Second Hand Wedding

The movie we saw at home (see the previous post) was Second Hand Wedding, a NZ film with Geraldine Brophy in the lead. It stands or falls on her skills, basically, as she’s the focus of a good deal of it. And she does a great job. Her acting is full of subtlety and humour, and pathos in the scenes where she faces how her daughter truly sees her.
The story is simple. Brophy plays a woman (almost) obsessed with garage sales. But she’s crafty and clever and knows how to strike a bargain, as well as knowing what’s worth getting. Her house is chocker with acquired goods, and somehow she and her ever-patient and retired husband manage to live peacefully in the midst of it all. Her daughter gets engaged, but doesn’t want to tell her mother because she thinks the latter will take over the wedding and bring all her specifically-acquired bargains along with her. There are a couple of minor subplots, but the story sticks to a pretty straightforward telling of events, and does it well.
Ryan O’Kane (whose face is very familiar, but I can’t see why, since the only thing I might recognise him from is Out of the Blue, the film about the Aramoana mass murder) and Holly Shanahan make a pleasant young couple; Patrick Rose, who’s been in a host of NZ films and TV, plays the long-suffering husband, and there are various other familiar faces amongst the cast, including Ray Henwood.
The film is set in Wellington's Kapiti Coast apparently (I'd thought it was Auckland!) and nicely shot amongst the persimmon trees and the rata and all the other typical suburban foliage. Fun viewing.
You can watch a scene from the film on Flicks.co.nz

The Village

Finally caught up with M Night Shyamalan’s The Village last night, on TV.
I always enjoy Shyamalan’s movies, but I’d steered away from this one because I’d heard it hadn’t quite achieved what it seemed to be setting out to do. It turns out still to be a very effective thriller, in its own unusual way, but doesn’t bear thinking about too much afterwards.
The tension would have been stronger if our viewing hadn’t been interrupted by frequent ads, and by my suspecting that things weren’t quite as the villagers tried to make out. I didn’t know the ending but had an inkling that things weren’t quite what they seemed.
It’s an odd story, however, more strange than any of the director/writer’s other outings, more strange because in the end its inner logic is based on shifting sands. The viewer is left with far too many questions at the end: why did the elders decide to continue to lie after Ivy came back from her trip to the ‘towns’. What would Ivy feel about that – she’d met someone who was kind there, not fearful as she’d expected. How was it Adrian Brophy’s character followed her successfully into the fearsome woods and yet managed to be overcome by her. (In fact, he seems immune to pretty much everything else, including the woods themselves.) How does Ivy manage that extraordinary trip through the woods on her own? Philosophising about her ability to ‘see’ when she’s blind because the other villagers may be blind in their thinking, doesn’t really cut it. Unfortunately this aspect of the story isn’t helped by the actress Bryce Dallas Howard. Too often she plainly has no trouble finding her way around. And then there are times when she’s stumbling around the village as though she’d never been there before. (For example, she runs freely in a race with Brophy, but later on walks, arm outstretched and cane tapping the ground, while finding her way to her lover’s house, a trip which ought to be just as familiar.)
Why would the elders sustain the lie that there were evil creatures in the woods to their children and grandchildren? How did they expect this all to be carried through to the next generation? And why is everybody dressed in 19th century garb? Where did all the materials to build their houses come from? And are we expected to believe that no one knows they’re living in a nature reserve?
Okay, okay. We can pull it apart as much as we like (only Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense seems unbreakable in this respect). In the end, what’s it like to watch without quibbling about the details?
The acting is uniformly convincing, and William Hurt and Joaquin Phoenix are excellent, as always. The direction is top-notch, with timing and editing superb (Shyamalan’s movies always shine in this regard) . The design is good with the drab costumes making a distinct contrast to the bold yellows and reds of the two opposing ‘sides’.
In the end it’s the script that doesn’t quite cut it. But the direction manages to make us suspend disbelief long enough to overlook the flaws.

The Pianist

I meant to mention that I watched The Pianist on DVD the other night. What a `grim piece, and how draining it was to watch.
It concerns a Jewish family in Poland who, along with thousands of other Jews are rounded up and sent off to the death camps. The pianist only escapes because he is hauled out of the crowd by a soldier who has become a policeman in order to escape death himself. After that he is on the run, gets caught up in a gang of Jewish prisoners who are made to build for the Germans, escapes again and is helped by an artistic couple, and finally is left to his own devices when his helpers are arrested, or vanish. In his last desperate days he is briefly befriended by a German officer, who, in return for hearing him play (on a grand piano that happens very conveniently to be in the house the pianist has hidden in) brings him some food, and stops him from being discovered by the other officers.
The film is full of brutal moments, sudden and unexpected deaths, dreadful beatings, utter cruelty on behalf of the Germans, corpses and the awfulness of starvation. At times it’s barely watchable. It’s beautifully photographed (by Pawel Edelman), and superbly directed. The cast, a real mix of nationalities, is uniformly good. Adrien Brophy may play on his skinny face a little too much, but he conveys well the despair of an artist, a man who would much sooner get on an play the piano than anything else.
It seems an odd choice for Roman Polanski to direct, though his own background is reflected in some of the events in the movie. I can’t say it’s a movie I’d like to see again: it’s too long, and in that curious way that audiences have of losing empathy with screen characters, we get a little tired of the lengthy stretch of time after Brody is forced to live on his own.
One curious thing about the movie is why an actor, Thomas Kretschmann, who doesn’t appear until something like the last quarter an hour of a 150 minute movie, gets second billing.