I read this book some time ago, and reading back my review, written so carefully to avoid spoilers, I had no idea what the ‘twist’ was at the end of it. I shouldn’t have been so delphic! Anyway, I think I must have interpreted what the film portrays as a visualization as being a fact in the book – or at least, I think it was a visualization. I found myself more worried on film to see the obvious power imbalances with this white, blonde academic luxuriating in her rent-controlled New York apartment, blithely ignoring the hispanic people who were doing their jobs, and twisting the rules about ‘service animals’ ( a term so vague that it is meaningless) to keep a dog which was far too large for an apartment.
The Spanish Film Festival has finished here in Melbourne, but as in other years, Palace Cinemas are showing the most popular films after the Festival has finished. El 47 is a Spanish film, set in Barcelona, and it combines both Castilian and Catalan Spanish (distinguished in the subtitles by different colours).
The movie starts in Franco’s Spain of the 1950s as internal migrants, displaced from their own land, move into Torre Barro, in the steep mountains on the outskirts of Barcelona. There they construct chabolas, or shanties, with their own hands. The law allowed any structure with a roof built between sunset and sunrise to remain, but when individual families worked on their own hut alone, they were continually unable to meet the deadline, only to see the authorities pull the hut down again. It is only when they realize that by working together to construct just one chabola a night, that they can manage to build a settlement communally.
Jump forward 20 years, and Franco has finally fallen and democracy has arrived. Those twenty years have seen the inhabitants of Torre Barro improve their houses, but the government has not provided any services in that time, forcing the inhabitants to carry on their backs everything needed to live: water, food, mail. Cars, public transport and emergency services cannot reach the houses, and low-paid workers trudge up and down the mountain each morning and night. Manolo Vital, a bus-driver from Torre Barro, lobbies the government to provide services, but without success. He then decides to hijack his bus, and take it up to Torre Barro, to prove that it is possible for large vehicles to get up the mountain.
This is based on a true story. The movie combines contemporary film footage, and although somewhat predictable, it was a feel-good story that reminds us that Franco’s Spain was another country, where tradition and poverty dominated right up until the 1970s, almost in defiance of the changes that were occurring elsewhere in the world.
This film, starring Richard Roxburgh, is drawn from Peter Greste’s memoir The First Casualty about his imprisonment for over 400 days in an Egyptian prison after his arrest while covering the unrest in Cairo after the overthrow of President Mohamad Morsi. He is bewildered by the whole process, and sure at first that a mistake has been made until the truth of the gravity of his situation seeps in. He is warned by another political prisoner that, in order to survive, he would need to learn to live with himself. He learns this for himself, as he has to face the fact that his own journalistic derring-do had led to the death of BBC journalist Kate Peyton, while they were chasing a story in Mogadishu in Somalia in 2005. I’m not really sure whether Kate’s death eight years earlier really had the centrality for Greste that is shown in this film, although he was a consultant on this film so he must have been comfortable with it. Certainly the Australian embassy doesn’t come out too well, and the film is a strong critique of what passes for ‘justice’ in Egypt and the impotence of foreign governments to help. The real life Peter Greste himself appears from the outside to be a fairly stoic sort of person, and I felt that Roxburgh didn’t really have a lot to work with here.
This movie was available on the plane on my recent trip, but I wanted to save it for the cinema, when I would have people to talk to about it afterwards. I’m glad I did. When I read the book, I wondered how a novella of such interiority could be depicted on the screen. The answer is simply Cillian Murphy, who is absolutely brilliant. As is Emily Watson, who plays the Mother Superior, with such menace below her icy exterior. The film depicted his anguish more as a breakdown than in the book, but I guess that film, by its nature, encourages visual representation of inner pain rather than internal dialogue, as occurs in a book. The sound was very well done too, although to be honest I could barely understand a word they said and found myself craving subtitles (I think I have been spoiled by subtitles). But in terms of reflecting his inner torment, and the stultifying presence of the Church, the sound was excellent. As with The Quiet Girl, it was a movie that had so many levels, and such poignancy, with an ending left ambiguous and yet satisfying at the same time.
These cinema productions of stage shows tend to spoil you for live performances: you become accustomed to seeing closeups and hearing every little whisper. It’s a bit like when you go to the MCG and realize that the players you’ve been seeing up close on television actually look like little ants on the field when you’re there, live.
The audience in the cinema version are all wearing headphones, and I assumed that it was because it was being filmed and that perhaps they were being short-changed by the filming process. But no- according to this video, the sound design is an integral part of the production, and theatre-goers at the Harold Pinter Theatre were all provided with headphones for a surround-sound experience, where whispers could be heard, and the sound could shift from one ear to the other, behind you. As a cinema audience, we didn’t have headphones, but the sound was so clear that at one stage, with the witches, I thought that someone was laughing very rudely and inappropriately in the cinema. It must have been part of the soundscape.
The set design is minimal: just a white square, a bit like a boxing ring, with glass cubes behind it, where you could glimpse the musicians at times, or action occurring ‘off-stage’ so to speak. The costumes, too, were rather drab in grey, except for the Macbeth’s, whose clothing changed.
It’s not a large cast, and I found myself getting a bit confused when a character would be killed off (there’s lots of killing in Macbeth) only to be resurrected as another character. This was particularly the case with King Duncan, who was offed fairly early on, only to reappear looking exactly the same, and with the same voice and delivery, in the guise of the doctor as Lady Macbeth fell apart.
Cush Jumbo did not seem particularly regal as such. Instead, she seemed like one part of a power-couple (which of course she was). And David Tennant – ah, David Tennant (sigh)- he was absolutely brilliant, on stage nearly the whole time, and just as intense and tortured as you would expect him to be.
I’m a Baby Boomer. Of course I’ve seen ‘A Complete Unknown’ and like nearly everyone else I know, I loved it. I didn’t realize how much the background soundtrack of my life is made up of Bob Dylan songs- songs that other people had covered that I didn’t realize had been written by Dylan. I’m astounded that Timothée Chalamet, who plays Dylan, sang all the songs himself. The movie covers the early 1960s from Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 and ends with the 1965 Newport Jazz Festival where Dylan ‘went electric’, which seems a particularly mild crime looking back sixty years later. (My God. Sixty years. How did that happen?)
That said, I could barely understand a word the Bob Dylan character said, and his mumbling seemed to become worse as the movie went on. I was a bit disappointed in the Joan Baez character too, who seemed too ’rounded’ instead of the rather pointy person I’ve always thought of her as being, and Monica Barbaro, who also did all her own singing, didn’t capture that crystalline, soaring voice- although few probably could.
I haven’t particularly been a Dylan fan, but I have a new appreciation for him now. However, doesn’t stretch as far as thinking that he was a worthy winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016.
Sort of Pretty Woman goes bad, but I think I’m too old for this movie. Grubby lives, grubby people- and this is supposed to be a comedy??? Certainly, there were no laughs from the sparse audience of people in the cinema who were a similar age to me. This won the Palme D’Or???
A nominee at the Golden Globes? Talk of an Oscar? Sheesh.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 