45 Years.

Debuting at the 65^th Berlin International Film Festival where it won Charlotte Rampling the Silver Bear for Best Actress and Tom Courtenay a Silver Bear for Best Actor 45 Years (2015) is directed and written by Andrew Haigh based on a short story In Another Country by David Constantine. It tells how something as insignificant as a visit from the postman can alter the perception of happiness between a retired couple that are about to celebrate 45 years of marriage.

Geoff sets out to translate his letter.

A letter arrives in German from the Swiss authorities revealing that the body of Geoff Mercer’s (Courtenay) first love Katya, who plunged to her death on a mountain in 1962 whilst out walking with him, has been found in a snowmelt due to climate change. This starts a serious of emotional forebodings in his wife Kate (Rampling) that threaten to fracture their rather tenuous relationship.

 

Does the Norfolk countryside reflect 45 years of marriage? 

A powerfully devastating drama about how life in a person’s dotage, and one that has relied on a good relationship, even if it’s not quite what it seems, can change, especially when you reach a point in life where it probable better not to think to deeply into that relationship in fear of blemishing 45 years of marriage.

 

The celebration of a long and 'happy' marriage. 

This cracking drama is headed up by very powerful performances from two veterans whose careers go back for over fifty years both of whom are expert at conveying their feelings through looks rather than words. The Director of Photography Loi Crawley, also responsible for the cinematography on Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom (2013), captures the flat and boring Norfolk countryside that probably reflects the true relationship between our two retirees. This is the type of movie that is typically British although it does at times bring to mind the work of filmmaker Francois Ozon and certainly is a film not to be missed by those of you that enjoy a subtle underplayed narrative. 

Our two leads receiving their well deserved Silver Bears in Berlin. 

  

The Sea.

Director:	Stephen Brown
Country:	Ireland, UK
Year:	2013
Running Time:	87 mins
Principle Cast:	Ciaran Hinds	Max Morden
	Charlotte Rampling	Miss Vavasour
	Natascha McElhone	Connie Grace
	Rufus Sewell	Carlo Grace
	Sinead Cusack	Ann Morden

Its not very often your have a Man Booker Prize Winner help introduce the world premiere of a film. John Banville, wrote The Sea in 2005 and adapted it for the big screen producing a script with which our other guest, the director Stephen Brown was to translate onto the big screen and what a good job he made of it.

Man Booker Prize Winner John Banville.

Described as ‘a journey back in time to a summer of turbulent emotions’. The summer in question is the early 1950’s and the place is Co Wexford located in the South East Region of Ireland in fact it was filmed on the same beaches where Spielberg shot Saving Private Ryan. Max Morden, a retired art historian, returns to where he and his family spent their summer holidays to reconcile himself with both the events of his youth, and the recent loss of his beloved wife Ann. He stays in a boarding house that was once the home of the Graces, a family that befriended him during this idyllic youthful period of his life, which in turn awakened his latent sexuality and subsequently involved him in a tragedy that was to have a marked effect on the remainder of his life including taking solace from copious amount of alcohol in an attempt to nullify his bad memories.

Basically Banvilles story is one of age, loneliness and the effect that death of a loved one can have upon a person and the ensuing grief that follows such a tragedy. Brown’s debut feature is a sensitive piece of filmmaking with a small ensemble cast of experienced actors that manage to convey the subtleties of the novel successfully to the big screen.  Ciaran Hinds is especially good with Charlotte Rampling still able to play the femme fatale with her oriental robe and cigarette holder. The film took only 25 days to film and both Stephen Brown and John Banville informed a sell out Filmhouse screening that they were very pleased with the end result as were the appreciative festival audience.

Jeune & jolie (Young & Beautiful) .

It’s strange how a single short scene in a movie can raise that film from being quite good to exceptional. This is exactly what happened in Francois Ozon latest French language offering Jeune & jolie (2013), which was being shown at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre’s Film Club evening, informatively hosted by Brendan Kearney. I won’t spoil your enjoyment of the film by going into detail but just to say the scene involves the ever-attractive Ozon regular Charlotte Rampling.

Brendan introduced the film by telling us that its takes place over the course of a year divided into four seasons from summer to spring each separated by a song by French cultural icon Francoise Hardy the words of which have significance to the narrative. He went on to explain that it’s a story about the loss of innocents, youthful rebellion and coming of age involving a well educated 17 year old girl from a middle class bourgeois family which includes her mother Sylvie (the wonderful Geraldine Paihas), her stepfather Patrick (Frederic Pierrot) and her younger brother Victor (Fantin Ravat).

Is Isabelle falling for Georges?

We first observe Isabelle (played superbly by the face of Yves Saint Laurent perfume the 22 year old Marine Vacth) while on holiday with her family in the South of France its here she looses her virginity to a young German lad. After the holiday we discover that home is a large and comfortable flat in Paris and that she attends a rather elite school where we witness the Rimbaud poem ‘We’re not serious when we are 17’ being discussed. So it comes as a bit of a shock that by the autumn she is selling her body under the working name of Lea to rich middle aged and older men in luxurious hotel rooms for 300 euro’s a time. Other than her younger brother the only person she has anywhere near a relationship with is one of her clients Georges whom she sees quite often. But it’s when Georges dies suddenly from heart attack in the middle of a sex session that Isabelle’s life takes a dramatic turn.

 

Ozon regular Charlotte Rampling plays a small but important part in how the story concludes.

Ozon’s character study never really explains why Isabelle turns to prostitution, It’s obviously not for the money, which she hides in a wardrobe, and it does not appear that she does it for the sexual thrill, which leaves her motivations obscure.  What is clear to this viewer is that she leads a voluntary double life that seems to give her no pleasure and leaves her a rather sad and lonely human being who is unable to connect feelings, emotions, love and sex.  It brings to mind other French film’s that deals with the subject of prostitution Elles (2011) and Luis Bunuel’s Belle de jour (1967) that also deals with a woman’s involved in voluntary prostitution. As I said at the beginning it’s the final scene that raises this film to a different level, a film that divided critics but was very well received at the RBCFT.

I, Anna

Anna Welles is a lonely woman in late middle age, separated from her husband Simon; she works at Peter Jones West End department store as a salesperson and spends her leisure time attending speed-dating events. It's at one of these occasions she meets George Stone and returns with him to his flat in the Barbican. But the evening takes a turn for the worse when Stone assaults her and she, in an attempt to save herself, batters him to death with a heavy sculpture. After a swift departure from the flats she realises that she has left her umbrella in the lift and returns to the building to retrieve it. Coincidently she runs into DCI Bernie Reid who is investigating the murder. It's this meeting that triggers the Detectives fascination with this vulnerable women that eventually leads to his involvement with a murder suspect. 

This British/German co-production, which premiered at 2012 Berlin Film Festival is the directorial feature film debut of Barnaby Southgate who is best known for working in television on such series as Footballers Wives, Bad Girls and Waterloo Road. This modern film noir was also written by Southgate, which he adapted from the New York based novel of the same name by Elsa Lewin. Now set mainly in a timeless London, which is given a similar disaffecting treatment that can be found in Eran Creevy’s Welcome to the Punch (2012). It stars the director’s mother, Charlotte Rampling as the femme fatale Anna with Gabriel Byrne as Bernie Reid.  It’s a psychological thriller about two lonely alienated characters, an isolated policemen and a mysterious women, who, we are led to believe, hide secret dark pasts.

 

Charlotte Rampling.

Gabriel Byrne.

Influenced by the noir relationships found in the French cinema of the 1970’s and 80’s the movies strength is in the elegance of Charlotte Ramplings performance and the atmospheric cinematography of Ben Smithard (My Week with Marilyn 2011, The Damned United 2009) but the problem with the film is that the narrative is obscure, it involves a tragic incident in Anna’s life that’s never fully explained, in fact its rather muddled ending spoils what could have been an excellent underlying study of the fear of solitary old age. 

The Statement.

Norman Jewison's final film of a distinguished career that spanned a 40-year period and included award-winning films like Moonstruck (1987), In the Heat of the Night (1967) and Fiddler on the Roof (1971) was the thriller/drama The Statement (2003). The story is set in the South of France and Paris in the early 1990's and is centred on a former French officer in the pro-Fascist militia that served the Vichy Regime that in turn collaborated with the German occupying forces in France during the Second World War. Pierre Brossard has spent his life in hiding since the end of the war. A devout Catholic, he has evaded capture for 40 years by being given asylum in monasteries and abbeys and protection from corrupt officials in the French government. It becomes pretty obvious that no one is interested in exposing the collaborator until Anne-Marie Levi, a federal judge, and Colonel Roux, a senior French military police investigator, join forces to expose Brossard and the corruption that has protected him and other collaborators now in positions of power. Based on a 1996 novel of the same name by Brian Moore which in turn was inspired by the true story of a real life Vichy French police officer Paul Touvier who was implicated in the execution of seven French Jews.

I can't help but feel that that the movie would have benefited from being filmed in its native tongue and using subtitles. But I'm probably being picky, the calibre of the cast makes this thriller stand out with the likes of Jeremy Northam, Alan Bates, Charlotte Rampling and Ciaran Hinds and great performance’s from Michael Caine as Brossard and Tilda Swinton as Anne-Marie Levi. This diverting and entertaining thriller exposés both Catholic Church and the dark side of French politics.