Background: This movie started, as many do, as a book. Written in 1980 by Julian Barnes, it's a semi-autobiographical novel about a young man from London who travels studies in Paris for a time. This book and many others by Barnes was quite well received. He's been shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize, an award for writers from the British Isles, for four separate books. it's said that when Barnes' mother originally read Metroland she was disgusted by the "bombardment" of filth contained within. He's also written far more lurid tales under a pseudonym. She was, unsurprisingly, appalled by those as well.
The cast comes with its share of stars. Christian Bale plays the lead, author standin Chris, and Emily Watson plays his wife, Marion. Christian Bale has long been quite popular, though this was made in the duller part of his career between his Disney days in Newsies, and before his career took off again and stayed there with American Psycho.
Both the writer and director, Adrian Hodges and Philip Saville, respectively, have worked almost exclusively for the BBC in their careers before and since this movie. The sorts of period pieces, costume dramas and stage plays that just don't translate to American audiences. I'm always leery of career television directors making the jump to the big screen, but I keep coming back for more. Also the music is by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, so that's kinda cool.
Plot: This movie starts in 1977, you can tell because Chris (Christian Bale) has some really terrible hair. He's a man of the suburbs, referred to herein as "metroland". He's married to Marion (Emily Watson) and has a baby. Their marriage is obviously stale, she refuses his sexual advances, and their baby interrupts what little momentum they get. One day, Chris gets a call from his old friend Toni, turns out he's coming to stay with them for a few days. Toni is an old friend from Chris' wild days, back when he hated suburban life. They roughhouse the way only fictional old friends do and they talk about the old days.
The movie spends much of its running time in flashback. First to when Chris was a teenager, angry and best friends with Toni. They smoke heavily and get angry at the metroland lifestyle. They get even angrier at the people who enjoy the metroland lifestyle. It's here that Chris decides what he wants to do with his life. He's gonna move to Paris and take photographs. Later, the timeline moves to a middle period, when Chris is doing just that.
In Paris, Chris gets a job working in a café. The interactions between him and his boss are all in French and not subtitled. I'm not sure how intentional that is, but it actually adds a neat layer, not being able to understand them. It's here that Chris meets Annick (pronounced An-neek), since she's very pretty, Chris chats her up on the job. I think the boss is annoyed by this, but I can't really tell. They two fall fast in love and have a ton of sex. This doesn't last long though, as he meets Marion a few months later.
Flash back to the present and Chris is conflicted. He goes to a party with Toni despite Marion's protestations. He's clearly flailing mentally, Toni has been bugging him to cheat on his wife, and now he decides to do just that. He gets a pretty lady in bed, but can't pull the trigger. When he gets home, he talks with Marion and their marriage ends up stronger than ever. I never once throughout the course of the movie expected the ending to be anything but that.
Why Was It Forgotten? This movie only saw a very limited release in the states. It was only shown on 12 screens, though it did pretty well on those 12 screens. It seems like it might have seen a wider release in England, but Netflix isn't in England yet. The story is quite good, though these days stories about growing up and leaving your past self behind are a dime a dozen. What a movie like this needs to set itself above the rest is style. This movie has absolutely no style whatsoever. Back at the top, I wrote about how I'm always leery of TV directors making the transition to feature films and this is why. Nothing about it feels at all cinematic.
I think part of the problem is that this movie doesn't do anything explicitly wrong. It doesn't reach to any great heights and instead hits pretty much smack dab in the middle. The stakes are never high, there's never any real drama, only mild internal conflict. It's the sort of thing that works well in books, but is almost impossible to translate to film. A book can write about a character's every emotion, whereas a movie has to show it. Internal emotions are very hard to put into external feelings.
What Went Right? Though the movie on the whole is unlikely to stick with me for very long, there are a few scenes that are quite striking. Two in particular. The first has a young Chris taking pictures of trains because he's English. He then jumps on the train on a whim and sits down with an older guy. He's just retired and received a whiskey decanter as a gift. he had worked there for 43 years and no one ever noticed that he didn't drink. He also mentions how this trip home would probably be the last time he ever made the journey that he's made the same way all those many years. The old man hates metroland as much as the teenage Chris, he rants about it angrily. It's a rare sincere scene that is, unfortunately, of zero consequence to anything else in the movie.
The second scene actually matters towards the plot. In it, Chris is laying in bed next to his wife, when suddenly she appears as his ex. She's wearing garish lingerie and is talking about the old days of when the two of them used to have constant sex at all times of the day. She talks about how she used to have three orgasms every time they had sex. He replies to this with "Really?" as if it was a surprise to him. But this entire thing is happening in his head, so it's really just him stroking his own ego. Later, we find out, though, that the first time they had sex, she didn't climax at all.
Verdict: I'm unable to make a verdict because I have absolutely no feelings about this movie
Score 60%?
No comments:
Post a Comment