Times and Winds

I loved this film, and after immersing myself in Turkey while reading Snow, I found it fascinating on many levels, but it's the sense of ferment, of tension between a deeply traditional society and the forces of modernisation, which co-exist and sometimes collide with each other.
It's a hard film to describe - it's basically a portrait of the lives of a group of teenagers in an isolated, rural part of Turkey.In spite of the way of life that governs them, something that's been embedded for centuries, there's television, telephones and education. The female schoolteacher doesn't wear a headscarf, unlike the mothers of the children she teaches. She's a force for modernity, as is the television which is always present in the children's often harsh and sppartan home surroundings. One of the boys she teaches has a crush on her, and it's clear she must seem like a goddess to her pupils, whose mothers and sisters labour under the yoke of tradition.
There are scenes of great beauty in this film, helped by Arvo Part's music. I know it isn't to everyone's taste, and it was pretty pervasive, and loud, but it gave the film a seriousness and grandeur which it deserved. A small masterpiece.

The Duchess

I went to see this with my daughter - we knew that no-one else in our male-orientated family would want to see it, but we both enjoy costume dramas, and we enjoyed it very much. It's funny how they've acquired such a bad reputation, but those who like them love them.
It had received some bad reviews in the usual predictable quarters - Peter Bradshaw, I mean you, though he wasn't the only one, practically every reviewer sneered at it. But my hero, Mark Kermode on FiveLive, came to the rescue. He's usually highly critical of costume films, and has savaged Keira Knightley (who played the eponymous duchess) in the past, but he approved of the film, so that in itself intrigued me.

I knew a bit about Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire as I'd read the biography by Amanda Foreman on which the film was based. It's an excellent book, and the Gainsborough portrait of her on the cover shows a character who looks as if she has a wicked sense of humour - she's not conventionally pretty, but she's intelligent-looking and feisty and it's easy to see how Foreman, as she confesses in her introduction, fell in love with her subject. It's very much a scholarly work, with footnotes and an index, but it's compulsive reading.

Georgiana's story is amazing, even by 18-century standards. Her arranged marriage at the age of 17, to the stratospherically wealthy, but emotionally cold and distant Duke of Devonshire gave her the chance to shine in society and she grabbed that opportunity with both hands, becoming a leading light in the ton as it was called. Her downfall came when she committed the crime of producing daughters, which distanced her even further from the Duke, and even though she eventually produced a son, by then she'd had a passionate affair with the man who eventually became Lord Grey (famous for introducing the famous Great Reform Act in 1832 - an event and date engraved on my memory from school history lessons).

You couldn't invent her life; and the film doesn't give us the half of it. That's its main failing, I think, as it gives us a too-happy ending. Nevertheless, it gives us a convincing picture of the period and I have to say that Knightley gives a sterling performance. I have a feeling she's going to become a Helen Mirren-like national acting treasure - her choice of roles is increasingly interesting, though she needs to stop making those hideous Pirates of the Caribbean films. I look forward to following her career.

The Orphanage

I'd meant to see this at the cinema when it was released but it didn't happen, so as soon as it came out on DVD I put it at the top of my rental list. I had to wait a while before it came, and it was pretty near the top of the DVD charts for quite a while, so it was obviously extremely popular. Anyway it finally arrived, so I had a real sense of anticipation.
Was it worth it? I watched it twice, as I was pretty sleepy the first time and knew that I may have missed the odd little chunk or two. Also I wanted to see it again to make sure that my feelings of flatness after seeing it were justified.
It's beautifully filmed, but where have I seen that look? It's the greyish-blue tinge to everything, and the creepy, country-house setting, very different from the National Trust look of many British films. We first saw it in The Others a few years ago, a ghost story set in the Channel Islands during the 1940s and it set the template. I thought it was excellent - scary children, weird, ghostly sets, and Nicole Kidman, brittle, fragile and heartbreaking, producing one of her best performances and Alejandro Amenabar proved himself an extremely accomplished director. Certainly Spanish cinema has produced some extraordinarily original films in recent years, and The Others, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labrynth have been prime examples.
The Orphanage is in this vein but, unlike those films it didn't convince. I'm happy to completely suspend disbelief when watching films, but the film has to make you do it, and this one didn't.
It obviously succeeded with many, and the reviews were adulatory, so maybe it's just me.
The Orphanage's narrative doesn't compel. It lacked narrative drive and structure and, although it was well acted and beautifully filmed, it was all over the place. The basic story, that of the childless couple attempting to set up a home for children with severe disabilities in the country house in which the wife, herself an orphan, had been brought up. The house had been an old-fashioned orphanage and the couple had now bought it. Their adopted son begins to collect imaginary friends, who turn out to be the ghosts of his mother's playmates, who were murdered....and so it went on. I've forgotten who the murderer was.
An implausible scenario, which doesn't disqualify it by any means; after all, the same might be said for many of the greatest films. But I didn't believe a word of it and the ending was ludicrous and had a tacked-on feel. It's one of those films where I have a blind spot - it doesn't happen too often, but occasionally I find myself out of step. Oh well......

David Miliband (5)

It's been a while since I've written about Miliband, and he was initially pretty quiet after he became Foreign Secretary, but he's been in the news quite a bit recently, especially since the Russia/Georgia stand-off started.

David Hearst in the Guardian today was damning, deriding him as 'blissfully unaware' of the history between the two countries, and accusing him of 'stepping blindly and foolishly into a minefield' and 'making vacuous commitments to a country he knows nothing about, and which he is in no position to honour'.
The blogger AppallingStrangeness is brutal, asking 'Does anyone else feel slightly embarrassed when they read about David Miliband prancing about on the international stage?' And goes on to describe him as having the 'general charisma of a snail crushed underfoot'. One of the most important jobs in government has been given to someone 'the political equivalent of Adrian Mole'.
Certainly he's seemed clearly out of his depth, and of course it's the first time he's been tested in a significant international situation of geopolitical importance. He's persistently labelled a 'Blairite' and therefore someone with leadership ambitions and he was suspected of mounting a leadership challenge recently after an article he wrote for the Guardian which didn't even mention Brown. With the undoubted forthcoming demise of the Government in the next couple of years it's difficult to see where he goes next - down with the sinking ship, I suspect. Whatever happens, he's dead meat, though young enough to rise from the ashes in the distant future, though in what form - who can say?

Man on Wire

I went to see this at the cinema the other day - I'd read the fantastic reviews and decided it must be seen. And the reviews were right, it was worth it.
Philippe Petit walked across a tightrope strung between the World Trade Centre's twin towers in 1974, and the film sketches the background, with interviews with Petit and the people who helped him. That's it, basically, but the film is so much more than that brief precis. The ultimate fate of the twin towers is never mentioned - it didn't need to be, but it's there in the background, all the time, especially as there is quite a bit of footage in the film of their construction.
The film gives a fascinating glimpse into life in 1974 - 34 years ago, a lifetime. No-one filmed Petit's feat; people didn't do that kind of thing then, the cameras would have been too difficult to conceal anyway. Now someone would pluck a mobile out of their pocket and capture the whole thing - if they could get up there in the first place, sceurity, although pretty tight then, would surely be impenetrable nowadays.
Petit is an engaging character, and it was easy to see how he managed to bring others on board to help him, but it was startling to see the contrast between his recollections and those of his friends. He told the story as a knd of personal challenge, but they remembered their terror of being discovered, the tension surrounding the whole affair. petit became a huge celebrity at the end, but the others disappeared into obscurity. Such is the nature of fame, I guess.
There was film footage of petit practising in what looked like a back garden, and of his other escapades, including his tightrope walk between the towers of Notre Dame in Paris. Yes, he's clearly a publicity seeker, but a very brave man. Self-obsessed, yes, but we still need people like that. The same applies to all those great Olympians, such as Steve Redgrave. You can ask 'what is the point?', as some journalists have written in the wake of the fantastic British success at the Beijing Olympics this month, but such killjoys deserve oblivion.
People like Petit add to the sum of human greatness, so thanks, Philippe.

Charlton Heston

I recorded El Cid recently on video - it's a popular film for filling the Saturday afternoon schedules, and I noticed that it's on yet again next week. So I whiled away a wet Sunday afternoon last week by watching it.
I really don't know why I love Charlton Heston, his right-wing views in recent years were a bit scary, but that doesn't make you a bad actor; he died this year from Alzhiemer's, but he was 88, so had a good innings, as they say. And in spite of becoming a leading light in the NRA he was a very early public advocate of civil rights, long before it became fashionable. So, a fascinatingly contradictory character.
Maybe it's because Ben Hur was the first wide-screen spectacular I'd ever seen. I was at an impressionable age, about 10 or 11, and it had an enormous impact on me. It was in the days when cinemas had only one screen, and it was huge. Ben Hur was in Todd AO as well, so it really was a massive experience for me.
CH was sold into slavery, endured the galleys, was rescued by the Romans, and became a hero in the arenas of Imperial Rome; he then escaped, bumped into Jesus who healed his sister and mother from leprosy, and found his long-lost love after his years away - what a story! I can't think of any, any actor, past or present, who could have carried it off. But especially now - Tom Cruise? Harrison Ford? I don't think so.
There's something about his expression - it's the stricken integrity in his eyes - you just know that he's always going to do the right thing, and in El Cid he has this quality in spades. Again, he endures all manner of hardships and humiliations, but prevails. The final scene has passed into cinema iconography, he's dead, but leads his men to victory while strapped to his horse on a Spanish beach. Tremendous even by Heston's standards!
He went on to be Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy, and John the Baptist in The Greatest Story Ever Told, then he took a different tack and made Will Penny, one of the very first 'revisionist' westerns.
He went on to make some fascinating films - science-fiction such as Soylent Green and The Omega Man, both excellent, and then his piece de resistance, Planet of the Apes. What a career!

Summer Hours

This was a lovely little film. It was definitely something that probably only someone over a certain age would really appreciate, and the cinema was pretty full of middle-aged people, and myself and the friend who accompanied me fitted in well. But then you would only really 'get' it if you'd had to deal with ageing parents, the dissolution of families as everyone carves out their individual lives, and the fractured nature of modern adult life.
It's one of those closely-observed portraits of modern bourgeois life that the French do so well - British versions, for example, Mike Leigh films, always seem to be satirical, laughing at middle-class pretensions. The French don't seem to be as hung up on class as us, and use such films to examine human nature and behaviour.
Anyway, Summer Hours was a treat. It's Helene's 70th birthday, and her 3 grown-up children and their families gather together in her country house, the family home. Helene is devoted, even obsessed with the memory of her uncle, a celebrated painter, and his works. She's a gracious lady who holds court in her extremely comfortable and well-appointed residence, though we become aware pretty quickly that there is a deep-rooted tension between each family member.
Helene dies - and the remainder of the film chronicles the adult children's wranglings over what to do with the house. The eldest wants to keep the property and Helene's art collection as something with which to hold the family together, but it's clear that his younger siblings aren't interested. One is off to China with his family to work, and the other is going to live in New York. The family is falling apart, but at the end the next generation gather at the house with their friends. Olivier Asseyas, the director, isn't interested in portraying nostalgia, though, and everyone's choices are seen as valid. He sees that times change, so do people and families. Those of us with grown-up children know all too well that families fracture, however close they seem. Differences are real, and often irreconcilable. We do our best, but everyone has their own very individual path.
I watched the latest instalment in the genealogy series on BBC last night, Who Do You Think You Are? It's an object lesson in the fissuring of families - sometimes events intercede, such as war and revolution, and there's nothing we can do about it.
Anyway, a film that has stayed with me. The final scenes, in which the children of the siblings and their friends hold an impromptu party at Helene's house, is filled with optimism. They run wild and care nothing for her art collection, but they are the future, like it or not.