Brideshead Revisited (2008) mini review

To my mind the 1980’s TV series of the Evelyn Waugh book is unsurpassable, and indeed I found it impossible not to compare this film adaptation (I watched the director’s cut) with the superior 11 hour miniseries.

The TV series, adapted by Jon Mortimer was probably the easiest adaptation ever made, as the words from the book were quite literally transferred directly to the small screen. What I saw with the TV series were the words and ideas of Waugh translated to images and the actors’ mouths.

The film however made all sorts of changes - some due to compression, exposition of the narrative had to be stated explicitly in many cases, whereas the TV series would take maybe half an hour to develop a plot point. Of course when you are compressing a book into a 2+ hour movie, these things need to be done. But some of the words from the mouths of the characters were just not Waugh - and to me they jarred.

More and more I find that a movie is not a good vehicle for a complex and idea-intense novel like Brideshead Revisited. I mourn the age of the serious TV serial where ideas and feelings and atmospheres can be developed over hours - or weeks, given the way the TV format was used in the early 80s - no VCRs or DVRs... For this reason I am anxious about watching this year’s adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - the late 70s BBC adaptation was magisterial - how can a 2 hour film be magisterial?

What really shocked me about this film adaptation is that, for me, it totally missed the point of the book. By that I mean the fundamental story was not resolved or really hinted at. This seems to me a terrible omission.

For me the book and the TV series is about one man’s conversion to the catholic faith.

This was totally ignored in the film! At the death of Lord Marchmain, the scales did not fall from Charles Ryder’s eyes, and the final scene in the chapel was not his conversion but a kind of sentimental gesture, of not snuffing out the candle in the Brideshead chapel. I cannot understand how what for me is the fundamental story of the book can be ignored. Evelyn Waugh was himself a convert to the Roman Church. The film therefore becomes a bisexual love story, or at most a three way between Sebastian, Julia and the catholic faith.

My last complaint is to do with the colour palette used in the movie - this fashionable and rather odious Teal and Orange which I find very distracting and unnatural. I of course prefer the duller but more natural shades from the TV series.

On the positive side, there was a good showing of English thespian talent - Sir Michael Gambon and Emma Thompson were their usual fine selves. I was shocked at the final credits to learn that Greta Scacchi had played the middle aged and rather frumpy Cara. At least her Italian accent was relatively genuine. It made me smile to see Niall Buggy as the priest who gives the last rites to Lord Marchmain. The younger cast members were good but not in the same league.

Finally, I wonder why this film needed to be made when the 80s TV series was so definitive - perhaps in this age we cannot expect people to follow 11 hours of slow story telling any more. TV series these days means Desperate Housewives, True Blood and Six Feet Under - none of which are to my taste...

Wings of Desire

I first saw this film in the winter of 1988-89 at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham, near the BBC studios at Pebble Mill. As I left the cinema, which was situated in Cannon Hill Park, I saw a police car waiting in the car park, headlights on. As I left the cinema, I felt a guardian angel watching over me. As I left the park and started walking home, I heard running behind me. Next thing I knew someone had kicked me in the back and a group of 5 or 6 or 7 mid-teenagers were around me punching and kicking me.

Somehow I managed to escape the melee and had the presence of mind to run up the drive of a large detached house and pretend to ring the doorbell. The group of teenagers decided to flee...

The most direct association I have with this film is having a guardian angel who totally failed to protect me.

And then there is Berlin - which I had visited the previous summer in 1988 - and all the impressions I had from the then-divided city. In fact all the impressions I had from the inter-railing tour of France, Italy and Germany from that summer 23 years ago are associated with this film.

Apart from several day-trips to Calais and Boulogne-sur-Mer, and two Mediterranean package holidays, I had not left the British Isles till then. Waking up in a night train on the railway bridge across the Rhine in Cologne was the germination of all my dreams of Europe, dreams that led me inevitably to Brussels.

And so to the film, which is about mortality, time, history, desire and the heaven over Berlin. The film has a certain kind of melancholic serenity. Footage is mixed in black and white (angel vision) and colour (just like in Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (or Stairway to Heaven in the US)) and film shot in the 80s and the 40s. The footage from the 40s is also mixed black and white, and colour.

I haven’t wanted to face my dreams of Berlin since my last visit 18 years ago, in 1993. As I write this text, I fly there tomorrow, flightpath Tegel. In a month where my life’s structure has been partially broken, it seemed time to face the dreams of a city divided, the witness I made to the cold war, the fractured city partly coalescing in 1993, the empty wasteland of Potsdamer Platz. Time to recall the memories of the nazi swastika showing through the faded East German paintwork in Potsdam near Sans-souci. Also time to face the reputation of wild debauchery that echoes the Wiemar Republic times, times maybe not so dissimilar to our own in 2011.

Tomorrow I leave Brussels and descend from the Himmel über Berlin.

Westvleteren - Happy new year!

From over two years ago. Better late than never...

Film Review : Empire of the Sun (1987)

Against my philosophy of life, Spielberg's films always seem so dead and uninteresting; watching one is like viewing coloured patterns on the screen and nothing much more. When this process is made on the semi-autobiographical book of one of my most seminal authors, the effect is quite seriously disorientating.

The main theme of the Spielberg-led story of this film is of a boy losing his parents, losing his innocence, then finding his parents again. The parental bond comes totally to the fore, and this is so, so wrong in terms of the book. The parents in the book are the typical 1930s upper middle class family where the offspring are brought up by the nanny. There is considerable distance between the parents and the offspring, that to make this bond the central part of the film is just totally out of context of the period. Spielberg just didn't get this English cultural fact.

Right at the start of the film things depart from reality - the nanny for the boy is a chinese woman. This again is just so wrong and it made me spend the first ten minutes annoyed by this fact. In the book the nanny is a Belarussian, Olga. It is important that there is a separate layer of staff coming between the Chinese and the English. A Chinese woman would never have been allowed to have such direct and important contact with an English boy. I felt annoyed as this simplifying move was clearly made to dumb-down the story for an American audience.

The secondary theme of the loss of innocence is out of place here also. The narration of the book clearly indicates that this is an adult recounting his childhood through adult eyes. There is no rite of passage or moment when the narrator loses his innocence. The entire narrative is made from the point of view of an adult, and this 'journey' does not form part of the story.

Other annoyances include the waste of a good many decent actors' parts. Miranda Richardson just drifts around the screen looking wan, Robert Stephens gets very little screen time, Leslie Phillips is there but only occasionally. Only John Malkovich and Nigel Havers have anything interesting to do, and they do it well - a surprise for Nigel Havers who has had most of his career on the small UK screen.

Spielberg of course cannot resist an occasional descent into the mawkish - the Japanese teenager in the adjoining airfield and his subsequent death being the worst example.

Christian Bale's performace I have no problem with. The talent he has shown later on in his adult career is there to be seen. One can almost imagine the lead character in American Psycho being an adult version of the boy in the internment camp.

For the things that I did enjoy - one moment gave me goosebumps, and that was the attack on the airfield by Mustangs, and the realisation of the part of the book when the boy is standing on a building and sees an American pilot wave at him as he flies past. It almost got the hallucinatory feeling that J.G. Ballard described in his book. The scene set in the abandoned stadium where the Japanese had stored all the valuable furniture and cars from the westerners was suitably surreal, as was the sequence set in this arena where the flash of the atom bomb dropped on Nagasaki is depicted. In this book this is clearly figurative rather than factual, but the hallucinatory rendering of this event and the tieing of it to the death of Miranda Richardson's character worked.

The final scene of the reunification of boy and parents, and the closing of the boy's eyes in the arms of his mother is the required happy end to the story. What I really missed from the end of this story as was described in the book was the torture and death of the young chinese youth by the four bored Japanses soldiers - an event that clearly changed the life of the real J.G.Ballard and an event that resonates through all of his writing. This is the most likely event that caused the loss of innocence in the book's author, though the actual moment when he loses innocence is probably many years later, after his children have left home. Anyway, this is the sequel of the book which I am sure will never be made into a Hollywood movie. These days it would be staggering for the BBC to make a mini-series out of it, even.

Billy

To see your face
As it tells me how many men in this place
Would be foolish not to want me.
And after we have kissed
I can smell impressive aftershave
On my lips
For hours afterwards.

Rest Assured

Best - Gestern. Abend verlassen.
Thinking, being, doing good.
Timeshare compartments of my body.
My telephone seems a stranger to passions
Once past through its eager ear,
Its moulded mouthpiece.

Gravel - grains on the track.
The noise that fed that dream
About the daisy chain and
Oven-ready chips. Slips into a hairline fracture.
Traps in the door to the next view.
Hidden from sullen light, but no darkness.

Greying skies like Russia or the Fens.
Pale trees and make-amends of yours.
Pastures soggy, coffee-black earth.
And the ditches and drains
Pass by the dykes of my countenance.
These words are for your reference.

Well meant, well healed.
The working day has ended.
Reeled in now, I must go out to drink
For moments lost, for times too far to think
Of. Parametric decoupling of my sensibilities.
Wife swapping would be more fun than this.

I must go now.
I don't want to go out.
What gain, what interest
Can I get from my further humiliation?

No Rheum at the Inn?

"I don't think I can quite stand it,"
He said, as he looked askance in the mirror.
Hairs in his nose protruding again - hankers
After a safe but effective method.
He then thinks of spermicidal jelly
And how the mouth yawns.

The grey marks on his collar and cuffs
Remind him of his lazy iron.
And half eaten apples rot
In terrifying unison
On the bedside cabinet.

Path to past, hashish to thrushes.
Madness, anger at his life's rushes.

Motorway Madness

Do I exchange my MG Metro
For some rusting, coughing metal
From "Fabbrica Italiano Automobile Torino?" -
FIAT as a formal command. But rather
Than blow my wanda on a Panda,
I really do feel I should go for a Lada.

Buy a Russian car? Some'd say I'd be batty.
But I like the image of the car from Togliatti.

And if Italian Communists are beyond perimeter
I could ease myself into a red Reliant Scimitar
And head for the hill in a ragtop retro.
But my aunt would rather see me in a Rover Metro.

I guess I'll keep the cash in the bank - moreover
Anything's better than being seen in a Skoda.

Thursday Night

Thursday night. Too tired to think.
Spilling patterns over the carpet.
Room a mess now, cold too.
Wasted and spaced without a drink.
It's already gone midnight.
Weary and uptight,
It rains on the outside.
This is the downside.

Cambs

We only see the city incomplete.
Snatches of architecture, a table
In a favourite cafe. Trees in the
Mist. Some half-unseen, as if a
Crowded station passes by.
The great mass of knowledge, lent
By my few friends. Usury, small
Portion of the common entirety of
This City. I cycle my streets,
Drink at my pubs. And in a
Blink, a speck in the eye, we
See something unrecognisible and
Our Mind forgets - peripheral amnesia.
In my mind's eye, a shrub, just by
The Cam, halfway between Magdalen
And that disused barge, that
Used to be a gallery.
You've been there?

Crossing the Field

All of a sudden we were volleying,
Batting, bowling, aiming and Rallying.
I turned to look at my friend
In some disbelief and worry
That I may be overcompensating,
Overacting in a hurry
And forcing the game's end.

But the food came, and more beer.
The company, alcohol and Stilton cheering
Me on. Then off we were, walking
Through fields flat and immense.
The conversation diverting, diverse.
Worries then at the current expense
Subdued by the joys of talking, talking.

A junction. the line of conversation stalls.
Disorientation, skipping through fields.
Lagoons of doubts, drones of engines.
Back to the path as it greys, rains.

Home in the car and a breakdown.
Coffee and conviviality with Viv and velvet.
The rest of the day in tiredness.
Damp walk home, food and the down
Train to London, home of the restless.
Looking back, then being glad we met.

I, as ever, the fool
Asking more questions
Than getting answers.
Mixed feelings
But positive about the chances.
The fool dances.

Consummate Durables

More books for breakfast.
Sometimes I wonder if I,
As in my times past,
Will ever have the time to buy
Enough time to scan these words,
These shards of thoughts,
Ideas, quests that have been fought
For, for me to stack and waste.
My only contact with these books, my dust.

What of my plastic coated aluminium disks?
I never seem to have the time to study,
Examine or even risk
Disliking them. Somebody
Should stop me buying CDs.
I should apportion cash to needs
And stop these dirty transactions and deeds.
I must now amortize my waste
Before my mind and chattels turn to dust.

Meditation on a Cambridge Past

I fell asleep at three this afternoon
And woke at seven. It was dusk
At seven, in this late August in my room,
In this late year, ninety-three.
And I felt a feint unease
At the thought of summer
Suddenly coming to an end;
The morning nip, the browning trees.
The night before briefly reeled
Before my eyes. Dancing, sweating
To music of twenty years ago. High-heeled
Boots, collars, nylon, dacron, polyester -
The camp burlesque of "Year-yester,"
Boogie nights, nineteen-seventy-three.

Cambridge, I believe you are
My first real home. The first place
I have throughly inhabited, more
Than anywhere in years past.
I've become comfortable with your face,
As one does of routine beauty.
I kick against your perpendicular,
Renaissance, Gothic less now, now I
Am older. In the present, in particular
An aspect of your past days
To me acts as an indicator of the malaise
Of this society, England in
The inevitable 20C fin de siecle.
My vital lifetime lies herein.

It's almost as if I am sixty not twenty
Years back. Europe, cradle of all we have
As we dizzily spin into the next millenium,
My Europe is in war again. Plenty
Of times this century, peace's tedium
Has been shattered by Europe's clamour.
Amongst the Cambridge I know now,
Touristed, jail-bait-thronged, no glamour,
Ghosts of nineteen-thirty-three speak
In what we laughingly now call innocence.
Speak to me now ghosts. I'm tired of our
Cynicism of your patronage of communism.
Tell me of the facist atrocities in Spain.
Illustrate to me Picasso's canvases of pain.

Tell me now, who is the despised hero?
Tell me of your thoughts on the appeasement
Of the Czechs; the Jews and Queers and
Intellects under Stalin, Hitler. Sarajevo,
What of it? Tell me soldiers, tell me Owen,
Butterworth and Brooke of the games at hand
From the time you died with Ferdinand.
Tell me all you ghosts of this horrific century,
Tell me what is wrong with us? Bosnia
Exhibits it's demon's wares on our TV screen.
Papers sell and the publishers get rich.
In Cambridge, the tourist trade is seen
As a necessary evil, for local prosperity.
Moral bankruptcy, forgetting our legacy.


Where is the Cambridge of thirty-three?
Are we now really so wise, so superior, so happy
That we cannot be idealistic, innocent again?
Men from this town fought and died in Spain.
Now Cambridge men drink, play laser-quest,
Trampoline onto velcro walls in velcro vests.
I'm angry and upset, that in this media
Saturated world, Bosnia is not cause for avid
Action, what-must-be-done; now tedium
Is our collective response. War in the Balkans
Makes us middle-classed think more of
Emma Thompson, blue stockings. And how to avoid
The queue at Branagh's "Much Ado."
Mostar has fallen. Barbarity. But who

Cares now? The IRA bomb the past away.
Great architecture of our civilisations blasted
Into obscure dust. Twyford Down, for example.
Even British Rail is being dissected, drowned
In the loch of noble privitisation. For the first
Time in my life, I really feel that society
Has run it's course, as it embraces all pretence
Of knowing where it's going and what it's doing.
I was frisked last night, This never
Happens at a socially unacceptable queer event.
On gay nights, the bouncers are there to keep
The violence out. So this is my life. Society
Accepts hate and despises love. My
Hands sweat. I exhale. I cry quietly.

Thursday Night

Second book of poems.

Copyright Benjamin Barrier (c)1993

Thought on falling asleep.

Between the paper clips and discarded cups of tea,
In the moment caught between the pain and memory,
After the curtains' close on the dreary day,
Behind that screen, erected to try and make it go away,

Before me, now, in this reflective twilight, sits
A man, who impresses me yet, all the more
Because we, who from him benefit,
Can now more clearly understand the score -

The how, the what, the ways and wherefore
We do this; all preconceived thoughts made forlorn
And small. I find a word I kick against
Time to time. This word invokes defence

So strong - reactionary. In the mess of my room
I berate myself for hating this thought, this dove
That you have freed in me in this gloom.
This answer, bird and revelation? This love.

Cambridge, 31st May 1993 - to Billy Scott

Dream Man

In the darkened spheres of eyes,
In the doughnuts of the corpuscles of blood
Exists a space that is beyond time
And the temporal word.

A man walks down the street in early May,
In his head Chopin can be heard to play.
He's fighting his way to school
Through a muddied pool of thought.

The events in his life have all but superseded
The child. The recollections of a 'fifties house
Send shards of shattered past to the gutter.
The yellow lines blur his line of sight.

Aghast from spirits drunk in false glee,
Reeling against the tumult of the skies,
The man falls over, falls again.
His mother's arms waste sickly as he slides.

Home again for half-past-six and news
Of rain or murder or tales of whose is whose.
Flesh yields to fork, flesh fields of pain.
The whole damn business repeated once again.

Who is this man? more than half his life already lived.
A dream I had, I guess.

Cambridge, May 1993

Overexpressif. Undemanding.

Overexpressif. Undemanding.
Through the fields we gaily tread.
Over five bar, under hedges,
Toying with same fears and dread.
To the castle, on the hilltop,
Faster, faster still we walk.
To the gate and onward, onward.
Ladies' gentlemanly talk.
Forest hills and streams sublime,
Gleaming glades and celandine,
Striding forward, hills of chalk.
Facing gusts and zephyrs westward,
Mending hearts and sacrament.
How jolly we, how far to go
To say that this is all I know,
Forgive, forget and then forgo
The pleasure, the pleasure.

Cambridge, November 1992

Cambridge Pink

There's mud on my boots. Yet
I know I have not really lived today.
The dusk gave me regret;
The shafts of pink assumed the task of that
Which modifies and ridicules the grey.

Time passes like the stream.
The chasms seem to loom up all around.
I felt the fear of dreams
And all the things that that cause me to react
Against the popular consent. Profound

Are thoughts which give us pause
And now illuminate my Cambridge skies.
The bare trees stand, perhaps, despite the fact
That wind and rain and grey can be the cause
For choking in the throat, and tears in eyes.

Cambridge, Late November 1992

Inland on a Sunday

Through my window coldly falls
Sunday afternoon's dreary pall.
Who said that it had to be
As grey as stone, bark of tree

As gaunt as flesh
Without life?
The curtain's mesh
Means all that I

Can see, the street, the cars
The wan people, wrapped in lonely clothes
Blown by winds they don't request
Sourced in seas they have not missed.

And here I
Peer from the gods.
My mind's eye
Records the tides

Of this far ocean, swelling now
Without a why, nor where nor how.
White horses leap, and so subside.
The horses race, and now I ride.

Cambridge, November 1992

On Returning to Cambridge, September 1992

The landing gear jerks as it hits the ground.
The coach wheels pound the M25.
Why does it feel so good
To be alive?
All my journeys lead here: home I am bound.
There where all my stories are told,
And so tongue-tied I speak of these.
I wish I could speak Welsh.

My simple pleasures transcribed to banalities.
My mind sending me signals. I have to laugh.

The sun warms my room, and I see
Through net curtains a scene,
A past spring, a well of
Knowledge. How far have I come
To return from where I am?

My face is wet, and I feel ecstasy.
The trees drip and wash away my vanity.
Water-logged, the Green forgives
And I forget, and that is good.

Tempting clouds gather above.
I trip and slip in the puddles.
The light from in me dances.
I feel I've beaten the odds,
Confounded the chances.

[Written on returning from three months in the USA. The Green here is Jesus Green.]