Culture Week

This was going to be part of the commentary to the three films I've seen at the Cinema on the Hill, but it had growed into a thread of its own. I'm used to the failure of cinemas to sell me A14 on the grounds that it's on the front row (well duh) but now it's the attempt to pay the right amount of money.

I bought a loyalty card. For a tenner I get two quid off a film (leaving out the 9.20pm Monday £3 showings) for a year - which is frankly ridiculous if not a little embarrassing. I used it for the third and fourth time on Monday to buy a ticket for Coeurs on Monday and Sketches of Frank Gehry on Wednesday. I had to wait because, for some reason, these have to go through the computer, and someone was using the computer in purchasing a CARNET (advance payment tickets) and a ticket. For some reason the cashier was trying to charge him for a CARNET and the ticket, rather than assuming the ticket was one of those he had purchased in advance. His not chip and pin credit card also caused fun and games.

So I get dealt with and get charged £10. That's £4 for Monday and ... hang on. I explain that I'm using the loyalty card for Monday and Wednesday, and so that surely should be £8. Eventually she agrees to take less than the given price.

Fortunately I'd seen the way the wind was blowing and so didn't try to buy a day pass for the Anifest, which, with the best part of two hours to spare before Sketches of Frank Gehry I had time to do. on Wednesday. Just about.

First she gave me a ticket.

For free.

I suggested that I really ought to be paying. Something like £15. And the free ticket was for the post-festival social in the bar.

She called her superior.

They reserved a space for each of the events and then tried to work out how to pay. The supervisor went away to make a phone call. There will be a short break.

I inquired about the state of sales for Punt and Dennis. Three tickets left. Better buy one of those. Can we do it without losing the booking?

H'm....

The supervisor comes back and struggles with the computer. I plead to be allowed to pay them money. She makes another phone call.

I believe I have now reserved a programme for the event, and I hope seats for all the events. I have a bad feeling about this, Toto.


But see Sketches of Frank Gehry

Punt and Dennis have two tickets left.

The happy ending is we timed it exactly right for the bus back.

Alain Resnais, Coeurs

Way back when, Alain Resnais directed two of the art house classics - Hiroshima Mon Amour, a meditation on war and love between he and she, and L'Anée Derniere a Marienbad, the French New Wave at its most Dickian. He's one of those directors who like Truffaut I had assumed had passed on but, like Chabrol and Godard he's still active, if less political.

He's adapting Alan Ayckbourn. Again.

Ayckbourn, former actor (I believe he was in some early Pinter plays) is one of the top three performed British playwrights - along with John Godber and some Brummie - and is notorious for plays in which he gets the middle classes to laugh at themselves, and which are fiendishly well structured: two dinner parties on two nights in two houses performed at the same time, a play which has the offstage events of a simultaneously performed play to which is offstage to that play, a branching play with sixteen possible outcomes... And also a serious side, underlying the comedy. I've been a fan of his stuff, live.

This adaptation of Private Fears in Public Places moves the events from London to a snowy Paris and is an ensemble tale of lovers and potential lovers. Nicole (Laura Morante) is shown round a flat by estate agent Thierry (André Dussollier) as she tries to save her relationship with Dan (Lambert Wilson). Back in the office, Thierry is lent a tape of a religious programme by his co-worker Gaëlle (Isabelle Carré), which turns out to have footage of erotic dancing on the end of the programme, presumably performed by Gaëlle. Meanwhile Dan is drinking in a hotel bar with the barman, Lionel (André Dussollier) and goes on a blind date with Thierry's daughter, Charlotte (Sabine Azéma), and Gaëlle looks after Lionel's sick father.

This is told in what felt like an endless series of short scenes, interspersed with endless snow. There's the sense here than any love is joyless, any sex is empty and sordid. There are moments of comedy but - well, perhaps this is one of Ayckbourn's bleaker plays. The deeply pious Gaëlle turning out to be an erotic dancer was both unconvincing and a cheap, even misogynistic, moment. The hardly seen father felt like it belonged in a sitcom. Thierry being caught watching porn - well, one never wants to think of parents having sexlives, but surely the French are more ... chic?

It's beautifully shot (although I longed for cinematic cuts over theatrical crossfades through snowstorms - I wasn't in the mood for mannered and lugubrious), and breaks away from realism at various points. I think I expected more from a veteran like Resnais. My bad.

Bernardo Bertolucci, Last Tango in Paris

Or maybe I should say L'Ultimo Tango a Parigi or Le Dernier Tango à Paris.

One of those classic arthouse films that I felt sure I must have seen in which middle-aged, pre-Godfather Marlon Brando bonks young whatersname, with a scene that does for butter what Ice Cold in Alex does for lager... Or not.

Paul (Brando) is grieving the death - by suicide - of his wife, and finds a cheap apartment at the same time as the young Jeanne (Maria Schneider) is looking at it. He persuades her that they should have sex together, but not share names with each other, and ignore the outside world. She is ostensibly in love with Tom (Jean-Pierre Léaud, Truffaut's alter ego in various films), who is making a documentary with her at the centre - although it's not really about her. Paul and Jeanne fall in love with each other, though not necessarily at the same time.

This is very much a film of its time - my guess is that most 9pm Channel 4 dramas are raunchier. Brando was 48 to Schneider's 20, and supposedly the infamous anal sex sequence was ad libbed by Brando (and her, I guess) on set, rather than being in the script. I don't think you see any of Brando's tackle, although he is clearly nude, whereas Schneider is repeatedly full frontal. Again, hardly more than contemporary post-watershed. (Do I want to see Brando's todger - not exactly - but it's the double standards of film makers and film censors.)

It is an astounding performance from Brando - who begins as seedy and dubious, but who seems to grow in stature and youth as the film progresses - the tango hall scenes in which he attempts to woo Jeanne make him seem very attractive, closer to the Brando of The Wild Ones. He is also quivering with repressed (and not so repressed) violence, as he had been in films such as Streetcar and On the Waterfront. It's not even acting - he seems to just be as he recalls the past (I gather some of these were Brando's memories.

I'm glad I've seen it - and it has dated better than I feared it might have. Curiously there seemed to be more laughter from the women than the men in the audience.

*

I missed the last bus, mind, and walked back home through a perfectly clear, but crisp night. There were pockets of rabbits scattered around the grass, and bundles of students, some of whom were clearly smoking grass. I found the middle way between T and W hills, that wasn't down the public footpath, but which comes out, eventually, on Forty Acres Road. The cathedral is clear in the darkness ahead, brilliantly illuminated, a dayglo answer to the secular questions of the campus on the hill.

Once I've reached the edge of the campus, I see no one until the Monument pub: a lone smoker. The town is more or less deserted. I might have been tempted to divert to the Bell&, and it looked like O was still in the Carps, but instead I followed the ring road round to Wincheap, and home and bed, after midnight.

Second Veg Box

I've cheated and looked up this week's box:

1/2 cauliflower
red potatoes
red onion
1lb salad potatoes
leeks
parsnips
srpout stalk
bunch thyme
little gem lettuce
1/2 celeriac
sprout top

Celeriac is the unknown quantity. I will have cabbage and potatoes left, but I'm out so many nights this week it's not been conducive to home cooking. Actual contents may vary.

Small Murphies XXIV

Hitting word counts.

One for Alan Coren

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2198799,00.html

Sydney Pollack, Sketches of Frank Gehry

Since visiting Melbourne I've had a loose interest in architecture. I suspect that if you counted up my Flickr photos there are more of buildings than people. I watch the RIBA Prize every year.

I knew Frank Gehry was one of those star names - alongside Rogers and Foster the British giants and Liebeskind the latest must-have icon project man. I had the vague idea of the Bilbao museum and the dancing house in Prague, but more than that nothing. A little reading showed that it had taken time for his characteristic designs to get commissioned, and so he'd started with adding glass, wood and chain link fences to his own house.

It seems as if he begins with a series of scribbles, and moves from that to models, which he tirelessly fools about with until it is no longer the easy answer. Only then does it move into computer aided design and front and side elevations, although traditional plans seem to miss the point. I love his counter to pomo's neoclassical return to the human form: that's only raiding the last 2,000,000 years - why not go back to  the fish?

Long time friend and film maker Sydney Pollack allows Gehry to talk, asking questions only a friend could ask, but Pollack also talks to other artists, architects or architectural critics such as Charles Jencks and Philip Johnson, as well as Bob Geldof. Hal Foster is left to put the boot in - perhaps we needed more of the negative. What about the dangers of reflecting surfaces for heat focusing? What about snow falls off slippy roofs? What if the gallery overwhelms the art it contains? (Make better art was the response to this point.)

Pollack does rather foreground the film making - he has a camera in virtually every shot he appears in, and I suspect he knows more about architecture than he lets on. But I was rivetted, and could have watched a whole lot more. I also want to go visit these places. f