By Digby Warde-Aldam

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There’s a phrase I hate perhaps more than any other, partly due to its patent falsehood, and partly due to the connotation with half arsed upper middle class parenting. Sure, there are some strong contenders for the title of the English language’s most irritating maxim (a solid runner up would be “a stitch in time saves nine”- what the fuck does that actually mean?), but this one takes the biscuit, throws it up, and proceeds to repeat the action with the rest of the family-sized packet. I this hear this wearisome platitude a lot on my regular mid-afternoon trips to the discount section in my local Waitrose. Genteel second-time mothers of a certain age, pushing their ludicrously over designed Cameronite prams look down at their complaining, Boden-bedecked firstborn as they reach for a re-up of organic grana padano from the precarious upper climes of the deli section.

‘I’m bored, mummy’ whines the Bedales-bound genetic photocopy.

‘Only boring people get bored, darling,’ she sighs in reply, with a look of prolonged resignation that no amount of Jamon Iberico or freshly sourced Guava puree can possibly assuage. I snigger a bit, and wonder whether wearing a ratty old tie will give me the requisite professional air to purchase alcohol without showing ID.

Anyway, before I describe any more of the rolling tedium of my existence, I’ll get back on the brief; we’ve all been bored at some point. Some of us aren’t boring. In fact, I know a number of people who, for better or for worse, are incapable of ever even approaching dull. On the contrary to this well worn parental riposte, you don’t need to be boring to be bored- you just need to watch a lot of French films.

I know, I know, I’m really rolling out the standard blokey English cliches here, and would sound like an unfunny Jeremy Clarkson were it not for the fact that I have actually watched a lot of French films. Jean Luc Godard and Alain Resnais may have been pretentious and incomprehensible at the best of times, but in no way whatsoever were they ever dull. The films I’m referring to are not the products of the Nouvelle Vague, themselves admittedly acquired tastes, but the work of the so-called “quality” directors of the last 15 years.

Maybe it’s due to the contrast with our own country’s appalling cinematic output of late, but as I see it, there’s a concrete routine for English film reviewers when discussing the new releases from across the Channel. They seem to swoon at the overlong dramatic pauses, ejaculate at the inevitable moment of labored dramatic climax, and bathe in the sheer tedium and predictability of yet another film about rough sex and lonely women.

Take, for example, Philippe Claudel’s critically arse-licked Kristen Scott-Thomas vehicle Il y a longtemps que je t’aime. Pretty much fuck all happens. Kristen, gaunt, “mysterious” (doesn’t say much: gets angry at predictably unpredictable moments) and very pleased with herself for being one of only two major English actresses who can pass for a Frenchwoman, goes to a job interview, reveals that she’s spent time in jail, argues a bit with her bourgeois family, and eventually comes over all saintly as she reveals that she ‘fessed’ up to a crime she didn’t commit. I saw it in Notting Hill when it was released back in 2008. In an audience of about six oh-so-cultured cultured couples, I counted four heads arched back over the red seats, mouths agape, their snoring drowned out only by the interminable paroles of Claudel’s semi-realised characters. I think it’s safe to say that the other two insomniacs in the audience were having as much fun longing for some wet paint to watch drying as I was by the time the bore-fest ended.

Four out of five French art movies of the last decade follow much the same route. Take Francois Ozon, for example; his films follow the above template pretty closely, but with some wife-beating thrown in for good measure. These may seem like sweeping generalisations, but, really, trust me: I studied French film.

Anyway, this is why I’m so excited about Un Prophet, Jacques Audiard’s new one. Audiard, best known for The Beat my heart skipped, with Romain Duris, is a true great. His films seem to turn the most tired old cliches into something genuinely new and exciting. Take his 2001 film, Sur mes levres; Vincent Cassel and Emmanuelle Devos play the classic odd couple. He, a pathologically violent ex-con with a plan for one last big heist, and she a deaf, dowdy goody-goody who works in the offices of a large construction firm. That it’s almost entirely predictable is half the point- a lot of great films (a good example being the grand-pere of modern French cinema, Godard’s A bout de souffle) have one-dimensional plots, but are executed with such skill that they can bring an audience to the edge of their seats, and reduce their fingernails to nothing through sheer dramatic attrition. The throbbing sexual tension between Cassel and Devos elevates the will they-won’t they tropes to a time-bomb of repressed passion, and the violence, when it does occur, is genuinely painful to watch. In a good way, that is.

Anyway, I’m writing this on Friday 15th January, which, coincidentally, is the English release date for Un Prophet. I’m going to the cinema tonight. If you’re reading this and haven’t yet made the acquaintance of Audiard’s oeuvre, then I suggest you do the same, and if it’s no longer showing, blow the rent money on a complete set of DVDs. Believe me, it will almost be worth becoming homeless for…

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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.

By Digby Warde-Aldam

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I’ve been watching a lot of crap recently. I’m in a strange sort of limbo at the moment, living on what is effectively a building site; my viewing habits have gone to seed. Being an unimaginative and lazy individual, my normal post college/work routine usually takes in two to three hours of internet TV or film per night, an allowance which cannot help but affect my disposition. Naturally when one fills up their time with tertiary material of such dizzying artistic merit as Masterchef and Celebrity Come Dine with me, there begins a slow descent into a state of zombification.

This isn’t to say I’m not enjoying my low-brow bingeing. I must have watched the opening scenes of the Guns of Navarone (possibly the greatest film about repressed homosexuality ever to have been subject to a twat like me writing something about it) about six hundred times since the end of August, and with each repeat viewing, the patriotic tear swelling in the corner of my eye becomes more and more jingoistic. There have been several instances where I have trawled the bowels of my DVD collection in search of long-forgotten gems, hidden amidst the horrific backlog of shit that really needs to be got rid of.

However, I have made one rediscovery that almost makes the hours of watching sub-standard thrillers, war movies and rom-coms (the shit that needs to go) bearable. This cinematic salvation comes in the form of the original Harry Palmer trilogy, or to be more accurate, the first two parts of it. The films themselves, The Ipcress File, Funeral in Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain were the first three instalments of a series conceived by producer Harry Saltzman as “the thinking man’s answer to James Bond”, with some strong emphasis placed on the first part of that phrase. Spy thrillers they may be but both Ipcress File and Funeral in Berlin require an unusual amount of involvement on the part of the viewer. Explosions, gadgets and supervillains simply do not figure, and Palmer, the reluctant antihero of the series (played by a post-Alfie Michael Caine) is more interested in buying tinned mushrooms than the shadowy world of international espionage. Unlike Bond, or almost any other action hero you’d care to mention, Palmer is a genuinely likeable figure, as confused and repulsed by the hypocrisy and double-dealing of his line of work as the viewer. Bespectacled and unglamorous, his only secret weapon is his perceived ignorance.

I had a lecturer once who claimed to only watch films set in places he knew. I imagine sticking to this, unless one happened to have an extraordinary knowledge of Los Angeles and New York, would be a rather restrictive and thankless task. However, in a funny way, I can see his point. Tracing Harry Palmer’s route around London is a lot of fun. Whether the undoubtedly great cinematography or an urban facelift are responsible I don’t know, but the familiar city is rendered almost completely alien. Kensington’s buildings are blackened, skeletal and resolutely Victorian, while Shoreditch may as well have been a battlefield, such is its squalor and eeriness. Similarly (and perhaps more understandably, this writer having been born not long before the wall came down), Funeral in Berlin’s juxtaposition of the titular city’s enforced no-man’s against its quasi-American shopping precinct the KuDamm, could not have presented a more unfamiliar picture of the city today had it been set in Beijing or Lagos.

I love these films as entertainment, but what really gets me is what I suppose should be referred to as “period detail”; the films are, to paraphrase John Cooper Clarke, a sociologist’s paradise. We see how shit life on a middling wage was in the 1960s (Palmer complains repeatedly about his salary, and is more than willing to make a buck or two on the side), and how the old order of the British establishment, represented by Palmer’s bosses had failed to come to terms with minor-power status, and the hilarious mediocrity of what passed for luxury circa 1966. It’s all a bit like laughing at your parents struggling with modern technology.

After Funeral in Berlin, the series lost its footing in the real world, and the final instalment, 1967’s Billion Dollar Brain (directed, weirdly, by a sleepwalking Ken Russell), is an Austen Powers movie in all but name. The film, more plot driven than its predecessors is fun, but ultimately shit. It’s every bit as far-fetched as the Bond movies that the franchise had been supposed to act as a foil to. After this wet fart of a finale, Caine and Saltzman (and indeed, the rest of the world) lost interest, and Harry Palmer was put to sleep.

Recently, though, Michael Caine has talked about resurrecting the character for one last blast of speccy triumph. Should this happen, let’s hope he’s evolved into a cantankerous OAP living in the suburbs rather than the director of MI6 or something- I’d feel slightly betrayed if he was anything other than average.

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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.

On British Film

By Digby Warde-Aldam

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It was Francois Truffaut, I believe, who once said that the English could not make films. Before I launch into my heroically unoriginal, whingeing diatribe, I must affirm that this is as ludicrous a claim as saying that Germans can’t rock (they can), or Syrians don’t use A4 paper (not so sure of this, but you get the point). However, to refine the statement somewhat, there is something sadly one dimensional about British film-making.

I can’t, off the top of my head, think of another major film-producing country with so narrow a spectrum of cinematic styles. Generally speaking, British films tend to fall into three categories (and I’m not counting the running, nay, collapsing asphyxiated joke that is the costume drama); heartwarming romantic comedies, which, with what I am loathe to call ‘typical British reserve’, rarely risk the volume of vulgarity which either makes or breaks a similar Hollywood flick. Then there is the kind of film we used to be revered, rather than shunned for making, namely the “gritty” (those commas must now be added by law) work of social realism, which stretches from the kitchen sink school of the late 50s to the gruesome (and in my mind, rather tedious) likes of Paul Andrew Williams’ London to Brighton.

Somewhere in between these categories lies the Underdog film- from The Italian Job to Billy Elliot and beyond, it has ooh-erred and Bob’s-yer-uncle’d its way into characterizing our national cinema. I’m pretty sure that the skewed image of Brits as incompetent charmers with bad teeth can be attributed more than anything to these nauseatingly predictable movies. All three categories do, of course, contain within their ranks a number of films that are perfectly watchable. The trouble is, though, that they are paragons of perfect watchability- mildly humorous, tasteful and completely unmemorable. Last night I struggled for half an hour to remember the title of Hot Fuzz, and still recall nothing of the plot, simply that it was about policemen and it had Simon Pegg in it.

There have, of course, been exceptions. These tend to be Powell and Pressburger productions or the work of directors in thrall to European or American movements. Take, for example, Chris Petit’s wonderful 1979 road movie, Radio On. With its grainy monochrome, pulsing new wave soundtrack and muted dialogue, it has the air of a mid-70s Wim Wenders film. As the credits roll up, it comes as little surprise that Wenders himself produced it. Alas, for those few British reviewers who didn’t completely ignore it, this was a step too far. With an uncomfortably xenophobic ire, Petit was condemned for jumping ship, going over to Johnny foreigner’s camp. While the film doesn’t deviate hugely from Wenders’ style of the period, it succeeds in documenting a culture which, thank god, we have all but lost. The viewer is left with the impression that the England of 1979 was not a nice place to be- the Irish war looms large, psychotic hitchhikers abound, and one can almost smell the stale gut-punch of the Ginsters pasties sold at the rudimentary motorway service stations. Petit, like Godard at his best, gives English parochiality a hint of the dignity which has made the quotidian culture of our North American cousins so iconic. Petit realized the hitherto unimagined notion of the English road movie, and breathed mythology into the second-rate motorway system and damp bedsits which constitute the mise en scene. As a work of art, the film defines its era far more successfully than many of the often melodramatically staged kitchen sink dramas of the previous decade, and thus succeeds by stealing its best moves from abroad. Similarly, Lindsay Anderson’s If and O Lucky Man borrow liberally from the canon of Bunuel and Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite, but their incoherent structure and whimsy only add to their overall depiction of Britain in the late 1960s, one defiantly at odds with the platitudinous image of beads, flowers and swinging London that has come to characterize our collective memory of the era. Prior to If, in 1968, it should be noted that the only true counter-cultural masterpiece set in the Britain of the 1960s was Blow Up- a film directed by an Italian.

Depressingly, it’s doubtful whether any studio exec would see fit to fund a project by a latter-day Anderson, Petit, or Michael Powell. Even indie studios won’t risk turning over a loss in the name of great cinema, which only serves to tighten the straps of our current cultural straightjacket. We have failed miserably to move on, and as our industry grapples desperately to recreate the commercial triumphs of ten years ago, we are forced to view our contemporary cinema culture as a parade of smudged facsimiles of Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and (aaaaaaargh!!!!!) Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.

As is clear, this is indeed a sorry state. However, from the left field, there are what you must forgive me for calling, green shoots appearing. Despite the lamentable state of British mainstream cinema, several art films have emerged over the last couple of years that offer some hope for infiltration into our multiplexes. Offerings from the likes of Steve McQueen and Julian Schnabel have surpassed all possible hopes, doing what all successful art movies should, and forcing the viewer to confront received opinions whilst exploiting the full possibilities of the moving image. It’s a long shot, but if talent of this caliber can succeed in this country, and, of course, continues to do so, there is a very real possibility that at some stage in the not too distant future, we will be able to visualize the beginnings of a new culture of British cinema. For now, however, I can only dream, and congratulate myself that I have never knowingly bought a ticket to a Jason Statham movie…

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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He will be contributing monthly to this blog. Enjoy.