The Hairdressers Husband (1990)

This will be the third time I’ve watched this film.

The previous 2 times I found it irritating. Something to do with how such a gorgeous woman (the hairdresser, Mathilde played by Anna Galiena) could be so inexplicably enamoured with this twit of a twat (her husband Antoine) played by Jean Rochefort.

I’ll see how I get on in this third, and probably, final, watch. See if I can feel less irritated, and more amused, or even charmed, by Rocheforts silly willyness.

*
‘The more they resist the sweeter the surrender’ is fathers advice to son.
Well,  gorgeous hairdresser Mathilde doesn’t offer much, or any, resistance. She’s accepting Antoines proposal of marriage almost immediately. She’s far too willing, too unseemingly eager, to be this creepy old mans wet dream. What is wrong with the girl?
He’s imagining her nipples rubbing against her blouse, and, aroused, pointed at his neck.
And now he starts doing his daft dancing. Actually, change daft to stupid. Is it mean to be amusing? Its embarrassing.

More embarrassment. He’s now pawing and squeezing and mouthing at the lovely young lady’s breasts like a dirty old lech. And she’s not stopping him – she’s letting him. What is wrong with the girl?!

Now there’s more of his imbecilic ‘arabic’ improvised dancing. That he’s meant to be mesmerizing, or bambooziling, a kid with. Please stop! It’s not funny. He hasn’t got a single erotic bone in his body has Rochefort. This dancing proves it.

And now look what the dirty old bugger is up to.

That feels as pervy as it looks. I’m not turned on. And I can’t believe she’s turned on either. Dancing his floaty finger arabesques around her fanny. Stop it will you – it tickles!.

She worries that he might stop loving her, stop finding her utterly desirable. Eh? It’s the other way round surely. In fact, if I were you Mathilde I’d dump the dirty old perv immediately.

But, no, she’s still worrying about losing her allure, her failure to continue to be drop dead gorgeous. And after one final peak of climatic ecstasy she runs of and, er, kills herself?!
I told you there was something wrong with this girl.

So that’s that. The Hairdressers Husband, and to be honest, also the Hairdresser herself, are just as irritating and embarrassing as they always were.
I’m realising that my irritation is with both the leads. They’re miscast and mismatched. Rochefort was 60 and Galiena 31 when the film was made. The 30 year age gap is glaringly obvious and incongruous. Rochefort comes across as a pathetic sleazy old lech;  his overly controlling possessive leering and duff dancing do not engage my amusement or my sympathy.
Therefore I’d ditch Rochefort and replace with an actor conveying charm, charisma, and uncringeworthy dance moves.
And I’d do something about Mathildes character – i.e give her one. Instead of merely being the vacuous vessel of fetishistic fantasy and objectification, sat there smiling emptily  (which I suppose most hairdressers could be prone to do) with not a single interesting thought in her hollow head. I’d animate her more subjectively from within.

No, on second thoughts, what I’d actually do is just scrap this film altogether, and start again from scratch.

Dir: Patrice Leconte, France

3/10

Deep Water (1981)

No he can’t explain. Not directly. Not in as many words.
But she knows. Knows what he’s up to.
He’s bumping off her blokes. If they get too much for him to bear.

Mind you, he shouldn’t be letting her flirt and dance with them, and be cuddling up with them on the sofa while he sits their playing with himself – at chess.

A most odd arrangement, or estrangement, this marriage, this family. Even their young daughter seems to be complicit in the oddness.
What’s he (Trintignant up to) Whats she (Isabelle Huppert) up to?
Contriving jealous possession as way of sharpening up attachment? A raising of the stakes of desirability to rather extreme levels?

It’s based on a book by Patricia Highsmith, so its bound to be tied up in perversity. A few dark corners are going to be backed into and some wriggly manoeuvres are going to be twisted around into some kind of knotted enravelment.

They should be getting rid of one another (divorcing), not these hapless blokes she keeps flaunting and taunting him with.

But it seems to have to go on. The complicity. The mucking about they call their relationship.

That lizard Trintignant is at his repellant best (or worst) Or is he more like slimy killer snail?.
And Isabelle Huppert. With boyishly short hair. Not quite doing it for me as a slippery seductress.

Dir: Michel Deville, France

5.5/10

Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1998)

This 1998 ITV version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles works quite a bit better than the Beeb adapation of 2008.

The main reason is down to the casting of the 2 main leads.
Ollie Milburn is less wet than Eddie Redmayne as Angel Claire
And Justine Wadell is far more convincing and compelling as Tess than simpering Gemma Arteton with her trouty pout.

Justine Wadell conveys a native naive charm that Gemma Arteton totally lacked. As an earthy milk maiden she really gets stuck in to her cows udders. You could easily imagine her doing a full days work down on the farm; whereas Arteton just seemed like she’d mislaid her way down a dusky Dorset backlane on route to a Kensington & Chelsea wine bar.

Justine Waddell makes Tess look, and seem, irresistibly charming and cherishable

No wonder our likely lad Angel has fallen head over heels for the lovely lass.

I really enjoyed the whole middle section of the film on the farm with the cows and the curlews, where Angel and Tess are tentatively, and teasingly, falling in love with one another. He – Ollie Milburn – wasn’t such a limp lettuce as wimpy Eddie baby Redmayne.

The last hour of the drama, where much tragic melodrama starts kicking off, wasn’t really holding together too well. I don’t know if this might not be a fault of the novel itself. I mean, why does Angel have to abandon Tess so dramatically and drastically on their wedding night? It just doesn’t make coherent sense of his undying, almost devotional, love for her.

And why is Alec D’Urberville so obessively fixated on her if she’s a married woman? He turns into some psychotic stalker person who she intially resists, but is ultimately too weakened by circumstance (the impending doom of impoverished family) to repel. This breakdown of her resistance was too flimsily flirted over to be entirely convincing.

The twisty turns of too many coincidental events, the helpless hoops that Hardy makes his protagonists jump too torturously through, are what constitutes their ‘fate’ and tragic destiny I suppose. But it does make for somewhat convoluted and deterministic drama. As is the case here. Which unfortunately, makes Tess seem simplistically stereotypical, a tragically doomed heroine – and Justine Waddell soon loses all the contours of her hard won individual identity as Tess, and resorts to sleepwalking through the last half an hour on an autopilot of sugary sweet cliches. Her stoic forbearance all gone. To be replaced by lachrymose weeping and wailing.

Anyway, I doubt whether there is ever going to be a good, let alone a defintive, version of Tess. She’s doomed to be an under-realised, unredeemed, helplessly hopeless Hardyesque ‘victim’. Doomed to her flawed and fallen-like fate.

Director: Ian Sharp, England

6.5/10

The Olive Tree (2016)

The syrupy strings over the opening credits were setting up low hopes for this film: not to expect anything too strikingly original.

But actually, it grew on me this Olive Tree.
I think that was partly to do with Paul Laverty’s screenplay. His dialogue kept heartfelt sentiments from slipping too far into saccharine sentimentality.
Although the story is highly implausible, and even faintly ridiculous, the relationships between the main protagonists stay grounded, sound realistically credible; their interactions never slip out of character into cliché.

It was impossible to dislike this film, or feel unsympathetic with its soulful sentiments. I even shed a little tear near the end (when Anna heard that her beloved granddad had died)

It felt sacrilegious that the olive tree had been ripped out of its ground, deprived of its rightful roots.

‘The olive tree has no price. Its sacred. It belongs to life, history’.

So what was it doing sat in the sterile soul-less lobby of a multinational company in Düsseldorf, thousands of miles from the sun and the soil of its ancestral home?

The film has been described as a comedy drama.
But I don’t think you’ll be laughing much.

Director: Iciar Bollain, Spain

6.5/10

Light Years Away (1981)

Swiss director Alain Tanner having a go at an English language film. In Ireland. Starring Trevor Howard and Mick Ford.

Trevor Howard is Yoshka Poliakeff, a cantankerous old recluse living in the bleak back of beyond; he takes in Jonas (Mick Ford) and initiates him in the meaningful or less mysteries of life.

The ridiculous tasks Trevor sets up Mick to do are covert tests of his aptness to be a suitably devotional disciple.  It’s Gurdjieffian absurdity added to Beckettian absurdity to = nonsense. At one point Trevor is demanding to be buried up to his neck in the ground so as to heal his clawed at flesh.

There he is with just his head popped up out of the earth like Winnie from Happy Days, or Ham from Endgame.

It’s a bleak, sunless, gloomy wilderness we’re in. Typical Ireland really.  The broody browns and moody hues make it look very end of the other worldly.

At last, we get to the pointless point of all this absurdity: Trev wants to fly beyond the galaxies on homemade hopeless wings. Soar away like a peerless bird of prey. He only makes it 20 miles down the road before crashing down to earth. He gets his eyes pecked out by an eagle.

Anyway Mick (Jonas) seems to have become suitably enlightened by all this meaningful (or less) malarkey. So that’s good. Although I haven’t. And I suspect nobody else who’s seen it through to its absurd end has either.

I’ll say what I’ve said before about these Tanner films: I’d have got far more out of them if I’d seen them when they were originally released; when I was in my 20’s (late 70’s through to mid 80’s) But now the time feels like it’s passed for me to engage with them quite as naively and idealistically as I would have done back then.  I’ve got older. And less gullible. And more cynical (unfortunately) Although it is also possible that the films themselves haven’t aged well, and would seem rather dated to a modern audience.

Dir: Alain Tanner, Switzerland

6/10

Sehnsucht (2006)

Markus (Andreas Müller) has got a lovely little wife.  She loves him, and he seemingly, loves her.  She loves him with such unbearably achy longing (sehnsucht)
So when he does the dirty on her, it hurts her (and us)

He’s ended up, inexplicably, bedding a waitress from a nearby town. Doesn’t even know her name.
Doesn’t remember what happened or even if they did it. A drunken one night stand. Best forget about it mate and move on.
But then hes having a go at her again the second night. Knows whats happening now. Appears to be wanting it, wanting her.

I couldn’t quite see what his attraction to her was. Why jeopardise his sweet little marriage for a fling with a rather underwhelmingly plain waitress?
And then he’s going to have lunch with her family sat around outside.
Whys she invited him to see her family? Because she’s obviously wanting him as her proper boyfriend.
And why has he accepted? Because now he’s plainly lusting after her, wants some extra-marital. Can’t stop himself.

Its difficult to see him as a callous cheating bastard because he appears so outwardly decent (hard working, local firefighter, kind to cuddly animals etc)
He’s an opaque muddle of puddly placidity. Doesn’t say a lot. And possibly, because he hasn’t got the words to say or share how he feels, his blind lust, his subconscious longing, precipitates the unwitting consequences of the rather surprising, and melodramtic, events that befall him in the last third of the film. As if some kind of hidden fate, unbeknowst to him, has had to be dumbfoundedly followed.

The coda at the end with the gossiping kids is quite a clever way of showing how what happens eventually gets turned into story, no matter how unnarratable and unknowable (and potentially untruthful) these external events may have been.

I’ve watched this film twice now. And I think I’ll be giving it another go in the not too distant future. In its own very quiet and understated way it is puzzilingly beguiling.

Director: Valeska Grisebach, Germany

7/10