The title of this biopic should have warned me. The term genius littered the first minutes of this film and regularly reoccurred throughout. The documentary adopted the tired formula of so many others, for example, Hunter S Thompson’s biography released a few years back. The story starts with the early years, homing in on some unusual relationship with the mother, then the instant rise to acclaim where the genius of the artist is most apparent, then their fruition, where in art and life they are temporarily fulfilled, know brief happiness with a woman (as all these geniuses are men) and possibly children, however the destructive, obsessive element of their genius comes back to wreak destruction on both life and, in the end, art. Period footage, either in blurred black and white or bleached colour alternates with contemporary interviews in jarringly sharp focus with a series of talking heads – ex wives and girlfriends and childhood friends make good material. Like Thompson’s biography one or two of these informants stand out for their gentle insights into the subject in question. In this film the son of the woman who lived with Gould for four years brought some unaffected honesty to the story. When there was no period footage, the director made up for it with shots of an actor dressed as Gould walking moodily through Toronto streets at night.
I was pleased when it ended. I learnt a few things about Gould’s chronology but got no insight into what his musical genius really consisted of beyond his good looks and nerve. Would that have been too much to ask?
cinema
Uncle Boonmee
This was the mesmerising film showing at the Arts Picturehouse this afternoon to a not too small audience.
Here should be the official trailer:
Trip to Aarhus for a Confirmation
Today I rode the 180 mile round trip to Aarhus to join Niels in his 13 year old son’s Confirmation. This is a big family event involving a church ceremony followed by a lavish party with speeches and songs – about Albert, his son. It was a real insight into Danish family culture. People were hugely generous and went out of their way to speak English to me.
On the way back I tapped in the wrong address to my GPS. I put in the address I’d just come from instead of the hotel in Odense. As a result I got badly confused and in fact ended up turning into a junction going the wrong way in the traffic. It was a really ragged period of riding – but I made it back in once piece.
Journey detail: 180miles Average speed 55.3mph; max 92.9mph; moving time 3 hours 15 minutes.
The Reader with Kate Winslet
Here is a beautiful for the most part film exploring guilt and shame – and love of course. The guilt and shame is individual, the two leading actors both have shameful secrets, and national in how Germany responds to its Nazi past. Perhaps the film is not entirely sure of its genre. The first half is softly erotic (late fifties period costumes enhance this) and slightly sloppy love story between Michael, a 15 year old boy, and a woman in her 30s who works as a tram conductress, Hannah. Later the atmosphere is unsettled by more serious material and awkward characters that may well be developed more fully in the book that the film is based on. One is the elderly professor of law played by ex-angel, ex-Hitler, Bruno Ganz (one of my favourite actors). It is a strange part that is never properly developed, awkward, perhaps because he raises some awkward questions for his young law students. Likewise the now wealthy concentration camp survivor, living in New York who makes her main appearance near the end of the film. Even the filming now seems very distant from the warm early scenes.
Very moving for me were the moments when our hero Michael in both young and old roles failed to acknowledge his feeling for Hannah, failing to speak up in court when information he had could have been highly influential and failing to meet her in friendship when she is about to be released from prison. Both failures have a catastrophic effect on her. We see him struggle with this sense of guilt and emptiness throughout the older scenes he plays. Most arresting for me were Kate Winseltt’s beautifully shaped – eyebrows
and her slightly cold European manner – both of which seem to remind me of someone.
Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008)
I finally saw this bio directed by Alex Gibney. It has a strange aesthetic – busy backgrounds, constant music track, very ‘live’ looking interviews that all did not make me feel very close to Thompson. However, one or two figures stood out as being very clear and passionate about his role in critical American culture and mourned his demise (by suicide – he shot himself in 2005) on this count. For me the most moving point was a young fellow journalist from Rolling Stone who told us how much America needed a figure like him today and read excerpts from one of his books with tears in his eyes. Thompson’s texts are read by Johnny Depp. Worth seeing to get more informed about this strange figure though not an engaging film in the normal sense.
Import/Export by Ulrich Seidl
A select audience were spread around the seats of Cambridge Picturehouse’s smallest screen (3) often the place for odd ball films or those that attract a minority viewer. I have seen films here with only one other person in the theatre. On Friday night while you could have been out drinking or even watching the latest Coen brothers film, you could have been one of the audience watching Austrian Ulrich Seidl’s latest uncompromising, grim critique of Austrian culture and politics, Import Export. The narrative centres around Pauli, a macho young guy and failed security guard who travels with his unattractive step-father from Austria through Slovakia to Ukraine working for a slot machines company, and a Ukrainian nurse Olga who travels to an unwelcoming Austria to escape grim conditions in an always freezing Ukraine. Of the two, Olga is the more sympathetic. At a moving moment she makes a hurried illicit telephone call from her workplace to her mother and baby daughter and sings the daughter’s favourite song to her, all but breaking down. Pauli moves from being a rather unsympathetic tough waster to someone who develops dignity and resilience, particularly in contrast to his exploitative step father with whom he shares a white van and hotel room (on their trip east) and is forced uncomfortably to watch his degrading exploits with a Ukrainian prostitute. This was far more ‘acted’ and plot driven than the only other Seidl film I’ve seen Mit Verlust ist zu rechnen (1992)… aka Loss Is to Be Expected (International: English title). Actually although this is probably not his intention, he makes beautiful shots from the most inhospitable settings: the camera work, usually locked down – rather like his fellow countryman Michael Haneke, has a certain aesthetic. It is one of the reasons that the films are bearable. In spite of the grim things that surround both lead characters, and as the reviews say, there is a strong humanism in this film and we can’t help but feel that dignity wins out. Is the film a bit over-egged? Possibly. Seidl selects only the grimmest environments to film, then waits till it either rains or snows. The film ends with an elderly inmate of an old-people’s home repeating Tod, Tod (death death) as the film fades to black.