Things You Need to Know About Le Mépris

[BLOG IN PROGRESS. I started this post hoping it might be of benefit to my students. As much as I love the film, I know it can be off-putting to non-film specialists, and to plenty of other people unfamiliar with Jean-Luc Godard's style of filmmaking. I intend it to be an ongoing post, and will add to it periodically, so if you have any thoughts about the film, or anything you think that viewers need to know about Le Mépris in order to get maximum interest from it, leave a comment below with your ideas and suggestions.]

In summary, it’s part domestic drama, in which a man tries to find out why his wife no longer loves him, and part meta-cinematic backstage dramatisation of the adaptation process, in which that man struggles with his job as a screenwriter on an American film of Homer‘s Odyssey. Filmed as the Hollywood studio system collapsed, Le Mépris is a meditation on the relationship between art and life, film and reality.

The Miffy Movie

I admit it. This must seem like a strange review with which to begin (belatedly) the New blogging Year, especially after such a long hiatus. But I’m keen to get things going again around here, and to me this seems like as good a place as any to begin, because Nijntje de Film (or The Miffy Movie, as its English language title would have it) will always have a special place in my heart. It’s not because this is an especially profound or beautiful film, but because it was the first time I ever took my daughter to the cinema. Evie is nearly 15 months old. Miffy (or Nijntje, as they call her in her native Netherlands) has been around for nearly six decades. I knew I wanted to test Evie out at the cinema to see how she would respond, and this seemed like a good place to start; Evie doesn’t watch TV, except for the occasional hand-picked cartoon (Peppa Pig, Rastamouse and Disney’s Silly Symphonies have so far proven to be her favourites), but she recognises Miffy from toys and merchandise and, more importantly, Dick Bruna’s beautiful books. We’ve also taken Evie to visit the Dick Bruna house in Utrecht, so she can identify the little bunny on sight by now.

345-Word Reviews: War Horse

My childhood is strewn with memories of animal movies: Kes, Watership Down, Plague Dogs, Storm Boy, Ring of Bright Water, Tarka the Otter etc. Invariably, these served as starter-wheels of grief, early encounters with death and loss. Things rarely ended well for these critters. Don’t worry, though: Steven Spielberg is not in the business of scarring children. His entry into the genre is Saving Private Horsey, which is ostensibly told from the point of view of a horse as it changes hands from one carer to another.

345-Word Reviews: The Woman in Black

One of the more successful efforts to buff up the Hammer Films brand, The Woman in Black gives Daniel Radcliffe the role of the respectable gent given the challenge of focusing on his paperwork in a place of mystery and dread, surrounding by superstitious rubes who pop up to tell him he’s not welcome round these parts. Forty years ago, this part might have been played by Ralph Bates, but now its a vehicle for the ex-Potter to show whether he can branch out. Most of the film consists of Radcliffe, his lower jaw determinedly jutting out with the tension of it all, exploring a tricked-out, pop-up house filled with spooky Victoriana. The obligatory shots of pale faces peering mournfully out of upper-floor windows are also given a good airing.

The trappings of the abandoned 19th-century nursery (broken dolls, rocking chairs, staring-eyed portrait paintings, clockwork toys) have become the visual shorthand for uncanny terror, the return of a repressed childhood trauma none of us can actually remember. These are the hard, unhuggable toys invested with the memories of games with long-dead children (that the film is about dead young ‘uns only compounds the creepy connotations), superstitious markers of the end that awaits us all: we will be outlived by our stuff. There is potential shock built into the mechanism of a moving toy: haunted house movies are all about anticipating movement in inert things and, to paraphrase Chekhov, you know that the wind-up monkey automaton from the first act is going to spring into life before the last.

Scares are effectively engineered by James Watkins (director of chavsploitation outing Eden Lake), and I must admit that my buttons were successfully poked with a cold finger a few times, but we race so swiftly from one jolt to the next that there’s little modulation between quiet repose and skin-jumping shockery. Like any good ghost story, it sets up a contest between rational and supernatural interpretations of paranormal phenomena but, as usual, rational explanations, which tend to make for less unsettling horror movies, don’t stand a chance.

345-Word Reviews: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

I haven’t seen the Swedish adaptations, nor read the Stieg Larsson books on which they are based, which either makes me hopelessly unqualified to comment on this piece of the franchise, or a blank slate for judging this film on its own terms. All I can say is that I once overheard sections of the audiobook, and it seemed to involve mostly people emailing each other (here’s a full plot synopsis if you need it). After The Social Network, I wondered if David Fincher was going to go one step further and make a whole film about electronic communication. Not quite.

Tony Scott’s Loving Memory

I was saddened to learn of the death of Tony Scott. This was mainly because a man had decided to take his own life, leaving friends and family bereft. The circumstances surrounding his death, the causes of his leap from a bridge, are still unclear, and speculation is not my business. I didn’t come here to eulogise Scott’s work, nor even to defend it. If you do want to read an eloquent and spirited case for the artistic value of his films, look no further than Ignatiy Vishnevetsky’s stirring appreciation. I have little that is terribly positive to say about Scott’s – I have always find his style so pronounced and his angular, dyspraxic cutting so distancing, that I rarely warmed to a Tony Scott film.

345-Word Reviews: Mission Impossible Ghost Protocol

Tom Cruise is now so eager to entertain us, to prove that he is the hardest-working movie star in the world, that he has to hang from the world’s tallest building, an icon climbing an icon. The more bad press he generates, the more intensely he will stare, and the higher he will climb up tall things. Fair enough – I can’t imagine Taylor Lautner keeping up that kind of pace into his 50s. 

Digesting Hugo

These are some preliminary thoughts from a first viewing of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo. I’m in the process of writing a chapter on representations of Georges Méliès for a forthcoming book, so this will be one of my primary texts, and I’ll need to watch it again. I thought I would assemble some notes as I go along. As a result, this might read like a string of disjointed observations at times, but hopefully there will be some points of interest for you along the way. I’m happy to discuss the film, too, and I’m aware that it has divided moviegoers in a way that it didn’t necessarily divide the critics. A quick perusal (which is all anyone should usually have to endure) of the IMDB comments page will give evidence of popular objections to the film. It was looking like a weighty flop on its domestic release, but Hugo will probably just about claw back its $170million budget  (the best evidence that this greenlit at a time when it looked like 3D was an infallible cash-cow) when the totals are added up from international markets. So, please leave me a comment if you have an opinion about this film. 

Le Havre

Something a little bit miraculous happens while you watch Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre. The film is effortlessly engrossing without ever hitting the marks one might expect in a film about such emotive subject matter. In the eponymous French port, a defeated writer, Marcel Marx (André Wilms), now eking out a living shining shoes, takes in a Gabonese child fleeing the immigration authorities, and goes to great lengths to ensure the child’s safety.

Midnight in Paris

This brief review of Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris will be very Allenesque. By that, I don’t mean that it will be packed with urbane, occasionally surreal witticisms about relationships, but rather that I’ll be borrowing whole sections of it from the last review I wrote of a Woody Allen film. Names will be changed, but I’ll be able to save time and energy by just copying and pasting directly from the previous article, which was mostly about Spectacular Attractions favourite Naomi Watts‘s performance in You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. Borrowed passages are highlighted in blue.