ANOTHER YEAR
If you’re gonna make the same film repeatedly, make it a good one. Ozu knew it, Woody Allen once knew it, and Mike Leigh knows it too, provided you’re not of the mind that he condescends to his characters and/or lets his actors veer into caricature. Another Year is Leigh’s latest slice of working class life, and as the title suggests, it’s as slice-of-life-ish as ever. It’s also one of his best and most emotionally panoramic films. Seasonal chapters may seem like a hoary device, but they’re perfectly apt here.
As usual for Leigh, character interaction dictates the plot, with long-married couple Gerri (Ruth Sheen) and Tom (Jim Broadbent) providing a loose centre of which other characters orbit around. Among them are their son Joe (Oliver Maltman), Tom’s lifelong friend Ken (Peter Wight), and most memorably, twice-divorced, self-proclaimed free spirit Mary (Lesley Manville), a work colleage and frequent visitor of Gerri’s. As with Secrets and Lies’ Brenda Blethyn and Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins, Manville’s high-strung turn is sure to be one of those polarising performances/characters, that’ll rivet some viewers and strike others as an actor’s workshop experiment gone berserk, but either way, she’s impossible to forget.
It’s perhaps easy to ascribe a certain conversatism to the contrast between Mary’s loneliness and Tom and Gerri’s relatively blissful marriage. But an early scene featuring Imelda Staunton as the world’s most miserable housewife looms over the proceedings as if to refute such a thesis. As such, Another Year is ultimately a catalogue of moods and behaviour more than a Message Movie. It won’t win over Leigh’s detractors, but for those who’ve found his films powerfully reflective experiences in the past, it’s unmissable.
Originally published in 3D WORLD Issue 1042
SOMEWHERE
Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere begins with an image that emblemizes the film’s strengths and weaknesses right off the bat. For roughly a minute, we’re presented with a static shot observing a segment of a racing circuit, occupied by a Ferrari zooming in and out of frame. It’s an image that’s at once strange and bold in its duration, as well as thuddingly obvious as a metaphor for its central character’s stasis. Likewise, Coppola’s film alternates between grace and crassness throughout, unfortunately edging more toward the latter.
Stephen Dorff play Johnny Marco, owner of the aforementioned Ferrari and a vacuous party boy actor, seen spending much of his time moping about LA’s Chateau Marmont hotel, picking up loose women, and doing press junkets for movies that look like real Stephen Dorff projects. Immediate comparisons will be made with Bill Murray’s burnout actor from Lost in Translation, and when Elle Fanning arrives on the scene as Dorff’s estranged daughter Cleo, Somewhere evokes the tentative connection that Murray and Scarlett Johansson made in the prior film. In that light, Somewhere might be its spiritual prequel, albeit one that no one asked for.
For all that formal risks that Coppola takes, Somewhere is ultimately undone by straying outside the ‘less is more’ parameters she sets up. As soon as you’re on the film’s patient, uninflected wavelength, there’s misjudged gags involved Johnny being served by a naked male masseuse, or falling asleep during cunnilingis to snap you out. And the final bids for emotional catharsis feel awfully strained compared to what’s come before. Finally, that Ferrari going in circles seems less a metaphor for Johnny’s stasis that Coppola’s own.
Originally published in Drum Media, Issue 1042, p59 (Flipbook)
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