bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1986) — Spring/Summer 1986 // Printemps/Été 1986, p. 36
Brief Encounter… Morgen In Alabama… Sugarbaby.
The Ploughman’s Lunch. .. Colonel Redl …
One noteworthy omission from “Sixty Reasons Why Ottawa is so Awesome”, found in the current issue of Chatelaine, is the Towne Cinema. Of Ottawa’s two repertory cinemas, the Towne is the one where I am more frequently to be found. The Mayfair tends to show movies made during the past five years – Hitchcock and Woody Allen festivals excepted — and the audience is, on the whole, less forgiving than that of the Towne. Their tolerance would have been stretched to the snapping point at the most recent screening of Brief Encounter at the Towne in January. The poor copy of the film which flickered along, coupled with a sound track which was barely sufficient for the dialogue but not at all for Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, should have emptied the cinema. Yet we remained, enthralled by this “oldie” adapted from the Coward play “Still Life” and starring Celia Johnson as the happily married woman attracted to a doctor, played movingly by Trevor Howard, whom she gets to know on her weekly shopping trips to the local town. The secret of its spell some 40 years on is probably that its theme — marital infidelity, and the inevitable tragedy which is still, for the majority, a return to normal life — is timeless. The film was not popular when it was released at the end of the war; perhaps it hit too many raw nerves, but it subsequently became accepted as a classic, due, no doubt, to Celia Johnson’s heartrending portrayal of a woman experiencing passion for the first time.
The Towne’s bi-monthly program always contains a good mix and generally includes a film which would otherwise not be released in Ottawa at all. A case in point is Morgen in Alabama or, by its English title, Man Under Suspicion, starring Maximillian Schell in his first German-speaking role in 25 years. Its disturbing theme is the predominance of right-wing extremism among the youth of Germany. It poses, but cannot answer, that most tricky of legal questions of how to bring a man to trial when there is no precise definition of his crime nor conclusive proof as to how it was perpetrated. Yet extremism is spreading and with it terrorism – today in Germany, tomorrow in Alabama.. • A thought-provoking film with a fine performance from Maximillian Schell.
Whereas Man Under Suspicion ran for only three days over a weeend, a longer run was afforded Sugarbaby, also from Germany. An erotic, lighthearted romp starring Marianne Sagebrecht as the elephantine heroine and Eisi Gulp as the subway driver whom she goes to ingenious lengths to entrap. By day she lays out corpses in a funeral parlour: by night she gorges on cookies in front of the television. That is until one day on the subway she hears a voice exhorting passengers to “mind the doors” and falls immediately, emphatically in love. She buys herself a new wardrobe and takes a holiday from work in order that not a minute be lost that could be devoted to the pursuit of Sugarbaby. Yet for all its lightheartedness, there is an element of sadness and poignancy in this modern day tale of beauty and the beast, which is shot in impressionistic neon colour that adds a delicate dreamlike quality to the film, as if we were seeing it through rose-tinted spectacles.
The Ploughman’s Lunch was first shown in Ottawa at a film festival, but received its first commercial screening at the Towne in March. This is one of the early Goldcrest low budget movies set in the time of the Falklands war and stars Jonathan Pryce, Tim Curry and Rosemary Harris. Pryce plays Penfield, a news editor with B.B.C. radio. A worthless creature whose formula for life is to latch on to whatever opinion or trend may help him to get on. Thus he glibly changes his tenuously held political affiliations when it suits him, closes his eyes to a colleague’s need for sympathy and denies the existence of his parents for fear that he should, on some future occasion, be required to produce them to Susie Bannister, played by Charlie Dore, whom he is pursuing and to whom, he fears, they would not be acceptable. The film constitutes a censure of Mrs. Thatcher’s Britain portrayed as a place where individual shallowness and corruption may not amount to much, but when taken as a whole reveal a society which is degenerating. Penfield is, of course, doomed. He never really gains the acceptance he seeks within the milieu of his upper-class friends, who are merely amusing themselves with him.
There are times when a film is released that for one reason or another you allow to go by, or you feel after a month or so that it needs a second viewing. Into the second category fell Colonel Redl which I first saw in the fall and took in again at the Towne in March. Inspired by John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me, directed by Istan Szabo and starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, it is set in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and traces the career of a peasant boy through the military academy to his rise to eminence. He is befriended by an aristocrat who, together with his sister, becomes the focus of his emotional needs. Yet these needs are, for the most part, subjugated to his unstinting, unquestioning service to the fatherland which takes on the magnitude almost of a debt of honour. As Redl progresses in seniority, so does his confidence. This growth is skillfully developed by Brandauer throughout the film but is pinpointed in three diatribes on matters of discipline or strategy delivered by Colonel Redl to his peers and subordinates at certain stages of his career. From the first tentative delivery to the final his downfall; in his fervent wish to serve the Archduke he unwittingly puts himself forward as the scapegoat he has been seeking. The final chilling moments when Redl finds himself bereft of the strengths he possessed as a leader when required to take the honourable course are some of the most moving I have experienced. Masterly filmmaking, an absolute must.
It was not until after Ran, Akira Kurosawa’s adaptation of King Lear, had completed its Ottawa run that I felt inclined to see it. Itend to resist movies made in a language of which I understand not a word Ran means chaos in Japanese and Kurosawa confronts us with the chaos which follows when Hidetora divides his Kingdom among his sons, effectively depriving himself of a place to live. But you know the story: Kurosawa has made of it a remarkable and spectacular film differing from the play in many particulars, yet the core of the plot remains. It is totally absorbing and enthralling. As our senses seem irrevocably battered by the bloody seige of Hidetora’s castle with its horrific scenes of carnage, the camera moves to the battlefield and the tempo changes. The purpose of the charging troops seems curiously muted as the pace of the film changes; their bright uniforms of red and yellow are veiled by swirls of smoke from the burning castle, their arrows, although ultimately finding their mark, swish and wing balletically across the screen allowing us a moment of detachment. Sequences such as these punctuate the film. Kurosawa’s view of chaos is universal whereas Shakespeare saw it in the more human terms of nemesis and filial ingratitude. There are fine performances from Hidetora, his sons and Meiko Harada as Lady Kaede, the wife of Hidetora’s eldest son — a character owing more to Lady Macbeth than either Goneril or Regan – but memorable for me will be the performance of the fool, played by a Japanese pop star — an inspired piece of casting. And where did I see it? At the Mayfair.
The Ploughman’s Lunch, Sugarbaby and Ran can all be seen at the Towne Cinema during the summer months.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1986) — Spring/Summer 1986 // Printemps/Été 1986, p. 36. Read the rest of this issue →
