Toc Toc (2017)

13 Sunday May 2018

Tags

Alexandra Jiménez, Comedy, Drama, OCD, Paco León, Patients, Review, Rossy de Palma, Spain, Theatrical adaptation, Therapy, Vicente Villanueva, Waiting room

D: Vicente Villanueva / 96m

Cast: Paco León, Rossy de Palma, Alexandra Jiménez, Nuria Herrero, Adrián Lastra, Oscar Martínez, Inma Cuevos

Six patients of the same therapist find themselves in his waiting room and all with the same appointment. With his receptionist (Cuevos) blaming the mix up on a new computer software programme, and the doctor himself delayed on his way back from London, the sextet decide to wait for him to arrive. Bianca (Jiménez) has a fear of bacteria and continually cleans both herself and her surroundings. Emilio (León) is a hoarder and someone who counts everything. Otto (Lastra) can’t step on lines and is obsessed by symmetry and balance. Lili (Herrero) has to repeat everything she or whomever she’s talking to says – twice. Ana Maria (De Palma) is susceptible to the power of suggestion and mis-repeats what other people say without realising it. And there’s Federico (Martínez) who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome. As the wait for their therapist carries on, they begin to find out about each other, and the various issues that blight their every day lives. And then one of them suggests they take the opportunity to do a bit of group therapy, something that brings forth some very unexpected results…

A seriously funny movie that avoids making fun of its characters by painting their various plights with sympathy and understanding, Toc Toc is an adaptation of the stage play by Laurent Baffie. It’s sensitively handled, and takes its time in establishing each character’s problem and how they attempt to deal with it. It’s these defensive mechanisms that the script (by Villanueva) exploits in the beginning, and a great deal of the early humour is in seeing how much more difficult these defence mechanisms make their individual lives. Bianca cleans the lab where she works which raises the ire of the cleaning staff. Ana Maria crosses herself every time she hears a profanity, which is tiringly often. Otto can’t maintain a relationship if his partner is deliberately and unthinkingly messy. As each character explains just how their obsessions can have a negative effect on their lives, each illustration is conveyed in a humorous and yet melancholy way that allows the movie to be both necessarily exploitative but also sincere and mindful. It’s a delicate balancing act, but thanks to Villanueva’s assured direction and the unwavering commitment of the cast, these characters are never less than treated kindly, and with a great deal of compassion.

This allows the interaction between them – though still imbued with a staginess that can’t be avoided – to flourish in rich and rewarding ways. There’s a budding romance between Otto and Lili that is as sweet and unassuming as you could hope for, and Ana Maria’s initial reluctance to admit she’s a patient reveals a resourcefulness that proves to be a benefit to the whole group. These and other aspects are carefully drawn out by Villanueva and the cast, and even though there are farcical elements that are enacted with undisguised glee, the underlying seriousness of the situation isn’t ignored, making this often beautifully observed and trenchant at the same time. All the cast are on good form, with León’s garrulous, jokey cab driver and de Palma’s uptight religious hausfrau particularly enjoyable to watch, and Villanueva maintains a light, frothy tone that’s supported by a whimsical score by Antonio Escobar, and David Omedes’ fluid cinematography. Even the most casual of viewers will be able to work out where all this is heading, but it’s how it gets there that’s very much part of the fun.

Rating: 8/10 – some staginess and predictability aside, Toc Toc is a delightfully engaging meringue of a movie that knows exactly what it’s doing, and does it very well indeed; good-natured and agreeable, it’s the kind of movie that, like many other foreign language movies, deserves a wider audience than it will most likely attract.

NOTE: Sadly, there’s no subtitled trailer for Toc Toc currently available.

British Classics – An Inspector Calls (1954)

15 Sunday Apr 2018

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Alistair Sim, Arthur Young, Brian Worth, Brumley, Bryan Forbes, Drama, Eileen Moore, Guy Hamilton, J.B. Priestley, Olga Lindo, Review, Theatrical adaptation

D: Guy Hamilton / 80m

Cast: Alistair Sim, Olga Lindo, Arthur Young, Brian Worth, Eileen Moore, Bryan Forbes, Jane Wenham

For the Birlings, a prosperous middle-class family living in the Yorkshire town of Brumley, an evening celebrating the engagement of their daughter, Sheila (Moore), to Gerald Croft (Worth), the son of one of Mr Birling’s competitors (Birling is a successful mill owner), is interrupted by the appearance of a police inspector named Poole (Sim). Poole is there to make enquiries relating to the death of a young woman at the local infirmary. Poole reveals that the young woman, Eva Smith (Wenham), appears to have committed suicide, and that she left behind a diary which mentions her connection to Mr Birling at least. At first, no one in the family – or Croft – admits to having known her, but as Poole relates her story over the last two years, it soon becomes clear that each one of them has had an effect on the direction the young woman’s life has taken, and that they may ultimately share a combined responsibility for her death. But a chance enounter reveals a truth about the inspector that none of them could have been prepared for…

The first screen adaptation of J.B. Priestley’s stage play, An Inspector Calls is a movie with a sense of political and social purpose. Set in 1912, it acts as a critique of post-Victorian middle-class hypocrisy, and in its own measured way, paints a searing portrait of the innate superiority that the middle-classes felt they were entitled to feel when dealing with the working-classes. Birling fires Eva from his mill because she was asking for better wages; he takes offence because he already feels he’s doing more than enough for his workers. Croft meets her at a low-point in her life, but his good deeds lead to her being set up as a mistress, and exploited accordingly. And at another point, when Eva is in dire need of help, Mrs Birling’s chairmanship of the local committee for financial aid, allows her to pour scorn on Eva’s request because she won’t reveal certain details of her situation out of pride. Desmond Davis’ screenplay highlights the self-satisfied, arrogant nature of the older Birlings, entrenched in their views and unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of their actions, while Priestley’s own socialist message is reflected in the younger Birlings’ ability to see why concern for others should be a necessary part of repaying earned privilege.

As Eva’s story plays out, and the scale of one family’s involvement in her tragic death is revealed, Davis and director Guy Hamilton tighten the emotional screws, and strip away the pretence and denial avowed by Croft and the Birlings until, as Sheila states, they’re all different people thanks to the inspector’s arrival. Sim is excellent as the gentle yet forceful Poole, his often mournful expression reflecting not just the sad fate of one young woman, but the inability of the older Birlings to admit their culpability. Lindo and Young deliver performances full of arrogance and bluster, while Moore is suitably anguished as the one person who can see why Poole’s presence is so meaningful for them all. Worth is a little stiff at times, but Forbes shines as Eric, the son whose drinking problem can’t be acknowledged by his mother because of how it will reflect on her. In many ways, the movie is a classic “drawing-room drama”, but spiked with an element of mystery. It draws in the viewer confidently and with a clear understanding of the story’s themes and values, and deftly skewers the institutional glibness and bigotry of the period. And by the time it reveals the hidden twist in its tale, its deconstruction of moral lassitude is complete.

Rating: 9/10 – a perfectly judged exploration of the class divide existing in pre-World War I Britain, An Inspector Calls offers an unassuming yet powerful dissection of that period’s social inequality; Sim has rarely been better, Hamilton’s direction is precise and uncompromising, and as theatrical adaptations go, it’s in a league of its own.

NOTE: Sadly, there’s no trailer available for An Inspector Calls.

Una (2016)

13 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Ben Mendelsohn, Benedict Andrews, Blackbird, Child abuse, David Harrower, Drama, Review, Riz Ahmed, Rooney Mara, Theatrical adaptation

D: Benedict Andrews / 90m

Cast: Rooney Mara, Ben Mendelsohn, Riz Ahmed, Ruby Stokes, Tara Fitzgerald, Natasha Little, Tobias Menzies

Very occasionally a movie comes along that makes you question why it was made, or maybe what message it was trying to get across. Such a movie makes the viewer question the validity or the purpose of its existence. Sometimes it’s because the movie is lacking in several important areas, such as acting, or being competently directed. At other times it could be down to the script, or the way the movie has been shot; it could even be all four reasons at once. If it’s an adaptation of an existing novel or play or television series, or something similar, then sometimes it’s all about whether or not the movie is faithful to the original, or whether the adaptation works on its own merits. And sometimes it’s purely because the movie itself is just plain bad, on every level.

Una isn’t bad on every level, but it is a movie that makes the viewer question why they’re watching it, while they’re watching it. Adapted from the stage play, Blackbird by David Harrower, Una is about the titular character (Mara) and her ex-neighbour, Ray (Mendelsohn), who seduced her when she was thirteen. It’s about the consequences and the ramifications of that illicit, and illegal, relationship, and the ways that it has affected both characters in the fifteen years since. Una has remained single, and still lives in her childhood home with her mother (Fitzgerald). We learn little about her except that she has sex with men she doesn’t know in night clubs, and that her relationship with her mother is fragile, partly because her mother isn’t well, and partly because of what happened fifteen years ago. One day she skips work and heads to a large warehouse where she asks to see Ray. Ray, it turns out, is now called Pete, and is a manager at the warehouse. He steers Una into a break room, and clearly unnerved by her arrival, asks her what she wants.

What Una wants, we discover, is very simple: she wants to know why he left her all those years ago, when they were on the verge of eloping to Europe. The answer proves not to be as clear-cut as we, or Una, might expect, but before we learn what that answer is, Ray’s attendance at a meeting leads to uproar amongst the workforce, and Ray having to hide from everyone. He and Una stay one step ahead of everyone else, including Scott (Ahmed), one of Ray’s co-workers, and senior management honcho, Mark (Menzies). As Ray waits for everyone to leave, he and Una talk about their relationship, what it meant for both of them at the time, and what it means for them now. Ray served four years in jail, and has since gotten married, and found a stable way of living his life. Una has no such stability, only the same house she’s lived in her whole life, and in a neighbourhood where everyone knows her and knows what happened to her.

What follows should be absorbing and fascinating at the same time, as both Una and Ray reflect on events from their past, and the feelings they each had at the time. Inevitably, it takes their combined memories to provide the truth of what happened at the end for both of them; whether this will be enough for Una is a different matter. Suffice it to say, it isn’t, and the movie insists on making the same points in slightly different ways, until it heads off into the night with no clearer idea of where it’s going than Una has of what she’s going to do next. What she does do next depends entirely on the kindness of Scott, and leads to a contrived ending that takes the movie out of the realm of psychological drama and into the realm of unvarnished melodrama. But while the last third of the movie is unsatisfying and unrewarding, and relies on the good will of Harrower’s screenplay to move its characters from Point A to Point B, the cracks in said screenplay start appearing much earlier on.

Whatever the merits of the stage production (and it did win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play in 2007), this new screen adaptation somehow manages to highlight a number of faults with the overall scenario that perhaps aren’t as noticeable under the proscenium arch. The reason for Una being at the warehouse, ostensibly to ask Ray why he left her, lacks conviction precisely because of the period of time that has elapsed. Harrower’s script never seeks to answer the question why this is still so important to her. Does she want to pick up where they left off? Does she still love Ray? Is her visit less about slaying the demons from her past, and more about breathing new life into them? These questions remain unexplored as the movie clatters along spewing out platitudes and clichés on both sides, with Ray bemoaning his time in prison, and Una blaming her father’s death on Ray’s predatory sexual behaviour. It also tries to show Una as being complicit in their affair, as if this is some kind of mitigating circumstance for what happened. The aim here may have been to make the issue more complex, but a paedophile is a paedophile, and what happened remains inexcusable.

Alas, very little of what is brought up is relatable or convincing, and with Una’s motives remaining obscure and possibly ill-considered throughout, the movie struggles to make us care what happened to her (which is concerning in itself). Mara gives a very good performance as the emotionally disturbed Una, but remains a figure we can’t relate to very well. Mendelsohn, however, is better served by the script, and makes Ray an untrustworthy character from the start. He lies to everyone, and probably about everything, and he’s good at it. Mendelsohn makes Ray self-serving and arrogant, and he rarely says anything important without thinking about it first. Ray may now be called Pete, and he may have a new life, but he’s still Ray, and with all that that entails. In bringing Una to the screen, theatre director Andrews makes his feature debut, but rarely seems comfortable in exploring the medium effectively. Within the warehouse, its crisp, clean lines and polished surfaces act as a stringent counterpoint to the raw emotions being mauled over in the break room (and a store cupboard and the ladies’ – of course), while the ending, which seems designed to leave the audience feeling appalled and shocked, plays out awkwardly and with scant regard for its backdrop.

Rating: 6/10 – a psychological drama that’s been given an arthouse makeover by its director, Una looks and feels austere, and lacks the passion to be truly effective as a movie about the lingering effects of child abuse; Mara and Mendelsohn make a good pairing but are unable to compensate for the wayward structure imposed on the material, and the script’s attempts at complexity inhibit the material even further, making it feel sterile rather than impassioned.

My Old Lady (2014)

27 Saturday Feb 2016

Posted by dullwood68 in Movies

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Comedy, Drama, Inheritance, Israel Horovitz, Kevin Kline, Kristin Scott Thomas, Maggie Smith, Paris, Relationships, Review, Theatrical adaptation, Viager

D: Israel Horovitz / 107m

Cast: Kevin Kline, Maggie Smith, Kristin Scott Thomas, Dominique Pinon, Stéphane Freiss, Noémie Lvovsky, Stéphane De Groodt, Sophie Touitou

When impoverished American Matthias Gold (Kline) inherits a Paris apartment from his late father, he has no idea that his plan to sell the apartment for several million euros will be stalled by the presence of Mathilde Girard (Smith), the woman who has lived there as a kind of sitting tenant ever since the death of her husband forty years before (she’s now ninety-two). As well, Matthias discovers that the terms of his father’s arrangement with Madame Girard means that he has to pay her a monthly stipend. In France, this arrangement is known as viager, and it also means that the apartment, which consists of three floors and a large garden, can’t be sold until Madame Girard’s death.

Luckily, Matthias has a back-up plan, in the form of François Roy (Freiss), a Paris businessman who is interested in buying the contract for the apartment, and despite Madame Girard’s presence in the property. This means little in real terms for Madame Girard, whose life will be unaffected if the contract is bought by someone else. However, it means a great deal to her daughter, Chloé (Thomas), who also lives in the apartment, and would be left homeless in the event of her mother’s death (what Matthias doesn’t know is that Roy’s plan is to demolish the apartment building and build a hotel in its place).

Matthias and Chloé are at odds over the situation, and find themselves clashing. Curious about her, Matthias follows her one day and discovers that she is having an affair with a married man, Philippe (De Groodt). Having been “persuaded” by Madame Girard to pay rent while he stays there, Matthias uses this information to blackmail Chloé into letting him stay rent-free. In the meantime, he’s been selling off items of furniture to local antique dealers in order to have some money. While searching the apartment for more items to sell, he finds a number of photographs that point to a much closer relationship between his father and Madame Girard than he ever suspected. In turn, this leads to further revelations that neither he, Madame Girard, or Chloé were ever aware of, and which have a profound effect on them all.

From the poster above (and from the trailer below), you’d be forgiven for thinking that My Old Lady is likely to be a bit of a genial romp, a comedy with heart that features a sprightly Maggie Smith running rings round a clueless Kevin Kline as she outmanoeuvres him time and again as he tries to oust her from the apartment. And initially, that’s exactly the kind of movie it is (except that Smith isn’t as sprightly as you might expect). Kline does a good job of looking exasperated and confused, Smith is polite and excessively punctilious, and the scene is set for a (one-sided) battle of wills, with humour aplenty and generous dollops of heart-warming sentiment served up throughout the movie as Matthias and Madame Girard learn to respect and like each other.

But writer/director Horovitz – adapting his stage play That Old Lady for the screen – has other ideas. It soon becomes apparent that Horovitz has a different tale to tell, one that includes humour as pathos only, and which at times, makes for a darker, more gruelling story than is first apparent. As Matthias begins to unravel the truths behind his parents’ marriage, and where Madame Girard and Chloé fit into it all, Horovitz takes the viewer on a journey into one man’s personal despair, and the way in which he finds redemption. There’s a long stretch where Matthias unburdens himself of a terrible event that happened when he was younger. It’s a scene that causes the viewer to hold their breath as Kline delivers a masterclass in dramatic acting, highlighting the depth of Matthias’s pain and the emotional devastation it’s caused him, and the effect it continues to have on him.

At first, this scene seems out of place, especially in terms of the movie’s tone, and subsequent scenes lack the power it contains (and some viewers may find the rest of the movie a bit of a letdown in terms of a lack of similar intensity), but it’s a cathartic moment, one that allows the viewer to understand both Matthias’s often crass, uncaring manner, and one that allows the viewer to connect with a character who seems motivated entirely by his own selfish needs. Chloé, who is present during the scene, has her own burdens, and this allows her to purge her resentments as well, as it becomes clear that she’s always known the truth about her mother and Matthias’ father. Both actors are superb, imbuing their characters with a common, tragic sadness that has hampered both their lives for so long, and to such terrible effect.

Rather than being an out and out comedy, My Old Lady is a compelling drama that focuses on serious topics such as emotional dysfunction, parental neglect, suicide, social occlusion, and inappropriate self-respect, and deals with each one without a trace of flippancy. But it is funny in places, and there are some good visual gags thrown in at odd moments to leaven the drama, as well as some very good reparteé between Kline and Smith that shows neither of them has lost their sense of comic timing.

Clearly at ease with the material, Horovitz blends the comedy with the drama to refreshingly good effect, and takes the viewer on a journey that in meteorological terms, starts off bright and sunny, becomes increasingly cloudy, then very stormy before rays of sunshine start to break through the dark clouds and disperse them. As mentioned briefly before, the last twenty minutes cuts corners in its attempts to wind up the narrative, and some viewers may feel that scenes have been excised in an attempt to bring the movie down to its current running time. But this is a minor disappointment in comparison to what’s gone before, and Horovitz and his trio of outstanding lead performers should be congratulating themselves on a movie that doesn’t shy away from dealing with some very serious matters indeed.

Rating: 8/10 – an intelligent, unexpectedly gripping movie that may put off some viewers (though that would be the wrong reaction to it), My Old Lady is a must-see for fans of serious drama; Kline and Thomas are superb, and Horovitz uses the Paris settings to add a melancholy tone that aids the movie tremendously.