Books on Film: Don't Look Now

Sutherland and Christie

Don’t Look Now by Nicholas Roeg (U.K./Italy, 1973) 110 minutes
Don’t Look Now by Daphne Du Maurier (Gollancz, 1971; republished Don't Look Now: Selected Stories of Daphne Du Maurier, NYRB, 2008)

The May selection for TIFF's Books on Film is Don't Look Now, a Nicholas Roeg classic I have long overlooked and wanted very much to see. 

In the film, two traumatized parents try to overcome grief over the death of their only daughter Christine who drowned in a pond on their property in England. The original premise is based on a short story by Daphne Du Maurier, a master of the Gothic and unspecified, unnameable horrors especially those found within a marriage. One may read an excellent review of the film posted by the Criterion Collection here. 

John Baxter (Donald Sutherland) is an exacting professional refurbishing a church in Venice, Italy. Laura Baxter (the always exquisite Julie Christie) is his young wife who is trying to establish some emotional equilibrium after the child’s death. In the story, the couple have left England and travelled to Venice to console themselves after the child's death. John hopes that "life will become as it was before, the wound will heal, she will forget."

Laura becomes involved with two elderly British sisters visiting Venice that they meet in a restaurant – Wendy and Heather. Heather, who is blind, is said to have psychic powers and can communicate with the dead. Laura is desperate to hear any information about her child. John feels that Laura, though not religious, is in a "state of susceptibility" to the suggestion of the supernatural. The motives of the siblings are unclear and are suspect to John – are they helpful, maternal souls administering to Laura's sorrow or are they more sinister in their intentions? John, the blind sister tells Laura, is also psychic. We surmise as much when at the beginning of the film, John rushes to the pond seconds after the little girl’s death with a premonition that something has gone very wrong.

The sisters have an ominous message for the couple – Heather prophesies that John is in danger – and Laura insists that they leave Venice. The parents receive a message that their son Johnny has had a medical emergency while at boarding school in England and Laura leaves to join their son. In the story, this red herring suggests that this is the danger that the family is facing.

The extraordinarily beautiful Venice looks washed out and dirty here – not the Venice of romantic cinema, dreams and travel brochures. This is epitomized by, among other things, a broken, undressed doll lining a canal steps, the rats in the canal, the smudged, grimy looking buildings that are always shuttered from natural light. The canals are largely deserted and melancholy, reflecting the couple's ennui and sense of displacement. Roeg captures Du Maurier's Venice perfectly as exemplified by John's growing unease:

This is the true life. Empty streets by night, the dank stillness of a stagnant canal beneath shuttered houses. The rest is a bright facade put on for show, glittering by sunlight. 

Later John thinks disconsolately, "The experts are right ... Venice is sinking. The whole city is slowly dying." 

The couple also face a panoply of somewhat unwelcoming Venetians who offer their assistance grudgingly: the police officers skeptical of John's claims; the sour faced, black clad crone in the washroom who is present when Heather tells Laura she has seen Christine in her visions; the Bishop whose visage seems to say that he knows more than he lets on – the aspect of the Venetians is even  more dangerous seeming in the film. 

The Bishop has commissioned work on the Church of St. Nicholas, the patron saint of children we are told. The Bishop presents a slightly disturbing, odd presence in the couple’s lives. In a harrowing, if somewhat prolonged scene, John has an accident on a scaffold within the church while examining a mosaic that needs to be repaired and nearly falls to his death (a dangerous stunt that Sutherland performed himself). We begin to sense that someone, or something, is in malignant pursuit of John.

After John survives the near fall he encounters the police fishing the corpse of a young woman out from the canal, by her heels, face unseen, resurrecting terrifying memories of his own daughter’s drowning. That scene, not included in the original story, lends a gruesome aspect to John's foreboding. There is a murderer on the loose we are told. John reflectively pauses before an Italian film poster of a Charlie Chaplin film entitled “Uno Contro Tutti” ("One Against All"). Signs affixed to construction sites proclaim "Venice in Peril". One feels the weight of the sinister forces that seem to oppose the couple. 

Roeg's shots of a cat behind a barred window in an apartment or a flock of dispersing birds seem disturbing, off putting. That which is commonly seen as exquisitely ancient or charming in Venice seems ruined, harbouring some archaic, unseen evil in Roeg's hands. The sisters in particular give John "an impending sense of doom, of tragedy". 

After Laura leaves for England, John sees (or imagines that he sees) Laura, dressed in black, riding on a vaporetto on the canal with the two sisters. She does not respond to his frantic calls. We feel that his mind is disintegrating. He searches for the pensione of the sisters and then reports that Laura is "missing" to the authorities even though he saw her leave for England. He tells the police that he knows that there is a murderer on the loose in Venice and possibly Laura is being held captive by the sisters. 

John is excitable and fearful as he searches for Laura and, seemingly, with good reason. He is being followed by a stranger in the calle; the police official he reports Laura's disappearance to is oddly nonchalant treating John's report in an offhand manner, carelessly doodling on a drawing of the two sisters as if they are of no import. Most importantly, John has many fleeting images of Christine's red coat in the alleyways of Venice which elude him.

The sisters are arrested, suspected of having done away with Laura but John soon learns that he is mistaken in his fears and secures their release. He continues to be pursued by visions (or apparitions) of Christine on the streets of Venice. There is a disquieting sense of doom as one wonders what is real and what is not. Laura returns from England and searches for John at the sisters' urgent behest (a scene also not depicted in the story).

Laura pursues John and John pursues "Christine", running through the streets of Venice at night, which makes no sense in the same way that a nightmare lacks reason or coherence. If you have walked the labyrinth of the Venetian streets you realize how confusing and horrifying that might be to a fevered mind especially at night.

John chases the the red hooded figure realizing that an unknown man is doing so as well. He surges forward to protect the small figure whom he feels is in jeopardy. In the end, John does possess the powers of prophesy as Heather predicted but he learns that too late to change the course of his destiny. 

Roeg's directing style has been described as "disjunctive". Perhaps. This editing style is now de rigueur in modern cinema but would have been somewhat revolutionary at the time of its release in 1973. Roeg is relying on the intelligence of the film goer to piece the narrative together coherently. It seems a particularly apt style of movie making when two of the main characters see both flashes of the future and are tortured by memories of the past. 

The film is only slightly marred by lingering shots of certain scenes which may have appeared intriguing in 1973 – an extended, superfluous lovemaking scene between the couple early in the film reflecting no doubt the new liberties of the cinematic era (in the story their lovemaking is summed up by one sentence) and the scene of John hanging precariously, and endlessly, from the scaffolding in the church he is refurbishing. Based on Sutherland's courage in attempting the stunt, one understands Roeg's desire to maintain the drama of the scene. Neither of these scenes appear in the short story which is tighter and more suspenseful.

These scenes, as well as Sutherland's exaggerated acting style, test the patience of the modern cinema goer somewhat. However, I cannot say I was not spooked by the film. I was indeed. 

Daphne Du Maurier

Towards the Green Light

The exquisite Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan

The Great Gatsby (Australia/U.S., 2013) directed by Baz Luhrmann, 143 minutes 
The Great Gatsby by F.Scott Fitzgerald (Originally published 1922)

The Great Gatsby has proven a formidable book to try and represent on film … and woe to those who have tried and failed as the critics' knives will be out forthwith. Announcements that Baz Luhrmann, considered a cinematic showman and, some might say, an impresario of excess, was to tackle the book met with both frenzied excitement and derision. If you loved Luhrmann's William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1996) and Moulin Rouge! (2001) you were optimistic and giddy in anticipation. If you hated those films (and Luhrmann haters are legion) you were dismayed at the idea of Luhrmann tackling one of the best loved American classics of all times.

I had a chance to see the film last weekend with three friends. We possessed varying levels of enthusiasm about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby - from wildly impassioned devotee (me) to largely indifferent long ago readers of the book. I re-read the book every summer and plan to do so again this summer while in NYC.

As I watched the credits roll I had mixed feelings … I felt that certain characters had been miscast.

Leonardo DiCaprio (Jay Gatsby), a talented and versatile actor, is, unfortunately, too old for the part. DiCaprio, now in his late 30s, is meant to represent a young man newly released from the army a mere four years before in 1918 (although there were mature soldiers in the war, Gatsby was not one of those). DiCaprio is too intense, too arrogant, too jaunty a persona, for the role. The accent DiCaprio uses is a mystery to me ... I'm not sure if it works as a obvious false construction of what he (Gatsby) believes is what an upper crust person would sound like or it is merely just wrong for the role.

Gatsby, despite his great wealth, is extremely vulnerable and insecure. The sudden amassing of his great wealth through illicit means demonstrates how desperately he wants to prove his worth to Daisy. And extremely naive. Money, that great American idol and symbol of success, is not enough to capture this golden girl. As Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband, so brutally points out, Gatsby lacks the unattainable prestige of inherited wealth and status ("We were born different. It's in our blood"), symbolized, for Gatsby, by the green light at the end of the Buchanans' dock on which he is fixated as he languishes in his Long Island mansion.

Oheka Castle ... said to be an inspiration for Gatsby's mansion

Carey Mulligan, lovely and vulnerable as the southern belle Daisy, sometimes has an accent as fleeting and ephemeral as the beautiful vintage dresses she wears in the film. And there is very little chemistry between the two main characters. But Mulligan does display the precise amount of vulnerability and self-absorption that the character warrants.

Tobey Maguire (Nick Carraway) has that dumbstruck look that he carries from film to film and that doesn’t quite work here. However, the Australian actor Joel Edgerton as Tom Buchanan, Daisy’s husband the philandering polo player, is spot on – cruel, ignorant, almost feral, and totally terrifying especially in the final confrontation at the Plaza Hotel where the men almost come to blows over Daisy. Isla Fisher as Myrtle Wilson, Tom’s mistress, is a little too crude, a little too obvious – yes, she’s meant to be a “cheap floozie” but Myrtle has legitimate reasons for feeling trapped, feeling cheated by her life in the flat above the garage and her slovenly husband George Wilson (impressively, if briefly, portrayed by Jason Clarke); however, the script gives no sense of that disappointment. For this I blame the costume/ production designer Catherine Martin and the director.

Certainly the CGI enhanced scenes - of Gatsby’s home on the fictional West Egg, the Buchanans’ lavish estate in East Egg (inspired by the old money locale of Manhasset Neck on Long Island), the orgiastic parties at Gatsby’s mansion, aerial views of the island of Manhattan - are vivid, often beautiful, but sometimes the effects and scenes are overwrought, overwhelming, and clearly unconvincing. 

When Myrtle is struck by Gatsby's car (with Daisy driving) her body flies up into the air surrounded by shattered glass spurting like tiny stars and skims the heights of Dr. Eckleburg's spectacles on the fabled giant, omnipresent billboard - not once, but twice, in the film. 

I felt at times as if Luhrmann did not trust the source material and that he felt he had to heighten the comedy or drama of certain scenes ... no need to make the attendees at the little impromptu party at Myrtle and Tom's hideaway on 158th Street more ridiculous, or sad, than they already are. The characters are sad and seedy but the designer clothes them in ridiculously bright colours and strange clothing with clown like makeup for the women (Myrtle, her sister Catherine and a neighbour named Mrs. McKee) and absurd little physical quirks for the lone man (Mr. McKee, an aspiring, foppish photographer). Or take the organist Klipspringer's character, who is depicted as a sort of mad, bizarre looking musical genius rather than an intriguing secondary character who haunts Gatsby's mansion and parties. 

The filmed scenes of the parties are riotous and frenzied ... was every party goer compelled to behave like a frat boy at his first party with alcohol? The action is too frenetic, too forced. Every inch of the screen is crammed with undulating, squirming partyers. Again, Luhrmann doesn't trust us to understand the excesses of the age as depicted by Fitzgerald on the page.

Of course, despite the predominance of black musicians and singers on the soundtrack black Americans play virtually no role in the book except as a source of bemusement or suspicion (when Nick passes a trio of haughty blacks in an expensive car he is condescendingly amused at their supposed sense of superiority) or in Tom Buchanan’s tirade to Nick, Daisy and Jordan Baker, Nick's erstwhile love interest, about having to beat back the coloured hordes or face the demise of white civilization. 

But in the film, as if to atone for this deficit and Luhrmann's heavy reliance on the talent of black artists on the excellent soundtrack, the black characters are essentially very pretty, shiny ornaments in the background - the entertainers and dancers at Gatsby’s parties and at a speakeasy that Gatsby takes Nick to with the gangster Meyer Wolfsheim – dressed in sumptuous, revealing costumes or as smartly dressed but indistinctly defined musicians who dutifully entertain the masses of white revelers. This is accentuated by their perfect, flawless skin and fully toned bodies.

The most annoying new element in the script is Nick's commitment to a sanatorium after Gatsby's death (this is how the film starts). This permits the filmmaker to tell Gatsby's life story as Nick writes it down for his doctor. This is a vast deviation from Carraway's character - he is not a broken man but an immensely disillusioned one, who has seen too much and been sickened by what he has seen in the destruction of Gatsby's life. One advantage of this technique is it allows the filmmaker to print Fitzgerald's words on the screen as Carraway writes them ... this highlights the more beautiful passages of the book.

I missed the exclusion of small sections from the book that were omitted - Meyer Wolfsheim's pathetic refusal to come to Gatsby's funeral, Gatsby's barely literate father Mr. Gatz coming for his remains and revealing some sad memories of the young Gatsby's aspirations, and, Nick's confrontation with an unrepentant Tom Buchanan on the streets of NYC long after Gatsby is dead. And Luhrmann doesn't even dare touch on the blatant anti-Semitism in the book regarding the Wolfsheim character (loosely based on the notorious gangster Arnold Rothstein). 

One thing that did remain with me was the music – a melange of hip hop and rap (Jay-Z, Kanye West), romantic moody melodies (Lana Del Rey, Beyonce, Sia, Gotye), and re-orchestrated classics (Brian Ferry). But they strike exactly the right mood despite the anachronistic nature of the 21stc. musical choices made by Luhrmann. You may listen to the soundtrack here ...

But I have to say, the film and its images have stayed with me ... it might be worth another look.  

Two of the best things in the film: Jason Clarke and Joel Edgerton

A Tale of the Maids

Emma Stone (Skeeter Phelan), aspiring 
journalist/chronicler of the maids' stories

The Help (U.S., 2011) directed by Tate Taylor, ‎2 hr. 17 min.‎

I don't think you could have found a more reluctant moviegoer than myself when my husband suggested seeing this film with our daughter. My reaction was a mixture of distaste and uneasiness. Yet another pious tome about a doe-eyed innocent white person transformed by the wisdom/piety of an oppressed black character (i.e. a "Magical Negro")? No thank you. I was immediately ready to write the film off.

Likely this opinion was hastened by Lynn Crosbie's acerbic August 6th review of the ubiquitous book in the Globe and Mail. Crosbie, an astute, if sharp-tongued, observer of popular culture had witheringly deplored the 2009 book written by Kathryn Stockett which formed the basis of this film. At the risk of comparing apples to oranges - Crosbie examines the book while I am looking at the film - I want to explore some of the issues that Crosbie raises which I think are pertinent in a discussion of the appropriation of voice.

Here is Crosbie's assessment of whether Stockett was even capable of telling this story:
"Stockett, a white Mississippi native, seems, incredibly, unaware of her competition – her novel is not only devoid of any deep insight into black women’s lives, it exists in a cultural vacuum, seemingly oblivious to the impact of black artists and activists of the era she writes about."

Why assume that Stockett is oblivious to the impact of black artists and activists of that era - because she does not explicitly reference them? That's a huge leap of logic.

Crosbie also states that Stockett's dialogue for the black characters in the book "while not racist" demonstrates "stylistic ineptitude". I am unsure if this is true based on the meager sample she provides to us, the readers, in her article. Does Stockett fail miserably or is it that she has no right to try because she is white and Southern?

If you were to postulate that the white writer has no right to make a creative attempt to speak in a black dialect then what are we to make of those who have transgressed the rigid boundaries of gender and racial identity and succeeded brilliantly? Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, William Faulkner's depictions of former slaves, Henry James' character Isabel Archer in A Portrait of the Lady, the many characters of Mark Twain's novels, not to mention the many female writers who wrote under the pseudonyms assuming male personas in their writing?

True, significant black pioneers are but briefly mentioned in the film and the book (Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers - both assassinated with Evers murdered in Stockett's home town Jackson, Mississippi where the novel is set); however, this is not their story. It is a fruitless argument to suggest to a writer that the story they have written should have been about this rather than that.

The Maids: Octavia Spencer (Minnie) and Viola Davis (Abilene)

Crosbie makes much of the need for an "authentic" voice - does she mean believable to her? The black female characters demonstrate a convincing terror in the film version. So much may be construed by the look on Abilene Clark's (Viola Davis) face upon hearing that a black man has been shot. They are harshly told by a bus driver that they must vacate the bus and walk home (it is indeed the civil rights activist Medgar Evers who has been shot). Abilene simulates calm as she walks with her black male companion, urging him to go home likely because she fears for him as well. Once they part - they both run like frightened rabbits. It's a terrifying scene.

Or even the simply acted scene where Abilene initially demurs giving Skeeter (Emma Stone) an interview about her work as a nanny and maid for white families. She knows only too well that white people don't truly want to to hear the truth about the black maids' employment.The polite wariness on her face speaks volumes.

And the most affecting scene for me was not that saccharine interaction between Abilene and her small charge, the daughter of her employer Elizabeth, whom she is forced to give up, and which is very consciously trying to pull at our heart strings, but the scene where the maids gather in Abilene's living room (all 31 of them) after steadfastly refusing to cooperate with Skeeter but then embracing the opportunity to speak after a final indignity against one of their own. I found a number of things manipulative in the film but this scene struck at the core of the issue for me.

I was so affected by this that I burst into tears and a kindly woman beside me handed me a much need wad of tissues. The courage an act of this type must have necessitated ... it knocked me out. My resistance to the film completely crumbled away.

When we see the humble living conditions that the maids live in. When we see them take off their straight-haired wigs at night to reveal the corn rows beneath. This speaks volumes about the way black women are viewed, about how blackness is viewed by both white and black society.

Crosbie wants to know "why are blacks always depicted in crisis, almost always punctuated with slapstick"? I sense a larger truth here which I tend to agree with; however, the novelist, the screenwriter, the director, are trying to construct a dramatic story here regarding a tumultuous period which necessitates a certain level of drama, of pathos and of emotion.

I wonder how exciting a story about my middle class black friends would be if we were to mirror the "authentic" nature of their lives: trying to raise a family, working in mundane jobs, church-going, caring for elderly and ill parents, living their day to day lives. True, I am sure there is some Chekovian drama underneath this middle class veneer but the not so distant history of black people in North America, particularly in the Southern U.S., is one of turmoil, of oppression, of difficult choices made. It ain't no party ...

What seems to irk Crosbie the most is the film's tag line: "Change begins with a whisper." She ends her article thus: "And the great American civil rights movement, shouted, not whispered about, at its height, should not be open for revision."

My response to this is that not every piece of fiction based on historical events, even one as horrifying and violent as this one, requires volume or blood to be effective as a piece of art. The film, if not the book, is not a "great" piece of art but it does achieve what many films aspire to: it makes people feel connected to an era that some may have forgotten or minimized merely as a relic of the past. It elicits not only grief for the tragedies of our past but compassion. It touches both the heart and the mind. And that ain't so bad.

For some additional thoughts please see Mary Elizabeth Williams' article on salon.com with whom I commiserate!

Gone but not really ...

Gone with the Wind (U.S., 1939) directed by Victor Fleming, 238 min.

Frankly, My Dear by Molly Haskell (Yale University Press, 2009) 244 pages

I just finished reading the wonderful non-fiction book Frankly My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited by Molly Haskell which made me want to watch Gone with the Wind again. The film has always been a guilty pleasure along the lines of enjoying The Sopranos (far superior artistically but evokes similar feelings of discomfort and guilty pleasure) or the milder guilt inducing West Side Story.

The whole premise of Margaret Mitchell's book and the 1939 film violates the liberal sensibility (or anyone with a conscience): the noble and beautiful Southern way of life destroyed by an uncomprehending and heartless Northern conqueror in the American Civil War. It's a nauseating fantasy when one contemplates what it must have cost in human blood to sustain the plantation system in the South. I am sure that life was an idyllic dream for the privileged white few but at whose expense was this lifestyle sustained?

And let me say upfront (which has been said many times before rightly) that the characterization of most of the black characters is evil and reprehensible - running the spectrum from squirm inducing to horrifying. It boggles the mind. What, therefore, redeems this film?

I must say, for me as it is for some other feminists, it is the characterization of Scarlett O'Hara by Vivien Leigh. And you are thinking ... but she is vain, selfish, manipulative, careless, hypocritical, at times heartless ... she is all of these things and she survives all that is thrown at her: the Civil War, the death of her beloved mother and the consequent mental deterioration of her father; burying two husbands; losing a child; famine, carpetbaggers; marauding Union solders; poverty; social ostracization and the heavy burden of sustaining a household of family and servants, black and white, who seem utterly lost at the end of the war.

In many respects she represents a steely feminist icon which flies in the face of the stereotypical, simpering Southern belle. If, on the surface, she preens and flirts and flatters, it belies a nature truer to the ruthless Yankees that she claims to despise. In her book Haskell compares the characters of the men in the book to Scarlett's ferocity:

Baby-faced Charles Hamilton woos (or is wooed by) Scarlett, and after one night with her, goes off to war to die of measles and pneumonia. Frank Kennedy, a little old maid, can’t collect from his customers and is outwitted by his wife. Ashley Wilkes gives loserdom a high poetic sheen. Gerald O’Hara, a reckless drunk, falls apart with the death of his wife. By contrast, Scarlett is a generalissima on the battlefield of courtship and marriage. Sherman has nothing on the deadly belle-then-widow as she cuts a swathe thought the rolls of Georgia’s most eligible bachelors.

From a mid 19th c. societal point of view as a Southern lady, Scarlett's transgressions range from the offensive (marrying Charles Hamilton, a man she did not love, to make Ashley Wilkes jealous; dancing in public while in mourning for one's husband and callously giving his wedding ring away under the guise of supporting the Confederate cause; sporadically necking with her lifelong love Ashley, a married man and an in-law to boot) to the fairly disreputable (marrying
sister Suellen's beau to save the family estate; traveling alone in a disreputable part of town to do business; trying to con Rhett Butler out of $300 to pay the taxes to save Tara, the family home) to the unconscionable (doing business with the hated carpetbaggers and those whom Southerners claim have destroyed the South; shooting a Union soldier in the face as he tries to rob you; using convicts as labour in her new business).

In the end, Scarlett gets what she wants - wealth and stability - even if she has to marry the once hated Rhett Butler to get it. And she eventually succumbs to his desire that she love him, truly love him, and drives the desire for that milquetoast Ashley Wilkes out of her head forever.

But it takes extraordinary things to happen before she comes to that point. Melanie must die and then Scarlett must see how much Ashley truly loved his wife. Scarlett has to lose virtually every person that she has loved: mother Ellen, father Gerald, Bonnie her first born, her unborn child which she miscarries, her love for Ashley, Rhett.

She stands alone at the end and yet is unbroken. She will triumph. And in the end, feminist or not, you forgive her her transgressions and believe that she will carry on by any means necessary.