Creating an atmosphere...

Whenever I spend a long period of time on a piece of writing over the course of a few months, I always find myself listening to certain songs and pieces of music over and over again. They create a soundtrack not necessarily to the work itself but to my writing of it. When I was at university and making my third and debatably most successful attempt at a novel (last time I checked it, it was forty or so pages and some of it wasn't that bad) the soundtrack was Interpol's first album "Turn On The Bright Lights". I don't know what came first, the writing or the music, but soon enough both were inseperable. The content of my novel seemed to fit perfectly the atmosphere of the album.

I've been working on this soulmates-themed film now for seven months or so. As I was sitting down to write this evening I thought I'd take a look at the playlist I've gradually accrued over the last half a year. Some of them seemed strange choices and when played seemed to be sounds from another era, when the film was something else entirely. Those were swiftly deleted. Others appeared to have cemented their place in my mind and in the film. The LCD Soundsystem track "All My Friends" seems now a classic evocation of parts of the script, and when I hear Som Tres' jolly "Homenagem A Mongo" it conjures up a crystal-clear image in my head of one of the club scenes. I can even see the characters dancing to it, each one dancing differently, for all the world as if they were actual, living people.

I've read about this before. A writer, a famous one (I can't remember her name, but I seem to remember it was a woman), wrote of similar feelings. In her case, it was a particular album that seeped into the writing of her novel (I think it was a novel) and its tempo, the rythmn, the way the singer delivered the words all found their way into the novel in the guise of style and even word choice. Something completely unintended and apparently unrealised until the final drafting. I suppose it's unremarkable in the sense that the music you listen to forms part of the fabric of your life, and that is all writers have to put into their work. But on the other hand, its an incredibly mysterious thing, perhaps unexplainable.

The Darjeeling Limited

Well I've seen it twice in three days so I obviously like it. I knew deep down I would. I did however share the suspicion of others that Wes Anderson's style would have become trying by now. That was the reaction of the people I saw it with, but as emphatically NOT my reaction as was possible. This film is so much more mature, more emotionally effecting than his others. As Dave at work said, "if you've got a brother, it's pretty much got you". That combined with all the signature stylistic flourishes that made us love Anderson in the first place makes The Darjeeling Limited perhaps his most successful film.



From the first moments of the preceding short film Hotel Chevalier we know we are to expect more from this film. That the end of a love affair is played out through Anderson's trademark slowmos and 60s pop heightens the emotion. As Natalie Portman's unnamed "ex-girlfriend" turns to Jason Schwartzman's lost Jack and says "what the fuck is going on?" the sense of frustration and sadness is unmistakable. Jack's emotionless stare is equally effecting.



The film proper benefits massively from Adrien Brody's prescence as the reluctant father-to-be Peter. Brody's ability to convey great worry in the slightest tremble of a lip or a forced smile works perfectly with Schwartzman's lost puppy dog eyes and Owen Wilson's repression of grief behind obsessive itinerary-making as Francis. That they look nothing like each other is of no consequence. These guys are the Whitman brothers, and they really are trying to make better lives for themselves however pathetically misguided they may be. Their desire is etched in the way Francis gets them to agree on making this a spirital quest, a life-changing experience. Of course finding oneself to a timetable typed up and laminated by a man called Brendan suffering from alopecia is unlikely to succeed. But their determination is touching. There is no sense of that "poor little rich kid" element that some people - unfairly - try to put onto Anderson.

The real difference is the sequence in a country village. Arriving at the village after only managing to save two of three drowing brothers they are welcomed, comforted and thanked in a nearly dialogue-less set of scenes that mark - in my opinion - a real step up for Anderson. The slowmos stop, the music stops, dialogue stops. Everything quietens down. Their spiritual quest seems to be bearing fruit. They begin to trust each other. They value each other.



I don't want to appear to be denigrating those classic Anderson traits of the slowmo and pop soundtrack. I went straight home and downloaded them! Whilst some people may have found them tiresome in this film, I felt they were used smartly and that they are taken out in the saddest moments of the film heightens their effect. They always come at moments the viewer needs for contemplation.

This film looks and sounds great and the acting comes from a finely-judged balance of humour and sadness. Of course it may be a touch sentimental, a little over-romantic but to accuse Anderson of un-realism is like accusing David Lynch of weirdness. As my friend Al said on coming out of the film, "it's a film I want to live in".

As a footnote, my lecturers warned against writing about things you love. I am afraid I have not heeded their advice on this occasion. Apologies. In depth reviewing will follow.

F For Fake

Made in 1974, and his last completed film, Orson Welles' F For Fake is the sign-off from a master. In control of the viewer from the first frame to the last, Welles as self-confessed "charlatan" weaves together a tale of fakery, forgery and film-making. A re-edited documentary about "the greatest art forger of the twentieth century" Elmyr de Hory turns into an interrogation of his 'outer', the author of of a fake biography of Howard Hughes Clifford Irving which turns into a history of Hughes and a history of Welles himself and a connection with a girl, a girl who set up a grand fake, a fake that is possibly fake. A fake fake.

F For Fake is alive with the lightness of touch of the French New Wave, the playfulness, the knowingness, the lack of seriousness and the conviction that "in a sense, each story is a sort of lie". It also features what's been called "the most profound moment in cinema history", a rumination on artistic signatures set amongst the mist swirling around the unclaimed Chartres cathedral:



Of course Welles is the perfect narrator of this story within a story within a story... As he himself owns up to (the whole truth?), he has a history of fakery himself, beginning in Ireland, at the age of 16 when he managed to convince members of a repertory theatre in Dublin that he was in fact a famous American actor. Of course he was soon to become just that, by way of one of the great hoaxes of the twentieth century, never mind Elmyr! Welles's great War of the Worlds broadcast of 1938 that sent thousands into mass hysteria. Or did it? Uncertainty is everywhere in this film, round every corner, in every frame, in every utterance. It would be good to remember that hall of mirrors sequence from The Lady From Shanghai. It might do you some good.

It says something about Welles' genius that he can laugh raucously at the absurdity of the rabbit hole of confusion and forgery surrounding Elmyr, Irving and himself one minute and compose the Chartres ode the next. Perhaps they're not that different. Perhaps that's the real sign of genius, the realisation that life, as a friend of mine once said, is "far to serious to be taken seriously".

Blow Out

I came across Brian de Palma's Blow Out from 1981 on a search for a key list of those great American political conspiracy thrillers that dominated the 1970s. Whilst obviously not fulfilling one of those descriptions (and debatably a couple of the others), it surely must be placed with All The President's Men and The Conversation if only for contextual reasons.

That it is a minor addition to the list is not a controversial statement. It doesn't have nearly the clarity of vision or the tautness of either Pakula's or Coppola's film. The viewer is never convinced of the depth or importance of the conspiracy John Travolta's Jack Terry is trying to uncover. It seems coincidental somehow, unimportant. Perhaps this is because the film never seems to know what it wants to be. It flits self-consciously between near-light romantic comedy and real political thriller. It reminded me of Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle romancing Betsy whilst shooting pimps and drug lords. And yet it didn't work in the way Scorsese's picture so obviously does.

This lack of certainty is reflected in the confused camera work. There is a great moment when Jack discovers all his tapes have been erased and the camera continues a dizzying circle around his office over an hour as Jack searches his office, leaves it, comes back, answers the phone and leaves again, but there is a terrible slow-motion climax as he runs to save Sally to the backdrop of fireworks and the celebrations of Liberty Day.

Much has been written about de Palma's Hitchcock fixation and his attempt at a Master of Suspense-style climax falls rather flat. But it is in this failure that the film is at its bravest. De Palma does something Hitchcock would never have done: have the hero fail. I won't spoil it by going into detail, but suffice it to say, the one moment of invention in this film is in the climax. Best place for it if you ask me.

More than expected...

Sometimes it's good to take stock. On opening the various scenes of our ever-changing script, I began to get a little confused. We have two realities to play with and it was becoming increasingly uncertain where and when we were switching. Whilst that can be an effect created for the viewer, if the writer shares the same confusion then it's generally a bad sign. I always try to keep hold of the near-maxim: The writer needs to know everything about every character at every minute.

To make more sense of it, I put all the scenes together (we have three "Parts" and each Part has numbers, so we have Part I - 1 but also Part I - 1 - 1) in their logical order and to my surprise discovered (a) it makes far more sense than I thought it would and (b) we have a third of the film. It made me think that we are actually getting somewhere. Every time me and my writing partner Tobias talk, we come up with more ideas, stripping away excess scenes, dialogue, ideas and coming up with newer, more streamlined ones.

Sometimes the end seems to be getting further away, but there's always something to spur you on. Confidence is one, I really think we can come up with a good script and make a good film from it. Excitement is another. We talked at the weekend and tackled the problems posed by the confusion detailed above. In simultaneously making it more rigid and flowing, I think we've achieved some sort of balance and hopefully the structural problems are more behind us than in front of us.

Metropolitan

I saw Whit Stillman's Metropolitan last night. Described as a "great afternoon film" by my friend Al, it is simply a great film. Not great in the grand scheme of things perhaps, but great nonetheless.



The tone is perfect. It manages to balance the arch dialogue ("I'm a committed Socialist yes but not a Marxist. I prefer the socialist model developed by the 19th century socialist critic Fourier") and intentionally mannered acting with a wonderful deftness. It helps that there is a constant stream of funny one-liners ("playing strip poker with an exhibitionist somehow takes the challenge out of it"), largely delivered by Chris Eigeman's Nick Smith. It has a consistency to it, the lines don't sound contrived even though they are.

It is like a cross between Woody Allen's films and JD Salinger's short stories. Metropolitan is as quintessentially New York as both Allen and Salinger, the characters in this film as firmly rooted in the Big Apple as Alvy Singer or Zooey Glass. It's part of the film's allure, that it presents us with this classic image of New York, New York at Christmas, New York's rich young things, great parties, balls, debutantes. It's a cinematic box of expensive chocolates; a wilful ignorance of the "real" New York that no-one wants to see and gives us our dream New York, the city we all want to be rich and young in.

I Don't Want To Sleep Alone

One of the trailers before Paranoid Park was this from Tsai Ming Liang.

I'd never heard of him before I saw this, but from the first second I was captivated. It looks absolutely like nothing I've seen before.