The first movie was Babies at the Embassy with Jenni and C. It was the documentary equivalent of a light romantic comedy – they didn’t show anything hard, tragic, or grim. It was just four babies, in four different countries, being adorable and loved. That’s not to say it was content-free, but I suspect that the information lies more in our reactions to what we see: the palpable concern for for Namibian baby as it crawls through puddle-deep running water (proving how deeply engrained the “children can drown in a teaspoon of water” message is), for example, or the equally palpable cringe when the white San Franciscans sat around in a group singing about the Earth Mother, hey-ya!
The African and Mongolian children definitely stole the show near the beginning, possibly because they were allowed more opportunities to express themselves – the parents were shown as being much more hands-off, whereas the Japanese and American babies seemed more closely supervised. But they all had an opportunity to shine, though the most memorable moment for the Japanese baby was the great trauma when she is unable to push a stick though a hole in the disc, which causes such great frustration that she has to throw herself backwards and wail… and then pick up a book, look at a page, and then remember she’s frustrated, and wail some more..
Like a meringue animal, it was cute and sweet and probably fine for you in moderation, but wasn’t particularly nutritious. I might watch it again if it were on TV, but I don’t think I’d buy it.
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Next, C stuck around for Agora, the film about the life of Hypatia, the female philosopher and mathematician who lived through the burning of the Library of Alexandria (where her father was the last director). The background was essentially the power-play of those in charge in the newly legitimate Christian church, saved from persecution thanks to a Christian Emperor. (The game-player in me couldn’t help thinking – if one were the governor, what steps could you take to hold power? You’d need to eliminate the local bishop as a force, to start…)
I thought it was well done, and there were some things (like the presentation to an unwanted suitor with a cloth with menstrual blood) that were strange enough that they could only be drawn from history. But… I felt worried that people were too… easy to understand, maybe? I mean, given how alien their culture is, I was surprised that none of the people’s motivations made me go, “Buh?” Although… maybe that’s a tribute to the writers, or to the fact that love doesn’t change much? I did like that they did retain some of the philosophy, though I’d be interested to know if there’s any evidence that Hypatia actually noticed that bodies in motion tend to stay in motion.
It was good, but I’m not sure I’d watch it again.
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I then ran all the way to Te Papa to see The Arbour, which did a bunch of interesting things, stylistically. It was telling the story around Andrea Dunbar, who wrote three plays at 19, and went on to write a movie of one of her plays, based on her sometimes brutal experience of life in a council estate in Britain in the 1970s. (She died ten years later, but she was survived by three children, one of whom experienced a similarly traumatic life.) But it wasn’t a straight documentary; instead, there was some television interview footage of the playwright and her family; some excerpts from her plays (done on the green of the estate where she lived, with slightly bemused inhabitants looking on); and some actors lip-syncing to interviews that the film-maker had done with the members of the family.
This was really effective in drawing you into the story – the lip-syncing portions must have been weird for the actors, but they really sold it, and allowed the film-maker to show some things that would have been very difficult to stage with a normal interview (such as using focus to direct attention back and forth between two people talking). I thought it worked well, and was very interesting to watch, though very sad.
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Then it was back to the Embassy for Gainsbourg.
The film itself was good – I liked what the actors did, the giant puppet that represented Gainsbourg’s ambition was both really well done and did a good job advancing the story, and it showed that the film wasn’t afraid to break away from reality. The man himself seems… like a bit of a dick: talented and charming, but spoiled, and happy to outrage people in order to be the centre of attention. How much of that is because of the weird experience of being a talented Jewish kid in France during the Nazi occupation, and the only surviving boy in his family… I don’t know. But explanation isn’t the same as excuse, and writing a song about a former lover about her being a hippopotamus is a dick move, plain and simple.
However… the film does a good job of making you empathise with him, and you never quite stop being hurt for him when he does something stupid and is rejected. I enjoyed watching it, and could imagine watching it again.
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Finally, Ghost Writer, a straight-up Hitchcockian political thriller about a man (never named in the film) hired to write the memoirs of a thinly disguised Tony Blair character. There are a few elements where fridge logic reveals that they don’t make too much sense, but it barrels along at a good clip, and the actors (particularly Olivia Williams) were so enjoyable to watch that I didn’t care. I’ll definitely be getting C to watch it, even though I’m reluctant to put money in Polanski’s pocket.
And I hope Olivia Williams gets tonnes more work, because I’ve enjoyed her in everything I’ve seen her in so far.
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