Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

The Wrestler
US 2008
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Marisa Tomei
Director: Darren Aronofsky

Belle Toujours
Portugal/France 2006
Starring: Michel Piccoli, Bulle Ogier
Director: Manoel de Oliveira

ALREADY in 2009, we have prime contenders for the very best and the very worst films to be released in Britain during the whole of this year. In the blue – as in depressingly gloomy – corner, we find the embarrassingly wretched British gangland “drama” Clubbed, a thuddingly inept farrago which boasts barely any redeeming features. In the red corner – and at the diametrically opposing end of the quality scale – we have The Wrestler, a genuine five-star masterpiece that instantly takes lofty rank among the decade’s cinematic achievements.

Clubbed is an adaptation of Watch My Back, Geoff Thompson’s bestselling 2000 memoir relating his exploits as a nightclub bouncer in his native Coventry. The book is well-regarded (“I can say from the perspective of a doorman that everything Geoff says does ring true,” nods the literary critic of Fighters Review), but something has clearly gone very badly awry in the transition from page to screen. The script, credited to Thompson himself, fictionalises his tale into the story of Danny (Mel Raido), an insecure, weedy factory-worker in an unnamed English city who semi-inadvertently finds himself drawn into a twilight world of nightclubs – and belated develops a backbone in the process.

Unfortunately for all concerned, Danny’s transition from mouse to man has an ersatz, phoney feel at every single step: at no point, to go back to Fighters Review, does anything remotely “ring true”, including the distractingly hazy geographical and period detail (the film is seemingly supposed to be set in the Midlands during the 1980s, but it’s hard to tell). Raido makes for a notably colourless, unengaging protagonist, and his toneless, near-incessant voice-over kills the movie’s momentum stone dead again and again.

Unimaginatively shot, scored and edited by director Neil Thompson (no relation), Clubbed features truly gratuitous violence and also lays on sentiment with a large trowel. It somehow succeeds in making Rocknrolla look like GoodFellas, and one can only wonder what a genuinely talented and charismatic actor such as Colin Salmon. who plays Danny’s suave mentor Louis, is doing in this meretricious, fifth-rate trash.

If Salmon should consider changing his agent sooner rather than later, one actor whose career is experiencing an unlikely and welcome resurgence is Mickey Rourke, who in The Wrestler has found a career-crowning showcase – one that which should, barring accidents, land him a Best Actor Oscar next month. It provides glorious vindication of a prediction/hunch ventured by David Thomson in his 2002 Biographical Dictionary of Film, and which sounded somewhat fanciful at the time: “He could come again. The guy… could still be waiting for his right moment, the big role, the unequivocal revelation that he has always been in charge.”

That “big role” turns out to be Randy “The Ram” Robinson – a kind of Hulk Hogan WWF-style celebrity 20 years ago, now reduced to eking out a living on the small-beer circuit in his native New Jersey. Supplementing his meagre income by working shifts at a local store, including spells on the delicatessen counter, the 50-ish Robinson (real name Robin Ramzinsky) is paying the price for a life of wrestling, steroids, drugs and partying. With his body starting to give out and the end of his career in sight, he belatedly tries to get himself back on track. He resumes contact with his long-estranged teenage daughter (Evan Rachel Wood); awkwardly romances a night-club hostess (Marisa Tomei); attempts to provide himself with one last decent-sized pay-day by agreeing a rematch with his greatest 1980s-heyday foe, an African-American whose nom de sport is “The Ayatollah” (Ernest Miller.)

The Wrestler is a sports film and isn’t afraid to embrace certain melodramatic clichés of the genre. It’s also another example of the gutter-poetic “noble loser” movie, in which American cinema has often specialised. But it’s also far more. Aronofsky, for once forsaking the smart-aleck tone and visual trickery of Pi and Requiem For a Dream, strips back his technique to the barest of bare bones: no score, no tripod, no gimmicks or affectations. He gives his performers time and scope to fully explore their roles, and the rewards are immense.

The Wrestler, deserved winner of the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, is a rare example of a film that is as heartbreaking as it is hilarious, as quietly profound and thought-provoking (there are all manner of political subtexts here if you want to explore them) as it is entertaining and accessible.

It takes some nerve to remake Hitchcock – even if the Hitchcock movie in question is an 80-year old silent which many of the master’s admirers may not even have heard about. Likewise, the original play on which both versions of Easy Virtue are based isn’t one of the better-known works by Noel Coward and is seldom revived these days.

The new film, which takes a slightly different approach to the material than the courtroom-oriented 1928 picture, is a breezy culture-clash comedy which chronicles how the Whittakers – a very British family of impoverished aristocrats – cope with the sudden arrival in their midst of an American heiress, the decidedly “modern” Larita (Jessica Biel).

Fresh from motor racing in Monte Carlo, divorcee Larita is the latest girlfriend of the family’s eldest son, John (Ben Barnes), and her combination of brash self-confidence and stunning glamour finds little favour with his ice-queen mother (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Scott Thomas continues her welcome return to the limelight with a delightfully nasty turn as the unyieldingly controlling matriarch. And her scenes with Biel, who reveals herself as a talented comedienne , provide the film with its most effective sequences – every word and gesture contributing to the war of wills over John’s future plans.

Easy Virtue is  well-appointed British country-house period-picture, latest example of an over-familiar genre which unfortunately shows little sign of going out of fashion at present. While fitfully amusing, this example is never really sufficiently stylish, bold, distinctive or original to lift it above the general run of such fare and will do little to rescue Australian writer-director Stephen Elliott – still best known for 1994’s Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – from one-hit-wonder status.

Cinephile readers of The Independent may have choked on their cornflakes when their newspaper’s front page promised extensive coverage of “Belle de Jour – The Sequel”. But fans of Luis Bunuel’s 1967 masterpiece – in which haute-bourgeoise housewife Severine (Catherine Deneuve) turns ultra-high-class prostitute – might  have been disappointed by the actual four-page feature. This was devoted to the author and blogger who uses “Belle de Jour” as her nom de plume for bestselling books purporting to be the Diary of a London Call-Girl.

Not a mention was made of Bunuel, of Joseph Kessel’s 1928 source novel, or of Belle Toujours, the 2006 follow-up to Belle de Jour. It’s now been belatedly released in this country to mark its Portuguese writer-director Manoel de Oliveira’s 100th birthday. De Oliveira is the last active director who worked in the silent era, and he’s showing few signs of slowing down. Since Belle Toujours, he’s completed three shorts, one feature and is in pre-production on another.

However, it’s unlikely Belle Toujours would be getting so much exposure if its director hadn’t shown such unique creative longevity and it had to be judged solely on its own merits, not in the reflected glory of the Bunuel movie. Fatally, Deneuve is a no-show, with Severine played instead (capably enough) by Bulle Ogier. But Michel Piccoli returns as one of the screen’s great connoisseurs of decadence, transgression and corruption, Monsieur Husson – an imposing, scene-stealing presence on the sidelines last time round. Piccoli (83 last year) is four decades older and, while he hasn’t lost his old devilish charm, his contribution is that much more belaboured.

Likewise the film: certain sequences have a pleasing lightness, while it’s refreshing to see the passing of time and the ravages of age tackled with such unapologetic directness. But Toujours is conspicuously padded out to reach bare-minimum feature-length. It might have worked better as a scaled-down miniature rather than the awkwardly mid-sized canvas we’re left with here.

Neil Young