D. Henry Schloss
B&W
There’s something much less intimidating about British bikers than their American counterparts. You see in films the American biker gangs, tearing up the American highways on their hogs, before tearing up American towns and then if they get the chance tearing up American womanhood. It’s all deliberately, unapologetically and provocatively intimidating; and because that image is so persuasive the belief becomes widespread that all American bikers are that way. Yet when you’re driving about the byways and highways of Blighty and you see British bikers, you don’t feel intimidated by them in the slightest. Even when there’s a group of them together, you can’t help thinking that they’re basically nice, if slightly oil-stained young men. No doubt they probably live at home with their mothers, they work as a bank clerk Monday to Friday and their favourite dinner is beef casserole. British bikers, even British bikers who dub themselves Hell’s Angels, just don’t have anywhere near the same air of menace about them.
This black & white British film seems to back up those prejudices. For the first half an hour the central character of Malcolm fits in exactly with what we imagine a British motorcyclist to be. Played by David Hemmings, still young, thin and cherubic, he does indeed live at home with his Mum (Beryl Reid), has what looks at first glance and incredibly boring job in an architect’s office and he has great trouble talking to pretty girls – be they the nice lass down the street, or the kind of sneering leather-clad good-time girl he sees when sitting by himself at biker stops. He is bland and inoffensive, a boy/man who just likes riding his motorcycle and doesn’t want to be a fuss to anyone. He is exactly what we all imagine British bikers to be.
But that’s before he takes a Stanley knife and slashes open the throat of the leader of the local biker gang.
What follows is a serial killer/chase film, where Malcolm rides around the country with good girl who just wants some dark thrills, Jane Asher, pinion behind him. In many ways this is your stereotypical 1960s dangerous bikers’ story, with our protagonist killing those who get in their way and always just about evading the police. But even with all the deaths and the violence, it manages to avoid the dark glamour of American biker movies. One really can’t picture Dennis Hopper sat down eating marmite sandwiches out of kitchen foil and moaning about how he wishes his mum would use mustard instead; just as you can’t imagine Peter Fonda having deeply inadequate sex with his young pouting lover, who just calmly tells him that it’s okay, they can practice when they get home.
This is a film about motorcyclists on the open road, about youthful rebellion; so it’s a film that steals tropes from an incredibly recognisable part of American culture, yet still manages to produce something so weirdly and bathetically British.
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Sunday, 7 September 2014
Wednesday, 13 August 2014
Over the Threshold (2004)
D. Mike Culumbus
Colour
Nicole Kidman should not be allowed to do comedy.
It’s a fact that should be as clear as the flipping moon by now.
Obviously she’s an extremely good dramatic actress and clearly a very attractive woman (there are blind man in lost tribes of the Amazon who fancy Nicole), but to cast her in a comedy is always huge and regrettable mistake. It’s as if she doesn’t understand the concept of jokes or laughter or punchlines, even prat-falls are beyond her – there’s just something too delicate and restrained about Nicole for her to ever fall over in a funny way. Evidently she thinks she can do it, but that’s because she has watched other people be funny and imagines she can copy them. But there isn’t an amusing, witty or humorous sinew in her whole body, so she just ends up working her way through comic scripts in dead-eyed incomprehension – and that is not good for the health of any comedy project. (For another red headed actress similarly affected, see Moore, Julianne). By all means cast her in drama, let her do big emotional, tragic, scenes with swelling scores that make Oscar voters sit up and salivate like juicy prunes, but just keep her away from comedy. There are some people who can get laughs and there are some who really, really can’t. She is the latter.
Here’s an example, with Nicole playing against Hugh Grant in a culture clash comedy that was actually released in 2004 but feels like it’s been sat on a shelf since about 1958. Giving an early sketch of her white trash role from ‘The Paperboy’, but this time broader and less subtle, NIcole is a Kentucky waffle waitress who is wooed and married by visiting English aristocrat Grant. After the wedding she’s whisked back to England where fish out of water comedy ensues. It’s not a particularly original scenario for a film, is it? And believe me the script does it no favours by being half-baked, underwritten and about an eighth as funny as a 1980’s ITV sitcom.
So we have comedy yokels, sniffy aristocratic relatives, cheerful barmen, flirty antique dealers, a brassy would-be mistress for Grant, and – as counter-balance – a sleazy aristo interested in the delectable Nicole. The jokes are asthmatic and seemingly riddled with hay-fever in the English sunshine, so Grant does what he always does in these situations and starts to flail wildly in an attempt to make things funny just through a kind of polite mania. It results in him playing every scene slightly too loud in an attempt to bring life to them, but really he just sucks all the fun away in his desperation. Yet because Nicole just doesn’t understand comedy and doesn’t understand that this won’t work, she starts to imitate him, as if believing that since Grant does know about comedy this must be the way to do it. And so we have both of them horribly over the top, both of them waving their arms and bulging their eyes, until the two of them are caught in a despairing and terrible death spiral of unfunniness.
It’s terrible to watch, and on a blog where I’m supposed to be recommending obscure films I have to say that you should avoid this one like a virulent plague-zone. I just bring it forth as Exhibit A in why Nicole most absolutely, totally and certainly shouldn’t do comedy.
Colour
Nicole Kidman should not be allowed to do comedy.
It’s a fact that should be as clear as the flipping moon by now.
Obviously she’s an extremely good dramatic actress and clearly a very attractive woman (there are blind man in lost tribes of the Amazon who fancy Nicole), but to cast her in a comedy is always huge and regrettable mistake. It’s as if she doesn’t understand the concept of jokes or laughter or punchlines, even prat-falls are beyond her – there’s just something too delicate and restrained about Nicole for her to ever fall over in a funny way. Evidently she thinks she can do it, but that’s because she has watched other people be funny and imagines she can copy them. But there isn’t an amusing, witty or humorous sinew in her whole body, so she just ends up working her way through comic scripts in dead-eyed incomprehension – and that is not good for the health of any comedy project. (For another red headed actress similarly affected, see Moore, Julianne). By all means cast her in drama, let her do big emotional, tragic, scenes with swelling scores that make Oscar voters sit up and salivate like juicy prunes, but just keep her away from comedy. There are some people who can get laughs and there are some who really, really can’t. She is the latter.
Here’s an example, with Nicole playing against Hugh Grant in a culture clash comedy that was actually released in 2004 but feels like it’s been sat on a shelf since about 1958. Giving an early sketch of her white trash role from ‘The Paperboy’, but this time broader and less subtle, NIcole is a Kentucky waffle waitress who is wooed and married by visiting English aristocrat Grant. After the wedding she’s whisked back to England where fish out of water comedy ensues. It’s not a particularly original scenario for a film, is it? And believe me the script does it no favours by being half-baked, underwritten and about an eighth as funny as a 1980’s ITV sitcom.
So we have comedy yokels, sniffy aristocratic relatives, cheerful barmen, flirty antique dealers, a brassy would-be mistress for Grant, and – as counter-balance – a sleazy aristo interested in the delectable Nicole. The jokes are asthmatic and seemingly riddled with hay-fever in the English sunshine, so Grant does what he always does in these situations and starts to flail wildly in an attempt to make things funny just through a kind of polite mania. It results in him playing every scene slightly too loud in an attempt to bring life to them, but really he just sucks all the fun away in his desperation. Yet because Nicole just doesn’t understand comedy and doesn’t understand that this won’t work, she starts to imitate him, as if believing that since Grant does know about comedy this must be the way to do it. And so we have both of them horribly over the top, both of them waving their arms and bulging their eyes, until the two of them are caught in a despairing and terrible death spiral of unfunniness.
It’s terrible to watch, and on a blog where I’m supposed to be recommending obscure films I have to say that you should avoid this one like a virulent plague-zone. I just bring it forth as Exhibit A in why Nicole most absolutely, totally and certainly shouldn’t do comedy.
Sunday, 10 August 2014
Honeymoon of Horrors (1945)
D. Jack van Dougel
B&W
‘Honeymoon of Horrors’ is a dark comedy of the type that you just feel Cary Grant wished he did more of. Obviously he knew his image and was fond of his image as it paid for him to be, well, Cary Grant, but there was always something about him that strained to be darker than that image. You can see it in the films he made with Alfred Hitchcock; you see it in the films he made with Howard Hawks. But this is one of those rare movies where he just really goes for it. From talking of the horrendous fate meted out to Archibald Leach in ‘His Girl Friday’, to murderous aunts in ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’, to bloody honeymoons here: this, my friends, is the dark side of Cary Grant.
Upping the tempo of his normal screen persona, this is Grant as full-on frazzled. The most famous example of a frazzled Cary Grant is of course ‘North by Northwest’, but there he’s a proto James Bond, which you have to admit is pretty damn suave. ‘Honeymoon of Horrors’ though is an increasingly macabre comedy, where laughs and deaths are piled on top of each other in frantic and haphazard fashion, and Grant is frazzled to the max. At points he doesn’t even look like Cary Grant: his face is grubby, that normally pristine hair finds itself ruffled and spiked, and his eyes are well and truly bulging. This is a Cary Grant lost in a situation he can’t control, as a newly-wed husband who starts to believe that his wife is a mass murderer.
The fact that the wife is played by Joan Fontaine makes this a delicious spin on Hitchcock’s ‘Suspicion’. In that film Joan plays a newlywed who starts to be suspicious about the murderous intentions of her husband, Cary Grant, suspicions which build to a disappointing ending. Here it’s Joan Fontaine as the suspected murderess, but it still builds to a disappointing ending. It’s much like Karl Marx said: good Hollywood ideas repeat themselves, first as suspense and then as farce.
Starting out as what looks like a blissful Hollywood romance, the two drive to the beautiful country hotel they’re staying in for their honeymoon, all loved up and with dreams of their future. They check in with the charming receptionist, kiss as they go up to their hotel room and everything looks rosy. But there’s a guest in reception who seems to recognise Fontaine and greets her by another name, before long he’s dead, and not long after all the other guests start dropping like particularly diseased flies. Grant grows suspicious that his lovely bride is responsible, and investigates even when trying to throw the suspicions of others away from her.
If we’re honest Fontaine isn’t much of a comedienne, but her icy, implacable cool serves the film well. It’s left to Grant to do all the heavy lifting laughs-wise and this he achieves with a truly manic unhinged performance. Think of some wild, lost Abbott & Costello movie with Grant in the Costello role; or a Marx Brothers film where Grant has moments of impersonating both Groucho and Harpo – then you have an idea of the joy that lies within ‘Honeymoon of Horrors’.
The dark tone and clearly cynical world view mean it won’t be for everyone’s tastes, but Grant is brilliant and serves yet another reminder why we should never forget what a fantastic, wonderful, always impeccable actor he was.
B&W
‘Honeymoon of Horrors’ is a dark comedy of the type that you just feel Cary Grant wished he did more of. Obviously he knew his image and was fond of his image as it paid for him to be, well, Cary Grant, but there was always something about him that strained to be darker than that image. You can see it in the films he made with Alfred Hitchcock; you see it in the films he made with Howard Hawks. But this is one of those rare movies where he just really goes for it. From talking of the horrendous fate meted out to Archibald Leach in ‘His Girl Friday’, to murderous aunts in ‘Arsenic and Old Lace’, to bloody honeymoons here: this, my friends, is the dark side of Cary Grant.
Upping the tempo of his normal screen persona, this is Grant as full-on frazzled. The most famous example of a frazzled Cary Grant is of course ‘North by Northwest’, but there he’s a proto James Bond, which you have to admit is pretty damn suave. ‘Honeymoon of Horrors’ though is an increasingly macabre comedy, where laughs and deaths are piled on top of each other in frantic and haphazard fashion, and Grant is frazzled to the max. At points he doesn’t even look like Cary Grant: his face is grubby, that normally pristine hair finds itself ruffled and spiked, and his eyes are well and truly bulging. This is a Cary Grant lost in a situation he can’t control, as a newly-wed husband who starts to believe that his wife is a mass murderer.
The fact that the wife is played by Joan Fontaine makes this a delicious spin on Hitchcock’s ‘Suspicion’. In that film Joan plays a newlywed who starts to be suspicious about the murderous intentions of her husband, Cary Grant, suspicions which build to a disappointing ending. Here it’s Joan Fontaine as the suspected murderess, but it still builds to a disappointing ending. It’s much like Karl Marx said: good Hollywood ideas repeat themselves, first as suspense and then as farce.
Starting out as what looks like a blissful Hollywood romance, the two drive to the beautiful country hotel they’re staying in for their honeymoon, all loved up and with dreams of their future. They check in with the charming receptionist, kiss as they go up to their hotel room and everything looks rosy. But there’s a guest in reception who seems to recognise Fontaine and greets her by another name, before long he’s dead, and not long after all the other guests start dropping like particularly diseased flies. Grant grows suspicious that his lovely bride is responsible, and investigates even when trying to throw the suspicions of others away from her.
If we’re honest Fontaine isn’t much of a comedienne, but her icy, implacable cool serves the film well. It’s left to Grant to do all the heavy lifting laughs-wise and this he achieves with a truly manic unhinged performance. Think of some wild, lost Abbott & Costello movie with Grant in the Costello role; or a Marx Brothers film where Grant has moments of impersonating both Groucho and Harpo – then you have an idea of the joy that lies within ‘Honeymoon of Horrors’.
The dark tone and clearly cynical world view mean it won’t be for everyone’s tastes, but Grant is brilliant and serves yet another reminder why we should never forget what a fantastic, wonderful, always impeccable actor he was.
Wednesday, 5 March 2014
Pont-y-Clun (2004)
D. Lee Edwards
Grainy and gritty colour, tinged by relentless Welsh rain
A teenager is hiding out in the woods. We open with him sat high in a tree, close to the bark, his eyes narrowed like a hawk’s. Before long a couple pass by underneath, a young man and younger woman. The man is leading her by hand and doing all the talking. His voice is light and fruity, it is posh, it is English. Seriously, it is English beyond the point of parody, the kind of English voice Bertie Wooster would deem a bit ‘plummy’. The teenager crouches close to the branches as they go past. It’s not long before the couple stop and the man lays her back, he is still talking, still impressing her with his accent and his breeding. He talks and talks, even when he is taking her clothes off. She only says one word and that is “Diolch”, Welsh for ‘Thank you’. Clearly it’s a signal, as the teenager leaps from the tree and expertly slits the man’s throat. The girl smiles at him the whole time, moving swiftly from coquettish to really turned on.
And so begins ‘Pont-Y-Clun’ a Welsh horror/thriller/love story: the tale of two murderous young lovers, ‘Badlands’ with an asbo and acting lessons from ‘Pobol-Y-Cwm’. Gwilliam is a young lad with a bad reputation, one who has been driven out of his local town (unnamed in the film, but presumably the small South Wales town of Pont-y-Clun – home to a pub called ‘The Isambard Kingdom Brunel’, which is the only thing I know about it). However even though he is despised and loathed by the townsfolk, so much so that even his parents spit to the ground when they refer to him, he is loved by one person. Nubile and lovely young Delyth Parry, who helps him make ends meet, by luring young English tourists into the nearby woods so that Gwilliam can kill them, steal their clothes, take their money and – gulp – it’s hinted, eat them. Eventually the pile of bones of dead Englishmen gets so high that even the Welsh police have to investigate.
(Interestingly, Gwilliam, with his shock of red-hair and NHS glasses, looks like a grown up Norman Price from Welsh TV’s ‘Fireman Sam’. Given how naughty Norman Price is in ‘Fireman Sam’, maybe this film serves as a warning from the future. Unless Norman is taken in hand, his hometown of Ponty-Pandy will also find itself piled high with the corpses of dead computer generated Englishmen.)
There’s a very amusing moment, when local Detective Inspector Owen Teale (appearing on this blog for the second time this week) sighs and says that six dead Englishmen is just too many. It gives the impression that three or four dead Englishmen would be well within acceptable levels, but really Gwilliam is being greedy by going for half a dozen. I like this film, it’s taut and well made, and really understands the trick that suggested violence is the most horrific – but the anti-English flavour of it means that it was never going to travel easily over the border. Gwilliam even makes it clear he would never kill real people, ie. the Welsh; while Delyth ponders how weird it would be to have actual sex with an Englishman. (The film also isn’t helped by the fact that – in the version I saw – some of the Welsh language scenes aren’t subtitled, making it seem like some strange private joke against English speakers). So even though I like this movie, it sums up one of the main things I dislike about Welsh culture: namely, the incredibly chippy need to punch upwards. It’s an attitude that exists in TV, films, local news and even just talking to people on the street or in the pub, that identification as the poor, trodden down underdog who has to hit out at the big bully, even though that particular big bully has long since stopped paying attention. A little bit of nationalistic banter is fine, but Welsh nationalism – certainly as far as the English are concerned – has a real aggrieved nastiness to it that never seems particularly justified. Let’s be fair, the good people of Llantrisant, Llanelli and Llandaff may hate the English; but the good people of Leeds, Leicester and Luton are more likely to be baffled by it than share the animosity.
By the time the police enter the woods we are in Rambo territory, with do and die for the two young lovers, desperate to hang onto each other even as their murderous world falls apart. This is a film like its central character, it’s rude, overly aggressive and suffers from alarming xenophobia, but like redheaded Gwilliam it’s not totally impossible for someone to love – or at least, appreciate – it.
Grainy and gritty colour, tinged by relentless Welsh rain
A teenager is hiding out in the woods. We open with him sat high in a tree, close to the bark, his eyes narrowed like a hawk’s. Before long a couple pass by underneath, a young man and younger woman. The man is leading her by hand and doing all the talking. His voice is light and fruity, it is posh, it is English. Seriously, it is English beyond the point of parody, the kind of English voice Bertie Wooster would deem a bit ‘plummy’. The teenager crouches close to the branches as they go past. It’s not long before the couple stop and the man lays her back, he is still talking, still impressing her with his accent and his breeding. He talks and talks, even when he is taking her clothes off. She only says one word and that is “Diolch”, Welsh for ‘Thank you’. Clearly it’s a signal, as the teenager leaps from the tree and expertly slits the man’s throat. The girl smiles at him the whole time, moving swiftly from coquettish to really turned on.
And so begins ‘Pont-Y-Clun’ a Welsh horror/thriller/love story: the tale of two murderous young lovers, ‘Badlands’ with an asbo and acting lessons from ‘Pobol-Y-Cwm’. Gwilliam is a young lad with a bad reputation, one who has been driven out of his local town (unnamed in the film, but presumably the small South Wales town of Pont-y-Clun – home to a pub called ‘The Isambard Kingdom Brunel’, which is the only thing I know about it). However even though he is despised and loathed by the townsfolk, so much so that even his parents spit to the ground when they refer to him, he is loved by one person. Nubile and lovely young Delyth Parry, who helps him make ends meet, by luring young English tourists into the nearby woods so that Gwilliam can kill them, steal their clothes, take their money and – gulp – it’s hinted, eat them. Eventually the pile of bones of dead Englishmen gets so high that even the Welsh police have to investigate.
(Interestingly, Gwilliam, with his shock of red-hair and NHS glasses, looks like a grown up Norman Price from Welsh TV’s ‘Fireman Sam’. Given how naughty Norman Price is in ‘Fireman Sam’, maybe this film serves as a warning from the future. Unless Norman is taken in hand, his hometown of Ponty-Pandy will also find itself piled high with the corpses of dead computer generated Englishmen.)
There’s a very amusing moment, when local Detective Inspector Owen Teale (appearing on this blog for the second time this week) sighs and says that six dead Englishmen is just too many. It gives the impression that three or four dead Englishmen would be well within acceptable levels, but really Gwilliam is being greedy by going for half a dozen. I like this film, it’s taut and well made, and really understands the trick that suggested violence is the most horrific – but the anti-English flavour of it means that it was never going to travel easily over the border. Gwilliam even makes it clear he would never kill real people, ie. the Welsh; while Delyth ponders how weird it would be to have actual sex with an Englishman. (The film also isn’t helped by the fact that – in the version I saw – some of the Welsh language scenes aren’t subtitled, making it seem like some strange private joke against English speakers). So even though I like this movie, it sums up one of the main things I dislike about Welsh culture: namely, the incredibly chippy need to punch upwards. It’s an attitude that exists in TV, films, local news and even just talking to people on the street or in the pub, that identification as the poor, trodden down underdog who has to hit out at the big bully, even though that particular big bully has long since stopped paying attention. A little bit of nationalistic banter is fine, but Welsh nationalism – certainly as far as the English are concerned – has a real aggrieved nastiness to it that never seems particularly justified. Let’s be fair, the good people of Llantrisant, Llanelli and Llandaff may hate the English; but the good people of Leeds, Leicester and Luton are more likely to be baffled by it than share the animosity.
By the time the police enter the woods we are in Rambo territory, with do and die for the two young lovers, desperate to hang onto each other even as their murderous world falls apart. This is a film like its central character, it’s rude, overly aggressive and suffers from alarming xenophobia, but like redheaded Gwilliam it’s not totally impossible for someone to love – or at least, appreciate – it.
Sunday, 16 February 2014
Adrienne and the Astronaut (1967)
D.
Jean-Pierre Matisse
Colour
It’s odd that the French film ‘Le Cosmonaute Rend Visite à Adrienne’ was given the English title ‘Adele and the Astronaut’, as the future we are shown seems to be one where the Americans are completely wiped out. An astronaut is obviously a term for an American voyager to space, and yet the spaceman we meet is Terence Stamp and very British. (Very cockney in fact, so cockney that one briefly wonders whether the future will be a nightmare vision of jellied eels and rolling out the barrel). He isn’t remotely American. Indeed Americans aren’t mentioned at any point in the film and so the impression we get is that there are no Americans in the future. So this film, made at the height of the space race, two years before the moon landings, seems to go out of its way to suggest that in outer space there will be no room for the Yanks.
How are we to read this? To theorise that years from now all Americans will have been wiped out is probably a step too far. This is a film which posits a totally idyllic future in store for us, one where all citizens are happy, where their minds are totally open to new experiences, where love and contentment are universal rights. As such it would be odd if such a future was built on the total genocide of the whole American nation. It would be more than a tad icky to think of a future so beautiful built on such brutality to Uncle Sam. But the French film makers do seem to be saying – at the height of Vietnam, with riots right across The States – that true brotherly love can only take place without the Americans there. So if that’s the case, what happened to them? If we discount genocide, then what else is there? Maybe they flew in away in their spaceships and have headed to Mars, where they now have all the wars their blood thirsty souls could possibly desire. Or perhaps they have transcended to whatever giant shakes, chilli cheese dogs, large fries on the side place in the sky Americans call nirvana.
Whatever. The French are making this film and they have decided NO Americans. And that it makes it interesting. After having seen and read so much American science fiction, it is intriguing, as well as somewhat jarring, to see a version of the future from which Americans have been totally excluded.
Catherine Deneuve is a futurist living in swinging London. By any measure she has made quite a good life from this nebulous profession of predicting the future, kitting herself out with a good pad and the fanciest designer clothes. But there’s one thing missing from her life and that’s a lover. That all changes one sunny morning however, when a man arrives from the heavens (actually there’s a blinding light in her bathroom and he steps out of that. So rather than the heavens it’s a toilet, but the principle is the same). He is spaceman, Terrence Stamp. A creature from the future, part of the British stellar expedition force (which isn’t as mad as it sounds, the British were trying to make strides towards space in the late sixties), who has volunteered to be part of the new time travel programme. The technology is still in early days though and so Terrence has found himself transported back to the 1960s and Catherine. The reason for this is that she’s apparently is his true love - even though she was born a couple of hundred years before him, which suggests Cupid has one weird sense of humour.
Terrence takes Catherine to visit his time, so she can compare it to her visions. What we’re given is a very sixties version of the future, where the phones are still the clunky same (and people actually still use phone-boxes for calls, and not just urination), the skirts are much shorter and mop-top bands are very much in fashion. The Beatles though are passé, which must have looked an odd conclusion to reach in 1967. There are also zeppelins, and that’s actually one of the things Catherine predicted correctly. (Seriously, what is it with futurologists and zeppelins? Why do they believe that the future will be filled with them? It’s seventy years now since the zeppelin was last a serious mode of transport, face it: zeppelins aren’t making a comeback). This future is a very 1960s ideal of brotherly love and peace, and it’s all so wonderful and everybody is so happy, and it’s truly and remarkably dull. The future is bright and its lovely, but nothing actually bloody happens. Eventually to add a bit of drama, it’s realised that the gorgeous young lovers can’t sustain their relationship over the timelines and must separate. It’s sad as Terrence Stamp and Catherine Deneuve may be the best looking couple in cinema history, and through their peaceful and non-threatening and non-adventurous adventures, we’ve grown to kind of like them. For those who are still awake, it’s a little bit sad when they part. But at least when Catherine returns to her timeline, she knows that the future is safe and beautiful. And who knows? When she gets married and has kids and grandchildren and so on, maybe Terrence will turn out to be a descendent of hers. (Come on, I was bored. The film wasn’t offering me any spice, so I had to create my own).
It’s a pleasant film, an optimistic film, but it is the kind of film to make your eyelids beg for mercy. Say what you will about the yanks, at least they know to add a bit of action to these things.
Colour
It’s odd that the French film ‘Le Cosmonaute Rend Visite à Adrienne’ was given the English title ‘Adele and the Astronaut’, as the future we are shown seems to be one where the Americans are completely wiped out. An astronaut is obviously a term for an American voyager to space, and yet the spaceman we meet is Terence Stamp and very British. (Very cockney in fact, so cockney that one briefly wonders whether the future will be a nightmare vision of jellied eels and rolling out the barrel). He isn’t remotely American. Indeed Americans aren’t mentioned at any point in the film and so the impression we get is that there are no Americans in the future. So this film, made at the height of the space race, two years before the moon landings, seems to go out of its way to suggest that in outer space there will be no room for the Yanks.
How are we to read this? To theorise that years from now all Americans will have been wiped out is probably a step too far. This is a film which posits a totally idyllic future in store for us, one where all citizens are happy, where their minds are totally open to new experiences, where love and contentment are universal rights. As such it would be odd if such a future was built on the total genocide of the whole American nation. It would be more than a tad icky to think of a future so beautiful built on such brutality to Uncle Sam. But the French film makers do seem to be saying – at the height of Vietnam, with riots right across The States – that true brotherly love can only take place without the Americans there. So if that’s the case, what happened to them? If we discount genocide, then what else is there? Maybe they flew in away in their spaceships and have headed to Mars, where they now have all the wars their blood thirsty souls could possibly desire. Or perhaps they have transcended to whatever giant shakes, chilli cheese dogs, large fries on the side place in the sky Americans call nirvana.
Whatever. The French are making this film and they have decided NO Americans. And that it makes it interesting. After having seen and read so much American science fiction, it is intriguing, as well as somewhat jarring, to see a version of the future from which Americans have been totally excluded.
Catherine Deneuve is a futurist living in swinging London. By any measure she has made quite a good life from this nebulous profession of predicting the future, kitting herself out with a good pad and the fanciest designer clothes. But there’s one thing missing from her life and that’s a lover. That all changes one sunny morning however, when a man arrives from the heavens (actually there’s a blinding light in her bathroom and he steps out of that. So rather than the heavens it’s a toilet, but the principle is the same). He is spaceman, Terrence Stamp. A creature from the future, part of the British stellar expedition force (which isn’t as mad as it sounds, the British were trying to make strides towards space in the late sixties), who has volunteered to be part of the new time travel programme. The technology is still in early days though and so Terrence has found himself transported back to the 1960s and Catherine. The reason for this is that she’s apparently is his true love - even though she was born a couple of hundred years before him, which suggests Cupid has one weird sense of humour.
Terrence takes Catherine to visit his time, so she can compare it to her visions. What we’re given is a very sixties version of the future, where the phones are still the clunky same (and people actually still use phone-boxes for calls, and not just urination), the skirts are much shorter and mop-top bands are very much in fashion. The Beatles though are passé, which must have looked an odd conclusion to reach in 1967. There are also zeppelins, and that’s actually one of the things Catherine predicted correctly. (Seriously, what is it with futurologists and zeppelins? Why do they believe that the future will be filled with them? It’s seventy years now since the zeppelin was last a serious mode of transport, face it: zeppelins aren’t making a comeback). This future is a very 1960s ideal of brotherly love and peace, and it’s all so wonderful and everybody is so happy, and it’s truly and remarkably dull. The future is bright and its lovely, but nothing actually bloody happens. Eventually to add a bit of drama, it’s realised that the gorgeous young lovers can’t sustain their relationship over the timelines and must separate. It’s sad as Terrence Stamp and Catherine Deneuve may be the best looking couple in cinema history, and through their peaceful and non-threatening and non-adventurous adventures, we’ve grown to kind of like them. For those who are still awake, it’s a little bit sad when they part. But at least when Catherine returns to her timeline, she knows that the future is safe and beautiful. And who knows? When she gets married and has kids and grandchildren and so on, maybe Terrence will turn out to be a descendent of hers. (Come on, I was bored. The film wasn’t offering me any spice, so I had to create my own).
It’s a pleasant film, an optimistic film, but it is the kind of film to make your eyelids beg for mercy. Say what you will about the yanks, at least they know to add a bit of action to these things.
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