Hampstead

Seen at the Roxy Cinema,Nowra NSW

Cecil says: This film was awful, in spite of its excellent cast.

We had put off going because we had a hunch and sadly all our fears were well-founded. And in the end, it was the film that was starting just as we got to the cinema on a Sunday morning, so we went for it anyway.

I’m trying to find some redeeming features to talk about: the only character who felt remotely believable was Diane Keaton’s son: slightly roguish, fairly posh son who pops round to his Mum’s Hampstead flat unannounced, gets breakfast and probes into her private life.

For the rest, the characters felt more like the fantasies so many second-rate American writers have of what it is to be English (or even Irish in Brendan Gleeson’s case): somehow the men are always debonair, middle-aged and wealthy, usually with a posh accent, or are stone-the-crows cor blimey guv Cockneys. Like Americans never came across Estuary English or just an average Joe or Jill?

This film felt like the sort of script a young tourist might write after her first visit to London. She discovered some of the cute nooks and crannies of Hampstead and just had to let everyone in on her ‘discoveries’ (I say ‘her’, but actually I think it was written by a man); she got the right bus route, pointed out the Marx grave in the cemetery (Highgate of course), even calculated more or less how far it was from Hampstead to Camden, but then made it unreal with the ridiculously ditzy Diane Keaton character, the caricature accountant, and then the Gleeson character: based on a real person, but so so badly- developed (he’d say and do things that were just not what a guy like that would do: he became a kind of goofy American caricature). Even his perfect veggie patch in amongst the trees felt unbelievable – we know how hard it is to grow vegetables in ground that get little sunlight, and his shack was hidden away in the depths of the Hampstead Heath trees.

I could go on and on picking holes in this film but why rack my brain to pick it apart anymore.

Best forgotten.

Stars? Zero or maybe 0.5…

Bea says: Yes, complete disappointment.  

As Cecil says, clearly written by someone who has visited London and fallen in love with it (understandable – I did the same).  But the writer would have been better writing about someone visiting London and falling in love with it, rather than trying to write about two mature “loveable eccentrics” meeting each other in Hampstead.  

The characters were unbelievable despite apparently being based on real people, the plot was unbelievable, and the clichés were jarring.  Keaton and Gleeson are both capable of much more, although I do tire of Keaton’s constant Annie Hall reprisal.  The fact that they couldn’t save it showed how bad the script was. 

I was flabbergasted that this actually got made, released, and was on a quite a widespread cinema run at the time we saw it.  This may work as a telemovie on a rainy Sunday afternoon, but in general – avoid.

*

Alone in Berlin

Seen at the Roxy Cinema in Nowra NSW

Cecil says: There was something terribly depressing about Alone in Berlin. That probably isn’t the film’s fault, actually. It probably has more to do with the current political situation around the world, and the realisation that in some ways we are closer now in 2017 to a rise of fascistic-style behaviour and morals than we have been at any time since 1945.

OK, so the plot here is: Berlin couple (superbly played by Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson) lose their only son at the front in France in 1940 (the opening scene of the film), so while the rest of the country celebrates, they are in mourning. And when Otto (Gleeson) gets criticised at work for not doing more for the cause and the country, he responds gruffly by saying ‘no man can give anything more valuable than his own son’, or words to that effect.

There then follows a lonely campaign to drop hand-written postcards in doorways, staircases, in hallways or entrances all over Berlin, with one-liners criticising Hitler and Nazism.

This is a rare portrait of Germany at war seen from Germany, or at least seen from the point of view of a dissident in the middle of the German capital.

The savagery of the Gestapo is somehow all the more horrific as it is carried out against their own people. We start to sympathise with the poor detective assigned to track down the mystery postcard-writer, and we witness his moment of realisation when he too gets a beating from the Gestapo because he has not managed quickly to find him out.

There have been criticisms of the accents of the lead actors. And it’s true it does ring a bit false to have English native speakers trying to act in a pseudo-German accent. But after a while you get used to it and the main parts are extremely well played.

I didn’t know until the credits that the film is based on a novel by Hans Fallada (“Jeder stirbt fuer sich allein”), and its grey depressing tone reminded me totally of my own A level years when Fallada was again on our reading syllabus (“Kleiner Mann, was nun?” – about a simple guy trying to get through the Depression – yes he did joyous themes, that Fallada).

The film left both of us in a sombre mood, though I’m sure when they started filming it, we had no idea there would be all the political upheaval of Brexit and Trump. But somehow, the mood of the time does feel as dangerous as Germany in the 1930s, and – God forbid – some of us may indeed have to be discreetly placing postcards on doorsteps in years to come, if things carry on the way they seem to have done for the last 12 months.

So, well acted; good story; but a bit grim for me, this film.

***.5

Bea says: Whilst not a feel-good experience, this sobering film was beautifully filmed, directed and acted.  I always like Emma Thompson (Anna), and she was certainly showing her versatility here, although the performances that stayed with me were those of Otto (Brendan Gleeson, also showing his versatility), and interestingly enough the performance of the actor who is (wrongly) about to be arrested by the Gestapo for the Quangel’s crime; as I don’t recall his name I can’t find him in the cast list.

It was not a feel-good experience, but it was a very interesting exploration of grief, and how there can be a purpose after dreadful loss.  This purpose also held the long married couple together after the death of their son; perhaps bringing them closer than they had been in some time, and the final scenes reinforced that.  So it was not all darkness.

Cecil has said it better than me above, but in our times – sobering.

***1/2