Amuse-Butchery

Here’s a name that has rather unexpectedly drifted up out of the mists of the past: Mark Mylod, long-time film and TV director, whose first movie, 2002’s Ali G Indahouse, dates back even unto the pre-blog days when I was solely doing this on a weird appendage to the BBC website. As you can see if you click the link, I was distinctly unimpressed by the film at the time, but – it may shock you to learn – Mr Mylod has gone on to have a solid career in both the UK and the US. (He’s the kind of person that Former Next Desk Colleague Now Manager may have worked with in his previous life as a TV editor; I must check.)

That said, it’s been a few years since Mylod’s done a movie, and his new one certainly looks like a change of pace from his previous work: it is The Menu, which feels rather like a horror film made for people who are normally a bit sniffy about horror. Or is it a satire? I think it’s probably a satire, to be honest, but a satire which has decided to hedge its bets by looking a bit like a horror film. This strikes me as a sensible strategy and one which doesn’t do the film any harm.

The film opens with enthusiastic foodie Tyler (Nicholas Hoult) preparing for the experience of a lifetime: he and his companion Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) are paying $1250 apiece to spend the evening at Hawthorne, a very exclusive restaurant on a private island. Also attending are a pretentious food critic (Janet McTeer) and her editor, three nouveau rich bros with far more money than taste, a veteran politician and his wife, and a fading film star (John Leguizamo) and his PA, who is trying to quit but finding it a challenge.

Hawthorne is famous for its unique and enigmatic menus – every sitting is different, and specially prepared with great precision by its head chef, Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes). Having received a tour of the island from Slowik’s steely head waiter (Hong Chau), everyone settles down for what they fully expect to be the meal of a lifetime. This turns out to be exactly what they get, although their lifetimes turn out to be somewhat shorter than they had anticipated when they arrived on the island.

Perhaps you can see what I mean about the horror trappings of The Menu: a group of people arrive on a secluded private island and find that their host has more planned than they originally expected. They have, in fact, been specially selected according to a rather particular set of criteria, and the fact that one of the people who have turned up is not the one featured on the guest list turns out to be pivotal to the plot. It’s not a million miles distant from fairly recent films like The Hunt and the horror version of Fantasy Island, in its premise anyway. The trailer makes it quite clear that, before the end, there will be a sequence in which many of the guests will be pursued across country by burly members of the kitchen staff.

That said – and this really shouldn’t come as a surprise given Mylod’s involvement as director – while some of the events of the film may be horrific (there are various stabbings, dismemberments, immolations, a drowning and a suicide) these never feel like the raison d’etre of the film, which they possibly would if this were an out-and-out horror – the movie seldom dwells on the gore, it is more about the idea of the violence than the grisly details. It’s an arch confection, and never that visceral.

Instead, this really is more of a black comedy, and specifically a social satire. The most obvious target is the world of the celebrity chef and the ridiculous adulation they occasionally receive for dishes which no sensible restaurant would have on their menu – a few years ago an elite restaurant in the UK started serving things like snail-flavoured porridge and bacon ice cream, and of course it very quickly became a kind of gastronomic mecca. The sheer absurdity of some of the conceptual courses that Slowik serves up to his guests is genuinely very funny, as are their reactions to the food (not to mention the helpful captions detailing the precise ingredients of the dishes) – at one point he sends out empty plates dabbed with sauces, for rigorously logical and well-explained reasons. Later on, as the tone darkens and the guests begin to suspect what’s going on, they get individualised tortillas, each one laser-inscribed with incriminating images of them.

However, there’s something a little more general going on here too, which is why it isn’t a great surprise to find Adam McKay listed as one of the producers of the film – he may be best known as a comedy director, but – amongst other things – he made the incisive, socially-committed comedy-drama The Big Short. The joke here is on the filthy rich and the careless way they make use of their vast wealth. From early on the film is drawing attention to the different levels of social strata occupied by the serving staff and the guests – Tyler is startled when a junior chef knows his name, but (as Margot notes) it doesn’t occur to him to ask the man’s name in return. Later on the distinction between those who give and those who take proves to be of the deepest significance.

The satire becomes increasingly grotesque one as it continues. You do get the sense that the idea of doing the satire was the priority, and the rest of the plot was built around it – it gets a bit unravelled towards the end, and perhaps could do with losing a course or two – certainly some of the characters’ actions, and their motivations, never quite ring true as those of real people: these are mostly caricatures, arch grotesques.

Nevertheless the performances are excellent, particularly from Fiennes and Taylor-Joy – Fiennes has the tricky job of essentially acting as the MC for the whole movie, and does it rather well. Taylor-Joy has become something of a fixture in all kinds of films since her early roles in horror, but as ever she brings a touch of class along with that truly remarkable bone structure. Then again, this is a classy movie, well-made, witty, and with something to say. Not quite a horror film per se, but horror-adjacent in the best possible way.

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Red Vs Blue Movie

The other day I was a little surprised to discover I still had a checklist in my head of all those movies which the onset of lockdown back in March 2020 stopped me from seeing in a timely manner. Possibly the outstanding item on said list is a movie called Military Wives, which may sound like a niche magazine but is actually one of those uplifting true-life comedy dramas which almost invariably make me feel like opening a vein whenever I watch one. I got as far as watching the first half hour of that at the cinema before the building’s electrics blew and we were all sent home with the promise of a free ticket to a future showing. Five days later the cinemas all closed, and I’ve never heard anything about this movie since (I wasn’t actually enjoying it much so I’m not that bothered about seeing the rest of it).

Perhaps even more unlucky was Craig Zobel’s The Hunt, which had already suffered one delay to its release and came out just in time to play for less than a week. But at least The Hunt has resurfaced on one of the big streamers, where it doesn’t seem to have made a particular impression. Perhaps that’s because this is a movie which was the product of a very particular moment in American culture, which has now to some degree passed, or possibly it’s simply because it’s a rather odd film.

It opens with the audience being made privy to a chat exchange between a group of liberal friends, complaining about the latest outrages committed by (we are invited to assume) Donald Trump. (As we have noted, the film was due to come out in early 2020.) The friends console themselves by discussing an upcoming social occasion, when they will gather at the mansion home of one of them and then hunt and kill a dozen or so ‘deplorables’ – this being a rather loaded expression, derived from a disparaging comment about Republican voters made by Hillary Clinton.

A sequence set on the flight to the hunting grounds then follows, which mainly seems to be here for shock value and to pad out the film to a decent ninety-minute length: the first class passengers gang up to kill someone from cattle class who recovers from the sedative they’ve been given unexpectedly early. And from here we’re off into the hunt itself.

A dozen people wake up on the edge of woodland, close to a large wooden crate; they are all gagged. Inside the crate they find weapons of various kinds, before coming under fire from a hide nearby – several of them are gorily killed before the survivors flee into the woods, contending with booby traps (spike pits, land mines) along the way.

That’s basically all you need to know about the premise of the movie; there isn’t a great deal more to be said about it, to be honest, without getting into the realm of spoilers. There’s a weird diversion where it looks like a replica of rural Arkansas has been constructed in Bosnia to confuse the quarry in the hunt, but this once again feels a bit like diversionary filler – there’s a distinct smell around this film of it being a case of a strong premise that they really had trouble blowing up to feature length.

The idea of people hunting people isn’t an especially new one, after all – readers with serious psychiatric issues may recall that, after The Hunt had its theatrical run cancelled, I consoled myself by watching The Most Dangerous Game, another movie with a similar premise from the early 1930s. It crops up in various genre TV episodes as well – see The Snare, an episode of the Hulk TV show from the seventies. But one also gets the sense that this was conceived as a piece of satire as much as a thriller or a horror movie (it’s certainly gory enough to qualify as the latter).

Exactly which genre The Hunt falls into is a somewhat contentious issue, which has even earned its own Wikipedia footnote. I originally heard it advertised as a horror movie (not surprisingly, given it was produced by Blumhouse, the makers of the Paranormal Activity, Purge and Insidious franchises, as well as the (rather good) recent Halloween films). However, if you slap together any combination of the words horror, action, thriller, satire, and comedy, it is practically certain that someone will have described the film this way.

And the odd thing is that they all do describe the film: there’s more than enough gore for it to qualify as a horror, parts of it are very funny, and there’s at least one really well-staged action sequence. The problem is that, rather than blending all of these things into a single, coherent whole, The Hunt has a rather frenetic quality, hopping from sequence to sequence and topic to topic as if it’s afraid that if it lingers on any of them the audience will realise it’s actually a fairly insubstantial film. The irony is that if anything’s likely to create this impression it’s the fact the movie can’t keep still.

Wrong-footing the audience is often a good idea, and the film does have a go at this, being deliberately misleading about what exactly’s going on. It also attempts to do the old Psycho routine of introducing a character as, ostensibly, the lead, and then spectacularly killing them off relatively early in the film. This can work quite well – but The Hunt does the idea to death, repeatedly seeming to establish a protagonist only for them to meet a grisly fate a few minutes later. It gets a little bit wearisome, to be honest.

The scattershot approach of the film does occasionally pay off: there are some very funny moments, most of them satirical – the liberal elitists responsible for the carnage often pause in planning their mass slaughter to pick each other up for things like cultural appropriation and inappropriately gendered language. These scenes are so knowingly absurd that only an idiot could genuinely find The Hunt to be a provocative and dangerous incitement to division – it’s an exaggerated parody of the splits already existing in modern America.

Needless to say, Donald Trump weighed in and suggested an upcoming film was intended to ‘inflame and cause chaos’ (possibly that very stable genius was concerned about demarcation issues). To be honest, The Hunt is very small potatoes on that particular score, but the central idea – liberals hunting conservatives – was always going to be a bit controversial. The script does attempt to subvert audience expectations, by turning out to have as its main target the tendency of some people to believe anything they read on the internet, and the inflexible and nuance-free nature of so much modern political discourse. But this turns up rather late in the day, and feels like a bit of an afterthought.

Nevertheless, I did rather enjoy it: there are solid performances from what’s largely an ensemble cast (Hilary Swank, Wayne Duvall, Ethan Suplee, Betty Gilpin, Emma Roberts and Justin Hartley all get their moments of prominence) and the piece does have pace, energy, and a degree of wit about it. I’m not sure it hangs together as a coherent political thesis but there are certainly some very nice moments along the way.

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Shallow Impact

The civilisation-toppling apocalypse of choice for most of mid-to-late twentieth century entertainment was the viral pandemic, although this never really caught on at the cinema except in the slightly modified form of the zombie apocalypse. For nearly a quarter of a century now it has been supplanted, some might say a little ironically, by something with a bit more visual potential: the cosmic or astronomical apocalypse. This cheerful subgenre, like so much else of SF, dates back to Wells, in this case his story The Star from 1897. Noteworthy entries over the years include R C Sheriff’s wistful The Hopkins Manuscript, When Worlds Collide (book and film), and Lucifer’s Hammer. For our purposes, however, the ball really got rolling in 1993 when Arthur C Clarke published The Hammer of God, about a huge asteroid on a collision course with Earth. This duly made its way to the screen in 1998, in the much-altered form of Deep Impact, accompanied by Armageddon (essentially a kind of idiot’s version of the same story).

Since then we have enjoyed the rom-com version of the planet-killing asteroid or comet story in Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, the unlikely neutrinos of Roland Emmerich’s 2012, really bad weather from space in Dean Devlin’s Geostorm, and many more besides. So another film on the subject should not be that noteworthy.

Except that Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up has become both much-talked-about and much-viewed, both of which should please the big N, which stumped up yet another eye-wateringly big budget and gave the film its customary just-big-enough-to-qualify-for-the-major-awards-but-no-bigger theatrical release.

It opens in the traditional manner, with PhD student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) going about her astronomical research and discovering a new comet. Her excitement, and that of her peers and supervisor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), quickly turns to alarm when further analysis reveals that the comet is on course to collide with Earth in a little over six months, producing an extinction-level event for life on the planet.

Needless to say they take their terrible news to NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office (the film is at pains to point out that this is a real thing) and its head Dr Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), and soon find themselves whisked off to the White House… where they find themselves sitting in a corridor for hour after hour. The President (Meryl Streep) is, unfortunately, an idiot, obsessed with her poll ratings, mired in controversy, and not above giving key government positions to her own children (Jonah Hill plays her son, the chief of staff). Worrying that announcing something like this will make her unpopular, the President decides to sit on the news for the time being.

So the scientists decide to take the story to the media. They find themselves in a minor slot on one of the morning shows, after another political scandal and a story about the personal life of a pop star, and the importance of what they have to say suddenly seems to be less significant than Kate’s hairstyle, Randall’s understated charms, and the importance of keeping everything light and upbeat so as not to alienate the audience…

Things continue in a similar vein: the government finally decides to do something (but only because this will make the President look good), a deranged tech billionaire (Mark Rylance) comes up with a plan to exploit the comet using untested robots and potentially make billions, the internet becomes a battleground between people wanting to do something and ‘comet sceptics’, and so on, and so on.

I suppose this qualifies as another of those movies which was originally intended to help get Donald Trump out of office, although the effects of the pandemic have obviously seen its release pushed back – as a result the movie’s various cracks at the Trump administration feel like empty satire (although Streep is clearly having fun lampooning her old sparring partner). But having a go at Trump feels like only one of the film’s objectives, of which there are many.

McKay has been quite clear that Don’t Look Up is intended as a black satire about the climate crisis and the near-total indifference shown to it by the media, elected officials, and other governments around the world. Actual climate scientists have been giving the film glowing reviews and praising the way in which it reflects their own actual experiences in trying to raise awareness of environmental issues. To be honest, though, it seemed to me that the film isn’t really focussed enough to qualify as just being about one thing. DiCaprio’s character gets his ranting Howard Beale moment towards the end of the film, but the whole movie almost feels like a two-hour-plus yell of despair about the state of the modern world – populist politicians, skewed news values, inane social media obsessions, self-absorbed celebrities, off-the-leash capitalism, the mindless veneration of tech entrepreneurs, and much, much more.

And as such it is often very funny, though seldom especially subtle. Perhaps that’s the point. I know it has been criticised by many proper critics for coming across as rather smug – certainly the film operates from an educated liberal-left perspective, and most of its targets lie in other regions of the political and cultural spectrum. Then again the media being dismissive of a seriously-intended film about a looming disaster is exactly the kind of thing that would happen in Don’t Look Up, so perhaps this is just proving McKay’s point for him. For me the only part of the film which didn’t quite work was a section in which DiCaprio, as one of the mouthpieces of reason, gets outraged about the degree to which the scientific peer-review process has been abandoned, which strikes me as a bit of a niche topic given some of the other things at stake.

In general, though, I thought this was an engaging and often funny film, with a note of genuine poignancy to it which gradually builds as the climax gets closer – no small achievement considering how broad some of the comedy is. There are good performances from the cast, although J-Law saddles herself with the fairly unrewarding voice-of-common-sense audience-identification figure and has fewer chances to shine than DiCaprio. Has it filled me with a burning desire to do something about the state of the world? Well, no, I’m afraid – perhaps I’m just too much of a fatalist. Perhaps it really is just the same kind of cathartic wail that Dr Strangelove was, nearly sixty years ago. McKay isn’t Kubrick and Don’t Look Up isn’t as sharp or funny or dark as it would perhaps like to be – but it’s a worthwhile movie nevertheless.

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An Accidental Mirror

It was suggested that I come up with some kind of contribution on the topic of ‘public art’ for a forthcoming themed issue of the webzine I contribute to. Once I’d found out what that meant and done some googling, it turned out that there are a few films on this subject, mostly documentaries, but for the most part access to them is restricted, either by geography or a paywall. Maybe this is the future of cinema right here: if, as people are seriously suggesting, physical cinemas will no longer be financially viable in the post-pandemic world, then everything is going to depend on where you live and which streaming services you can afford to subscribe to. At which point I think I will simply just throw in the towel and just stick to watching moronic game shows and TV series from fifty years ago.

Thankfully, that awful day is still a few months away, and in the meantime there are still a few relatively free streamers available: mostly those tied to TV networks, which just means you have to endure them stopping the film now and then while they try to sell you things you can’t really afford any more and never needed in the first place. One of them turned out to be showing The Square, directed by Ruben Ostlund (O with two dots over it), an artist whose career has had some ups and downs: The Square won the top prize at Cannes, but on the other hand his previous film, Force Majeure, suffered the indignity of an American remake starring Will Ferrell. So it goes sometimes.

The Square takes place in and around a Stockholm art museum, curated by the suave and thoughtful Christian (Claes Bang). He is something of a public figure around town, and the museum is hosting a number of prestigious shows and installations, including a man pretending to be an ape (Terry Notary) and the ground-breaking ‘Mirrors and Piles of Gravel’, which is pretty much what it sounds like.

All is well in Christian’s world until he sees a young woman begging for help while he is on the way to work one morning: naturally, his decent and humane instincts lead to him being dragged into a scene with her, her violent ex, and another stranger. Everything seems to resolve itself quite peacefully, but then he is horrified to discover it was all a set up and he has been mugged.

This preys rather on Christian’s mind, as you might expect, and somewhat takes his mind off preparations for a new installation called ‘The Square’, which apparently symbolises compassion and shared humanity. Then, one of his staff is able to trace the location of the stolen phone to a nearby tower block, and rather than face a confrontation, Christian decides to send a letter demanding the return of his property to every single flat.

You know this is not going to end well, but exactly how it all goes wrong is not quite so easy to guess. The general thesis of the film is much easier to discern, though, as it’s not presented with particular subtlety: one scene shows a charity worker in a busy street asking the passers-by to ‘Save a human life’, the irony being that she herself seems completely oblivious to the plight of the various homeless people around her. Most of the film is a series of extended riffs on the same idea: characters make a big deal about how decent, humane, refined and liberal they are, but then their actual behaviour suggests they are rather more petty and self-serving.

There are also a number of pretty good gags about the absurdity of the contemporary art and culture world: at one point part of one of the piles of gravel is accidentally hoovered up, forcing Christian to get some fresh gravel and recreate the pile using old photos as a model. (The Duchampian question of what this says about the nature of art is left implicit.) The hip young social media gurus the gallery hires to drum up publicity for The Square come up with a video which is ridiculously offensive and inappropriate, but still somehow entirely credible.

Elsewhere the film perhaps acts as a reminder that satire and comedy are not always the same thing. In one of the film’s big set pieces (and the one depicted in most of the publicity), the artist pretending to be an ape runs amok at a dinner, which is initially greeted with indulgent laughter from the attendees, but eventually results in an angry mob delivering a beating. It’s oddly uncomfortable and unsettling to watch, as are the various scenes where Christian is given a hard time by a young boy who is suffering as a result of his non-confrontational approach to dealing with the muggers.

In the end, if this is a comedy, then it is a comedy of manners and social awkwardness, although one taking place in a milieu that was unfamiliar to me, at least: there’s a scene in which Christian and Anne (Elizabeth Moss), a journalist he hooks up with, have a protracted row over who should be allowed to dispose of the used contraceptive. Another depicts a visiting artist (Dominic West) attempting to give an interview in front of an audience which contains a man with Tourette’s syndrome: it’s all very low-key and naturalistic, but still somehow squirm-inducing. (Apparently this is one of several sequences in the film based on real events; another touch of verisimilitude which led to problems is that The Square is ascribed to real-life artist Lola Arias – there was a dispute over whether she actually gave her permission to be used.)

You know, reading all this back I’m making The Square sound like a solid, thoughtful, intelligent film, a worthy Palm D’Or winner. Maybe it is – Bang’s performance is a fine one (he has since become rather better known in the UK after appearing in the BBC’s Dracula), and it is clearly not one of those films which has just been slapped together. However, as with Force Majeure, I found a lot of it to be so understated, deadpan and slow that I wasn’t sure what to make of it. The problem is compounded here by the fact The Square is nearly two and a half hours long. I’m not saying it sprawls, but I did find it very hard work and in the end watched it, effectively, as a mini-series of three episodes, which isn’t something I normally consider doing. After all that, would I recommend it? I’m not sure. It almost seems more interested in its own austere and careful style than in actually making its points effectively and entertainingly. It actually comes across as slightly pretentious, which for a film aspiring to satirise pretentiousness is not a good look. It’s okay, but I would be wary of giving a more enthusiastic endorsement.

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A Cruise to Lose

My taste in movies is broader than most people’s, but that doesn’t mean I expect all of them to be good. I find it is important to bear in mind that, no matter how talented or discriminating someone is, the chances are they have participated in at least one piece of complete garbage in the course of their careers: successful movie actors just have a much higher hit rate than most. I am reminded of something Michael Caine said, about how one needed to make sure only one film in five was a genuine stinker – Caine’s legendary willingness to appear in virtually anything may have constituted an attempt to stack the odds in his favour.

Much as I have attempted to impress this principle on others, it has not always taken. It would have been in the late summer of 2005 that my father approached me and enquired if I would be recording a showing of Joe McGrath’s 1969 film The Magic Christian, due on TV that evening. I had not planned to; reviews in the TV listings were unenthusiastic and it didn’t look like my kind of thing, let alone his. Nevertheless, he asked if I would tape it for him. I agreed, but asked why: ‘it’s got lots of good people in it,’ was his response. This I cannot argue with: the film’s most distinguishing feature is an astonishing cast list, starting with Peter Sellers and going on to include Ringo Starr, Laurence Harvey, Hattie Jacques, John le Mesurier, Richard Attenborough, John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Spike Milligan, Dennis Price, Yul Brynner, Roman Polanski, Raquel Welch and Christopher Lee, along with many other well-known faces, some of them playing themselves. That the film does not seem to recognise the value of its assets, and fritters them away rather, is thematically appropriate but still bad film-making.

(NB: staring at the poster for three minutes will mean you probably have a longer exposure to Raquel Welch than her entire actual screen-time in the movie. Caveat emptor.)

Peter Sellers plays Sir Guy Grand, an eccentric billionaire, who at the start of the film decides to make up for his childless state by adopting an heir: he chooses a tramp from one of London’s parks, played by Ringo Starr (there have been suggestions the part was actually written for John Lennon, and you can imagine him in it). The duo set out to perpetrate a series of insanely lavish practical jokes puncturing the pomposity of the society they see around them and exposing the venality of the great and the good. As Sellers’ character puts it at one point, ‘Grand’s the name, money’s my game – would you like to play?’

What follows is an almost entirely plotless series of skits and sketches, most of which concern the Grands bribing people to sabotage various aspects of mainstream society. They pay the actor Laurence Harvey to do a striptease in the middle of a performance of Hamlet, pay one of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race teams to ram their opponents and wreck the contest, get someone to enter a black panther (farcically disguised as a dog) at Crufts, and so on. Eventually the Grands set out on a cruise to New York on the liner The Magic Christian, where all manner of strange events start to occur – but is all as it seems? (Hint: no it isn’t, but by this point you will have stopped caring anyway.)

Apart from Sellers and Starr, most of those big names in the cast list turn up for only one or two scenes, and it is a general rule of thumb that the less time they have on screen, the better they come across, as the script for this movie is so slapdash and lousy that hardly any of them can do much with this material. I suppose this excuses most of them, with the possible exception of John Cleese and Graham Chapman: they wrote an earlier version of the script (later replaced by one written by McGrath and Terry Southern, author of the source novel), but the only scenes from this which survived are the ones they appear in – so in a very real sense they are the authors of their own misfortunes here. (This clearly left its mark on Cleese and Chapman: an episode of Monty Python made a couple of years later features an insane, incompetent Scottish film director, and the stage directions in the script drily make clear that he ‘in no way resembles J. McGrath.’)

Some of the more lavishly silly sequences in The Magic Christian do kind of anticipate Python at its most absurd – there’s a bit where Grand goes partridge hunting using an ack-ack gun and a flame-thrower – but the film has a kind of laboriousness about it that takes away most of the fun; much of the humour also comes across as rather problematic, too (many jokes seem racist, sexist, or homophobic).

This is because it seems to be battering away at a supposedly subversive message about how money-obsessed the great and the good of society are. (This is possibly not the most dazzlingly original insight in the annals of British satire.) One has to remember the film was made at the end of the 1960s and does embody, awkwardly, something of the hippy ideal of not being materialist or acquisitive. However, if this film was a person, it would be Sid James dragged up as a hippy at the end of Carry On Camping – the costume is just about right, and he’s saying some of the right words, but it is plainly a disguise and a deeply unconvincing one. It feels more like a hippy exploitation film than a genuine attempt to make a satire embodying the philosophy of the counter-culture – even if it is, it is hopelessly naive and unsubtle.

There is the odd mildly amusing moment scattered through the film – the scene where Roman Polanski encounters a rather unexpected cabaret singer is perhaps the closest it gets to being laugh-out-loud funny – and I suppose Peter Sellers deserves some kind of credit for delivering a solid comic performance that does as much as anything to hold the film together. But even so, this is one sixties artefact which has not aged well, mainly because it was never any good at the time. Paul Merton once went on TV to defend The Magic Christian, suggesting it has a reputation as a bad movie because it has been smeared by various establishment film critics offended by its all-purpose irreverence. Paul, I hate to contradict you, but I have to disagree: The Magic Christian‘s reputation as a bad movie stems mainly from the fact it is a bad movie.

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An Off Day

The actor, writer, director and much else Chris Morris surely landed himself a place on the worth-keeping-an-eye-on list of any sensible person many, many years ago, following his work on On the Hour, The Day Today, Brass Eye, Jam, and much else – this is before we even get to his 2009 movie Four Lions, a film which takes some of the most dubious subject matter imaginable and still manages to be thoughtful, touching, and above all very funny. Suffice to say that expectations were high for his new film, The Day Shall Come. It should not come as a great surprise that the new film has been written, directed, and co-produced by Morris himself; he’s that sort of perfectionist – nor should it really be a shock that much of the film was apparently made in secret in the Dominican Republic, given that Morris was briefly something of a hate-figure for the British tabloid press.

Not on the poster but still the biggest performer in the film (in terms of profile if not actual stature) is Anna Kendrick, who plays FBI agent Kendra Glack. Based out of Miami, Glack is predominantly concerned with a peculiar string of operations where the FBI, for reasons of publicity and political expediency, engages in what is obviously entrapment of a string of nobodies, encouraging them to commit terror-related offenses so they can then swoop in and heroically arrest them at the last minute. No-one on the team seems minded to question the deeply compromised nature of their activities.

Next up on the task force’s list of targets is Moses Al Shabazz (Marchant Davis), who may be a cult leader, might be a preacher, is definitely a psychiatric patient who’s stopped taking his meds, but certainly isn’t any kind of threat to the fabric of society (no matter how fondly he thinks of himself as one). Moses lives in a commune/mission/farm in the middle of the Miami projects, practising a bizarre syncretic religion venerating an amalgamation of Jesus, Allah, ‘Black Santa’ and General Toussaint L’Ouverture. At first he seems a hapless, delusional figure, but one of the points the film makes (if perhaps not strongly enough) is that he has, in a small way, been a force for social good, persuading a number of young men to give up their gang lifestyle and guns and join his ‘movement’; he is also clearly a loving husband and father.

Still, farming in inner-city Miami is not exactly booming and the commune is forced to live off discarded food scavenged from local fast food restaurants, while there is also the issue of paying the rent on the mission building. And thus Moses falls into the orbit of the FBI and its network of collaborators and informants. Completely against his principles and the wishes of his wife (Danielle Brooks), Moses finds himself urged to engage in all kinds of dubious dealings – accepting guns from fictitious IS-supporting sheikhs, acting as middle-man in sales of nuclear material, and so on, in exchange for rent money for his home. But can he actually go through with it? And if he does, are the authorities competent enough to actually arrest their man?

You can definitely see the similarities between The Day Shall Come and Four Lions – Moses and his followers are the same kind of hapless fantasists as the earlier film’s wannabe jihadist martyrs – but I regret to say that it seems to me that the new film falls considerably short of the same standards. To be honest, it’s the first thing I can remember Morris being responsible for which is actually sub-par, in the sense that you can kind of see what it’s trying to do, but it’s also very clear that it’s just not succeeding.

You can see the film comes from a serious place, wanting to explore and expose the absurd workings of the American justice system, and doubtless also touch on issues of race and prejudice in modern America. But the thing is the film is also obviously attempting to function as a genuine comedy as well. There’s nothing wrong with doing comedy about serious issues, especially if you’re a satirist (which is probably one of the things Morris has on his passport), but with any kind of comedy the bottom line is that you have to be funny. That’s the entry fee, the sine qua non of the form. The Day Shall Come is just not consistently funny enough to work on those terms. There are certainly some amusing moments, and you can make out the kind of absurdist, Kafkaesque satire it probably wants to be – but, and these are words I never really expected to be typing, Morris seems to be trying a bit too hard to court a mainstream audience, including various sight-gags and other obvious bits of business, presumably to compensate for the fact that much of the plot is relatively complex and serious. It’s okay to be funny about serious issues; many great films have been the result. But far too often The Day Shall Come is just self-consciously silly, and the resulting tonal mismatch really does the film no favours at all.

It’s also a problem that the film never quite takes off as a piece of cinema, either – obviously, there is a developing storyline which builds up to a proper climax, but this always feels rather more like a string of comedy sketches of varying quality. For a film about such American issues, it always feels curiously British in sensibility, regardless of the fact the only British performer prominent in it is Kayvan Novak. It also feels like a film which is concerned with issues which would have felt much more urgent ten or fifteen years ago – if you want to do satire about the US government now, well, good luck in finding a way to be more depressingly absurd than reality: the inner workings of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security really feel like quite small potatoes.

Still, Morris clearly feels quite passionate about this, even if it’s hard to share his commitment to it. I’m struggling to find very positive things to say, obviously, but the film does manage to hold together as a narrative and you can glimpse the clever, absurd film he was looking to create. I should also say that Anna Kendrick is obviously working immensely hard to lift the material she has been given. Passion and hard work can only take you so far, though. It’s a little difficult to work out what exactly has gone wrong with The Day Shall Come, beyond the fact that it’s just not funny or clever enough, but go wrong it certainly has.

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The Tragic Decline of English Satire, Part Two

My unpublished (and, let’s face it, unpublishable) NaNoWriMo novel from 2016 has repeatedly proven to be eerily prescient in a number of ways. So here are a couple more vaguely-topical extracts.

Chapter 29

The story so far: in the face of an insurrection by political folk-hero Nigel Brittain, hapless Prime Minister April Trace has finally been driven to resignation by the sinister forces of continental superstate, the Federation of 27…

Soon to be ex-Prime Minister April Trace closed the doors of her private flat above Number Ten Downing Street, and the panicky wailing of most the cabinet outside in the vestibule was blessedly silenced. That was a relief, but it meant that for the first time she was alone with her thoughts. Had she made the right decision? It had felt like it at the time. But now, of course, it was starting to sink in. She looked around the lovely flat with its lovely curtains in front of the lovely triple-thickness armoured glass. She was giving all of this up, and for what? A point of principle. A belief in the primacy of basic human decency and kindness.

‘Maybe I was never really cut out for politics after all,’ April Trace murmured to herself.

There would be time enough for soul-searching (by which she meant searching her soul, of course, not searching to see if she actually possessed a soul, which some of her less kindly critics had occasionally suggested might not in fact be the case) later. The Buckingham Palace tech support people had indicated Her Majesty the Queen would be ready to process her resignation in about an hour, so that was her top priority.

Well, almost her top priority. From out of the kitchen came the slender, reticent figure of Mr Trace, the soon to be ex-Prime Ministerial consort. He had his apron on and had clearly been doing something domestic in the Prime Ministerial kitchenette. As ever, his face broke into a beaming smile as he saw her, and she felt something inside thaw a little.

‘Prime Minister!’ he cried with obvious delight. ‘I didn’t expect you home so soon.’

She smiled at him. ‘I’ve told you so many times,’ she said, ‘you don’t have to be so formal when we’re at home together, Mr Trace.’

‘Sorry,’ he said. Something about her mien clearly registered with him. ‘Is everything all right, my dear?’

‘Oh, Mr Trace!’ She ran into his welcoming, if slightly confused arms. ‘It’s all over. I’ve resigned as Prime Minister. The Federation forced me into it.’

‘What!’ Mr Trace clearly couldn’t believe his ears. Bafflement danced about behind his big round glasses. ‘But the Federation needs you! Who’s going to run the country now?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Some compliant ovine, I expect,’ said April Trace. ‘Bronson, maybe. Or… the Blaine creature. He’d be the perfect choice for them.’

‘But the country would be up in arms! They’d never accept Toby Blaine as Prime Minister again – he’s not even an MP -‘

‘Another emergency decree,’ she shrugged. ‘And a major uprising now – it wouldn’t make a lot of difference, would it?’

‘I suppose you’re right,’ her husband said. He forced a smile onto his dear little face. ‘So, what’s the plan?’

‘I have to go to the palace and formally resign to Her Majesty the Queen,’ said April Trace. ‘Then I suppose we have to get the removals people in.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Mr Trace, with the expression unique to a man considering the problem of how to relocate three large roomfuls of unique and extravagant footwear at very short notice.

‘We’ll manage,’ April Trace assured him. ‘There’s always your business to fall back on if times get hard.’

‘Let’s hope the market for professional Charles Hawtrey lookalikes stays buoyant,’ said Mr Trace earnestly.

‘I need to change,’ April Trace said. ‘The car will be here soon -‘

‘Mrs Trace, open the door please.’ The voice boomed from out in the corridor. The Traces looked at each other in surprise, then she went to the door and unlatched it.

A squad of large men in dark jumpsuits and blue body armour and helmets stood there, the gold stars of the Federation prominent amongst their insignia. They were carrying an alarming range of weaponry and other gear.

‘April Trace? We’re here to take you into protective custody,’ said the squad leader.

‘I – I don’t need protective custody,’ said April Trace in alarm, glancing at her husband.

‘The Acting Prime Minister has decreed otherwise.’

‘Acting Prime Minister? But I haven’t even resigned yet -‘

‘We don’t have time for this. Get her, lads!’ the squad leader barked, hefting his pump-action shotgun threateningly in Mr Trace’s direction.

‘Stay strong, my dear! Take care of my shoes!’ cried the ex-Prime Minister as she was grabbed by the Federation enforcement squad and bundled out of the flat.

‘Mrs Trace! Mrs Trace!’ shouted the former Prime Ministerial consort forlornly, running to the door. But April Trace had already been swept away. He heard the front door of Number Ten Downing Street slam heavily, then there was only silence.

‘It’s the end of an era,’ Mr Trace murmured sadly, then went back into the flat to start packing up all the footwear.

From Chapter 40:

Nigel Brittain has triumphed and England is free again. Heroic young soldier Billy Sharples roams the streets as the celebrations continue…

Everyone seemed to be relaxing, finding warmth and fellowship. Well – almost everyone – he spied two stooped, thin figures, weighted down with heavy bags, keeping well away from the bonfires and the singing as they crept out of the city. Curious, he followed after them, until he was sure his first response to seeing them had been correct.

‘Mrs Trace,’ Billy said.

The former Prime Minister and her husband both started and looked at him, clearly on the verge of panic. Both were dressed in battered, shabby old clothes, and were carrying heavy suitcases and rucksacks. What appeared to be a tiger-striped kitten heel was poking out of one of the bags.

‘I thought it was you,’ Billy said.

A nervous glance between the couple. Then – ‘Please, we just want to get out of the city. Find a quiet place to live now,’ Mr Trace said. There was pleading in his eyes, behind the big round glasses.

‘I – I don’t know,’ Billy said. Surely these two were complicit in so many of the crimes inflicted on the English people? Didn’t justice need to be done?

‘I – I just meant it all for the best,’ April Trace said, tears starting to trickle down her cheeks, voice cracking and splintering. ‘I thought there was no other way…’

‘Well, you know better now,’ Billy said. In that moment he could no longer find any hatred in his heart for this pathetic couple. If they couldn’t find it in their hearts to be merciful in victory, Billy thought, then it was no victory worth mentioning. He nodded. ‘Go on, then. On your way.’

‘Thank you. Thank you!’ The Traces scuttled on their way.

And let that last vestige of the old regime disappear, Billy thought. It was a time for new faces and new ideas – well, no, he corrected himself, old faces and old ideas. He allowed himself a thrill of excitement at the thought of the country making this unprecedented journey back to the way things had been forty or fifty years before.

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A Stable Economy

Is it just me, or was the back end of last year particularly busy when it came to the kind of big commercial studio releases that tend to guzzle up multiple screens at the typical multiplex? The reason I ask is that a couple of films which I would have expected to make at least some kind of appearance on the big screen in central Oxford seem to have been squeezed out entirely. It’s not unheard of for this to happen when it comes to a certain kind of low-brow action-thriller, but here we’re talking about much more distinctive pieces of work – as I mentioned, I missed Bad Times at the El Royale UK release entirely and had to go to Berlin to see it, while Boots Riley’s extravagantly well-reviewed Sorry to Bother You likewise barely seemed to trouble either the big chains or my art-house cinema of choice, and I only just managed to catch it at the Ultimate Picture Palace (doing sterling work in its function of providing exactly this sort of last chance saloon).

Set in a sort of version of present-day San Francisco, this film retells the curious odyssey of Cassius ‘Cash’ Green (Lakeith Stanfield), a young African-American man struggling to establish himself financially: he and his girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson), a performance artist and sign-twirler, are having to live in his uncle’s garage, for example. He seems to be making some kind of progress when he gets a job as a telemarketer with a company named RegalView, although the work is initially challenging. Success comes when an older colleague (Danny Glover) suggests that he use his ‘white voice’ when making calls as this will be more reassuring for his clients (in the first of many quirky choices, when using the white voice Stanfield is dubbed by David Cross).

This leads to great success for Cash, even as his fellow employees are agitating and trying to organise for better working conditions. Eventually he is promoted to ‘Power Caller’, handling extremely lucrative and important business transactions, especially for a company named WorryFree. Owned by the visionary tycoon Steve Lift (Armie Hammer), WorryFree has become greatly successful by playing on people’s stress and uncertainty about modern life – by signing away all rights to self-determination, they are provided with work and the essentials for living. Is this exploiting a gap in the market or simply a clever re-branding of slavery? Cash does his best not to worry about it and concentrates on the material rewards his new success is bringing him, until Steve Lift himself approaches him with a proposition that could change both his life and the world to an almost inconceivable degree…

I suspect that Boots Riley won’t thank me for saying so, but the shadow of Charlie Kaufman does seem to me to hang rather heavily over Sorry to Bother You – this is the same kind of wildly absurdist comedy that Kaufman made his name by writing: the structures of modern urban life are present, but have had their normal contents emptied out and been refilled with things which are almost palpably ridiculous. The sheer inventiveness of the film is impressive, not to mention the strike rate of its jokes – there are some unforgettably funny moments in the course of the story.

However, this is the kind of satirical comedy which is setting out to draw blood, and while Charlie Kaufman often seems to me to be playing with ideas for the fun of it, Riley clearly has serious social and political points to make throughout this film. The element of this film which most of the early coverage settled on was the gimmick of the ‘white voice’, which as well as being a striking cinematic gag is a convenient metaphor for the different modes of behaviour many people, perhaps especially those from ethnic minorities, are obliged to adopt. That said, it’s still a relatively minor element of the film, which is about… well, lots of different things, to be honest, perhaps even a few too many for it to be entirely coherent as a narrative. Many of these are, admittedly, about the somewhat-vexed question of race in America – I thought that one sequence, in which Cash, as one of only two black men at a party for the super-rich, is commanded to rap for his hosts, manages to be funnier, more provocative, and say more about cultural appropriation than all of Get Out.

That said, I think this is much more a film about economics than race, although Sorry to Bother You is naturally smart enough to acknowledge that the two things are inseparably linked in modern America. Riley has said that the title itself doesn’t just refer to a telemarketer’s usual opening line, but also the film’s intention to confront the audience with some uncomfortable truths which they may habitually try quite hard to ignore. Well, maybe so, but I wonder who he imagines the audience of this film will be – I imagine that most people seeing it will already be aware of the immense social and financial inequities in western civilisation, the immense power wielded by the wealthy, the dehumanising effects of many modern jobs, and so on – these things are not secrets, they’re just treated as facts of life. Once you look past the larger-than-life characterisations and ridiculous gags, the parable of Cash’s socio-economic awakening is actually fairly straightforward, as the young man has to make a choice between getting very rich very quickly or doing the right thing. It’s only the relentless onslaught of outlandish jokes and ideas that makes the film so memorable and entertaining. Similarly, the only real solution the film has to offer basically seems to be for workers to unionise, which some might consider a little anticlimactic (well, there’s a suggestion that a violent uprising might also solve some problems, but given its context in the film it’s hard to see this is a serious proposal).

I would say that the film possibly outstays its welcome by just a few minutes, and the third act in particular shows signs of becoming completely unravelled, but the film is a satire and heavily allegorical, so this is less of a problem than it could have been. It is, in any case, quite bracing to discover a film which is so smart, so energetic, and so willing to be openly political in its comedy. I’ve heard Sorry to Bother You described as the best SF film of 2018 – I can see how someone might think it qualifies, but the science fiction elements are just part of a brew which defies conventional genre descriptions. A very funny, very sharp film, driven along by great performances from Stanfield and Hammer; one could perhaps reasonably take exception to its politics, but not to the skill with which it has been made.

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The Limits of Satire

Now of course, if we are going to talk about famous auteur comedians, then the place to start is surely with Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin is a curiously ambiguous figure these days: he remains possibly the single most recognisable person in history (while in his Tramp rig, anyway), and is still considered one of the greatest artists in the history of cinema, but his films have – generally speaking – fallen out of favour and are little-watched these days. All this was really presaged in Chaplin’s lifetime, with his immense popularity in the early part of the last century declining to the point where he was essentially obliged to leave the country at the beginning of the 1950s.

With hindsight, the moment of Chaplin’s peak commercial and critical success was also one in which the seeds of his fall from grace were visible. I’m talking about his 1940 film The Great Dictator, which was his biggest hit at the box-office, and is one of his best-regarded films these days, possibly because of the subject matter. At the same time, though, it’s one which demands you keep its historical context in mind.

 

An opening caption informs the audience that the film is set between the two world wars, a period in which ‘Insanity cut loose… and humanity was kicked around somewhat’. From here we go straight into a lengthy, quite lavish sequence depicting the final hours of the First World War, and the exploits of a hapless soldier fighting in the army of Tomainia (played by Chaplin himself, clearly as a variation on the Tramp character). After various misadventures he ends up being sent to a veterans’ hospital with amnesia.

Twenty years pass and Tomainia falls under the control of the dictator Adenoid Hynkel (Chaplin again, making the most of his passing resemblance to Adolf Hitler), who institutes a regime of vicious oppression against his Jewish citizens. When the soldier, now revealed to be an unnamed Jewish barber, is discharged from hospital, he is shocked to discover what has befallen the country.

What follows is basically a film with two main plotlines – one concerning the barber, his romance with a local woman (Chaplin’s then-soon-to-be-ex-wife Paulette Goddard), and their attempts to live some kind of life in the ghetto, which mainly consists of sentimental melodrama and slapstick comedy, and one focusing on happenings within Hynkel’s palace. This is mostly farcical satire, with lots more slapstick in the mix. In the end the two storylines come together, with the fact that Hynkel and the barber are identical crucial to the denouement, but there’s never a moment where someone says ‘You know what, you look just like him!’ – the similarity is never commented upon prior to the moment it becomes central to the narrative.

I think that before you decide about your opinion of The Great Dictator, you really do have to remember that this is a film made at a particular moment in time: in 1940, to be precise. Why is this significant? Well, for one thing it is important to remember that this was a full year before the USA entered the Second World War, and the two countries were still technically at peace; for Chaplin to make a film which so openly ridicules both Hitler, Mussolini, and various other senior Nazi figures was a bold choice (after Hitler saw the movie he put Chaplin on a death list, or so the story goes).

But there’s more than this. These days you sit down to watch The Great Dictator in expectations of a timeless masterpiece in the modern sense. In the opening minutes what you get is a sequence in which Chaplin is in charge of firing a piece of artillery: he pulls the ignition cord, the gun goes off with a big bang, Chaplin falls over and waggles his legs in the air. Enemy planes attack the area and so Chaplin mans an anti-aircraft gun; frantically spinning the wheel that controls its direction and angle of fire, he ends up whirling around uselessly like a man on a fairground ride. Assigned to help a group of infantry, he is given a hand grenade; having pulled the pin, the grenade drops down his sleeve and ends up in his trousers. And so on.

In short, this is very broad slapstick, and not especially distinguished as such (later sequences in the film make it quite clear what an astonishingly accomplished and capable physical performer Chaplin was, even in his fifties). To a modern viewer there is something inescapably out-of-kilter about this sort of thing appearing in a film about Hitler and the Nazis. But it persists as the film continues: Goering and Goebbels are lampooned as Herring and Garbitsch (pronounced as a homophone of ‘garbage’), Mussolini is played as a cartoon Italian gangster (it is somewhat eye-opening that the performer, Jack Oakie, was Oscar-nominated for the role); and yet in the same film there are scenes of Jews being beaten and robbed by Hynkel’s stormtroopers, having their homes burnt to the ground, eventually shot… this is not the stuff of comedy, by any sane metric. It is an uneasy juxtaposition.

But, as I say, you have to remember this is a film from 1940 and the full scale of Nazi atrocities had yet to become clear. Over twenty years later Chaplin himself wrote that ‘…had I known of the actual horrors of the German concentration camps, I could not have made The Great Dictator, I could not have made fun of the homicidal insanity of the Nazis.’ Which is fair enough, I suppose. But the film is still uncomfortable to watch in parts.

Apparently, Hitler was under the impression that Chaplin himself was Jewish, and if this had been the case it would have explained the film-maker’s decision to lampoon the dictator with quite such asperity. But he wasn’t, and – beyond simple moral outrage – there doesn’t seem to have been a particular reason for him to make this film, although he himself observed that ‘one doesn’t have to be a Jew to be anti-Nazi, just a decent normal human being.’ Then again, apparently Hitler held a strange fascination for Chaplin, the two men having so much in common – they were born within days of each other, both rose from backgrounds of extreme poverty to immense fame and power, and so on. ‘[Hitler]’s copying your act,’ observes Kevin Kline as Douglas Fairbanks in Richard Attenborough’s Chaplin; perhaps Chaplin felt the need to return the favour in some form.

Whatever the reason, The Great Dictator is clearly a heartfelt piece, and this is never more clear than in the concluding sequence, in which the barber (now pretending to be Hynkel) addresses his followers. Chaplin is speaking straight into the camera, in a monologue that goes on for nearly five minutes, calling for peace, brotherhood, freedom and democracy. Some people think it is beautiful and uplifting, others that it is overly earnest and quite simply preachy (it has been identified as the moment at which Chaplin’s personal politics began to impact upon his public image, to his eventual detriment). Personally, I can only agree with Chaplin’s sentiments, I just don’t think this is the stuff of good film-making.

But then The Great Dictator is not really traditional film-making, in the sense that this is not primarily entertainment – Chaplin’s intention seems to have been to use his popularity, especially as the Tramp character, to attract audiences to a film with an overtly political purpose. Chaplin’s physical performance is terrific, and there are some very funny scenes (such as the one with the puddings filled with coins). But that’s never quite the point. Judging The Great Dictator as entertainment kind of misses the point of it. As a piece of political satire, though, I have to find its intentions admirable even if the execution often makes me rather uneasy.

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La Comedie Democratique

I used to be a fairly regular participant in the great British tradition of the pub quiz, back before the institution was effectively killed off by the rise of the smartphone and hand-held search engines. One of the methods by which the proprietors of these events tried to limit people’s ability to cheat was by introducing things like music and picture rounds, where you couldn’t just google for the answers. There was usually an interesting mixture of difficulties on display.

I recall on one occasion being heads-down with the rest of the team poring over some of the more challenging pictures we were being asked to identify: 1970s football managers, obscure cousins to the queen, and so on. And there was one photo of a middle-aged man in a shapeless hat and a raincoat, smoking a pipe, with a rather peculiar expression on his face.

‘Is that Eric Morecambe without his glasses?’ wondered one of the team, aloud.

‘No it’s not. Maybe it’s Harold Wilson,’ said another, prompting an instinctive and visceral hiss from the members of the team who also belonged to the local Conservative Club (one can’t always freely pick one’s pub quiz team-mates).

Something was stirring in the back of my brain, as the machinery back there (which I have given up trying to understand) quivered and buzzed and finally coughed up an answer.

‘I… I think that’s Jacques Tati,’ I said.

They stared at me a lot, torn between lack of comprehension at what I was on about and bemusement that I actually appeared to know the answer. For myself, I was astonished that a picture of a French comedian from the middle of the last century had turned up in a pub quiz picture round in the north-west of England, and also that I was able to recognise him despite never actually having seen one of his films.

I mean, come on, it’s French comedy: our cousins across the channel are famous for their wine, their cuisine, their sense of style, and the sense of humility which they take with them whenever they travel abroad, but French comedy is (generally speaking) down the list beneath their pop music when it comes to les grandes realisations de la France.

Then again, there are exceptions to everything, and if there is a French comedian with a claim to international recognition it is Jacques Tati, acclaimed as one of the greatest auteurs and film directors of all time by people who should actually know about that sort of thing.

Well, as I say, I’d heard of Tati (and clearly seen a picture of him at some point), but had never seen one of his movies until recently when a stack of films passed on to me by a friend happened to include Tati’s 1958 film Mon Oncle (even I, who didn’t even take GCSE French, can figure out that this means My Uncle).

With a title like that it sounds like some sort of sentimental, family-themed romp, but (and to be honest you had best get used to this) Mon Oncle defies – or, perhaps, ignores – expectations. Tati plays his most famous creation, Monsieur Hulot, a carefree, easy-going gentleman of middle years, residing in a chaotic Parisian neighbourhood at the top of a ramshackle apartment block.

This is quite at odds with the lifestyle of his sister (Adrienne Servantie), who along with her husband Arpel (Jean-Pierre Zola) has relocated to an ultra-modern home in the suburbs, with all kinds of modern fixtures and conveniences. Despite all of this, their son (Alain Becourt) seems much happier spending time with his uncle, Hulot. This is a source of much chagrin to the Arpels, who view Hulot as a feckless embarrassment and seemingly spend most of their time trying to get him to adopt a more ‘appropriate’ lifestyle – working in Arpel’s factory, and so on.

There is, it must be said, not much more in the way of plot when it comes to Mon Oncle, mainly just a succession of set-pieces which usually depict Monsieur Hulot unintentionally wreaking havoc upon the ordered existence and plans of the Arpels. Your sympathies are intended to be with Hulot throughout, not because he is a particularly engaging or identifiable figure, but because the lifestyle of the Arpels is depicted as phoney and dehumanised: their home is a sterile environment depicted in a palette of dull greys, the most distinctive feature a fairly ugly fountain (which Mme Arpel hurries to switch on whenever they receive an important guest).

This extends to the film’s view of the factory and the consumerist lifestyle which the Arpels have enthusiastically adopted: rows of grey cars trundling in perfect unison between grey boxes. The contrast with the slightly shambolic, but always warm and vibrant neighbourhood in which Hulot resides could not be much more clear. Points are obviously being made, and there’s a certain sense in which Mon Oncle would be a good double-bill companion piece to George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, for they are both obviously very seriously-intentioned satires of consumerism – indeed, Mon Oncle occasionally seems almost reactionary in its suspicion of modern technology.

Satire isn’t an exact synonym for comedy, of course, which I suppose is my way of delicately raising the issue of whether this famous comedy film is actually funny or not. I suppose it is, but this feels like the kind of comedy which is meant to be taken very seriously – in other words, it is Art. As you admire the conception, composition, art direction and performances of each scene, it almost seems disrespectful to laugh at the film: an approving, serious nod feels like a much more appropriate response.

It’s not really the style of comedy you expect, either. Monsieur Hulot is clearly part of a tradition of clowning which – in cinematic terms at least – goes back at least to Chaplin’s Tramp and continues on to characters like Mr Bean (Rowan Atkinson has acknowledged Tati’s influence on his work). But the difference is that with the Tramp or Bean, you are always watching a star vehicle – they are always centre stage, the comedy built around them. In Mon Oncle, on the other hand, many of the scenes are filmed in long shot, with Hulot just one figure in a crowd of other characters (if he is present at all). He is a major character, but the film does not revolve solely around him.

I should probably also observe that there is an abrasive element to Anglophone clowning which seems to be almost entirely absent here. There is a lot less falling-over, slapstick, and comic violence than you might expect – there’s a fairly lengthy sequence about an automatic garage door opening mechanism which eventually causes the Arpels a lot of trouble after their dachshund starts to accidentally trigger the mechanism. I was anticipating the moment where someone either gets hit by the door or entangled in the works and whisked out of sight; it never happens and it almost feels like a scene without a pay-off. There are many other almost-throwaway moments of visual inspiration.

So I have to conclude that while Mon Oncle is clearly a well-made film and the product of a distinct creative sensibility, it didn’t actually make me laugh very much. Then again, it seems to be a film about ideas and the changes in French society in the late 1950s at least as much as it is a comedy; the conclusion (Hulot is banished to the provinces to become a sales rep) seemed to me to be genuinely affecting and rather sad. Still, an interesting film, though definitely the product of a rather different comedic tradition.

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