Films before the fall

Or, to be precise, what we watched over the Christmas period before I was hospitalised: two outright masterpieces, two American indie slices of life (one admittedly very out of the ordinary). Netflix justifies its existence by funding the Mexican master Alfonso Cuarón's Roma. Cuarón had already carved his place in cinema history with the sexy-sad Y Tu Mamá También, but I'm sure he feels for a number of reasons that Roma is his magnum opus (by the way, though I couldn't care less about the Oscars, I think it's absurd that a film like this is shovelled into the 'Best in a foreign language' category when it's surely a winner on any level).

In it, he manages so many things, above all to turn the intensely felt experience of his childhood, with incidents carried over wholesale, into the most poetic movie-making, a perfect balance of subjective and objective, and to celebrate the hitherto unsung life of a native Mexican, the much-loved family maid Cleo, a Mixtec woman from the village of Tepelmeme in the state of Oaxaca: in real life it's Liboria Rodriguez, who has seen the film several times and always cries, but for the children, not for herself, and the actor is Yaliza Aparicio, who had no previous film or stage experience and who even featured on the cover of Mexican Vogue - a first, shamefully... Netflix released this lovely photo of 'Libo' and Cuarón as they are now.

How well we get to know the family home in the (then) shabby-genteel Roma district of Mexico City, with its garage runway, always covered in dog poo, ill negotiated by the fraught father and mother when they try and drive their cars up to the door. It soon emerges that all is not well between husband and wife.

How shocked we are by the student uprising which ended in slaughter, seen from the windows of a furniture department; this is a realisation of a newspaper clipping which the 10-year-old Cuarón saw, and had explained to him by his communist uncle. 'My little middle-class bubble burst,' he says. 'I realized there was a way bigger bubble, one that was more complex'.

Also compelling (though what isn't, in this film) are the scene showing the government's military training of young men in a very specific martial art - very expensive to film because the extras all had to be taught the discipline - 

and by the heart-in-mouth single take where Cleo saves two of the children from drowning (young Alfonso was one of them, in reality).  

I wouldn't have noticed had I not read an article in a film magazine while I was in hospital that the camera starts by looking downwards and that gradually more sky is introduced into the final scenes, looking upwards; but this, I'm sure, is something one registers unconsciously. There's so much detail in every frame, though, that I regretted not seeing Roma on a big screen, and look forward to correcting that.

Just as great an achievement, in its own oblique but often very funny way (yes, a German comedy, or rather tragicomedy), though the deliberately blanched cinematography is hard to adjust to, is Toni Erdmann,  directed, written and co-produced by genius Maren Ade.

Now that Bergman is no longer with us, and Lars von Trier seems to have lost his way after his amazing earlier films - though I did like Melancholia, if 'like' is the right word, and I don't have the courage to see whether the sexually explicit and violent later works actually have a moral compass and a singular touch, as The Idiots ultimately did - Ade must take the palm for getting layered, complex performances out of two remarkable actors.

The title refers to the bewigged, false-teethed alter ego of sad clown Winifried (Peter Simonischek, whom I want to see in Shakespeare); but Sandra Hüller as his career-driven daughter Ines is just as compelling, and has a harder job winning our sympathy - though she does, in spades, and there's a sensational rendition of a Whitney Houston song which marks a turning-point in the film.

Even the outcome of the last scene is held in the balance, and the later stages are totally unpredictable. Let's just say that Toni/Winifried's last stunt, within the compass of the film, has to do with the costume in the poster.

What you get in two films about American life are a truthful performance from the luminous and versatile Saoirse Ronan in Ladybird, about a not-much-more-than-averagely-rebellious teenage girl slyly subverting what she can of small-town life

and slightly stylised, but nevertheless brilliant ones in a classy take on the true-life tragicomedy of a skating queen

from Margot Robbie (curiously turning up as Gloriana vs Saoirse's Stuart in what sounds like a turgidly-scripted Mary, Queen of Scots; surely Josie Rourke should have known to adapt Schiller's Mary Stuart rather than go for a stilted new screenplay) as well as an idol of mine, Alison Janney, who will forever be the surprisingly sexy, always sassy C. J. Cregg in The West Wing but excels here as the Mother from Hell,

and Sebastian Stan as Tonya's psychopath boyfriend/husband.

Small beer, perhaps, by the side of the two diamonds, but both beautifully crafted and acted gems. By the way, I was about to pass another evening in hospital by going to see Mary Poppins Returns in the amazing Medicinema of Chelsea & Westminster, but I was discharged two hours earlier; my 'second musketeer' pal in the bed opposite went instead with his granddaughter, and (as he told me when I popped in to see him on Tuesday) was surprised by how good it was. As I'm still awaiting the op, I'm entitled to revisit and was going to see The Favourite on Thursday evening, but that was one of my bad days so I stayed home. Outings need to be carefully spaced at the moment, though I'm proud to have made, and reviewed, two events this week: Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades at the Royal Opera on Sunday afternoon, and Bang on a Can's Friday night cornucopia at Kings Place.

Wingnuts adrift

After 154 episodes and approximately six months' viewing - when exactly did I pick up Series 1 and 2 in a charity shop for a fiver? - our sole addiction to the telly screen of late has come to an end. The West Wing (hence 'wingnuts' = fans) went out with a stylish whimper, and organically as ever, with the conclusion of President Josiah Bartlet's sometimes compromised but by and large pretty ideal two-term reign and his handing over of the reins to...

Can't divulge, since it was a surprise to my fellow-watcher even if I'd snuck a look at the episodes precis. Suffice it to say that part of the series' natural evolution was to find a potential Democratic successor as charismatic as Martin Sheen's lovable President, Jimmy Smits's Matt Santos - modelled, I recently read, on the speeches of a then largely unknown Barack Obama, with the emphasis shifted from black to Latino - and a Republican challenger as sympathetic as Alan Alda's Arnie Vinick. Both proved more than equal to the rest of the fabulous ensemble.

The presidential campaign is eye-opening to us barely comprehending Brits, and bears out in its twists and turns the famous 'events, dear boy' saying (or as Thucydides put it, 'the persistence of the unforeseen').

Americans would have found special pleasure in the live debate where Vinick takes up Santos's gauntlet to drop the usual format and go uninhibitedly head to head (I understand two versions were filmed, one for the west coast and one for the east; we should have had both, as well as the promised extras about the making of this episode which were not to be found, on the DVDs).


Interesting, of course, but what makes The West Wing unique is the flexibility of tone in the behind-the-scenes dialogues and developments. I thought, for instance, that the old 1930s screwball-comedy flavour had disappeared somewhere in Series Five; and yet there it was again, in an achingly funny episode based around Josh Lyman's post-campaign burnout ('Transition', superb script by Peter Noah and actor Bradley Whitford at his peak). Then the focus shifted back on my favourite of all, C.J. Cregg (the ineffable Alison Janney), with whom I'm just a little bit in romantic love, and another superb instalment, this time in the sentimental-drama mode. We also got to see Toby of the sensitive eyes again - Richard Schiff, low-key and hardly on screen for more than a few minutes in later episodes, if at all, but powerful as ever.

Loose ends are all tied up, to a point, but the last episode is no wave-farewell-to-all-you-best-loved-characters; some don't reappear, and the end of run mood is pointedly subdued. The viewer is encouraged to share in the feeling that this is how it has to be, and no regrets. True, one imagines, to how it was and how it is. And there was never a point where I felt the classic series had dated or was no longer relevant to ongoing issues. No wonder Obama, currently taking up the constant gauntlet mentioned here of taxing the millionaires, adores the show. It actually made me love America again.


Postscript: a final word from Martin Sheen, long before a seventh series was so much as a glimmer (and yes, I have a second-hand copy of the 'official' West Wing Companion covering series 1 and 2; it was a present, if you must know):

One of these only comes along in a lifetime, let's face it...Why would I want to look back? What am I going to follow this with? I may as well go and do Shakespeare in Minneapolis or something.

Given Bartlet's Lear-like attack on God at the end of series 2, that might not be a bad idea. Could one do Shakespeare's greatest tragedy in a contemporary political setting, with Sheen Martin not Michael? There's a thought.

Claudia Jean vs. the media moguls

Is there anyone out there who doesn't love C. J. Cregg? The White House Press Secretary in the parallel universe and not-quite-perfect-but-better-than-most American democratic government of The West Wing as played by the consummate Alison Janney, and pictured above with Martin Sheen's toweringly charismatic President Jed Bartlet, is witty, incorruptible, sharpshooting, sassy (I can pick up on that though I'm probably not the world's best expert on female sexuality) and compassionate but never in a gooey way. And the reason I mention her today is because we're up to Episode 19 of Life After Aaron Sorkin, that's to say Series 5, and C. J. is hot on the trail of a Federal Communications Commission decision which turns out to be in cahoots with big corporations controlling the media. Sound familiar?

I wonder if I can explain the specifics half as well as she does. In short, the FCC has reduced the proportion of local media purchase by the big guys from 45 per cent to 39.37 per cent, 'a number that ought to come with a decoder ring* and a jar of Ovaltine'. Why the magic figure? Because that was the limit (over)reached by 'Mert Media' when it purchased nine TV stations, and the FCC has just in effect 'posted bail' for this and the other giants which reached similar quotas - cited as Viacom, News Corp (yes, there it is), GE, Disney, Clearchannel - for 'illegally gobbling up TV stations like greasy hors d'oeuvres'.

The select press to whom C. J. wants to give the exclusive aren't interested, and she quickly twigs why: 'you don't want to write about this because it's about your corporate owners'. One says 'I'm not a media critic'; 'no-one in the media is', she shoots back, 'that's the problem' (of course everyone in the non-Murdoch-owned press is now). She's told she's partisan but insists she doesn't 'have a take' when 'one company can now own stations in 199 of the nation's 210 media markets and one company can influence the decisions of 98 senators and 382 house members' (don't you love it when your telly heroes can reel off figures like that as so few real-life politicos can?).

C. J.'s revenge is short but sweet on all those who kowtow to their 'media mogul robber baron bosses' in 'the biggest media conspiracy since William Randolph Hearst was starting wars and crushing filmmakers'. She simply brings in carpenters to the briefing room to see to it that only 39.37 per cent of seats go to the representatives of their corporate owners, one each. Everything has to go quickly back to what it was before, but she's had her victory. STOP PRESS (17/7) Where C. J. led, Miliband follows, with Clegg behind him. You saw it first, as usual, on The West Wing.


Series 5 so far has by no means been as disappointing as critics claimed the show became after visionary scriptwriter Sorkin left the scene. OK, so there's much less of the dizzying baroque wordplay, but one cast member described it as down to solid work after the honeymoon, and the way an idealistic if necessarily compromised White House functions can still spring a few surprises. We lost another sassy feminist as played by Mary-Louise Parker in, was it, Episode 5 but Glenn Close breezed in for Episode 17 - more, please - and Mary McCormack has just surfaced as a stylishly tight-lipped new Deputy National Security Advisor. We even had a likeable gay press assistant pop up in Episode 18, and he's just been glimpsed again, so there's hope. But - with the dreamy but character-hazy Rob Lowe replaced by the very definite Joshua Malina - the core team is full of people you'd want to be your best friends. Or I would. Now going off to order up Series 6.

One snag - on the evening or two in a week free at home we now watch wall-to-wall West Wing, so the last three LoveFilm movies have all been sitting unwatched for months. As I had an agonising day and a half of not yet diagnosed leg pain - the most excruciating physical incapacity I've experienced, some say sciatica, gone now, thank goodness - I took late Tuesday afternoon off work and caught up on the one J had already seen.


We love Ferzan Ozpetek almost as much as we love C. J. His visually ravishing films have immense charm and frequent lightness of touch, but at some point they all seem to evoke serious issues and a sense of what's beyond the normal parameters of life. Loose Cannons (Mine vaganti)is no exception. Set like Cuore sacro and Le fate ignoranti (surely everyone's favourite) in his adopted Italy, it's a pretty good advertisement for the beauties of Lecce and the surrounding Puglian landscapes.

Character, though, is as paramount as ever in Ozpetek's singular world. How are 'loose cannons' like a fiercely conservative patriarch's two gay sons and his mother, whom we see choose duty over love in a series of luminously-filmed flashbacks, integrated into their traditional but subtly evolving society (the Meistersinger question)? I won't spoil the plot twists except to say that one of the most touching moments is when the nonna describes how she wakes up every morning alongside the man she loved and sacrificed to marry his brother, in other words that he's always with her in spirit - and the wonderful Ilaria Occhini says this with immense dignity and no false sentimentality. In the final credits, there's a blink-and-you'll-miss-it image where you see the old woman reading in bed, and the young man as he was lying beside her. Not to give too much away, there's also perhaps the most exultant cinematic death since Thelma and Louise hurtled over the cliff. Here's Occhini (seated) with the other female stars Of Mine vaganti Elena Sofia Ricci, Bianca Nappi and Lunetta Savino.


Of course there's a fair bit of well-made feelgood about the film, too, and though its soundtrack can be insistent, I did love this disco sequence to 'Sorry, I'm a lady' by the outrageously camp Baccara (the ladies of the 70s hit 'Yes sir, I can boogie'). It doesn't evoke the general tinta of the film - though it does go all innig when the protagonist watches the girl who's fallen in love with him and his boyfriend splashing about - but it's good, simple fun. You'll need to double-click on the moving image to get the full screen effect (and the best body). Enjoy.



As a bonus for those of you whose Italian is good enough - the YouTube clips are all without subtitles - here's a scene featuring the two sisters in the extended family. They're walking through the town trying to deal with the gossip and looks following the revelation that one of them has a gay son who was supposed to inherit the pasta business. The mother gets her own back on the bitch in the shop by telling her that the girl she's so proudly announced her son is about to marry is a 'spiaggia libera' (public beach) into whose sand all the boys have poked their umbrellas. Result.



*I think that's what she said (there's no script, so I wrote it down off the telly). It sounded to me like Dakota ring, which I thought must be a kind of donut, but in an earlier episode Sam talked about a 'secret decoder ring', and this makes most sense.