-- a selection of short-form reviews of the films I have watched this week --
Casablanca (dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942)
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‘But the others wait in Casablanca, and wait … and wait … and wait,’ reads the opening script to one of Hollywood’s greatest romances. It is possible that the story of Casablanca is unexceptional, or artless to a degree – simply continuing long-established stereotypes and cliché, as noted Umberto Eco – and yet, by cocooning itself within such tradition, its very essence (themes of love, sacrifice and war) are allowed to flourish and breathe in ways it could never have anticipated. I was not conscious of Casablanca having this sway over me when I first watched it, 5 years ago, or even again recently, its charm and allure rather a symptom of its ordinariness. Casablanca – an elegant, bustling port in Northern Africa – is a site of time past and time present, and maybe even of time imagined. It is the ‘grey area’ on the map, a purgatorial waiting room for expatriates, survivors and victims of war who dream of travelling to the United States, often limited by funds and their political or personal means. Time moves curiously in the city of Casablanca – that which is remembered one day appears to be forgotten the next, or scattered into the past – everybody waiting for some kind of relief to their predicament. Rick Blaine (smoothly played by Humphrey Bogart) is one such example, occupying an eponymous, upscale nightclub, (its glittering, neon placard reads: “Ricks Café Américain”) that seeks to nest refugees and those unstuck in time. It is a relocated idea of ‘America’, swollen with more-or-less faded, ghost-town figures. Early in the film, the past returns in the portrait figure of Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman) – trailed by the melodic, bitter-sweet refrain of “As Time Goes By” – whose former, Parisian history with Rick is only now confronted. One emotional hurricane is caught by another, and we can only watch as their pain is discovered all over again, as if slowly encroaching into the spaces of Casablanca itself. Crowded with refuges and the lost, the two shine out as characters swept into an unspectacular, yet wonderful, tale of love and loss. Everyone is waiting for something better, without realising the perfection they once held.
Destroyer (dir. Karyn Kusama, 2018)
✭✭✭✭✩
Southern-gothic landscapes predominate across Karyn Kusama’s unusual LA noir, Destroyer, its spread of concrete neighbourhoods drenched in brilliant, all-exposing sunlight. Out of this bleached wasteland do we follow the career of hollow-necked LAPD cop Erin Bell – played with stolid restraint by Nicole Kidman – whose dark past emerges with the uncovering of a new body, attended by a dye-stained bank note. Images shimmer between the present investigation and a spectacular, botched job whilst undercover in a quasi-commune. Such failings and trauma, nonetheless, are sensed in the violence of the present, Kidman’s gaunt, raw features – as if stained and rubbed sore with grief – a visual contour of such bereavement. Kusama presents a fairly ordinary thriller with touches of magnificence, yet it does not cohere as well as it might expect. Destroyer is a meditative descent into the pains of another time. Evocative, if flawed.
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese (dir. Martin Scorsese, 2019)
✭✭✭✭✭
Rolling Thunder Revue is a wildly entertaining rove alongside a string of characters and scenes that defined Bob Dylan’s 1975-1976 tour across North America, a unique companion piece to Scorsese’s 2006 opus No Direction Home. Scorsese’s work continues in a trend of mockumentaries, covering themselves (much like Dylan) in their own mischievous face paint – F for Fake (Welles), A Hard Day’s Night (Lester) and Zelig (Allen), to name a few – employing fictionalised accounts alongside real, such as Martin Von Haselberg playing the imagined filmmaker Stefan Van Dorp, as well as Sharon Stone playing herself. Not unlike Dylan’s work itself, the documentary engages in a creative act of reshaping identity, drawing us into its world of fantasy and make-believe, before then spitting us back out, laughing. It is impossible not to surrender to the wonder and dazzling lights of this work, an imagination whose colour and music is a moment of history.
A Single Man (dir. Tom Ford, 2009)
✭✭✩✩✩
Fashion designer Tom Ford directs Colin Firth as the beautiful and damned protagonist in this Christopher Isherwood adaptation, a film whose well-polished, expensive allure steeps each scene with its own heady weightlessness. Set against the feverish tide of 1960s, anti-government feeling, Firth plays a day in the life of George Falconer, a well-groomed college professor whose bereavement over a former gay lover cannot be fixed to any form. Out of such grief does Falconer’s everyday survival appear more strained, more poignant in its conduct. Ford conducts a wonderful performance from this 1964 Isherwood text – building from, and out of, close-cut English mannerism that Firth has so comfortably slipped into over his career – peppering it with moments of delicacy and soft-heartedness. It is this delicacy that appears to distract Falconer’s central mission, however, an aesthetic attention to all that is beautiful and all that is gorgeous. A Single Man is drunk on such woozy, perfume-ad stylisation – you can all but laugh at certain set pieces – which, unlike his latest foray into cinema, Nocturnal Animals, does not serve the substance of its story so effectively.
Murder Mystery (dir. Kyle Newacheck, 2019)
✭✩✩✩✩
Another year, another Adam Sandler film to painfully digest – a further instalment in his mega-bucks, octaptych Netflix deal. Nick and Audrey Spitz (played by Sandler and Jennifer Anniston, respectively) fulfil their long-delayed dream of travelling to Europe only to find themselves invited by billionaire Charles Cavendish aboard a luxurious yacht, whereupon a plethora of suspicious characters, family and friends of, are entertained for the occasion. On the first night, the father of the family is mysteriously murdered – oh, what a shock – before sending the film into parodic, Agathie-Christie mode. It is weak and lazy storytelling, fitted together by a selection of stereotypes, puerile jokes, and the occasional Cluedo-style revelation that is laid bare. Oddly satisfying, if pulp trash, Murder Mystery is nevertheless as banal and charmless as anything delivered in Sandler’s career. (Indie works Punch-Drunk Love or The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected) should not, by any means, restore faith in his ability.)
Diego Maradona (dir. Asif Kapadia, 2019)
✭✭✭✭✩
Asif Kapadia excels yet again with the conclusive feature to his documentary cycle – following the acclaimed Senna and Amy – another instalment ‘of a trilogy of child geniuses and fame, and the effect it can have’ (Guardian interview). Ambition runs through the blood of Diego Maradona, an Icarus-like myth of the Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona, a nobody who soared to unimaginable heights. “I learnt that there was Diego and Maradona,” recalls the player’s ex-fitness coach, Fernando Signorini, the timid boy and the legend he grew to be – one side of the coin slowly eclipsing the other. Maradona grows in stardom and public symbolism, the film opening with his transfer from Barcelona to the Italian club of Napoli, a team failing at the time, but illumined and enthused by the saviourism of his talent in the game. Football is a ‘beautiful toy’, comments Maradona, but it is also a lethal one. World cup success for Argentina – including the infamous “Hand of God” gesture against England, in the 1986 quarter final – inevitably pits his game against the nation of Italy, wherein, after being safely nested for several years, the world around him quickly unravels. From boy to God, and from God to bane of Italy, Maradona’s life is cleverly manoeuvred through reems of archive footage, shuttling between home footage, news clips, and glimpses caught (by accident, or not) by fans and followers. Such editing, heralded by Chris King and Kapadia, continues the approach from his prior documentaries, an exercise in ‘looking-glass self’ creation – the views, judgements and growth of the individual as seen through others, individual nature now assigned to its public perception. Diego Maradona is a thrilling look at the best and worst of glory, a life imploding under its own weight.
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