Bea says: We were very surprised to find this Italian gem of a film showing on a Saturday night in a very mainstream cinema complex in Hull recently, and although neither of us had heard of it we decided to see it instead of The Karate Kid.
Going on, I was somewhat concerned about the length of the film (2 1/2 hours). Regular readers know I dislike the current vogue for unnecessarily long films (most just need better and tighter editing). However, every minute of the 2 1/2 hours was needed to tell the story of Pepe and several generations of his family, from the 1920s to the present day, in the village of Baaria in southern Italy.
The film required concentration, as it was postmodern in style with the plot presented out of chronological order, and many scenes involved symbolism, magical realism and dream sequences. In fact, both Cecil and myself felt we wanted to sit right down and watch it all again, to have another chance at getting all the references.
The film deals with universal topics which would strike a chord with most people watching - the choices we make in life, ambition, love and lust, settling down, money, home, what we leave for future generations, and, crucially, how things change around us, whilst as people, our concerns remain the same. Powerful stuff.
***
Cecil says: I actually love films like this - real epics you hardly ever see these days; and with so many characters interlinked you actually feel compelled just to go back in there and watch it all over again so that you can put together some of the connections you almost certainly missed at the first time of asking.
It's also a very reflective film, which made me philosophical on the way out, mulling over big issues, motivations for our actions and all sorts of questioning why we do things.
Sicilian culture is not something I'm familiar with, so even with subtitles for the impossible dialects (and the Romany? language), there are large chunks I'm sure I'll never get, however often I watch this film. But it didn't matter, somehow, because the storyline drew me in and held me for the whole 150 minutes.
Funnily enough I did meet a Sicilian Communist Party member on a holiday some 20 odd years ago. It would be good to meet him again now having seen this film. In the UK we tend to associate Sicily with the Mafia, and this guy I met on holiday made lots of jokes about Mafiosi to local shopkeepers in Scotland, just to get a reaction. They're not the main players in this film, but they are always there, always a threat, and it makes me wonder if my Communist holiday contact is still around today.
I didn't like what Bea calls the 'magical realism' stuff in the film, though. Never a great fan of dream-sequence type of scenes and the film tends to dip in and out of these without any Hollywood-style screen-flickering to tell you - yes, folks, you're back in dreamtime now. Funnily enough the dream bits reminded me of those ads for the olive spread at the moment where the family members fly through the air to catch falling olives.
No, but that apart, hard to fault this film. Though, I want to see it again before I give it star rating...
Sunday 22 August 2010
Tuesday 3 August 2010
Precious
Cecil says: We saw this film in one of those community-run cinemas every little market town should have, at The Witham in Barnard Castle, County Durham. The enthusiastic group run this cinema on a laptop, projector and sound system in a big, old hall which is also used for badminton and local theatre (though there's a bit of a dispute brewing over whether to develop the space, thereby losing the wonderful old music hall stage, but gaining cafes, a well-being centre and a modern cinema. Tough call, and not sure which side of the argument I'd be on).
For Saturday night in a small town with no mainstream cinema, we were delighted to have the chance to see a film as edgy and controversial as Precious, and we were joined by about 20 other locals, so not a bad audience compared to other films we've seen since we began this blog. A nice touch too was the interval half way through, which gave us the chance to chat to our neighbour and hear more about how the local cinema group works. If only other towns could follow suit...
But, what of the film? The first thing to say is that Precious is very hard to follow without subtitles. Not being a New Yorker, nor accustomed to the language of the ghetto, I wouldn't have been able to follow much of the dialogue. Though, to be honest, you didn't need to to be able to follow the plot: young, black girl raped by her father has two babies and is abused by her violent mother. The film charts her progress through a special educational programme and her fantasies about what she might become.
It's a tough, violent film, but actually very positive in its message: kind of a black female version of Dead Poets Society or The Browning Version, if you really want a parallel.
Are the characters realistic? Hard to say, not having had much contact thankfully with that kind of life myself. But very believable and horribly convincing. I'll let Bea say more on the content of the film, but I liked it, in spite of its apparently grim subject matter.
***
Bea says: I had read a few reviews of Precious over past months, but thought we had missed the boat in terms of seeing it at a cinema, so I was thrilled when we walked past this beautiful old music hall on our first day of holiday and randomly noticed they were showing it that evening. Yes - a film that depicts the central character's very tough life fairly uncompromisingly.
Unlike Cecil, my work does bring me into contact with this kind of life experience on occasion, and in fact the character of Precious reminded me of a girl from my youth who had two babies at a very young age indeed (food for thought); I felt it was pretty realistic. The "inspiring teacher" plot was quite well done - not too sugary, the social workers (one played by a very dressed-down Mariah Carey) portrayed in a sympathetic and real way, as were the family dynamics - the mother's role in the abuse and the grandmother's fear of stepping in.
The ending didn't tidy everything up - Precious still had a long, hard road to climb - but was sufficiently upbeat not to leave the audience reeling from the hard experience of watching parts of this film. Interestingly, a number of the audience were older, even elderly, and I wondered how they had found it, so took the opporunity to chat to a few at the end. "Terrible, but thought-provoking" was their verdict; "after all it does go on, doesn't it"? How many of us, like me, remember a quiet girl who had one or more babies at a very young age?
Noticing that the film is an adaptation of a novel, I thought I might look out for it - having always dismissed Sapphire as chick-lit previously.
My final comment is on the performance of the actess playing Precious; I understand that, like in a Ken Loach film, she had no acting experience and was pulled from the "ghetto" to play the part - she did well.
***
For Saturday night in a small town with no mainstream cinema, we were delighted to have the chance to see a film as edgy and controversial as Precious, and we were joined by about 20 other locals, so not a bad audience compared to other films we've seen since we began this blog. A nice touch too was the interval half way through, which gave us the chance to chat to our neighbour and hear more about how the local cinema group works. If only other towns could follow suit...
But, what of the film? The first thing to say is that Precious is very hard to follow without subtitles. Not being a New Yorker, nor accustomed to the language of the ghetto, I wouldn't have been able to follow much of the dialogue. Though, to be honest, you didn't need to to be able to follow the plot: young, black girl raped by her father has two babies and is abused by her violent mother. The film charts her progress through a special educational programme and her fantasies about what she might become.
It's a tough, violent film, but actually very positive in its message: kind of a black female version of Dead Poets Society or The Browning Version, if you really want a parallel.
Are the characters realistic? Hard to say, not having had much contact thankfully with that kind of life myself. But very believable and horribly convincing. I'll let Bea say more on the content of the film, but I liked it, in spite of its apparently grim subject matter.
***
Bea says: I had read a few reviews of Precious over past months, but thought we had missed the boat in terms of seeing it at a cinema, so I was thrilled when we walked past this beautiful old music hall on our first day of holiday and randomly noticed they were showing it that evening. Yes - a film that depicts the central character's very tough life fairly uncompromisingly.
Unlike Cecil, my work does bring me into contact with this kind of life experience on occasion, and in fact the character of Precious reminded me of a girl from my youth who had two babies at a very young age indeed (food for thought); I felt it was pretty realistic. The "inspiring teacher" plot was quite well done - not too sugary, the social workers (one played by a very dressed-down Mariah Carey) portrayed in a sympathetic and real way, as were the family dynamics - the mother's role in the abuse and the grandmother's fear of stepping in.
The ending didn't tidy everything up - Precious still had a long, hard road to climb - but was sufficiently upbeat not to leave the audience reeling from the hard experience of watching parts of this film. Interestingly, a number of the audience were older, even elderly, and I wondered how they had found it, so took the opporunity to chat to a few at the end. "Terrible, but thought-provoking" was their verdict; "after all it does go on, doesn't it"? How many of us, like me, remember a quiet girl who had one or more babies at a very young age?
Noticing that the film is an adaptation of a novel, I thought I might look out for it - having always dismissed Sapphire as chick-lit previously.
My final comment is on the performance of the actess playing Precious; I understand that, like in a Ken Loach film, she had no acting experience and was pulled from the "ghetto" to play the part - she did well.
***
Sunday 1 August 2010
Partir (Leaving)
Bea says: A promising storyline and at least one big name (Kristen Scott-Thomas) - this could have been so much better. The first half to two-thirds was indeed quite good, the plot following Kristen Scott-Thomas as she began to try to break free from her stifling upper middle class life in provincial France (married to a doctor, two teenage kids, no life of her own etc).
When trying to return to her profession as a physiotherapist, she meets Spanish builderIvan, who is building treatment rooms for her at the family home, and they begin a passionate affair. Kristen Scott-Thomas' character gets in deeper and deeper, confessing all to her doctor husband (cue highly emotional scene between the two of them, which is realistic and well done), and leaving him for a life of squalor and poverty with Ivan.
So far so good - the stresses and strains this would have placed on their "love" would have been good to explore - what would she have done, faced with a life of council flats and fruit picking? Would her feelings have lasted, or would she have returned to her husband after all?.
However, the plot then loses it somewhat and the female character behaves in increasingly desperate and odd ways - selling her Cartier watch at a petrol station to pay for fuel, "robbing" her own home of expensive art and getting Ivan (who has a criminal record) to sell it on, with disastrous consequences, which ulitmately lead to her returning to her husband and the film's difficult to believe climax. The histrionics take away from what could have been a subtle and powerful exploration of a not commonly examined area of female life.
**1/2
Cecil says: Regular readers will know how important a film's opening scene is in my view for setting the tone and atmosphere. Here we had a still shot of a staircase at night with the only sound that of cicadas, so we knew it was somewhere hot, but then came the crisp crackling sound of...popcorn from the couple behind us in the cinema. I really do hate the noise of sweet wrappings, the crunch of popcorn and the slurp of fizzy drinks being sucked through a straw. So 'Leaving' made me feel like doing just that since the popcorn continued through most of the film...
The film should have grabbed me more easily, I thought. English person living in France (been there, though never in Nimes); professional reflexologist (done that, though not full-time); passionate affair (ahem, NOT done that, but it's always interesting to watch...).
But I felt little empathy for any of the three main characters. In fact, the person I could relate to most was the teenage son, dealing with his conflict of loyalties between two parents going in different directions. But his was very much a cameo role. The husband was odious; the Spanish builder was a Spanish builder, ex-con; and Kristen Scott-Thomas just kept doing unbelievable things, as Bea says.
So, how about the sex scenes? (I was talking recently to someone who judges a film on the quality of the sex scenes). They were passionate for sure, but they also made me feel like a voyeur; was this because I had little empathy for either of the main characters or was it intentional on the part of the director? The film focused mainly on the Scott-Thomas character, and the director was a woman, so you could expect the sex scenes to focus on the woman's view or perceptions of what was going on; but - maybe because of camera angles (pretty hard to film up from the bed??) - aside from close-ups of Kristen's face at key moments, they didn't feel terribly new or different from many other male-directed films.
And the ending. I shan't give it away, but is that REALLY a likely outcome for such an affair???
**.5
When trying to return to her profession as a physiotherapist, she meets Spanish builderIvan, who is building treatment rooms for her at the family home, and they begin a passionate affair. Kristen Scott-Thomas' character gets in deeper and deeper, confessing all to her doctor husband (cue highly emotional scene between the two of them, which is realistic and well done), and leaving him for a life of squalor and poverty with Ivan.
So far so good - the stresses and strains this would have placed on their "love" would have been good to explore - what would she have done, faced with a life of council flats and fruit picking? Would her feelings have lasted, or would she have returned to her husband after all?.
However, the plot then loses it somewhat and the female character behaves in increasingly desperate and odd ways - selling her Cartier watch at a petrol station to pay for fuel, "robbing" her own home of expensive art and getting Ivan (who has a criminal record) to sell it on, with disastrous consequences, which ulitmately lead to her returning to her husband and the film's difficult to believe climax. The histrionics take away from what could have been a subtle and powerful exploration of a not commonly examined area of female life.
**1/2
Cecil says: Regular readers will know how important a film's opening scene is in my view for setting the tone and atmosphere. Here we had a still shot of a staircase at night with the only sound that of cicadas, so we knew it was somewhere hot, but then came the crisp crackling sound of...popcorn from the couple behind us in the cinema. I really do hate the noise of sweet wrappings, the crunch of popcorn and the slurp of fizzy drinks being sucked through a straw. So 'Leaving' made me feel like doing just that since the popcorn continued through most of the film...
The film should have grabbed me more easily, I thought. English person living in France (been there, though never in Nimes); professional reflexologist (done that, though not full-time); passionate affair (ahem, NOT done that, but it's always interesting to watch...).
But I felt little empathy for any of the three main characters. In fact, the person I could relate to most was the teenage son, dealing with his conflict of loyalties between two parents going in different directions. But his was very much a cameo role. The husband was odious; the Spanish builder was a Spanish builder, ex-con; and Kristen Scott-Thomas just kept doing unbelievable things, as Bea says.
So, how about the sex scenes? (I was talking recently to someone who judges a film on the quality of the sex scenes). They were passionate for sure, but they also made me feel like a voyeur; was this because I had little empathy for either of the main characters or was it intentional on the part of the director? The film focused mainly on the Scott-Thomas character, and the director was a woman, so you could expect the sex scenes to focus on the woman's view or perceptions of what was going on; but - maybe because of camera angles (pretty hard to film up from the bed??) - aside from close-ups of Kristen's face at key moments, they didn't feel terribly new or different from many other male-directed films.
And the ending. I shan't give it away, but is that REALLY a likely outcome for such an affair???
**.5
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