Recent Articles
Showing posts with label Ben Whishaw. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ben Whishaw. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
- 0 Comments
The Lobster is about as high concept as it gets. In a mildly dystopian future, any singletons must report to a hotel. Once there they must fall in love within 40 days, if they fail to do so theywill turned into an animal of their choice. Most choose dogs. Colin Farrell's David chooses a lobster because "they're blue-blooded like aristocrats, they live for hundreds of years, are fertile their entire lives and I like the sea very much".
But crustaceanhood is not inevitable. He can extend the amount of days he has left by hunting down free-roaming singletons with a tranquilliser rifle, or try his best to find a compatible partner amongst the rest of these sadsack singles. Gradually Lanthimos expands the borders of his world: exploring the world of forest-dwelling militant singletons and their guerrilla activities in a society only fit for happy couples.
The film is strange from top to bottom. On top of the animal transformations, Lanthimos shows us a society composed of adult children who suffer a life under byzantine rules, peppered with bizarre punishments and sudden acts of extreme violence. English is spoken in a faintly slurred monotone, as if the speakers are slightly drugged. What they actually say is honest to point of being surreal - the characters generally saying exactly what's on their mind at all times.
As a cinematic experience it's strangely hypnotic, like being stuck in a dream that's constantly on the brink of curdling. I can only really find two points of genuine comparison; the first are the monologues of satirist Chris Morris, the second is playwright Eugène Ionesco's Rhinoceros - about the population of a town slowly turning into rhinoceroses. Both these pieces and The Lobster fit into 'theatre of the absurd'. This is drama exploring the idea that human existence is unguided and ultimately pointless. It argues that if there's no meaning or purpose to life, then logic begins to dissolve, being replaced with the irrational and bizarre.
In The Lobster, Lanthimos applies this philosophy of meaninglessness to romantic relationships, reaching fascinating conclusions. On one hand there's an obviously satirical examination of people 'matching' with each other for the flimsiest of reasons. Lanthimos' couples define compatibility with each other by both sharing maladies; for example short-sightedness, limps and propensity for nosebleeds. There's clear parallels in the way we use Tindr, OkCupid and Match.com - searching for people who we can connect with on a completely superficial level.
Within the narrative this mode of thinking eventually infects even true love, Lanthimos characters unable to distinguish the superficial from the genuine. I think it's a little too neat to summarise The Lobster as an allegory for online dating, rather that it intends to expose how expectations of romance have been warped by technology, media and identity politics. In an age of where ego rules the roost, the modern singleton merely seeks a carbon copy of themselves to love, or tries their best to cram themselves into someone else's pre-existing mould.
Thing is, The Lobster is so opaque that this is just one of a thousand valid readings. I suspect that interpretations of what's really thrumming away in its emotional core will be strongly individual romantic experience.
That said there's some things that can't be quibbled with. For one, this is an unambiguously beautiful film. The inside of the hotel has a The Shining-esque creepiness to it, all repeated geometric patterns and shots of long, telescoping hallways. The latter half of the film takes place in the forest, where luscious tangled greenery bristles with dark Edenic eroticism recalling Lars von Trier's Antichrist.
Though the two 'halves' occupy opposite aesthetic poles, the film finds a visual unity in its framing. Keeping us on our toes, Lanthimos sticks with painfully long still takes with the aim of unnerving us. In one memorable shot we gaze at the twitching body of a suicide jumper. A halo of blood slowly grows around her head while in the upper right corner of the frame a character calmly sips tea. We gaze impassively alongside her, incriminating ourselves in the process. Another awesome moment is, a bravura slow-motion hunting scene, where we watch the character's flesh jiggle on their bones; faces alive with the fear and thrill of the chase. This slow motion highlights their animalistic behaviour - entirely appropriately given the story.
The quality extends throughout the performances, all of which seem to display the satisfaction you sometimes sense in actors when they know they're in a good film. Farrell is excellent as the protagonist, exuding a confused, hangdog innocence that makes even the weirdest events palatable. Rachel Weisz also seriously impresses, turning in a performance that grows increasingly heartbreaking. Ably supported by such luminaries as Olivia Colman, Ben Whishaw, John C Reilly, Léa Seydoux, Angeliki Papoulia and the wonderful Michael Smiley - the film is performative pleasure.
One of the best of the year and certainly my current favourite of the London Film Festival, The Lobster is a work of twisted genius. Though high concept, it speaks with intelligence and clarity about the human condition and is beautiful, funny and exciting to boot. A hell of an achievement in cinema and one that'll be remembered for years to come.
★★★★★
The Lobster is on wide release 16 October
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
- 0 Comments
Set in a perpetually overcast Hackney, Lilting is a delicately painted argument that the most fundamental human emotions exist somewhere beyond language. In this case it's grief, loss and depression that provides the fuel for an unlikely, fractious friendship between two people; Richard (Ben Whishaw) and Junn (Pei-pei Cheng). Richard is a....
...hang on a minute....
Pei-pei Cheng? THE Pei-pei Cheng? The Lady of Steel? The Iron Princess? THE QUEEN OF SWORDS?! This Pei-pei Cheng?
Wow! Alright where was I?
Oh yeah. So Richard is the epitome of metropolitan life; he's trendy, fashionable, hangs out in all the right coffee shops and has a beautifully tasteful run-down house in what looks like Cambridge Heath. Junn is an elderly Cambodian immigrant living a depressed life in an old people's home. She speaks very little English, looks isolated and apparently spends her days counting down the hours until the Grim Reaper comes a-knockin'.
Bringing them together is the character of Kai. He's Junn's beloved son, responsible for her being in the UK and obsessed with making sure she's provided for. As the film opens we see them happily making small-talk about the minutia of their lives. Their mutual love is palpable, though there's an undercurrent of unhappiness from the mother at being 'abandoned' in a nursing home. As conversation rambles on a nurse suddenly enters the room and, in a perfectly executed panning shot, we realise that Junn has been talking to herself.
Kai is dead. Hit by a car. Now, left alone, her only regular visitor is Richard, Kai's best friend. But of course he's not his best friend, he's Kai's bereaved partner. Unable to out Kai to his mother even in death, he feels responsible towards her - though she's confused as to why Richard cares so much. Eventually he hires an interpreter that allows them to converse, and the two very gradually form an uneasy bond.
 |
| Kai and Richard |
Lilting is a purposefully slow, desaturated and flatly shot piece of cinema. Khaou clearly understands the psychic numbness that comes with loss, endeavouring to make his cinematic world as muted as possible. Everything from the hideous 1960s wallpaper in the nursing home to the alabaster white skin of Richard and Kai as they lie in bed together combines to create a rather depressing vision of a world where all hope is lost.
The few bright spots in the story come from Alan (Peter Bowles) and Vann (Naomi Christie). Alan and Junn are a rather cute couple in the nursing home, getting on well even though they can't communicate directly with each other. Richard decides the best way to cheer up Junn is to hire an interpretor, Vann, to translate. Bowles gives the role a great deal curmudgeonly charm, making this geriatric romance rather sweet and uplifting in the middle of all this gloom.
As Vann becomes increasingly involved in the drama between Richard and Junn, she translates more and more. The cinematic result of that is quite interesting, breaking up the rhythm of a normal movie conversation. It's a way of clearly delineating reaction from response, the gap necessitated by translation allowing us to focus on the actor's physical and not what they're saying. Both Whishaw and Cheng exploit this dynamic beautifully, the method adding a ton of tension to the fraught final scenes.
 |
| That wallpaper is just awful. |
Lilting is very much an actor's movie - one of ponderous conversations, revelations and gradual character development. Whishaw in particular embodies that stage in a man's life where he realises, once and for all, that he is no longer officially young. In his grief he's shouldered some very mature burdens; and with the death of his partner he has nowhere to direct his newfound desire for responsibility - Junn being the most obvious and worthwhile outlet.
Meanwhile Cheng's Junn bears the burden of constantly lying to herself. You're never quite sure whether she secretly knows her dead son is gay or if she really is naive to the whole deal. I'd like to give the character the benefit of the doubt - her performance is infused with a weird, naked truth that indicates she'd hate to lie to herself. My favourite moments in the film are all her - when she nods in approval as she notices Richard frying bacon with chopsticks, or her sharply felt shock and anger at being denied her son's ashes.
I had no idea Cheng has transitioned so smoothly into straight dramatic roles and though a small part of me was hoping for her to break into an orgy of bloody swordfighting, she fills the screen with the same ironclad inner strength that made her so compelling as a basher of heads and slicer-offer of limbs.
Hong Khaou's style is the cinematic equivalent of a rainy, hungover Sunday afternoon. Lilting is often a bit of a downer, but it's a sensitive movie that has the confidence to proceed at its own pace. I suspect that for some audiences the stately, melancholy drama will translate into straight-up boredom, but I was enthralled from start to finish. It's an unassuming little movie, yet what Khaou has to say about the universal nature of grieving, and how bonds form regardless of cultural or language barriers rings true.
★★★★
Lilting is released August 8th
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
Wednesday, January 2, 2013
- 0 Comments
It's difficult to know where to start. 'Cloud Atlas' tries to do so much, some of the time it succeeds and some of the time it doesn't. The film, adapted from the book of the same name by David Mitchell, tells us a series of stories that manage to both interconnect with each other while remaining almost entirely separate. On a surface level they couldn't be more different, ranging from a 1970s detective story to a light-hearted escape from a Scottish retirement home to survival in a primitive post-apocalyptic tribal society. The film cuts between these stories freely, and by cleverly cutting between different sequences the directors subtly link actions a millennia apart.
Our cast is scattered across time, every actor playing multiple roles as they crop up in each story. For example, Halle Berry plays Luisa Rey, an investigative journalist in 1970s New York, but also Meronym, a scientist in a post-apocalyptic future. Both of these characters bond quickly with Tom Hanks' character, and seem to share a determination and curiosity even across time. But aside from these two, Berry shows up throughout the film, even if it's only for a split second, as say, a native slave in the 17th century, the wife of a Scottish composer in the 1930s or a cybernetic surgeon in futuristic Neo-Seoul.
 |
| Sonmi-351 (Doona Bae) and Ovid (Halle Berry) |
This approach has mixed results. Watching the same people recurring across time and space explicitly underlines a continuity throughout humanity. It's touching (in a temporally mixed up way) to see people we know fall in love in one time meeting in another and feeling some instant, inexplicable spark between them. The actors look like they're having an enormous amount of fun getting to play some much weirder characters than they'd normally be cast as. Tom Hanks in particular seems to take great relish in playing a violent Irish gangster novelist, or a demented ship's doctor. Hanks, for better or worse, does tend to play a lot of 'Tom Hanks roles', and although he's obviously fantastic at them, it's great to see him ham it up a bit.
But this tactic of casting the same people across time becomes a little distracting, and eventually starts to distract from the film itself. Very quickly you begin to play "let's spot the actor", with the result that you spend time trying to work out who is buried under a mountain of prosthetics and makeup rather than on what's going on in the scene. It gets to a point where casting, say Hugo Weaving as a Nurse Ratchet type, feels more like stunt casting than something that compliments the themes of the film, particularly as the prosthetics he gamely performs through aren't particularly convincing.
 |
| Jim Sturgess as a Scottish rugby fan about to bonk Hugo Weaving's Nurse Noakes on the head. |
'Cloud Atlas' relies on these prosthetic masks a lot, frequently to the detriment of the performance underneath. For all the film's bombast and scope, the stories nearly all focus on small, interpersonal developments between a duo. When one or more of their faces is hidden underneath a big blob of latex it's difficult to tell even what expression they're making. The principle offender in this regard is Jim Sturgess' 'Hae-Joo Chang', a revolutionary in future Neo-Seoul. He looks distractingly weird, less like a Korean and more like something out of Star Trek. This very strange prosthetic never stops looking extremely odd. The cherry on top is the constant awkward feeling that having a white actor playing a Korean man feels like a strange choice to make in 2012. 'Cloud Atlas' is genuinely thematically progressive when it comes to race: we have Halle Berry playing a white socialite in the 1930s or Doona Bae playing an English wife in the 18th century. This is a film that posits a 'post-racial' philosophy, which is admirable enough, but it's not being released in a post-racial culture, and so the way the character of 'Hae-Joo Chang' is presented is inescapably problematic.
 |
| A uh.. futuristic Korean, apparently. |
These problems are distracting but fortunately they don't overwhelm the film. At its finest moments it's unexpectedly and disarmingly touching. One of the main reasons I was anticipating this film was because of how much I adored the highly under-rated 'Speed Racer' (2008). That film is a kaleidoscope of intensely kinetic action sequences and cutting edge editing. 'Cloud Atlas' takes an entirely different tack altogether, the few big action set pieces are competently put together, but nothing to write home about. Where the film shifts into high-gear is when the emotional stakes are raised. My favourite performance in the film was Ben Whishaw's 'Robert Frobisher', a young bisexual composer in the 1930s struggling to complete his masterpiece symphony, the 'Cloud Atlas Sextet'. He's racked with depression as he's exploited and blackmailed, but even as the character reaches the end of his rope we still sense the bright young thing we met at the beginning of the film. He's brilliant here, talented but flawed and desperate. 'Cloud Atlas' is a long film, but it's worth it to let performances like this breathe.
This is not a film for everyone, on its release last September in the US it was greeted with what can charitably be described as mixed reviews. But it's difficult not to be admire the sheer gumption of some of the decisions and ambitions that went into this. For example, the far future society speaks a garbled, slangy version of English:
"Prescients come barterin' twice a year. Their ships creep-crawlin' on the waves, just floatin' on the smart of the old ones."
The film opens with dialogue like this, a lot of which is mumbled by Tom Hanks in a low voice. There are no concessions to the audience in trying to work out what's going on, and on first viewing you'll maybe understand half of it, if that. Forcing an audience to concentrate on what the characters are saying isn't necessarily a downside, it emphasises both the alien nature of the primitive world of the characters and their connection to our world.
 |
| Robert Frobisher (Ben Whishaw) and Rufus Sixmith (James D'Arcy) |
The contrasts in tone between these stories are hugely impressive, particularly the way in which 'Cloud Atlas' cuts between the micro and macro scale. So we get an action-packed adventure through a futuristic city, complete with hoverbike chases, huge explosions and martial arts gunplay, and then without skipping a beat we'll be in a contemporary retirement home in Scotland plotting a 'jailbreak'. It's like going from 'Minority Report' to 'Last of the Summer Wine' in the blink of an eye. This isn't some refuge in audacity to distract from any failings, it actually works! Emotional high points in each story coincide with each other and there are myriad ways each the time periods subtly link together (this is definitely a film that benefits from multiple viewings). One stylistic choice the directors make is to shoot everything in the same way, with no concessions made to making the past seem distant, or the future especially visually confusing. The upshot is that there's a continuity to the visual style, which goes a long way towards making the film one larger story rather than six short films.
This all feeds into the messages of the film, namely that there are certain universal human qualities that transcend time and space. Everything about the way the film is constructed underlines this message: race, age, period and gender are irrelevancies as far as 'Cloud Atlas' is concerned. What's important are acts of kindness big and small, and co-operation and trust between people. Each of the stories examined features a series of collaborations between people, and over and over again we see great acts and works produced when people work together and tragedy striking when people act in their own self-interest at the expense of others.
 |
| Hugh Grant! |
The structure of 'Cloud Atlas' diminishes the role of the individual in the grand scale of things explaining that no-one can achieve greatness on their own, everyone stands on the shoulders of others. This sounds pretty straightforward and sensible, but puts the film in philosophical opposition to vast tracts of Western cinema, which tends to prioritise the Campbellian journey of the individual. 'Cloud Atlas' defiantly refuses to have a protagonist, and goes to great lengths to blur the line between heroism and villainy through the multiple roles each actor plays. In one story Jim Broadbent might play a bumbling loveable grump who learns the importance of co-operation, and in another a hateful, blackmailing old miser living leechlike off someone else's talent. Both characters share aspects of their personalities and so we have to evaluate why one is sympathetic and one isn't, and what choices led them to that point. Inevitably if you're thinking like this you begin to analyse yourself; what impact have the choices you've made had on your personality?
 |
| There is also an absolute smorgasbord of visual loveliness in this film. |
'Cloud Atlas' is far from a perfect film, or even a great one. But with its wild ambitions and earnest optimism it's difficult to dislike. I'd much rather see a film that's a bit hit and miss than something glossily successful that achieves its limited goals. They don't make many films like 'Cloud Atlas'; too unselfconsciously weird to be taken entirely seriously; too serious and moral to be made fun of. Sure it's butt-numbingly long, and at times it consciously sets out to alienate and confuse the audience, but for all its flaws the film is stuffed with moments of genuine lyricism that make it a must-see, if only to appreciate the scale of the cinematic ambition present in every frame.
****/*****
****/*****
'Cloud Atlas' is on general release from 22nd February.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
