Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

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Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan

Turkey, 2011

Cornerhouse, 26 March 2012

This is a film whose meandering, digressive style creates a sense of abundant life, teeming being.

We are in the closing stages of a police investigation: a man has confessed – whether correctly or not – to murder and now it’s a matter of locating the body of the victim.  In the dark of the night, the search proves to be none too successful and so prosecutor, police and perpetrator repair to a nearby village for refreshments and rest.

What s the film about?  Well, there’s the portrait of modernTurkey, a country at once Asian and aspirant European.  The contrast between city and village is made plain.  There is the concern with truth – the facts of the case – and in the end a refusal to look too deeply.  Put it down to a dizzying nausea brought on by a night of sifting through the stuff of others’ souls.  Ultimately, that’s what the film leaves you with: a compassionate letting be.

RNCM Big Band with Clare Teal

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Chasing Cars, Choro Dancado, Clare Teal, Minuano, RNCM Big Band, Too Darn Hot

RNCM Big Band with Clare Teal

RNCM Theatre, 28 March 2012

It’s big and it’s a band and it breathes fire.

The fire-breathing feats of the RNCM Big Band were most pronounced during the epic tunes on show tonight – Minuano and Choro Dancado – but were evident too when Clare Teal sang the appropriately-titled Too Darn Hot and a slue of other classic songs.

Clare Teal was on top form, performing a diverse programme ranging from Cheek to Cheek to Van Morrison’s Bright Side of the Road to Get Happy, ending at the last with Snow Patrol’s Chasing Cars.  Her easy-going repartee smoothed things along pleasantly between songs.  She’s a game girl.

RNCM Big Band perform next with Bob Mintzer on 7 July, details here.  Watch out and beware: here be a dragon.

Carancho (The Vulture)

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Carancho, David Goodis, Jim Thompson, Pablo Trapero, Ricardo Darín, The Vulture

Carancho (The Vulture)

Pablo Trapero

Argentina, 2010

Cornerhouse, 24 March 2012

It’s a typical noir tale.

On falling for a girl, a guy looks at his life and wants to make it better.  Love will do that to you.  Anyway, he decides that her love deserves more than what he is: an ambulance chaser, a dodgy lawyer.  She’s in a noble profession, a doctor working in A and E, and she could never ever, or so he feels, love him simply as he is, warts and all.  No, she is too pure and perfect for that.  Even though when he goes down on her on their first date, she seems to like it a lot.

So the dodgy lawyer (the brilliant Ricardo Darin) decides to become a good man: a fine notion.  But in doing so he thereby threatens the livelihood of his similarly dodgy, not to say violent colleagues.  And so they act (and attack) to protect their interests.  Naturally.

And another thing: the doctor, working long hours in A and E, has been taking drugs in order to function, I’m guessing amphetamines.  She’s got a bit of a dependency.

The upshot is that this great love, a catalyst that he (they?) believed could transform everything, becomes mired in the messiness of contemporary urban life.  You have two fallible people bonded by a fragile love, running scared, making a bid for freedom.

As a noir experience, it is a terrific film, well worthy of David Goodis, Jim Thompson, one of those guys.  Imagine The Getaway without the happy ending.  That’s how it crashes out.

Entity

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Entity, Random Dance

Entity

Random Dance

The Lowry, 27 March 2012

Photo by Ravi Deepres

Very beautiful, very intriguing and not a little perplexing: that would be my judgement.

And the prowess of the dancers is little short of miraculous.

There’s something about the very nature of modern dance that tends towards abstraction.  Here the title and the nature of the onstage video (a greyhound, some scientific images of what might be microbes, a stream of data… ) give you some clue as to narrative (are you seeing incidents from the battle for survival of an exotic life form?) but they are suggestions rather than constraints on meaning.  Dance can only evoke; imagination and memory are needed to give it meaning.

Despite the perlexity, it was a wonderful experience.  Now when have I said that before?

In Darkness

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Agnieszka Holland, In Darkness, Kinga Preis, Robert Wieckiewicz

In Darkness

Directed by Agnieszka Holland

Canada, 2011

Cornerhouse, 24 March 2012

It’s an impressive film, presenting an uncontrived and unsentimental account of an act of heroism in Lvov during World War Two.

Leopold Socha, a plumber, agrees to shelter various Jewish families who are seeking to evade deportation to the camps.  He shelters them in the sewerage canals below the city, which he knows like the back of his hand, for money.  Yet when the money runs out, he continues to help them.

What’s admirable about the film is the way in which Leopold gradually, and almost against his will, begins to act heroically.  Then suddenly he’s a hero.  The Jews are depicted as actively resisting the Nazis, rather than as passive victims, which also makes a welcome change.  And the full horror of the Nazi occupation, its penchant for ruthless and systematic violence, is brought home.  This is effectively contrasted with the fallible yet warm relationship between Leopold (Robert Wieckiewicz ) and his wife Wanda (Kinga Preis).

A fine film made without schmaltz.

George Frideric Handel’s Xerxes

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Aimee Toshney, Eleanor Garside, George Frideric Handel, Handel, Hanna-Liisa Kirchin, Sophie Goldrick, Xerxes

Xerxes

Music by George Frideric Handel

RNCM Theatre, 25 March 2012

From left to right: Aimee Toshney (Romilda), Sophie Goldrick (Arsamene), Hanna-Liisa Kirchin (Xerxes) and Lucilla Graham (Amastre). Photo: Victoria Haydn

This is a gorgeous production of Handel’s little-known opera about the loves of the ancient Persian king.

In real life he seems to have been – if Herodotus is to be believed – ever so slightly off his rocker.  Here he’s your typical romantic hero, though perhaps more headstrong and arrogant than most.

The music is wonderful – all very jolly and jaunty, in Handel’s best style – and the three principal characters – Xerxes (Hanna-Liisa Kirchin), Arsamene (Sophie Goldrick) and Romilda (Aimee Toshney) – are given enough arias to make their feelings known.  It’s an absolute pleasure, all the singing.  Sets and costumes were resplendent, especially the dresses; they were like shimmering sunlit-clouds: fluffy, frothy and floating.

And as a cherry on top there was Eleanor Garside’s performance as Atalante, a girl who lands on her feet at the end, free to flirt another day.  Garside makes of Atalante a fine comic creation, a young woman who treats love as an amusing game, and you don’t get many of those in your average opera.  Off she goes fluttering her fan, indefatigable.

Xerxes is showing again tonight and then later in the month on the 29 and 31 March, further details are here.

The Last Waltz

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Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, I Shall Be Released, Martin Scorsese, Neil Young, Richard Manuel, Stage Fright, The Band, The Last Waltz, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Weight, Van Morrison

The Last Waltz

Directed by Martin Scorsese

USA, 1978

Cornerhouse, 25 March 2012

Martin Scorsese’s film has become an important document of record, marking the moment and capturing the concert when The Band decided to renounce the open road.

They perform a bunch of their own songs (Stage Fright, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, The Weight… ) and are also joined onstage by various rock ’n’ roll luminaries such as Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Van Morrison and above all Bob Dylan.

It is fitting that Dylan’s I Shall Be Released should end the concert – and that for a fair few reasons.  The song came out of the period that gave rise to The Basement Tapes, perhaps Dylan and The Band’s most creative collaboration.  As interest in the music made during this time has grown (thanks to Greil Marcus and others) so too has the importance of Scorsese’s film.

Scorsese comes across as a fan, though not always a knowledgeable one.  There’s a naivety or a fake naivety about some of his questions.  However, his interviews with The Band’s members are illuminating more often than not, Robbie Robertson being especially articulate and forthcoming.

If you want to understand American music of the ‘60s and ‘70s – or rock ‘n’ roll itself, come to that – you must see this film.  You must see it even if the scenes featuring Richard Manuel – knowing as we do his fate – are now kind of heart-breaking.  It’s showing again as a Matinee Classic on Wednesday, details here.

Calefax @ the RNCM

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Alban Wesly, Bach, basset horn, bassoon, Calefax, clarinet, Debussy, Goldberg Variations, Jelte Althuis, Michelangelo Rossi and Shostakovich, Nina Simone, oboe, reed quintet, RNCM, saxophone

Calefax

RNCM Concert Hall, 22 March 2012

 

Calefax. Photo by Oliver Boekhoorn

 

This was quite an eye-opener all around – or whatever the aural equivalent might be – as well as being a pleasurable concert in itself.

They’re a reed quintet, Calefax are, and they seem on this showing to specialise in arrangements of music originally written for strings, perhaps piano especially.

The highlight of the concert, amongst works by Debussy, Michelangelo Rossi and Shostakovich (and a Nina Simone song ‘For All We Know’ played as an encore), was the performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

At first you smile with something like indulgence, especially as you hear the bassoon (Alban Wesly) and the basset horn (Jelte Althuis) take the reins, playing music originally written for the harpsichord.  But this smile soon becomes one of delight, almost childish delight, blossoming quickly into unbridled enthusiasm and admiration.  The other instruments represented were saxophone, clarinet and oboe and the way they worked in combination and unison with the richer tones of the other two was simply wonderful. 

What about ear-enhancer as an aural equivalent of eye-opener?

Anyway, this concert made for an enjoyable, an educational and even an edifying experience.  It was wonderful, quite wonderful.

Calefax have a website, which includes tour dates and everything, here.

Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!

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Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!, Tchaikovsky

Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker!

Music by Tchaikovsky

New Adventures

The Lowry, 20 March 2012

The whole of this show – the complete shebang – is an exercise in enchantment.

It begins with the still alive and kicking orphans shuffling bashfully onstage, into the glare of a waiting audience, surprise etched on their faces, and ends in a nightclub whose entrance is an inviting, open mouth (think of Mick Jagger’s lips) and whose interior is graced by a gigantic wedding cake.  It is the figures on the tiers of the cake below the bride and groom who come alive: a telling detail.

Among them there’s a lounge lizard with a pompadour that is topped by – what else? – a cherry and a lady in a liquorice allsorts dress (the doorman to the night club might also have been dressed as one of the less popular liquorice allsorts).  And there’re a gang of sweet girls on the razz.

Wherever you look, whether at the choreography or costumes or sets, your eye encounters delight.  The highlight for me was when the ginger boy toy – he’s a catalyst for intimacy – came to life, in a scene that alludes to both Frankenstein and Coppelia.

What makes the show work so well is that it retains the fairytale feel while adding a definite air of eroticism, a subdued kinkiness or naughtiness.  So there’s one lad – one of the poor, betrodden orphans – who rather than a deflated football prefers a doll for Christmas, liking nothing better than to look up her dress…  Or again, in the second part, the emphasis is on kissing and, lets say, the sweetness of human flesh rather than sweets per se (as in the traditional version of the ballet) – though liquorice allsorts, as indicated, do get a major look in.  All of this naughtiness is done with subtle humour, mind, and in the twinkling of an eye.  Young children are unlikely to take much heed of it and there’s much – an abundance of stuff, actually – in this show to enchant and delight them.  So unlike Matthew Bourne’s Cinderella, I’d definitely recommend Nutcracker! as being suitable for children.  This was a magical, transporting evening, a wonderful version of the story.

Matthew Bourne’s Nutcracker! Is at The Lowry until 24 March, details here.

La Mirada invisible

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Diego Lerman, If..., Julieta Zylberberg, La Mirada invisible, Lindsay Anderson, The Invisible Eye

La Mirada invisible (The Invisible Eye)

Directed by Diego Lerman

Argentina, 2010

Cornerhouse, 17 March 2012

Lerman’s film is an involving drama – and while a political allegory can be found if you go looking for it, it’s not intrusively pushed.

It’s set in an exclusive school during the last years of the Argentine dictatorship.  The pupils are strictly disciplined and monitored, force-fed tales of Argentina’s glorious history, controlled with an iron rod.  We follow a sexually repressed teacher who’s especially attracted to one of her pupils.  Off her own bat, she decides to take the art of surveillance to a whole new level.  But the eye can be seduced by what it surveys.

There’s a splendid central performance by Julieta Zylberberg as the teacher in question.  Her portrait of a conflicted, erotically wounded woman is quite simply wonderful.  The nature of her affliction means that she’s not quite on the side of the status quo, not entirely at ease with her pupils, nor at ease within her own skin.

As a depiction of the collapse of order, the film will, rightly, evoke comparisons with Lindsay Anderson’s classic If…  This impressive film is, however, told from the oppressor’s viewpoint.