Vale Stan Dalby - Barrie Pattison remembers one of the pioneers of Australian film-making

The recent death of Stanley Dalby (pictured above) has passed without a half-page obit in the Sydney Morning Herald,  an evening new items or a retrospective at the Arc Cinema but, as an in-house filmmaker at Film Australia, Stanley had once been one of the busiest movie directors in this country.

Until their status was eroded, first by TV and then by a feature film industry, Film Australia (previously the Dept of the Interior Film Unit and then the Commonwealth Film Unit) had been the prestige end of local production. They turned out the official entries you would see in schools, theatrical first halves and in their privileged status as contributor to local film festivals. John Heyer, the country’s most respected film maker after his Back of Beyond carried off its awards, ran up to speed at the D.O.I. and when They’re a Weird Mob launched Australian feature making, it recruited talents like Tom Cowan and Don Crombie from Film Australia.

Stanley Dalby didn’t desert the ship and continued making their official documentary shorts  includingThe DSTO laboratories in South Australia (1982) a film produced for the Defence Research Centre in Salisbury, South Australia by Film Australia. He was a good fit with Film Australia. While the progressive element plotted Vietnam protests, Stanley volunteered for the coverage of Royal visits and was chuffed when the Duke of Edinburgh (doubtless with a prompt from a diligent social secretary) greeted him “I believe we have met before, Mr. Dalby.” But Stan’s respect for authority was tempered. He had a bobblehead of Queen Elizabeth on the mantle piece.

Stanley’s family had fled the Communists replacing the Nazis who controlled Czechoslovakia during Stanley’s school days. We once at a party did the Horst Wessel Song as a duet.  I’d learned it propping up Kevin Brownlow on It Happened Here. Arriving with basic English, Stanley became a jackeroo and graduated to the city and the circle generated by Hayes Gordon at the Ensemble Theatre. Stan’s own amateur theatre company put on “Hedda Gabler” at the Wizard’s Club in George Street, because the cast list matched his membership.

He made a short dramatic film called Night Wait, where a hunchback’s attempt to move on a waitress, who shares the bus stop, ends badly. For someone who had never made a film, it showed a remarkable understanding of the form and a sensitivity with actors. This was the point at which the Underground Movie movement reached Australia and Night Wait was scooped up in their screenings. Stanley did a feature-length Biblical spectacle, which became the operation’s most ambitious undertaking, till the last copy went up in smoke in the Hobart fire. He made experimental pieces under the name of Frank Radd.

This attracted the attention of Film Australia. Stan moved up through the ranks joining reliables like Jack Rogers, Don Murray, Richard Mason, Ian Dunlop, Robert Kingsbury and Tony Colacino there.

When a new broom brought that to an end, Stan didn’t turn to his window boxes, though smart investments in property had given him a measure of independence. He moved to Goulburn, home of the Big Merino, and ran the A.V. Unit at the police academy. He translated an art theory book by famous Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. In with all this, he acquired three wives and a daughter. He was an epicure cook and he traveled widely. I knew him for sixty years and, like his many long-term associates, valued his friendship. His was a full life. 

On 4K Ultra HD - David Hare is not taken with THE WICKER MAN (Robin Hardy, UK, 1973)

 For reasons that now completely escape me I stupidly bought the new StudioCanal UHD disc of that much touted Brit “cult film' The Wicker Man.

Maybe it’s my current nausea at horrible world events but I have not had a more vacant viewing of something so bad it actually confounded any understanding of why in God’s name (as it were) it was ever made.

For starters the director, Robin Hardy, is a figure whose movie career never took off. After watching this I know why. Lifeless, pointless arranging of poorly lit and ineptly staged shots with not one sequence displaying any dynamic or visual meaning. Direction of actors that through sheer incompetence reduces stalwarts like Edward Woodward and Britt Ekland to distilled parodies of themselves through multiple layers of strained infantile narcissism. 

If you think Woodward’s screwed up face, so tight to express his clenched sphincter so it looks like he hasn’t been able to shit for a month, is great acting, this is your picture.

Even the far too infrequent tits and ass moments are derisorily short. Boobies shake until they’re suddenly overwhelmed by the hideous tat decor that looks like it came out of the crummy antique shop David Hemmings stops to visit in Blow Up.  

But if the general hetero campery of a bunch of faux Gauls/Druids singing and dancing in costume party drag lights your joint, this is probably for you.

Italian Film Festival - Sydney's supercinephile Barrie Pattison puts in the hard yards and recalls the highlights including STRANGENESS (Roberto Ando), A BRIGHTER TOMORROW (Nanni Moretti), THE LAST NIGHT OF AMORE (Franco de Stefano), LA CHIMERA (Alice Rohrwacher) and ORLANDO (Daniele Vicari)

 

NB: The 2023 Italian Film Festival ends in Sydney on October 18, some other states a week later. There are overflow sessions of the hits including some of the titles mentioned here in Barrie's report. Check out Palace Cinemas websites for details.

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This year’s Italian Film Festival (at least they generated a new St. Ali commercial) is in there stressing significance. No teen musicals, gallant swordsmen and dialect comics this year.

They did manage Mario Martone’s Laggiu qualcuno mi ama/ Somebody Down There Likes me a biography of Neapolitan comic, the late Massimo Troisi and a three movie retrospective. With a bit of luck I’ll get onto that shortly.

More characteristic was Roberto Ando’s La strangezza/ Strangeness, a coverage of Nobel Prize Winning dramatist Luigi Pirandello’s 1920s visit to his Sicilian origins. It’s a bit disturbing to find no reference in the press response to the Tavianis’ remarkable 1984 Kaos which deals with the same incident, down to the exhausting rail trip and the local crazy.

In the new film, a barbered Tony Servillo is the blocked celebrity writer coming back to his one time Catania home to confer with mentor Renato Carpentieri  but sidetracked by the death of his old wet nurse, whose funeral involves him with gravediggers, comic duo Salvatore Ficarra & Valentino Picone from l primo Natale/Once Upon a Time in Bethlehem. There are routines of two bodies allocated to the same mortuary niche and bribed bureaucrats. Turns out that the pair are staging their own local theatre piece, complete with a comic séance, extra lines for the priest whose hall they want to use and Picone, complete with moustache, rung in as the Countess character because everyone else is already on stage.

Servillo tries to hide his famous writer status but his cover is blown and he finds himself honored guest at the presentation, where audience members indignantly recognise themselves in the characters. This Kaos triggers his struggling creativity and he returns to the city to spin the mix of comic and tragic, real and illusory into his major work “Six Characters in Search of an Author” to which he invites the Sicilians. They find themselves witness to the riot the first presentation of the revolutionary work provokes. Spot Luigio Lo Cascio as the onstage director.

 

Strangeness is given the best frock coat movie mounting, with dim lit images of the kind better deployed in Bellochio’s imposing Rapito/Kidnapped, which was also on show. I covered it on its Melbourne festival outing. Despite the new production’s obvious ambitions, it falls far short of the Taviani brothers’ take on the same material.

Curiously this one plays in the same event as the most Pirandellian movie I’ve seen – Nanni Moretti’s new Il sol dell'avvenire/A Brighter Tomorrow which deliberately shuffles comic and tragic, real and unreal, movies and history. 

Moretti offers his on-screen director character thrashing about with an industry that has moved away from him. Clips of movies he cherishes, notably the Demy Lola and La dolce vita, fail to involve his associates. His proposed film of John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” evokes the flawed Burt Lancaster version. Moretti’s hours long nocturnal disruption of a film set with his harangue about violence in movies or his scooter ride with shonk French producer Mathieu Almaric go with a caricatured meeting with Netflix reps.

Meanwhile, Moretti’s character isn’t aware that wife and longtime assistant Margherita Buy is seeing a shrink in order to work up the courage to leave him, as he gets stuck into the production of a film about the Fifties Russian invasion of Hungary stranding a Hungarian circus troop invited by the Italian Communist Party, who now fluctuate between an allegiance to Moscow and outrage at their barbaric conduct (no one has to mention Ukraine) while an order for fifty pounds of meat a day for the animals has to be met.

This stream is headed up by the great Silvio Orlando and Barbora Bobulova as the film’s star players, while the lead couple finds their daughter Valentina Romani an item with Polish senior citizen diplomat Jerzy Stuhr (Camera Buff) adding to the already eye popping cast. Any celebrity who happens to be left out gets to march in the final parade complete with glimpsed Trotsky banner, celebrating the ironic title – the blissful new world order following the Italians’ break with Soviet Hegemony.

 

At seventy, Moretti is still on top of his game, able to surprise, amuse and involve. This is one of the best films in the event and one of the best we are likely to see this year.

Also a class item is Franco de Stefano’s L'ultima notte di Amore/The Last Night of Amore, another cop piece, which goes with Nostalgia and Suburra to put Pierfrancisco Favino in the top bracket of Italian crime movie stars. Think a kind of sad sack Gian Maria Volonte. Favino is a thirty five year police veteran who has never had to fire his weapon on duty. That’s a key piece of plot information actually. After resuscitating a Chinese businessman following a gone wrong encounter with vice girls, he’s offered a well-paid gig like his security businessman colleague. Only trouble is that the diamond pick-up from the airport which will net him a month’s salary at a stroke, comes on Favino’s last evening on the force. It of course goes pear shaped, endangering his pension and the comfort of wife Linda Caridi  and their student daughter Skype calling from her dorm to his surprise farewell party.

 

The actual night time motorway tunnel encounter is a great suspense set piece and must have been hell on wheels to stage. The script, weaving backward and forward around it, is ingenious and original. Conviction only wilts when Caridi becomes involved in the action, not probably through the shortcomings of the performer, who registers as alert & attractive, but through the implausible device of involving the wife in all the hard man stuff.

Craft aspects impress. Notice the blows of the beating suggested as continuing in the imposing score after the visual has ended. The largely unfamiliar-face cast are spot on and the Milanese setting convincing, with the ending with Favino crossing the deserted square in front of the Cathedral particularly resonant.

I can see this one having a long life as a Euro-action classic on a par with Borsalino  or Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

On the other hand coming after her Happy as Lazarro and medium length La pupille, Alice Rohrwacher’s La Chimera is a letdown. It centers on young Englishman Josh O’Connor  who we learn is making his way to the manor house run by an ailing Isabella Rossellini (identifiable by her Ingrid Bergman sound-alike voice), with whose deceased daughter he had an association Rossellini approved. He has just come out of the slammer for tomb-robbing, with cops homing in on family heirlooms as property of the state. Josh is welcomed by the local hoon element for his ability to locate lootable grave sites with a divining rod. Their mysterious fence has paid his bail.

On a drunken night with the stronzi gang on the beach, he snaps back into discovery mode and they find a millennia-untouched Etruscan grave site complete with an imposing marble statue from which the experienced vandals immediately saw off the head. The foreigner is appalled… and the sound of a police siren rings out.

Developments introduce director Rohrwacher’s actress-star sister Alba, here got up glamorous, elaborating the plot. The story’s possibilities are lost in unsatisfactory wandering into unreal imagery. Josh O’Connor’s dowsing inspired visions as shots cut in upside down, following the red thread. Staging a finale in a cheery women’s co-operative in the vacant Tuscan  Riparbella station house doesn’t convince.

Curiously this is the third piece I’ve just encountered to deal with provenance in art, after Steve Martin’s novel “An Object of Beauty” and the ABC’s Brett Whiteley documentary. I don’t know whether it is a comfort to know that the process of mystifying the value of movies still has some way to go by comparison.

Director Daniele Vicari is a visitor from the Projects on the margins of Sub-Titles City. We’ve seen him passing every so often (Diaz – Don’t Clean Up This Blood is a show-stopper) but we really don’t know what he gets up to. His new Orlando deserves attention for that alone. 

This one provides an initial shock in finding once rugged juvenile Michele Placido as a plausibly stooped and surly seventy-three year old Central Italian peasant. He throws a crumpled letter into the wheelbarrow rubbish but relents and makes the requested call from the bar to his alienated son gone years from the remote village to make a new life in Brussels. They have to find a migrant worker who can understand the person who answers. For the first time in his life, Placido leaves his home only to face his son’s feet framed by part obscured coffin, leaving Placido the man’s pre-teen daughter, Angelica Krazancova’s only living relative. Complications include a black landlord who Placido treats with contempt despite the man’s sympathy and a fellow Italian social worker who has lived through the migrant experience, like the dead son, and is getting stick from his woman associate for not following regulations.

Placido, for whom the greatest satisfaction in his life is eating the food from his own land, and Krazancova who lives for her figure skating, are mutually incomprehensible. Her tantrum at the station, when he wants to take her back with him, gets him into strife with the gendarmes there and he finds himself slaving as a day laborer and still short on the rent. There are however moments like the shared pleasure of the Xmas ice festival in the square or finding the girl cooking her grandmother’s recipe, learned from her father. Despite digressions like the night at the expatriate Italians’ concertina bar, it’s made clear to Placido that his impossible options narrow to never seeing the girl again as she is swallowed by the adoption machine, where he has no say.

The piece is laid out with unrelenting clarity – legal detail, real locations, language problems. Masking the characters for COVID is in character. I’d guess it’s too deliberate for a wide audience. I was the only one in the theater that session but I defy anyone to remain uninvolved by the final scene.

This one extends a line that’s not exactly new. Since the days of Jackie Coogan and Freddy Barthololemew, we’ve seen unlikely child custodian movies. There was a spate of them with WW2 displaced persons – Tomorrow the World, The Pied Piper, The Search or Germany Year Zero. Since then however, we've had widely spaced pieces from different cultures –  Joseph Lejtes’particularly strong 1963 Dick Powell Theater ep. Apples Don’t Fall Far, Michel Simon & Alain Cohen in Claude Berri’s Le vieil homme et l'enfant/The Two of Us, Wu Ma and Kun-Hsuan Huang in Anne Hui’s Shanghai jiaqi/My American Grandson, or Richard Burton and Tatum O’Neal in Jules Dassin’s Circle of Two. Ponder a season made up of those.

Recommended Reading and Viewing- THE SECRET HOURS - a new novel by Mick Herron and SLOW HORSES (Apple TV)

 “…since how we act in the light of day is largely for other people’s benefit, but what we do in the secret hours reveals who we really are.”

It takes a while, around page 256, for Mick Herron to tell us his meaning of ‘the secret hours’, the title of his new book about the spy trade and the spy business. It also takes quite a while for Herron to get us back into the orbit of Jackson Lamb, renamed under his espionage alias as Brinsley Miles and now back in Berlin in the 1990s, post the wall coming down but still a hotbed of intrigue. That doesn't come till around page 190 and the novel picks up speed and grip from that point.

 

From then it doesn’t take long for the aficionados to work out the Lamb/Miles connection:

 

Alison North, another alias that does take a long while to be revealed, brilliantly,  makes her views known in an early encounter in her Berlin posting, organised by David Cartwright (if you don’t know who these names are then you are going to have start off with Slow Horses and work your way forward):

 

“Which means I expect to be treated with respect. And if that bar’s too high, you can at least refrain from treating me with contempt. Do we understand each other?

“He stared for a long while, his face partially wreathed in the smoke his cigarette was sighing. And then, quietly but unmistakably, he farted.”

 

The Secret Hours  is probably the longest book (391pp) that Mick Herron has written in his Balzacian chronicling of Jackson Lamb and London’s spies. It ranges across the European continent and engages with British politics more directly than before. It doesn't take a genius to work out that Boris Johnson is being regularly pilloried and that Sparrow is a hatchet job on the odious Dominic Cummings of Brexit fame. And you wonder whether it might have once been a series of incidents that possibly would have formed small entries in what are referred to among the “Standalone Books” in the Herron bibliography at the front. Previously there were The List, The Drop and The Catch  all modest novellas that dovetailed into the Jackson Lamb Slough House stories, introducing new characters, explaining things about others. 

 

In The Secret Hours (spoiler alert) we come to learn for instance not just who killed Charles Partner but why and we learn how archivist Molly lost her legs.

 

So far the TV adaptations have only done two of the books so that makes six to go if they get to even the current end to say nothing of the incidents in the novellas and any future stories. But those two series have nailed down the characters and we have to hope that Gary Oldman (below as Jackson Lamb) stays alive and doesn’t age any further for starters.

 

Still there’s one question I don’t know the answer too. Is the Description “First Desk”, or in the case of this new novel “First Chair”, Herron’s invention? Love to know the answer.

“You have to learn to live with imperfection.” - Part One of Tom Ryan's interviews with Cedric Klapisch and Romain Duris rediscovered

 

Photographs by Tom Ryan. Cedric Klapisch before I invited him to smile for
the camera in a room at the Hotel Meurice, and then afterwards.

 

In his recent piece for Film Alert drawing readers’ attention to the arrival on Amazon Prime of French filmmaker Cedric Klapisch’s delicious 2023 series, Salade Grecque (Greek Salad), made in collaboration with wife Lola Doillon, Peter Hourigan rightly observed that the 62-year-old writer-director is worthy of closer attention than he’s so far received. “Klapisch is a director with a solid career, many successful films, with prizes and nominations from many major film festivals,” Peter wrote. “Yet, he doesn’t seem to have quite become a ‘name director’, the kind who attracts scholarly monographs from academic writers.”

 

Klapisch is a writer-director whose work I’ve long admired too, from the first film of his that I saw, 1996’s irresistible Chacun cherche son chat (When the Cat’s Away), co-written with Buenos Aires-born Santiago Amigorena (with whom he’s worked on seven projects) and starring Garance Clavel. After it, there were many others, including Un air de famille (1996), which he co-wrote with lead actors, Agnes Jaoui and her then partner Jean-Pierre Bacri (they separated in 2012 and he died in 2021), and the very wacky Peut- être (1999). 

 

Then there was the thoroughly engaging Paris (2007), with Fabrice Luchini and Romain Duris, and 2011’s biting social comedy, Ma parte du gâteau (My Piece of the Pie) with Karin Viard. In 2017, he gave us the splendid family drama, Ce qui nous lie (Back to Burgundy), and, two years later, the amiably wry romantic comedy, Deux moi (Someone, Somewhere), with Ana Girardot. 

 

Perhaps best of all, though, is his wonderful ensemble trilogy, which began in 2002 with L’auberge espagnol (The Spanish Apartment, aka Pot Luck), which starred Duris alongside Kelly Reilly (now probably best known as Beth Dutton in TV’s Yellowstone), Cécile de France and Audrey Tautou and which takes place in Barcelona. After it came Les poupées russes (Russian Dolls) in 2005, whose settings include St. Petersburg, Paris, London and Moscow, followed in 2013 by the Manhattan-based Casse-tête chinois (Chinese Puzzle). And now Greek Salad, which is set in Athens, revolves around the Duris and Reilly characters’ brother-and-sister offspring (played by Aliocha Schneider and Megan Northam) and dealing with the ways in which the new generation’s immersion of themselves in life’s complications is similar to and, in some ways, different from their parents’.

 

Although Klapisch satirises the world of television in Russian Dolls as a relative outsider – in 1994, he’d made a couple of short films as part of an AIDS-prevention program that ended up on French TV as 3000 scénarios contre un virus – in 2015, he became a full-fledged insider. He directed the first and third episodes of the opening season of the hugely enjoyable series, Dix pour cent (Call My Agent!), as well as, in 2018, a live HD broadcast of the ballet Quatre chorégraphes d'aujourd'hui à l'Opéra de Paris: Thierrée/Shechter/ Pérez/Pite.

 

In 2005, I travelled to Paris for The Age, on a junket organised by UniFrance to promote French cinema where, with my estimable Age colleague Stephanie Bunbury – who remains the masthead’s finest feature writer about film and the other arts – I interviewed the amiable and very likeable Klapisch about the first two films in the trilogy. That interview, along with my discussion with Duris about his work with Klapisch, begins below and will continue in subsequent editions of Film Alert.

 

In March 2014, corresponding with the Australian release of Chinese Puzzle, I spoke to the writer-director again, this time by phone. That interview will appear in Film Alert soon after the first.

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Part One: “You have to learn to live with imperfection.”

 

Tom: Both L’Auberge Espagnole and Russian Dolls seem like very personal films. Are they?

 

Cedric Klapisch: L’Auberge Espagnole was a very strange experience because it was done very quickly. I had five months to write the story and shoot the movie, which was almost impossible. It was a crazy set-up. Everything we did, I didn’t have time: I didn’t have time to rewrite, I didn’t have time to think. And it was just pure energy which went really well with the subject. It was a matter of trying something and, if wasn’t really the right thing, it didn’t matter because it’s really about the energy. 

The ensemble in L'Auberge Espagnole/The Spanish Apartment

I’d been thinking about the movie for a long time, maybe 10 years, so I had the story somewhere in my head. And so, when I wrote the screenplay, it only took me two weeks. I think I had many things ready to say, so it wasn’t really two weeks. So that was L’Auberge Espagnole and, at the end, when I saw the movie, I felt I needed to make a second one, to redo it, this time with thinking. With some distance and with reflection. 

I think Russian Dolls is the same kind of movie with more reflection. I wanted to add some kind of depth to the process because L’Auberge espagnole works on the lightness. Which was also good for the subject, because it was about someone who’s turning 30 and knows he’s making important choices about his life. Russian Dolls is a much more thought-out movie.

 

It’s a deeply romantic film, not just because the couple get together at the end but because of the way they reflect on love. Everybody talks about it, but they’re all talking about something different. I found it really moving. And when Wendy says, “I’m in love with all your imperfections,” I just cried.

 

I agree with you. I think it’s something that I came to understand as I grew up, that, in the first part of my life, I was looking for perfection, or dreaming about it, and I had to realize that perfection doesn’t exist and I had to get along without it. Not just with love, but with everything. There are always mistakes and stupidities, and you have to learn to live with them. You have to learn to live with imperfection.

 

Is Xavier you?

 

I don’t think so. I think he was more me in L’Auberge espagnole. I felt close to him because I went to study filmmaking in New York and spent two years there. And even though it’s not the same story that happens in Barcelona, I made an effort to put some distance between me and Xavier when I was writing L’Auberge espagnole. And with Russian Dolls, while I was trying to follow the same character, I was trying to be mindful of his logic. He’s 30 in 2005, which is not the same thing as being 30 when I was, 14 years ago, so I think that he’s not who I am any more. 

Romain Duris, L'Auberge Espagnole

 

He’s a writer but I don’t think his doubts about life and love are like mine. Perhaps in some period of my life they were, but I didn’t go through the same things. And I think that the Xavier of Russian Dolls is more truthful for someone who is 30 years old now, when teenagers seem much older than they used to. 

 

When I grew up, it was very different. There was no Play Station, or internet, or social media. The leisure civilization that we’re dealing with puts people into problems where they want to stay children for longer. They’re infantilised and gentrified. I can still relate to Xavier, but he’s really a fictional character.

 

Stephanie: Has Xavier taken on any of Roman?

 

When he and I are interviewed together, journalists also ask him if he’s Xavier. But it’s really not me and not him but somewhere in-between, because it’s his body... But he’s not like that in real life.

 

Tom: Is Xavier going to become your Antoine Doinel?

 

Yes, it’s already happened. What I said to the actors was that we’d call each other in five or ten years and see where we were and what’s up. With Russian Dolls, when I called the actors, they were really keen to work together again, not only with me but together again. So if I feel the same need in five years, I’ll try to find a story. But I’ll have to see with the passage of time whether it’s worth it or not. Maybe we’ll hate each other in five years…

 

Stephanie: That could still be interesting…

 

[Laughing] Yes.

 

Tom: It strikes me that all your films keep coming back to the same theme, the same idea: how groups of people come together and work out their lives. It’s as if the idea of people finding themselves through communities is something that’s really important to you… Are you consciously looking for this?

 

Well, it wasn’t conscious before, but now I have to admit that it’s more and more conscious. It wasn’t intentional, but everything that I’ve come up with, every story that’s interested me, deals with what binds people: how boundaries exist in a family, or a group of friends, or a couple, or a company. If I deal with only personal problems, for me that wouldn’t be enough. And I think that I can go even further in that direction. 

 

The ensemble re-assembles Russian Dolls

I try to see what can be the connection between psychology and politics. Is there a relationship between personal, intimate problems and globalisation? When you tell stories, you’re dealing with conflicts, you’re dealing with problems and it’s just a matter of what kind of problems you’re dealing with. Whether that character is the President or an ordinary person, it’s just a question of scale for a movie. 

 

I think that the world is like that. Globalisation has made us more aware of the rest of the world. I think that we can be emotional about the World Trade Centre in 2001 and about the tsunami, whereas years ago I think it wasn’t like that. A Frenchman now knows about how someone in Pakistan lives, or Africa, so I think that you can deal with international problems in an intimate way… 

 

It’s very interesting to be an observer of that. And I think that racism gives you the temperature of how people are relating to each other and to their own lives. How you deal with differences is critical. Modern life drives people to experience diversity much more than before.

 

There are problems everywhere: people marching in the streets in Paris, race riots. And we’re still seeing people blindly adhering to the American myth that when you’re poor, you can still make it. That’s what 50 Cent’s film, Get Rich or Die Trying [2005, directed by Jim Sheridan, written by Terrence Winter] is about. Whereas in France, people don’t believe that when you’re poor you can change your social circumstances. There is a powerful connection between psychology and politics: if you can make people believe something, then it becomes true for them.

 

Bush and Sarkozy are both authority figures, making empty gestures towards doing the right thing: like affirmative action, which creates quotas for the conduct of public life.

 

Is the satire in Russian Dolls about what happens behind the scenes of TV shows based on your own experience, or are you imagining it?

 

No, it’s not my experience because I’ve never really worked for TV. But I know it’s like that because I have friends in the business. What was of interest to me was that I had two characters, Xavier and Wendy, who were going live inside a love story. I thought it would be interesting to look at the way we’re surrounded by such stories: we read books, we see films and we always talk about our love lives. But when you experience it and have to actualise it in your life, it’s different. And that difference is what those scenes were really about. You said the movie was romantic, but it’s hard to be romantic because we’re overfed with romanticism.

 

Like Passionate Love in Venice! [in Russian Dolls, this is the title of the TV show Romain Duris’ Xavier is writing for BBC2]

 

[Laughter] That’s right. But it’s true that when you go with your lover to Venice, it’s great. But it’s about how to deal with the cliché when you’re on the beach and the sun is setting and it’s all so nice. I have two children and I see the way children make fun of lovers when they’re holding hands and kissing and hugging. They look stupid and, when you fall in love, you have to go through the fact that it is stupid. I think that’s what’s funny about love: how it’s difficult to accept being ridiculous when you fall in love.

 

Audrey Tautou, Romain Duris, Russian Dolls

I was just thinking you might have had some trouble with backers, or financiers or producers who would come to you and say, “You can’t do that.” And “It has to be a happy ending”.

 

No. That’s what’s great about the French way of producing. When we made When the Cat’s Away, we had intended to make a short film about that and we made a feature. I was inventing it as we were shooting and the producers – Canal Plus especially – were prepared to be blind on the script because they knew I was able to work like that. And for them it was more trusting my way of working than trusting a script or a story. It’s a great privilege. They know that if I feel free, then I’ll do better. It might be different for other directors, but I have to feel free in order to be creative.

 

Like Xavier.

 

[Laughter]

 

Stephanie: In those films, there’s a very dim view of corporate life. Xavier does not want to work in that company, and he doesn’t want to work at that television station. I’m with him, I must say. And you did seem to be making a sly comment or two about the nature of corporate life.

 

There was a scene that I cut where Isabelle [the Cécile de France character] says she was enjoying working for that company in London, and it was important for me to have somebody say that. She doesn’t need to be free with her job in the same way that Xavier does

 

So why did it get scrapped?

 

The film was already too long and the scene wasn’t well-written enough.

 

It sounds like you’re quite hard on yourself when you’re editing.

 

I need to be. I’m very loose in the way I make films. But I have to be hard on myself at some point because I think that writing and storytelling is about erasing and getting rid of things that aren’t working.

 

You must lose a lot that you like.

 

Yes. But it’s always for good reasons. I know at the end of the editing that I’ve made choices to make the story work better. You can’t put everything you shoot in and so it’s always going to be a question of choosing.

 

Well, it has to be said that the films all move along very briskly. Romain has mentioned Howard Hawks…

 

How it what?

 

Howard Hawks. 

Tom: As in Bringing up Baby.

 

[Laughter] OK, I heard “how it works”

 

Stephanie: Yes, I was going to use his films as a point of comparison. And we all agreed that there was this feeling of effervescence. Comedy that moves very quickly.

Tom: But that’s also serious underneath.

 

That’s what I like about Howard Hawks: how you can be serious and light at the same time.

 

Stephanie: It’s interesting how your humour really travels, and often that’s not the case. I wonder if you’re particularly conscious of that?

 

I’m discovering that. And it’s interesting for me. But do you know why?

 

I have no idea. But in your films, the humour is very immediate. And the humour about national characteristics is also very immediate. It doesn’t seem to be a particularly French point of view.

 

I also travel a lot. Maybe it’s something you get when you live in another country for a long time? Then you come to know what’s working in different places. There’s more of a chance to be human rather than just national. Maybe because of that I’m dealing with human nature rather than specifically cultural humour or cultural things.

 

There’s that wonderful scene where the German character is trying to study for his exam and the English boy comes into his room and says, “Oh, this room is so tidy. You’ve got to be German.” That’s so hilarious. And I can’t believe that someone from another country wrote that because it says so much about the relationship between the English and the Germans.

 

We were rehearsing in Paris and I had all the actors together and I said to the German guy that we should have something about Nazism. All the actors agreed, but he said, “No, why? I don’t want to do that.” It was funny because he then realised that he had to go through that. 

 

And Kevin Bishop [who plays the Kelly Reilly character’s brother] said, “I’d like to try an improvisation and he had the idea of making it funny and I rewrote the script in line with his ideas. I was glad that he came up with that because it was much better that someone English came up with that and not Xavier and the other guys.

 

No, Xavier would never say something like that.

 

But he would think the same thing. [Laughter]

 

Tom: Is there a lot of improvisation in these films?

 

Ummm. In L’Auberge Espagnole, yes, because I didn’t have much time and I thought it was a good thing. With people like Kevin, it was great to work that way because he’s great at that. But I needed to rewrite and so I used it in rehearsal as something to give me ideas. But on the set we weren’t improvising.

Next: A Conversation with Romain Duris

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison tracks down CREATION OF THE GODS 1: KINGDOM OF STORMS (Wu Ershan, China, 2023) and JAWAN (Atlee Kumar, India, 2023)

Not so long ago we had unprecedented access to the films of China and India - and not a few more - in dedicated cinemas and video stores. Where did all that go? Well not really all that far. The multiplexes now run their product in late sessions, sometimes to empty houses and occasionally in ones sold out.

Wu Ershan’s grim new Block Buster Creation of the Gods I: Kingdom of Storms is getting a down town first run. This one offers monster budget myth as special effects piece and is being touted as the second biggest earner in the history of the Chinese film. Actually it logs in about number twenty eight but its owners are talking it up big with an eye to the overseas market - European musical scoring and script participation by James Schamus, long time collaborator with Ang Lee, including Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

The film opens with the usual captions on graphics explaining the descent of the Shang Dynasty from the Gods, to rule a China divided into four territories, the governor of each having to send a non heir son to the Shang court to participate in the hostage Legion of the Disinherited. It is this that the Shang ruler sends against a rebel province (where have I heard that description before?) under the command of his own son Fei Xiang who is scornful when the commanders are repulsed by a fire barrier, which their horses will not cross and sends them back with the animals blindfolded.

The now defeated governor is pursued by two of the Legion Commander sons who overtake him and his alluring daughter Narana, who they feel it would be wasteful to slaughter with her father. They bring her back to Fei Xiang for his victory celebration. Bad move guys! Her pupils narrow to those of a cat. Yes she’s a Fairy Fox in human form, who sets about bewitching the macho leader. His solution to the disturbances is to have a massive funeral pyre which - promises, promises - he will ascend to assuage the wrath of the Gods.

It’s not long before people are assassinating their children or parents as part of the royal power struggle and the concerned gods dispatch ancient sage comedian Huang Bo, in loads of make up, with the enchanted message stick, to impose control. The convoluted plot is spaced by mass action footage and, rather better, a bit of erotic by-play like the scene of the power couple bathing together naked in the milky pool with Narana’s floor length hair trailing in a circle round them. 

It looks like things get sorted but a couple of epilogues tell us that the fox demon will have it all going again for part two.

We recognise a mash up of Shakespeare, Eisenstein, John Woo and Kurosawa (the fake head in the bag is instantly Ran). Westerners would be battling to follow events or to find a focal point for their sympathies in three hours of all this violence within families. Origins in the Chinese classic “Investiture of the Gods” from sixteen hundred AD would be known to its home audience, if not from the original, then from adaptations like the Xu An’s 2016 Feng Shen Bang / League of Gods 3D, which similarly buried Bingbing Fan and Jet Li in CG effects work.

It all left me yearning for the great days of Chu Yuan and the Shaw Brothers whose fantastic costume melodramas packaged this kind of material with welcome self deprecating comedy - at considerably shorter length.

The great days of (mainly) Hong Kong movies were succeeded by the great leap forward in Twenty first Century Hindi Cinema which followed the arrival of MTV in India. Front runners were the Jash Rash productions with their imposing stars Sha Rukh Kahn and Amitabh Bachchan, who now make joke promotion videos about giving roles offered them to one another.

Despite the difusion of interest through Bengali, Tamil and Sanskrit regional cinemas (not however the English language productions), Yash Rash is still a thing and Atlee Kumar’s new Jawan is a big hit for them. It offers the old Yash Raj over production even before SRK shows up again. 

Our superhero makes a spectral looking entry as he arrives to take down the hoard of red star soldiers conducting a village massacre. It’s not long before that looks like him again running the hijack and terrorising of the commuter train with ransom demands by ‘phone to the Minister, bringing his own fake hijab casualties, like the bank bandits in Un Flic, before blending in with the crowd, like the team in the 1981 John Huston Victory - all backed by SRK's personal Charley’s Angels. While we are processing that, our hero, rendered youthful, shows as the governor of the model women’s prison sheltering all the green uniform inmates (OK digitally populated aerial shot intro) which provides a haven for arrestees who never re-offend. Confused - that’s the idea.

Throw in successive production numbers, like the one where our high stepping hero does his routine in the red shirt, the “Fly Away Little Birds” dance and becoming progressively more virtuoso till we get to the finale where a couple of him dance together while the motion capture camera. weaves around them.

As a follow up to the red star soldiers, we get Bhopal style industrialists backed with goon squad heavies and money from the Mafia (who are making a comeback as movie heavies - Equalizer 3) Our heroes out smart them by holding the countries' voting machines ransom, when it looks like the election will be bought, complete with the spectacular highway stunt action piece where the veteran biker retainers fan out to make a moving wall and truck loads of bribe money blow in the wind. It takes a super cop to battle our super heroes, so Sanjav Dutt (Munna Bhai himself) makes a late appearance - ripple of audience recognition.

Despite virtuoso touches this one is too nasty, too loud and too simple minded to recommend to the outside audience that once lapped up their industry’s Lagaan, Mohabateen and Robot - when they had the chance.