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Several months ago I watched both Pan’s Labyrinth and Tideland within a few weeks of each other. They have some notable parallels, and are both quite disturbing explorations of the imaginative worlds of children. I meant to write a piece about this, but for various reasons it ended up on the back burner for a long time until I saw an interview with Guillermo del Toro (the director of Pan’s Labyrinth) in a documentary about fantasy writing and films, and it reminded me that I’d never got around to it.

I suspect that one of the reasons I dragged my heels a bit was because I found both films deeply disturbing (in different ways), and rather harrowing to watch. Don’t get me wrong — I think they’re both great films, but they aren’t easy viewing by any means.

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I love Jacques Tati. Almost nothing cheers me up as quickly as watching one of his films, which is odd really, given that Tati was a very visual, physical comedian, and that isn’t normally the kind of thing I enjoy. But I just have to watch a few minutes of Monsieur Hulot walking — leaning forward, as if into a stiff headwind — and I’m in fits of laughter.

I’ve seen ‘Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday’ many times, but recently we’ve rented some of his other films, and watched ‘Playtime’ last night. It wasn’t a success when first released, and eventually bankrupted Tati, because he spent a fortune building what amounted to an entire town for the set. For those reasons, I wasn’t sure that I would enjoy it as much as the other films, but I thought it was wonderful.

Tati films contain very little in the way of plot, but the plot of Playtime — such as it is — concerns the efforts of Monsieur Hulot to meet someone in an enormous modern office block. In this film, as in most of the others, Hulot is a kind of passive entropy generator. The world starts out clean and ordered, but when Hulot comes on the scene he unwittingly sets up a chain of events which result in chaos, by doing nothing more than wandering around in a benevolent but bewildered fashion.

It’s particularly clear in Playtime that this is a good thing: the clean, modern world depicted at the start of the film is sterile and alienating to humans. We see an elderly porter trying to contact the man Hulot has come to meet using a high-tech bank of switches and lights. It takes him several minutes of tentatively pressing buttons (getting incomprehensible patterns of flashing lights and beeps in return) before he actually manages to communicate with a person. The building is so vast and uniform that Hulot gets hopelessly lost within a short while of arriving. Considering it was made in the 60s, Playtime feels like a modern, satirical film about the perils of modern architecture and technology. When things start to unravel later in the film, the world feels like a much warmer and more friendly place, partly because the chaos means that people actually talk to one another.

There are some wonderfully clever visual puns in the film. A group of female American tourists are all wearing floral hats, and at the restaurant, a waiter appears to be watering their hats with champagne. The film is supposed to be set in Paris, but it is so modern and anonymous that it could be anywhere. However, occasionally when characters open the ubiquitous glass doors, they see the Eiffel Tower, or some other landmark reflected in the door. There’s also a brilliant joke about a patent ‘silent’ door, being shown at a kind of Ideal Home Exhibition. For complicated reasons, the Director of the company believes that Hulot is the man who has been rifling through their office doors, and shouts at him for his presumption before flouncing off through his silent door, slamming it — completely noiselessly — behind him. I’m going to have to watch it again soon, because I’m sure that there were probably lots of jokes I missed.

Reading a review in the Guardian of The Golden Compass — the film adaptation of the first part of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials (HDM) trilogy — I was not sure whether to be excited or appalled. I’m a massive fan of Pullman’s work, and HDM is one of my favourite books of all time. Despite ostensibly being books for children, they are as rich, subtle, disturbing, intriguing, exciting, and many-layered as any adult book you are likely to find. Even after reading them twice, there are still aspects I don’t fully understand or that I wonder about, and that’s exactly the way it should be.

ThoughtBadger and I had a brief conversation about this in the comments for my review of the last Harry Potter book, so I know I’m not the only one who feels a certain dread about the films. One of the things which troubled me most about the review by Peter Bradshaw was when he said, “…to this non-Pullman-reader, the claims often made on behalf of his legend about striking a blow for rationalism against religious authoritarianism don’t precisely hold up.” He also describes the film as “deeply conservative”. If they didn’t capture the fierce, rebellious exhortation for everyone to think for themselves, use their own intelligence and live this life, rather than hoping for a life hereafter, then the film will be a terrible failure. It’s true that the books only gradually reveal the full import of what Dust is over the course of the trilogy, rather than at the start, but I hope that they didn’t miss the point completely.

I’m worried about the characterisations, too: according to Peter Bradshaw, Lord Asriel is a “gallant hero”. One of the brilliant things about HDM is that none of the characters are entirely good or evil (or even what they seem at first), but rather real people with complex emotions, personalities and motivations. From the start in the book, Asriel is a very ambiguous character, and far from being a gallant hero. He’s an adventurer, and appears to be on the side of good, but he’s ruthless, arrogant and seemingly out for personal glory. Mrs. Coulter is also not purely evil at all, though she is rather chilling in the first book. From the clips I’ve seen, Lyra (played by Dakota Blue Richards) appears to be rather a delicate, wistful child, which is a million miles away from the way I see Lyra.

At the start of the book, Lyra is a tough, independent tomboy, running over the rooftops of Oxford colleges, and starting fights with local kids. She’s fierce, brave and scruffy, and has a tendency to lie to get her way or to talk up her own achievements. But she is also deeply empathetic to the feelings of those around her, and has a strong sense of natural justice. At one point in the first book, she unselfconsciously puts herself into a situation which horrifies and disgusts the adults around her, purely to provide what comfort she can for a boy in a terrible situation. Iorek Byrnison (the armoured bear) rebukes the adults hanging back where Lyra jumps in, because he shares Lyra’s deep sense of honour and justice, and the importance of keeping one’s word. Throughout the books, the things she has to go through make her more serious, and she loses her innocence. In short she grows up, which is one of the themes of the series — what does it mean to be an adult? Pullman’s thesis (I think) is that the mythical expulsion from the Garden of Eden was the best thing that ever happened to us¹ — that losing our innocence and gaining knowledge about ourselves and the world around us is a precious, important thing, and not something to be mourned.

I could ramble on about HDM for ages. Just the other day, I was thinking about how skilfully and subtly he shows us what it might be like to have a part of your spirit² as a separate, external being. Daemons in HDM are not airy, ghostly things, but warm and solid animal-formed beings. They can speak, and people and their daemons have discussions and even arguments over what is the right thing to do. But a daemon isn’t a kind of magical conscience like Jimminy Cricket; neither a person nor their daemon have all the answers, but they must come to understand the world together through discussion and joint experience. The remarkable thing is that Pullman describes this thing which is very far outside our experience in such a natural and vivid way that you feel rather lonely without a daemon of your own by the end.

The mainstream cinemas around here are pretty dire, so I’d probably wait until this came out on DVD anyway, but if anyone else goes to see the film (particularly anyone who loves the books), I’d be curious to know what you think of it. I might summon up the courage to watch it if it’s not a total travesty.

¹ Since I don’t believe in this, I think of it as a metaphor. ↑

² The closest word I can get to his idea of a daemon, but it’s not quite right. ↑

Nearly a year ago, we watched a film called Capote (IMDB page), which we both enjoyed a lot. Last week, we watched another very similar film about Truman Capote, called Infamous. It made for an interesting comparison. While both films are based on different books (‘Capote’ is based on a book by Gerald Clarke, and ‘Infamous’ on one by George Plimpton), they both document the same event: the research that Capote did for his book ‘In Cold Blood’ about the murder of a family in Kansas.

Both feature excellent leads and supporting actors (Philip Seymour Hoffman in ‘Capote’ and Toby Jones in ‘Infamous’), but the feel and tone of both films is quite different. ‘Capote’ was quite dark, leaving you with the predominant feeling that Truman was a cold manipulator, consuming the story of the two killers to build his literary reputation. In contrast, in ‘Infamous’, Capote came across as a much warmer, more charming and witty person, damaged by his upbringing and finding something of a soulmate in Perry Smith (Daniel Craig). You got glimpses of his coldness every now and then, but those references were much more ambiguous. In ‘Infamous’, Perry becomes enraged after pouring his heart out to Capote, when he finds out he plans to title his book ‘In Cold Blood’, seeing it as a betrayal. Capote tries to persuade him that the title refers in equal measure to the coldness of the authorities, preparing the execute the men in a pre-meditated way that he feels is almost worse than the original crime. But in ‘Capote’, it could equally apply to Truman’s own enterprise of writing about the details of the crime.

‘Infamous’ was released about a year after ‘Capote’, and I can imagine that none of the people involved with it were too pleased about the timing. However, both films work rather well together, showing subtly different aspects of an inherently ambiguous story.

I watched a couple of things yesterday (one a TV documentary and the other a film) which were both — in their different ways — about silence, isolation, and internal mental strength. The coincidence of watching them both in the same night wasn’t planned, but they made a very interesting pair of companion pieces.

The first was a documentary called “Real Men Under Pressure” about saturation divers working on North Sea oil installations on the sea bed. The other was Into Great Silence (Die Große Stille), a film about Carthusian monks in the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. Two more dissimilar subjects, you would think, would be hard to find, but there were a lot of parallels.

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I know that people sometimes don’t notice my reviews over in the sidebar on the right, so I’ll point out that I’m currently raving about Children of Men which we saw last night. It’s definitely one of the best films I’ve seen in a while.

Update 2007-04-23: For those of you who commented here and found that your comments disappeared, do not fear! It seems that having the same url title for this posting and the actual review, I had inadvertantly created some kind of comment worm hole, such that comments posted here ended up attached to the actual review. I’ve changed the url title for this entry now, so hopefully it shouldn’t happen anymore. Many thanks to Brian Tanaka for solving the mystery!

I’ve been meaning to write about a couple of excellent and unusual animated films I’ve seen recently. The first was shown over Christmas, and was a BAFTA-nominated retelling of the story of Peter and the Wolf by a joint UK/Polish team. There’s no dialogue, but it uses Prokofiev’s score for the story, fitting the action in the visuals to the musical themes. It’s hard to say what is so enchanting about it, but the characters are so engaging (Peter in particular) that you’re genuinely upset when the duck gets eaten by the wolf (I know — a spoiler — but I’m assuming that most people already know the story). The film manages to have a dark, contemporary feeling, without losing the timelessness or charm of the original story.

The second animation — The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello — is much more unusual visually speaking, but also features fantastic story-telling. Jasper Morello is a navigator who has lost his professional reputation after a tiny mistake lead to the death of a man. He’s been given another chance to prove himself on an airship voyage to unknown territory. The passenger — a ‘controversial scientist’ — is performing experiments to try to find a cure for the incurable plague which is killing much of the population.

The visual world that Jasper inhabits is a wildly imaginative riff on Victoriana, with gothic touches worthy of Mary Shelley, M. R. James or Conan Doyle. The world is rendered in rich, dark sepia, with etiolated, silhouetted Giacometti-like characters. This darkness makes the occasional splashes of red or orange, or changes of lighting, all the more striking. The technology is Victorian engineering gone mad: there are gears, cogs, steam engines, steel beams, rivets and wrought iron everywhere, and wonderfully excessive ornamentation on every structure. Jasper’s narration sounds like a Victorian gentleman’s journal, and fits well with the visual feel.

The animation is superb, but what holds your attention is the wonderful, old-fashioned story-telling. It feels like someone telling you a gothic horror story (the kind that is enjoyably creepy, rather than terrifying) around a cosy winter fire, and we were gripped by the tale. It was rightly nominated for an Oscar, and is well worth a watch if you can track it down.