Tell Me Lies

British Film Institute

20 October 2013

Trailer. From here.

Visceral examination of the Vietnam war protests in London, examining questions still very relevant today.

It’s difficult to review this film, because watching it was something of a theatrical event – it has long been unavailable, has been restored with the involvement of its director, Peter Brook, and the director and some of the surviving cast were present for this screening as part of the London Film Festival. At the end, Brook answered audience questions, an event in itself.

So it is hard, on reflection, to distinguish between my feelings about the film and my feelings overall about the experience. Brook was already a controversial, thrilling theatre director when in 1968 at the Royal Shakespeare Company he directed US (or ‘us’, it is an intentional pun), a drama, or perhaps a ‘theatrical happening’ about the Vietnam war. That subsequently became this equally innovative film, a semi-documentary as one character puts it.

That was 45 years ago, and Brook has gone on to increase his theatre guru status through his decades in Paris, pioneering minimalist world theatre and suchlike. So part of the screening experience was religious, an audience devoted to a man and his ideas rather than his actual output.

I’ll try to focus on his output here. The film’s subtitle tells us it is ‘about London’, and this is significant because although it addresses the Vietnam War, it does so through the perspectives of various Londoners, except for a ballad celebrating a US draft objector.

There are several songs in this piece, with Brechtian lyrics by Adrian Mitchell, and the overall style owes something to Brecht, though more, I think, to Brook’s own talent with actors. A small group of actors are present throughout, visiting different events in London (an anti-war poetry reading, marches, a Buddhist teacher, etc).

When they speak, we aren’t sure if they are inhabiting a role or telling us their direct feelings, and this ambiguity is both intentional and enormously powerful. When ‘real’ people, such as Kingsley Amis or Stokely Carmichael are speaking here, their certainty seems affected, and they are trying to win an argument, present forcefully their point of view. When the actors express their doubts and anxieties, they seem more authentic, which isn’t paradoxical, though it seems so.

This matters because the narrative of the film is that of trying to navigate in a world where almost unimaginable horrors are taking place, but these are taking place far away, and any individual’s ability to influence these events seems very small.

At times, the film goes too far in creating a sense of utter confusion. It contrasts our desire for strong heroic action with more practicable but ineffectual efforts. But as the Buddhist teacher says, when asked about monks burning themselves alive, there are more effective ways of helping people than such extreme actions. The film doesn’t really accept this, though in fairness it doesn’t suggest that the accumulation of smaller actions had no effect: and subsequent history is inspiring about this.

This is a work that tries to make us question ourselves, and it seems to me very effective. Yet it also has almost never been seen, so in the end I suppose this makes it a failure. The good news is it hasn’t dated much, so perhaps it will enjoy a potent afterlife when no longer linked to the still-developing myth of its creator.

Kalpana

British Film Institute

12 October 2013

Tiny excerpt from the film. From here.

An important rediscovered Indian film, which seems an ambitious failure on first viewing.

Indian films are in thrall to money and so harming the nation, says Uday when one of his lovers suggests he make a film of his life to raise money for his hard-pressed revolutionary cultural centre. He will never make a film, he says.

There are two ironies here. The intended irony is that he does make a film, and it’s the 1948 film we’re watching. The unintended irony is that his prediction that he is unsuited to making a commercial film is proved correct.

Uday Shankar – older brother of Ravi – clearly did not suffer from false modesty. He wrote, directed, designed, choreographed and starred in this idealised autobiography, in which his vision is presented as being vital for the cultural revival of all India, if only people would listen and support him.

His character has no head for money, but by the end of the film has succeeded in raising enormous funds for his cultural centre through a Spring Festival promoting the regional dances of India.

In reality, the cultural centre closed through lack of funds, and this film wasn’t a success either. Still, it is explicitly a fantasy, and a very charming one, so we can easily forgive this optimistic rewriting of history.

I’ve no idea how closely this film maps its creators actual biography, and whether this matters. One striking difference between the two Udays is that the film character seems not to have left India, whereas the director became a celebrated choreographer in Europe.

This is important, because one aspect of the film is its celebration of India, of Uday’s attempt to help forge a unified national identity. The film teeters on the brink of didacticism, keen to show us that differences of gender, class and caste don’t matter (and in that order).

It helps that the film has a light touch – at one point the royal audience for the festival believes it is watching African dancing. It is informed this is actually from the Naxalite region of their massive country. It’s a deft satire.

The film is surprisingly quiet about religion; to my ignorant eye Shankar seems to assume everyone is Hindu. But it didn’t seem very prominent; at other moments he appears antagonistic to religion generally.

This is an enormously ambitious work, with the idealised cultural centre attempting to revolutionise almost every aspect of human life through a greater respect for India’s heritage. The films many dance sequences are Shankar's attempt to fulfil this project, which requires India to become united and to awaken to the heritage that can transform the world.

The framing narrative is around Uday’s two lovers, one of whom is the director’s wife in ‘reality’. They oppose each other, and are perhaps best described as two sides of a single woman, in best expressionistic fashion. Shankar's direction also draws upon the expressionistic silent films of the 1920s, with exaggerated facial poses.

Unfortunately the framing device is too slender to support quite so many dances, and I found the experience increasingly dull. Repeated viewings may improve my appreciation for what is intended to be a compendium as much as a drama.

Starred Up

Odeon West End

11 October 2013

The trailer. From here.

Ignore the happy(ish) ending and this prison tragedy has much to recommend it.

At least we’re not in a US prison, opines one character here during his regular group therapy session, as they all have sex with each other. Sexual violence is mercifully one aspect of violence not depicted in this prison drama.

It’s plenty violent enough. It seems to take only a few minutes for new inmate Eric, a teenager moved to the prison after proving too aggressive for juvenile detention, to be involved in a murderous fight with the guards. The threatening mood is unrelenting.

Film – cinema or TV – is peculiarly well suited to prison drama, because it conveys a sense of actually being there that no other medium can match. Cinema is particularly effective, as the isolation we feel in a darkened auditorium heightens the impact.

Prison dramas can go at least two ways. They can choose to highlight the desolation of a long period in prison, the hopelessness. Or they can focus on the idea that a community of aggressive criminals is likely to be itself extremely volatile. The latter path would seem incompatible with suggesting the boredom of prison life, as violence, even implicit violence, is exciting, in some cases fatally so.

Redemption, or its possibility, is another feature of the genre, and it appears here. It’s the leaven in an otherwise unpalatably heavy bread, and as with other necessary features of an artform, whether it works must be judged case-by-case.

In this film it comes through group therapy, and the group’s support role for Eric, who seems to have received no support from anywhere else, especially his parents. The subtlest parts of this piece are these scenes, where violence is slowly, extremely slowly, brought under some kind of control.

Of course, there are other ways a convict can get support, and Eric is introduced to the organised crime side of prison by his father, who is implausibly a fellow convict (I don’t mean its implausible he is a convict but rather that they would end up in the same prison).

Unfortunately, despite some committed acting, the father-son dynamic greatly weakens the film. The plot turns melodramatic at the end, and at the very end becomes a version of the ‘I love you dad’ films so popular in US cinema.

The father, it should go without saying, is a 'hardened criminal'. I’m not sure repairing the father-son relationship in such circumstances is as much a sign of progress for Eric as the film-makers seem to think. Perhaps they want us to be ambivalent over the ending?

Almost every prison drama contributes to the important, thankless and depressingly unending cause of justice system reform. Such things as group therapy should hardly need defending, but it seems they do. If the film was going to defend it, some dramatic tension was needed, and that is provided by the father.

Given that unpromising artistic constraint, necessary for its broader political point, this film could have been a lot worse. The ending is a betrayal: this is really a tragedy with an almost literal deus ex machina, a throwback to earlier centuries.

There's a high standard of acting, from the central cast through to smaller speaking roles. The directing was unobtrusive, and served the story well.