Thursday 25 March 2010
This is England (Shane Meadows 2006)
This Is England(Cert 18)
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian, Friday 27 April 2007 Article history
Cutting edge... Shane Meadows' This is England
Shane Meadows continues his fast and fluent film-making career with this quasi-autobiographical picture about skinheads: a movie with hints of Alan Clarke's Made in Britain and, in its final image, the haunted disenchantment of Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It is a sad, painful and sometimes funny story from the white working classes of 1980s Britain, the cannon-fodder caste alienated from Falklands rejoicing on the home front and not invited to participate in the nation's promised service-economy prosperity.
This Is EnglandProduction year: 2006Country: UKCert (UK): 18Runtime: 100 minsDirectors: Shane MeadowsCast: Jo Hartley, Jo Hartley, Joe Gilgun, Stephen Graham, Thomas TurgooseMore on this filmMeadows boldly attempts to reclaim the skinhead from the traditional neo-Nazi image, explicitly distinguishing his characters from a separate racist influence, and presenting them as an anarchic youth tribe that idolised West Indian music. He sees their susceptibility to the extremist right as a poignant and even tragic part of their fatherless culture, literally and figuratively orphaned by the times.
There's a winning lead performance from 13-year-old newcomer Thomas Turgoose playing a put-upon lad called Shaun in the run-down Grimsby of 1983. His dad was a serviceman killed in the Falklands and he's perennially getting picked on for this, and for his horrible flared jeans which make him look, as one bully cruelly puts it, like Keith Chegwin's son. Sloping and moping his way home after a standard-issue school day of humiliation, Shaun gets waylaid by some skins in a dodgy underpass, but instead of yet more battering, the gang give him sympathy and understanding; they become Shaun's only friends, and with a new Ben Sherman shirt and number one cut, Shaun has new pride and a new identity.
The gang's leader is Woody - a cheerful, sparky performance from Joe Gilgun - and they have an African-Caribbean member facetiously nicknamed Milky, played by Meadows regular Andrew Shim; Shaun even finds romance with one of the group's girl-punk fellow travellers: a languid and rather elegant older woman called Smell (Rosamund Hanson) who earnestly explains to Shaun's mum that she is called that simply because it rhymes with Michelle. The idyll is soon destroyed with the highly unwelcome appearance of Combo, a ferocious and sinister skin warrior just out of prison, played by Stephen Graham. He demands the group join his National Front cell, and turn out for an NF meeting in a tatty pub, addressed by one of the movement's suit-wearing officer class, played in cameo by Frank Harper.
Turgoose is the picture's heart and soul, and it's a terrifically natural, easy and commanding performance. Turgoose's open face radiates charm, and then, when he goes over to the dark side of racism, a creepy, anti-cherubic scorn: almost like one of the little blond kids in Village of the Damned. But Meadows is always concerned to preserve a sympathetic core to Shaun, and in fact to all the skins. Even the deeply objectionable Combo is shown to be suffering from emotional pain.
Like Meadows' earlier pictures, Dead Man's Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass, This Is England is about younger, vulnerable figures being taken under the wing of older, flawed men, and this personal theme here finds its richest and maturest expression yet. As to whether we should buy its implied leniency about skinhead culture: that is another question. The West Indian influence is advanced as proof that skins were not necessarily racist: yet it can't cancel out Combo's hate campaign against South Asians, the "Pakis" who "smell of curry", a campaign which goes quite unchallenged or even unremarked upon by any of the skins, good or bad.
The skinhead identity is, after all, obviously supposed to be more aggressive than that of other tribes: I remember as a 10-year-old cowering on the terraces of Watford football club in the early 70s, as the Luton boot boys got stuck in, and my father grimly telling me that the reason they shaved their heads that way was so the coppers couldn't grab them by the hair. Whether or not that is true, it certainly made the wearer's head look like a big, third clenched fist. And it's still difficult to get a handle on them.
Meadows appears to want to find emotional truths behind the bravado, to find reasons for the male rage. It's a valid quest, and there are telling and touching moments, particularly between Turgoose and Rosamund Hanson. I found myself wishing that their love story could occupy more of the film, maybe for the same reason that the Shane Meadows film I have enjoyed most is the one his real fans loathe: the comedy Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. But from the get-go of this drama, it is obvious that things are heading only one way: towards a climactic flourish of violence, and it's a glum business wondering to whom and from whom this is going to happen. This is a violent subject, and these are violent people, and yet I couldn't help feeling that Meadows is, as so often, more comfortable with machismo than with the humour and gentleness which play a smaller, yet intensely welcome part of his movies. However agnostic I confess to still feeling about his work, there's no doubt that Meadows is a real film-maker with a growing and evolving career, and with his own natural cinematic language. When I think of his films, I think, for good or ill: this is English cinema.
Peter Bradshaw The Guardian, Friday 27 April 2007 Article history
Cutting edge... Shane Meadows' This is England
Shane Meadows continues his fast and fluent film-making career with this quasi-autobiographical picture about skinheads: a movie with hints of Alan Clarke's Made in Britain and, in its final image, the haunted disenchantment of Truffaut's The 400 Blows. It is a sad, painful and sometimes funny story from the white working classes of 1980s Britain, the cannon-fodder caste alienated from Falklands rejoicing on the home front and not invited to participate in the nation's promised service-economy prosperity.
This Is EnglandProduction year: 2006Country: UKCert (UK): 18Runtime: 100 minsDirectors: Shane MeadowsCast: Jo Hartley, Jo Hartley, Joe Gilgun, Stephen Graham, Thomas TurgooseMore on this filmMeadows boldly attempts to reclaim the skinhead from the traditional neo-Nazi image, explicitly distinguishing his characters from a separate racist influence, and presenting them as an anarchic youth tribe that idolised West Indian music. He sees their susceptibility to the extremist right as a poignant and even tragic part of their fatherless culture, literally and figuratively orphaned by the times.
There's a winning lead performance from 13-year-old newcomer Thomas Turgoose playing a put-upon lad called Shaun in the run-down Grimsby of 1983. His dad was a serviceman killed in the Falklands and he's perennially getting picked on for this, and for his horrible flared jeans which make him look, as one bully cruelly puts it, like Keith Chegwin's son. Sloping and moping his way home after a standard-issue school day of humiliation, Shaun gets waylaid by some skins in a dodgy underpass, but instead of yet more battering, the gang give him sympathy and understanding; they become Shaun's only friends, and with a new Ben Sherman shirt and number one cut, Shaun has new pride and a new identity.
The gang's leader is Woody - a cheerful, sparky performance from Joe Gilgun - and they have an African-Caribbean member facetiously nicknamed Milky, played by Meadows regular Andrew Shim; Shaun even finds romance with one of the group's girl-punk fellow travellers: a languid and rather elegant older woman called Smell (Rosamund Hanson) who earnestly explains to Shaun's mum that she is called that simply because it rhymes with Michelle. The idyll is soon destroyed with the highly unwelcome appearance of Combo, a ferocious and sinister skin warrior just out of prison, played by Stephen Graham. He demands the group join his National Front cell, and turn out for an NF meeting in a tatty pub, addressed by one of the movement's suit-wearing officer class, played in cameo by Frank Harper.
Turgoose is the picture's heart and soul, and it's a terrifically natural, easy and commanding performance. Turgoose's open face radiates charm, and then, when he goes over to the dark side of racism, a creepy, anti-cherubic scorn: almost like one of the little blond kids in Village of the Damned. But Meadows is always concerned to preserve a sympathetic core to Shaun, and in fact to all the skins. Even the deeply objectionable Combo is shown to be suffering from emotional pain.
Like Meadows' earlier pictures, Dead Man's Shoes and A Room for Romeo Brass, This Is England is about younger, vulnerable figures being taken under the wing of older, flawed men, and this personal theme here finds its richest and maturest expression yet. As to whether we should buy its implied leniency about skinhead culture: that is another question. The West Indian influence is advanced as proof that skins were not necessarily racist: yet it can't cancel out Combo's hate campaign against South Asians, the "Pakis" who "smell of curry", a campaign which goes quite unchallenged or even unremarked upon by any of the skins, good or bad.
The skinhead identity is, after all, obviously supposed to be more aggressive than that of other tribes: I remember as a 10-year-old cowering on the terraces of Watford football club in the early 70s, as the Luton boot boys got stuck in, and my father grimly telling me that the reason they shaved their heads that way was so the coppers couldn't grab them by the hair. Whether or not that is true, it certainly made the wearer's head look like a big, third clenched fist. And it's still difficult to get a handle on them.
Meadows appears to want to find emotional truths behind the bravado, to find reasons for the male rage. It's a valid quest, and there are telling and touching moments, particularly between Turgoose and Rosamund Hanson. I found myself wishing that their love story could occupy more of the film, maybe for the same reason that the Shane Meadows film I have enjoyed most is the one his real fans loathe: the comedy Once Upon a Time in the Midlands. But from the get-go of this drama, it is obvious that things are heading only one way: towards a climactic flourish of violence, and it's a glum business wondering to whom and from whom this is going to happen. This is a violent subject, and these are violent people, and yet I couldn't help feeling that Meadows is, as so often, more comfortable with machismo than with the humour and gentleness which play a smaller, yet intensely welcome part of his movies. However agnostic I confess to still feeling about his work, there's no doubt that Meadows is a real film-maker with a growing and evolving career, and with his own natural cinematic language. When I think of his films, I think, for good or ill: this is English cinema.
Son of Rambow (Garth Jennings 2007)
Time Out Review
Son of Rambow (2007)
Director: Garth Jennings
Time Out rating
Average user rating
66 reviews
Movie review
From Time Out London
Garth Jennings’s last film, ‘The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, had visual imagination to burn, but was less sure-footed when it came to plot and character. It’s a pleasure, then, to find that his follow-up shows just as much wit and verve in its production design, while also succeeding as storytelling: ‘Son of Rambow’ is a schoolboy yarn with a bracing emotional honesty
that packs a real kick.
Jennings takes us to the early ’80s Home Counties suburbia of his youth for the story of two mismatched pre-teens. Will (Bill Milner) is the sheltered son of a strict religious family, whose father has died in the Falklands and has never even watched TV; Lee (Will Poulter) is the tougher wide-boy, a latchkey kid who bullies and then befriends Will as they embark on a homemade VHS opus, after seeing a pirate copy of ‘First Blood’.
Meanwhile, a group of French exchange students descend on the school, including one particular guy who constitutes a New Wave all of his own. Will is a keen doodler, and his sketches burst out across the countryside in playful CGI, but there’s also great entertainment in the boys’ lo-tech Heath-Robinson production plans.
Backyard remakes are very much of the moment – think Michel Gondry’s ‘Be Kind Rewind’ – but ‘Son of Rambow’ integrates its slapstick genre pastiche into a thoughtful story about peer pressure, neglect and yearning. Both Milner and Poulter are terrific; their performances, along with a keen eye for the indignities of the playground, help keep things the right side of sentimentality.
Son of Rambow (2007)
Director: Garth Jennings
Time Out rating
Average user rating
66 reviews
Movie review
From Time Out London
Garth Jennings’s last film, ‘The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, had visual imagination to burn, but was less sure-footed when it came to plot and character. It’s a pleasure, then, to find that his follow-up shows just as much wit and verve in its production design, while also succeeding as storytelling: ‘Son of Rambow’ is a schoolboy yarn with a bracing emotional honesty
that packs a real kick.
Jennings takes us to the early ’80s Home Counties suburbia of his youth for the story of two mismatched pre-teens. Will (Bill Milner) is the sheltered son of a strict religious family, whose father has died in the Falklands and has never even watched TV; Lee (Will Poulter) is the tougher wide-boy, a latchkey kid who bullies and then befriends Will as they embark on a homemade VHS opus, after seeing a pirate copy of ‘First Blood’.
Meanwhile, a group of French exchange students descend on the school, including one particular guy who constitutes a New Wave all of his own. Will is a keen doodler, and his sketches burst out across the countryside in playful CGI, but there’s also great entertainment in the boys’ lo-tech Heath-Robinson production plans.
Backyard remakes are very much of the moment – think Michel Gondry’s ‘Be Kind Rewind’ – but ‘Son of Rambow’ integrates its slapstick genre pastiche into a thoughtful story about peer pressure, neglect and yearning. Both Milner and Poulter are terrific; their performances, along with a keen eye for the indignities of the playground, help keep things the right side of sentimentality.
East is East (Damien O'Donnell 1999) Review
East Is East (15)
BY: Total Film Nov 5th 1999 FILED UNDER: Cinema reviews
Growing up is never easy, but when mum's a loud-mouth from Lancashire and dad's a devout Pakistani Muslim, being a kid is even harder than usual. The seven Khan children - - gay rebel Nazir, Tariq-the-lad, art student Saleem, daddy's boy Maneer, timid Abdul, tomboy Meenah and Parka-clad Sajid - - have all lived through the end of the Sixties and most are not heavily into the Koran. So, when Dad decides that Abdul and Tariq must marry two fantastically ugly Pakistani girls from Bradford, the family comes to the verge of collapse.
In less gentle hands, East Is East might have hit crassor preachy notes, but first-time director Damien O'Donnell has an enviable lightness of touch. The choice of an irreverent Irishman to direct a movie about Pakistanis in Manchester was whip-smart: instead of a dissection of a Muslim household in the kitchen-sink mode, what we get is a film with the power to move anyone who has ever been part of a family.
On paper it almost sounds like two different movies: we've East Is East: The Riotous Comedy (cue the "tickle-tackle" knob gags, the prosthetic vagina, the mustachioed Shah sisters, the orange Spacehopper, and the Khan kids spraying air freshener around the kitchen to get rid of the smell of sausages) and East Is East: The Anatomy Of A Marriage, which looks at the love affair between the kids' parents, George and Ella.
In practice, thanks to Khan-Din's spotless script and O'Donnell's skill at stitching it all together, what we see is a multi-layered whole. There's no standing on soap boxes or thumping of tubs: any tolerance message is delivered wittily, by sleight of hand, such as when Meenah kicks a football through a window that sports a big poster of Enoch Powell.
The cast are uniformly excellent, but East Is East is primarily George's story, with Indian actor Om Puri (My Son The Fanatic) delivering an outstanding performance. It's easy to laugh at George, but Khan-Din's script also shows us the world from his point of view. We find ourselves grinning indulgently at the childish joy with which he presents his wife with the dentist's chair he's found for their over-crowded lounge, and we look right into his heart as he tenderly arranges the wedding paraphernalia for his sons. The last directorial choice is a masterstroke: once we've grown to care for George, we're then complicit when he loses his rag and beats his wife.
East Is East mixes broad comedy and more subtle visual gags with beautifully drawn performances and moments of real pain. What makes the film work is the vision with which it was made: somehow all these strands become a piece of cinema that is as comfortable breaking your heart as it is having you watch a Great Dane try to fuck a fat girl in a flowery frock.
Verdict:
A cast-iron crowd-pleaser in the best traditions of the Great British comedy. Don't be put off by the Muslims in Manchester pitch - - East Is East is much more. A bold, hilarious take on family life for anyone who's fallen through the generation gap.
BY: Total Film Nov 5th 1999 FILED UNDER: Cinema reviews
Growing up is never easy, but when mum's a loud-mouth from Lancashire and dad's a devout Pakistani Muslim, being a kid is even harder than usual. The seven Khan children - - gay rebel Nazir, Tariq-the-lad, art student Saleem, daddy's boy Maneer, timid Abdul, tomboy Meenah and Parka-clad Sajid - - have all lived through the end of the Sixties and most are not heavily into the Koran. So, when Dad decides that Abdul and Tariq must marry two fantastically ugly Pakistani girls from Bradford, the family comes to the verge of collapse.
In less gentle hands, East Is East might have hit crassor preachy notes, but first-time director Damien O'Donnell has an enviable lightness of touch. The choice of an irreverent Irishman to direct a movie about Pakistanis in Manchester was whip-smart: instead of a dissection of a Muslim household in the kitchen-sink mode, what we get is a film with the power to move anyone who has ever been part of a family.
On paper it almost sounds like two different movies: we've East Is East: The Riotous Comedy (cue the "tickle-tackle" knob gags, the prosthetic vagina, the mustachioed Shah sisters, the orange Spacehopper, and the Khan kids spraying air freshener around the kitchen to get rid of the smell of sausages) and East Is East: The Anatomy Of A Marriage, which looks at the love affair between the kids' parents, George and Ella.
In practice, thanks to Khan-Din's spotless script and O'Donnell's skill at stitching it all together, what we see is a multi-layered whole. There's no standing on soap boxes or thumping of tubs: any tolerance message is delivered wittily, by sleight of hand, such as when Meenah kicks a football through a window that sports a big poster of Enoch Powell.
The cast are uniformly excellent, but East Is East is primarily George's story, with Indian actor Om Puri (My Son The Fanatic) delivering an outstanding performance. It's easy to laugh at George, but Khan-Din's script also shows us the world from his point of view. We find ourselves grinning indulgently at the childish joy with which he presents his wife with the dentist's chair he's found for their over-crowded lounge, and we look right into his heart as he tenderly arranges the wedding paraphernalia for his sons. The last directorial choice is a masterstroke: once we've grown to care for George, we're then complicit when he loses his rag and beats his wife.
East Is East mixes broad comedy and more subtle visual gags with beautifully drawn performances and moments of real pain. What makes the film work is the vision with which it was made: somehow all these strands become a piece of cinema that is as comfortable breaking your heart as it is having you watch a Great Dane try to fuck a fat girl in a flowery frock.
Verdict:
A cast-iron crowd-pleaser in the best traditions of the Great British comedy. Don't be put off by the Muslims in Manchester pitch - - East Is East is much more. A bold, hilarious take on family life for anyone who's fallen through the generation gap.
Wednesday 10 March 2010
An Education 2009 Trailer and Review
An Education
Nick Hornby skilfully adapts Lynn Barber's book of teenage memories. By Peter Bradshaw
Extremely funny misery-lit … Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard in An Education
A very unsentimental education it was, too. Nick Hornby has adroitly adapted and given a dramatic shape to the bestselling memoir by Lynn Barber, telling the true story of how, in the early 1960s, she was seduced as a 16-year-old schoolgirl by an older man. This sociopathic charmer's seduction crucially extended to her poor old mum and dad, dazzling them into being complicit in the arrangement; along with their daughter, they went into a clenched denial about what was happening.
An Education
Production year: 2009
Country: UK
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 100 mins
Directors: Lone Scherfig
Cast: Alfred Molina, Carey Mulligan, Dominic Cooper, Emma Thompson, Olivia Williams, Peter Sarsgaard, Rosamund Pike
Seen from a certain angle, that could look like misery-lit, a story of sex abuse and class shame, were it not for the fact that it is extremely funny. Hornby's screenplay catches the stranger-than-fiction absurdity nicely, and, although he softens the most excruciating moment from Barber's book, his script gives the audience a clear view of the painful delusions of all concerned. Lone Scherfig directs, and there is a wonderful performance from 24-year-old newcomer Carey Mulligan as Lynn – here renamed Jenny – the heartbreakingly vulnerable pseudo-sophisticate earnestly cramming for her Oxbridge exams, and longing for real experience.
Cara Seymour and Alfred Molina play Jenny's parents, the mother a kindly soul, sensitive to her daughter's unformed yearnings, the dad a grumpy martinet: a great insister on homework and obsesser on the subject of all the money he's forking out on school fees, uniform, etc.
One rainy day, when Jenny is carrying her cello home from an orchestra rehearsal, super-smooth David pulls up in his flashy car and coolly offers her a lift. He is played by American actor Peter Sarsgaard with a slowish, carefully enunciated English voice that by accident or design really does sound very creepy. David captivates her with his casual directness, his exotic Jewishness, his worldly manner. David has a compulsive liar's sixth sense for other people's weaknesses. He picks up on Jenny's need to be taken seriously – and to escape.
On being invited back to meet her parents, David walks into their modest living room to catch Jenny's father Jack making an apparently antisemitic remark. He had been blathering about one of Jenny's old boyfriends being a "wandering Jew", simply because of his gadabout ways. It's an innocent turn of phrase, but with an instinctive strategic brilliance worthy of Stephen Potter's Lifemanship academy, David puts Jack at a disadvantage. Dad will now have to allow him to take his daughter out – or else be thought a bigot. Soon David is turning the charm on her parents, turning them into his simpering, giggling fans, and he introduces Jenny to a thrilling new world of restaurants, nightclubs and naughty weekends in Paris. Shamingly, her dad abandons his strictness and turns a blind eye to everything, hoping this apparently rich man might marry her. But there is a dark side to David: he is a chancer, a fantasist and a seedy underling of slum landlord Peter Rachman. He is also deeply strange in bed, with his baby-talk and weird, fastidious lack of enthusiasm for the act itself. Jenny is on the brink of throwing her future away on a tacky illusion.
Some of the best parts of the film show Jenny's dreamy delight in going out à quatre with David and his glamorous friends Danny and Helen, played by Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike. At last, she is being treated like a grownup! Pike is outstanding as the faintly vacant and glassy-eyed Helen who is nonetheless entirely aware of what Jenny is feeling, and becomes the nearest thing she has to a real friend. When they first meet, Jenny reaches across and wonderingly strokes Helen's fur coat, like a child, before she can stop herself. "Yes, it's lovely isn't it?" smiles Helen – gentle, understanding, knowing not to make Jenny feel small.
The story, as it is played out, is not too far from the kitchen-sink dramas from the 60s era of Billy Liar and A Taste of Honey. Traditionally, it's the working-class girl who gets above herself, gets into trouble and has to get it sorted. But this girl is middle class and pregnancy isn't what happens: what is aborted, or almost aborted, is Jenny's Oxford career. Her horrible and quite genuinely antisemitic headmistress – a great cameo from Emma Thompson – expels her on learning that she is engaged to a Jew. In the book, there is a brilliantly awful and all-too-real moment when her poor old dad has to go cap-in-hand to the headmistress after the affair has collapsed, begging her to let his humiliated daughter return and sit the Oxbridge exams after all. In the film, Jenny stays heroically defiant, and gets private coaching.
So why on earth didn't Jenny question her shabby lover more closely? In the book, Barber semi-seriously claims it was because her teenage self affected a ropey suburban existentialism that forbade such questioning as "bourgeois". Hornby's script suggests that this wasn't exactly it. She was simply conned, hobbled by her English politeness, and ashamed of her English lack of sophistication. She was taken in, as we all could be, by someone brazen enough to believe in his own lies. It's a sad, painful comedy, and the lovely performance from Mulligan makes it a very enjoyable film.
Fish Tank
2009. Directed by Andrea Arnold.
http://www.fishtankmovie.com/
Synopsis:
Fish Tank is the story of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a volatile 15 year old, who is always in trouble and has been excluded from school and ostracised by her friends. One day her mother brings home a mysterious stranger called Connor who promises to change everything and bring love into all their lives.
Trailers:
http://www.fishtankmovie.com/
Synopsis:
Fish Tank is the story of Mia (Katie Jarvis), a volatile 15 year old, who is always in trouble and has been excluded from school and ostracised by her friends. One day her mother brings home a mysterious stranger called Connor who promises to change everything and bring love into all their lives.
Trailers:
Awards:
Best Director for Andrea Arnold and Most Promising Newcomer for Katie Jarvis
British Independent Film Awards – www.bifa.org.uk/winners/2009
Jury Prize Winner – Cannes Film Festival 2009
BAFTA – Outstanding British Film
Best Director for Andrea Arnold and Most Promising Newcomer for Katie Jarvis
British Independent Film Awards – www.bifa.org.uk/winners/2009
Jury Prize Winner – Cannes Film Festival 2009
BAFTA – Outstanding British Film
Reviews:
Andrea Arnold's Palme d'Or contender is a powerful film of betrayed love in a bleak landscape, powered by fizzing performances from Michael Fassbender and newcomer Katie Jarvis.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 14th May 2009
In the claustrophobic flats which incubate family dysfunction and rage, and the wild beautiful spaces thereabouts, where the urban sprawls out into the country, film-maker Andrea Arnold finds a powerful story of betrayed love. One of three British movies in competition at Cannes this year, Fish Tank is a powerfully acted drama, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who intersperses bleak interiors with sudden, gasp-inducing landscapes like something by Turner. Arnold takes elements of tough social-realist drama which are, if not cliches exactly, then certainly familiar — but makes them live again and steers the movie away from miserabilism, driven by a heartfelt central performance.
Mia, played by newcomer Katie Jarvis, is a lary 15-year-old who lives with single mum Joanne, played by Kierston Wareing, her lippy younger sister Tyler — a scene-stealer from Rebecca Griffiths — and their drolly named dog, Tennents. As well as a sincere devotion to cheap supermarket booze, the girls have learned from their mother mannerisms of pre-emptive scorn and rage to cover up perennially hurt feelings. Mia herself is a wannabe dancer, and when she's trying out some moves in the kitchen one morning, her mother's new boyfriend ambles in half-naked, looking to put the kettle on.
This is handsome, charming Connor, outstandingly played by Michael Fassbender, and he looks at Mia with frank appraisal. "You dance like a black," he says, " ... I mean that as a compliment." Poor Mia has never had a compliment or any praise in her life and responds with alternating suspicion and fierce, semi-controlled gratitude, especially when Connor behaves like a real dad, taking everyone out for drives in the country.
Of course there is a sexual atmosphere between Connor and Mia, so tropically humid that the ceiling is almost dripping. Mia pretends to be asleep one night so Connor will carry her to bed, and there is an extremely gamey mock-spanking scene, when Connor pretends to "discipline" her. Mia has no idea how to express or manage huge, unspent reserves of passion: she doesn't know if she wants a lover, or a father — or just someone to love her unconditionally. Connor is perhaps the man for this, but the slippery charmer has secrets.
The performances of Jarvis and Fassbender are outstanding and their chemistry fizzes — and then explodes. It is another highly intelligent, involving film from one of the most powerful voices in British cinema.
Andrea Arnold's Palme d'Or contender is a powerful film of betrayed love in a bleak landscape, powered by fizzing performances from Michael Fassbender and newcomer Katie Jarvis.
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 14th May 2009
In the claustrophobic flats which incubate family dysfunction and rage, and the wild beautiful spaces thereabouts, where the urban sprawls out into the country, film-maker Andrea Arnold finds a powerful story of betrayed love. One of three British movies in competition at Cannes this year, Fish Tank is a powerfully acted drama, beautifully photographed by cinematographer Robbie Ryan, who intersperses bleak interiors with sudden, gasp-inducing landscapes like something by Turner. Arnold takes elements of tough social-realist drama which are, if not cliches exactly, then certainly familiar — but makes them live again and steers the movie away from miserabilism, driven by a heartfelt central performance.
Mia, played by newcomer Katie Jarvis, is a lary 15-year-old who lives with single mum Joanne, played by Kierston Wareing, her lippy younger sister Tyler — a scene-stealer from Rebecca Griffiths — and their drolly named dog, Tennents. As well as a sincere devotion to cheap supermarket booze, the girls have learned from their mother mannerisms of pre-emptive scorn and rage to cover up perennially hurt feelings. Mia herself is a wannabe dancer, and when she's trying out some moves in the kitchen one morning, her mother's new boyfriend ambles in half-naked, looking to put the kettle on.
This is handsome, charming Connor, outstandingly played by Michael Fassbender, and he looks at Mia with frank appraisal. "You dance like a black," he says, " ... I mean that as a compliment." Poor Mia has never had a compliment or any praise in her life and responds with alternating suspicion and fierce, semi-controlled gratitude, especially when Connor behaves like a real dad, taking everyone out for drives in the country.
Of course there is a sexual atmosphere between Connor and Mia, so tropically humid that the ceiling is almost dripping. Mia pretends to be asleep one night so Connor will carry her to bed, and there is an extremely gamey mock-spanking scene, when Connor pretends to "discipline" her. Mia has no idea how to express or manage huge, unspent reserves of passion: she doesn't know if she wants a lover, or a father — or just someone to love her unconditionally. Connor is perhaps the man for this, but the slippery charmer has secrets.
The performances of Jarvis and Fassbender are outstanding and their chemistry fizzes — and then explodes. It is another highly intelligent, involving film from one of the most powerful voices in British cinema.
Tuesday 9 March 2010
Passport to Pimlico 1949 Article
Passport to Pimlico (1949)
Courtesy of Canal Plus Image UK
35mm, black and white, 84 mins
Director Henry Cornelius
Producer Michael Balcon
Production Company Ealing Studios
Screenplay T.E.B. Clarke
Photography Lionel Banes
Music Georges Auric
Cast: Stanley Holloway (Arthur Pemberton); Betty Warren (Connie Pemberton); Paul Dupuis (Duke Of Burgundy); Barbara Murray (Shirley Pemberton); John Slater (Frank Huggins)
Show full cast and credits
The inhabitants of a London street discover buried treasure and documents proving they are really citizens of Burgundy. When the government tries to claim the treasure for the Crown, the Burgundians declare their independence.
Show full synopsis
By general consent the best of writer T.E.B. Clarke's six Ealing comedies, Passport to Pimlico (d. Henry Cornelius, 1949) arguably best exemplifies studio head Michael Balcon's description of Ealing's postwar films as "our mild revolution".
But as with most of the studio's output, the accent is on the 'mild', while the 'revolutionary' element is little more than play. Like Clarke's The Lavender Hill Mob (d. Charles Crichton, 1951), which imagines a mild-mannered bank clerk turned master criminal (in the nicest possible way), Passport's story allows its contemporary audience to play out a fantasy of escape - from the unending burden of rationing and postwar 'austerity', from government, from Britain - before delivering them safely back to the status quo. The events of the story are more like a holiday - as suggested by the very un-British heatwave, which comes to an immediate end once the Burgundians rejoin Britain.
The film has been described by some as 'anarchic'. But after the initial starry-eyed celebration of new-found freedoms - which amounts to one long, boozy, after hours knees-up - has passed, the Burgundians quickly install a makeshift government, restore the monarchy (in the form of the returning 'Duke of Burgundy') and implement a programme of civic building (a public lido).
Running through the film is a yearning nostalgia for the social unity of the war years, remembered fondly as Britain's 'finest hour'. This is most explicit in two sequences late in the film: the first a newsreel praising the fortitude of "plucky little Burgundy" in the face of adversity - exactly the terms in which Britain saw itself in the early part of the war - and the second an extended montage in which the people of London come to the aid of the stricken Burgundians, throwing parcels of food from passing cars and trains - directly evoking the celebrated 'Dunkirk spirit'.
This exploration of the British (or specifically English) character is at the heart of Passport to Pimlico. For all their dogged resistance, the Burgundians never lose sight of their true national identity, as the film's most memorable line wittily makes clear: "We always were English and we always will be English, and it's just because we are English that we're sticking up for our right to be Burgundian!"
Director Henry Cornelius made no further films at Ealing, though he later directed the very Ealing-ish Genevieve (1953) for Rank.
Mark Duguid
Courtesy of Canal Plus Image UK
35mm, black and white, 84 mins
Director Henry Cornelius
Producer Michael Balcon
Production Company Ealing Studios
Screenplay T.E.B. Clarke
Photography Lionel Banes
Music Georges Auric
Cast: Stanley Holloway (Arthur Pemberton); Betty Warren (Connie Pemberton); Paul Dupuis (Duke Of Burgundy); Barbara Murray (Shirley Pemberton); John Slater (Frank Huggins)
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The inhabitants of a London street discover buried treasure and documents proving they are really citizens of Burgundy. When the government tries to claim the treasure for the Crown, the Burgundians declare their independence.
Show full synopsis
By general consent the best of writer T.E.B. Clarke's six Ealing comedies, Passport to Pimlico (d. Henry Cornelius, 1949) arguably best exemplifies studio head Michael Balcon's description of Ealing's postwar films as "our mild revolution".
But as with most of the studio's output, the accent is on the 'mild', while the 'revolutionary' element is little more than play. Like Clarke's The Lavender Hill Mob (d. Charles Crichton, 1951), which imagines a mild-mannered bank clerk turned master criminal (in the nicest possible way), Passport's story allows its contemporary audience to play out a fantasy of escape - from the unending burden of rationing and postwar 'austerity', from government, from Britain - before delivering them safely back to the status quo. The events of the story are more like a holiday - as suggested by the very un-British heatwave, which comes to an immediate end once the Burgundians rejoin Britain.
The film has been described by some as 'anarchic'. But after the initial starry-eyed celebration of new-found freedoms - which amounts to one long, boozy, after hours knees-up - has passed, the Burgundians quickly install a makeshift government, restore the monarchy (in the form of the returning 'Duke of Burgundy') and implement a programme of civic building (a public lido).
Running through the film is a yearning nostalgia for the social unity of the war years, remembered fondly as Britain's 'finest hour'. This is most explicit in two sequences late in the film: the first a newsreel praising the fortitude of "plucky little Burgundy" in the face of adversity - exactly the terms in which Britain saw itself in the early part of the war - and the second an extended montage in which the people of London come to the aid of the stricken Burgundians, throwing parcels of food from passing cars and trains - directly evoking the celebrated 'Dunkirk spirit'.
This exploration of the British (or specifically English) character is at the heart of Passport to Pimlico. For all their dogged resistance, the Burgundians never lose sight of their true national identity, as the film's most memorable line wittily makes clear: "We always were English and we always will be English, and it's just because we are English that we're sticking up for our right to be Burgundian!"
Director Henry Cornelius made no further films at Ealing, though he later directed the very Ealing-ish Genevieve (1953) for Rank.
Mark Duguid
Passport to Pimlico 1949
Passport to Pimlico
1949 (Henry Cornelius)
Production companies:
J Arthur Rank Organisation and Ealing Studios.
Summary.
The inhabitants of the London borough of Pimlico are feeling in need of a break from the restrictions of post war rationing. A left-over bomb then explodes in Miramont Place and reveals not only valuable artifacts, but a document that identifies the area as under the control of the Duchy of Burgundy and not England.
The newly formed sub-state of Burgundy, now controlled by the Burgundians (once the Pimlico residents) has autonomy and has rejected rationing and other restrictions. Free trade also begins in the new state.
This new idyll doesn’t last long, however, and not only do black market traders move in, but the Burgundians have their water supply cut. This attempt to draw the Burgundians out is over-come, but unfortunately their plan to get water ends in a cellar full of food being flooded. Sympathetic Londoners then throw food to the Burgundians, but even this is not enough to make them eventually sign a treaty with England.
Issues and Debates.
Themes of resistance and conformity.
Post-war Britain.
Representations of Britain/ Britishness.
Themes of division and community.
1949 (Henry Cornelius)
Production companies:
J Arthur Rank Organisation and Ealing Studios.
Summary.
The inhabitants of the London borough of Pimlico are feeling in need of a break from the restrictions of post war rationing. A left-over bomb then explodes in Miramont Place and reveals not only valuable artifacts, but a document that identifies the area as under the control of the Duchy of Burgundy and not England.
The newly formed sub-state of Burgundy, now controlled by the Burgundians (once the Pimlico residents) has autonomy and has rejected rationing and other restrictions. Free trade also begins in the new state.
This new idyll doesn’t last long, however, and not only do black market traders move in, but the Burgundians have their water supply cut. This attempt to draw the Burgundians out is over-come, but unfortunately their plan to get water ends in a cellar full of food being flooded. Sympathetic Londoners then throw food to the Burgundians, but even this is not enough to make them eventually sign a treaty with England.
Issues and Debates.
Themes of resistance and conformity.
Post-war Britain.
Representations of Britain/ Britishness.
Themes of division and community.