Once Upon a Time… A Clockwork Orange

Once Upon a Time… A Clockwork Orange

Directed by Antoine de Gaudemar

France, 2011

Cornerhouse, 27 June 2012

Quite an interesting documentary, focusing on Stanley Kubrick’s cult film and on the director’s own unique approach to cinema.

Interviews with Malcolm McDowell, the star of the film, Kubrick’s widow and colleagues, as well as Anthony Burgess, the author of the novel, grace the film.  Various cultural commentators also chip in.

Kubrick’s work was characterised by constant experiment and innovation and A Clockwork Orange, conceived as a prophetic film, seems strikingly inventive and transgressive even today.

Élisabeth Roudinesco, author of Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion (reviewed here), was in the cultural commentators’ camp.  An admirer of the film, she stressed its ambivalence and refusal to simplify.

By the end, you have an appetite to seek out the film and read Burgess’s book, so the documentary can be said to have done its job.

The film is showing as part of the Anthony Burgess and Cinema season.

Café Müller by Pina Bausch

Café Müller

By Pina Bausch

L’Arche Editeur, September 2010

ISBN: 9782851817273

Café Müller was created and first performed in 1978, thirty four years ago: a fair distance in time.  It still lives.

This film of the dance (or the psychodrama, which may be a better description) was made in May 1985 at the Opera house in Wuppertal, then broadcast on German TV in December of that year.  Pina Bausch directed the film and she’s on stage here too, taking the same role that she took in the original production, some seven years before.

It begins with a lone woman dressed in an ethereal gown, edging into a cluttered room.  There is very little space.  Chairs are strewn around and she bumps into them: perhaps she is blind?  To avoid obstacles, to stay safe from pain, she keeps to the wall, clinging to the margins.  The woman is played by Pina Bausch.

Another woman, similarly dressed, enters the room shortly thereafter and goes towards the chairs, which are (most of the time) cleared out of her way by a man.  He watches over and makes a path for her, but he can become impatient with her fumbling. There’s an edge, a possibility of violence or desertion.

You could view the women as two halves of the same whole, or perhaps they represent two choices (to put it starkly, Yes or No) towards life, the world, love, intimacy…

One scene haunts the mind, still.  A man holds a woman in his arms then drops her, whether through tiredness, carelessness or cruelty.  At once she gets up and clings to him.  Again he holds her, lifts her up into his arms but drops her.  And again, after she falls, she stands up and clings to him.  It is cruel, funny, pathetic, indescribably sad – all these at once.  The cycle goes on for so long that eventually you pray for it to end, as all the while Purcell’s mournful aria (‘Remember me, but oh forget my fate!’) drives despairingly on.

Herve Guibert wrote of Café Müller that it leaves you ‘with the heart wounded and bandaged, bathed in an emanation of tears’, which is one way of putting it.  In the same review (it is one of six articles in the booklet that accompanies the DVD) he goes on to explain:

It is not Pina Bausch who wounds the heart; it was already hurt, but the wound had been forgotten, written off as foolish, romantic or narcissistic, and Pina Bausch, through the bodies of her dancers, reminds us of the reality and the vitality of that wound.  (77)

Of course, viewing Café Müller on DVD can never be the same as seeing it live on stage: your eye is curtailed, there are things you cannot see.  Even so, in this form it still has the power to move and one advantage is that there’s time to reflect on its rich meanings.

The publisher’s description of the DVD and booklet can be read here.

Where Do We Go Now?

Where Do We Go Now?

Directed by Nadine Labaki

Lebanon, 2011

Cornerhouse, 26 June 2012

The smouldering beauty of Nadine Labaki is a captivating presence in this agreeable comedy, which is set in a Lebanese village.

No blonde Ukrainian showgirl can touch her tenebrous fire, though a bevy of such beauties are bussed in to keep the men’s minds free of sectarian bickering.  Those girls are helpful but not entirely successful, and eventually some special-recipe baklava is called into service…

For entertainment and diversion, the film scores highly; but its main premise cannot stand too close an examination.  Why are these saintly women so free of sectarian prejudice and religious hatred, while the men are so prone to it?  Better by far to just enjoy the range and variety of comic incident, not least a crazy scene where the Madonna is seen to weep blood.  While the predominant tone is light and comic, it can also become flighty, polemical, angry, raging… a good film.

The Girl I Left Behind Me

The Girl I Left Behind Me

By Jessica Walker and Neil Bartlett

Opera North

The Lowry, 24 June 2012

In this show Jessica Walker performed various songs, taken mainly from the realms of music hall and vaudeville.  All were originally sung by women impersonating men.

When singing, Walker took on the character of each song’s protagonist, whether it was Burlington Bertie, down-at-heel but intent on keeping up appearances; or the young toff out on a night on the town, ‘Following in Father’s Footsteps’; or an old man recounting the tale of his lost love.  What incredible songs they were, they really held up well, and what dazzling performances!

As for the narrative that linked these songs together (a story of repressed and persecuted sexuality) it was contrived and less than convincing.  There was a definite air of preaching to the converted.  Yes, some of these women were no doubt gay and identified with men.  Yet for others dressing up as a man was simply an act that worked and a job that paid.  It drew in the crowds.

Be that as it may, Jessica Walker was wonderful, even more extraordinary than the women whom she represented: for she didn’t merely impersonate one man, but several.

Further details regarding The Girl I Left Behind Me can be read here.

Prazak Quartet @ the RNCM

Prazak Quartet

RNCM Concert Hall, 18 June 2012

They were very unassuming and very, very good, this Czech quartet.

The secret, it seems, is teamwork – they play well together, have an excellent mutual understanding.  Well, the Prazak Quartet has been going for 40 years, so perhaps that’s only to be expected.

Mozart opened the concert, Dvorak closed it, and in between there was a piece by Zemlinsky.

Zemlinsky was a surprise, but a welcome one.  For a long time rather neglected, he was a curiously untimely composer, a high romantic who lived during the age of modernism.  Certainly, this sublime performance of his String Quartet No 1 in A major piqued my interest no end.

Overall, the concert was like playing through a score of Vlastimil Hort’s strategic masterpieces, that’s how well these four fellows performed.

The Prazak Quartet have a website, which includes tour dates and everything, here.

Starlight Express

Starlight Express

Lyrics by Richard Stilgoe

Music by Andrew Lloyd-Webber

The Lowry, 20 June 2012

Puzzling and perplexing, that’s the provisional judgement regarding this curious musical beast.

Lets try to work it out, the gender landscape at least.  Men are train engines and can be powered by steam, diesel and even electricity (though it has to be said that the masculinity and sexuality of the electric train is called into question since he’s ‘OK with AC/DC’); women are carriages or, when they’re especially appetizing, buffet cars.  They attach themselves to, or are ‘coupled with’ engines: that’s the only way they can move forward.  Now, doesn’t it already sound despicable?

Anyway, the engines race each other for the right to take certain carriages, that’s the story: who will win the race?  It’s a kind of courtship ritual and has most likely been going on since Stephenson’s day.

There’s also a Starlight Express entity that the engines appeal to when things don’t go their way.  They don’t pray to it exactly, because there’s no element of propitiation.  There’s instead an infantile wish or appeal, such as savages make when scrabbling about in the dirt.  At first ‘Starlight Express’ sounds like a metaphor for God, an heavenly engine of some sort, but then we learn that it’s ‘within’ – well, of course it is.  Narcissism, hippie style, fits in with the reactionary politics.

Where the show is not confused and idiotic, it is suspect.  However, one good feature was the dexterity and skill exhibited by the skaters.  Here the standard was very high.

Starlight Express is at The Lowry until 30 June, details here.

A Royal Affair

A Royal Affair 

Directed by Nikolaj Arcel

Denmark, 2012

Cornerhouse, 18 June 2012

Thought provoking drama, flawless acting and beautifully composed cinematography – this is a very fine film indeed.

It tells the story of how an Enlightenment intellectual befriended the King of Denmark and his queen, thereby changing that nation’s social policies and, ultimately, the nature of its politics.

There is a love triangle, a genuine one, and plenty of political intrigue but what’s remarkable about the film is the way in which it conveys the conflict between the liberal policies of a disciple of Voltaire and the vested interests of the church and the nobility.  Doctor Struensee (Mads Mikkelsen) is a physician in the mould of Semmelweis, as well as being a liberal reformer, and that’s what gives him his authority.

The film is not without its cruel and poignant ironies, especially in the final moments, where the man who had battled and argued hard for the people’s rights is met by a baying mob.

This is the best film of the year so far.

Swinging at the Cotton Club

Swinging at the Cotton Club

The Lowry, 15 June 2012

This was an assured, immensely entertaining show, full of undulating song and fantastic dance.

Most songs were jazz standards, with a few blues and show-tunes added to the mix.  Some dances were lindy hop, others tap, and even the Charleston got a look in.  Not a Sambola in sight, though.  That dance craze has not yet caught on or been reprised, despite its recommendation by the blonde one (Greta Gerwig) in Damsels in Distress.

It was wonderful, and wholly unexpected, to see that Amy Roberts was one of the members of the Harry Strutters’ Hot Rhythm Orchestra.  Just 18 months ago she was playing in the RNCM Big Band, where she gave Pete Long a run for his money on the clarinet.  Now she’s playing professionally and is well on her way to making a mark.

Cosmopolis

Cosmopolis

Directed by David Cronenberg

Canada, 2012

Cornerhouse, 10 June 2012

Another unsettling film by David Cronenberg, a thriller set in a dystopian future that could soon become our present.

This rich kid, Eric Packer (Robert Pattinson), he is some kind of financial wizard and he wants a haircut.  Golden touch, yeah the lad has got that, but he’s also got debts to pay.

The journey to the barber is constantly interrupted and sidetracked: by the rich kid’s security advisors, the arrival of various members of his deadhead coterie, the anti-capitalist protestors on the street.  They take exception to the stretch-limousine he travels in, for some reason.

It’s a film of ideas as much as anything, the characters spout a bunch of reflections occasioned by the continuing financial crisis (or crises) and patterns and crookedness in nature (Luctretius go there first).  As such, it is fairly faithful to Don DeLillo’s novel.

Pattinson is a surprisingly good lead (I was surprised, anyway) and as an actor here he reminds me very strongly of James Spader.  He’s one of those clean-cut types, yet with a dangerous soup of toxic emotion lurking behind the eyes.

To dabble with the currency markets and the global economy is in a sense to play God, to mess with people’s lives, a world that matters.  Cosmopolis can therefore be construed as a variant of Frankenstein, a film about transgression and slowly unfolding horror.  With this film Cronenberg has come home, or at any rate touched base.

Opera Seria’s Anna Bolena

Anna Bolena

Music by Gaetano Donizetti

Opera Seria

RNCM Theatre, 16 June 2012

This production, the first undertaking of newly formed, Manchester based Opera Seria, must be reckoned a triumph.

Donizetti’s Anna Bolena may seem a strange choice for a debut, but it paid off royally: we got passion, intrigue, violence, despair, everything you’d hope for in an opera.  There were very many beautiful arias, transforming dramatic moments into captivating tableaux.  Virtually every scene was an occasion for song and the singers – all of them – easily held their own.

Versions aplenty of Henry VIII’s character and reign can be found, and you don’t have to buy into the accuracy of the account here to enjoy the opera.  Just surrender to the story and the emotion.

Details of Opera Seria’s future productions can be found here.