Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy: a short review

I have to admit to being a bit of a sucker when it comes to spy films. Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps (1939), Notorious (1946) and North By Northwest (1959) as well as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (Martin Ritt, 1963) were some of the first films I saw and still stand as some of my favorites. However, more recently the BBC Television series Spooks has surpassed any spy film I've ever seen and set a level of sophistication that I expected when I went to view Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, Spy (Tomas Alfredson, 2011) at the Rivoli Cinema this morning.
I've never read a novel by John le Carré so wasn't, like many in the audience, comparing the film to the book, but realized that in its adaptation to the screen,  slices of information about the myriad of characters who surrounded the central MI5 agents needed to be supplied as background information in the early part of the film. Unfortunately this meant that viewers were offered fragmented vignettes that eventually made sense once the film progressed.
This was a quiet and measured production that revealed, as many spy dramas do, the complexities of espionage, the politics and personalities. I personally didn't find it either intriguing or exciting, but enjoyed the bleak aesthetic of the film achieved by an emphasis on rather dull architecture, punctuated briefly by scenes that included decorative ironwork staircases.
I did find Garry Oldman's acting superb as George Smiley, Control's right hand man and John Hurt, just brilliant as Control.
In this film dominated by old men of British Intelligence; men who decided who should live and who should die within and without their own ranks, I enjoyed one particular frame, which showed a piece of graffiti written across a wall outside the secret house. It read: The Future is Female. Unlike Ros Myers (Hermione Norris)  who is a formidable spy in Spooks, the few women in this film are allotted stereotypical roles of keeper of the house where the spies meet, a love interest who has vital information to share and a teacher who used to work for the circus and reminisces over photographs of 'her boys' - the old MI5 guys when they were young.
For me at least there were several scenes that made the film more interesting. In one, a bee is trapped inside the car  in which the operatives are traveling and in another, an owl, which has been trapped inside a lit fireplace, screeches headlong into the class room, but is callously bludgeoned to death by the male teacher in front of the children. Another scene, which puts a human touch on this otherwise cold and callous film shows Smiley unwrap a mint whilst waiting, gun in hand for the mole.
If you love le Carré novels then you are probably going to love this film, but if you love Spooks, or films that are high powered then you may be a little disappointed.

Io sono L'Amore

I'm awake at 1.15am trying to think of how to explain how I felt about I am Love ( (Io Sono L'Amore). I could recount the narrative, which acutely displays the damaging affect of a passionate love affair on Emma and her family, but strangely enough that would only be telling half the story. I was trying to explain the films impact on me to a young woman in a coffee shop after I'd left the Kino Cinema and I spent most of the time using non-verbal language and hand gesticulations, much to my own surprise; so I figured that this film worked on me as a real affect or bodily level.

There is more than a nod to Hitchcock in the film when Emma (Tilda Swinton) is filmed from behind with her hair made up into a spiral shape ~ both Madeleine (Kim Novak) in Vertigo (1958) and Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954) wore their hair in this way. The spiral was a motif in Hitchcock's films to denote sexual desire or the loss of self-control and this certainly occurs in I am Love. Strangely enough, it is at the height of Emma's passion that she cuts her hair short (indeed, mirroring the hairstyle of her daughter who has just come out as lesbian).

Apart from the persistent scenes of the inside of the immense Ricchi mansion, there is an extended scene in the middle of the film of close-ups of insects on plants, juxtaposed with the lovemaking of Emma and the young chef Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini) in the countryside and fragmented abstract images of their bodily parts. Since insects are carriers of pollen and disease and are associated with debris and decay, I read this scene ~ as not only homage to nature ~ the naturalness of sexual attraction, but also dire warning of possible infection or death, which occurs twice in the Ricchi family. Firstly, the death of her grandfather which signals the beginning of the demise of the Ricchi family business and then the sudden death of her son Edoardo (Flavio Parenti) when he accidentally hits his head on the side of the swimming pool after trying to escape her explanation of why she had become involved with Antonio.

A cold aesthetic pervades the film from the first scene of a Milan snow scape to the austere interiors of the Ricchi house. This is an interesting film, which culminated for me in the final dramatic scene after Edoardo's funeral in which the relationships of all the characters (but primarily the women) are highlighted by music that builds to a loud brass crescendo and dialogue between them that cannot be heard. It's as if they are all rendered mute by their situation! We are left with only facial and bodily language which speaks so loudly. Emma, bereft from her son's death and her husband's declaration that she 'does not exist', is escaping the household. Her daughter looks at her with tears in her eyes, her daughter-in-law grasps at her body where Emma's unborn grandchild is growing, Emma's housekeeper is distraught and crying unashamedly in the upstairs bedroom ~ all of these women are drawn together in Emma who is about to become absent in their lives ~ it is unfathomable that this could have occurred because she fell in love. The film ends and we are left traumatised.

A Single Man (Tom Ford, 2009) - It's all about the eyes...

It's all about the eyes. So many of the scenes from Tom Ford's A Single Man (2009) centers on the organs of sight. In one of the early scenes, George Falconer (Colin Firth) lays down in the snow next to his dead lover Jim (Matthew Goodeand) and looks into his pale glazed over eyes. In a flashback scene of his first encounter with Jim, emphasis is placed on eye contact and non-verbal communication. Consequent scenes include a sensual visual exchange with his student Kenny Potter (Nicholas Hoult), who wears a soft, white mohair jumper, and another with Carlos (Jon Kortajarena) a Spanish male prostitute who lights his cigarette and looks vaguely like James Dean. Ford doesn't only use eye to eye contact between George and other males he encounters, there is also a close-up scene of the eyes and lips of one of his female students, who for all purposes resembles the iconic 60s film-star and sex-goddess, Brigit Bardot. George parks his car in front of a large billboard of the frightened eyes of Janet Leigh (Marion Crane) from the Alfred Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) and in another scene he encounters the beautiful eyes of his neighbours daughter. Of course, there is that very telling scene, which tells of things reflected back to us, very early on, in which he looks at himself in the mirror whilst dressing and tells himself to 'just get through the day'.

The emphasis on eyes in this film is not only that they convey so much feeling, that they insist that we see the world through the eyes of George who has lost his lover in a car accident and is experiencing loss and grief, but that in our looking at all this beauty (the film is exquisitely beautiful and why wouldn't it be, it was directed by Tom Ford, a former designer for the Gucci fashion house) we are asked to see beyond the pain and sorrow of George's planned suicide, beyond the chaos that is happening in the world in 1962, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the fact that at that time gay people remained invisible for fear that they would be stigmatised and loose their jobs, to the beauty that surrounds him. And there are so many beautiful scenes, which reference a time that was going through so many political, social and economic upheavals.

What is amazing about this film that amidst all this beauty and order - George is depicted as being an obsessive compulsive, all his clothing, utensils and other possessions are neatly placed in correct order and he has even laid out clothing that he wants to be buried in (including instructions that his tie must be made with a Windsor knot), along with his will, insurance papers and keys on his table; George is experiencing so much inner turmoil. Indeed, the many scenes of him floating in water suggest that he is literally drowning in sorrow.

Ford's ability to create designer fashion has worked well for him here, for he has crafted a film that uses the very fact that we love to look, to insist that we look deeper into this film, to try and understand that love has more to do with sensuality rather than just sexuality (there is no depiction of any obvious sexual act in the film) and that no matter how much we think we are in control that this is just as much as an illusion as the masks created by fashion, clothing and human behavior.

Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2009)

Yesterday I saw Martin Scorsese's new film Shutter Island (2009) which I highly recommend, even though I wasn't totally convinced of Leonardo DiCaprio's performance in some of the more emotional scenes. What I found interesting about the film, apart from obvious references to psychological thrillers by Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), Psycho (1960) ) and perhaps even the psychological exploration by Virginia Woolfe in her novel To The Lighthouse (1927), was Shutter Island, a character it its own right, with its stillness and dark, foreboding presence that presides over the whole film with an authority that in the end represents not only Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, but all power structures that can intervene, take hold and ultimately have power over us. Indeed between 1950 and 1960 the CIA - Office of Scientific Intelligence initiated MKULTRA, a project that involved 'the surreptitious use of many types of drugs, as well as other methods, to manipulate individual mental states and to alter brain function' in American and Canadian subjects. (See: Wiki entry). The film also reveals how we collect and process information and often make incorrect assumptions often to our own and others detriment. It reminded me of Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), how alert we have to be to little bits of data, how we are often faced with the question what is truth and how did we come to this understanding? The soundtrack is saturated with contemporary classical music, which appears to exemplify the ghosts that haunt the islands inhabitants. Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) could be you or I, plagued by fantasies, haunted by memories, unwilling or unable to let go of the past!