With some re-releases, the fascination is not only discovering the work of a director, but also the environment and context in which he or she worked.
Never mind breaking the fourth wall, Joe Wright and the Young Vic have smashed the other three as well.
For a demoralising period towards the start of Miss Sloane, it looks as if we’re in for a high-octane thriller about palm oil. That’s right, palm oil. Everything you never wanted to know about the ethics and economics of the palm oil market is splurged in frenetic, rat-a-tat, overlapping, school-of-Sorkin dialogue. After 10 minutes your ears need a rest on a park bench.
"This is the most fun province in Iraq" isn't the sort of sentence you hear every day on a London stage. On the basis of geographical breadth alone, one applauds Occupational Hazards, in which playwright Stephen Brown adapts global adventurer-turned-Tory MP Rory Stewart's 2006 account of his attempt to bring order to a newly-liberated Iraq. Ambitious in scope but piecemeal in impact, the play gains immeasurably from Simon Godwin's fleet, pacy production, though you wonder if the whole enterprise might not work better on screen.
An Egyptian/French co-production directed by Egyptian film-maker Mohamed Diab, Clash is a fevered, chaotic attempt to portray some of the tangled undercurrents that fuelled Egypt’s “Arab Spring” and its subsequent unravelling.
It was a long time coming, but Homeland’s sixth series at last awoke from its early-season slumbers to put on a late surge over the closing episodes. For a while, it had seemed that the story was barely advancing at all, as the screen was self-indulgently hogged by Carrie Mathison’s emotional life, particularly her anguish over her daughter being taken into care.
Chilean director Pablo Larrain has described Neruda as a “false biopic”, and it’s a film that surprises on many levels in its presentation of Pablo Neruda, the great poet who is his country’s best-known cultural figure. It captivates for the scope of its invention, its ludic combination of reality and artifice, poetry and politics, as well as the contradictions of its central character.
Larrain's last film Jackie was also a biopic with a difference, but Neruda goes further in every sense. It’s also something of a departure from the director’s earlier works, such as No and Post Mortem, which were grounded in the very real context of Chile in the Pinochet years, or The Club, which showed how the inheritance of that totalitarian world endured after its actual circumstances had ended. Set in 1948, Neruda works as a prologue to that era: it was then that Chilean president Gabriel González Videla, who had come to power with a leftist agenda, realigned his loyalties away from Communism in a “sell-out to the empire of the North”.
This symbiotic relationship works very much in one direction
As well as his renown as a writer, Pablo Neruda was a Senator from the Communist Party, and his denouncement of Videla for this political change of tack made him an immediate enemy of the authorities. We first encounter him in the corridors of power, specifically an anteroom in the Senate that bizarrely seems to function as a combination of common room, urinal and bar (imbibing is plentiful throughout the film). That presents him as statesman, and though the epithet of “the most important communist in the world” may be an exaggeration, the poet’s international reputation, backed by Europe intellectuals including that other great Pablo, Picasso – who makes cameo appearances – gave him real importance in his world.
The next time we meet him is in a very different conext, at an almost bacchanalian party at the poet’s home, clearly a point of congregation for Chile’s own intelligentsia as well as off-duty public figures. The atmosphere is part fancy-dress fiesta – Neruda costumes himself as Lawrence of Arabia – part cultural salon, presided over by the poet and his wife Delia (Mercedes Morán, pictured below), the Argentine aristocrat whose acceptance of her husband’s philandering was only part of the unwavering support that she gave him. The contrast is highlighted when a Party delegation arrives to warn that he must go into hiding. In the portrayal of Luis Gnecco, an actor with a pedigree in comedy, the poet is a corpulent voluptuary, most unlike more typical revolutionary heroes; although he obviously does not "know what it is to sleep on the floor”, his writings and personality nevertheless inspire real devotion among Chileans.
In a nicely satirical scene, Neruda finds that his connections within the old Chilean aristocracy (which still really runs the country) are of no avail, while his attempt to flee abroad is halted at the border. At which point the film's “wild hunt” sets in. With the poet on the run, his pursuer becomes police inspector Oscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal, playing with nicely stylised verve), whom we have already encountered in voiceover. The communists may have initially debated whether the poet might be more valuable as a prisoner – we get a glimpse of what his fate in captivity would have been in a desert detention camp under the command of Augusto Pinochet, the nation’s future dictator – but now Party minders will be hurrying him and Delia from one safe house to another. Such furtiveness is alien to Neruda, who can’t resist reappearing at his old haunts, albeit often in disguise.
The trimly moustached Peluchonneau (pictured below) is a creature of fiction in every sense. In his own version he’s the illegitimate son of the founder of the Chilean police force and a prostitute, but actually his identity seems to develop as a product of Neruda's fantasy. The poet certainly seems to be in command of the pursuit, leaving a series of cheap detective stories – one of the writer’s fascinations – behind at each step of the chase (Larrain adds rear projections in Peluchonneau's car scenes, highlighting the detectve tropes). The ultimate indignity he feels is the suspicion that without his target he himself is literally nothing: Neruda may refer to him as “my phantom in uniform”, but it is clear that he is the one writing the script. This symbiotic relationship – “I dream of him, he dreams of me” – works in one direction.
There is rich comedy in the process, as at each stage the hapless Peluchonneau arrives too late, or is defeated by disguises (there's a very funny scene set in a transvestite brothel). His interception of Neruda’s first wife Maria, and attempts to involve her in the process, are brought to a hilariously bathetic conclusion, while his encounter with Delia, no longer following her husband in his escape, provides one of the film's most telling scenes.
The pursuit becomes increasingly frantic, culminating in a dramatic ascent into the snows of the Andean mountains. Those last scenes are beautifully filmed by Larraine’s long-term cinematographer Sergio Armstrong, who also catches the darker period cityscapes of Santiago and the bright colours of Neruda’s festivities – both imagined and not, they have a visual flare that Fellini would surely have relished – with distinction. Federico Jusid contributes a grandiose musical score that feels like a presence in its own right.
“I chased the eagle, but I didn’t know how to fly,” Peluchonneau admits poignantly towards the end. We know from history that Neruda will escape, and flourish in emigration: his pursuer faces the cold end of irrelevance. It's a wry conclusion to a wry film, one which in its playful self-referencing sometimes recalls the work of Peter Greenaway. Larrain may not have set out to "catch" his subject in any predictable way, but his film is certainly imbued with the poet's spirit.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Neruda
Politics certainly caught up with Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius. The Brazilian director and his cast appeared at their Cannes competition premiere last year with placards protesting that democracy in their native land was in peril: it was the day after Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff had been suspended. Cut forward a few months, and the film’s autumn release coincided with the announcement that Rousseff would be thrown out of office and impeached.
Given that Aquarius tells the story of Clara, a spirited matriarch in the coastal city of Recife – Filho’s hometown is the capital of Brazil’s northeastern state of Pernambuco – who refuses to be evicted from the apartment in which she has spent her life, the parallels with the presidency were striking. While it brought the film extra attention the situation didn’t play exclusively to its advantage. First it received an unjustified 18 certificate (later adjusted), then it was controversially overlooked for Brazil’s Best Foreign Film Oscar entry.
'Aquarius' certainly celebrates female independence, not least sexual freedom
Filho is certainly a director alert to politics, at least with a small “p”. His debut feature Neighbouring Sounds from 2012 was an elliptical picture of his homeland through the microcosm of a small urban environment. It depicted contemporary Brazil as carrying considerable historical baggage, caught between tradition and modernity: one dividing line was drawn around real estate – low-rise, old style versus high-rise, new style.
That distinction is at the heart of Aquarius, but there’s nothing abstract in the way it’s portrayed. Its heroine, played with wonderful aplomb by Brazilian star Sonia Braga, has spent her life, at least as far back as the 1980 flashback with which the film begins, in a spacious apartment in a three-storey building – its name gives the film its title – overlooking the beach. Its interior is packed with the accumulations of a life richly lived – now 65, Clara was a music critic, whose broad tastes range from Brazil’s great native composer Heiror Villa-Lobos to Queen (her vinyl collection is enormous).
That opening episode shows the younger Clara (played by Barbara Colen) as a free spirit, driving her car on the beach, music playing loud; she is gamine, her hair cropped close, as opposed to the flowing tresses that are so much part of her later personality (the film is divided into three loose parts, this opener titled “Clara’s hair”). The main business of the episode, though, is a celebration party for her much-loved Aunt Lucia, another independent soul whose life spans back into earlier eras of Brazil’s history, who never married, and spent time in prison (a clear political allusion).
Aquarius certainly celebrates female independence, not least sexual freedom, and the camera relishes a chest of drawers, as Filho fills in its particular history with flashbacks to Lucia’s own youthful sexual passion. It highlights the sense that life is an accretion of such memories, such precious objects. Thus, the associations of Clara's building are incomparably richer than the skyscraper that would be put up in its place.
Clara's husband and three children are at the centre of that celebration, and through them we learn that she has successfully battled cancer (her mastectomy features later). By the next part, she is widowed, her children grown up and living their own lives, with attitudes that do not always accord with those of their mother. .
Filho weaves a rich tapestry with his feisty, forthright heroine in centre place, surrounded by a host of other characters. There’s her long-serving housekeeper Ladjane (Zoraide Coleto, prompting reflection on the divides, class-based and racial, that characterise Brazilian society); her wider family (pictured top), including a favourite nephew; the newspaper connections from her earlier career that will assist at a crucial moment; even the lifeguard on the beach who supervises her morning swim, with whom Clara has a long and affectionate friendship, and whose help will also prove useful (beach scene, pictured above). Above all there is the company of a wider group of women friends, with whom she congregates at a dance evening early on in the film; it’s a lovely, laughing, gossipy atmosphere which reveals, among other things, that this is a generation for whom sexuality remains very much a thing of the present.
At close on two and a half hours, 'Aquarius' is a languid film
Filho portrays it as an organic world whose natural habits and routines are threatened by the prospect of its physical locus, the Aquarius building, being destroyed. The director makes the lead player in the company trying to redevelop it the grandson of its original proprietor, adding another generational element to the story; we sense that if the older man somehow fitted into the accepted order, the younger one, slick with the new confidence of a US Business Studies degree, plays by new rules. The variety of methods to which he resorts is inventive, their impact most unsettling for the way that they reverberate uneasily in Clara’s dreams. The ending is left open, with Clara’s cancer – those two words are the title of the film's closing episode – assuming a somehow symbolic quality. If cancer destroys the body from within, Filho makes explicit parallels to the destruction of Clara’s building, but also refers to her wider society (in Brazilian terms, by the almost insuperable entity that is capitalism and politics combined).
At close on two and a half hours, Aquarius is a languid film, lovingly enjoying its length, and blessed with a simply glorious performance from Braga. Physically she stands out, high cheekbones, a balletically slim form, and the hair, either falling loose or tied tightly over her head. It’s combined with such keenness of intelligence, such a sense of strength intermingled with vulnerability, such depth of character. Estupenda!
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Aquarius
What's in a name? Terence Rattigan’s Love in Idleness is a reworking of his 1944 play Less Than Kind (never staged at the time, it was first produced just six years ago). It reached the London stage at the very end of the same year with the Lunts, the premier theatre couple of their time, in the leads.