Film Glow 1 - Grappling with The Last Duel, Halloween Kills, Venom 2
Film Glow: Friday, October 15.
This is my inaugural… what? The host encourages you to consider it as a newsletter, but that sounds too much like a church circular, or the annual family update, or some company missive reminding people not to leave food overnight in the third floor fridge.
I suppose it is a blog. The hope is to touch base weekly. It will have few rules, beyond what has shaken my boat on a given week. Perhaps some personal promotion - you have to be a one-man band these days. But mainly a chance to air some thoughts, declare my allegiances, get snotty over a movie, and rattle on too long as usual.
You could consider it as an extension to my slot on Times Radio on Monday nights with Phil Williams - a livelier, snappier format. Or as an accompaniment to my array of film books. Or indeed as an adjunct to my life as a talking head on Sky Arts - a blessed chance to go old school.
It is also, like so much I do, an experiment to find out how the internet works.
I’ve called it Film Glow after the aura of the movie screen.
All things considered, it was best to start with something straightforward.
Some thoughts on the latest film from a filmmaker close to my heart.
THE LAST DUEL
I was ready for The Last Duel. I’d read the advance publicity. I’d done the research. I’d written the damn book. One does not simply walk into a Ridley Scott movie. He still possesses a singular authority, unique in the modern era. Epics spring from his eye - a flowing correspondence between past and present. There is never any doubting his conviction. Especially, when there is so little of it to go round. We ought to reflect on the fact that Scott is 83, and to be mounting films on this scale, with such boldness (and in the face of fashion), is extraordinary. Again and again, he thrusts us into the churn of history; a stinging brutality delivered with the brushstrokes of a Renaissance master.
At first glance, the plot headlines as Arthurian love triangle: the ethereal beauty who comes between two knights, honour and libido as knotted as the stays on a pair of greaves. Far from it. Based on Eric Jager’s thrusting account, this is in fact (and fact is the crux of the matter) a depiction of the events that surrounded the last recorded trial by combat in medieval France. Gladiator with jurisprudence. Arguably, a courtroom thriller, or courtly-room thriller.
The year is 1386. The weather overcast. The mise-en-scène leathery. This is when discredited knight Sir Jean de Carrouges (Matt Damon) – a hothead trailing a litany of valorous but ineffectual military campaigns – marries Marguerite de Carrouges (Jodie Comer), comely daughter of a wealthy but disgraced (having once sided with the English) Normandy burgher.
It is a practical rather than romantic union, but introducing his new wife to virile, cape-swirling, erstwhile bestie Jacques Le Gris (Adam Driver) is a mistake. He and Le Gris have shared both the mires of the 100 Years War and the transactional landscape of French society. Make that male French society. Bottom line: Le Gris is a player, de Carrouges a blunt tool, but care of family ties lands one rung higher - knight to squire (please note: this is not a servant class, rather a lower grade of aristocrat). Resentment soars.
You should also note that Driver is granted flowing jet-black locks and a scrupulous proto-Van Dyke, and poor Damon, looking as if he was birthed by a washing machine, sports a proto-Tiger King with a Brillo-pad of blonde tassels poking from the end of his chin like a shaving brush (to add to his general indignity, he also appears to have a map of the Seine inscribed into his cheek). The Last Duel is big on hair symbolism. Comer’s luxuriant golden plats double as chains. Ben Affleck (who we’ll come to) evidently shares the same stylist as the Romanian World Cup Squad of 1998.
Here’s the rub. The smarmy, loquacious Le Gris, taken with Marguerite’s beauty, bearing, and erudition – that rube de Carrouges signs documents with an inky cross - makes a violently, unsocial call while de Carrouges is away and rapes his friend’s wife. Or at least for two thirds of the story that is what is alleged. De Carrouges demands justice, allegedly on behalf of his brutally wronged wife.
Naturally, this will be resolved via a medieval Squid Game, which the giggly, underage King Charles VI (Alex Lawther - born to play giggly, underage kings) signs off with bloodthirsty glee. To defend Marguerite’s honour, de Carrouges will duel to the death with Le Gris. One petulantly throws down his glove and the other swooshes his cape like a demented toreador. They are like a pair of preening birds. If de Carrouges wins, slaying his friend turned foe, this will be proof of God’s will and therefore Madeleine’s innocence. If Le Gris is victorious, according to the small print she will burn at the stake. Such is justice.
All of which makes The Last Duel an unexpectedly complex beast. Not only does it entwine Scott’s savage time travel with tight threads of #MeToo era relevance, he structures the plot around the three viewpoints of the leads, basically Rashomon in gusty 14th century France, leading to a disquisition on relative truths and slanted testimony as each presents the audience with their take on events. Resisting the pull of an El Cid or Braveheart, or even a Kingdom of Heaven or Robin Hood, it is the least romantic film he has ever made. The Last Duel is an anti-epic. An intimate saga. And a film full of ideas, not all of which are wholly compatible.
SCOTT IS LOOKING TO DRAW BLOOD
You can see why Scott was drawn to the flame of Jager’s book. He has an estate in France, where he paints oils in his leisure (whenever that is). The rolling, bucolic, misty-dawned landscape, accented with stubborn castles, suits his eye. Here too was a chance to re-enter the historical sequence that has been the backbone of his career. The Last Duel chimes directly with The Duellists, his magnificent 1977 Napoleonic-era debut, with men borne into cycles of violence on elusive codes of honour, draped in a painterly French twilight. No one shoots an early snowfall like the maestro.
But there is no doubt that the thorny subtext stirred his imagination. From Alien to Thelma & Louise (another tale of rape, injustice and the guises of misogyny framed against barren landscapes) to G.I. Jane he has hardly been shy in tackling sexual politics head on. He’s looking to draw blood in more ways than one.
From Lancelot du Lac to Excalibur to Kingdom of Heaven, there’s a subgenre of plate armoured movies, men heaving themselves across damp fields like angry bears. Among the shards of memory that build up each viewpoint, the slivers of battle are spectacularly unheroic. Though, a rain of arrows bouncing off the metal flanks of an oblivious de Carrouges like firecrackers is one for the Scott collection.
When the time comes, the venue for the duel is an icy quadrangle on the outskirts of a bony Paris, skirted in wooden bleachers like a proto-stadium. We get a swooping helicopter shot down onto the contest, though it’s no Colosseum. The film stubbornly resists the spectacular. The computer generated hoards (as pioneered in Gladiator) radiate bloodlust as Scott drags us into the hot breath of the joust, reducing the swashbuckling tradition, Errol Flynn dancing on tables, to pure battery. Cocooned in their dented breastplates and helmets, the actors wheeze like the crew of the Nostromo daring the surface of LV-426 bubble-wrapped in space suits.
You simply can’t beat Scott for the tang of the past. Or the future.
From Deckard on the sodden rooftop in Blade Runner to the soldiers hunkered down in Black Hawk Down, exhaustion is as much a motif as shitty weather.
And how Scott must have relished the opportunity to play Kurosawa at his own game. Rashomon probes the idea that all narrative is unreliable. Memory is distorted by ego, prejudice, moral blindness, hope and desperation. We can only see through our own eyes. It was a film that raised questions about the deceptions cinema played on us. What we accept to be right and wrong.
MEN CURDLED BY HONOUR
Everything in The Last Duel circles our perception of the characters, as well as their perception of events, and crucially themselves. The men are a wheedling, petty, greedy, self-righteous set. And women are no more than vassals in their squabbles and desires, to be traded off, father to husband. To be used as a right. These are men curdled by honour codes, ambition, the demands of social standing, and enslaved to a hierarchy that leads up the king, who is a child. I’ve never known known Damon to look or feel as unsympathetic.
So rarely credited for his work with actors, Scott draws out three detailed performances. Which is crucial. This is a film about performances. What co-screenwriter Nichole Holofcener called “the delusion of men”. And how the arrangement of events, Marguerite’s defiance, and the contrast between each testimony reveals them. The greatest strength of the film lies in its connection of toxicity and a concomitant self-destruction across the gulf of years.
De Carrouges is like a spoilt, wounded, self-absorbed child. He is an infant in armour.
The cunning Le Gris’s uses arrogance as a weapon, a means to survive.
The way Driver struts about a candlelit chamber reminded me of Tim Curry’s wounded Darkness in Legend - another horny devil driven by pathetic hungers. The dread point is that he may not even consider what he did as rape. But he is unwilling to probe at the loose tooth of his guilt. Driver gives Le Gris a pinch of self awareness that De Carrouges never knows.
A MODERN WOMAN
With the light catching her glacial cheekbones, Comer is Faye Dunaway in fur collars. She looks radiant, history’s supermodel with a perfect complexion. Then you have to grant movies some aesthetic leeway. With Marguerite, Scott indulges in the glow of a movie star. Comer is a marvel to watch, a vibrant, intelligent woman trapped in the cage of a dark age, but there is a modern air she can’t quite shake. Which is partly because once we enter her story – and the re-angling of events begins to wear thin by the third chapter – there is a shift in emphasis.
Entering her head, her rage, is like a blade held against our conscience – the repeated rape is duly harrowing, but with the indignities then heaped upon her in court the effect is devastating (and remember these are historical veracities). Ambiguity is set aside for a blast of cold significance. We are unequivocally assured that Madeleine’s is the truthful account. We are told things rather than left to feel them though Comer’s fierce performance. The spirit of Rashomon fades and a more direct, more didactic film emerges.
What is so telling and resonant with today is that it is the whole of society that is stacked against Marguerite. All the horse trading for honour and money makes a mockery of literature’s courtly knights. De Carrouges’s live-in mother, a lemon-sharp Harriet Walter as withered as Whistler’s Mother, blasts her daughter-in-law for daring to protest. Suck it up. Survive. But that is the lasting point of this shard of history. It is not the report on two fools hacking at each other in the cold mud, but the courage it took for Marguerite to demand justice from her husband, to manipulate his pride (she is cunning too), to be demeaned in court and turn her own demeaned position into an advantage. She was a modern woman.
There is a procession of pouting wives and queens, speechless witnesses leaving behind the damning report of their silence and tacit knowledge of the truth. The first two acts are a bloody reckoning for history, the third act throws down a gauntlet to the present day.
WHAT OF AFFLECK?
If all this sounds terribly serious, there is at least Ben Affleck. Cast not entirely against type, he plays vainglorious, ranking (hardly) nobleman Pierre d'Alençon who slips the icy bounds of Scott’s vérité to throw a dose of camp into the gloom with bleached blonde locks, pointy gold shoes and a collection of eye rolls that would do Villanelle proud. He comes over a 14th century Bat-villain, a chip off Liam Neeson’s rousing turn as Sir Godfrey in Kingdom of Heaven, treating the Crusades as a glorious wheeze, or his own Ned Alleyn, the Elizabethan A-lister swaggering in to lift the ponderous romance of Shakespeare In Love. D'Alençon is weary liege lord to both men, but shares his coterie of willing (?) girls with Le Gris (who knows how to cook his books), and despises de Carrouges for a symphony of failings, but mostly for being so horribly downmarket. The withering glances Affleck trains on Damon’s pinched face are an in-joke slipped in from a different universe. That they both had a hand in the script speaks volumes. And d'Alençon seeds a joke about Hollywood vanity - and Hollywood crimes.
Are we not entertained? Well, the irony Scott scorches onto the screen is that the crowds were mightily entertained (the ending has a bitter sting), but his film leaves you uneasy (which may forestall it being a hit). There is no contesting the inflamed point. It’s like an steel-toed kick in the ribs. What a world it was: mercenary, callous, short-lived, wholly idiotic and darkly phallocentric. How far exactly have we really come from such a barbarous order?
Also a brief mention for Harry Gregson Wagner for daring themes and melodies with the lovely score. My current bette noir is Hans Zimmer’s brooding foghorns. Bravo to that.
And the inevitable plug.
Other thoughts…
Halloween Kills sends the entire town of Haddonfield out on the hunt for Michael Myers. Which almost snaps into place as a fine idea. As the mob self-winds into a fervour, giving it lungfuls of “evil must die tonight!” and led by an unreasonably weathered Anthony Michael Hall as survivor Tommy Doyle, we’re back at the doorstep of the Capitol riots. Trump’s neanderthals. Of all things, is this a slasher sequel with a whiff of relevance? Periodically, you gain an uncomfortable shiver of sympathy for Michael as David Gordon Green’s film takes a sideways glance at Frankenstein (kudos for the pitchfork). But Green and his writers (including Danny McBride) keep sending the mob in the wrong direction to get on with the unironic M.O. of Myers gutting foolish stragglers with extra relish. The look is cosily familiar: afterhours suburbia (the exact time is always disconcertingly uncertain), breathy POV shots through windows and windscreens, flashbacks to an eerily accurate Donald Pleasance lookalike. But with another sequel due this time next year – Halloween Overkills! – the simmering Jamie Lee Curtis is confined to a hospital bed making improbable diagnoses of Michael as the embodiment of evil, and the film ends up treading narrative water. You’re reminded too often that the icy genius of the Carpenter original was in its restraint.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage didn’t stint on its promise. It’s almost freeform mayhem, superhero jazz with a CGI blitzkrieg of clattering bodies and falling masonry, but played with a comic (rather than comic-book) patina that borders on Abbott and Costello. It is often delightfully self-mocking - the Turner and Hooch of the Marvel network. The plot is rudimentary. Remember wisecracking, Hulk-alike Venom, the alien symbiote attached like an oil slick to slacker hack and straight man Tom Hardy? Well, he has accidentally birthed a new bigger, redder, angrier stripe of alien symbiote (the mythology is hardly tended to) called Carnage. The director is none other than Andy Serkis, who knows a thing or two about dual identities, and seems to be enjoying himself. It’s not subtle. The vibrato cutting does jar. And Woody Harrelson is wasted as the production line wackadoodle who plays host to the new toothy CG anarchist. But in its lack of pretension it’s like the blood rush of The Clash to the noodling prog rock of the MCU. Stay for the post-credits sting. If you dare.
Afterthoughts…
It is the season which delivers my kind of filmmakers. Auteurs who cram the frame.
I’ll be seeing the new Coen (alas that is singular now) on Sunday evening. I already sense The Tragedy of Macbeth will be my kind of Bermanesque banquet of the senses.
By next week, I should also have got my head around Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which is a lot of Wes Anderson even for Wes Anderson.
And at some point, I’d like to talk about Bond, which could lead me to a whole heap of trouble. Among many spiralling thoughts, I was left thinking that Daniel Craig would make a hell of a Bond villain.
Talking of spies, there’s the new le Carre sitting on my desk. A ghost book, published posthumously, which makes it a genuine spook novel.
And Dune is on the agenda.
Wait, I have two new books out, and it would remiss of me not to mention them (I suspect it’s contractually obliged). I’ve been busy.
Guillermo del Toro - The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work (from White Lion Publishing) extends my series on cult directors, this time unpeeling the Mexican maestro from haunted childhood to Hollywood’s primo fantasist, and is as pretty as a fairy tale. Available here.
The Coppolas A Movie Dynasty (from Palazzo Editions) relays Hollywood’s greatest family saga with novelistic dash, including but by no means limited to the staggering stories behind The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Lost In Translation. Available here.
So farewell, then. If you have come this far, please spread the word.
Furthermore, I’d love to hear your thoughts on The Last Duel or frankly anything of a movie slant.