Branagh gets closer to Poirot's haunted heart.

 

 

Last night I watched  Kenneth Branagh’s 2023 Poirot movie, A Haunting In Venice.  

I thought it was an interesting step away from the big budget, heavily star-laden extravaganzas of his last two Poirots, with a very limited location, almost all of it shot inside a Venetian Palazzo, but with Venice still in view enough for locations to be identified and enjoyed.   

It has an interesting, if less expensive, cast: Jamie Dornan and the remarkable young Jude Hill play father and son again as they did in Branagh’s Belfast, but offering us very different characters; Michelle Yeoh gives us some rather pleasing scenery-chewing as the medium Joyce Reynolds; Tina Fey steps back 60 years into a 14’s screwball comedy persona as the Agatha Christie stand-in, Ariadne Oliver, the writer whose fortune is based on fictionalising Poirot’s cases and Camile Cottin, who I last watched with much pleasure in ‘Call My Agent’ is there along with some British actors I did not really know, such as Kyle Allen, Ali Khan and Emma Laird.    

Branagh used his favourite cinematographer, Haris Zambarloukos, who shot his previous Poirots, plus Cinderella and Belfast, and who has recently filmed Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.   In A Haunting Zambarloukos used discombobulating ‘Dutch Angles’ and unusual POVs, which alongside Hildur Guonadottir’s queasy score (Joker and Magdalene both benefited from her contributions), and the editing of Lucy Donaldson, heighten the weirdness of what is essentially a Cert 12 family horror movie.  

One of the benefits of watching this on DVD that I was able to replay one shot frame by frame and see something I had almost missed on first sight.   Although throughout the story Poirot is determined to debunk any supernatural explanations, and solves a number of murders by doing so, these few frames towards the end do raise a question about the supernatural that is not addressed or answered.      

Typically it A Haunting divided critics, some claiming it to the best of Branagh’s Poirots, others saying it was the worst.   I thought that the smaller scale suited Agatha Christie’s actual literary importance.  This is not an adaptation of War and Peace, The English Patient, David Copperfield or Cloud Atlas. It is light entertainment, but it really does entertain.  When Branagh makes a film he always uses the best talent available.   Some Producers/Directors ‘show us the money’ on the screen;  Branagh shows the talent. Michael Green, as an example, wrote both Logan and Blade Runner 2049.   

I do not know the original novel, Hallowe’en Party, set in the `Home Counties’, nor its chronological place in the saga, but I thought Branagh and the scriptwriter with whom he created all the Poirot movies have now established an arc that is deepening and darkening Poirot’s story, especially showing the effect of the two World Wars and the loss of his late wife, Katherine.  In A Haunting Joyce the medium exclaims her name when in a (supposed) trance.  Some may remember that the story of Katherine and Poirot was told in Branagh’s Death on the Nile, and the heaviness of so much death obviously hangs heavily on his shoulders and heart.  That is why he had given up his detective work at the beginning of the film and retired to Venice.   

I hope that this movie will continue his career in this less spectacular but more personal tone.  

Angels and Devils in America?

Watching one of my favourite actors, Jeffrey Wright, in the recent American Fiction reminded of the first time I saw him in the miniseries  Angels in America, developed from  Tony Kushner’s 1991 play set in 1985 during the New York Aids epidemic.     

 In the miniseries, Directed by Mike Nichols,  Al Pacino played the real life Right Wing Jewish NY lawyer Roy Cohn, who had claimed he had manoeuvred the death penalty for the Jewish American spies Ethel Rosenberg and her husband Julius at their 1951 trial.    Cohn also worked for Senator McCarthy in the anti-Communist Un-American Trials.   As it happens, Cohn also represented Donald Trump in his early business career – along with the Mafia bosses Fat Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante and John Gotti. 

 

But in the final Act of the miniseries, Cohn, a closet homosexual and virulent homophobe, is in hospital dying of Aids, attended by Belize, a gay black drag artist and male nurse played by Jeffrey Wright.    As Cohn dies the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg  (Meryl Streep) visits him,  wondering if she will forgive him - but she decides instead to share the fact that he has been disbarred from practicing as a lawyer, and relish his misery.    

 

When Cohn dies Belize asks Louis, a Gay Jew,  to sing the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.  

“I’m not saying the Kaddish for him.” says Louis, ‘No fucking way am I praying for him.  I can’t believe you’d actually pray for him.” 

Belize says “He was a terrible person.  He died a hard death.  So maybe a queen can forgive her vanquished foe.  It isn’t easy.  It doesn’t count if it’s easy.  I’s the hardest thing.  Forgiveness.  Maybe that’s where love and justice finally meet.  Peace, a least, isn’t that what the Kaddish asks for?    

 

Reluctantly, Louis, a secular Jew who says he hardly knows the words of the prayer,  begins.  As he faulters the ghost of Ethel reappears, prompting him.   At the end she says, and Louis repeats “You son of a bitch”.    

 

The miniseries, which also starred Emma Thompson and Mary-Louise Parker is still available on an HBO video.  it is over 5 hours long, but full of invention - and for me it was worth it for Jeffrey Wright's performance.   Very far from the late Bond character Felix Leiter.  

Bella Baxter: a new Eve, a Prodigal Daughter and a New Adam?

 

 

What was the last internationally award winning, multi Oscar nominated film that addressed head on the issue of Original Sin?   

 

It seems to me that Yorgos Lanthimos’ film of ‘Poor Things’ offers  us fresh perspectives on an unfallen Eve, living without ‘Original Sin’. 

 

This review assumes knowledge of the film, and so does not outline the plot or avoid ‘spoilers’, unlike my earlier review written after my first viewing.   I have now seen Poor Things three times in cinemas, and each time I wanted to stand up and cheer at the end.   I wish I had been wearing my clerical garb.     ‘Witness!’ as some say.    

 

Like the Biblical Eve Bella is born, or created, in a fully formed human body, which happens to be female, but she has no knowledge or experience.  This aspect of Eve in Genesis does not seem to attract much attention in Bible studies, , but it is central for Bella.  She has a child’s mind in an adult body.  Like Eve her Creator has provided a safe place to live and learn, though they are very different Edens.   What Biblical Eve learns is Forbidden Knowledge.   She becomes ashamed of her God given sexuality, and is cast out of her Eden as a punishment.     Bella, on the other hand,  demands to leave, so that she can learn and grow.    She has discovered one pleasurable aspect of sex, but suspects there is so much more to learn, and she does so without guilt of shame.    She may have a tempting serpent, Duncan, and she knows he is dangerous,  but believes that knowledge is worth a risk.  Her Father, Godwin, God Win,  taught her this, with his account of her parents lives and death.  He knew this story was not true, but obviously believed it to be ‘truthful’, like any worthwhile myth or parable.  Bella also knows that whatever boundaries she pushes through in pursuit of knowledge she will not risk losing her father’s love.     She will not be cast out and punished.  When she demands to be free to leave her home, her Eden, she does not know what sin and evil are. That knowledge, which many theologians call blessed,  will come later.   

 

In fact it seems that she knows something that the Prodigal Son in Luke’s Gospel did not – that her Father/God will not only forgive her, but does not believe she needs forgiveness.   As has often been said, but rarely is seems believed,  ‘Nothing you can do will make God love you more – and nothing you can do will make God love you less’. Bella does believe this.  

Evil is not forbidden to Bella.  

 

Godwin, however is not her real father. She is the child of Victoria and Alfie Blessington, even though she inhabits Victoria’s body, and they were two very unpleasant people, drawn together by their love of cruelty.   But Bella is not cruel, even though she is born with the natural uneducated cruelty of a child, a being without empathy.    Empathy has to be learnt, and Bella does learn it in Alexandria where she is exposed to the actual human costs of her privilege, and is moved to tears by it, devastated, and immediately gives away any monies she can lay her hands on.   It does not occur to her that Duncan, whose winnings she is donating, would object.    What other response could any properly responsible human being have.   

 

There are shades here of The Karamazov Brothers, and Ursula Le Guin’s story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, telling of the scapegoats who pay the price for our sins, our refusal to be properly responsible human beings.    

"The central idea of this psychomyth, the scapegoat’, wrote Le Guin, ‘turns up in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, and several people have asked me, rather suspiciously, why I gave the credit to William James. The fact is…I'd simply forgotten he used the idea. But when I met it in James' 'The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life', it was with a shock of recognition."

The quote from William James is:

“… if the hypothesis were offered us of a world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture, what except a sceptical and independent sort of emotion can it be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain?” 

 

In Alexandria Bella is devastated by this revelation and it maybe the last step towards the full ‘height and depth and breadth’ of her becoming fully human, and humane.   This is why she decides to become a Doctor, following her Father’s example.     But/and, is Bella a Christ figure?   I have mentioned Eve, but does she also suggest a New Adam?   An ‘unfallen’ Adam.   If Bella is n unfallen Eve then does her gender matter?  Jesus, of course, offers us a much richer, complex, compelling and human figure than Adam.    If that idea is shocking then maybe we should remember how shocking Jesus was, indeed his Gospel was scandalous one, scandalous in the way that Paul said was a stone that might trip many people up, and by doing so offer them a new perspective.    I remember when the idea that McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest could be a Christ figure was either unaddressed or rejected.   He was after all convicted of Statutory Rape, now more often called Child Sexual Abuse.     Is Child Sexual Abuse the closest crime we have to 1st century blasphemy?  Some certainly respond to it with a murderous rage.

I am not suggesting that either Ken Kesey or Milos Foreman intended One Flew Over as a Passion narrative, but the parallels are interesting.  As I wrote in my film blog (revbobsblog.blogspot) many years ago, A man comes into the world of the asylum, filled with people imprisoned internally and externally, dumb, crippled, damaged, frightened, dependent, depressed and controlled by the 'carers' in charge. He gives them respect, hope, stimulus, autonomy - he even gets the dumb to speak. He leads patients out into the real world, where they are taken to be doctors and psychiatrists; takes them fishing; allows them to be free, if only for a while, from their dominators and definers. The powers that-be turn on him. Billy betrays him, and then - when the Pharisees exert pressure, Billy kills himself. McMurphy is destroyed (his body remains but his spirit is gone) but the big man moves the stone and breaks out into new life. The spirit of McMurphy lives in him.

 

 Neither Alastair Grey’s book nor Yorgos Lanthimos’ film of ‘Poor Things’ is a theological tract.  Godwin Baxter is not God – save for his ‘miraculous Creativity’ and unexceptional forgivingness.  Duncan is not a serpent.  He tells Bella he is dangerous, but in fact it is he who is almost destroyed by Bella.   Max is not Adam, unless he too is blessed by Bella’s experience.    In the film he learns how to be human through his love for Bella, and joins her in their real Eden, an Eden that even includes the once brutal Alastair.   Even if  Alastair has been ‘improved’ somewhat there is no indication that he is unhappy – and I think his fate is more of a joke than a moral lessen.    It certainly made me laugh. 

 

Alastair Grey once wrote that “My stories try to seduce the reader by disguising themselves as sensational entertainment, but are propaganda for democratic welfare-state Socialism and an independent Scottish parliament. My jacket designs and illustrations—especially the erotic ones—are designed with the same high purpose.^” Contemporary Novelists (1996).  There is not much about Scottish Independence in the film, and Socialism hardly gets a look in, but as Emma Stone has said "It's such a fairy tale, and a metaphor—clearly, this can't actually happen—but the idea that you could start anew as a woman, as this body that's already formed, and see everything for the first time and try to understand the nature of sexuality, or power, or money or choice, the ability to make choices and live by your own rules and not society's—I thought that was a really fascinating world to go into."

Stone especially appreciated Bella's lack of shame in regards to her experiences.   She was the most joyous character in the world to play, because she has no shame about anything. She's new, you know? I've never had to build a character before that didn't have things that had happened to them or had been put on them by society throughout their lives. It was an extremely freeing experience to be her”.   

We may have different ideas about freedom and morality, and even those of us who do not subscribe to the idea of the Original Sin,  as projected by Augustine onto Eve, have still lived under its theological shadow and societal influence.   It is rather like knowing at a profound level that God is not male, but still finding it hard to shake of the engendered imagery and language.  This makes Bella a properly shocking creation – even to those who welcome her.    

  

Among the richly implied references in this story - including Pilgrim’s Progress and Candide - Bella is not Frankenstein’s Creature.   Even though we meet Bella in a state of Original Innocence; is the creation of a human surgeon;  embarks on an educational odyssey; Bella is not like Mary Shelley’s tragic creation.   Shelley’s Creature is left in the Arctic wastes.  Bella’s journey eventually takes her home.   Frankenstein’s Creature was wretchedly unloved by his Creator.  Bella is obviously loved by hers.    That is her precious heritage,   She is beautiful, not ugly, and formed completely from her own flesh, not ‘spare parts’.   

 

After the revelation in Alexandria Bella is overwhelmed by misery, but she does not become a ‘miserable sinner’.   She is not moved by guilt but by compassion.   In a Lutheran sense she become a more ‘bold sinner’, or as I would say, cheerful sinner,  and eventually decides to become a Doctor.   Even her attitude to her ‘clients’ in the Parisian brothel seems to be one of curious and compassionate ‘giving’, not seeking her own satisfaction but pursuing her own education in humanity by meeting their differing needs.   She even suggests to Swiney that her visitors might enjoy their time in the brothel more of they were chosen by the girls rather than choosing them themselves.    

 

I believe that Augustine’s ‘sin’ was his own, not Eve’s.  His lustful past and ongoing sexual fantasies lay in his own heart and soul, not in those of some mythical Eve, but Augustine was not a psyche-ologist (a student of the soul) like Eusebius, even if he did understand the effectiveness of  aversion therapy, plunging naked (we are told) into a bed of nettle when tortured by his erotic visions.  Happily there is none of Augustine’s Manichaeanism in Bella’s view of herself, and nothing Marcionite about her view of Godwin.   For me the implicit theology of Poor Things is about Divine Unity, not Duality.    

 

One obviously scapegoated sin today is not the driving an EV or using a Smartphone, articles that include rare metals often mined by children in landscapes as poisonous as those of Hunt’s Scapegoat, but is in refusing to ‘know’ what we do really know – that “Cobalt is a type of metal commonly used in lithium-ion batteries.  The DMC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) is the leading mecca for cobalt production as the nation holds more than 50% of the global cobalt reserves.  The excavation fields are mostly small artisanal mines, often lacking resources and protective equipment, such as gloves and masks, necessary for safer mining activities. Due to poverty rates in the country, child labor is common in mining and other sectors.” (The Borgen Project).   I do not think Bella would turn a blind eye to that, or to so many other ways in which we ignore the true human cost of life-styles we accept as natural.   

 

No doubt some folk will be scandalised by this films frank sexual scenes.   Quite right, the whole film is scandalous, in the original sense of being a tripping stone.   Saint Paul described the Gospel of Christ as scandalous, it should upset us, trip us up, let us see every thing from a fresh perspective, most especially our ideas about God, Sin, guilt and what it means to be human.   I think this film does these things.   

 

Godwin asks Max if he would “rather the World did not have Bella in it.”

 

I am glad it does.  

 

Poor Things is rich!

 Ironically to describe Yogos Lanthimos’s latest film Poor Things requires the richest of vocabularies.   

 

Grotesque, beautiful, hilarious, heart wrenching, fearless, horrific, filthy, garish, demented, phantasmagorical, anarchic, audacious, batshit, satirical, astonishing, surreal, bizarre, luscious, breath-taking, beguiling, hopeful, political, philosophical and absurdist – and for me simply wonderful.   

 

At the end I wanted to stand up and cheer;  cheer the film, cheer Lanthimos and all his crew, cheer Bella Baxter the protagonist,  and cheer Emily Stone for her amazing re-creation of her.  But, as you may infer from my opening paragraph, you may not feel the same.    

 

If you did not enjoy The Killing of the Sacred Deer or The Favourite I cannot recommend that you go and see this film.   You may well hate it.   If you did enjoy either of them and are willing to follow Yorgos Lanthimos further along his journey then buckle up and go for it!  

 

Poor Things is set in an Steam-Punk Victorian Age – with surreal and anachronistic elements,  adapted by Tony McNamara from the eponymous novel by Alistair Grey, and tells the story of Bella, a Frankensteinian creation who is literally her own mother and her own child – the body of a resurrected young woman with the brain of her own unborn child transplanted with her own.  This was achieved by the surgeon Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe), who was himself horrifically experimented on surgically by his own father.   Godwin is called God by Bella.   

                                                                                                                  

When we first meet her she behaves like a small child.  She does not know how to speak, eat, walk, behave – or to think.  She is a true innocent.   Totally uninhibited, selfish, impulsive and cruel, shame and guilt free.   That is, after all how we all start.   Stone’s physical acting here is  phenomenal, and I remember how she credibly portrayed Billy Jean King in The Battle of the Sexes.  We then follow Bella’s education; physical, intellectual, emotional, social, philosophical, sexual and moral.    

 

Some of this ‘education’ takes her on a cruise round the Mediterranean in the company of an unscrupulous, hilarious, lascivious and oddly charming lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn, played with enormous gusto by Mark Ruffalo.   We have also met Max McCandless, (Ramy Youssef) a student of Baxter commissioned to study her development, who falls in love with her.    

 

In many ways this is like the odyssey of the equally innocent Candide in Voltaire’s satirical attack on Leibniz’s ‘This is the best of all possible Worlds’ philosophy, and Baxter being called God is surely relevant here.  (Discuss.) 

 

In some ways this is like  Odysseus’s Odyssey,  as he too toured the ancient Mediterranean trying to find his way home – and in my reading find out who and what he really was.    In Odysseus’ case, it could be argued, he was ultimately no more and no less than Penelope’s husband.   

 

In Bella’s case, it seems to me, she finds she herself to be a truly liberated, fulfilled and admirable person - and of course a woman.     

 

Her story is properly shocking.   There are many (MANY) very graphic sex scenes, and Emily Stones performance is as uninhibited, audacious and moving as the part requires.     There are of course important questions that need to be raised by sex on screen but as Ms Stone came on board as a co-producer of the move early in its development,  and had worked with  Lanthimos before, most recently in The Favourite,  she obviously trusted him – and the Intimacy Consultant they used. I am also sure these scenes are essential to the film.      

  

The Photography, by the veteran Irish cinemaphotographer Robby Ryan, is inventive and ravishing.   He had also shot The Favourite for Lanthimos, plus Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank and Wuthering Heights, Ken Loach’s Angel’s Share, I, Danial Blake, and Jimmy’s Hall,  John Maclean’s Slow West, Noah Baumbach’sMarriage Story, Stephen Frear’s Philomena,  and Nick Cave’s Idiot Prayer (among many other music videos.  (Sorry to go on, but I think the combination of Director and Cinematographer is really important.)  

 

It is Edited, immaculately as ever, by Yorgos  Mavropsaridis.

 

The Production Design by James Price and Shona Heath is as astonishing and beautiful as the film absolutely requires it to be.   

 

The music, by first time English film composer Jerskin Fendrix (real name Joscelin Dent-Pooley)  is wedded to Bella’s progressive humanisation, 

 

and the Costume Design by Holly Waddington illustrates her emergence as from a chrysalis to a butterfly.