george street/central

lambton pool

There Will Be Blood

Last week we missed the Film Society season opener, The Great Dictator, but this week we got to There Will Be Blood. It was so different to the other two films I've seen this week (the class and A Serious Man); it's an epic about the discovery of oil in California. Its characters inhabit an extraordinary world where, with the oil boom and the motor-car, everything's rapidly changing. The remotest parts of the U.S. are now linked to the big industrial centres and, with the cash and the desire, a hundred mile oil pipeline running all the way to the Pacific seems perfectly feasible. What makes it interesting is, in telling the evolution of America, it captures much of the rapacious spirit of modern capitalism, this brought out beautifully in the much-talked-about ending which reminds me stylistically of a 1930's political cartoon where isms were often drawn as evil and beastly - in this case it's Daniel Day Lewis, embodiment of greed, standing over the prostrate form of religion.

the class

I'd been wanting to see this film for a while. It's about a teacher of French who works in a school in Paris. It's shot in an objective/documentary style with lots of quick editing suggesting multiple points of view and an emphasis on diegetic sound - scraping of chairs, kids yelling in the yard, tense exchanges between the teachers and their pupils. The characters are interesting - the main character, the teacher, particularly so. He seems to care about his pupils but can't seem to help making inflammatory comments; he doesn't always respect the students' honesty and doesn't really understand them culturally. (Somehow this doesn't make him any less likeable.) The school seems super-strict and the penalties for misbehaviour excessive. What it does well though is describe the problem most schools face of making and enforcing rules while ensuring individual fairness; this becomes the focus of the last half of the film where the teacher, Francois, acts against an African-born student who then faces the school disciplinary panel and, more dauntingly, the wrath of his parents. The ending's very effective; the narrative moves on from its main problem, and never returns, but leaves the viewer to ponder it all - which seemed a gesture towards the idea of individual regard/collective disregard. It wasn't as good as I'd hoped but not bad. It'd be a great resource for teachers of pedagogy.

A Serious Man

There seem to be a number of things the Coen Brothers got just right in their recent film, A Serious Man. The first thing I noticed about it was the pace was right – for a film that tells the story of an ordinary life, the narrative ambles, with extended scenes (longer than they need to be) made up of everyday dialogue. It’s deliberately slow to go anywhere which entirely suits its subject matter. When it does appear to venture out beyond the ordinary, like when Larry’s depressed brother crosses the border into Canada, we find that Larry’s only dreaming. So we come back to Larry’s plethora of problems. This is where it works. Too many films purport to tell stories of the everyday only to lose sight of that intention, developing an ending that seems altogether extraordinary, or at least out there and beyond any of the experiences most of us have had living in suburbia. Sure these things happen but…So this Coen film is about control. As a film whose topic is ordinary things, it insists on its own ordinariness, which paradoxically lifts it out of the ordinary. It’s slow, a bit ponderous, but never banal. It got mainly middling reviews, the grounds for which I can’t remember. It’s worth a look.