Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 10/11/2011) (From The Oxford Times)

Parky at the Pictures (In Cinemas 10/11/2011)

7:44am Thursday 10th November 2011

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Published in 1847, Emily Brontë's sole novel, Wuthering Heights, was criticised in its day for the stark depiction of physical and psychological cruelty. Subsequent adaptations, however, have chosen to focus on the romantic nature of the doomed liaison between Heathcliff and Cathy, with AV Bramble (1920). William Wyler (1939), Luis Buñuel (1954), Robert Fuest (1970), Jacques Rivette (1985), Yoshishige Yoshida (1988) and Peter Kosminsky (1992) among those to attempt big-screen variations. But, in stripping the text to its bare essentials (for example, dispensing with the book's first narrator Lockwood and ignoring Heathcliff's dealings with Cathy's children), Andrea Arnold has restored the emphasis on the pain endured by the foundling and the farmer's daughter as prejudice and circumstance conspire to keep them apart.

On a grey day on the Yorkshire Moors, Mr Earnshaw (Paul Hilton) returns from a trip to Liverpool with a companion, a young black boy whom he names Heathcliff (Solomon Glave). His son Hindley (Lee Shaw) is scowlingly unimpressed by the newcomer, while his daughter Catherine (Shannon Beer) spits in his face before he is taken away to be bathed. However, she comes to fetch him next morning to explore the farm and they soon become inseparable, despite Earnshaw's frequent complaints about her wickedness and Hindley's insistence that Heathcliff has to work for his keep. But he remains a member of the family and the pair enjoy untold freedom after Hindley is sent away to complete his education. Their intimacy also grows, with Cathy licking the blood from a wound on Heathcliff's back after a particularly brutal beating.

But the situation changes when Earnshaw dies and the returning Hindley sends his adoptive brother to sleep in the stables and places him in the care of Joseph (Steve Evets), a no-nonsense farmhand who keeps his nose to the grindstone. Hindley's wife, Frances (Amy Wren), bears him a son, but she dies soon afterwards and he turns his wrath on Heathcliff, who can no longer count on Cathy's unwavering support, as she has been much changed by a short stay with the neighbouring Linton family. Indeed, she now prefers the company of Edgar Linton (Jonny Powell) and mocks Heathcliff's dishevelled appearance and uncouth manners.

As time passes, Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) decides to marry Edgar (James Northcote) and Heathcliff overhears her explaining to Ellen the trusted housekeeper (Simone Jackson) that she doesn't really love him, but knows that society would never approve of her union with Heathcliff. However, he fails to hear her promise to use her new status to help improve his position and he runs away vowing vengeance on those who had wronged him.

By the time he returns a wealthy man, three years later, Heathcliff is appalled to learn that Cathy is married and he seeks to exploit the affection of her sister-in-law Isabella (Nichola Burley) to make Cathy jealous and humiliate Edgar. He also becomes the now dissolute Hindley's tenant and eventually purchases the farm and installs his new bride as the mistress of Wuthering Heights. But he soon discovers that Cathy is gravely ill and is distraught when she dies, leaving him to curse the fates and the intolerance that prevented them from fulfilling their desire.

Much has been made of Arnold casting black actors Solomon Glave and James Howson as Heathcliff and suggesting that he was the son of a slave rather than a gypsy. However, this is something of a dramatic side issue, as the male Earnshaws are similarly bigoted to outsiders of any race or class. What is more pertinent is the social realist approach to the story and the decision to have the largely non-professional cast deliver the pared down dialogue with the minimum of inflection. While it brings a certain grim authenticity to proceedings, it does little to make the characters empathetic and the self-consciously slow pacing means that this is often a film of withering lows rather than wuthering heights.

Scripting in collaboration with Olivia Hetreed, Arnold inherited the project from Peter Webber after he had taken it over from John Maybury. It's tempting to speculate how the respective directors of Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003) and The Edge of Love (2008) might have handled the adaptation, especially as rumours abounded they were considering such actresses as Natalie Portman, Abbie Cornish and Gemma Arterton to play Cathy. But one thing is likely, they would probably not have adhered to rigorously to the naturalism that made Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009) so convincing and compelling.

There is much to admire about the production, however. Robbie Ryan's handheld and autumnally hued Academy Ratio views of the windswept terrain, Helen Scott and Christopher Wyatt's contrasting interiors and Nicholas Becker's sound design all enhance the sense of time and place, while the absence of music (beside the occasional snatch of diegetic song) reinforces the notion of observing life as it is being lived. But the hesitancy of the performances depletes the emotional intensity of the plot and introduces a modernity that sits awkwardly with the period trappings. The insertion of some decidedly unBrontëan curse words also feels forced and wholly unnecessary. Nonetheless, Arnold does restore the emphasis on the harshness of country life in the mid-19th century and the clash between civilisation and the untamed. In addition to a sheep being slaughtered and a couple of dogs being hung up by their collars to stop them yapping, Heathcliff is also thrashed and he even bites into Isabella's lip during their first kiss, in what is actually the only tangible evidence of the seething fury and rampaging passion that prompts his retaliatory return to moors.

By contrast, Marcel Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis (1945) made a virtue of its stylised recreation of the Boulevard du Temple in the 1830s, as this celebration of the French spirit was always made with the collapse of Vichy and the liberation from the Nazis in mind, so that it could stand as a symbol of the nation's indomitability. Reissued in a shimmering new print, this is one of the masterworks of world cinema and simply has to be seen.

As the scene opens on `Boulevard du Crime', the first part of this glorious 190-minute epic, France is still enjoying the benefits of the Bourbon restoration and the crowds are milling along the Parisian thoroughfare renowned for its very different places of entertainment - the Grand Theatre, where the great works of literature are performed, and the Théâtre des Funambules, which is known for the garish melodramas that delight the common people up in the gods (or, as they say across the Channel, `le paradis').

Actor Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur) dreams of becoming the darling of the masses, but he sets his sights slightly lower in flirting with Claire Reine (Arletty), a free-spirited beauty known as Garance who appears in a carnival sideshow. She is also desired by Pierre François Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), a thief who masquerades as a scrivener to cover his larcenous and often subversive activities. However, he is quite prepared for Garance to be accused of the theft of a gold watch and it's only the intervention of mime Baptiste Debureau (Jean-Louis Barrault) that prevents her arrest, as he had witnessed the crime and acts it out for the benefit of the police and Garance rewards him with a flower.

Baptiste's father Anselme (Étienne Decroux) also performs at the Funambules, alongside Nathalie (María Casares), the manager's daughter who has always been devoted to the melancholic mime. However, her displays have recently been lacklustre and her father bribes peddler Jéricho (Pierre Renoir) to read her palm and convince her she will marry her ideal man. Thus, she is more enamoured than ever when Baptiste and Frédérick improvise a piece of comic business to cool tempers after a fight breaks out that night between rival players.

But Baptiste's hopes of romancing Garance seem dashed when he sees her accompany Lecenaire to the seedy café, Le Rouge Gorge. Yet, even though he is ejected by the thuggish Avril (Fabien Loris) for attempting to dance with Garance, she takes pity on him and agrees to move into a room in the tenement where he lives with Frédérick. Unfortunately, however, her singing catches the actor's ear and he seduces her and invites her to join the troupe, leaving Baptiste to pour his heart into the anguished performances that make him a star and make Nathalie love him all the more. However, Garance also wins new admirers, including Comte Édouard de Montray (Louis Salou), an arrogant dandy whose offer of protection comes in handy when she is implicated in one of Lacenaire's bungled robberies.

With Garance now in hiding, Frédérick dedicates himself to his art and, as the second act, `L'Homme Blanc', opens, he has become the leading man at the Grand Theatre. However, his decision to turn a mediocre melodrama into a raucous, crowd-pleasing comedy backfires, as the authors challenge him to a duel. But, following a nocturnal contretemps, he finds himself accompanied by an unlikely second, as, instead of robbing and killing him, Lacenaire (who has ambitions to become a playwright) recognises Frédérick and asks to become his friend.

Meanwhile, Baptiste has married Nathalie and found fame of his own at the Funambles. Indeed, he is such a major star that Frédérick comes to watch him to relax after surviving his skirmishes and is surprised to find Garance sharing his box. She has been travelling the world with De Montray and yet has never forgotten the simple mime who loved her with such sincerity. Frédérick is stung by the depth of her feeling and realises he now understands the jealousy that will enable him to play Othello with genuine insight. But Garance is persuaded against making her presence known to Baptiste when Nathalie spots her and sends her young son to the box to sing the virtues of his happy family life.

On returning to De Montray's mansion, however, Garance finds Lacenaire waiting for her and he confronts the Comte with a knife on being informed that Garance has no feelings for him. The revelation arouses De Montray's suspicions and Garance admits she can never love him as her heart belongs to another. However, she promises to be faithful to him and he can proclaim their union from the rooftops if he so desires.

But everything unravels at the opening night of Othello. As the Comte believes Frédérick is Garance's paramour, he tries to goad him into accepting a duel and has Lacenaire tossed out of the Grand Theatre when he comes to the actor's defence. Elsewhere, Garance bumps into Baptiste on the balcony and they slip away to her former lodging. The following morning, Lacenaire murders De Montray at the Turkish bath for humiliating him at the theatre and Nathalie finds her husband with Garance. Unaware that her protector has been killed, she flees into the bustling boulevard as the carnival procession comes past and the star-crossed lovers are parted forever.

It's somewhat surprising that nobody has ever made a film about the making of Les Enfants du Paradis, as its production is every bit as compelling as the picture itself. Jean-Louis Barrault suggested making a film about Baptiste Deburau and Frédérick Lemaître when he met Marcel Carné in Nice in the early 1940s. However, Carné's longtime screenwriter, poet Jacques Prévert, was reluctant to centre a story around a mime. On discovering the misdemeanours of Pierre-François Lacenaire - who was nicknamed `the Dandy of Crime' - he became more enthusiastic and shooting was scheduled to start on sets designed by the peerless Alexandre Trauner in 1944.

According to rumour, the majority of the 1800 extras required for the crowd scenes were members of the Maquis, who needed daytime cover and food to enable them to fight the Occupation by night. Moreover, Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma were Jews and worked incognito under the noses of the Nazi soldiers who supervised proceedings. They could not prevent the sets being destroyed in a storm, however, and three months passed before shooting resumed in Paris. But Carné was in no hurry to complete the feature, as he wanted it to be the first movie shown in the capital after the liberation and he was aided in his delaying tactics by the appointment of cinematographer Roger Hubert to another assignment and his perfectionist replacement Philippe Agostini's insistence on matching the exact lighting in every single pick-up shot.

A futher setback was caused by the Normandy landings in June 1944 and the need to replace Robert Le Vigan as Jéricho after he was arrested for collaboration with the Germans. But Carné finally wrapped and premiered the film in the Palais de Chaillot on 9 March 1945. It was an instant success and critics have been eulogising about it ever since. The scope and scale are deeply impressive considering the conditions under which it was made, while the performances are as impeccable as the production values. But it is the undimmed sense of joie de vivre and national pride that makes this so relishable and it remains a beacon of defiance against tyranny 66 years on. Arletty missed the premiere, as she was in prison in Drancy on a charge of consorting with a German officer. In fact, she had started her affair with a Luftwaffe colonel after Carné had dispatched her to entice the Nazis into letting them use the chateau that Napoleon had once given to his laundress lover as the Comte's residence. Ultimately, the charges were dropped and, although Arletty's reputation never fully recovered, Garance remained the embodiment of Free France.

One can only imagine how the press today would have treated Artletty, who responded to accusations of treachery at her trial with the phrase `My heart is France's. My body is my own.' How Joyce McKinney probably wishes she had said something like this when asked about her relationship with Kirk Anderson instead of `I loved him so much I would have skiied down Mount Everest naked with a carnation up my nose!' However, as Errol Morris reveals in Tabloid, McKinney seemed to have a regretable talent for saying or doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

That said, nobody comes out of this curious exposé of yellow journalism with much credit. For somebody so desperate to correct inaccuracies in the reporting of her 1977 Devon kidnap of her Mormon lover, ex-beauty queen McKinney exaggerates her eccentricity with resistible self-consciousness (especially for someone with an IQ of 168), while Daily Express hack Peter Tory and Mirror paparazzo Kent Gavin are loathesomely smug in their mockery of a woman they purportedly drove to attempt suicide.

However, Morris hardly helps matters with his use of monochrome clips to illustrate interview revelations about the `sex in chains' incident and giant captions highlighting seemingly incriminating words. He clearly finds his subject and her persecutors ghoulishly fascinating and the story faintly ridiculous and allows them and bit players like pilot Jackson Shaw and Mormon missionary-turned-radio host Troy Williams to blurt out remarks that make them look less than dignified. But Morris has surprisingly little to say in this disappointingly frivolous enterprise about tabloid tactics or the extent to which the media reflects the society on which it reports. Indeed, he seems more interested in McKinney hiring Dr Hong of the Seoul-based RNL Bio lab to clone her beloved pit bull terrier, Booger.

McKinney has recently filed a suit against Morris and producer Mark Lipson, in which she accuses this `celluloid catastrophe' of presenting her as `crazy, a sex offender, an S&M prostitute, and/or a rapist'. The verdict will be some time in coming. But, while she seems happy enough to reminisce about this sleazy episode to Morris's Interrotron camera, one can sympathise with McKinney's concern that the slogans, animations and commercial clips added during the edit do her few favours - although she must have had sufficient experience of the media after all this time to know the risks of supping with the devil.

Chris Langham is also no stranger to lurid headlines and he displays laudable self-deprecation, as well as considerable chutzpah, in electing to make his return to the big screen in Black Pond, a bleak comedy about a sordid scandal. However, his rehabilitation and the presence of a debuting Simon Amstell are more likely to garner attention than the fact that Cambridge Footlights alumni Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley make a decent directorial bow with this offbeat mocku-sitcom. It may never quite be as quirky or controlled as Ben Wheatley's Down Terrace (2009), but it's rarely wide of the mark with its pot shots at the public's grimly insatiable appetite for lurid stories and the media's propensity for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick and beating about the bush with it.

Langham plays the paterfamilias in an unremarkable middle-class family. Daughters Anna O'Grady and Helen Cripps have moved away and Langham and wife Amanda Hadingue often struggle to find things to talk about now they're left to their own devices. However, while out walking his three-legged dog, Langham encounters derelict Colin Hurley, who readily accepts his invitation to tea. Only the stay extends well beyond the afternoon and Langham and Hadingue are soon at a loss what to do with their limpet-like guest.

Things change, however, when their pet mysteriously drowns in the eponymous pond and O'Grady and Cripps return home for the funeral with their adoring Japanese friend, Will Sharpe. They are bemused by Hurley, but even more astonished when he dies at the table and their parents decide to honour his last wish and bury him in the woods.

Nothing more would have been said of the matter. But Sharpe confesses all during a session with shrink Simon Amstell and the press has soon branded `The Family of Killers' and they are forced into going on the PR offensive in order to salvage their reputation.

Nobody likes a bit of bourgeois dysfunction more than the Brits - well, apart from the French and maybe Wes Anderson - and Sharpe and Kingsley have created a scenario worthy of Chris Morris. But it is too slight to accommodate the constant switching between flashbacks, animated segments and speeches to camera. Moreover, the calculated stylistic fussiness occasionally makes the plotline seem ridiculous rather than audacious and often leaves the female characters with too little to do, as Langham revisits the bumbling mannerisms that earned him a BAFTA for The Thick of It and Amstell tries too hard to prove he has made the transition from Buzzcocks to the boards.

Much ink (and whatever its cyber equivalent is called) has been spilt in discussing the (de)merits of Dutch director Tom Six's The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence), which was denied a certificate by the British Board of Film Classification earlier in the year before the august censor performed a volte face and decided that a picture that could not be redeemed by any excisions could be cut in 32 places to remove the offending `scenes of sexual and sexualised violence, sadistic violence and humiliation, and a child presented in an abusive and violent context'.

Those wishing to know precise details of the deleted material should consult the BBFC website. But, even with the grotesque images of sandpapered self-arousal, amateur dentistry, forced defecation, barbed wire assault and inept staple surgery, it's difficult to see why this self-reflexive and wholly unamusing comedy horror should have incurred the wrath of the specialist panel when it passes so much more casually contentious material without a second glance.

Scoffing at the notion that horror films corrupt impressionable minds, Six shows car park attendant Laurence R. Harvey watching his 2009 opus The Human Centipede (First Sequence) during his night shift. Harvey is obsessed by the film and has a scrapbook packed with shots of the cast and drawings of the medical procedures mad German surgeon Dieter Laser had used to stitch three victims mouth to anus to produce a grotesque creation sharing a single digestive tract. However, he is not just a demented fan. Harvey has plans to produce his own human centipede and has convinced the film's star, Ashlynn Yennie, to come to Britain for what she thinks is an audition for the new Quentin Tarantino movie.

Harvey shares a cramped flat with Vivien Bridson, the mother who allowed his father to abuse him and who now annoys thuggish upstairs neighbour Dominic Borrelli by banging on the ceiling whenever he plays his loud music and subjects Harvey to regular therapy sessions with bearded doctor Bill Hutchens. Repelled by her, Harvey can never get to work quickly enough, as he can watch his favourite film in peace in a tiny office banked with CCTV monitors. He is distracted during one viewing, however, by a couple arguing after locking themselves out of their vehicle. But, instead of assisting them, the taciturn and decidedly slobbish Harvey shoots them both in the leg and knocks them out with a tyre iron.

Having bundled them into his van, he drives to a warehouse for hire in a rundown part of town and adds the grumpy landlord to his growing collection of specimens. Even Borrelli and Hutchens are captured, with the latter being caught in flagrante in the back seat of a parked car with a prostitute. But it's only after he had brutally murdered Bridson and imprisoned the newly arrived Yennie that Harvey begins putting his absurd scheme into operation. Lacking the surgical skills to conjoin his victims, he staples Yennie, Borelli, Maddi Black, Kandace Caine, Lucas Hansen, Lee Nicholas Harris, Dan Burman, Daniel Jude Gennis, Georgia Goodrick and Emma Lock together by their facial and buttock cheeks and cackles manically as they writhe and groan on the warehouse floor.

However, Harvey is keen to recreate The Human Centipede's most gruesome moment and injects each component of his hideous creature with laxative. This is supposed to be grimly comical, but few will see the joke and many will feel short-changed by the climactic revelation - after the insect turns and Yennie exacts her excruciating revenge on the hapless Harvey - that the entire sordid episode had simply been the imaginings of a disturbed and rather pathetic loner.

Clearly seeking to emulate Wes Craven in his witty deconstruction of the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise in New Nightmare (1994), Six certainly knows how to play to the fanboy gallery and press the buttons of would-be moral guardians. But this is a disappointing sequel that wastes a remarkable performance by the debuting Laurence R. Harvey and some menacing monochrome photography by David Meadows in cobbling together a series of slasher set-pieces that are never quite as shocking as Six had intended. The BBFC cuts take the curse off some of the atrocities Harvey commits during his twisted rampage, but their relentless excessiveness ultimately renders them more risible than terrifying.