Harry Potter is getting a bit long in the tooth. Goodness, at this stage, one would have imagined he'd be out the other side of university, wondering now where he was going to get a job with an arts degree. No doubt he'd have lost his virginity, to a Muggle who recently emigrated to Australia to work at an ice-cream counter for which she doesn't get paid very much but at least there's sunshine, and no more Harry, who she's grown tired of listening to prattling on and on about being the Chosen One. And heartbroken Harry would still have his muggle parents, who, before they had their life savings wiped out, would have paid for his 23rd birthday to have his eyes lasered and perhaps that ugly forehead scar too.
Alas, no such luck. The Chosen One is still stuck in a film franchise that renders him a teenage boy in Daniel Radcliffe's now discernibly adult body. And like Radcliffe's jaw, surviving each adventure for young Harry is a tight shave. He keeps on defeating evil only for it to come hurtling back again. This was Einstein's definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It is also beginning to feel like something Nietzsche would have dreamed up, a film franchise of eternal recurrence – an infinite repetition without alteration of each and every moment. Think about it: can you really tell one film from the other?
The Deathly Hallows is film number seven and still there's no sign of the grand finale with Lord Voldemort. Honestly, you'd swear the Evil One was a No 18 bus on a Sunday. And no, I don't want two showdowns. Just one will do.
In The Half-Blood Prince, Hogwarts was a bubbling hormonal brew. Here, everybody is discernibly more serious, and one presumes this is because our heroes know the great demonic denouement is just one more film away, after you've waded through the two hours and 20 minutes of this. Dumbledore is dead, the ministry of magic is under Voldemort's control, while a panoply of Potter villains sit scowling around the Evil One's table. Voldemort looks down on them with a face that hasn't been getting any sunshine and a nose that looks like it was lopped off in a bizarre sneering accident. He wants to get his hands on Harry alive. Harry wants the 'horcruxes', magical necklaces that could probably earn you a few quid at the pawnshop. And I wanted them all to stop talking and just get on with it.
The ministry of magic, where people move like clockwork, now looks like a totalitarian nightmare inspired by Fritz Lang's Metropolis, but watered down with 20 parts. And there are period shades of WWII: Ron carries a radio with him which he listens to while they flee across a mythic landscape (looks like Scotland to me) as if he was tuning into war news; one scene feels like we are waiting for bomber planes to land and to see who has made it (one of the Weasley twins comes in low on the horizon with one ear flaming), while the ministry of magic is purging Muggle-bloods, or half-bloods. This is being conducted by Imelda Staunton's smiling witch Dolores Umbridge with ironic abandon. She condemns an innocent woman with the line: "Wands only choose witches and you are not a witch." It used to be the other way around.
The look and feel of the films has been so carefully honed over the years that everything here is as it should be. The glossy grey-green palate is silken and the digital effects are seamless. But by golly does Alfonso Cuarón's The Prisoner of Azkaban, the second film and the highpoint in the series, feel like eons ago. Where that film was fleet of foot and swift to action, The Deathly Hallows is lined with lead.
David Yates undoes all the smooth fixing he did in his second Potter, the previous film The Half-Blood Prince. This feels like an exposition dump, with characters constantly telling us who's who, and what they have to do and why and where they're going next, and oh my gosh, is that the No 18 bus? I really do have to leave…
If The Deathly Hallows sinks on screen with the weight of a diving bell, here, then, is a butterfly: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives is the film that took the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes, and there's nothing like it anywhere or in any time. It is made by the uniquely talented Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Thai artist and film director who, like David Lynch, is able to magic up universes that are hermetically sealed and flow with their own strange logic. Western rationality need not apply: you have to give yourself over.
Knowing how to approach a film like this probably helps. If arthouse can be viewed as literature, Uncle Boonmee... is poetry steeped in an oriental mystique that is startlingly different. And watching how Weerasethakul flaunts and flings the rules of film to his own liking made me wonder if I was experiencing the same shock that was felt when TS Eliot launched Prufrock and its high modernism onto the world.
The story is difficult to circle. But it does involve one Uncle Boonmee, a man who lives in the Thai jungle and who is slowly dying of kidney failure. The grace with which he approaches this fact is moving and the film can be viewed in one way as a Buddhist meditation on death. Strange instances of reincarnation abound. He receives various visits, one from his sister-in-law and others from… well, I can't tell you as this would ruin their startling effect.
There is so much else and Weerasethakul pushes out in whatever direction he fancies. The story weaves the mythic with the modern, a tantric flow of the fantastic set in rich crepuscular light. Much like his previous film, the colder Syndromes and a Century, time creeps slowly up on you like the advance of urban modernity. But the fantastical is always here: there is a scene which culminates in sex with a catfish and it made me flap around with the giggles. And then there are those creatures. They stare out of dark jungle with red alien eyes. Watching one of them mount the stairs slowly into Boonmee's house is easily the most eerie moment in this year's cinema.
Weerasethakul, who doesn't like to explain his films, has said Uncle Boonmee… is an homage to the dying use of film. Different sections are shot on different stock, and one section is composed entirely of photographs a la Chris Marker's La Jetée, which I found jarring but it doesn't ruin the wider effect. A previous section involving a photographer is inspired by Antonioni's Blow Up, but testament to Weerasethakul's genius, it travels to a uniquely different place. There is so much going on here and most of it is contained within stillness, a well from which you can drink deep.
The animation Chico and Rita, meanwhile, is all sentimental surface. But what a surface. Director Fernando Trueba and Spanish designer Javier Mariscal's ode to the jazz era of the 1940s and '50s swings like a cat and snaps and swoons like a tango dance.
This is the story of Chico and Rita, remembered by Chico as a cigar-chomping old man in Havana. In his youth, Chico is a jazz pianist hustling for work in pre-revolutionary Cuba. Rita is the jade-eyed firebrand who sings with that kind of breathless voice that makes men's legs wobble. Their story plays out under the stars of doomed romance and is largely defined by their absence. He writes hit songs, she sings them; they love, they fight, they break up, they go to America. He ends up in Paris playing with Dizzy Gillespie. She ends up a screen star who dates Brando. Can they ever get it together?
Sex comes easy and so do the tunes. The mixture of '50s bebop and latin jazz is a dinnerparty delight. The depiction of the era, from the bright lights of New York, to a vibrant Havana that becomes soured by revolution, makes movie nostalgia look dull.
November 21, 2010
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