Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009)

Like any biopic, or a literary or artistic biography in any medium, Jane Campion’s Bright Star (which depicts the late life of John Keats until his death in 1821, his love affair with Fanny Brawne and her rivalry with Charles Brown, Keats’s close friend, for the poet’s heart and attention) finds itself having to ask a question: where do literary works come from? What was going on when a writer, musician or painter came up with a work of art now familiar to us? And in answering that question, the biographer confronts another problem: do they find their explanations in the everyday life of the poet, in his or her erotic and personal encounters, and so on, thereby risking an occasionally reductive determinism (which accounts for an art-work as the direct and explicit consequence of a particular profession, a particular moment, a particular glimpse of the beloved, and so on), or suggest that the life of their subject is lived every bit as passionately as their art, and thereby slip into fancy and expressionism, obscuring the often laborious processes by which life is turned into art?

The very best biographies have to confront this problem; the solution that Bright Star finds begins with the first shot of the film: a close-up of Brawne’s needlework, a needle passing through cloth. This is an occupation that is portrayed throughout the film, and Campion makes us see an analogy between the two creative professions – Brawne’s needlework and Keats’s poetry. The analogy is complicated by Keats’s insistence that poetry (perhaps unlike Brawne’s more obviously laborious craft) needs to come from feeling or from nowhere at all, but it also calls that claim into question, especially as the scene in which Keats is shown composing ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ in a reverie beneath a tree in his garden is followed by a scene of him and Brown poring over the text of the poem – editing it, putting it into shape. Poems are produced as much by work, the film insists, as by inspiration. In fact, the many scenes showing Keats and Brown in their “poets’ room” both pay tribute to that fact, and satirize the alternative claim made by mere inspiration: for while the film claims that Keats’s best creativity comes from having Brawne near to him, it also debunks the notion that poetry can come from nowhere, from the mere heady atmosphere of reverie.

In other words, Bright Star switches our attention from the creative moment to the products of artistic inspiration and work – books of poetry, written texts. And these written artefacts (poems, letters, books) are treated with reverence, both by their recipients and by the camera, which frames and dwells on them as they are passed from hand to hand, pressed against windows, and so on. This is only true, though, insofar as the same is so of Brawne’s dresses, ribbons, pillowslips. Erotic reverence for these art-works (literary or stitched) is the emotional and cinematographic touchstone of the film, and it is produced at the moments when they are passed from person to person, shared, spoken together or by characters in turn.

Once again, Campion stages a parodic version of this, as Brown delivers rhymes upon a scone to the Irish maid whom he is about to seduce – but at its most reverential, it is a trope that appears again and again (for instance, the pin-prick drawing of a fairy princess made by Brawne next to the bed slept in by Keats: we don’t see the figure, but we see her asking him about it). At moments, it might seem to complicate the politics of the film, and of Keats’s verse. To have the lovers recite alternate stanzas of ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, with its queasy anxiety about the power of mysterious women to suck the life away from unwary men, might seem to diminish or overlook these uncomfortable, or at least ambiguous aspects. But since Campion incorporates this recital into the moment when Keats is bracing himself for his departure from Brawne, a scene in which love, blame and sickness seem to come together, the poem seems to bear the weight of declaration and accusation combined.

Bright Star works, in other words, because it shifts the focus of the film slightly away from Keats, and balances him with Brawne; it shifts its narrative focus away from creative inspiration, onto the poems themselves, as shared by the two lovers – not as metaphors of their love, or as contrived commentary upon it, but as something shared and read together. Fanny Brawne is an essential part of Bright Star, not just because Abbie Cornish’s portrayal is so good, so controlled until her final seizures of grief, but because she allows Campion to reconceive the shape of cinematic biography.

Back to Bond

What does everyone know about James Bond, as played by Daniel Craig? He has 'breathed new life into the character', or however you want to put it, he has given us our thrills and spills back, he has inspired lust and man-lust and a thousand diets and work-outs. And he has identified something unpleasant, thuggish, in the franchise and in the character. I'm not sure how much further he can take this charmless brutalism, or whether, to be honest, I'm really up for any more Bond.

But what I hadn't realised about his films was the way in which they would make me see earlier Bond incarnations with fresh eyes. Not by providing a new model for them, a new standard of technical or athletic excellence against which Sean and Roger and so on would look pale and jowly, but somehow by releasing something nasty in those old films that had been there all along. It was only last night, we were tired and wanted something to watch before going to bed, we put on the video of You Only Live Twice, ready for some good honest fun and jokes about chest-hair and men coming first in Japan - and couldn't believe what we were seeing. All of the charm had gone. We could only see the casual, patronizing misogyny; the glamour of location (all that glamour!) had disappeared and only the racial stereotypes remained. Those things must have been there while we were watching these movies in the past: why did we not see them head on? Why did it take a re-casting of that original to show us what the original was really like?

I still stand by the narratives of these early films. I still think they bring together discovery and adventure in an exciting way. I still think that a Bond who can discover everything from his laptop is not just a 'Bond for the modern age' but a man who no longer has to struggle to find anything out (and what is an adventure story, an adventure narrative, if discovery - discovery of the story - has no danger?). But I don't know whether I'll be watching them again in a hurry.

You've been a long way away

It's been a long time since I was here. I've moved house, changed jobs, and made a solemn resolution to make a go of this. I've seen a lot of films since last time; saw my first Chabrol movies over the holidays, loved Le Boucher, loved La Ceremonie. And I watched There Will be Blood and enjoyed it much more than I thought I might. We also watched Pan's Labyrinth over the weekend, and again had a much better time than we might have done. But I'm going to start by writing about a film that we saw last night, The Wrestler. More anon.

Twelve Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957)

Twelve Angry Men makes me feel great, and I'll gladly watch it again and again until the day I die, but I find myself thinking it more frothy than I used to, a liberal feel-good fantasy movie.

Of course, who doesn't want to feel good about the idea that justice will be done by democracy, that faith in the human individual can overcome the indifference of the institutions of justice, that a good conscience can make a difference even in the most difficult of situations, that twelve men locked in a room will come, after a little shouting and a few tears, to the right decision?

And what, I asked myself as I watched it again last week, and the shot at the start of the film in which the boy's anxious face dissolves into the empty jury room, what if we take the film as a fantasy that justice will be done - on the part of the boy himself as well as for us?

But this strikes me as a really uncinematic film, not just in its theatrical restriction to the jury room (and I was struck on this occasion by the script's continual insistence that we should imagine the scene of crime, and of the witnesses, imagine ourself looking out of the window, hearing the EL Train, and so on. What if the boy did do it, though? What, more importantly, if we were to see him doing it - or, conversely, to see that he didn't do it? How would our faith in the image, or our suspicion of it, react with the questions that we're invited to have about his guilt or his innocence?

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

As the Joker himself (not to mention GWF Hegel) would tell us, every force calls forth a force in opposition, inimical but somehow intrinsic to it. And for all the critical praise and the box-office excitement that this film has produced, it was (inevitably) possible, long before its UK release, to read a website devoted to showing exactly why The Dark Knight sucks. I guess it hardly needs saying that it has a plot full of absurdities, a narrative that replaces tension with contrived thrills, that it's little more than a mechanism designed for the duration of 150 minutes (with its metronomic music, repeated attention to clocks and countdowns, and so on) to reassure its target audience that they won't have to wait more than 90 seconds for another explosion - or perhaps that they can allow themselves 90 seconds' intermission before they need to lift their faces from their iPhones, or from their popcorn.

The first thing to say about this disappointing movie is that Heath Ledger really is rather good, cruel and charismatic, funny without campness. Poor chap. But the second thing is that I just don't understand the origin of the idea that it's a film with any moral or allegorical weight at all. I looked back at the Guardian reviews, expecting to find adulation for its darkness and seriousness, but found Peter Bradshaw describing it as "overlong and overhyped but hugely entertaining", and Philip French cautioning us that "whether such a movie can bear the increasing moral weight imposed upon it is another matter".

So why would I have expected anything else? In spite of its visual phantasmagoria, The Dark Knight strikes me as a vacuous film, a film that ducks out of more or less every opportunity for ethical complexity. Consider its conclusion. We spend the entire film being told that Batman is an outsider, a near image of the Joker (this month's Sight and Sound gives us the perplexing, absurd line that "the one key difference" between Batman and the Joker is that the Joker kills people, and Batman doesn't), feared and ostracized by the people of Gotham. We know that this is the allegorical potential of the Batman character: Batman can show us the objective violence inherent in the system of justice, he can show us the personal consequences for those who act on behalf of the good, his treatment can illustrate the way that the polis rejects its own good. But Batman ends this film as a self-imposed and unquestionably good exile, not an outsider. Even if the Gothamites fear him, we don't. The message of this final moment is not that justice and crime are uncomfortably close to one another, that justice somehow requires and fosters its criminals (and again, it's the Joker who tells us this) - rather, that good men like Batman sometimes have to take a rough deal for the greater good. Batman takes one for the team and runs off into the night.

Consider, too, the bloated Harvey Dent sub-plot, which distends the film long beyond its running time, but which seems to have been inserted to suggest moral ambiguity: doesn't Two-Face show us the cruelty, the arbitrariness of justice, the lawman and the criminal as two sides of the same coin? Well, no. It's a plot that comes out of nowhere. There's no suggestion in the first half of the film that Dent is anything other than a blameless moral crusader. The name 'Two-Face' comes only from the corrupt and resentful cops whose force he has cleaned up as District Attorney. And his moral transformation is accompanied by a comic-book physical transformation (as the website above says, it makes him look like half an alien from Mars Attacks!, not a scarred monster. There's nothing complex about this man, and actually nothing ambiguous at all, either. He's a good guy who turns into a bad guy: he's no longer the man he was.

Consider, finally, the prominent role that Alfred (Michael Caine) and Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman) have in this film. Was there ever a pair of actors who could be chosen to suggest decency, to neutralize any moral ambiguity that Batman's actions might have had?

Even the cityscapes, I came to think, sucked a bit. Nolan says in Sight and Sound that these computer-generated vistas are not just a legitimate resource for a film-maker, but something that a director ought to employ, a technological way of fighting cinema's corner against home entertainment. "It's incumbent on exhibitors but also on film-makers to provide the audience with a reason to leave their homes." And these are spectacular, and in a way I liked the idea that Batman's natural habitat might be not the subterranean Batcave, but the top of the skyscraper: an urban eyrie. But how, if your view of the city is habitually the sweeping panorama, are you going to suggest and portray moral dirtiness and compromise? Even if they're shot at night, these visuals leave us just too far from the streets, marvelling at the spectacle of the city but never seeing it from ground-level, never needing to be afraid of it.

For this film, a C.

Double bills

Pat and I had been talking about double bills the other week, having watched Altman's Short Cuts for the first time in ages. It has such obvious links with Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia - Magnolia always seems much more than a film inspired by Short Cuts, more a remake than a commentary. It's also a film that I've come to know much better than Altman's. And as well as finding that I liked Short Cuts much more when the bravado of Magnolia was less fresh in my mind, it felt obvious that these two films would make a tiresome and very bad double bill - too similar, not enough distance between them for the marriage to be a productive one.

And then this month's edition of Sight and Sound arrived, with a feature on double bills (Iain Sinclair talks about them as an interbreeding, the formation of a composite work), and I thought it might be a nice idea to watch one of the pairs of films that they mention: Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't There. And when Billy Bob Thornton's barber meets a coroner called Didriksen (the name of Barbara Stanwyck's temptress in Double Indemnity) about half way through the latter film, the light came on and the links between them started to flicker away.

The Coens are great pastiche-makers, of course, and their film is completely self-conscious in its pastiche - think of the final scene, in which we see Thornton transcribing his story for a "men's magazine" on the eve of his execution, not just an allusion to (and transformation of) Kind Hearts and Coronets, I thought, but also a tribute to the pulp fiction and cinema that the film mimics so well, and that surrounds Thornton on his desk.


But as we yoked the films together, as it became so obvious exactly what the Coens were pastiching, they pulled apart. And they pulled apart through their central metaphors. Double Indemnity is a film about the insurance system; the corruption of that system motivates all of its characters - the agents and customers of the insurance-game become complicit in its swindles, even as they seem to be pitched against one another. And Walter Neff's tragedy comes from the system itself: even as he imagines that he can play it from the inside, it drags him down, discovers him at the very end, at the moment when we realise that he too has been a passive instrument of an even greater swindle.


The Man Who Wasn't There, though, is a film about consumer culture. Everyone is a consumer, an investor; the film plants us in the affluent homes of the 1940s, post-war middle class, with their driveways and waste-disposal, their aspirations and their failures. Ed Crane is just a barber, but is he also more than a barber? That's the case that his lawyer makes at the end of the film, attempting to get him off the murder charge that he ends up facing. He's an allegory of modern man, says Riedenschneider, a simple little man caught up in a big system. And the film has existential ambitions - or at least Crane does, speaking about his alienation from the world, from the system that he has somehow stepped outside of. But has he? What's he hoping to gain from the $10,000 that he tries to extort? And hasn't his voice-over narrative distanced him from his world from the very beginning (unlike Walter Neff's, which is a way of reliving the squalid events that have landed him in his sorry predicament)?

I enjoyed the Coen film; I think it's beautifully edited, and I think the photography is sumptuous. But I guess I found it just a little uneven in tone, a bit baggy at times. There's a handful of scenes about flying saucers that interrupt the seriousness of the flow of scenes, and just don't seem to belong there; as the Coens overload their movie with references to the paranoias and quirks of 1940s Americana, they distance it in tone from the taughter, meaner Double Indemnity.

Then we watched Pick Up on South Street. Halliwell calls it 'over rich', and I suppose that just about sums it up. A gripping first scene, if obvious (and gross): the picking of a woman's purse in the New York subway as sexual violation. But then you're left with 90 minutes of macho-men, gritting their teeth and spitting as they worry about Commies, just itching to slap a confession, or a hundred dollars or a microfilm, out of one another. This movie had nothing of the qualities of the other two films, but it was amusing to see the neuroses that Wilder may have understood and the Coens may have pastiched, laid bare like that.

Terence Davies, Of Time and the City

I'm not sure how long the trailer will remain here, though there's a rather stylish website here, but I'm feeling really excited about this film.