In Le dîner de cons, a group of friends regularly play a game in which they each invite the biggest idiot they can find to dinner and then proceed to make fun of them for the entire evening, but Francis Veber's hit 1998 comedy never even gets to stage the titular event. Instead, the film takes place in the apartment owned by Pierre Brochant (Thierry Lhermitte) whose life and relationship quickly unravels thanks to the well-meaning intervention of his own idiot François Pignon (Jacques Villeret). It's a simple premise that Veber carries off with great skill, not making any real attempt to open up his own stage play for the screen, but simply ensuring that the performances are pitch-perfect and that the whole thing plays out with clockwork efficiency. This is how you do a good screen farce.
Dinner for Schmucks, on the other hand, is how not to do a good screen farce. It's essentially the same story, but through the process of its adaptation the film has become bloated and distended, and its gleefully silly trifle of a plot has been flattened by the Hollywood formula machine. In other words, it has become a Jay Roach picture, and whereas the original made do with a single location and 80-odd minutes of fun, this version is built around a series of frantic yet increasingly tiresome set-pieces, with an awful lot of padding being required to help fill out its near two-hour running time. Dinner for Schmucks' most grievous crime, however, is its appalling waste of a cast packed with comic ability.
For example, take a look at the lead roles, which are filled by Paul Rudd and Steve Carell, two actors I'm normally delighted to see. Rudd plays Tim Conrad, an ambitious young banker looking to climb the corporate ladder, who is given the chance to join the high-rollers if he'll only take part in their idiots' dinner. In the original film, the arrogant, self-centred character of Pierre Brochant deserved his comeuppance, but Rudd is too likeable to play a bad guy, and he displays his misgivings with this idea from the start, so he's stuck playing a passive, wimpy cipher who just has to repeatedly gurn and moan at Barry's antics. Carell's Barry is little more than a recycling of the actor's Brick Tamland from Anchorman, an enthusiastic fool with an idiotic grin permanently etched upon his face, but his characterisation is too thin to hold for an entire movie. Whereas Veber's idiot was more of a likably clumsy oaf, Barry repeatedly comes across as aggressively annoying, and borderline retarded.
A film like Dinner for Schmucks really needed a director with a greater sense of anarchy and recklessness to fulfil its comedic potential, but Roach is not that director. Each of the big comic moments plays out in a drearily predictable fashion; a scene in involving Tim's ex-lover Darla (Lucy Punch, just awful) ends with her and Barry happily destroying Tim's apartment, while a later scene in which the same character impersonates Tim's girlfriend Julie climaxes with the real Julie (Stephanie Szostak, pretty but vapid) arriving at exactly the wrong moment. On two separate occasions in the film, the narrative is moved forward by characters walking in on a conversation and overhearing a confessional speech – the writing is beyond lazy.
There are small moments of inspiration visible here and there – most of which are offered by Jemaine Clement, who makes the most of his clichéd character – but in general the film is bafflingly free of jokes. Roach does eventually end with the dinner itself, but the picture is hardly improved by its presence as it quickly turns into a loud free-for-all, with Carell and Zach Galifianakis having some sort of mind-control contest, Chris O'Dowd waving a sword in the air, and David Walliams talking in a silly accent. I'm not sure what I found more grating, the hysterical mugging on display or the horribly insincere redemptive climax that has been bolted onto the end of the story. Roach seems to believe that audiences will go away happy as long as there's some trite learning and hugging at the end of the film, regardless of whether it coheres with what we've been watching for two hours, which strikes me as something of an insult. The dinner may be for schmucks, but does the movie have to be made for idiots?
Abbas Kiarostami's work over the past decade has grown increasingly experimental, so in the early stages of Certified Copy it's startling to note just how conventional it appears to be. The film is the story of two people who meet in Italy and then spend a day together, walking and talking, as their relationship evolves before our eyes. From that description, the film seems to resemble pictures like Before Sunset or In Search of a Midnight Kiss, but typically for Kiarostami, the picture subtly shifts its focus throughout, altering our perception of the main couple and imbuing their nascent relationship with a beguiling sense of mystery.
There's an air of mystery around the female lead too, as Juliette Binoche's character is never given a name. She's a French single mother living in Tuscany who has turned up to see English author James Miller (William Shimell) give a talk about his latest book, in which he argues that a good copy can be just as valuable as an original piece of art. Having been distracted at the lecture by her restless teenage son, Binoche leaves a note for Miller, suggesting they meet later at her antiques shop. From there, Binoche decides to take a drive out to the small town of Lucignano (leading to that Kiarostami staple, the in-car sequence, which is beautifully filmed) and while they drive, the couple shares a wide-ranging and occasionally flirtatious conversation, discussing art, love and personal woes. What we're watching here is a relationship taking form, perhaps with the early spark of a romance, but as Certified Copy develops, we begin to wonder if that really is what we're watching.
Do these people already know each other? Are they simply playing some elaborate game? What appears at first to be a playful conceit, roles adopted by the two characters after a waitress' confusion, subsequently seems to grow into something more real, although Kiarostami refuses to draw any boundaries between fact and fiction. He draws us into the drama with his leisurely pacing and long takes, giving the film a fluid feel as his camera follows Binoche and Shimmell through the streets, and in and out of cafés and churches. The director's mise-en-scène is a pleasure to behold. He makes such superb use of the space around his two lead characters, often filling the background with couples in various stages of their lives together, and on one level Certified Copy works as a meditation on the very nature of relationships. In one scene, a young bride takes a seat to the left of the frame with tears in her eyes; we don't know anything about this woman but the director invites us to speculate on her story in the same way he did with Shirin's anonymous female cast. Later, he stages a scene in which a man appears to be raging at his wife, although that is subsequently revealed to be a false assumption. Kiarostami has made a film that rewards those who invest themselves in his picture, and closely examine his skilfully composed frames.
There is, however, one unavoidable problem in Certified Copy, and it comes in the shape of William Shimmell. The male lead is not an actor, he's an opera singer by trade, and while his charming and reserved nature gets him through the first half of the film with few problems, his lack of experience is horribly exposed as the relationship between James and Binoche's character grows more emotionally turbulent. In a key scene, during which Kiarostami has both actors speak directly to the camera, Shimmell is as stiff and awkward as Binoche is vibrant and compelling. The gulf in quality is huge and potentially damaging for the film, but Binoche is spectacular enough to carry Shimmell in the scenes where he fails to live up to his co-star. Certified Copy is an opportunity to watch one of the world's greatest actresses at work, providing the film with a radiant, warm and complex central presence, and giving Kiarostami's picture an emotional anchor that is vital as he toys with our sense of reality and fantasy, and rapidly undermines our understanding of this relationship. Yes, Certified Copy is every bit as daring, ambiguous and accomplished as this great director's best work, even if it does come wrapped in a deceptively familiar packaging.
After his extraordinary debut London to Brighton, Paul Andrew Williams' career took a surprising twist with the 2008 comic horror The Cottage, and his third film finds the director in new territory once again. Cherry Tree Lane is a compelling, intimate thriller that unfolds in real time and takes place in a single location, drawing great tension from its story of an ordinary couple coming face-to-face with a trio of violent teens. The film is another interesting offering from the talented British writer/director, and I met Paul Andrew Williams earlier this week to talk about it.
Since London to Brighton, the choices you've made have taken you in a new direction with each film. Is that policy something that's important to you and something you want to maintain in your career?
If I still have a career! [laughs]. I don't know, I didn't really think about it like that. I do have different projects and while I have some projects that are similar to other ones I've got, I've got some that aren't similar to any of them. It's just the luck of the draw, really. I like stories and I like different characters, and I'm not a real stickler for genre, to be honest. I don't look at genre as being important to me. It's just all about the stories.
The violence in The Cottage was very gory and exaggerated for comic effect, but you've taken things to the other extreme in this film by keeping the violent acts off camera. Can you talk about that decision?
The truth is I'm not a massive fan of violence when it's real. Silly stuff like The Cottage – or Piranha, which I watched the other day – stuff that's nonsense is one thing, but I always think, "Do I need to see that? Do I need to see a woman be punched and raped?" I don't like to see that stuff. Also, if you were to do that in a film like Cherry Tree Lane, you're just over-egging it and it suddenly becomes more about "this incredibly violent movie." You can let people make up their own mind about what they see and what they don't see, and people have said to me that this film is so violent, but it really isn't. I mean, what's the point? It doesn't make the film any better because you see someone being raped or hit.
Instead of showing us the violence, you focus on the tension in the film. How much of a challenge was it to develop and sustain that mood?
It's about picking up on little moments and it's mainly about the silences. For one thing, you know the kid is coming home, so you know that this poor kid is going to walk through the door and get battered or whatever, and you've got that hanging over the film. Also, you've got a beautiful woman like Rachael sitting there tied up and you've got this kid who slowly has things taking form in his head, and it's about finding a way to build that up and put it in there without making it too obvious.
Does the fact that the film unfolds in real time add to that tension?
I guess so, because you're not allowed to have a breather, you can't get out of the house and focus on something else. The idea was to tell it in real time so we could see what could really happen in this hour and twenty minutes.
In terms of shooting, what was it like working in such a confined space?
Physically, it was a challenge, in terms of having a lot of people in the room and getting very hot. The DP would say things like, "You can't do this, we don't have enough room for the cameras," but for me the challenge was to make it as cinematic as possible without having all of the moves, and I really liked that. These are the confined spaces we find ourselves in and now we have to make the most out of our limitations. The DP was great and we both talked a lot about the best way to shoot it, the best way to light it, he was such an asset, but when he came in I was very clear about "This is how I want it to be."
The budget for this film is much smaller than The Cottage. Was it easy to transition back to that smaller scale of filmmaking?
Yeah, it was bigger than London to Brighton and smaller than The Cottage. For me, you turn up on the day and you use whatever tools you've got. If you're making a film for X amount you've got certain tools, so you plan a shoot around whatever's available. It you don't have all of those tools you simply have to plan it another way, and I quite like having boundaries there so we know where we can and can't go.
Were you getting offers for bigger productions after The Cottage and London to Brighton?
There were always things around but projects were stalling and it's just so hard to get a film made in this country. There were projects that had most of the finance in place but then the casting would be a problem, and by the time you have a cast you might not have that bit of financing anymore. So the idea was, "Let's just shoot something." I'd had the idea a while ago, and I started writing it in April and we shot it in July.
Was it important to you to emphasise the mundane and ordinary nature of this setting and these characters?
Well, it is mundane. The thing is, when it comes to things like mugging or crime or tragedy, the way we experience it is via media and usually via entertainment. When that's the case it's always made very adventurous, exiting and dramatic, when in all honesty life is not that exciting. The idea was to play it as real as possible. There's not going to be raving and masses of drugs and some supercop coming in to save them – they've got 45 minutes to wait and they're bored.
Did the young actors bring a lot to their roles, being closer to that world than you are?
You're right, they are closer to that world, and while I didn't change the script much after writing it, we improvised and workshopped through the auditions and then did some character work. The question was always "Is this genuine?" and while we'd go back and change a line here and there, it's predominately as it was written.
In each of your films you've pushed your actors to play very extreme emotions. Is that something that you find easy to do?
Actors love extreme emotions! [laughs] The thing is, in our lives we don't often experience extremes, so trying to find a way of interpreting that and getting something across is a challenge. My thing is that I always want to do it for real, and when you experience things like shock or grief you don't have the great, Oscar-winning score coming in. It's fucking shock, and it's hard to deal with. Perhaps that's difficult for an audience to watch because it's not very exciting or filmic, but it's much more effective and realistic for me if it feels real.
Perhaps inevitably, the film that Cherry Tree Lane brought to mind was Funny Games, but while Michael Haneke has a message he wants to ram home in that film, you have a sense of ambiguity around the moral and themes of your film. What's your view on that?
Well, I haven't seen Funny Games and I made a conscious choice to not watch any home invasion movies once we had set about doing this film. I didn't want a message, I didn't want a moral in there, and I didn't want to say, "I want you to take this from my film" or to feel like you've been educated. That's not this film. There are films like that, but for me this film is just as non-judgemental and as neutral as possible. When you make a film like this or London to Brighton, people assume that you've gone into a project thinking, "The audience will take this from it" but that's not what I'm trying to do. It's interesting to me that people think, "Who am I meant to be rooting for?" Some people tell me that they felt a bit of sympathy for the kids, and I think, well that's up to you. You should be big enough, old enough and clever enough to be given a load of information and take something from it. I hope an audience should be able to get what I've done, I guess they might not and you could say that's my fault.
I was interested in your decision to bring those other kids into the film at a late stage, because I thought that threatened to undermine the sense of tension that had been established.
Well, I take that on board, totally. I did read a review that mentioned that and I think it has taken some people out of the story or out of the moment, and I can accept that. Would I have done it differently? What I wanted to get across was the idea of this guy being on the floor and not meaning anything to them, and then there are a few moments when Corinne looks at him and just feels awful. There's also the idea of this innocent young kid coming into this situation, and what's he going to do? It was natural for me to have these people come round, but did I pull that off? It's subjective, isn't it.
The final image is very powerful. Was it always in your mind to end it that way?
Yes, I wanted people to wonder what he's going to do, not because I want a big debate but just because I wanted to ask, "What would you do?" People talk to me about scenes in the film and say, "I'd fucking kill them, I'd do this, I'd do that" and I think, you're saying this from the luxury of not having to deal with it. None of us can put ourselves in his shoes, and we have no real idea how we would react in a situation like that. It's a luxury to be able to say, "Yeah, I'd get up and kill him" because we really don't know. Even when you say basic things like, "If my girlfriend cheated on me I'd leave her right away," that's not always the case because you've got emotions running through your body and you're experiencing something you never expected.
You mentioned earlier how difficult it is to get films made, and the UK Film Council played a bit part in funding Cherry Tree Lane. As an independent filmmaker, how do you view the current filmmaking landscape in this country?
It's getting harder and harder to make films that aren't necessarily commercial. If you're trying to make something with a certain budget, and that's not necessarily a high budget, there are boxes that have to be ticked way before you start shooting. Who's going to star in it? Is it entertaining enough? How are we going to market it? All of those things are very important because it's a lot of money to risk. With a film like Cherry Tree Lane, the only way I would have been able to make that on a bigger budget would have been to have Daniel Craig in it, and then it would have been a different film.
In terms of accepting those compromises, would you consider taking on a more commercial project to help get a more personal film off the ground?
Yeah, I've obviously been thinking about that, but I've learned through The Cottage and this film that you can't think about the audience too much. You can't second-guess them, because you know some people are going to hate it and some people are going to like it, so all you can do is make what you believe is the best you can do. In this film, there are little moments and every now and then someone will say, "I really liked that moment, it was very effective" and you think, "Thank God, I'm not mad. Someone got it," [laughs]. That's the most rewarding reaction you can get.
This last question actually ties in to the first question about taking your career in fresh directions, because in the production notes it said you're currently working on a drama about a choir for the BBC, a period piece, action-adventure monster project, and a sci-fi noir project. That's a pretty eclectic slate.
Yeah, those three are all around and they're all in various stages with various people. Nothing's certain until it has been released as far as I'm concerned. I would say those projects are all much more commercial than anything else I've done, but hopefully they'll retain some respectability. I mean, I don't think you can say that just because something is commercial it doesn't have respectability, because I think you can do both.
My cinemagoing in September will take place to the music of Nino Rota, with the composer's astounding body of work being celebrated at the NFT throughout the month. 8½, Rocco and His Brothers, La Dolce Vita, The Godfather Part II and Amarcord are among the films screening this month, but the greatest treat of all is the extended run of The Leopard in a new print. I watched Visconti's 1963 masterpiece, starring a magnificent Burt Lancaster, just a few days ago and it took my breath away. The sumptuous production design, elegant camerawork, confident storytelling and, of course, the wonderful score make this a film that simply must be seen on the big screen. Don't miss this opportunity.
Beyond that season, I'll also be taking the opportunity to see Black Narcissus and The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp once again as part of the Deborah Kerr season, and Korean director Hong Sangsoo will be coming to London as part of a complete retrospective. Also appearing at the NFT this month are a number of acclaimed screenwriters who will be taking part in a series of BAFTA lectures, with Aline Brosh McKenna, Christopher Hampton, David Hare, Ronald Harwood, Peter Morgan and Simon Beaufoy all ready to discuss their craft. The biggest draw of September, however, may be Michael Caine, who will be discussing his remarkable career onstage at the end of the month as he promotes his autobiography. The event will be followed by one of my favourite Caine films: The Man Who Would Be King.
Elsewhere, Vincente Minnelli is in focus at the Barbican, while a number of fine films are on offer for free at both The Scoop and the Portobello Film Festival. The London Spanish Film Festival features new films from Julio Medem and Carlos Saura while the Cambridge Film Festival has a diverse programme, including films from Roy Andersson, Carl Theodor Dreyer and Nicolas Philibert. Finally, the festival season is now in full swing, with Venice, Toronto and New York all kicking off this month, but I've got my eye on next Wednesday when the full programme for this year's London Film Festival is announced. I'll have a complete preview of the 2010 LFF this time next week.
If you know of any upcoming film events that you'd like me to include in future articles, please let me know at philipconcannon@googlemail.com.
After the comically extravagant bloodshed of his last film The Cottage, Paul Andrew Williams takes things in an entirely new direction for his new film Cherry Tree Lane. This time all of the violence occurs off screen, and instead Williams focuses his attention on developing a slow-burning sense of tension and steadily mounting panic, which he does so very skilfully. The opening 15 minutes establishes a tone of dreary normality, introducing Christine (Rachael Blake) and Mike (Tom Butcher) as a very ordinary middle-aged couple living in a comfortable North London suburb. There's a frosty tension between the couple as they sit down to share their evening meal, with the lingering resentment over an affair Christine once had still making its presence felt, but the elephant in the room is their teenage son's association with drugs. The pair decline to discuss the issue in any constructive way, but while they may try to ignore the problem, it's about to have a huge impact on their lives.
A trio of teenagers burst into the couple's home with violent intent. They beat up Mike and leave him on the living room floor, bound with duct tape, while the gang's leader Rian (Jumayn Hunter) ties up Christine and sits next to her on the couch. In less than an hour, Mike and Christine's son Sebastian will be returning home, and Rian is ready to exact revenge upon him for a perceived betrayal. Until that moment occurs, the characters have to simply wait, and Williams' handling of this situation, rarely taking his camera outside this room and gradually cranking up the tension, makes Cherry Tree Lane a gripping affair for the majority of its short running time. As the film unfolds in real time, Tom Hemmings' sharp editing maintains a taut atmosphere, with Williams aptly using close-ups and taking advantage of the claustrophobic nature of the setting to fully exploit the sense of fear and anxiety his characters are experiencing. The film also benefits from a surprisingly cinematic feel, thanks to the carefully composed camerawork and effective lighting by Carlos Catalan, and throughout Cherry Tree Lane Williams displays a real command of the filmmaking tools at his disposal.
That includes his cast, who all turn in the kinds of committed, convincing performances we've seen in each of the director's features to date. The characters are sketched in a shorthand fashion – the gang comprises of a brutal leader, a slightly comical dogsbody and the even-handed "conscience" of the group – but Jumayn Hunter, Sonny Muslim and Ashley Chin all excel, and they bring more complexity to their roles than we might expect. Williams frequently allows them moments that reinforce how young, naïve and out of their depth these characters are, when they are distracted by the grave situation they're in by trivialities such as figuring out how to work the remote control, or browsing through the DVDs on the shelf. Eventually, however, the violence we've been anticipating has to explode, and it takes its darkest form when Rian, who has been admiring Christine all evening, takes her out of the room to have his way with her. This is the film's trickiest juncture, but Williams negotiates it well, leaving what takes place between them out of sight and only letting us hear muffled sounds from the next room. The director's decision to keep Cherry Tree Lane's infrequent violent acts out of sight gives them a greater impact, and the film often made me recall Michael Haneke's Funny Games, which took a similar approach, focusing more on the people involved in the violence rather than the violence itself.
The difference is that Haneke had a clear moral and purpose with Funny Games, whether you agree with his stance or not, and Cherry Tree Lane's lack of such a viewpoint eventually leaves it feeling rather empty. Even while Williams displays his considerable talent in the frenzied final sequence, he also stumbles with the late inclusion of a fresh set of characters and the encroaching sense that there may not be much more to Cherry Tree Lane than its technical bravado and its undeniable ability to twist the audience's nerves. On that level, Williams achieves his goals with aplomb, but you still can't help feeling that he's capable of more than that.
Read my interview with Paul Andrew Williams here.
