Ars longa, vita brevis

Petition for Roman Polanski

We have learned the astonishing news of Roman Polanski’s arrest by the Swiss police on September 26th, upon arrival in Zurich (Switzerland) while on his way to a film festival where he was due to receive an award for his career in filmmaking.

He's a great film maker.

His arrest follows an American arrest warrant dating from 1978

an awfully long time ago. Don't you think we can just let bygones be bygones?

against the filmmaker, in a case of morals.

We don't judge other people by standards of bourgeois morality.

Filmmakers in France, in Europe, in the United States and around the world are dismayed by this decision. It seems inadmissible to them that an international cultural event, paying homage to one of the greatest contemporary filmmakers, is used by the police to apprehend him.

He's a great film maker. We all think so. You can't go around arresting great guys like that. Film festivals are sacrosanct. This is tantamount to arresting a priest in church.

By their extraterritorial nature, film festivals the world over have always permitted works to be shown and for filmmakers to present them freely and safely, even when certain States opposed this.

We claim diplomatic immunity for our event. Otherwise, what next? They will be arresting people for showing films that someone doesn't like. This is like McCarthysism.

The arrest of Roman Polanski in a neutral country,

Switzerland was neutral in WWII, and is not a member of NATO or the EU and it's um we think it's probably therefore neutral in the enforcement of cases of morals

where he assumed he could travel without hindrance,

He's been able to get away with it for so long he thought he could get away with it this time.

undermines this tradition: it opens the way for actions of which no one can know the effects.

What next? They will be arresting people for showing films that someone doesn't like. This is like McCarthysism.

Roman Polanski is a French citizen, a renowned and international artist now facing extradition.

He should be immune from your bourgeois American moral judgements.

This extradition, if it takes place, will be heavy in consequences and will take away his freedom.

And he should be free, because he's a great film maker.

Filmmakers, actors, producers and technicians—everyone involved in international filmmaking — want him to know that he has their support and friendship.

He is one of us. He is our friend.

On September 16th, 2009, Mr. Charles Rivkin, the US Ambassador to France, received French artists and intellectuals at the embassy. He presented to them the new Minister Counselor for Public Affairs at the embassy, Ms Judith Baroody. In perfect French she lauded the Franco-American friendship and recommended the development of cultural relations between our two countries.

We appeal to all enlightened French-speaking people

If only in the name of this friendship between our two countries, we demand the immediate release of Roman Polanski.

* * *

If a friend of mine were threatened with jail I'd go to some lengths to help keep them out, and if they went to jail I'd go and visit. (Assuming they hadn't done something so gross I didn't want to stay friends.) I'm not going to boycott anyone for signing this petition. There are many people I like and admire who support it. I just think their arguments are woolly.

It's a long time ago.
OK, so you want a statute of limitations for rape. Some jurisdictions have that. No doubt some elderly clergymen wish they had the benefit of a statute of limitations. But you will have to make a better argument than this. He's hardly Jean Valjean is he.

Hollywood, rock stars, the golden days - everyone was messing around with kids back then.
There have been powerful people indulging their urges since time immoral, and society sometimes lets them get away with it. Then people start thinking you can get away with it if you're rich and influential enough. There is never a shortage of victims. There should have been a lot more prosecutions. Why should an auteur be treated differently from a priest, or someone who lives in a trailer?

Her mother knew all about it.
The victim was thirteen. I don't know what her mother has to do with it. (It's a pity she didn't stay around during the shoot.) The sexuality of children isn't - in western society at least - the property of their parents. How many times did that kid say No? I've lost count, but it was a lot.

The victim wants it dropped.
And some offences are so difficult or humiliating that the victim may not want to talk about them. But unless the offence is really trivial, the victim shouldn't have a say in the matter. Otherwise the perp would be able to intimidate the victim into dropping charges, or if they were rich enough, buy the victim off.

But he's Roman Polanski! He makes great films! What about Chaucer, Villon, Marlowe, Byron, Wilde, Eric Gill &c, &c?
Let's separate the man from his work.

And why focus on him when there are all these other guys running around evading prosection?
Because of the petition. People like me are sounding off because we don't think the petition should be unchallenged. We may speculate on why it's taken the US so long to catch him, and why now. They need to catch the other guys as well.

Feelings are running high. There's wild talk of witch hunts, of pitchforks and torches, of lynch mobs. This isn't Salem, it isn't McCarthyism, and it trivialises what the Ku Klux Klan did. It's not even as if Polanski can be claimed an innocent man. It's not totally unreasonable, is it, to call these celebs out on their assumption of entitlement to immunity?

[Edited to remove link to victim's testimony.]

Let the Right One In

Image: Momentum Pictures

The producers call it

a story about emancipation. Of how love and trust build the foundation for personal growth and liberation.

The film is based on a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, who wrote the screenplay. On the film's website he says:

Above all it's a love story. Of how Eli's love releases Oskar, how she makes him look upon himself in a different light. Not as the scared one, not as the victim. How she gives him courage to stand up for himself. But Eli is a vampire. A real one...

I still don’t really know what to make of it. It is an unforgettable film, poetic and complex, and for the most part never looks like a horror movie at all. For me, the worst horror is not what appears onscreen. It's been praised for its restraint but in fact I could have done with even less gore, and less sniggering at the back.

Horror is a genre I have never understood. Why do people laugh at horror films? How did horror become camp? And why do they laugh even when the horror isn’t camp? Why do they laugh at the most gruesome things? They can laugh because it’s unconvincing, or excessive. Perhaps they laugh when it’s too frightening, or out of relief, or simply to show their companions that they're not scared. Sometimes of course there is deliberate wit, a compact between director and knowing audience, and there was an element of that here.

As a student I went with a friend to see The Exorcist, which at the time was getting rave reviews in the grown up press. Despite the sniggering at the back, I was impressed by the night-dressed child’s passive-aggressive urination on the carpet at the cocktail party, rather shocked by the creative abuse of a crucifix, repulsed by the 360 degree head rotation (this was a generation before CGI) - but I’m afraid that by the time we got to the projectile vomiting I laughed too. It was just over the top. It didn’t make us popular with the Very Old townspeople in the audience. I had a feeling that I'd spoiled something, that they wanted to continue to be convinced by something that had now lost its spell over me. And in turn I had the feeling of having been spoilsported at times while watching this film. I wonder what the effect would have been if I'd seen it at home on DVD.

I still don’t really get horror. Violence revolts me, and I have so far resisted all blandishments to see Tarantino as I lack the sense of humour that finds severed limbs funny. (No, sorry, not even in that German fork-lift truck safety film.)

But I was persuaded to see this by the five-star reviews, one of those rare occasions when Anthony Quinn (The Independent) agrees with Nigel Andrews (the FT). They insisted this was more than a vampire movie.

It could hardly be more different from the image conjured up by the tag "teenage vampire movie". There's no sex, no glamour, very little melodrama. It’s set in a bland suburb of Stockholm in the early 1980s, tensions with Russia on the radio in the background. It is winter, bitter outside and fetid indoors. The camera is patient, allowing appreciation of composition, the almost abstract qualities of the blocks of flats. The pace is restrained, and there is a rich palette of sound. The focus is on Oskar, a twelve year old boy who is being bullied at school and fantasises about revenge.

There is a murder scene very early on, where a young man is waylaid at night in the park. There is some verismo business with scuffed plastic containers and the sound of blood knocking into them. It's all very matter of fact. But the butchery is interrupted by a dog. There is undeniably something uncomfortably funny about the way the dog is so riveted by the scene – as anyone might be – and continues to ignore its owner’s calls. Instead it sits down to watch. It’s funny not least because it’s one of those fancy manicured poodles, sitting politely, not a wild-looking mutt who'd have been getting stuck in. The streetlights are on in the background, and passing traffic. The murderer gets more and more frantic, and it’s funny too because such an effete looking creature can thwart someone so murderous. And because it’s a movie, part of you wants the man to get away with it so we can have more of the story. The scene epitomises the delicate area the film explores: the park, liminal between civilisation and the elemental, banality and evil. The horror is that it can happen within earshot of everything ordinary.

For the first twenty minutes or so, I was in the world of the movie: the housing estate, the cold, the mundanities of the kid’s life, the bullying he suffers, his halting attempts at friendship with the mysterious girl. This is what the film does best: ordinariness, alienation, suggestion. It's never exactly clear how much is going on in real life and how much in Oskar's head. The leads – Kåre Hedebrant as Oskar and Lina Leandersson as Eli – are terrific. Natural, sensitive, believable. The film is psychologically very astute. It lingers but never bores. The tension is fantastic.

The film makes beautiful pictures, whether of the suburbs, the snow, or the outback, where the boy’s father drinks vodka with a man who appears out of nowhere and may be his lover. Or maybe just a drinking buddy, and the lover is really the vodka, but at any rate the boy knows his idyll with his father is ruined.

Then a man's face is half destroyed by acid, and the students giggle. They are so grown up, students these days, and so knowledgeable.

Some of the special effects seemed unnecessary. But perhaps their ability to disrupt underlines the moral ambiguity. Eli herself is not above a bit of passive-aggressive manipulation in her bid to be accepted across the threshold.

And there are puzzles, some of which might be resolved by the book, which I haven't read. This is a film: it doesn't need a book to explain it. There are hints of a massive back story for Eli. Why, if she is so “old”, is her Pa so incompetent at bloodletting? He wears a homely plastic overcoat, has an idea of disposing of a body, but really is extraordinarily hamfisted, not reading the culture: he chooses a park with streetlights; he doesn’t realise that kids will wait for their pals to go home together after basketball practice. He is new to the city, but acts as if he is new to the century – which is the last one, not ours.

And why has Eli got that scar we glimpse for a moment? What does it mean? (Oskar is wounded twice: once by violence, and once by his own bravado.) And the jigsaw egg, which she claims is worth enough to buy a nuclear power plant, an odd measure of value?

There is a shockingly ambiguous scene in which the father goes back home to the vampire daughter and asks her to do one thing for him, not to see “that boy”. Although the narrative is skewed to suggest that he is always her gofer, here is a glimpse of an alternative abusive relationship. He is clearly jealous. She touches his cheek as if to confer a blessing; he closes his eyes as if receiving it. In his submission, we glimpse a sense of his desire.

It seems commonly agreed that in this movie vampirism is a metaphor for other sorts of difference. Both Oskar and Eli are outsiders. Neither has a normal family life. Oskar lives with a mother who seems to pay him no attention, let alone notice that he's being bullied, and a father who indulges him with a sentimental fondness until the bottle appears. Eli’s parent/guardian makes it his business to go about getting her haemoglobin rations, and doesn’t appear to have any job.

None of the adults in the film is particularly sympathetic.* The parents don’t seem to engage properly with the boy; the others are boozers, except for the teacher who can’t wait to get home when the bell rings - even though Oskar is staying behind, copying something out of an encyclopaedia. You’d think she’d want to see what he’s up to, but she leaves him to it, and he rather touchingly switches off the classroom light when he leaves. In one scene where his mother berates him, the sound wonderfully enacts how Oskar switches off.

Eli’s true nature eventually dawns on Oskar: she appears only after dark, doesn’t seem to feel the cold, and when Oskar cuts his hand in a gesture of kinship, falls to the floor to lap it up with those curious animal gutturals that come with her affliction. He accepts this, yet when later she offers him money he is scandalised. You stole it! You stole it from those people you killed!

What is going on here? He nods at murder but baulks at theft? Is vampirism so bizarre that both Oskar and we the audience can gloss over it as beyond morality, a theatrical device, a mere stroke of fate that has to be endured despite its victims (for the most part not the toothsome youngsters of tradition, but boozers and losers – the implication perhaps that none of them will be missed)? Perhaps I’m being too literalist, but it’s one thing to accept someone from an alien culture, or with an alienating label or even an antisocial addiction, but quite another to be OK around a vampire.

Critics have focused on how it is a beautiful metaphor, probably because the darker side is bleedin' obvious. And there is a deeply disturbing cultural aspect to it. Eli’s way of life is shown as different but sufficiently similar that she can live in the flat next door. She may sleep in the bath under a light-proof cover, but when the cover is lifted, she is an ordinary girl asleep. In one sense, Eli provides the kinship that Oskar, if he weren't a loner, would find in a gang. At that level, the violence isn't so remarkable. Although friendship and acceptance can redeem us, if we befriend the wrong person, one possible outcome of unconditional acceptance is corruption.


*Correction: one of the unglamorous middle aged boozers is a heroine. She makes the supreme sacrifice in one of those scenes with baffling comedic overtones, but she has been dogged (or should that be catted) by comedy all along.

The State of Play

Was there ever a movie about investigative journalism where the future of the paper isn't on the line?

Having missed the BBC series I could watch this with an open mind. It pushes paranoia buttons about NorthCom, corrupt defence procurement, jumbo corporations and privatised homeland security. It's a pacy political thriller, with some very familiar tropes: the maverick boozy journo, the editor anxious about the bottom line, the dodgy pols, the love interest/conflict of interest, the abrasive police, the dangerous assignation, the sleazy bar, the deadline, and so on. There is even an underground carpark sequence, so it's a lot of fun.

Russell Crowe is terrific as the slobby maverick journo. Helen Mirren as the editor is a sort of cross between Tina Brown and Anna Wintour. Ben Affleck, though well-groomed as a Congressman, lacks gravitas and steel.

The film could have ended many minutes earlier, and been a different, simpler, and perhaps more satisfying piece. There are too many improbable plot twists, and so many loose ends I gave up counting, so many circling black helicopters that never land. I wondered whether room was being made for a sequel.

At a time when print journalism is under greater threat than ever, it makes a traditional plea for inky hands. It's worth seeing the movie - which is never boring - simply for the beautiful credit sequence, following the paper to the press and on to distribution: this coda is a soaring hymn to newsprint.

La Vie Moderne

When I first visited rural southern France in the early 70s, some farmers were still ploughing with oxen. Even now, you can find old ox-ploughs rusting under a hedge – where there are still hedges. My parents have lived there nearly 30 years, and during that time we have seen farmers retire, their children move away, cattle sold, vineyards grubbed up, fields amalgamated, and the growth of tourism.

In La Vie Moderne photojournalist Raymond Depardon records the life of farmers in the Cévennes. It is part of an ongoing project dear to his heart. As a farmer's son, he has a great sympathy for them, and they open up to him as best they can, though it’s clear some of them are not completely at ease with the camera. The interiors are so familiar: the solemn pendule in the background, the open fire, the long kitchen table with the oilcloth, the plate of vanilla flavoured biscuits, the scuffed tin of sugarcubes pushed towards the visitor for the bitter coffee. You have to keep them in a tin because of mice.

The landscape is achingly beautiful. To strains of Fauré, the camera tracks up and down narrow country lanes, dives into valleys, past snowbound forests and shuttered houses, halts at a barbed wire gate. The people who scrape a living from the mountainside are dying out. Villages are ghosts of themselves. It’s heartbreaking to hear the stories, to contemplate the passing of a whole way of life, something which for generations had seemed so permanent. The way of life was backbreaking and brought little reward. Young people these days demand more. It is the loss of a culture. The loss of the language (Occitan) began even earlier.

Even here they now use tractors. Little of the old soundscape remains now but the bells on the brebis as they scramble down over the rocks to their barn for the night.

The film makes no argument beyond presenting a few farmers and their families to talk about the hardships of their existence, their hopes and fears for the future. The first family consisted of two elderly bachelor brothers and their nephew, who had got himself a wife from up North via a lonely hearts ad. He seemed well pleased with life, apparently oblivious to the jealousy and pain occasioned by the introduction of his new family - a wife and her daughter, people from elsewhere, who didn't understand the district, or farming, and showed insufficient deference to their elders.

One of the most poignant was a man who lived alone in a state of some neglect. His hair was long and matted, and he chainsmoked. For the entire session, he was glued to his ancient television watching the funeral mass for Abbé Pierre (founder of Emmaus). Without taking his eyes off the screen, he answered the questions almost monosyllabically:
- Are you a Catholic?
- No.
- Were you baptised a Catholic?
- No. I’m Protestant.
- Do you go to church?
- No.
And so on. I found all this disconcerting. The television was clearly his constant companion, and on this occasion enabled him to share in a national day of mourning. It seemed rather rude to persist in questioning when the interviewer had dropped in unannounced on this particular day. For all his sensitivity elsewhere, Depardon seemed curiously unalert in this instance - except that it made a telling piece of film, albeit partly at his own expense.

Although the film has received rave notices, it is not an obvious hit. There is little pacing, no polemic. There are odd flashes of wit but nothing to stop the viewer from nodding off for a minute or two. The voice of the interviewer slows things down, keeping a sense of distance between audience and subject.

I never saw any of those programmes about Hannah Hauxwell, but suspect that focusing on one family in the Cévennes might have made more engaging viewing than La Vie Moderne in its dutiful progress round the valleys. But Depardon’s aim is to be more faithfully representative of the different types of farmer and family set-ups. He is more of a collector than a specialist. Nor is this a visual Akenfield. We are so used to documentaries which edit out the questions, giving the impression that the participants are speaking freely for themselves, that the questioning, with all the rephrasings, repetitions – one of the participants was pretty deaf – and awkward silences, feels rough-hewn. Perhaps the documentary maker who is also a photojournalist wishes to display more regard for the “truth” of the present moment, even if that includes the non-answer and considerable longueurs. Why not say what happened? Yet he doesn't hesitate to stage a shot, to position the camera in the best place - the far side of a cow who is crumpled on the floor with mastitis, her grieving owner beyond... And heaven knows what went on the cutting room floor. As a photographer, he'd be used to culling the one image out of a thousand. Perhaps it's a category error to want something more rigorous from a documentary too.

However, that's a personal gripe that no-one else seems to share. And this is without question a valuable record of the remnants of a community that will have disappeared the way of the ox-plough within a generation.

Il Divo

Quite a contrast with last week's movie, this stylish piece from Sorrentino foregrounds cinematographic technique with clever background music to make a drama which never pretends to the documentary. It deals with the top end of society, its manners, masks and gross corruptions. The children in Entre les Murs are saints by comparison. Knowing little of Italian politics - though I remember the perennial Andreotti, the whiff of corruption that hung about him, the tragedies of Aldo Moro and Falcone, and the endlessly interrogated mystery of Calvi (and how can any of these be called "politics"? Oh, and I recall learning back in school that Italy's system of proportional representation led to inherently unstable government and unpalatable dealmaking) - even knowing so little, I found it compelling. A huge amount must have been over my head. I don't know enough to know what percentage that might be but guess it's well north of 50: I don't speak Italian; I know precious little about their political structures; I don't know the names of the politicians, nor remember them from one scene to the next so was frequently lost. But I'd gladly go again, and not just to pick up a few of the threads I missed first time round. For the most part, it's fascinating viewing. The very few longueurs are places where too much explanation is being given, and are defined only by the drive of the rest of the film.

Jumpcuts, flashbacks, flashforwards and leitmotifs create depth and texture. The fizzing glass of migraine cure marks the end of an Act. The focus on his curious hands has its own strange language once his secretary explains it to his inexplicable visitor.

Let's take her as an example of the ambiguity the film revels in. A woman appears at his office, sur commande. She is attractive, very nervous - frightened even. Her blouse is undone by one too many buttons for her to be respectable. Yet she has crows' feet - she must be fortyfive if she's a day, far too old to be a prostitute. What other explanation can there be? She seeks advice from the loyal secretary as if an ingénue from a madam. When she meets Andreotti she is shy, but embraces him. They talk of intimacy, she says she explores herself... The camera focuses on his hair, his physicality. The next time we see her she is on the arm of an Ambassador, and when someone asks her about her painting dismisses it: "I just dabble." Can we believe that Andreotti, whose power could command whomsoever he could choose, would choose a woman d'un certain age to be his companion of the night, or a "dabbler" to paint his portait?

This is a drama, so we can take it only as a means to the construction of a character - one who is undemonstrative, enigmatic.

And yes, so much comes down to the physical presence. Much as there's a hint of The West Wing in that encounter on the diplomat's arm at the ball, even though it's taking the trope of embarrassed recognition to put a different spin on it, so there is an inescapable comparison with Richard III. At least for the English. Er, well, there's the intelligence, the dead bodies strewn on the path to power. And the hunchback. I am ashamed to mention it. Yet it's undeniably there. If we're going to be politically incorrect here, let's go the whole hog and suggest that the Italians, in common with their French neighbours, are much less bothered by political correctness than the Anglo-Saxons.

But like Entre les Murs, it is an intelligent film, treats its audience like adults. And engaged. Whereas Entre les Murs listens to children for once, and shows teachers to be fallible - and neither of them perfect - this film ironises Andreotti's claims to innocence. He is never seen to mandate anything. Enemies die right and left; he prays. The only hint of guilt is circumstantial: the kiss. Later, he jokes that a politician must take care whom he associates with: think of Jesus and Judas. Later still, there is a parody of Leonardo's Last Supper where associates meet to anoint him presidential candidate. No-one kisses and betrays him. They all toast him with wine, white and red, even the cardinal, while he toasts with migraine remedy, his cup of bitterness and guilt.

And his physicality is amazing. Toni Servillo as Andreotti manages to make his neck disappear. He wears a hunchback. His curious hands have a role of their own: praying, or marking pleasure or displeasure. He holds his body still as if nothing could move him. His stillness exemplifies his power - and occasionally his vulnerability.

It's overdone in places, no question. The ears are too much. The abject senator whose name I forget (the ugly, stupid one who complains that A never showed him any affection) is a caricature. No-one would vote for him. The kingmaker whose name I forget wouldn't have tested the slide of the marble floor IRL even if he fancied himself as a funky dancer. The scene after Andreotti is indicted, where he is sitting with his wife who is channel-hopping to avoid the appalling news - very stagey, but effective. After many channel-hops she finds a station playing a torch song and as the two of them sit there and she reaches out a hand to him and tears up, you can't be sure whether she is weeping for her husband, or the man she thought he was.

Along with the swooping and savvy camera work, an extraordinarily eclectic range of incidental music, sometimes so brief it was over before I noticed it.

The credits played to this:


Update
Why I walked out of my own biopic: an interview with Andreotti about the film here.

Entre les Murs

Compelling movie. I knew nothing about it when I went. I loved the documentary feel of it, the absence of music (save the poignant offstage Schubert during the parents' evening, a telling counterpoint to the dialogue). I loved the ambiguity of the teacher's role. He is idealistic but an insensitive loudmouth. He fucks up. He compromises himself with the disciplinary board, and even before that he is faking good in his account of the run-up to Suleiman's disastrous outburst. The earlier grading meeting is similarly compromised by the vested interests of the student representatives: a lovely piece of symmetry. I loved the vitality of the kids, all the more so thinking that this was largely improvised.

And I loved the subtitles. Someone had thought about them. At one point, a pupil has to conjugate "croire", so the subtitler went for an equivalent irregular verb rather than a straight translation, and had a lot of fun with "swim". It kept all the fun of the mistakes, and wouldn't have mattered a bit to anyone who doesn't know French, but flattered anyone who does.

I despaired of the bureaucracy. Of the low expectations. Of the student representatives on the grading committee, even though they are bright girls. Of the slovenliness. Should it matter that a teacher goes to school in t-shirt, jeans and trainers? Hmf, in my young day teachers wore suits, or at least sports jackets and flannels or cavalry twills. They certainly wore a tie. And Mr Brown wore a linen jacket in the summer term, and a panama hat. The past is another country.