Frances Ha

Frances Ha

Directed by Noah Baumbach

USA, 2012

Cornerhouse, 28 July 2013

Another chick flick, but a good one this time out.

Greta Gerwig is the difference; she co-wrote the film and gives a fine performance in the title role.  Frances is a wannabe dancer looking to find her way in life, forge a career.  She flits from flat to flat, even journeying to Paris with Proust (not Aragon: a significant, symptomatic detail) under her arm.  This flying visit, pretty useless since she doesn’t even go to the Louvre, is the clincher: she needs to get herself sorted.

Anyway, Frances comes out OK in the end and finds a path of her own.  People have been looking out for her, a great discovery.  She won’t have to get married or convert to Catholicism to survive in the world.  And that’s a result in anyone’s book.

The Big Band Divas

The Big Band Divas

Claire Martin and the BBC Big Band

The Bridgewater Hall, 27 July 2013

As big band concerts go, this one was up there with the best.

One after another, Claire Martin performed songs made famous by the likes of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Judy Garland.  She had a smooth, easy delivery, not at all reverential yet not left-field either.  Martin simply, or not so simply, made the songs her own.  On one occasion, it was during the performance of Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin’s ‘The Man that Got Away’, she broke your heart.

However, the band also got plenty of chances to storm out and there was a smorgasbord of stand-out solos on show.  Space was allowed for the flow between voice and music.  A danger with big band music is that sometimes the singer can be drowned out.  That was averted here, due mainly to the ingenious arrangements and the clarity of Martin’s diction and phrasing.

Survivors of the faux exit and encore saw (and heard) Sinatra added to the diva detail.  He was in good company.

Details of further events at the Manchester Jazz Festival can be found here.

Dying

Dying

By Arthur Schnitzler

Translated by Anthea Bell

Cover illustration by Lovis Corinth

Pushkin Press, 2006

ISBN: 9781901285741

A young couple, Marie and Felix, meet in a park in Vienna of a spring evening in May 1890.

They walk to a garden restaurant and, once there, Felix tells Marie that he has less than a year to live, he is dying.  She is uncertain, disbelieving, yet resolves to stick by him to the end.

Their final year together, that’s what Schnitzler’s novella, originally published in 1895, charts: we see the fluctuations in their relationship, each lover’s changing state of mind.  Felix feels on occasion an insidious hope: maybe he’ll turn out to be one of the lucky ones, and survive against all the odds.  Marie loves Felix yet also wants to live; she is drawn towards the light.  Laughter, gaiety, happiness (in short, the world) awaits her.  To Felix, these natural inclinations, and even her vitality and health, gradually come to be seen as a betrayal of trust.  He wants to keep Marie, hold her to an avowal of undying love, her stated desire to share his fate.  He wants to take her with him.

At the end it becomes a bit of a horror-fest, the Gothic atmosphere laid on a bit thick, but it’s a beautiful work of fiction for all that.  An involving, restrained psychological study peppered with startling insights, as for instance when Felix says:

That’s the secret of being alive, and I’ve discovered it: it’s the sense you have of owning everything.  34

Or this unblinking peek at Marie’s thinking:

She no longer shrank from the idea [of Felix’s death], and those treacherous words that made hypocritical pity out of the most dreadful wish of all came to her mind.  “If only he were at peace!”  113

Schnitzler’s prose in Anthea Bell’s luminous translation can best be described as spare and poetic.  Every detail seems not only important but necessary.  There is a precision of scene and expression.  Not a single word is wasted.

Death is absence, Epicurus tells us, but dying, the final loosening of the ties that bind us to this world and the people in it: well, that’s serious stuff, a grand, pitiful arena of human experience.  Schnitzler nailed it.  No buts.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

The World’s End

The World’s End

Directed by Edgar Wright

UK, 2013

Cornerhouse, 21 July 2013

A royally entertaining concoction of comedy, science fiction, buddy-bonding, horror and whatnot, wherein a group of friends revisit the seminal pub crawl of their youth.

Happily, they (or rather one or two of their number) are able to complete the full itinerary this time around.  Gary (leader of the gang, played by Pegg) and his pals provoke an apocalypse and the consequent collapse of civilisation in doing  so, that’s the downside, a less fortunate outcome.  But, WTF.

Roughly and readily, it is Invasion of the Body Snatchers together with slapstick blood and gore and some elegiac stuff about lost adolescence, time spent never to return, friendships forged in youth which flounder on the rocks of adult life.

An unhappy outcome for mankind, but a happy experience for the viewer: this is a hugely enjoyable, obliquely moving film.

crude joy

same mess

dog soul

stone swamp

crude joy

Scarecrow

Scarecrow

Directed by Jerry Schatzberg

USA, 1973

Cornerhouse, 21 July 2013

After this movie is over, long after, it haunts the memory.

Scarecrow and Lion (Hackman and Pacino) meet on the road, where they give each other their respective moniker (there’s the Wizard of Oz allusion to pick up on, naturally) and become partners in a business enterprise.  He, Scarecrow, is looking to set up a car wash, in Pittsburgh of all places.  And maybe he does in the end.

When all’s said and done,  it’s a film about the transformative power of friendship and the enduring promise of America, Hart Crane’s and most likely also Jim Tully’s America, updated to the early 1970s.  Crane’s vision of America as ‘an empire wilderness of freight and rails’ (and throw in there as well: working class bars, roadside cafes & prison farms) – that’s more or less what you get.

An aside: as an oxymoron, ‘empire wilderness’ takes some beating.

Scarecrow, a potent and beautiful film, is showing again on Wednesday as part of the Matinee Classics season.  Further details are here.

Too Clever by Half @ the Royal Exchange Theatre

Too Clever by Half

By Alexandr Ostrovsky

Told by an Idiot

Royal Exchange Theatre, 15 July 2013

Dyfan Dwyfor as Yegor Dimitrich Gloumov in TOO CLEVER BY HALF. Photo – Jonathan Keenan

You are presented with an excess of enjoyments in this riotous production of Ostrovsky’s comedy of manners.

Wherever you look, you are entranced.  This is so whether you focus on the several wonderful individual performances – where Nick Haverson, Lisa Hammond and Debbie Korley just about edged it over the others – or at the many inventive aspects of the staging.  Most striking of all here, perhaps: a brobdingnagian bear with glowing eyes.  Maybe he shared a first name with the author of the forthcoming An Inquiry Into Modes of Existence.  Then again,  maybe not.

The story itself is rather humdrum: a young man on the make, penniless yet shrewd Gloumov (Dyfan Dwyfor), keeps a diary where he records his real thoughts and feelings about the flotsam and jetsam he finds alongside him as he swims towards survival and a hoped-for success.  When the diary is discovered, he comes over all high and mighty, making out that the exposure of hypocrisy was his genuine motive.  It’s OK as a storyline, nothing special, but the theatrical realisation is nothing less than brilliant.  And the choice of music, not least Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones, is inspired.

Too Clever by Half is at the Royal Exchange Theatre until 17 August, further details can be found here.

The Machine

The Machine

By Matt Charman

Campfield Market Hall, 12 July 2013

Hadley Fraser as Garry Kasparov in The Machine. Photo by Helen Maybanks.

Without a doubt, the 1997 match between Kasparov and Deep Blue was a pivotal event in modern chess history.

Before the match few took computers as chess players at all seriously; they were brute calculators, with no positional understanding or feel for the game.  Whereas now, less than twenty years on, the accepted wisdom is that humans would come a poor second; just look at how Michael Adams, England’s top chess player of the last decade or so, was trashed by Hydra in 2005.  For Magnus Carlsen, the current world number one, the computer is an essential training partner; and the same goes for other top players.  You might even say that Carlsen’s whole approach to chess, his very style, has been influenced by the silicon monsters.  His twin strengths are accuracy and relentless pressure: the avoidance and detection of (human) error.

Matt Charman’s play is a fun drama, bringing out all the fractious (and entertaining) shenanigans of the match and also touching on some wider issues.  But some of the chess detail is a little silly.  When Deep Blue plays 6.Re1 in the Lopez, for example, we are told that it’s suddenly playing positional chess, that we’re watching some kind of revolution.  Yet with 6.Re1 the computer is simply copying humans.  It’s a book move that had been played hundreds of thousands of times before.  On the plus side, Hadley Fraser is a convincing Kasparov.

The Machine is showing at the Campfield Market Hall (just off Deansgate) as part of the Manchester International Festival, and it is there until 21 July.  Further details can be found here.

Opera North’s Siegfried

Siegfried

By Richard Wagner

Opera North

The Lowry, 6 July 2013

Now we are given the story of Siegfried, a hero who doesn’t seem to know his own strength.

He is like the Incredible Hulk in that respect; and he also has the Hulk’s innate naivety and the emotional vulnerability that goes along with it.  And the taste of blood gives him superpowers: an ability to understand forest animals and fly with the birds of the wood.  And we’ve yet to consider the powers conferred by the possession of a magical (incisive, thrusting: hey, hey) sword.  Siegfried is the template for any superhero you might think of.

You soon catch on to the convention of the staging here, such as that when the singers face forward they’re looking at each other, and are responding accordingly.  It makes for a spare, pared-back,  compelling telling of Wagner’s great epic, this being the penultimate instalment.  There’s the music, the song and the drama; and nothing else to get in the way.  The old order is in crisis, it’s a colossus that is about to crumble.

This Opera North production does full justice to the grandeur of Wagner’s vision and Siegfried is next showing at Leeds Town Hall on 13 July.  Further details can be found here.

The Old Woman

The Old Woman

By Daniil Kharms

Palace Theatre, 4 July 2013

Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryshnikov in The Old Woman. Photo by Lucie Jansch

Kharms gets the Comeddia dell’Arte treatment, perhaps with a smidgeon of zaum thrown in, courtesy of Robert Wilson.

In the main, it suits: Mikhail Baryshnikov and Willem Dafoe make for a congenial double act, the set and lighting effects are both expressionistic and childlike (a reminder that Kharms was a terrific children’s writer, despite his antipathy toward the little ones), it’s all very jolly yet with an undertone of dread.

There is not much narrative to speak of, but then again there is little to be found in the original inchoate text, which might best be described as an absurdist skit on Crime and Punishment with a vibe of ‘I could, but I choose not to.’  It is a story about lack as much as anything and when Kharms writes of the hallucinations brought on by hunger, he is likely writing from experience: he lived a hand-to-mouth existence and died of starvation in 1942.  Some of Kharms shorter writings, notably ‘Tumbling Old Women’ and the portrait of the red-headed fellow in The Blue Notebook (it’s Entry No. 10), have been incorporated into the performance.  These additions work well.

The Old Woman is showing at the Palace Theatre as part of the Manchester International Festival until 7 July.  Further details can be found here.