Drifting Clouds Cinema Blog: "Nuts4R2 on Peter Strickland's Berberian Sound Studio"

Berberian Sound Studio

The New Berberians

 Berberian Sound Studio  2012 UK 
Directed by Peter Strickland
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: There are going to be some big spoilers here, including the ending... in as much as you could consider it possible to spoil a movie of this nature.

I told myself, and anyone else who was prepared to listen, that I wouldn’t brave London while the Olympics and Para-Olympics were on. This would give me a) time to write more and b) help me save some cash for far more tawdry and unspoken pleasures (that’ll be a book buying spree then). Well the first benefit seems to have been shot down in flames (I’m still only getting three or four blog reviews up a week) and the second option... yeah, maybe, if they’re not expensive books.

However, in the end, a new movie I’d heard only good things about, Berberian Sound Studio, forced me into the busy heart of London while the Para-Olympics were on because, frankly, I could only find one chain of cinemas in London showing the thing and none of those screens were local to me (so much for my Cineworld card, then). On the positive side, I would be seeing it in one of the better cinemas in London... which just goes to show how much I am missing the era of the Lumiere and Metro cinemas these days. So I saw it in possibly the best sound and vision equipment I was likely to have an opportunity to see it on and, also, with a crowd of like minded people instead of the usual coke gargling, popcorn munching heathens who adorn my local multiplex (I promise you... you’d have to see some of them to believe them... and that’s just the staff).

So... was my trip to London worth all the effort in regards to this film?

I’m sorry to say it, and I know I’ll probably get shot down for this but... no, not really.

Berberian Sound Studio is quite confounding in it’s own way because it is at once one of the more interesting films screening at the cinema this year but also, I feel, terribly dissapointing. Dissapointing both in it’s failure to live up to it’s hyped up expectations, which is only partially it’s fault and I’ll get on to that in a minute, and in its failure to really deliver any bite to its metatextual explorations. On the upside, it’s got Toby Jones in it as the main protagonist and, frankly, any film which has that has to have some measure of coolness to it. Hey, just found out he’s Freddie Jones' son, that’s even cooler.

Okay, so the first thing which got me interested in this was everyone referring to it as an homage to either the genres of Italian Giallo or Italian Horror.

For starters, these two genres, despite sharing some major directors working in both (and a fair few other genres), are not interchangeable and rarely cross over because, when a film starts slipping into the realm of the supernatural... it ceases being a giallo and slips into being a horror movie. A giallo is a giallo and a horror is a horror... let’s leave it at that. It really is that simple.

Now, just because I’d heard this stuff word of mouth is not the film's producer's fault, for sure... except that it does use Italian horror as its subject matter (but not it’s own composition) and thetrailer (which was the next thing I watched after reading a good many tweets) is, to be fair, cut like it’s a horror movie. The fact that it was premiered at this year’s FrightFest probably does help set up expectations that it’s somehow going to be some kind of horror film too and... it so isn’t. 

It also doesn’t help itself in setting up fake expectations by advertising itself with a poster that is, at least in the UK poster design’s case, a whole lot more than just a little reminiscent of one of the more famous poster campaigns for lionised giallo director Dario Argento’s Four Flies On Grey Velvet (see images above). Great poster for sure (both the Argento and the Strickland movie) but it does itself a bit of an injustice when it comes to representing the movie I feel. I thought it had a vague surrealist feel about the movie and I think comparisons to the worlds of David Lynch might be a more pertinent comparision to make, if comparisons are your thing.

The film is about, if indeed it could be said to be about anything, a British sound designer who has been called over to Italy to work on an Italian horror film called The Equestrian Vortex. After he arrives at the studio, within the first few minutes, we are then treated to the full opening titles for this movie within a movie (the actual movie titles for the film you are actually watching are saved for the end credits) and this was my favourite part of the film, it has to be said. The Equestrian Vortex credits are scored in funky 70s horror style and they have a more “British Horror” vibe to them rather than Italian, I would have said. It wouldn’t look out of place on a 70s UK TV anthology show like Hammer House Of Horror, for instance.

There are, it has to be said, sequences in the film which are a direct homage to Italian horror/giallo, but only in that the lighting style is similar to two directors who were/are key exponents of both genres, Mario Bava and Dario Argento. So there are some scenes which are lit in the kinds of bright greens and reds that you would expect from these two directors and their succesful band of imitators. But this stuff is only used for scenes which have a dreamlike quality and as the narrative (or what I shall stubbornly refer to as a narrative, at least) continues, the director starts to play with the format of the film in the good old “medium is the message” kind of way. There is (dare I say it again in another review, bearing in mind I know a review going up next week forThe Girlfriend Experience will also be pushing this angle) a very deliberate and repeated use of a Godardian distancing device intended to pop you out of the movie at various scene transitions by way of a flashing “Silenzio” subtitle and scenes from earlier in the film are also replayed, but this time in an Italian dub which, perhaps less than subtly, shifts the viewer into an enquiry of the nature of the footage viewed thus far.

Toby Jones’ protagonist is disturbed by a ringing doorbell one night and after getting scared, he runs through his door, carving knife in hand, only to be confronted with the interior of the screening room of the studio, and we watch as he watches the footage of him being disturbed in the night... the same footage we just watched, of course. The main protagonist starts to disintegrate as a real character for us and, as his character is slowly eroded by repeated scenes and dialogue coming out in the script for the movie he’s working on, which we are familiar with as letters from his mother in England, it’s a temptation to say that some of the more surreal sequences scattered throughout the picture are purely dream sequences. However, the clue in the text comes when the reimbursment via the receipts he turns over for his flight to Italy doesn’t ever get paid to him. His avenue of enquiry leads him to the brick wall of his employers not being able to find any evidence that he has actually been on a flight to Italy.

The end of the film provides no real answers unless you take it for what it is. Toby Jones is merely playing a character you are watching and at the finish, this character just fades out of existence in much the same way that David Hemming’s main protagionist in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up just winks out of existence. This is not a film about narrative closure and it’s very much a spiritual cousin of the aforementioned Blow Up and some of the more subtle works of David Lynch (such as the hit and miss crowd pleaser Blue Velvet). Experimentation is much the order of the day but, alas, this old reviewer has, I think, seen it all before. There are some very well trod clichés (such as the film stock burning up before your very eyes in the projector... which I’m also pleased to be able to say I’ve actually seen happen in real life too, as it happens) and call me jaded but I was hoping to see something new or maybe even shocking/thought provoking contained in this movie. Overall I found it entertaining but less than mind-blowing.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great moments here in this movie... but I just don’t feel the movie adds up to being more than the sum of those great moments and it leaves a very unsatisfying taste in the mouth of this blogger. However, the acting, cinematography and music are all great, or at least interesting, and my dissapointment shouldn’t stop you from scurrying off to see this movie. You may get a lot more out of it than me, I suspect. I found it to be a little over-rated but certainly of a high quality of movie making and I’m looking forward to seeing what this director does in the future... as well as catching up with what he did prior to this film. Let me know what you think of it... I’d be interested to hear.

 

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The Great Acting Blog: "Make Choices You Enjoy - John Malkovich In Colour Me Kubrick"

Malkovich is one of those American actors who is regarded as a real actor, which is to say, he actually can act, he's an artist, he's in it because he wants to be a great actor, or make a great contribution, he's certainly an actor who gives something a little bit extra, he's always provocative, always intense. He's also one of those actors for whom we feel that the calibre of material offered to him is rarely commensurate to his talent – Malkovich has never had a great run of performances in the way his compatriots from the generation preceding his did, namely Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro. But then perhaps Malkovich has never quite been the Hollywood star in the same way either. Infact, off the top of my head, it's difficult to really name any of his Hollywood films. However, his output in Europe seems to be more distinctive, where he has worked with Raoul Ruiz, Manoel de Olveira, Michelangelo Antonioni and Liliana Cavani. Malkovich though, is an actor of such strength, that he can take fairly mediocre material, and render it compelling. And Colour Me Kubrick is an example of this.

The film itself is a light, fluffy affair, loose in parts, piquant in others, and had the actor at the centre of the film been of anything less than Malkovich's standard, then Colour Me Kubrick would have been a very ordinary film indeed. But there Malkovich is, delivering perhaps one of the great underrated screen performances of recent years (this is certainly an example of an actor's work receiving less than due attention because it was done in an unfeted film – an actor cannot enjoy success unless the production he is working on, is successful as a whole – there's moral in there somewhere). Colour Me Kubrick is based on the true story of Alan Conway, who went around passing himself off as filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. It wasn't that Conway looked anything like Kubrick, he didn't, but he was able to get away with it because Kubrick's reclusiveness meant that few people were certain of what he looked like. And Malkovich goes to town as Conway, playing him as a cheap, camp, bedsitland, alcoholic – imagine one of those middle aged men wearing a brown mac and tatty old baseball cap with a cheap bottle of vodka in his pocket, and you've got him . Scene by scene, he wins the confidence of wannabe showbiz types by appealing to their vanity; he promises a young rock group work on his new film, and so they buy him drinks (“rich people don't carry cash”), and on another occasion, he beds a young costumer designer after promising to hook him up with his Hollywood connections, and on another, he agrees to invest in a swanky restaurant in order to save it from bankruptcy, offering to get his Hollywood legal team to “look over the figures”. Perhaps Conway's most audacious con, was of a light entertainer, who, in real life had been Joe Longthorne but was coded as Lee Pratt in the film. After attending a party at Pratt's house, Conway tells him he will help him crack Vegas, and the con starts in a scene where Malkovich delivers a great piece of bravura acting – waving his arms about, and speaking in a sort of unmodulated bellow: he informs Pratt that he will speak to “Moe Green in Vegas”, and, “Sheckie in New York”, and get the ball rolling. It is a sensational acting choice, hilarious, and disquietingly true, the film is worth watching if only for this scene. The net result however, is that he takes up residence in a luxury hotel, all at Pratt's expense of course.

The film is choc full of these wonderful little moments created by Malkovich. Playing a character who is himself acting, offers rich performance possibilities. It's true that Malkovich, now in his late 50s, is a master craftsman. He is innately compelling, with his intensity, intelligence, dry humour and unusual persona. His work is always precise, always simple, never adding unnecessary detail, but always striving to express the scene, and he makes it seem effortless in Colour Me Kubrick, as all great actors do. Essentially however, at the heart of this performance, is the fact that Malkovich is making acting choices he enjoys, choices which interest him, which touch off his imagination, and which ultimately energise him and fuel him through the scenes. The alternative to making enjoyable choices, is making choices we do not enjoy, and this typically happens when we act to please the director – whether that's to give the director what we think he wants in order to make him like us, or whether it's to shore up an insecure director by doing it his way (insecure directors typically talk too much, and want to control how the actor does the scene) – the irony is, most actors make choices in order to please others, which is why so much contemporary acting is joyless and stingy. Malkovich doesn't fall into that trap – and as a result, we the audience, are delighted by a performance which is properly energised, vivid, various, and, well, fun.

 

Make choices you enjoy.

 

To quote the great David Mamet; “You not only have a right to choose actions which are fun, you have a responsibility – that's your job as an actor”.

 

The Great Acting Blog: "The Shy Poetry Of Irene Jacob"

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I suppose Irene Jacob will always be inextricably linked with Krzysztof Kieslowski, and the two masterpieces she made with him: The Double Life Of Veronique, and Three Colours: Red, which made her name. I am convinced had Kieslowski lived on, he and Jacob would have made many more films together; the aesthetics of Jacob's acting and Kieslowski's cinema are utterly compatible, both marked by an unpretentious poetry and a sensitivity – no other actor is as seemless in Kieslowski's films as Jacob, infact, the BFI's Geoff Andrew wrote that Kieslowski was “making those films around her”. However, it could be said that Jacob has never quite reached the heights of those films with Kieslowski since, although it's true that after winning the best actress award at Cannes in 1994 for Red, the offers poured in, from Europe and Hollywood*, but Jacob instead retreated and took nine months off, spending most of her time “reading Tolstoy, Balzac, Singer and several autobiographies”.She worked with Louis Malle before Kieslowski, and Antonioni after, and latterly delivered a masterpiece of screen acting in Theo Angelopoulos' The Dust Of Time.

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What is unusual about Jacob on screen, is her shyness. She is never aggressive, or flamboyant, and hardly makes any attempt at intensity, even though her performances are vivid. There is a gentleness about Jacob, with a hint of melancholy. However, there is always joy in her performance, it is the energy source for all her work, and it may be re-shaped in all kinds of ways, such as sadness or confusion, depending on the needs of the moment in the scene. Jacob's performances flow from her, which sometimes gives her an ecstatic quality. Her performances are unfettered, and unmolested by vanity. There is a sensitivity and delicacy about her which can at times be heartbreaking. Her acting has the absolute ring of truth to it. As with all great actors, it is her essential goodness we respond to. Further, we also sense that her performances are coming from a deep place, they are important to her. Although she is physically small, she has a magnitude of soul, as though there is so much more to be explored, as though we are only seeing a fraction of what she may express.

 

Jacob, by her own admission, came from a “shy” family, who rarely if ever expressed their feelings. As a result, through much of her childhood, she will have repressed much of what she felt, locking it away somewhere. Then she discovers cinema:

 

“They made me laugh and cry, and that was exactly what I was waiting for in a film: to awaken me to my feelings”.

 

Suddenly those repressed feelings are stirred, and the possibility of being an actor, offers the possibility of an escape from introversion, albeit temporarily and under imaginary circumstances (ie – for the duration of the performance), and the possibility of giving expression to that repressed material. Here's Jacob again: -

 

“...the protection of a character....it's the distance that creates the poetry”.

 

The protection of a character is an interesting point – there is no character, everything the actor expresses is of himself, not of anybody else. In Jacob's case, an introvert, the objectivity of playing a character, creates a vehicle to transport the repressed material out into the world. However, she is such a captivating actor because there is a tension between her inclination for introversion and the demands of the scene (her performance). The poetry is the repressed material touched off by the actor's response to the scene, and reconfigured as truthful fiction by the actor's performance.

 

Jacob (as with all true actors), possesses a surfeit of thought and feeling brought about by shyness, and from this surfeit, Jacob creates her poetry.

 

 

The Great Acting Blog: "Alain Delon"

 

Alain Delon delivered great performances in films made by some of the great maestros of cinema: Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Pierre Melville, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, Rene Clement and Joseph Losey. That alone may qualify Delon as a great actor, because in order to be great, the actor must give great performances in great productions, it is not good enough to give great performances in mediocre ones. Delon however, not only gave great performances in great movies, but defined an entire aesthetic (Delon is a reference point for a certain kind of acting) in the same way a painter might, or a filmmaker or a playwright. In this sense, Delon is a supreme actor-artist and belongs in a group made up of only a handful of actors.

 

How do you describe Delon's work to someone who has never seen him perform? Well, Delon is not forceful in the way Brando was forceful, and he's a positive wallflower compared to someone like Laughton. Delon is reserved, he is still, and when he does move it is swift, decisive and precise, and he always keeps it simple. His work is about clarity of action, that is: the actions Delon performs on behalf of his character in the scene are clear. He is highly disciplined* and excludes the non-essential in service of the film he is working on. Physically, he is superbly constructed, and I have often thought that if I had to design a screen actor, it would probably come out something like Alain Delon.

 

I knew Delon was my kind of actor when I saw him in Antonioni's masterpiece, L'Eclisse, where he plays a brash, arrogant stockbroker chasing after Monica Vitti. There is a scene which takes place in the office where Delon's character works. It is the end of a very busy day, where Delon has had to deal with many angry clients demanding their money back after the stock market has collapsed. Finally, he has a moment of peace: relaxing at his desk he picks up a glass of Coke, rocks back on his chair and slowly brings the drink to his lips, but just before he is about to drink, he pulls the glass away from his mouth and slams it back down onto the desk, leaps out of his chair, grabs his coat and leaves the office. We find out in the next scene that Delon was late for a date, hence the about turn with the Coke. This is a brilliant example of how the actor can convey so much through the handling of objects. Here, Delon has shown, by changing his action in front of us, how the character has had a complete and rapid change of thought (note that the actor need not “think” the “thoughts” of the “character”, and this is impossible anyway), it is simple, but it's compelling, and it's true.

 

This week saw Delon turn 75, and I was shocked to see him in a photograph as the old man he now is (albeit still in good shape) because my image of him is still stuck in 1967, when he played the now iconic hitman, Jef Costello, in Jean-Pierre Melville's seminal film noir masterpiece, Le Samourai, a movie which reached almost mythical proportions for me because I had to wait so many years to see it, and it's still not readily available here in the UK. Le Samourai is also one of the most influential films of all time. Almost all contemporary silent-assassin-films will have been affected by it in some way. Infact, Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino among others, have sited Melville's film as an influence upon their own work (and, if I may, an influence upon mine, as my short script “Reprieve” owes something to Melville), and, at the centre of it all, is Delon, as the stoical master Hitman, utterly immaculate, and very, very cool.

 

Le Samourai is a deceptively simple film, as is Delon's performance in it, yet neither are lacking in mystery. Further, Melville's film is essential in the sense that every frame is necessary, exclude anything and the film will not make sense. Again, this is in harmony with Delon's work, we absolutely must watch everything he does because everything he does is meaningful, and we sense this while watching. And both the film and Delon refuse to yield their secrets, even after repeat viewing. Rarely has there been an example of a film being constructed around the aesthetic of it's leading actor, and, vice versa, rarely has an actor embodied a film's aesthetic so purely. There is a unity between the actor's performance and the filmmaker's design, they become one and the same, and the overall effect is a film of true aesthetic beauty.

 

*Volker Schlondorff tells the tale of how Delon would arrive on set precisely at the time he was called, and leave exactly when scheduled to.