A
Midsummer Night’s Dream
A very analytical
work, using what is required in the theatrical director as decipherer of texts,
to expose an elemental framework and its successive increments of development.
Perfect
Friday
When you leave
your job with bags of money and a mistress and never work again.
The caper takes
place on a Monday as it happens, which is when a man who’s good at his job
begins the week.
All the critics
agreed there was a twist and a caper film, none could see the point.
The
Homecoming
Of an English
wife, the American cousin’s, he a brother and son and nephew, to North London,
her name is Ruth.
Hall has the
peculiar advantages of a seasoned cast in the play, also Cyril Cusack and
Michael Jayston.
David Watkin is
the cinematographer.
She’s
been away
Cassavetes’ A
Woman under the Influence is directly cited and still Caryn James of the New
York Times pronounced it “never as psychologically astute or emotionally
compelling as it should have been.”
One might easily
see a bit of Plath in the old girl’s plight, the great point at length is
rather more along the lines of Losey’s Steaming, the province of women vis-à-vis
the understanding of men, still more, matters of life or death not strictly
covered in the social sphere.
It was Hall’s
first film in fifteen years, the New York Times review pointed out, a
film for the BBC, small wonder.
Jacob
Hall’s Jacob
is a fascinating artistic gamble, rather like the curate’s egg or Jacob’s
speckled goats at first glance, and to all intents and purposes deliberately
so.
The inspiration
might have come from Whistler, whose etchings figure as the basis of some
astounding compositions, such as the morning after Jacob and Leah’s wedding,
bed to the right in the middle distance, table laden with crockery on the left
beyond it, far in the center a lighted window. This is almost Dalian, but the
meeting of Jacob and Laban to discuss livestock takes place in a sort of wide
shed with a low flat table holding jugs and crockery, extending in the background
to an open door and daylight, echt Whistler.
Against this,
Hall plays with the most conventional television technique, the plain truth of
which is matched by the performances of Matthew Modine and Lara Flynn Boyle as
Jacob and Rachel, compared with the articulateness and brilliance ascending
from Juliet Aubrey’s Leah and Sean Bean’s Esau to Giancarlo Giannini’s Laban
(to which Akim Tamiroff could add very little indeed). Esau rides a camel like
But the
transparent unknown is the effect sought at the close, and this is where Hall’s
strange offhand treatment of his two Americans pays off as they depart from all
this English and European artfulness. It’s a daring device, and there is very
little evidence of anyone having noticed it.
The special
effect of the ladder is convincingly done as a luminous apparition in the night
sky after the manner of Grünewald, drawing nearer and then revealing the
apparatus. Jacob wrestles with the angel in a scene rather like Dobbs’ madness
in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
Among the
sprinkled compositions here and there throughout in generally well-realized
evocations of the Holy Land out of Moroccan landscapes are exteriors of
rivulet, sky and habitation, interiors from Italian painters such as perhaps
Caravaggio, and a nice dizzying effect as Jacob wanders in the desert somewhere
near delirium. A truly great scene counters this with his bride’s ritual bath
before the wedding, all the dustiness and authentically worn-looking costumes
are put aside for the sound of lapping water and the girl in a modest garment
seen from the back as she enters and slowly sits down.
Never
Talk to Strangers
Hall’s rendition
of a joke whose punchline has one curst leading apes in hell, with very opulent
photography.