roland barfs film diary week 48

chimes at midnight, house of games, the card counter, vanya on 42nd street, the firm

November 23. Monday. I am unwell, and have taken the day off work. I spend most of my time underneath a duvet very slowly reading Arthur Machen. Occasionally I get up to drink some warm combination of lemon, honey, ginger, turmeric, cayenne pepper and brandy. I only have a cold but I haven’t had one for a good while and apart from the physical discomfort I am surprised at how much it affects my mood. I feel pretty maudlin. In the afternoon I watch a documentary on iPlayer about B. Catling, which is quite good—I like it more than I’ve liked his books when I’ve tried to read them. After it gets dark, L goes to Lincoln and leaves me alone for a few days. I eat some soup and drink another hot toddy, and then I watch Chimes at Midnight (dir. Orson Welles, 1965). This is probably not the right choice for my state of mind, but I have been thinking about watching it for a while and for whatever reason I stick with it after putting it on. Chimes at Midnight, also known as Falstaff, is perhaps the fulfilment of Orson Welles’s life’s mission: a very smart and carefully done adaptation of Shakespeare, which combines a number of elements from various segments of the Henriad, as well as The Merry Wives of Windsor and selections from Holinshed’s Chronicles. Falstaff is surely the part that Welles was born to play, as he himself recognised: a large, pathetic, grandiose, jovial coward with a hint of misrecognised genius. In Shakespeare, Falstaff appears in various different guises, with different emphases depending on the play in which he’s appearing in, and what makes Welles’ version so successful is his ability to tease out the contradictions in the different Falstaffs, and reveal that they can sit comfortably within the same person, who, through this process, becomes even larger: there’s a kind of gesture towards the universal in Welles’ Falstaff—his humiliation, his appetite, his capacity for joy and for grief. So Chimes at Midnight would be an incredible film if it was just Orson Welles tooling around in Shakespearean costume for two hours, being a massive ham, but because this is a film made by The Master, and because it was a true passion project of his, it is also an incredible film—very likely Welles’ masterpiece (of course I say that about all Welles films, because I speak with the zeal of the convert)—because of his skill in direction, his understanding of mise-en-scene and the elements of cinematic style (Chimes at Midnight was shot by Edmond Richard, who would go on to do the cinematography for Buñuel’s three final films in the 1970s, and there’s a clear relation between those works of late Buñuellian style and the relation between absurdity and pathos in the style of Welles’ film). The only thing that I find kind of difficult or frustrating about Chimes at Midnight is the sound design: the dialogue, collaged from Shakespeare, is spoken at great speed and sometimes veers on incoherent. But I’m prepared to say that this is good, actually, because part of what Chimes at Midnight is so concerned with is the pathos involved in the gap between language and action, and the inadequacy of the language of even the greatest poets to reflect or describe the world of human feeling accurately. Which is why we need films, and why we need Orson Welles. Maybe that’s overselling it, and I’m not entirely convinced by what I’ve just written, but it’s the kind of grandiose exaggeration that Welles’ work seems to demand of me and so I’ll let it stay. Anyway, you should watch Chimes at Midnight, so you can see one of the greatest cinematic artists there will ever be trying to fulfil what he is convinced is his destiny. Not many films let you experience that.

November 24. Tuesday. I’m still sick but a steady diet of hot toddies has made me feel mostly better. I am not unwell enough to cancel my driving lesson in the morning but I slightly regret attending, because it’s intense and stressful. I kind of hate it but I’m fully aware that it’s something I’ve brought on myself and I just need to get through it. And I do get through it, and I even drive most of the way home, using the satnav for the first time. I spend the rest of the day doing very little, the same as yesterday. I go for a brief walk and buy three Anita Brookner novels. I eat some soup. I finish reading Arthur Machen’s The Three Imposters. In the evening I eat a vegetable lasagne and then somehow end up watching three films. These are House of Games (dir. David Mamet, 1987), The Card Counter (dir. Paul Schrader, 2021) and Vanya on 42nd Street (dir. Louis Malle, 1994). There was definitely a logic to me watching these three films in this order, but I can’t quite remember what it is now, but David Mamet is credited as a writer on Vanya on 42nd Street so maybe that’s what leads me to that particular film tonight, and House of Games and The Card Counter are both kind of about scams, kind of, and kind of about trauma, kind of, in different ways.  Whatever, doesn’t matter. In watching these three very different films back to back I suspect that I don’t do any of them justice, and that they all need some breathing room, but it’s too late now. House of Games I actually watch in a mood of half-distraction, not completely involved in what’s happening or how it’s happening, but following along adequately enough. This is a film about a hot-shot celebrity psychiatrist who gets seduced by and caught up in the lives of a bunch of scam artists, fronted by Joe Mantegna but also starring real-life stage magician and general oddball Ricky Jay, who is responsible for the only magic show I’ve written about in this diary to date (and hopefully the only one I’ll ever write about, good as it was). It’s pretty good, a solid smart heist with noirish elements and a fair amount of twists and reveals. What maybe sets it apart from many other films which rely on twists is that Mamet tells us how the scams work, how the cons are run, and then encourages us to apply that kind of looking to the film, so none of the reveals feel very surprising, but the viewer (or this viewer at least) gets the little buzz of having figured out what the film is doing before the film has done it, even though the film has told us what to expect. Very clever Mr. Mamet, thank you. It’s entertaining and satisfying and enjoyable. I watch it because I’m trying to write something short about films about or featuring therapists, and I thought I’d have something to say about it in that regard, but it doesn’t really spark many thoughts about that, other than something along the lines of: psychiatrists are people too, and they are as susceptible to being tricked and scammed and making poor decisions based on irrational desire and compulsion as anyone else. Which isn’t news to anyone. I guess Mamet chooses to use a psychiatrist in this film to create a distinction between the professional practice of psychological intervention and the grittier, more cynical use of psychological intervention by conmen, and then kind of gestures vaguely towards suggesting that maybe they’re, like, the same thing, man. Or not. Dunno. Either way it’s a solid heist movie that you can pay as much or as little attention to as you think it merits.

I pay much more attention to The Card Counter, both because I respect Paul Schrader more than I do Mamet (sorry David) and because the film demands attention from the viewer in a way that House of Games does not. I missed this in the cinema, regrettably, but I find myself pretty rapt during this home viewing. I am predisposed to like this film and I have high expectations for it based on my history with Schrader’s work. I’m not sure if in the end I do actually like it or not, but that seems to be beside the point with a work like this. Schrader has turned the Bresson influence up all the way here; it’s always inescapable in his work, but here it’s particularly intense. But I’m also surprised to find that the other work that comes to mind most frequently throughout my viewing of The Card Counter is David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, particularly the still shots of the interiors of dimly lit provincial casinos. I feel intuitively that these similar visual compositions are put to different ends in Schrader’s films than they are in the work of Lynch, but thinking about it I think they are both directors concerned with trying to communicate an ineffable and transcendental sense of wrongness which inhabits even the most mundane and unremarkable places. In Lynch that wrongness comes from some kind of dark realm which bleeds into our world; in Schrader the wrongness is something like sin, and it sits in the hinterlands where humanity is separated from grace. Like shithole casinos on reservations in the middle of nowhere that host conferences on enhanced interrogation techniques. The Card Counter is a film about Abu Ghraib, about torture, trauma, justice, revenge, shame, retribution, and the uses of violence. It’s also about gambling, but that doesn’t seem particularly important. Oscar Isaac is good in it: very reserved, very tense, quite a serious performance for him which is very different from the last thing I saw him in (Dune), and which I’m interpreting (along with his recent appearance in the new Scenes of a Marriage remake) as a sign of his intent to remind people of his high brow cinema chops: he’s not just some handsome guy in the space movies, he’s a Serious Actor who works with Serious Directors. And, well, good for him; he does well in The Card Counter. Willem Dafoe is also in it, but not for long enough. As I say, I’m pretty absorbed in The Card Counter and I think it’s a very solid well-made film which pushes Schrader’s work forwards, or distills it quite effectively. There are parts which I think work less well, and parts which feel recycled from his other work (Oscar Isaac drinking whiskey while he writes in his notebook at night, in shots taken basically straight from First Reformed) but this is part of the Bressonianisms he’s working with. I’m still not sure what I make of it, but I am impressed by Schrader’s insistence that film be used to interrogate difficult and complex feelings, his commitment to making work which demands to be taken seriously, which is at no point glib or casual, but which is an effort to work through something opaque and challenging. And I’m not just saying that because he read and liked my essay about First Reformed, but because it makes a refreshing change from a lot of contemporary releases.

It’s late when I finish The Card Counter, and really I should just go to bed, but after a few days of sleeping a lot I am reluctant to end my day. Something compels me to watch Vanya on 42nd Street, though I am expecting that I’ll be too tired and either fall asleep in front of it or end up turning it off. But I don’t. As with My Dinner with André—the other collaboration between Wallace Shawn, Louis Malle and André Gregory—I find myself completely beguiled by the film, and I don’t take my eyes off the screen for the whole two hour runtime. Again, as with My Dinner with André, this is surprising, and shouldn’t be the case: these films seem like they should be almost aggressively dull, but something in the combination of talents on display from everyone involved means that they are extremely compelling. Vanya on 42nd Street is, more or less, just a straight-through rehearsal of a performance of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a play which I first read when I had a big Chekhov phase aged about 17 or 18, and which I’ve seen staged once (maybe twice?) but which I haven’t thought about much at all for years. Chekhov is one of those writers who I have the bad habit of thinking I’ve some how ‘done’, as though they’re items on a to-do list: I read a lot of his short stories and plays over a decade ago, and have since persuaded myself that I have finished with them and will get nothing fresh out of them. Obviously this is a totally juvenile and stupid way to approach art, and I am glad to be proven wrong about it. Vanya on 42nd Street strips Chekhov almost all the way down to its basics: there’s no costuming, there’s no set, there’s just some actors in their everyday clothes, using whatever table and chairs they can find, running through the whole play. Wallace Shawn is perfectly cast as Uncle Vanya, a mixture of bitterness, regret, envy, hatred, childishness and depression, giving a heart-rending cri de coeur about having wasted his one life on this earth. The rest of the cast are good, but it’s really Wallace Shawn’s show—that is, with the exception of one other actor, who is also perfectly cast and completely astonishing. I feel like before watching this I obviously was aware of the fact that Julianne Moore is extremely beautiful, but Vanya on 42nd Street really makes you constantly aware of this: everyone in the film is looking at Julianne Moore constantly, she is an object of desire for every man and most of the women in the play, but she is also the focal point of the camera, as though this is really a film about how unbearably beautiful Julianne Moore was in 1994. It is almost painful to look at her. This might come across as though I spend the two hours gawping at Julianne Moore like some sort of pervert, but since she’s playing the part of Yelena, whose presence in the play is a disruption which provokes the disinterring of long-repressed feelings on almost everyone’s behalf, a disinterring which in turn is a tedious and frustrating ordeal for Yelena herself, who can’t go five minutes without someone trying to kiss her or declare their eternal love for her, I feel safe in the knowledge that I’m not being weird or creepy about this. The point of Vanya on 42nd Street is that Julianne Moore is so beautiful that she drives Wallace Shawn, and everyone around him, insane. Or maybe that should be something like: Julianne Moore is so beautiful that she drives Wallace Shawn and everyone around him out of their insanity and back into a painful and complicated relationship with the reality of their desire. At one point, during the climax, of the film, I am suddenly terrified that I am going to waste my life and make a promise to myself that tomorrow I will really get down to work on my book, properly, no more fucking about. We’ll see if I stick to it. But even if I don’t, I feel like my life has been enriched by Vanya on 42nd Street in a way that I couldn’t have expected—except I probably could have expected it, because I had the same response to My Dinner with Andre. Maybe it’s the Chekhov, maybe it’s Wallace Shawn, maybe it’s Louis Malle; either way—great film.

November 28. Sunday. I wake up in Walthamstow, having spent the night at Katie and Ryan’s. Their cat, Bartleby, vocally insists I stop sleeping and I immediately know that I need to go back to Sheffield earlier than I thought, after two days in which I’ve over-stretched myself socially and have seen and spoken to too many people. I just want to get home and sit at my desk and not open my mouth for speech ever again. Though I have had a nice time. I drink some tea with Katie and Ryan and then head to Haringey where I meet Kester for a coffee. We discuss eating insects for an hour or so and then get the tube southwards together. I get off at St Pancras and wander around the station for an hour or so until my train, which is very busy and very slow. I read some of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and look out the window. In London the weather has been cold and bright, but by Market Harborough the fields are covered by low clouds and snow, which increases in intensity the further north we go. By the time I’m back in Sheffield it’s dark. I can’t get a taxi and I wait on the street for forty minutes without a bus turning up and so walk home along very icy roads, feeling extremely tired and irritated. It is nice to get home. I read some more Morrison in the bath and then L and I watch The Firm (dir. Sydney Pollack, 1993), which is on Netflix. The Firm is an overly-long John Grisham adaptation starring Tom Cruise as a hot shot young lawyer who gets his comeuppance for being an unbearably smug prick, by getting hired by a law firm that works for the mafia and is prepared to ruin his life or kill him if he doesn’t comply with their requirements of him. He then figures out a way to outsmart both his employers and the FBI and come out on top, so of course, as is the case in all Tom Cruise films, any comeuppance he seems to be getting is really just a winding road for his victory over all. There are really three films here, happening one after the other: a romantic drama about a young couple with different experiences of wealth growing up, whose love is disrupted by conflicting attitudes towards work; a legal thriller about convoluted obfuscations used to cover up illicit activities and the impenetrable grey areas involved in interpreting the law, and, finally, an action thriller which involves Tom Cruise barrelling around Memphis at great pace, consisting of a series of visual homages to The French Connection. Towards the end it kind of wants to be a mafia film but it can’t quite be bothered to really commit. It is… quite good, I guess. Not great, but kind of exactly the kind of thing I have capacity to watch tonight. L has chosen it because we enjoyed A Few Good Men not so long ago, which is kind of the same film (one year earlier) but with Jack Nicholson as an antagonist rather than Gene Hackman (as is the case here) and with a much sharper script, which I hate to admit because I kind of hate Aaron Sorkin and his work. Robert Towne—the profoundly influential Hollywood script doctor and writer of Chinatown—was involved in writing The Firm, and it was the upshot of the work he did here that Tom Cruise invited him to work on the scripts of Mission: Impossible and Mission Impossible II, so I guess as much as anything The Firm is a kind of interesting linking film in the development of Cruise’s trajectory. Anyway, The Firm does not in any way need to be two and a half hours long, and I think its runtime is a sign that its a film which takes itself more seriously than perhaps it deserves to. It’s a Tom Cruise movie. You know what you’re going to get, and then you get it, and then it’s over, and it’s the end of the week, and all things continue as they always do.