Broadchurch (UK TV Mini-Series 2103 ): Exceptional

Broadchurch which had a massive following in the UK over 8 weeks earlier this year, is about the investigation of the murder of a young boy in a small prosperous seaside town in Dorset. The performances from a stellar cast are top notch, and the high production values demonstrate the real strength of British TV, and the willingness to delve into life as it is lived by most of us, using actors who actually look and behave like real people.

 

At first I was reluctant to go to such a dark place, and then was compelled to continue watching as it drew me into a maelstrom of emotions driven by the need not only to find the killer but to comprehend the how and why of it all. The writing, the cinematography, and the direction are exceptional. The landscape is intimately involved and rendered in rich tones of aching beauty. A must-see.

 

 

Our Friends In The North (BBC TV - 1995)

The British TV drama series Our Friends In The North is compulsive viewing. At £8m it did not come cheap and the BBC took years to find the courage to give the project the go-ahead.

Writer Peter Flannery worked on the script for six years, and he delivers real lives where the tragedy is slow and cumulative and not on a grand scale but no less human or devastating. Quality English-speaking TV drama with a conviction and veracity only the British can deliver. Indeed, nothing since has come close in quality and historic sweep. There is a seething anger with the failure of the political process and the betrayal of progressive aspirations, which 16 years later, is still manifestly justified.

Contemporary popular music is used sparingly but very effectively in conveying not only the zeitgeist but in establishing a sense of time and place, and a shared history that crosses international borders.

There are no heroes and each character is flawed – as we all are – why blame ourselves when we can blame someone else? Still friends after 30 years, but are we? Nothing left to say, and where were we when we needed each other. We leave family behind and then at the end the truth too late. And working people are still the scapegoat and their desolation aways the solution.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was a big disappointment. I have read most of Le Carre’s novels, and while critics find his 70s work superior, I prefer his most recent output as it reveals a weary disillusionment, and a greater concern for the tragic ‘collateral damage’ that is inflicted by so-called democratic regimes.

The film is a flashy anachronism suited more to the cold war years. The world has moved on. This is not to say it could not have been better. Rich period detail and an intelligent script are pluses, but the pace is glacial and there is little if any of the tension you would expect from a spy thriller. There is intrigue but the action is plodding. A big mistake was casting a major star Colin Firth in a minor but pivotal role – anyone with half a brain knows who the mole is at the get go.

The denouement is so flat you wonder what the hell you have been doing for the last two hours. The story should have focused more on the mole, Karla (the Soviet spymaster), and Control, very ably played by John Hurt, who we see much too little of. Some unnecessarily graphic gore is really indulgent. Definitely over-rated, and BAFTA is being patently parochial in naming it one of the best films of 2011.

Summary Judgements #5: Failed Revolutions

The Peach Girl (Tao hua qi xue ji 1931) Starring the luminous Chinese screen legend, Lingyu Ruan, The Peach Girl, is an histrionic and predictable silent melodrama. What saves it from obscurity is the iridescent beauty of Lingyu Ruan, and the assured direction of veteran Shanghai director Wancang Bu. A young peasant girl and the son of a wealthy widow are star-crossed lovers, and the girl and her family are tragically ruined when she falls pregnant and the boy's mother refuses to allow him to marry the girl. Though the plight of the girl and her family is sympathetically handled, the resolution is reactionary, with a romantic reconciliation between the families. The greater tragedy for the Chinese peasantry is that still after 80 years, a revolution, and the madness of the Great Leap Forward, the baton of class arrogance and corruption has not been destroyed, but only passed from the bourgeoisie to corrupt Party cardres and a greedy economic elite.

Christ in Concrete (aka Give Us This Day 1949) Based on the novel by Italo-American Pietro Di Donato, this powerful leftist denunciation of contemporary capitalism from director Edward Dmytryk, had to be filmed in the UK, and was buried two days after its US release by a reactionary backlash. Telling the story of Italian immigrant building workers and their families in Brooklyn during the Depression, the film is the closest an Anglo-American movie ever got to the aesthetic and socialist outlook of Italian neo-realism. Teeming tenements and residential streets are shot with a provocatively gritty realism and film noir atmospherics. The cast is superb with particularly powerful performances from the two leads, Sam Wanamaker and Lea Padovani, who embody the immigrant experience, which is so imbued with vitality and compassion that the film soars above any other similar work of the period. Enriched by a poetic script, the innovative cinematography of C.M. Pennington-Richards, and a brilliantly evocative score from Benjamin Frankel, the movie is a revelation. The opening scene in a deprived urban locale that follows a drunken man from the street and up the stairs of a dirty tenement building is a tour-de-force. An inspired mise-en-scene and a moving camera that follows the action from below Ozu-style, framed by the drama of the musical motifs, had me enthralled. Film as art, Christ in Concrete is simply a masterpiece.

Slumdog Millionaire

The ‘quiz show that stopped the nation’ trope is imposed and corny, the resolution clichéd, the genuine pathos of the older brother Samil’s sacrifice lost, the drama undermined by the love conquers all ending, and the dance number as a final coda misplaced and even repugnant. But the movie is still a dazzling cinematic experience: the cinematography, the editing, and the sound production as integral as the inspired direction. The acting of the young people and the kids is as solid as you could wish. In a scene that deals with the mother's death, the visual terror and the cacophony is loud and intense, and the adrenalin that fuels the kids' flight is palpable, with the fast editing, the angled and off-center shots, all amplifying the brutality of what is happening on the screen; the abrupt stop as the kids' escape is blocked by a car with an annoyed and indifferent better-off passenger cocooned behind the closed windows; then the boys are off again until the final soaring aerial shots that move from the particular to the general - this is not a single story but one of many. A Hollywood movie is not going to save India, but it can bring an immediacy to the plight of people living marginal lives in dire poverty, and perhaps widen awareness and understanding. The blinded kids don't escape their fate. Jamal and Latika escape only because Samal has a gun and uses it. A background story on the writing of the screenplay by writer Simon Beaufoy is of interest.

A disturbing post-script: According to a recent newspaper report, the kids who played the young boy and girl who grew up to be the young lovers are still destitute and living in a Mumbai slum.

Mr Deeds Meets Slumdog: Who wants to be a millionaire?

I often wonder how it feels to be at home in your country of birth. As a child of immigrant parents, and though an Australian by birth, I have never been confident that I ever will. There is a discontinuity, and bridging it is as unlikely as me flying to the moon. It is a strange feeling that I am in a place but not of it - a stranger in the only home I know. Perhaps it is me and not my situation, but the feeling of estrangement is always there under the surface, dormant, but ever-ready to puncture that rare sensation that I may have found that elusive threshold to a life unhindered by a feeling of not belonging. I imagine this is how Slumdog Jamal feels. A Muslim in a hostile Hindu nation, first as an orphan eking out an existence on a refuse heap, living little better than a dog, later as a hustler on the edge of society, and then as a lowly chah-wallah in a Mumbai office tower. He has no home and belongs nowhere. This is how Longfellow Deeds feels in New York City. A fish out of water. A decent man surrounded by conceit and deceit. At least he has a home in Bedford Falls to go back to, where he truly belongs - a place in the world that is inviolably his - a very part of his being. I grew up in a tenement behind my parent's fruit store. There was love and we struggled together, but my life was different from the other children I knew. My brother and I between school and homework toiled with ours parent in the store seven days a week. We had no vacations and no lawn, or a shiny car. And we were seen as different: dagoes who didn't amount too much. My dreams of what life could be were shaped by Hollywood. Andy Hardy and Frank Capra were the stuff my dreams were made of. Mickey Rooney, James Stewart, and Gary Cooper populated my imagination. They belonged and they knew who they were - their lives were magic. Jamal wades through a cess-pit to get a glance of his Bollywood idol. Shit: the stuff that slum-dreams are made of. The conceited quiz show host tries to set Jamal up for failure, and when that stratagem fails, he accuses Jamal of cheating and delivers him to police brutality. Longfellow Deeds suffers humiliation at the hands of his literary idol, he is manipulated by a cynical young reporter, and finally his shyster lawyer, who is after his dough, tries to have him declared insane when Longfellow decides to give his inherited millions to the needy. They each overcome by their essential decency and natural intelligence. Jamal says he didn't want the quiz show prize, he wanted to find his girl- and he does - just like Longfellow Deeds. Bollywood meets Hollywood. Jamal's millions may buy him a measure of comfort and respect, but Longfellow Deeds doesn't need the money - he has something more precious and inviolate - a place in the sun.