Stephen Frears | The Queen / 2006

the queen bows

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Morgan (screenwriter), Stephen Frears (director) The Queen / 2006

 

Stephen Frears’ 2006 film, The Queen, with a script by Peter Morgan, is in essence a comedy (a work in which the characters triumph over adversity, ending in a happy conclusion) and, in many senses, a one-liner at that: The Queen, caught in the trappings of the late 19th century, is suddenly forced to come to terms with the late 20th century if the monarchy is to survive.

      For all the simplicity of the movie’s subject, however, The Queen succeeds in providing a substantive entertainment, in part because its heroes are world figures of our own time, and, however inconsequential to the real events each of us is, we feel as an audience both within and outside of the theater, that we had a vicarious role in the events portrayed. And then, of course, there is the voyeuristic joy of being invited into Queen Elizabeth’s Balmoral Castle as well as into 10 Downing Street!

 

      In response to the shocking news of Princess Diana’s death, delivered with utter discretion by the Queen’s personal advisor, Robin Janvrin, Elizabeth can barely hide her dislike of her former daughter-in-law. Her comment to her son, “Charles, isn’t this awful,” seems to express more of her feelings about a new scandale than it does about a beautiful, young ex-princess’s death in a horrible accident. She clearly is determined to have little to do with the whole event, passively awaiting the Spencers’ decision concerning the funeral, while Charles awkwardly scuttles to Paris to bring back the body.

      Enter the hero to save the day, the newly-appointed Prime Minister, only too ready to play the touchy-feely “teddy” Blair the British public evidently seeks. “She is the people’s princess,” he declares—a phrase that endears him to the public, but one also that linguistically pits the people against the royals. Blair’s wife, indeed, is presented as a virulent anti-royalist, mocking even the early vague attempts her husband makes in order to save the addled-brained “nutters” from themselves.

      There is no question that the death of a princess, clearly tortured by the disdain and outright hatred of the royal family, a woman hounded by the press who—despite the drunkenness of her car’s chauffeur—also played a role in the crash of her automobile, was a sad and perhaps tragic event. I still recall going to bed on the west coast of the US with the belief that she had survived the accident, only to discover later the next day (our morning paper often arrives after I leave the house) the sad news that she had died.

      Yet as the public adulation (in the U.S. and as well as in Britain) rose seemingly by the hour, and the comparisons of Diana with Mother Theresa and other saintly figures grew, I felt perhaps a bit of the royals’ confusion. Had this woman been so naïve upon her marriage to Charles, that she had expected her life to be lived in privacy? Had it never occurred to her before her marriage that the royal family would not permit easy assimilation? Hadn’t the princess sought out much of the press attention, using the press to her advantage, both within her marriage and since? If Charles had shown himself to be a whimpering, cheating spouse, hadn’t she also, in her own extra-marital affairs—replete with letters and telephone calls—shown herself to be, to put it nicely, a horribly failed being. As for all her supposedly wonderful charitable acts, wasn’t that a role played by the entire royal family?

     Clearly her public saw Diana through a lens as strangely distorted as the Queen saw her own people. “I think the less attention we draw to it, the better,” declares her Majesty of the death, completely out of touch with her countrymen. No flag is flown at half-mast over the Royal Palace since the Queen is away—away in more senses than one; and as the floral tributes to Diana quickly grow from a trickle of the public’s affection into an absolute avalanche of grief-filled expression, the Queen retreats further and further into the behavioral ideals of the past.

     If one had doubts about the sanctity of dear Diana, one must also wonder about the royal family’s bunker-like mentality. Just four years previous even the Queen had had to admit an Annus horribilis in describing the year in which her second son, the Duke of York, divorced his wife Sarah (who, later that year, was pictured by the tabloids in a topless bikini kissing her friend, John Bryan); the Princess Royal divorced her husband Captain Mark Philips; Windsor Castle was badly burned in a fire; and Diana and the Prince of Wales separated. Hadn’t that impossible year taught her that you can’t hide from the press, that to do nothing was to admit everything? Certainly by this time, she might have discovered the values of the day were no longer those of her youth.

     Morgan’s script, perversely, focuses on Elizabeth’s insistence upon silence against the hordes who, as Prince Philip puts it, sleep in the streets, “pulling out their hair for someone they never knew.” Lunacy clearly has won the day.   

  Thank heaven, accordingly, for Helen Mirren, who portrays this out-of-touch monarch with true dignity and respect—performing alternately with reserve and imperious disdain. Against this near-perfect interpretation, Michael Sheen almost impishly interprets that most common of commoners, the slightly bumpkinish Blair, as a man of the hour, a figure who, if he didn’t exist, might have been created by the tabloids; accordingly, Blair is quite able to manipulate the press in his favor. At first, indeed, he almost seems to get a perverse joy out the Queen’s refusal to publicly express her grief. But almost as quickly, he perceives as a politician that it is crucial to save this great shadowy monarchy—if only to cast it as a backdrop against his shining light.

    After several failed attempts to grasp the situation, the Queen struggles to comprehend her free-fall from grace. In the film, her vision comes in the form of a great stag she accidentally encounters after her car stalls mid-river; Prince Philip has taken Charles’s sons to seek out and kill the stag, but as that animal now appears before the Queen, she recognizes in the majesty of this beast something akin to her own position, that that remarkable survivor must be saved, and she quickly shews it away for its own protection. When the Queen finally bows, agreeing to leave Balmoral to return to the Palace, she first pays homage to the carcass of the stag, shot not by her own family, but by a visiting American tourist

     The hate she discovers embedded in the mountain of floral tributes outside her London residence is terrifying, and, as she turns, offering to place the flowers a young child holds in her hands upon that sacrificial heap, for an instant Mirren registers even greater pain in response to the young girl’s negative reply. In fact, the flowers are meant for Elizabeth herself. It is her presence, she and we both come to understand, which the masses truly seek. 

    So, too, sometime after Diana’s funeral, does Blair seek out that presence—it is, after all, his job to consult with the Queen. But it is apparent that he also seeks some tribute, some recognition for having saved the monarchy—if nothing else, a pat on his obedient head. Elizabeth gives no such bone to her faithful dog. If she has been forced to bow to her public, as Mirren portrays her, the Queen now stands again at full height, reminding her Prime Minister that it is to her he must bow, and the film ends in the hilarious pan of the camera as she, “a walker,” quickly moves forward, he trotting after.

 

      If this film is not particularly profound, it does raise several interesting questions, most notably how the monarchy can remain out of necessity aloof and separate while performing the tightrope walk of empathizing and communicating with its subjects. There is always the problem that in bowing to the public’s desire for the Queen to share their grief, fears…etc., her Majesty will be transformed from a sovereign figure into simply a person of great wealth. In the particular instance of Diana’s death, moreover, the Queen seemed unable to perceive that Diana had been created by the royal family themselves, that through her marriage to Charles this young woman had been elevated to royal status, and that no matter how much the Queen detested Diana and her behavior, as a member of the royal family Diana had married them (even if divorced the year before from the Queen’s son) until death do them part. Accordingly, the Frankenstein the royals had created and loosed upon the public could not simply be ignored or disavowed. The public, moreover, saw Diana less as a Frankenstein (or less as a Windsor or Mountbatten—more ghoulish perhaps even than a Frankenstein!) than as a loveable monster, a beautiful, spoiled girl, nearly destroyed by her creators. Like the monster of Mary Shelley’s mythic tale, Diana perhaps had no choice but through her life-style to seek out her own destruction; whatever happened in the Alma tunnel of Paris that dreadful night seems almost inevitable in hindsight. 

 

Los Angeles, October 25, 2006

Reprinted in Nth Position [England] (November 2006).

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne | L’Enfant / 2005

children in distress

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne (screenwriters and directors) L’Enfant / 2005

 

Sonia has just been released from the hospital with her new baby, Jimmy, and is seeking the whereabouts of the father, Bruno. He has temporarily rented their apartment and is living on the streets, but Sonia is ready to join him with baby in arms. For neither she nor Bruno fully recognize the consequences of their acts. Bruno, who perceives any kind of employment as beneath his dignity (“only suckers work”), lives as a beggar and petty thief. And, like the two boys Bruno uses to accomplish some of the heists, Sonia and Bruno are themselves children, adult enfants who have never grown up. The first part of this beautifully haunting movie is devoted to simply establishing their infantile perspective of life, as the two poke at, chase, and tumble over one another, behaving more like naughty but loving siblings than as the sexual beings they obviously have become too early in their lives. 

 

     Sonia, alone, has begun to awaken to her new responsibility, and she attempts to arouse a sense of paternal instinct in Bruno. But while the Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s camera quickly moves in close to the faces of this duo and stays there for most of the film, the baby is observed almost always at a distance, signifying Bruno’s perception of it. A website reports the movie used over twenty-one babies in the filming of the motion picture, but, except for one or two scenes when the baby cries, a doll would have done as well; for the father the child is no more than a prop. Better that it was a thing, for then it might be something of worth. Bruno recognizes a child in his world as having no meaning other an unaffordable expense. A gold chain, a ring, a

coat, a radio, and, especially a telephone are tangible things to be used or sold—things of significance because they are attained with money.

     As Sonia and Bruno stand in line to register the child, he offers to take the infant for a ride in its pram, and almost as soon as he has turned the corner, arranges over the telephone to sell it on the black market. A bus ride later, he returns, almost proudly announcing to Sonia what he has done; he now has, after all, a large wad of cash in hand. “We can have another one,” he suggests to smooth things over. The girl collapses and remains unconscious, and he is forced to take her to the hospital.

 

      Bruno now recognizes that she will “spill the beans,” and he is entrapped by his own series of horrifyingly irresponsible acts. Strangely, most of the reviews I’ve read of this movie stop here, suggesting that the film directs its focus away from the child to Bruno’s life.  Writing in The New York Times, Manohla Dargis asks, for example, “You yearn to find out who bought Jimmy, and whether his fate lies with a childless couple or an organ mill.” The point is, however, that the child and Bruno are one and the same thing.  In actuality, the film structurally rewinds itself.

     Quickly realizing that he has this time done something nearly irreparable, Bruno determines to retrieve the child and return him to its mother, an action he successfully accomplishes. In carrying his “trophy” back to Sonia, he has had, this time around, to interact with the child—if nothing else, truly recognizing his son by holding and carrying him. His deeds, however, are not rewarded with a return to normalcy, but with ever-expanding waves of dangerous consequence. The police question him; even though he has returned the money, the black-marketers threaten him, demand he work for them, beat him, and rob him of the few dollars he carries with him in order to eat; released from the hospital, Sonia refuses to speak to him and kicks him out of their apartment. Nearly starved, Bruno sleeps in a cardboard box in his riverside “hideout.”

 

     Desperate to regain the bit of turf he delusionally felt he once controlled, Bruno, like Dickens’s Bill Sykes, plans his most audacious robbery with Steve, his child accomplice. The two succeed in carrying away a woman’s bag, at the bottom of which sits the money she was about to deposit, but they are brutally chased until they must go it on foot. Clinging to the underside of a river overhang, the two are forced to partially immerse themselves in the icy water, and when they attempt to scramble back to shore, Steve falls completely into the river, nearly drowning. Bruno saves him and carries him ashore, attempting to warm up the boy’s legs enough so they can make a run for it; but the child can hardly move his lower torso and as police retrace their tracks, Bruno is forced to escape alone, leaving the child to be arrested.

      Having destroyed the only two meaningful relationships he has perhaps ever established, Bruno is left so alone—which the directors perfectly capture in their camera’s almost loving obsession with the image of their anti-hero—that he has no exit left. If he has previously not recognized his own son as something of worth, out of need, if nothing else, he clearly values the life of the young accomplice. His choice to turn himself in comes with the recognition that things are now of less importance than human beings. The tears he and Sonia later share in their prison room conference are no longer those of selfish innocents but of painfully aware adults. 

 

Los Angeles, April 9, 2006

Reprinted from My Year 2006: Serving (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2009)

Florian von Donnersmarck | Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) / 2006

possibility in a world where nothing is left to chance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Florian von Donnersmarck (screenwriter and director) Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) / 2006

Awarded the best film of the European Film Awards, the Deutscher Filmpreis and awards at numerous other film festivals, and chosen as the Best Foreign Film of the Academy Awards of 2007, Florian von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) is truly an outstanding work of cinema.

    Through an ever-deepening narrative and lush interior imagery Donnersmarck gradually demonstrates—through the spying activities of the Stasi (the former German Democratic Republic secret police force)—just how intellectually and spiritually pernicious such a paranoid governmental system as the former GDR was. The beloved GDR playwright Georg Dreyman despite his idealistic support of the system and squeaky-clean credentials (he, supposedly, was admired even by Minister Bruno Hempf) is suddenly suspected of Western leanings, and an equally idealistic spy in the Communist regime, Capt. Gerd Wiesler, is ordered to investigate. As Georg and his actress girlfriend, Christa-Maria Sieland, attend a party, the Stasi moves into their apartment, installing microphones in the light switches, inserting cables into the walls, and connecting everything to an attic space above the apartment. The Stasi, who apparently know everything about everyone, even threatens a neighbor of Dreyman’s—who observed their comings and goings—with her daughter’s dismissal from a position in the university if the mother dares to report their intrusion.

     Much of the early part of the film simply outlines the process of spying, as Wiesler listens in to every aspect of Dreyman’s life, including his love-making and statements about the GDR government. Had the film gone no further it might have revealed to audiences who had never known or forgotten the abolishment of privacy that existed in that system. But Donnersmarck takes this work in new directions by creating in Dreyman an innately “good man,” a man who clearly believes in the Communist system and attempts to create work within its restrictive structures—a man symbolically connected to this idea in the film through a gift of sheet music, “Sonata of a Good Man,” from his director-friend Jerska.

    When Weisler reports his findings to friend and superior Lt-Col. Anton Grubitz, he is merely encouraged to “get” something on Dreyman; as he observes the comings and goings of both Dreyman and his girlfriend, it becomes clear that Christa-Maria is, in fact, being forced into a relationship with Minister Hempf. Weisler’s role, accordingly, shifts from a simple observer of duty to a position of being a kind of traitor, from hard-working member of the Stasi to someone who is being used to get Dreyman out of the way. From that moment in his life we begin to observe changes in Wiesler, who in his complete servitude has seemingly never before thought of any possible evil in his acts. Now Wiesler, through his voyeuristic activities, is slowly awakened to sexuality and, more importantly, to the power of art.

     The Stasi agent also soon realizes, moreover, that things have begun to unwind in Dreyman’s life. His girlfriend’s weekly outings with the Minister come between them, as the playwright encourages her to stay in and accept the consequences of her refusal to give into Hempf’s sexual demands. Dreyman’s director-friend, blacklisted for several years, commits suicide. An article Dreyman writes about the rise of suicide in the GDR—whose government denies any involvement in these deaths by changing the language itself, describing suicide as “self-murder”—must be smuggled out of the country for publication. And bit by bit, Dreyman has no choice but to participate in illegal activities, hiding a special typewriter beneath a floorboard, meeting with dissident friends, etc. Without a safe place to gather, the group decides to test Dreyman’s apartment to see if it is bugged, pretending that they are planning to smuggle someone to the West. For the first time perhaps in his life, Wiesler decides against appropriate action and fails to report the incident, but in so doing ultimately dooms Dreyman and his friends.

     The various strategies and plots Dreyman and his friends begin to hatch are portrayed by Wiesler as plans for a celebratory play. When the article on suicide appears in the West, however, Wiesler’s superiors become suspicious at the very moment when Minister Hempf grows disenchanted with his actress prey. Christa-Maria is arrested for accepting illegal narcotics and Dreyman’s apartment is searched and plundered; yet no typewriter is found. As a master Stasi interrogator, Wiesler is given no choice but to question Dreyman’s girlfriend, intimidating her until she reveals the location of the playwright’s typewriter. In that devastatingly painful scene, Christa-Maria gives in to his demands, simultaneously dooming her lover and destroying her own sanity.

  

     She is released, but as the Stasi returns to search Dreyman’s apartment, she runs from the house into the street, facing a car head-on in yet another act of “self-murder.” Ironically, when the Stasi check the floorboards where they have been told the typewriter is stashed, they (and Dreyman) are shocked to find that it is missing—clearly Wiesler has gotten to the apartment before their arrival. The former obedient servant of the State, Wiesler is demoted to the position of a letter-opener—a worker whose job it is to steam open the letters of his fellow countrymen and read them for possible infractions.

      Had Donnersmarck ended his film here it would have stood as a stronger statement of the effects of governmental paranoia. Even if one found flaws—as I did—in his presentation of the sudden changes in Wiesler’s personality (were it only possible for art to so quickly change an individual!), one could have read this as a fable to possibility in a world where nothing is left to chance.

     The director, however, carries the film beyond the fall of the Berlin Wall, as Dreyman, now free to present his dramas (which, unfortunately, in the few scenes we witness seem to be unbearably bad theater), encounters former minister Hempf, inquiring of him why his apartment had been made an exception to Stasi spying. Hempf gloatingly reveals that Dreyman had not been made an exception, that he need only check the lights and walls to find the traces of government surveillance. Returning home, the playwright pulls apart the walls of his apartment in a manner that somewhat reminds one of Harry Caul’s maniacal destruction of his own apartment in fear that he has similarly been “bugged” in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation.

     After uncovering the truth and realizing that Christa-Maria evidently led the Stasi to him, Dreyman visits the state archives, where he uncovers Wiesler’s role in the affair and how he purposely misled the government in his reports. In a reversal of power, Dreyman now “looks up” Wiesler, only to discover a now poverty-stricken man, clearly working as a day laborer in distributing fliers. The author makes no attempt to communicate, championing the man anonymously in his novel based upon his experiences, Sonata for a Good Man, a book Wiesler accidentally discovers, purchasing it in celebration of himself.

   This latter part of the film, I argue, unnecessarily pulls the story away from its Kafka-like implications and detracts from the haunting and terrible tale of the reality that seems beyond belief. As it ends, Dreyman is presented almost as a kind of new hero, an exemplar of how the “good men” of the old GDR will perhaps transform a reunited Germany. Of far greater importance is the realization that the world is in constant danger of such paranoiac systems and should be terrified of the individuals behind them, a danger that may affect our own supposedly free lives today.

 

Los Angeles, May 28, 2007

Reprinted from Nth Position [England] (September 2007).

 

Kim Ki-young | 하녀 Hanyeo (The Housemaid) / 1960

a cautionary tale

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kim Ki-young (writer and director) 하녀 Hanyeo (The Housemaid) / 1960

 

In a manner somewhat reminiscent of the films of Douglas Sirk, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid of 1960 is a hothouse melodrama with a nearly absurdly clotted story-line with elements of a horror tale. A great many aspects of the story are never quite explained: why, for example, is the composer Dong-sik Kim’s (Kim Jin-kyu) daughter Ae-soon crippled? Why are so many young women factory workers literally swooning over the handsome music teacher? And why is Kim, himself, so prudish that when one of the workers writes him a love note, he reports her to factory officials and she is fired, later committing suicide?

       Just as inexplicable is the fact that her fellow worker, Kyung-hee Cho (who may actually have written the lover-letter) suddenly determines to take piano lessons from Kim? And why later does she suggest Myung-sook (Lee Eun-shim), another fellow worker, take the job of the Kim family’s housemaid, with she, herself, paying part of her salary?

        How, if the Kims must both work to survive—Mrs. Kim does sewing from home—can they afford a large new attachment to their current home? And why is it hinted that Kim’s wife was greedy in desiring such a large house? Moreover, how can they afford a housemaid on top of building a new addition?

        We can certainly speculate on some of these issues. It is clear that Kyung-hee is also in love with the composer, and takes lessons to be near him. Since the Kims are expecting a third child, they desperately need more space. Perhaps like many children of the 1950s, the daughter may have contracted polio. And Kim’s traditional decorum is what helps to make him ripe for a comeuppance in the form of a love affair with his maid.

        But even providing answers for these curious plot-twists does not necessarily lead to the central story, which presents the housemaid as a kind of femme fatale, who, after being convinced by Kim’s wife to abort the composer’s baby in her womb, determines to destroy this nuclear family, killing both the son (by pretending to feed him rat poison) and daughter (by forcing her to eat poison-laced rice).

       To large degree, through this melodramatic series of events, the director is actually creating a comic and witty series of happenings that prove that rationality can easily go awry. And in these slightly campy and fully ghoulish goings-on, Kim pulls the rug from under the family’s smug sense of morality. In fact, the movie ends with the composer, evidently the narrator of this tale, explaining to us, his audience, that everything we just saw was a fiction, but it might truly happen to anyone, making the whole work a kind of cautionary tale.       

     The unexplained details, accordingly, distract us, just as the characters are utterly distracted, from what is really important in perceiving reality, that evil lurks everywhere the hearts of mankind.

 

     Today The Housemaid reads almost like an earlier—and far more complex—version of Adrian Lyne’s Fatal Attraction; but unlike that 1987 film, Kim’s work gives us plenty of psychological clues for his composer-character’s downfall. Both husband and wife, while outwardly seeming perfectly matched and normal, subtly torture their children (the father is determined that his daughter should climb steep stairs to strengthen her arms and legs) and benignly neglect them. Both children, like children everywhere, bizarrely taunt one another. And all the Kims have centered their life on money and upward mobility far too much. In the end, it is almost as if their children’s and the maid’s future child must be sacrificed to sense of propriety and so that the composer won’t lose his job, despite the fact that he had forced another to lose hers. But, of course, Kim also loses, in the process, his own life, at least in the cautionary tale.

       That this high comic morality play was made during a period when Korea was ruled by a censoring military government is even more amazing. And then—because of the reuse of cinema stock in the brims of hats and in mining silver from the old frames—almost lost to film audiences forever (the missing first two reels were finally discovered and the film was restored for the Cannes Film Festival in 2008) is astounding. Eight of Kim’s other films have forever disappeared.

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2016

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2016).