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Jeanne Dielman: The Greatest Film of All Time?

The Sight and Sound poll of the world’s best films had a bit of a shake-up last year when an obscure three-and-a-half-hour experimental feminist movie made it to the number one spot. Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles is as austere, detailed and lengthy as its title.

The film spans three days in the life of Jeanne (Delphine Seyrig), a suburban Belgian housewife who is also a prostitute. She lives with her taciturn teenage son in a drab apartment whose decor exerts an almost hypnotic fascination. Jeanne’s bedroom wardrobe summons up a whole world of psychic malaise as well as anything in Lynch. It perfectly matches her existence which is a joyless round of chores punctuated by the occasional client.

Her relationship with her son is perfectly cordial though neither expresses the slightest bit of affection to the other. They hardly talk and when they do they seem to have strange conversations about sex. At one point Sylvain says “If I were a woman I couldn’t make love with someone I wasn’t deeply in love with,” to which Jeanne replies “How could you know? You’re not a woman.” Another conversation includes Sylvain saying that “a man’s penis is like a sword’. I suppose it’s always a temptation for a feminist movie to have a man compare his penis to a lethal weapon.

Huge swathes of the running time are concerned with Jeanne’s chores: we see her peeling potatoes, preparing meals, washing up, cleaning. But while a lot of the action is prosaic, there are mysteries. The living room is bathed in a flashing blue light. From a nearby neon sign? A police station? Or the foreshadowing of a terrible event? Mild spoiler: there is, in fact, a terrible event. Each night Jeanne and Sylvain go out but we don’t know where they go or what they do. One evening Sylvain asks “Can we not go tonight?”, which implies a definite destination rather than a stroll. But they end up going anyway.

The film is 50 years old and its age gives the film another level of fascination. We feel almost like time-travellers, as well as voyeurs, in that it gives the impression of another life unspooling as we watch. This is undoubtedly what life in suburban Belgium in the mid-’70s was like. The camera neutrally records the action – every shot is mid-distance without any camera movement whatsoever – which adds to the sense of verisimilitude. Jeanne Dielman is both very boring and fascinating and a film I’ll definitely watch again.

Is it a great film? I’d say yes. The greatest film of all time? Nowhere near. It’s very much an anti-film in that it uses very few of the techniques – or even grammar – of traditional film making. It’a a one-of-a-kind which earns its place in the canon but when the next Sight and Sound poll in 2032 is announced I’d be surprised if it even features in the top ten.

Jeanne Dielman can be viewed on the BFI player.

REVIEW: The Doctor @ Theatre Royal Brighton

Robert Icke’s The Doctor is very much an ideas-driven play. It’s a profusion of debates about race, gender, identity, morality, religion, medical ethics and wokeness which, against the odds, fit neatly into one production. It’s hard to know where the author stands on pretty much any of the themes he discusses; everything comes so thick and fast I found myself continually playing catch-up trying to figure out where I stood on practically all of the characters and their actions. Although presenting the audience with ambiguity at practically every turn has its virtues, part of me wanted an actual argument to be unambiguously advanced.

Professor Ruth Wolff (Juliet Stevenson) is the doctor in charge of a fourteen-year-old girl dying of sepsis. On instructions from the girl’s parents a Catholic priest (John Mackay) is sent to read her the last rites. Wolff denies him entry on the grounds that the girl herself has not requested this and that were she to be informed she was going to die this information could lead to a fraught death as opposed to a peaceful one. To complicate matters – and to add another few debating topics – the girl dies due to a botched abortion induced by illegal drugs bought on the internet.

Even from the off the board of the hospital is divided. Roger Hardiman (Naomi Wirthner), himself a Catholic, believes Wolff’s actions were a form of religious discrimination. During a heated meeting further insinuations are made about Wolff, her Jewishness, her membership of a controlling ‘elite’ which later prompts Wolff to accuse him of antisemitism. Troubles increase when an online petition against the hospital goes from a few hundred signatures to tens of thousands. In the second act Wolff, in a move that seems particularly foolhardy and against her character, takes part in a live TV debate on her actions which turns out to be a trial as much as a debate. During this she commits an act of betrayal against a teenage girl, the daughter of a friend, which compromises the character’s integrity. Though it’s possible Icke is showing how the pressure of the situation is distorting her essential nature. I’d imagine being the subject of that day’s Twitter storm would have psychologically unpredictable consequences.

Photo: Manuel Harlan

Whatever the faults of the writing Stevenson is magnificent. She’s furious, determined and utterly convinced of her position though, by the play’s end, this certainty starts to crumble. Ruth isn’t a particularly likeable character but she feels utterly real and not just a mouthpiece for a series of developing arguments. Wirthner is commanding as the adversary and though the character certainly says some crass things, even here it’s hard to judge whether he’s truly antisemitic or just outraged about Ruth’s behaviour.

When Wolff confronts the priest she uses a mildly insulting word to describe his behaviour which goes unnoticed by the audience. The word’s significance is revealed later when we learn something about the priest which was not apparent to the audience – but was to the play’s characters. Without giving too much away the casting is gender- and race-blind. Not for actor opportunities but to make a point about identity though what the point is I couldn’t fathom.

The Doctor is so dense with argument and counter argument, with audience sympathies liable to shift not just within a scene but within a sentence, it’s hard to fully absorb it all. I should also add that it’s often very funny, though – as you’d expect – the wit is often biting and even bitter. It’s a magnificent theatrical experience which grabs your attention and holds it for its expansive two-and-a-half hours running time.

Reviewer: Michael Hootman

Continues at the Theatre Royal Brighton until September 10.

For more information and tickets click here.

AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘Get Carter’ to ‘Vampyr’

PICKPOCKET (BFI Blu-ray). Famously austere director Robert Bresson’s film is heavily influenced by Crime and Punishment but replaces old-lady murder with the more socially acceptable crime of theft.

Michel (Martin LaSalle) steals some money at a horse race and is picked up by a police inspector who lets him go due to lack of evidence. As in Dostoevsky’s novel, Michel – rather feebly – puts forward the case that some people are, because of their superiority, above the law and should be allowed to break it.

It’s hard to fathom in which field of human endeavour Michel thinks he excels as his whole character is rather opaque. It’s immediately apparent that LaSalle is not a professional actor and his performance is not exactly bad just reined in almost to the point of blankness.

The Inspector plays a game of cat and mouse with the film’s antihero, occasionally showing up at his seedy apartment to give him something between a pep talk and a warning. It all leads up to a final shot in which Michel seeks to be physically consoled by the woman he loves despite the two of them being physically separated by prison bars.

PickPocket

As the baroque music rises on the soundtrack it seems that Bresson is – and this may sound vaguely heretical – actually tugging on the audience’s heartstrings. And to make matters worse it strongly reminds me of the scene when Dumbo is comforted by his mother through her prison bars. An ice-cool treatise on criminality with a surprise sentimental ending inspired by Disney? Probably not, but on first viewing this interpretation at least seems plausible.


GET CARTER (BFI Blu-ray). On his way up to his home town of Newcastle, Jack Carter (Michael Caine) is seen reading Farewell My Lovely. Director Mike Hodges is, none too subtly, foreshadowing the intricate plotting and macho morality of classic American noir.

The plot revolves around Caine avenging the murder of his brother but in order to get to the culprit he has to untangle a whole web of motivations involving a seedy property developer, a local crime boss (playwright John Osborne) and his own Kray-like bosses. There’s also a small number of women who he sleeps with, slaps around and even murders.

Carter is no Philip Marlowe, he’s a brutish, psychotic thug, yet Caine’s performance – and some snappy dialogue – make him so watchable that the audience ends up queasily rooting for him.

Get Carter

Although no one in the film, apart from his niece (though she might actually be his daughter), has anything approaching a human character the archetypes are so well sketched it really doesn’t matter.

From the campy hitman to the slightly less campy crime boss played by Osborne almost all the men are fascinatingly reptilian. Ian Hendry as Osborne’s lackey is particularly good: there’s no histrionics he’s just calmly, repulsively evil. It’s a film often accused of misogyny due to the terrible way its women are treated but it’s the women who are portrayed with anything approaching humanity. It’s a brilliant, unlovely film and an important milestone in the history of British cinema.


VAMPYR (Eureka Blu-ray). The first 20 minutes of Dreyer’s supernatural drama are amongst the finest of ‘30s horror. It comprises a series of hallucinatory dreamlike images which conjure up an uncanny netherworld where everything is strangely out of kilter.

A man arrives in a sleepy village, is woken up by a mysterious stranger and then goes on a weird nighttime odyssey. He eventually arrives at a manor house and here the somewhat confusing plot kicks in.

It then becomes a perfectly serviceable vampire drama but the magic seems to evaporate as the film has to get on with the understandable business of telling a story. In comparison to the beginning the climax seems almost mundane in that the villain’s death feels like something from a minor Hitchcock. Vampyr is a great movie which, in its first third, points to how it could have been a work of genius.

THE APPOINTMENT (BFI Blu-ray). This British supernatural drama from 1981 never got a cinema release and it’s not hard to see why. It starts off with a schoolgirl disappearing due to some inexplicable force and this admittedly powerful sequence is never mentioned again.

The director’s commentary explains it was done simply to keep the interest of the notoriously fickle TV audience. Which might be good for advertising revenue but narratively it leaves a bit of a hole. There’s no real plot, just a series of uncanny – but mostly quite boring – incidents.

Edward Woodward is the boring father with a boring wife and a daughter who may have Carrie-like powers. The latter’s performance is so wooden it easily transcends dullness and becomes quite hypnotic.

The photography is very muddy and occasionally it’s hard to see what’s going on. The aforementioned commentary is probably the most entertaining thing on the disc as it features someone from the BFI desperate to praise the film yet constantly getting things wrong.

There’s a rather embarrassing bit where some apples are described, almost heroically, as both a leitmotif and a McGuffin. Although awful it’s not quite awful enough not to have garnered a cult following: if you like pretentiously defending absolute nonsense then this is probably the film for you.

 

At Home With Hootman: From ‘Jules et Jim’ to ‘Lawrence of Belgravia’

JULES ET JIM (BFI Blu-ray). Truffaut’s masterpiece has a passing resemblance to a romcom but it occasionally has the darkness, and psychologcial depth, of a Bergman. Just before the Great War a close friendship forms between two bohemians, Austrian Jules (Oskar Werner) and native Parisian Jim (Henri Serre). They do wild romantic things like visiting a small Adriatic island simply to see the bust of a goddess with an enchanting smile. A woman with the same smile, Catherine (Jeanne Moreau), turns up in their lives and the three become inseperable until Catherine and Jules marry and the two men find themselves fighting on opposite sides in the Great War.

The centre of the film is undoubtedly Moreau who is accurately described as ‘a force of nature that lives in cataclysms’. She is the freest of spirits but is her determination to live life on her own terms idealistic or selfish? The scene where, after the war, Jules confides to Jim that his marriage is not happy is beautifully handled and quietly heartbreaking.

There are many lines which will have modern audiences outraged or scratching their heads, from a quoted description of women being ‘abominable’ or ‘a blend of idiocy and depravity’ to a very strange scene where a friend of Jim’s introduces his latest conquest as an ‘empty thing’ whose only use is for sex.

The ending – which stretched my credulity – perhaps points to the idea that Catherine is mentally disturbed more than anything. This is a film which is a half-century old so it’s not surprising it doesn’t chime with us totally; but its virtues of character and Truffaut’s sheer mastery of the medium more than make up for its vices.

LA PEAU DOUCE (SILKEN SKIN) (BFI Blu-ray). A married publisher has an affair with a much younger woman in one of Truffaut’s less successful films. It’s a serious drama but the narrative has its farcical elements though the film – apart from one line it’s never overtly funny.

Whilst trying to keep the affair secret, life presents Lachenay, a famous intellectual, with petty humiliations and the sheer awkwardness of having to lie to everyone. His air hostess girlfriend (Françoise Dorléac) also has to keep things secret though when she’s accosted in the street by a random man and Lachenay can’t do anything to intervene it seems we’re supposed to feel sympathy for Lachenay as much as Nicole.

There’s one blackly funny scene where Nicole confides to Lachenay about a former boyfriend who ’nearly’ raped her and, after having sex with him, she felt so dirty she had to have a shower. His response, a cool ‘what did he do for work?’, certainly made me laugh though whether it was at the absurd insensitivity of Lachenay or Truffaut it’s hard to tell.

The film is also at pains to point out the role blind chance has in all human affairs though the fact that if you miss a plane and therefore don’t meet someone your life could take a different turn is fairly trite.

Françoise Dorléac has the charisma and beauty to carry the film and outshines her co-star to the degree it’s hard to see why she’s attracted to him. The crazy ending makes that of Jules et Jim look restrained.

LAWRENCE OF BELGRAVIA (BFI Blu-ray). Lawrence is the cult singer behind bands such as Felt and Denim whose work is sort of New Wave-ish with a bit of punk and occasionally psychedelic folk. This low-fi film follows him as despite being virtually penniless, homeless and on methadone he’s still doggedly continuing his music career with his latest band Go-Kart Mozart. The film looks like a mockumentary in its wry comedy with about 75% of its hero’s utterances being deliberately funny. I liked his declaration of love for Kate Moss and his insistence that they’d make a great match (they’d have a joint bank account and she’d put in her millions and he’d put in his dole every two weeks).

There’s a lot of discussion about former band members and obscure industry names from the ‘80s which I’m guessing would mean a lot to diehard musos. Lawrence isn’t quite enough of a presence to make the film appeal to anyone but his fans and those fascinated by indie music from 40 years ago.

OUTSIDE THE LAW (Eureka Blu-ray). In 1920 the police procedural had yet to be born so audiences – and it would seem filmmakers – had little idea of how either the police or criminals operated. Tod Browning’s silent feels like some kind of morality play where the gritty details of how the world works (even down to a safe which can be broken into simply by deftly turning a handle) are less important that its heroine’s moral salvation.

Priscilla Dean plays a hoodlum’s daughter who takes on one last job stealing some jewels due to the machinations of her dad’s arch enemy Blackie (Lon Chaney). This is the kind of film where a criminal can mend her evil ways simply by seeing the shadow of a cross on the living room carpet. It’s set in Chinatown and has a number of wise and serene Chinese characters who give philosophical advice and the film probably should get points for positive representation (and then have them taken away again as the parts are played by white actors). As a relic of film history it has a certain fascination.

REVIEW: Circa Sacre @ Theatre Royal Brighton (BRIGHTON FESTIVAL)

Words by Michael Hootman

Circa is a company of ten dancers whose performance, without any set and with the company dressed often only in the plainest of underwear, falls at the more austere end of contemporary dance. The choreography is impressive: fluid and gliding and suitably gravity-defying. However, due to my manifest limitations, I wanted to leave after about ten minutes.

The first piece of music was loud, percussive and occasionally punctuated by even louder crashes which taken as a whole sounded like something designed by the military to incapacitate the enemy. The spotlight falls on a man and a woman who seem to be in a state of mutual antagonism. Dressed in black they dance around each other though it’s hard to be sure about their motivations. They could, also, be very much in love. My inability to read modern dance yet again appears to be my undoing. Uncharitably, I start to think that at least with Michael Clark you get some lovely costumes and Bowie on the soundtrack. I marvel at the dancers’ physiques and their prowess: and it’s truly amazing how they balance with up to three stacked on top of each other, how they can be thrown around like rag dolls, how a dancer can be twisted until it looks like he may snap.

The second part of the evening is performed to The Rite of Spring. There’s a recurring motif where they all seem to have small seizures. I don’t know what this means; I don’t know what any of it means. There’s one truly astounding bit when the women throw themselves into the men and the way they’re caught gives the sense that the women are somehow being absorbed. It’s brilliant and I wish the whole evening meant more to me than this one image. I then reflect that all that training, that strained musculature, that dedication, that skill, that technical brilliance is entirely wasted on me. After an hour and a ten minutes the final note of Stravinsky sounds through the theatre and there’s a moment’s silence before the audience bursts into rapturous applause.

If it’s any consolation to anyone – and I’m sure it won’t be – as I cycled home I hung my head in shame.

Circa Sacre is at Theatre Royal Brighton as part of Brighton Festival 2022 and runs till Saturday, May 28. For tickets, CLICK HERE 

LEAD PIC CRED: JUSTIN MA

REVIEW: The Patient Gloria @ Theatre Royal Brighton (BRIGHTON FESTIVAL)

Words by Michael Hootman

In mid-’60s California, a young woman, Gloria (Liv O’Donoghue), left her husband and discovered the joy and guilt of sex outside of marriage. In order to help future students she saw three eminent psychotherapists for one session, each of which was filmed to be used only within an academic setting. Gloria is betrayed subtly, and not so subtly, by these three men; Gina Moxley’s play focuses on the woman whilst putting the famous men she saw firmly in their place in a work which looks at some of the worst aspects of male pattern misbehaviour.

Moxley herself plays the three men Gloria opens up to. The first is the avuncular Carl Rogers and the last the nakedly antagonistic Fritz Perls. It’s hard to know how much dialogue is lifted from the films but the triptych makes an interesting set of different male stereotypes. Perhaps the films could be seen as an exploration of the male psyche as much as analysis of the one patient. We learn that after the session Perls, on meeting his former patient, invited her to use her hand as an ashtray for his cigarette – it’s a bizarrely unpleasant story which seems to underline one of the play’s hypotheses that it’s the doctors who had the personality defects. And when we learn that Perls later hit a woman and told her “I’ve beaten up more than one bitch in my life” it’s pretty obvious who needed therapy. After all, Gloria just wanted to enjoy herself without feeling shame.

Interspersed with the therapy sessions Moxley remembers what life was like for women in Ireland in the ’70s. It’s a depressing story of girls being constantly exposed to unwanted flashes of male genitalia and older women being subject to contempt and violence. But if the show sounds uncompromisingly heavy it’s all done with humour which can be light as a feather or blackly ironic. Moxley is as charismatic an actor as I’ve seen in a long while – puckish, mischievous with an almost permanent twinkle in her eye. O’Donoghue completely inhabits the role of Gloria, an obviously intelligent, decent woman who has her own Jackie Onassis-style glamour.

Needless to say, the promise to Gloria was not honoured and the films were widely released and today can even be seen on Youtube. But this play is a brilliant tribute to a woman who feared she’d just be a footnote in the history of psychoanalysis. It’s also got a great soundtrack with live renditions of songs by the Beach Boys, L7 and, of course, Van Morrison. Plus it’s probably the only show you’ll see this year which has a flying penis.

The Patient Gloria is at Theatre Royal Brighton as part of Brighton Festival 2022 and runs till Saturday 14 May.

For tickets, CLICK HERE

REVIEW: The Homecoming @ Theatre Royal Brighton

A good three decades before the term toxic masculinity was coined, Pinter’s The Homecoming presented audiences with a group of men who revel in the worst excesses of stereotypical masculine behaviour. When sitting in their North London house – a subtly nightmarish vision of dark blue flock wallpaper – life seems to consist of dominating whoever happens to be in their immediate vicinity. Should a woman come into contact with them then we’re led to believe that things get very ugly indeed. But, like much of Pinter, there are ambiguities at every turn.

The stories the men tell of their lives often seem to be improvised on the spot simply to aid them in whatever confrontation they’re involved in, so it’s hard to know if we’re supposed to take them at face value. Woman are causally threatened with murder, or just as casually raped, but internal inconsistencies suggest that the tales are exaggerated or simply fabrications. When an actual woman comes into the home they share it turns out that she is the one who wields the power. But even here it’s hard to know if this is illusory as by the play’s end she seems to acquiesce in her own degradation.

THE HOMECOMING. Shanaya Rafaat (Ruth), Ian Bartholomew (Sam) & Keith Allen (Max) © Manuel Harlan

Max (Keith Allen) is the prototypical Pinter character: a working class man who radiates a certain kind of domineering energy. He shares a house with his brother Sam (Ian Bartholomew) and his two sons Lenny (Mathew Horne) and Joey (Geoffrey Lumb). Max is a man looking for a fight and Lenny is more than eager to rile him with a mixture of amused contempt and the occasional display of naked hostility. Sam is arguably the most likeable character on stage, and certainly the gentlest, and it’s interesting that Pinter gives hints that he’s gay. Early on he’s criticised by Max for his inability to find a wife and later on Max even says that he’d ‘bend over for half a dollar on Blackfriars Bridge’. Sam manages to exempt himself from the constant onslaught of petty battles, at least until a final physical confrontations.

THE HOMECOMING. Sam Alexander (Teddy) Keith Allen (Max), Mathew Horne (Lenny) © Manuel Harlan

The cycle of anger and resentment would conceivably go on forever though it takes a new course when Max’s other son Teddy (Sam Alexander) arrives unannounced with his wife Ruth (Shanaya Rafaat). Teddy is a professor of philosophy at an American university and although he shows none of the menace of his immediate family members he still tries to control his wife: no matter how often she insists she’s not tired the more he pointlessly insists she goes to bed. Ruth is ill-prepared for the reality of Max (Teddy has simply told her that his family are ‘very warm’ and, rather ominously, ’they’re not ogres’) who, on seeing her, asks why there’s a filthy tart in his house.

THE HOMECOMING. Keith Allen (Max) © Manuel Harlan

Allen is suitably misanthropic and menacing as the irredeemable patriarch of the family – it might actually be impossible to name one good thing he does or says. In fact his descriptions of bathing his sons and tucking them up in bed when they were young are delivered with such a sense of threat it’s tempting to read them as him tormenting victims he sexually abused as children. The stand out performance comes from Horne whose Lenny can electrify with the sheer force of his hatred. The evening truly comes alive when he gives two appalling monologues about helping, and then attacking, an old woman and then toying with the idea of murdering a prostitute because she was ‘falling apart with the pox’.

When Ruth asks how he knew she was diseased Horne’s delivery of the line ‘I decided she was’ is as chilling as it’s horrifying, and it’s here The Homecoming becomes truly thrilling theatre. Rafaat is imperious and and seemingly unfazed by the appalling events taking place around her; it’s as if she’s some other-worldly being who can’t be affected by the stupid men who surround her. Though her ‘victory’ which has her being turned into a prostitute, but on favourable terms, will probably not please many feminists if the bargain is taken literally. Or, I suspect, metaphorically.

Jamie Glover’s excellent production certainly brings out the dark humour of the play. It’s always exciting in the theatre to find yourself laughing and then almost immediately feeling slightly guilty for doing so.

The Homecoming continues at Theatre Royal Brighton until Saturday, May 7. For more info or  tickets click here

Words by Michael Hootman

AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘YellowJackets’ to ‘Hard Cell’

FAITHLESS (BFI Blu-ray). Scripted by Ingmar Bergman and directed by one of his favourite actresses, Liv Ullmann, this is an intense examination of an affair and its consequences. Marianne (Lena Endre) is married to world-famous conductor Markus but finds herself having an affair with theatre director David – a friend of the family and a man who she formerly saw as a brother. The film has a fascinating framing device: Marianne doesn’t exist but is a character dreamt up by an ageing film director who interviews her as he teases out the story we see dramatised. It’s a great conceit with the director as creator, if not Creator, bringing life into existence, listening to his creations whilst also putting up incredibly cruel obstacles to their happiness.

The film has an undoubtedly brilliant central performance from Endre as Marianne. In some scenes we see her practically disintegrate as if being emotionally destoryed by the strength of her feelings. However, it’s this ramping up of this intensity which ultimately compromises the whole enterprise. Eventually the film comes crashing down as its melodrama skirts with absurdity and becomes almost ridiculous. A divorce following a spouse’s affair is going to be tough but the theatrics its three protagonists go through seem to happen purely because of the cruelty of the director (the character rather than Ullmann). The twist at the end where Marianne learns something about her husband seems gratuitous. And a few minutes later the shocking revelation in Markus’s final letter pointlessly ramps up things up further.

There’s one scene where Marianne sees the notes the director has written, literally the story of how her life will unfold, and from the director’s face we know what happens next is not going to be good. Perhaps the point of the film isn’t the human affair and rather Faithless is a critique of God himself. Ullmann’s movie is absolutely compelling from scene to scene, but the narrative is simply too focussed on veering towards darkness and tragedy, occasionally at the expense of believability.

JIMMY SAVILE: A BRITISH HORROR STORY (Netflix). This two-part documentary seems to be aimed at an American audience as it tells us Brits little that we didn’t already know. The first part is, strangely given the material, very boring. It focuses on Savile’s TV career and so there’s a lot of footage – I mean way too much – from the Savile oeuvre. There’s also something rather disingenuous about the clips used: there are many instances of Savile making a ‘sexy’ joke about a young girl who happens to be in his vicinity. To anyone under 40 these ominously presented clips would seem to be actual proof of the man’s depravity – a fully grown creepy man making sexual references about underage girls. Yet there’s no one on hand to point out this was the 1970s/ ‘80s and Savile was a typical representation of the culture of the time.

Take popular song Kinky Boots (released in 1964 and made the top ten in 1990) which had actor Patrick Macnee singing about ‘sexy little school girls’ without any eyebrows being raised. Shorn of any context it’s hard to know if Savile’s on screen behaviour really was that much worse than his contemporaries.

Part two shows some harrowing testimony from a survivor but the programme doesn’t get close to answering the perhaps unanswerable question of how he got away with his crimes for half a century.

YELLOWJACKETS (Sky). In 1996 an all-girl football team’s plane crashes in the jungle. In the present day we follow the characters – at least the ones that survived – whilst the narrative moves between the two strands gradually revealing parts of what happened in the wildnerness.

This is a brilliantly inventive drama with horror and perhaps supernatural undertones full of great performances from both the girls and their adult counterparts. Stand out favourite is weirdly sweet, and slightly sinister, Misty (Christina Ricci and Sammi Hanratty) whilst Juliette Lewis is great as the adult Natalie, a hard-as-nails cynic and a great modern noir character.

Fairly early on there are hints that there’s something occult going on (could a carved symbol on a tree near the crash site be a coincidence? Probably not!) and my only fear is this could turn out to be the equivalent of seminal ‘90s series Lost. Like Lost it slowly lets the mystery deepen and I hope that, unlike the earlier programme, Yellowjackets actually has some idea where it’s going and it doesn’t rack up incidents of head-scratching bizarreness without any attempt at resolution.

HARD CELL (Netflix) Catherine Tate is not a woman without talent so it’s baffling how she could turn out something so devoid of humour, intelligence or wit.

The set-up is Tate plays the governor of a prison, and various inmates, who are the subject of a TV documentary. Apart from being desperately unfunny its slavish use of The Office as a template is simply embarrassing. As the governor she’s basically a clueless Ricky Gervais whilst her second-in-command (Christian Brassington) has been directed to act exactly like Martin Freeman – even down to the intensely sardonic looks directed straight to the camera’s lens.

After 30 minutes of this abject failure I quickly switched to Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s brilliant predecessor to Fleabag, Crashing, which is funny, touching and sexy and I felt my faith in the sitcom, and perhaps humanity itself, restored.

AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘The Proposition’ to ‘Lot In Sodom’

THE PROPOSITION (BFI Blu-Ray/UHD). This Australian Western, scripted by singer Nick Cave, certainly has the virtue of authenticity: apart from its leading lady the entire cast and their surroundings look suitably filthy. The movie is closer to Peckinpah than Ford in its depiction of violence and the bestial side of human nature although director John Hillcoat also brings out the natural beauty of the Australian landscape.

Despite the virtues of unflinching realism – there’s a brillinantly acted and hard-to-watch scene in which a character receives a flogging which will kill him – Cave’s script seems undeveloped and perhaps too austere in the simplicity of the plot and its taciturn characters. It’s hard to warm to a script which has a character in 1880 quoting Dorothy Parker a decade before she was born (presumably Cave guessed, like many people, that her ‘what fresh hell is this?’ is Shakespeare). After watching one of the extras on the two-disc set we learn that Cave wrote the script in three weeks – and unfortunately it shows.

Ray Winstone is Captain Stanley, an English policeman who believes it’s his job to civilise the god forsaken country he’s ended up in. He captures two brothers from the Burns gang: Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mike (Richard Wilson) and makes the former an offer – if he tracks down and kills his older brother Arthur (Danny Huston) then he and Mike will go free. Already we see that Stanley is a vicious brute when he violently assaults Mike and this contrasts with his almost demure behaviour when he’s with his wife played by Emily Watson. As the symbolic representation of Colonialism he’s an aggressive thug though it’s ambiguous whether his love for Watson shows that he has a shred of decency or it’s just a smothering manifestation of patriarchy.

On his travels, Pearce happens upon John Hurt as a bounty hunter and it’s here the film comes brilliantly to life. Hurt delivers a rollicking turn as Jellon Lamb, a man whose character is as extravagant as his name. It seems believable that before hunting down criminals Lamb was a failed actor, at any rate Hurt is fantastically hammy yet he’s also the most fully realised and even human person that we see. When Pearce eventually finds Arthur he’s broodingly poetic (which is at least surprising for someone we know to be a violent rapist) but this feels more like a writer’s conceit than flesh and blood.

The Proposition has some great scenes and its story, whilst interesting, needs opening out. Had Cave taken a few months rather than weeks it could have been something quite spectacular.

THE POWER OF THE DOG (Netflix). Jane Campion’s latest is up for every conceivable award which, in a sense, is not surprising. The whole film seems to have been designed solely to persuade people they’re experiencing a great work of art whereas what’s actually unfolding on screen is a series of beautifully composed images signifying very little.

The film is an anti-Brokeback Mountain: it’s a gay Western but one sapped of any hint of vitality and certainly any entertainment value. Whereas Ang Lee’s film was a brilliant crowd-pleaser, an unabashed update of the ‘40s weepie, Power is, for the most part, a monumental bore. Benedict Cumberbatch is domineering bully with a secret, Kodi Smit-McPhee is a mummy’s boy (and also a psychopath) and the film concentrates on their will-they-won’t-they relationship.

There’s one very funny scene where we learn that Cumberbatch’s life was saved through the simple expediency of sharing a sleeping bag with another man in a storm but apart from this, and Kirsten Dunst’s performance as the sister-in-law he’s beastly to, there’s not much of interest. There’s an evil part of me that would like to make the case for the movie being homophobic: the villain is homosexual, the homicidal psycho is effeminate and sexually ambiguous whereas the straight couple (Dunst and Jesse Plemons) are thoroughly decent and likeable. If it were truly homophobic the movie would be despicable, but at least it probably wouldn’t be so deathly dull.

LOT IN SODOM (YouTube). Unavailable commercially, this legendary gay film can now be seen online for free. First off make sure you see the version with the Hands of Ruin soundtrack which is not only one of the finest silent scores I’ve heard, I’d say it’s one of the finest film scores period: a haunting industrial discord which thrillingly evokes the harshness and the mystery of the accompanying images. It’s an experimental work made in America in the ‘30s and its intent is now lost to history.

The opening scenes show fractured images of naked young men cavorting with each other in a joyful representation of homosexuality which is hard to read as condemnatory (though the surrounding biblical story ends in death for all the men depicted).

Perhaps the eroticism of the movie’s opening could only be sanctioned by having it as part of a biblical story. Who was the film for? To what degree did it mirror contemporary Christian homophobic readings of the story? How was it received by its initial audiences? The film’s ambiguities only add to its allure.

AT HOME WITH HOOTMAN: From ‘The Tinder Swindler’ to ‘The Real Charlie Chaplin’

THE TINDER SWINDLER (Netflix). If a handsome man took you out in his private jet, bought you lavish meals, paid for the best hotels and swore that you were the one he wanted to settle down with you’d be swept off your feet, right? And if after a month he told you his life was in danger and as his enemies could trace his whereabouts through his use of his credit cards you’d take out loans of a few hundred thousand dollars to help him, wouldn’t you? After all you knew for a fact he was a multi-millionaire so it would be absurd to think he wouldn’t pay you back.

These events are exactly what happened to a number of women using the popular dating app and – as the title suggests – the women were very much mistaken.

It’s a horrible story with its antagonist, Israeli-born Shimon Hayut, an incredibly persuasive conman who managed to manipulate a large number of intelligent women into ruining themselves financially. And to add to the horror was the fact that when the story broke legions of online Twitter accounts were often less than sympathetic and quite willing to somehow blame the victims.

Although Hayut is a grade A sociopath it’s hard not to acknowledge he’s great at his job. The documentary shows him after the jig is up and there’s footage of him living in a grubby looking hostel which leads the viewer to think that at least he’s got his just deserts. His imprisonment in Israel for 15 months seems to be the icing on the cake. However, he’s released after only five months and the final few minutes of the film suggest strongly that he’s up to his old tricks again and that a sequel may, unfortunately, be just round the corner.

THE INDIAN TOMB (Eureka Blu-ray). This all-but-forgotten 1921 German silent is, in its own way, quite incredible. The plot is basically a weird fairytale with racist overtones. A Maharajah (Conrad Veidt) digs up a seemingly omnipotent yogi who he uses to complete his fiendish plan to get an English architect to build a tomb for his wife. The fiendish part is that the wife is still very much alive and having an affair with a dashing army officer.

It should be noted that here that Veidt has a tiger pit at his disposal which, when you think about it, is quite a convenient way of getting rid of your wife’s boyfriend. It’s a handsome production with some impressive sets which conjures up a version of India which could only be dreamt up by someone who’d only seen a couple of pictures of it in a magazine. The main Indian parts are played by white actors – which is fine considering the film is a century old – but its view of wily sinister Asians being thwarted by the morally upstanding Europeans probably had eyes rolling even back then.

Indian Tomb

The stand-out actor by far is Bernhard Goetzke as the yogi whose commanding presence almost makes you believe he has spectral hands which can magically reach through space to commit nefarious deeds. The plot and script are ludicrous beyond belief. This is the kind of film where a woman who thinks that goings-on at the Maharajah’s palace are a bit rum can send a note via carrier pigeon to the German Embassy simply saying ‘Situation here uncanny. Request urgent visit’ and expect instant assistance.

I’m no political expert but it seems unlikely that embassy staff routinely sent out staff to investigate uncanny situations. Its age somehow gives it a romantic aspect; it’s like stumbling across a beautifully produced chlldren’s book from Victorian times: you can admire the artistry and the beauty of its production without getting too hung up on its twisted morality.

THE REAL CHARLIE CHAPLIN (BFI player). As a Chaplin fan I didn’t learn that much more about the finest comic cinema has ever produced, but this is still a throughly engaging movie. It includes plenty of great documentary footage such as Chaplin’s appearances bringing city centres to a complete standstill with tightly knit crowds of people stretching as far as the eye can see.

There’s some staged reconstructions of taped interviews, not only with Chaplin but with an elderly woman who lived near him when he was a child (incredibly, she was talking about events that took place during the reign of Queen Victoria). The film is entirely sympathetic to its subject but doesn’t shy away from his controlling behaviour and his predilection for very young girls. He married his first wife when she was 16 – although the film neglects to mention he started having sex with her when she was 15: a crime which could have seen Chaplin in prison.

There’s a great segment which compares the lives of Chaplin and Hitler (they were born within a few days of each other) and makes the case for ‘The Great Dictator’ being something close to a cosmic inevitability. The sheer craziness of the FBI under J Edgar Hoover is revealed when the agency seems to sincerely believe that Chaplin was homosexual – and, taking the cue from the Nazis themselves, that he was also Jewish.

It’s a whirlwind tour of an incredible life which will almost certainly want to make you reacquaint yourself with his works or have the enviable experience of watching them for the first time.

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