and even giving a glimpse of boy Tyler in his wilderness years.

What they got wrong:

The novel's Prophet is a nightmare of childhood indulgence turned monstrous in adulthood. He is a terrifying figure who might be a David Koresh or a Jim Jones. Add dogma to charismatic narcissism and you get an unstoppable force of destruction. The tv version of the Prophet is all back story and through lines, allowing too much room for redemption to a character who must remain a dread. I should say that the big scene between him and Kirsten in the novel is a non-event and, curiously, with the changes, she has a similar encounter which is also a non-event. In any case, changing the engine room of the lion's share of the plot means that everything around it must also be changed and in this case we are led to a long ending rather than a crisp, business like one. Replacing his skewed Christianity with his memory of a comic (sse below) and changing his harem-like cult to a children's army gives rise to another problem. He is depicted as organising an atrocity (no spoilers) which we are meant to forgive and forget as we get to know him. That's worse than having him bad through and through.

What they couldn't change:

The title refers to a graphic novel that the annoying character Miranda writes and draws while she is married to the novel's chief soporific Arthur. Station Eleven is a sci-fi story involving a flight from a defiled Earth. While there are sample pages given in the novel and a great deal of exposure in the tv show, this comic that has guided lives and events is really only a series of inconsequential quotes. While that is a clever retooling of what religious texts are and how they are referred to in real life the ones from Station Eleven all have a weightiness and solemnity that suggests that they are part of the most boring and self-righteous comic in history. But because of its linking role it has to be there and the puzzle of its fascination for some of the characters must remain. The main change to the Prophet's character means that rather than be a weirdly wired devotee of The Bible he has based his new religion on a comic. Poignant, maybe, but it sill reeks of the writers' room.

If you are a fan of the novel be prepared to be taken away from it if you watch this, and to a significant degree. If you don't know or intend to read the novel, you'll get a well produced if a little soft post apocalyptic drama that works by its internal logic. As a fable of survival and hard deicision with the promise of a hopeful future Station Eleven gets a resolute "ok" from me. Buuuut, I read the book in 2020 which felt like the early chapters were happening around me and the community was getting freakish and disturbing so any opportunity to remind us that we should prefer humaneness and sharing to self-interest and falsely easy solutions is right for these times. In that sense, Station Eleven really does do its job.

Station Eleven is currently available though STAN

2021 best and worst

I kept running at this one and really could only come up with a repeat of synopses and potted reviews I've already given. Instead, and because it's late, here is my favourite and least favourite of last year.

Best: Titane - it is always refreshing to go to the cinema and feel transformed by what you witness there. This nightmare of sex, violence, gender and responsibility could not be bettered.

Worst: Coming Home in the Dark - A wasted extreme moment and then a long deflation and then a sloppy generic ending by which time I had long since ceased to care. Everything was in the wrong proportion which made the central thiller road movie progressively contrived. Irreversible and Inside and Martyrs all have points to make and make them precisely and with warmth, regardless of the atrocities on screen. This team has only learned how to shock, the human elements just don't fall into place automatically and the responsibility of earning the right to show the extremity has long fled the scene.

1972@50: FRENZY

A press conference about a program to clean up the Thames is interrupted by the sight of a body floating in it. A naked woman who was strangled to death by the necktie still tight around her throat is brought to the bank by the current. Hitchcock, whom we've already seen standing dourly in the crowd, has not only kept his sense of humour in his second last film but has moved with the times. Anyone who suggests that he would have made Psycho II low on gore and high on suspense is only half right.

Ex-RAF officer down on his luck falls victim to a series of increasingly incriminating coincidences and circumstantial ghosts from his past as a friend of his continues his career as the Necktie Murderer. Jon Finch provides a believably flawed hero in Blaney whose post military life has been a series of missteps that have all but obscured his natural goodness. As his foil Barry Foster's Bob Rusk is all Cockney charm that ends as soon as his urges turn to frenzy. Between these points are the gang of hinderers and helpers that you'd expect from a Hitchcock movie plus one of his best police characters (Chief Inspector Oxford played by Alec McCowen). The cast also includes Samuel Beckett's favourite Billie Whitelaw, dependably severe and intimidating, and Anna Massey of whom more later. 

And the setting is the updated London of his earliest features but now updated if a little weary after its days of swinging. Scotland Yard has become the gleaming rotating sign and glass skyscrapers of New Scotland Yard. If Hitch's Londoners were always  on the grown-up side they now are more worldly and grumpy. It feels, if anything, like the London of 10 Rillington Place but there is another spectre hanging over it that needs a mention.

Psycho was released in 1960 so was, back in the U.K. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a violent and confronting serial killer film that drew on the building blocks of cinema itself. Psycho further consolidated Hitchcock's name and reputation. Peeping Tom damn near destroyed Powell (who sentenced himself to transportation and made a few features in Australia). As a fan of Peeping Tom and the extra mile it goes toward the gravity of its central monster and the disturbing origins of his condition I find watching Frenzy impossible not to compare the two. I don't mean in how far they go in depicting violence or sex crimes (both films feature sexually motivated murder) but in that icy worldliness. The masturbation joke by the shop keeper in the earlier film has a direct descendant in the sleazy rape joke in Frenzy. In both we get the other side. Peeping Tom's Mark takes the kind of photos that the newsagent sells to knowing customers as "views". That smirking rape joke is wiped off its teller's face when he beholds a victim in the morgue (it's subtle but it's clear). And I can't help but wonder if the casting of Anna Massey was intentional. She went to the edge as Mark's would be girlfriend and then has an extended acquaintance with sexual violence in Frenzy. There's even a very impressive long take in that moment that takes us from the scene to the murmuring everyday world which invokes the walking camera of the opening of Peeping Tom. What do I make of this? Mostly coincidence but I do like to fancy that it is Hitchcock's acknowledgement of his fellow cinemaster who took one for the team all those years ago.

As well, there is a great deal of Hitchcockian humour on show from the Inspector's wife's faddish and hideous culinary experiments (Vivien Merchant who gives us more than the screenplay would allow) and the near unbearable suspense of a ride in the back of a lorry to retrieve evidence among a mass of potatoes. Most unsettling is the continued rapport between the accused killer and the real one throughout; jolly friends but for that one divergent flaw.

Frenzy finds Hitchcock in the familiar territory of an innocent fugitive and a rounded villain as well as the physical territory of his own youth. His adaptability makes me think of other filmmakers who have not been so agile in the face of changing times. Scorsese's more recent efforts feel older fashioned than the '70s films that broke his name and I don't mean the period settings. Dario Argento has struggled with shifts in the culture since the '80s. There are more but these will do. Hitch could make it like today whenever today was. He even went out on a 'convincing '70s style black comedy with Family Plot. Frenzy feels less dated than the work of those he influenced. Says  lot.

Review: THE NIGHT HOUSE

Beth is grieving for her husband after his suicide. It might be the drinking she's doing to cope or something weird and malevolent but she is hearing the sounds of someone else in her isolated home at night. Going through his things she finds a photo of a woman who might be her but is dressed in clothes she doesn't have. One night, there is a deliberate blurring between dreams and reality for passages of this film, she sees a house identical to hers across the lake. The lights are on. She goes to investigate.

What she finds and how she responds constitute spoilers so that's it for plot in this review. What I can say is that the theme of grief for a suicide is explored to a degree impressive for a movie that doesn't present itself as being more than a horror tale. The kind of questions that pile up over the sense of loss are aired very clearly here and the note he leaves holds pity as well as terror.

Rebecca Hall has to carry this and it is her performance that guides us through a series of increasingly dark revelations as the situation intensifies and then breaks. She shows us a woman brittle from sudden and baffling loss, gripping her personal power lest it should explode. She gives us solid and clear intellect and which way the fight or flight might take her. It's an impressive performance. It's a performance that is too good for this film.

The Night House is a good notion for a film. Genre cinema has been an effective channel for the examination of any issue imaginable as it can pack notions into a monster or a phenomenon with great density and still be comprehensible and simply entertaining. The problems start when one or more of those features gets diproportionate treatment. So, while the production values are high and performances easily watchable the writing of this film allows such gormless repetition of information in the first two acts that the third act with all the dark and violence that you'd expect is robbed of momentum. We know Beth is angry. We know she has questions about her husband that might lead to profoundly affecting revelations. We just need to get on with it. This film is just over ten minutes shy of two hours and it is at least thirty minutes too long. If the plodding is intended as plumbing it fails and it is all Hall can do to keep it from implosion.

That's a pity as this is a story with something to say. There are moments where it promises to lift itself into real power. There's a technique of suggesting a human shape on screen which a second look dissipates. It's sleight of hand by CGI and it works a treat. Just a little more of that quality of vision and practice and an eye on the running time would have made this an exemplary horror film rather than the slowly drying wallpaper it turned out to be.

1972@50: THE GODFATHER.

As a lavish extended family Italan American wedding is in progress the Patriarch of the Corleone family is observing tradition by hearing the requests and grievances of members of the greater community. Eldest son Sonny is busy chasing a woman into a place of privacy. Youngest son Mike, war hero recently returned from service, is introducing his wasp girlfriend to the peculiarities of his clan. Petitioners come and go, some empty handed, others chastised, and eventually Don Corleone's daughter is wed and order reaches its circular end.

The reason that that's almost all the plot you're going to get is not because this grey eminence of modern crime films is light on plot or even that spoilable but that the events peppering the timeline are far less important than the sense that if one turn of the wheel doesn't break it the wheel will turn the stronger into a chaotic and uncertain future. This is a tale of organised crime and the families that run it. More so, it's about the families themselves.

While there are many threads to follow in this epic the most compelling is that of Mike played by Al Pacino. His trek goes from family trophy with medals to be protected from "our thing" to having to act decisively at breaking points. These are some of the tensest and most compelling scenes and Coppola's conducting of his forces is not just masterful it goes right up to that final episode of The Sopranos which quotes it by the subtlest means. And as this is an epic in which Coppola is setting about inventing the mafia movie for the American audience his liberal debts to Italian post war crime thrillers and epics are paid in full. The sprawling opening setpiece, the assassination in the street, the narrative of the lawyer and the west coast producer and its effects, even the phrase "offer he can't refuse" are cinematic canon and are seen clearly in all this film's descendants.

So, is it any good? Well, first you have to remember that stuff about its long trailing influence. Is it good or bad that a big mafia celebration in The Sopranos looks pretty much like it does here? If Scorsese upped the ante on violence and then was outdone by Tarrantino and then was mainstreamed by The Sopranos the depiction of the banality of violence still stems from The Godfather. There is great care taken to provide depth so that these acts aren't simply vengeance spinning out of control and all that have followed ... have followed. "Leave the gun, take the cannoli." That's The Godfather. Even the opening petition scenes in which acts of extreme violence are discussed in casual code and presided over by a man who sounds like grandad as well as the coldest blooded Satan is a template. Mob bosses haven't just lashed out and fired away from this point, they always have to deliver the sermon, the joke, the shaggy dog explanation.

Is it good or bad? On the one hand nothing changes over decades, on the other the immediate depth of this example frees all its imitators to improvise and seek even further depth. Ever more imagination must be called upon to establish the mundanity of a contract hit. Well, it's not all Scorsese, there are mediocre to utterly cruddy gangster movies as well, it's just that those we recall and celebrate are those that inject the difficulty of the premise: family values and violence and extortion to uphold the family values. Hell, Mick Jagger sang about it: "Oh, the gangster looks so frightening with his Luger in his hand but when he gets home to his children he's a family man". If the Italian mob sagas admitted the issues Coppola put them centre screen. Michael's early actions are practical and intelligent but there's clearly a buzz in them that takes him to the next one, wiser and stronger and the more embroiled he gets, the closer to the centre, the more complete he is as a human. We don't like admitting that even as we hope he gets through but there's no escaping that we are witnessing the birth of a monster.

It's this mix of virtuoso cinema and ethical difficulty that thrilled audiences even as it sobered them. Painterly power and machine guns that look like pain (not just power). He imported a European aesthetic into an already established American film genre and made an epic art film that could be watched with a barrel of popcorn. Also, think of Brando's iconic performance: he was coasting at this time but after this he was about to have a great '70s. Al Pacino went from young and promising to the A-list. Ditto Diane Keaton. Robert Duvall entered the realm of dependable character actors which led to the apotheosis of his art in the same director's Apocalypse Now (see also Brando again). And Coppola himself went from a jobbing Corman apprentice to a capable feature director with a few artsy tools in the workshop to mainstream auteur number one. It was this success in profit and acclaim that put him at the top but also allowed the other movie brats, the Lucases, the Spielbergs, the Scorseses, through the gate to overhaul the old system and accelerate the change. I know, Easy Rider, but that just made the money men think it would all be low budget big returns, Coppola added budget and brains and warmth and so the '70s was born.

So, yeah, it's good.