OF DREAMS AND MONSTERS... "MARNIE"

Ok, I know you guys kinda prefer me writing about the newer things out on the cinema screen. I respect that. This is why this week is about compromises. Something old and something new. Nothing borrowed but my pyjamas are blue so that should count for something. Ehm. Moving on.  Now I picked this film because it has a little bit of something for everything I think. You may have seen the name “Alfred Hitchcock” and automatically assumed “crime and gore” well, here’s some good news for you : Not every film Hitchcock did was a derivative of Psycho. Oh no. Mr Hitchcock was a man of many, many talents not a one trick pony. So this is, in fact, a top notch psychological thriller with some romance and drama thrown in. You’ll like it. I know you will.

Marnie (Tippy Hedren) is many things for many people. She is not a “lady of the night” nor is she a special agent – she is, in fact, a secretary. But she is not exactly content with the life or salary of a secretary. She makes her “real” living changing identities and moving from job to job, robbing the safes of the companies she works for as she goes. And she has got quite a nice little side line going in this way until she stumbles into Rutland Coop. Now the dashing young owner of the company, Mark Rutland (Sean Connery) takes a shine to her. He takes a shine to her in a big way. So much so, not only does he want to “make her his” – which is easier said than done, believe you me – but he also wants to cure her of her thieving and lying. What starts as something cross between a love affair and an interesting project for him and a minor inconvenience for Marnie will end up taking the couple on an eventful journey, both psychological and physical, that will lead to more and greater discoveries than either of them could possibly imagine.

Now this is an interesting one. Firstly, it’s a Hitchcock classic as far as suspense goes. This is undoubtedly a voyage of adventure and discovery. And the added benefit? No blood or gore. That’s good news for those of you who are weaker in the stomach area. Mom, yes, that means you too. The chase this time takes place largely in the human psyche. And I have always said, our minds can dream up monsters and horrors greater than anything the “real” world can provide. Of course the construction of the story is picture perfect and you are just chomping on the bit trying to figure out where the whole thing is going, not least because Mr Hitchcock is not exactly renowned for his happy endings. He invented the concept of killing of the lead character mid plot, remember (yes, that was Hitchcock, NOT Game of Thrones).

But why is it, I pondered as I watched, that we get so enthralled in the fates of this typically good looking movie couple ? I am a romantic at heart, but it takes more than “beautiful people” and some /any premise that they are together for me to root for them. Then I did a bit more deep thinking and worked it out, well I worked out my perspective at an answer anyway. See, the film taps into what we all really, deep down inside want in life. At a certain age, we have all got hang ups, old wounds, battle scars… Things that have hurt us, that makes us suspicious or over-protective or whatever your own particular Achilles heel might be. Now, we may or may not voice it openly, as we know this is a rare occurance, but deep down, yes we would love a beautiful stranger of the gender and sexual preference of our choice to sweep us off our feet, fall madly in love with us, face up to all our excess baggage, not shy away or be daunted by it at all, and “cure us” of the baggage. Thus we emerge, perfectly healed, at peace with our past and madly in love. I mean yes, in this particular piece the couple are very “typical Hollywood” – blond beautiful woman with a set of problems clearly (and unabashedly) taken straight from Freud’s own textbooks (at least Hitchcock has the integrity to slip Freud in there too) coupled with a tall dark and handsome Sean Connery who just happens to be a millionaire and an amateur scientist (and thus in possession of the means and knowledge to cure her). I mean the premise is as unrealistic as they come, yes, bosses fall for their secretaries but it is rare that they actually stick around to “cure” them. In fact, like most people, they probably shout “excess baggage” and bail if they have as much baggage as Marnie. Then again, you are so enthralled in the story you can easily put yourself in Marnie’s shoes and have your own “dream relationship” for two hours. This, my friends is the beauty of cinema. Maybe not therapy per se, but catharsis guaranteed… 

"KAFKA" - AND YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON LIFE...

Now, in our family it is often me who calls up Mom and gives her a list of things to watch. I am the big “movie watcher” in the family and Mom, it has to be said (sorry Mom) is a creature of habit when it comes to the kinds of films she watches. I mean don’t get me wrong, once I manage to chide her out of her comfort zone she’s often glad I did it, but it does take work. Usually. This is why when she actually sat down and watched a film by Sodebergh completely on her own volition, I was surprised. I was even more surprised when she loved it and insisted I watched it too. I had put the film duly on my list, but when it transpired she had gone as far was watching it twice in the same week, I knew I had to pull it up to the top of the list.

Franz Kafka (Jeremy Irons) is a clerk in an insurance office in the city. The city is much like all others, except that it’s administrative hub is The Castle. The officials from The Castle make sure order is constant and everyone knows their place.  And Kafka’s place is a particularly non-descript one, deep in a world where it pays not to stick out too much. And Kafka fulfils his duty of keeping to himself a little too well. He writes in his spare time and has a problematic relationship with a lady friend /fiancée of yore but apart from that there are very few people in his life. This is why it spikes more of his attention than average when Eduard, a colleague and one of his few friends, goes missing. The official channels hand out the usual explanations and soon his fears are realised and Kafka is called to identify the body of his friend on the mortician’s slab. Kafka is deeply saddened by this. But he also has something most of his colleagues don’t seem to possess: an inquiring mind. And the more he uses it, the more he begins to realise something doesn’t quite scan. The deeper he digs the fancier the conspiracy theories seem to become and at first Kafka will have nothing to do with them but then… Kafka runs out of explanations until he is only left with the unthinkable. And the only way to confirm his suspicions is to somehow break in to The Castle and find out…

There are several ways you can take this film. On the surface, you can assume it’s a simple thriller. And in that sense, it does its job beyond admirably. You will be gripping the arms of your seats and there is at least one jump-scare in there that will have you bodily leaping out of said seats. Jeremy Irons is perfect, so are his rather admirable co-actors Joel Grey and Alec Guinness. But one can’t help but stop and wonder whether that is really all the film is about.

Now, as the film is actually set in Prague you might actually think that “the officials” who conspire against the people and make the subversives “disappear” is an allusion to the Soviet occupation of the city – and I must say I thought of that myself for a while but then I realised… Well hang on, Kafka died in 1924. That’s even before the Nazis, much less the Soviets. It’s a mighty strange choice of protagonist if that’s the true aim of the film, one would have thought they would have put a bit more of an emphasis on Kafka, a turn of the century man, trying to adapt to Soviet ways… At this point, I took a leaf out of Kafka’s book and dug a little deeper. Like Kafka, my digging was rewarded with an uncomfortable truth.

The anonymity of the city, of the officials, of Kafka’s place of work is not really simply artistic licence. He is not “interpreting” some period or another. It is, in fact, the life we live. The world we live in. Kafka is, in fact, a beautiful and painful testament of an individual trying to come to terms with the fact that we live in a world that pushes us away from our individuality and towards conformism. Oh come on, I’m not romanticising, you know it’s true. I know you know. In the film, Kafka is not young, he has been in his position for a number of years now. But you know the feeling you got when you started your first full time job? You know, that grey, numb, nameless feeling when you looked down at the rush hour crowd around you as you came down the escalator when you were commuting to or from work? That sinking feeling you got when you thought “what a beautiful day” but then realised you were going to be at work all day? That heart ache when you realised your paint brushes / musical instrument / books/ whatever the particular tools of your artistic dream used to be are now under several inches of dust because work doesn’t leave you the time or the energy? What about when you realised you had the same phone /hair cut /clothes (possibly more than one of the above) as your colleagues? You laughed, but didn't you feel a certain, soreness that is hard to name? That’s what this film is about. It is not a “happy” film by any stretch of the imagination. But it does such a good job of putting a feeling into motion and making a thriller out of it that well… You MUST see it. Joel Grey’s perfect characterisation of the petty official whose work has become his entire life is work watching on its own. He obsesses over every detail and is draconian about the observation of the most meaningless rules. I mean, EVERYONE knows at least someone like that… You don’t? Oh that’s dangerous… I advise a long hard look in the mirror. It might not be too late. 

THE SCARIEST JOURNEY IS SOMETIMES THE ONE INTO YOUR OWN MIND : "FELICIA’S JOURNEY"

Oooh guys and dolls – this is all very exciting! We may have spotted my first ever sense of déjà vu! People who know me in real life may know this little quirk I have – at the age of 30 I can honestly say I have NEVER had déjà vu in my life. I strongly suspect it may be something completely made up by script writers and novelists but then again, the rest of the planet seems to disagree with me so I’m not entirely sure where that leaves us… Anyway, about this film. Well, for the entire first half of it, I could have sworn blind I had seen it before. I just couldn’t for the life of me figure out when and where. It was just a continual sense of familiarity, coupled almost – almost mind – with a sense of what the next picture would be. This sense sort of petered out towards the middle and vanished at the end. I may have become self-conscious. Then again, there is a much higher possibility I watched it when I was far too young to have a clue what it was about and got bored towards the middle. Well, either that or I got caught by my mother who put a stop to the whole thing. Good thing too really – if I was so young I can’t even remember it now, there was no way on earth I would have truly grasped what was happening. Oh. See what I did there, destroyed my own theory. *Sigh*. Oh well no déjà vu again. I guess I shall have to swallow my disappointment and get to my review…

Joe Hildich (supremely portrayed by Bob Hoskins) is an elderly catering manager. Living alone but seemingly content, he fills his time left free from work with experiments in the kitchen and re-watching tapes of Gala,  television chef with which he is seemingly a tiny bit obsessed  but hey,  we all need a hobby. His path crosses with Felicia. Felicia is a young girl from rural Ireland and seems a tad bit on the naïve side. She is looking for her boyfriend. She neither knows her boyfriend’s address or his place of work but it’s somewhere in the city. Making parts for lawnmowers. Possibly. As you can imagine her search isn’t going that well, so Mr Hildich takes her under his wing. This is a good thing, right? Not necessarily. This is not yet another cutesy film about a naïve pure heart giving a lease of life to a lonely old man. Well what is it then? I hear you cry. Dear reader, you will have to just watch, and see.

Ok, I need to do a bit more research but I may have found a new director to be crazily obsessed with. Atom Egoyan. I had heard a lot about him, and yet he was one of those many greats I simply hadn’t got round to yet. I now kick myself for the delay. As you can imagine, the whole “set-up” of the story is an entry point. An entry point to something sinister that you will not receive any clues about. I don’t want you to have clues because that is precisely the point of the film. There is seemingly nothing wrong with the picture to start with. But that weird aftertaste, that “something you can’t put your finger on” persists. It grows. It grows before you even quite know yourself what you’re so tense or nervous about. Then it hits you. And for the rest of the film you are left a juddering mass of “well what comes next??” It is rare that I am completely clueless about a storyline. I absolutely love it when it happens. Especially in film this good. This kind of film is also a dying breed, if you will. These days, psychology seems to have fallen by the wayside, being taken over in popularity by monsters and such like in horror, and action heroes or romances in general. In fact, and I say this often, there is nothing as scary as the human mind if you look at it up close. I don’t know, maybe that’s why we’ve stopped looking up close. Then again, if you’re like me, you ‘ll be all over the really scary stuff, even if it gives you terrible nightmares later (since I don’t remember most of my dreams either that’s a bit of a cop-out for me too. Yes, I do rather suspect there may be something odd going on what with the déjà vu thing and this, but that’s a different story. I think). Suffice it to say my dears; I haven’t watched anything this creepy in a very, VERY long time. This is old school quality of the highest degree – perfect for old-school peeps like yours truly…