Reviews

Cinema's affronts to Emily Bronte are many but two stand out. First came the 1939 Hollywood misreading of Wuthering Heights as a simplistic tear-jerking love story, which the book certainly isn't. Now comes this film "Emily", reinventing the author's life to match a sexualized version of this banal treatment. In reality, both the book and its author are much more complex, representing a far wider range of emotions and ideas.

So, to cleanse my mouth of the bad taste, I shall now go and watch the nuanced and penetrating performance of Chloe Pirrie as Emily Bronte in the very fine film "To Walk Invisible", 2016.

This film could have been great but isn't. It has excellent actors, reasonable character building, good portrayal through actions and expressions of the difficult choices faced by the characters, and also fine cinematography and even a worthy tribute to Eisenstein's Battle on the Ice (from Alexander Nevsky). But in the end it falls victim to pseudo-history too strongly pushed. Being myself a historian, I'll explain.

All history is the historian's imagination based on some facts. The farter away in time the fewer the facts, which are moreover lumbered with layer upon layer of later imaginations. So all we actually know about Arthur is that sometime between the fifth and the eighth centuries a great warrior by that name was already remembered, but who he was, who were his companions, and what he did is the imagination of storytellers and historians from the twelfth century onwards. They derive the details from what they perceive to be his historical context, in most cases anachronistically.

So this film presents a very particular theory, which is tempting but impossible to prove. It places Arthur in the fifth century, when the Roman Empire was disintegrating, various Celtic and Germanic tribes were carving kingdoms for themselves with endless war, and Christianity was competing with entrenched Paganism. This is fine, as long as the authors do not insist that any of this is historical fact, which this film unfortunately does. It would be much better to say: let's imagine Arthur differently from the chivalric and magical inventions of the later Middle Ages. Let's imagine him as a fifth-century professional soldier caught between the Romans, and Celts (Picts, here called Woads) and the Germanic (Saxons).

Another problem is that the script writers do not trust the viewer to understand their imaginary characters through their very eloquent actions and expressions. Therefore they give them a tedious script rife with historical and philosophical explanations, which is totally unnecessary and in places cringeworthy.

Despite all this, I gave the film 8 for the fine performances, moderate and well used CGI, and the courage to confront the long entrenched myth of Camelot and the Round Table.

If you like conspiracy theories about religious people, especially Christians, this is your cup of tea. If you don't believe in such theories, avoid. You will probably find the plot exceptionally tiresome.

Edward Norton is an excellent actor, but this film is living proof that actors should stay on the far side of the fourth wall. This side is too complicated for them.

His attempt at writing/directing seems to me a one-dimensional anti-capitalist manifesto, heavily tinged with woke assumptions. Characters divide simplistically into good and evil. The poor are good simply for being the underdog. I cannot see any other reason for the hero to be afflicted with Tourette Syndrome except to strengthen his underdog credentials. At the other end of this one-dimensional structure, the villainous capitalist has no redeeming features. Even his contributions to the city are mere camouflage for evil intentions. And as in public life, so are the various characters in their private lives.

The real world, which is this side of the fourth wall, is never that simple.

Much has been said about the mixed character of this excellent film as drama cum comedy, delicately balancing a well-explained passion for science with the joys and hardships of everyday life. The main protagonists are of course Pierre and Marie Curie, but a major point of this film seems to me different: it celebrates the secondary characters, themselves unimportant, but without whom the genius pair may not have reached their destiny. These are the uneducated house help who asks the right question at the right time, or the friend who abandons science for patented inventions that eventually help them. But above all Mr. Schutz, a university busybody without scientific achievement, but wise enough to realize the potential of his minions and fighting for them tooth and nail. He is the representative of all the unsung heroes that made the work of Marie and Pierre possible, therefore fully deserving his Prize (les palmes). That this was the intention is evident from the fact that the film is called "The Prize of Mr Schutz" and not the Curie Nobel prize.

The film concerns the making of Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, from the point of view of the librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. It portrays the main events and characters in the opera as a reflection of da Ponte's own life. I don't know if this is true historically, but it doesn't matter. As an artistic proposition, the idea is legitimate.

As a lover of the actual opera, I expected little of this film but was favorably surprised. The film captures the exceptional mixture of drama and frivolity in the opera itself. In an understated manner, it also does justice to the tormented figure of Mozart and his extraordinary mixture of joie de vivre and tragedy.

The photography, dealing with eighteenth-century material from a modern perspective, is simply breathtaking. So is the pace of events, which again is a reflection of the innovations in this respect in the opera itself.

Highly recommended, especially if you love the opera.

I don't think it is Science Fiction, nor an Apocalypse film in the usual sense, nuclear or otherwise. I think it is a psychological drama. As said in my title, I may be very wrong which is why I would appreciate other people's opinions on the argument below.

I think that the key to the film is the last 'scene', or rather the last sequence of stills. For this reason my comments should probably count as a spoiler. So ...

*** SPOILER ***

The last 'scene' returns to the pier (jetee) at Orly. The man stands on one side, and from afar he sees a woman. He begins to approach her, when another man with strange spectacles appears from the side and shoots him. He falls to the ground and dies.

Then you remember that fragments of the same 'scene' occurred also at the very beginning of the film. On these grounds, I understand the film as follows:

The opening and final 'scenes' represent the main plot. It is very simple: a man is shot, falls to the ground, and dies. Everything in-between these 'scenes' is what passes in his mind from the moment of the shot and until he hits the ground, in a way 'his life passes before his eyes' at the moment of death. But this 'life' is composed of different psychological elements: memories, hopes and fears which are privately his, as well as those which come from the collective memory of his generation, the first generation after WW2 and the one whose main fear was a nuclear conflagration.

Both the private and the collective 'memories' mix elements of the past with hopes or fear of the future.

The private ones include a whole romance with the woman he is attempting to approach on the pier, which is what he hopes for rather than what actually happened in the past. This is mixed with pleasant memories of childhood. But there interferes the sinister element of the man who shot him, for reasons unknown, perhaps even unknown to himself. Hence the paranoid thoughts of his blind 'inteogation' and torture, mostly by the same man.

This is mixed with the collective memories, especially war pictures, which are not futuristic but represent rather the near past: the devastation after WW2 and even some pictures reminiscent of the German death camps, superposed on those of the underground corridors. If I am not mistaken, most of these pictures are actual WW2 photos. All this is presented as both memory of the past and fear of the future, in particular a nuclear war. Another collective element is the history of nature and mankind within it, represented by the Trocadero 'scenes'. The Trocadero is after all the Paris ethnography museum. If the last war didn't quite destroy mankind, fears persist that the next one will.

So his own life past and future, mixed with that of his generation past and future, pass desperately before his eyes. Except that there is no future for him. In the end he hits the ground and dies.