#WTW: Phantom of the Paradise

(#WhatThomWatched spooky-scary #23)

Phantom of the Paradise

(1974, Brian De Palma; Shout! Factory disk)

By rights, Brian De Palma’s horror/comedy/musical should be at least as famous as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was gestating at the same time, but Phantom of the Paradise was plagued by horrible luck when it opened in 1974. As detailed in the 2006 French documentary Paradise Regained (included on the recent Scream Factory release), the film was hit with no fewer than four lawsuits in the days just after post-production wrapped, seriously hampering its release: Universal called the film an infringement on the Lon Chaney Phantom of the Opera from 1925; King Features sued as the owners of the comic book character “The Phantom”; the manager of a rock frontman who had been tragically electrocuted onstage in a manner uncomfortably close to a comic death in the film sued for defamation (not named in the docu, but most likely Peter Grant, manager of Stone the Crows guitarist Les Harvey, killed in 1972); and, most damaging to to De Palma’s intricately crafted production design, Led Zeppelin. Their record label had just been registered as “Swan Song Records,” and their manager (Peter Grant again) didn’t like the use of “Swan Song Enterprises” as the name of the fictional company in the movie, run by the evil impresario played by Paul Williams. The filmmakers were forced to use very obvious optical mattes to cover up names and logos throughout the movie, ruining many scenes; other shots had to be cut entirely. The title had to be changed (from the original’s simple Phantom) and all the artwork and promotional materials redesigned. And then the premiere was an unexpected disaster — the audience just didn’t get it. (Except, oddly, in Winnipeg, which is still the center for Phantom phandom worldwide.)*

Phantom’s ambitious story combines several classic psychological horror plots: in addition to the Gaston Leroux serial from 1909-1910 in which a deformed and frustrated artist haunts the venue where he was ruined, lusting after the pure woman who is his last connection to humanity, the movie also loops in the Faust story and Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Williams makes for a singularly seductive Mephistopheles, from his purring voice to his affected dress; he’s smartly cast to set his diminutive size and seeming harmlessness against his all-powerful, all-seeing evil; his henchman played by George Memmoli is huge in contrast to Williams. William Finley as (first) the hapless and goofy songwriter taken advantage of by Williams, and (later) as the mangled and tortured monster again bested by Williams, is beautiful to watch, with so much of his performance in his carriage and the one visible eye through his mask; in one nicely underplayed gag, all of the door frames in both Williams’s mansion and studio are 5” 6’ to accommodate him, forcing Finley to grotesquely contort his body to get through them. The ingenue and Finley’s obsession is played by Jessica Harper, who projects wholesomeness and likability even as she proves to be just as ambitious as both Finley and Williams. Finally, four key musical frontmen play the contract employees of Williams’s conglomerate who are tasked with delivering his music to the masses, packaged and repackaged to fit the latest trend: Archie Hahn, Jeffery Comanor, and Peter Elbling front doo-wop band The Juicy Fruits, surfer band The Beach Bums, and shock-rockers The Undeads in turn, with Gerrit Graham added to the final band as the lead singer intended to carry the Faust role written by Finley (and which he’d intended for Harper). The changing bands, cynically sold as the next hot thing, are a powerful conceit, explicitly accusing mass media and mass entertainment in the grinding down of art and artists, while implicitly criticizing the (teenage?) audience that drives the evil empire with their undiscerning consumption. (There’s some suspicion in the documentary material on this disk that this theme wasn’t understood by the distribution people at Fox, who tried to sell the movie to the same teens that were being satirized, with mixed results.)

The De Palma hallmarks are all there — fully developed, in a surprisingly early entry in his oeuvre. It has his Hitchcock homage, an attack in a shower a la Psycho. It has his split-screen, here serving a truly tense scene: two angles on the same band rehearsal allow unsuspecting dancers and musicians to run into a time bomb that’s been planted in a rolling prop car, with the cameras following each as the car comes closer and closer together and eventually (after several minutes, during which the bomb’s ticking is heard throughout) reaches them just at the moment of mayhem. Another De Palma specialty is shown off in the long final scene, the Williams-Harper wedding sequence. Using the experience he’d gained with documentary-style continuous shooting for Dionysus in ’69, De Palma put all of the cameramen in costume as members of William’s ubiquitous press photographers. De Palma’s choreographers-cum-crowd-wranglers were tasked with organizing the scene’s overall action: the primary actors had lines, blocking, and marks to hit; other actors had specific bits of business they had to fit in; the remaining extras mostly had to stay out of the way. Then the entire sequence was filmed in one go, with everything taking place in real time pretty much as it does in the final film. De Palma had to trust that he would have enough varied footage to cut together to tell his story; the end result (reportedly from only two takes) feels “real” in a sort of hyped-up, media-exaggerated way — furthering the overall theme of corporations manufacturing and selling packaged, inartistic experiences.

Reminds me of:

Rocky Horror, obviously . . . . I love The Rocky Horror Picture Show as much as the next seventies kids, but Phantom has far more going on than Richard O’Brien’s goof on RKO B-pictures ever did. Rocky gets its shocks (and, frankly, most of its value) from transgression and its twisted one-to-one cooption of each beat from square, classic horror movies; that’s made clear from its first scene (listing the science fiction and horror films it will cite) to last (where the RKO logo is literally the portal back to the alien world). There’s no real social satire in Rocky beyond its minimal critique of the “straight world” suburbia of Denton contrasted with the freaks and the freak nature that apparently exists in everyone. The joys of Rocky really surface when the movie is beside-the-point, just a canvas for a communal experience where theatergoers yell and dance and throw things at the screen. Phantom, in contrast, actually rewards close watching; like all De Palma films, it’s a beautiful object which opens up to reveal hidden themes and ideas.

Of course both Rocky and Phantom have great music. Williams’s songs and score are just perfect; it’s a bonus that several of the numbers are intended to mimic and poke fun at certain popular rock styles to be sung by the three iterations of Swan Enterprises' house musicians reconstituted as 1950’s greasers, 1960’s surf dudes, and 1970’s shock rockers (like Alice Cooper). Every time Williams composed for the the screen, he turned out exceptional work: The Muppet Movie, the “intentionally bad” songs for the songwriters in Ishtar, Bugsy Malone (which has subsequently been turned into a stage musical), A Star is Born. I wish he’d been given as many chances over the years to score films as the (admittedly also awesome) Randy Newman. (Interestingly, given this movie’s plot point of a composer creating “the first rock version of ‘Faust,’” Newman wrote his own (not very successful) Faust in the mid-1990’s; I have the concept album.)

The sequence of the bomb being placed in a prop car trunk is a clear echo of Welles’s famous opening shot for Touch of Evil, where the camera follows a bomb-laden car through a border crossing in continuous real-time; the double-framing is almost a one-upmanship in terms of technical prowess. It’s not as beautiful as some of his other split-screen work (I’m very partial to images in Blow Out) but it is chillingly functional. I’m sure De Palma put in a zillion more directorial homages beyond Hitchcock and Welles; I’m too dense to find them, but I’ll say (betraying my personal obsessions again) that the ever-present cameras and Williams’s console of spying video screens reminds me of Dr. Mabuse in general and specifically of my favorite, Lang’s The 1,000 Eyes of Dr. Mabuse.

But then — the guilt!

This movie has plenty of recognizable character actors and repeat De Palma performers, but I was particularly bothered by Archie Hahn, one of the three contract musicians and the lead singer of the first number, the Juicy Fruits’ “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye” — he felt so familiar to me, like an old friend you recognize at a party and just can’t place. I looked at his long credits list in IMDb for a while before it came to me: He has that literally-five-seconds-long role in This is Spinal Tap as the hotel employee delivering room service to the band, with the absolutely perfect line delivery: “Thank God! Civilization!!”

Watching Paul Williams’s performance and listening to his songs, and then seeing him on this disk’s extras (in particular a long interview conducted by his friend, director Guillermo Del Toro) reminded me yet again of the apparently superlative 2011 documentary about Williams’s career and fight with drug addiction, Paul Williams Still Alive. It’s on my neverending list of films to see, and now it bumps up a notch or two.

Actor William Finley thinks that the Phantom costume he helped design — full-head mask, black leather body, cape — was ripped off for Darth Vader in Star Wars VI: A New Hope, specifically the blue-and-red light-up pushbuttons on the chest. This is in the BTTG section and not the RMO section because, full admission: I would never have noticed this.

Pitch:

I think that you are either grabbed by the very first moments — the Juicy Fruits singing their 1950’s pastiche — or you aren’t. All of the show’s humor and appeal is right there. Or if you’re more of an old-school horror aficionado, the sequence where Finley is transformed into the monster is perfect — genuinely disturbing yet still funny and a clear connection to the horror films of the past.

* Pencils down for me: Now that I’m done writing this #WTW (and you, theoretically, are done reading it), it’s time to really dig deep into Phantom of the Paradise by exploring every corner of The Swan Archives. This tribute site is one of the best I’ve ever seen on the web — beautifully written and designed — and while it helped me avoid some obvious mistakes here, I promised myself that I wouldn’t indulge in their scene-by-scene visual analysis, their extensive production and release history, or their long list of artifacts and collectibles until after I’d posted my own hastily considered points, lest I outright steal their work. They carried the torch for Phantom for such a long time — becoming the official owners of the film’s outtakes and other cut scenes — that when it came time for Arrow Films and Shout! Factory to create these definitive editions in 2014, it was this site (the “Principal Archivist”) who provided all these extras to the two companies. It’s a master class in how fandom should work. Please go there now!

<< Zéro de conduite (-) The Pit and the Pendulum >>

#WTW: Zéro de conduite

(#WhatThomWatched nombre de vingt-deux)

Zéro de conduite

(1934, Jean Vigo; Criterion spine #578, from The Complete Jean Vigo)

Vigo is so original, so startling, so compelling that he’s rarely been bettered. This no-budget film, shaky and smoky and as often out-of-focus as in-, with inexplicable cuts and dummies — actual, obvious dummies! — standing in for extras he could not afford or be bothered to secure, is still the ultimate expression of the nihilistic anarchy of childhood, the heartlessness and anger inherent in a child’s situation: completely powerless against adults and against society in general. Everyone who made a film about kids since him can only imitate Vigo. And make no mistake — this is hard stuff to imitate, because in Zéro de conduite Vigo throws out all pretense at realism at every turn. A schoolteacher’s cartoon doodle animates on the page as his colleague stares at it, turning from a rude caricature into an appropriately “academic” textbook illustration. Kids show off their crudest jokes and tricks to one another — balloons under the shirt to imitate what can here be only appropriately referred to as “boobies,” pillow fights and food fights, nose flutes and cigars and sleight-of hand — but they can just as easily perform Georges Méliès-level camera magic for each other, like the class clown who makes a soccer ball disappear for his fellows via a camera cut. The boys are often out of control, pure id, in classroom scenes where each one is moving independently or in the celebrated dorm scene where feathers from the pillows fill the air; this is difficult to rectify with any kind of reality. But the adults are equally over-the-top, from the weird teacher who lurks around the classroom when the kids are out, pawing through their belongings and stealing bites of their lunches, to the much weirder teacher who sniffs a tube of airplane glue right in front of the students.

For a film usually described as episodic there’s actually a very coherent story: Boys return via train to their boarding school, which is staffed by an array of horrible authority figures plus one humanistic teacher who is clearly just one of them, older without having crossed over into adulthood. Cassat and Bruel bond first and are clearly the troublemaker-ringleader types; they find and bring into their circle two boys who need looking out for (Colin, the slight and sad son of the school cook; and the effeminate “sissy” Tabard). Bruel and Tabard have an obvious crush on each other; the school authorities pick up on this and choose to torment Tabard as the weakest. But emboldened by their friends, both Colin and Tabard get their moment to stand up to authority. By the end, the all-important “Commendation Day” celebration (to which important military and clergymen have been invited) is destroyed by the four boys, pelting the crowd with garbage from above, waving a skull-and-crossbones flag, and running off over the rooftops. The planning for this act of anarchy has been seen throughout the film in schoolyard meetings; the boys very deliberately incapacitate and tie up their room monitor before marching off in parade formation. But narrative only goes so far; the fact that there’s no logical tie between this scene and the school celebration the next day (at which the other boys are shown serving the guests, and the conspirators are on the roof) tips the film back into pure fantasy.

There are so many elements here that must have been much harder to shoot than they seem. The child actors, especially en masse, rarely seem to be consciously acting; they look as hard to control in real life as they are scripted to be in the classroom. The dorm room has a ceiling — we are very deliberately shown the ceiling in the first shots of it. So when the camera is roving above the boys, like a god looking down on them and the dorm master in their beds . . . it’s technically thrilling. There are also many long master shots that contain loads of characterizing action; there couldn’t have been funds to do many takes of these.

Vigo was an avowed anarchist. There are obvious anarchist themes built into the film and its form, not just in the story: cuts directly in the frame, the mentioned use of dummies and camera tricks, lack of narrative logic. The film was never publicly exhibited during Vigo’s short life. Instead it was immediately banned outright due to nudity, homosexual content, disrespect of the army, disrespect of the church, and all-around disrespect of (adult!) authority. Vigo got to make one more film, his only full-length, from someone else’s script, the equally astonishing L’Atalante, during which he died at age 29. He wasn’t really discovered for another decade or two, until after the war. His influence since then has been staggering.

Reminds me of:

There are obvious connections here to other films about youth, most clearly in The 400 Blows which lifts the entire sequence of the boys running off during a school excursion, including the camera angles. In my memory, though, the Truffaut version is scored with twee music and suffused with starry-eyed nostalgia; I so much prefer this original version. (I could be 100% wrong about this; the next time I watch 400 Blows (and write a #WTW about it, obviously) I’ll come back here with a footnote if I’m being unfair.) Jean Dasté as the young-in-spirit teacher is so terribly irresponsible here that the whole boys-running-off narrative is raised to a higher level. Dasté doesn’t just lose the kids; he first leads them in pursuit of a woman and later stops off for a drink before they find and rejoin him completely on their own initiative. (Years ago when I first saw Zéro I hadn’t seen L’Atalante; Dasté’s huge and immediate appeal here easily carries over to his young barge captain there.)

Again, obviously, any of the great school rebellion stories connects here, most notably Lindsay Anderson’s If… and Malcolm McDowell’s indelible performance as Mick, winding up on the roof of the boarding school he attends — in his case, with a machine gun, openly murdering the adult authorities. Maybe I’m wrong that there are a host of such movies; maybe I just attribute the “boarding school” narrative (along with sadistic teachers and homosexual encounters) to British books and films in an unfair and clichéd way. But what about the Jack Nicholson-directed Drive, He Said from 1971? That ends with a school rout, too, in that case a release of animals from an experimental laboratory. Or is there a connection to Heathers and its apocalyptic ending, with the high school utterly destroyed?

And does anyone doubt that Wes Anderson took his signature slow-motion scenes (generally one per movie) from Zéro? Or from, simultaneously, this and Scorsese, who in turn took his signature slow-motion scenes from Zéro? Interestingly for such an early masterpiece, their filmic connection to the past is an echo of Vigo himself, who has Dasté demonstrate his light-heartedness by having him imitate Charlie Chaplin. Movies need other movies for reference, right from the very beginning.

So here’s my only thought that might not be obvious: Animal House. Apart from the fantastic casting, one of the aspects of John Landis’s 1978 film that came in for repeated positive comment at the time is the unconventional ending: the heroes of the film can’t succeed at school (in classes, as a fraternity, or socially), so instead they destroy their enemies by sabotaging the town-wide parade. It’s not a huge leap to imagine the Deltas as the next progressive step from the boys in Zéro, unable to win on society’s terms, they anarchistically destroy it. Animal House has to make its antagonists slightly more realistic — no professor sniffs glue in class (though Donald Sutherland’s seductive prof certainly does the equivalent off hours!) — but by the parade set piece at the end, the movie has similarly fantastical elements (Kevin Bacon crushed flat like a cartoon; band instruments crumpling like tin foil against a brick wall). I know a hundred critics cited Warner Brothers animation as a precursor for Animal House, or the once-removed work of directors like former animator Frank Tashlin, but the actions of the protagonists seem more akin to Vigo. Of course at the end of Zéro Vigo can’t give us any real sense of a future hope for the boys — they are so young, after all, and completely out of control of their fate. The slightly older men in Animal House have made it to college and then blown up their futures — but here, on the cusp of their adulthoods, Landis can end the film with a glimpse of each of their destinies. The put-upon anarchists wind up inheriting the earth, of course, with their future adult selves becoming senators and successes, while their tormentors are appropriately punished for their assholery. It’s hard not to imagine that Vigo would have been delighted with Landis’s film.

But then — the guilt!

I knew as soon as I’d finished watching L’Atalante that I wanted Vigo to be the first repeat director in my #WTW experiment — then I wound up watching Winterbottom’s two The Trip films first. I think I fairly nullified that by bundling them up as one piece, though. (Winterbottom might still win out as the second repeat director to be watched — I’ve had a hankering to rewatch 24 Hour Party People for a while now.)

Pitch:

I can’t get over the bizarre vignette in Cassat’s house, during the school break section (when we also see Colin’s home life). He’s clearly hanging out with a girlfriend, in his sitting room, with at least one adult present (behind the newspaper). But what exactly are they doing? We cut into the middle of some kind of game they’re playing, with her hanging a lantern on a wire. After blindfolding him. And flashing her underwear at us, the audience. The scene is suffused with details that would make Freud quietly lay down his pipe and slink out of the room. We already have a sense of Cassat as a confident and appealing personality; this very short scene adds immeasurably to his characterization. Even as I marvel at how well I feel I know Cassat and the other boys, I have no idea how Vigo possibly could have come up with a scene like this. It’s magic.

<< The Trip / The Trip to Italy (-) Phantom of the Paradise >>

#WTW: The Trip; The Trip to Italy

(#WhatThomWatched number twenty-one, or, how you say, il numero ventuno)

The Trip and The Trip to Italy

(2010/2014, Michael Winterbottom; Streaming via Netflix)

It’s not a particularly original or internet-shaking insight to observe that genius, groundbreaking actor/comedian/writer/chameleon Steve Coogan does not get enough love, especially in the United States. Considering that he often plays characters very like himself, and sometimes “himself” as one or more variant characters, and that these variant Steve Coogans are very vocal about the lack of Coogan appreciation, a lack of recognition is built into many of his performances. While his long string of innovative BBC radio and television programs and his recurring characters started this — notably Alan Partridge in The Day Today, Knowing Me Knowing You, and I’m Alan Partridge — his long partnership with director Michael Winterbottom on films like Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story and The Look of Love has added to the complexity. Coogan’s varied projects demonstrate both his ability to completely disappear into character (Coogan’s Run, Dr. Terrible’s House of Horrible), play “himself” (Tristram Shandy and the Trip movies), or both (24 Hour Party People, where he expertly becomes rock promoter Tony Wilson, but not before an opening scene where he addresses the camera to explain that he’s an actor, Steve Coogan, playing Wilson.)

Winterbottom and Coogan clearly sit round the pub plotting new ways to mess with the fourth wall. In that spirit, they started a BBC2 series in 2010, purportedly a straight-up celebrity-hosted lifestyle show, in which Coogan and British standup comic Rob Brydon drive together in a rental, stay in beautiful towns in England and Europe, and eat and drink at fine restaurants, supposedly as guest reporters for The Observer checking out the wine, dining, and accommodations. But of course we don’t get the real Coogan and Brydon; instead, Coogan plays a bitter, conceited actor and Brydon his put-upon comedian pal. Or not; as Brydon puts it when asked if the two are friends: “No. We work together.”

The original television series (in which they travel to England’s North Country) comprised six 30-minute episodes; in 2014 a second series (a road trip in Italy) added six more. In each case, Winterbottom also shaped the material into an under-two-hour theatrical movie, with the six “days” of each trip signified by title cards. The two men are seen driving a rental car together, checking into inns (at which Coogan is always angling for the better room), eating a meal prepared by their host’s kitchen, and, at the end of each day, falling asleep in their beds, sometimes alone, sometimes with a companion. They also sample many of the towns’ local culture, most often the graves of famous British writers (Italy is the resting place for Shelley) and the towns where they worked (Lord Byron lived in Italy for most of his working life). Stunning, large-scale shots of landscapes and intricate close-ups of food preparation round out the movies’ visuals; the soundtracks are exclusively classical, with new music by Michael Nyman or (in Italy) classic works by Strauss or Mahler.

So with this as their basis, the two compilation movies stand or fall on a couple of things: First, to what degree Winterbottom shaped the television episodes’ looser material into an arc that carries weight — emotional or thematic, since there’s very little narrative to work with. And, of course, how funny the conversation is between the two rivals.

Brydon is a very successful comic within Britain, a regular on the talk-show circuit, with an endless stream of impressions (here he’s particularly locked on Michael Caine and Sean Connery). He has a famous bit called “Small Man in a Box” which causes old ladies to approach him on the street for autographs. The Brydon-character here is portrayed as a man aware of his limitations and unsure of his ability to carry a real acting role; when he is given a chance to put an audition on tape for a possible character role in an American movie, he worries that he’s unable to actually act without slipping into an impersonation. Coogan is fully tuned in to Brydon’s insecurity and pokes at him every chance he gets; the Coogan-character considers himself a true actor who has done exemplary work in both British and American movies but who is constantly denied the fame he deserves. He never fails to put Brydon down and sneer at Brydon’s constant, reflexive efforts to be funny — except, in a brilliant repeated conceit, Coogan can’t stop himself from competing with Brydon. Watching the two of them trying to school the other in an impression is hysterical; a lengthy scene where they try to fine-tune the classic James Bond supervillain Blofeld is incredible (and has its own following as a YouTube clip): “Come come, Mr. Bond . . . .”

As for Coogan, where Brydon can’t turn off the hail-fellow-well-met entertainer, Coogan is the perpetual autodidact, spouting endless facts about everything they encounter, and correcting any offering from Brydon or anyone else. The highlight of Trip is his encounter with another traveller doing the same thing; after Coogan has annoyed Brydon to the point where he’s been left to stomp off alone, he is forced to back away himself as a stranger tries to regale him with more facts about history. Both men also have a series of dreams (Coogan’s in Trip; Brydon’s in Italy) that reinforce their insecurities; Coogan dreams of having Ben Stiller as an agent, telling him all of the top-ranked American directors who are desperate to work with him; when Coogan rejects “P. T. Anderson, Wes Anderson” as “auteurs,” dream-Stiller smoothly slips to mainstream directors: “The Scotts. Tony and Ridley. They both want to work with you.” Meanwhile, Brydon has a dream of performing a dramatic role in a Godfather-esque film with perfect pathos and delivery; as his dream-self mutters over how to say a line in Italian, we see that he’s gutted Coogan as Vito Corleone.

A question of the travellers’ authenticity hangs over most of their experiences. Lots of the dinner scenes feature their frozen, polite stares as a waiter explains the dishes that have been prepared for them, followed by an awkward “Thanks!”; they don’t seem to have any qualifications to judge the wines or cuisine. They clearly crave connection to the historical sites they visit, usually to the great English authors; they carry around a thick compilation of Wordsworth and (at one point) are reading William Hazlitt’s capsule biographies (from the 1800’s) of writers, “The Spirit of the Age.” But as with so many of us today, they mostly settle for cell-phone selfies in front of various graves or preserved garrets. In addition to endless fights about actors, they spend a large part of Italy discussing the artistic and lasting merits of Alanis Morissette’s “Jagged Little Pill” (coincidentally relevant at this writing, as the album reaches the 20th anniversary of its release). At the same time that they are creating these ersatz portraits and pop-culture theories, Winterbottom sometimes seems to ironically compose them or their surroundings in ways that mirror artworks, without their conscious acknowledgement.

Reminds me of:

The Trip films are “long-form conversation movies” like My Dinner With Andre or the Before trilogy; or Certified Copy (which also happens to share a lot of the visual grammar! though instead of geography as a map of a marriage, here the vistas, bedrooms, and graveyards seem more tied to aging and a loss of male potency).

Distinct from the two-handed dialogue these are also road-trip films, of which there have certainly been many: I haven’t seen Il Sorpasso yet, but the ones I’ve watched involve couples squabbling their way to love (It Happened One Night, The Sure Thing) or couples falling out of love (Two For the Road) or weirdoes finding common ground (Melvin and Howard, Thelma and Louise). As for the Trip version, I don’t think there are better examples of a realistic (read: antagonistic) male friendship. There’s nary a hint of “bromance”; maybe this level of unpleasantness and mistreatment of each other is exactly right as a depiction of performer coworkers. They’ve passed any need for affirmations or close inquiry; instead of affection the proof of their connectedness is their deep need to make the other laugh. This happens on occasion but at regular intervals; after affecting stone-faced disapproval for most of the other’s forays, broken often by attempts to top or outfox them, they suddenly slip into a bit that they have discovered together like old comedy partners. When this happens the mutual approval is palpable; instead of one-upmanship, they are supporting each other’s best efforts.

But then — the guilt!

Still haven’t watched Coogan’s Saxondale. I own it, though.

Pitch:

Both films choose to end on melancholy notes; the first narrative hangs on Coogan’s loneliness and unhappiness and winds up with a perfect coda between Brydon and his baby daughter, with his wife, in their kitchen. So the second is particularly heartbreaking as Brydon seems to have used the out-of-country trip as an opportunity to drift into an affair; as he worries about what he might have lost, he is watching Coogan reconnect with his teenage son. Yet in fact all of these details — the wife, baby, son, and all other relationships — are scripted, played by actors, and are in no way related to the real Brydon or Coogan. That’s the deep game that Winterbottom and his collaborators are playing.

<< The Day the Earth Stood Still (-) Zéro de conduite >>