The Current Cinema - Some thoughts on LIVING (Oliver Hermanus, UK, 2022) and a backward glance at IKIRU (Kurosawa Akira, Japan, 1952)

Bill Nighy, Living

I think I’ve only been provoked to write this by the Sight & Sound review I mention below. 

As I said on Facebook LIVING....an odd movie if ever there were…  and I went on to say  it made me dig out a copy of Kurosawa's film Ikiru  from 1952 which as I recall from my youth was in a MUFS season in the 60s. Then, I found its near two and half hours hard going... but that was back then... and that was the only time I’ve ever seen it until last night.

 

In between the two viewings of the old and the new, the Sight & Sound review of the new version came to hand and in big type there is “This is a dangerously audacious undertaking, but Oliver Hermanus and Kazuo Ishiguro have brought it off” according to Philip Kemp. He goes on “Ishiguro’s script closely follows the shape and tone” and concludes “Living offers a rare example of the remake of a masterpiece that can stand with the original.” So much there but I’m not sure I’d ever class a remake of anything as “dangerously audacious”. Maybe a remake of Satantango...

 

I’m still not all in the group who think the original is a masterpiece. Still not sure that a dull, risk averse, as they say today but whatever, very ordered and dull life that suddenly explodes into commitment and action is totally convincing but that’s the story. All 2 hours and 23 minutes of it.

Shimura Takashi, Ikiru

Kurosawa’s film is set in the then present, and thus in the medical environment of the day. A cancer diagnosis likely meant an inevitable if slow death. “A long illness” the obits used to say. The new version thus decides to take us back to 50s London with all its social repression and paper-filled offices echoing Kurosawa’s original. The new one also decides to be upbeat by introducing a side story romance. The new one is all about getting the colours right, the drabness in the art design of office and home. You can feel superior because things are so much better today.  So we compare and contrast a film about the day and a film which dips, maybe even wallows, in nostalgia.

 

And as I also said I'm not at all sure that Bill Nighy's one note raspy whisper is that effective beyond the mannerism. It’s a good trope when he plays people who can convey a mountain of information with an ironic gesture, a raised eyebrow. Like he did in the Johnny Worricker trilogy of spy stories written by David Hare. (That’s the other David Hare from the northern hemisphere). As I also also  said I  found Adrian Rawlins (there's a name to conjure with, a Melbourne reference unless you’ve seen Philip Noyce’s Castor and Pollux) to be a much more authentic grump and someone who  got deep into his misanthropic part. 

That's all...

Streaming - John Baxter contemplates the British rendition of WWII in GLORIOUS 39 (Stephen Poliakoff, 2009) and THEIR FINEST (Lone Scherfig, 2016)

BLOOD, TOIL, TEARS, SWEAT AND CELLULOID.

            In August 1939, at the height of an idyllic summer, the glitterati of high society and show business converged on Cannes for the first Cinema Festival of Free Nations, a response to the previous year’s Venice Film Festival, a showcase for the fascist Italy of Benito Mussolini.  A record 1386 passengers had arrived in France on the liner Normandie , among them Edward G. Robinson, Gary Cooper, Norma Shearer, Bob Hope, Charles Boyer, Tyrone Power and his new wife Annabella, all headed for the festival. 

            A lavish gala preceded the opening. On the Croisette, to the music of five orchestras, guests danced under the stars or watched a show hosted by France’s most popular comedian, Fernandel. But a sudden squall interrupted the fireworks that ended the fete. Icy air rushing off the Mediterranean, accompanied by flashes of lightning, sent celebrities fleeing to their hotels.  Most slept serenely, unaware that Hitler’s panzerswere invading Poland. They woke to find Europe at war,  and the festival to celebrate “the cinema of free nations” indefinitely postponed.

            No movie has ever included this moment of jarring disjunction in the history of Europe and the world, with its implicit sense of nature and humanity shatteringly at odds; the Pathetic Fallacy at its most vivid. Hollywood has exploited the announcement of Pearl Harbour to the point of cliché but the start of war in Europe never inspired the same the dramatic attention.  Perhaps European film-makers would have followed Hollywood had the Polish invasion led, like Pearl Harbour, to immediate conflict rather than to the so-called “Phoney War” as Europe waited apprehensively to see what Hitler would do when the snows thawed. 

Arthur Lowe (3rd from left), John Le Mesurier (4th)
Dad's Army

            Traditionally, British films and television have mined the period for laughs, a scandalous concept for American media, and, apparently, its audience, to judge from the thunderous flop of Steven Spielberg’s 1941. Contrast the continued success in Britain, from 1968 to 1977, of BBC TV’s Dad’s Army, which showed Britain’s class distinctions replicated in a contingent of bumbling amateur National Guard soldiers.  Its animated titles set the tone,  depicting Britain as a yapping puppy keeping the Nazis at bay.

            Recently, however, some films have taken a more serious view. As well as Dunkirk and the various Winston Churchill biopics, Simon Stone’s The Dig  and Steven Poliakoff’s Glorious 39  chose to deal with this moment of historical free-fall, and, in their case, using the same geographical location, though in a very different manner. 

Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, The Dig

            In a key scene from the former,  Ralph Fiennes’ truculent East Anglian archaeologist glares resentfully at Spitfires roaring overhead, an omen that war in the present will delay work on a project measured in millenia. Glorious 39  makes a similar point with a glamorous dinner party where, under a marquee on a perfect lawn amid the ruins of stately Walsingham Abbey,  politicians debate  appeasing Hitler.  

            The Top People’s Norfolk of Glorious 39, with its National Trust settings and full-dress intrigue, contrasted with the shabby gentility and mud-caked boots of The Dig, might be  a rebuke to the Dad’s Army  vision of a Brave Little Britain united in defiance of the Hun. Implicit is the reminder that the country’s survival in World War II was, as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, “a damn close-run thing.” 

Eddie Redmayne, Charlie Cox, David Tennant,
Glorious 39

            If the model for Dad’s Army was Ealing comedy, Poliakoff burgles Hitchcock. Glorious 39  uses many  of Hitch’s favourite tropes; suave villains who offer poison with a smile; families unmasked as cold-blooded killers; a lone character nervously exploring some surrealistically sinister location, in this casea slaughterhouse for domestic pets killed off on government advice rather than see them crazed by the bombing. The yapping puppy of Dad’s Army becomes scores of dead Fidos and Kitties bagged in white cloth that dangle around the heroine (Romola Garai) as she discovers among them the corpse, also shrouded and hanging, of her lover (Charlie Cox). 

Gemma Arterton, Bill Nighy, Their Finest

            The ubiquitous Bill Nighy adds his urbane presence as a genial politician to Glorious 39. Dad’s Army  had his equivalent in John le Mesurier’s long-suffering foil to pompous commanding officer (Arthur Lowe), also his boss at the bank in which both work. Nighy again adds his implied stamp of approval to another recent exercise in reconstruction: Their Finest, byDanish director Lone Scherfig, which also uses the early days of war in Britain to riff on changing roles of class and gender, and the clash of historical far-sightedness with present pragmatism. 

            The project to make a romantic comedy about Dunkirk sweeps up an innocent Welsh woman adrift in London (Gemma Arterton), a cynical screenwriter (Sam Claflin), a fussy movie actor (Nighy), a snappy Eve Arden-type lesbian named Phyl (Rachel Stirling) and a miscellany of Whitehall bureaucrats, European displaced persons and movie gypsies. Gaby Chiappe’s screenplay from Lissa Evans’ novel embraces, unabashed, a variant of the Dad’s Army/Ealing formula, turning away from questions of history to the practical problems of how to sit out a bombing raid in the Underground or convincing housewives to grow carrots. 

            Nighy, Eddie Marsan and Helen McCrory collaborate convincingly as the ageing actor, his Polish agent and the latter’s sexually alert sister, who inherits the agency (and Nighy) when the former is blown to pieces in an air raid. The film extracts Grand Guignol humour from Nighy trying to identify the dismembered remains of Marsan, and from Arterton who, laughing at having mistaking shop window dummies for corpses after a bombing raid, turns away, only to stumble over the real thing. At such times, the weightier questions of history and heritage seem remote. 

Streaming and on BBC Channels - John Baxter revives THE JOHNNY WORRICKER TRILOGY (David Hare, UK, 2011-2014)

'...a kind of perfect role", Bill Nighy

 A PARFIT GENTIL SPY.

            Given its failure to anticipate 9/11 and other disasters, the international intelligence community has clearly lost the plot. The problem may be the sheer number of people involved. Efficiency in espionage appears to be inversely proportionate to the number of agents.  Why else would East Germany, where the Stasi spied on everyone, fail to envision the fall of the Wall? 

            Spying is simpler in the cinema. Hardly had Tom Hanks and his busty assistants driven Russia from Afghanistan in Charlie Wilson’s War than he changed hats to become the lawyer in Bridge of Spies who saves Soviet agent Rudolf Abel from execution. Catch Hanks spending a decade tracking down Osama bin Laden. He’d have nailed him in an afternoon, with no more help than an adoring aide to keep the Martinis flowing.

            A similar thought appears to have motivated David Hare in writing and directing his trilogy of spy dramas about MI5 analyst Johnny Worricker, played by the imperturbable Bill Nighy. 

            Produced by the BBC, Page Eight (2011), Turks & Caicos and Salting the Battlefield (both 2014) reduce espionage to the matching of skills among a handful of dedicated individuals. As in most spy fiction, winning or losing are abstractions.  Nobody believes the recovery of “the plans”, the exposure of the mole or the outwitting of Karla, Moriarty or Smersh will change anything. To Hare, as to his predecessors John Buchan, Rudyard Kipling and John le Carré, it’s all about what Edwardians called The Great Game.

"a thuggish Ralph Fiennes"

            Like George Smiley in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy,  Worricker is the right-hand man of a dying boss, in this case Benedict Baron (Michael Gambon), head of MI5. Almost on his deathbed, Baron entrusts him with a report on America’s clandestine “black sites” and the practice of “rendition”.  Page eight of the document reveals in passing that British Prime Minister Alec Beasley (a thuggish Ralph Fiennes) knows and approves of their existence. 

            Worricker exploits allies, lovers and family to authenticate the report and disseminate its contents.  He’s unconcerned that this makes him a fugitive from his own department, now run by Jill Tankard (a snarling Judy Davis;).  Should we be in any doubt as to where his true loyalties lie, the vicar at Benedict’s memorial service announces that Johnny has chosen the music, then leads the congregation in the hymn I Vow to Thee, My Country.

            The last shot of Page Eight shows Johnny standing at an airport, contemplating a smorgasbord of possible bolt-holes.  His story could have ended there, had the popularity of the first film not induced the BBC to fund two more. 

            Turks & Caicos finds Worricker on that particular Caribbean haven for dirty money, eavesdropping on some post-9/11 profiteers who have become rich constructing the infrastructure of illegal imprisonment.  Pausing to take up again with old flame Margot (Helena Bonham-Carter), he sabotages their consortium and the secret fund set up to guarantee Prime Minister Beasley a comfortable retirement, then slips away with Margot just before the axe falls. 

            The third film, Salting the Battlefield – a reference to the practice of victors destroying the economy of the defeated by sowing their fields with salt - might have been better called The Morning After.  Flitting between German safe houses, Worricker is induced to return to Britain with Margot, only to find that his absence has barely been noticed. Jill Tankard now runs MI5 in cahoots with a thriving American intelligence industry, for which rendition and black sites are just weapons in the arsenal of freedom. Beasley has escaped censure by blaming the Americans, then resigning to become a well-paid statesman-for-hire on the model of Tony Blair. 

            Fortunately, Johnny’s enemies are compassionate in victory. He’s allowed to come in from the cold and return to his old office where he can play the Great Game while Tankard and Co. get on with the Greater Game of fighting international terrorism. 

            In all three films, Worricker has a female companion, and sometimes two. In Page Eight, he befriends Syrian publisher Rachel Weisz, the mysterious death of whose brother at the hands of the Israeli Army he’s able to elucidate. “I don’t suppose you’d let me thank you?” she says hopefully when they find themselves alone in a hotel room, but of course nothing so carnal would cross Johnny’s mind. If he were to share her bed, it would be with a metaphorical sword laid between them, a guarantee of knightly restraint. 

Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, Christopher Walken

            The distressed damsel of Turks & Caicos is Winona Ryder, who, in a different kind of film and another era, would have been called a “moll”. With the connivance of a CIA man, played with loose-jointed glee by Christopher Walken (an actor Nighy greatly admires – “Every move he makes is a dance”), Johnny saves her, before escaping into the dark waters of the Caribbean with Bonham-Carter. (Whistle-blowing accountant Meredith Eaton would have been a more appropriate companion, though her height, a mere four feet, might have complicated the incognito on which Salting the Battlefield depends.)

             “British actors,” said Roger Ebert, “love playing gangsters as much as American actors love playing cowboys.” This is no less true of spy stories, and clearly Nighy enjoyed himself as Worricker.  Asked to describe his character, he said “I wear a dark blue overcoat. I smoke herbal cigrettes in the rain, I stand on Battersea Bridge in the dark and you have to worry about what I’m thinking. It’s a kind of perfect role.”  

            Why would a political writer like David Hare devote three films to something so close to escapism?  Did he, by exposing the aimlessness of espionage, hope to condemn by implication the secret gathering of information and those involved in it? Alas, in the wake of Wikileaks, this is old news.  We are now all too aware that strangers can watch our every move, hear every word.  “Aren’t you worried?” attorney Tom Hanks periodically enquires of Rudolf Abel in Bridge of Spies.   We can only respond, like Abel, “Would it help?”   

Christopher Walken, Meredith Eaton, Bill Nighy, Winona Ryder, on set