Woody Allen’s fourth London-based comedy-drama, You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger, should be released with the following consumer advice: “Warning – this film has limited cultural references”. Does Allen really know anyone in contemporary London who has consulted a fortune-teller? Or even, for that matter, a young Anglo-Indian woman who has an affair with a married blocked American novelist? Allen could use a decent script reader, some jokes and a challenge to his myopic worldview. He’s like a man who reads the newspaper and only absorbs the typeface.
The fascination of an Allen film is seeing how a distinguished cast react to the slim fodder that he gives them. Todorov said that all fiction basically conforms to one of seven basic plots. I don’t think Allen got further than plot number three. Here, we have the older man, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), who leaves his wife (Gemma Jones) and attempts to find himself. This involves splashing the cash on a young vulgarian (Lucy Punch) whom he later marries. Is there a twist? Only that she has an affair with a younger man.
Then we have the blocked writer, Roy (Josh Brolin) who reads and admires his friend’s manuscript. When the friend (Ewan Bremner) is involved in an accident and ends up in a coma, Roy passes his manuscript off as his own. Is there a twist? Only that the writer shows signs of recovery.
Then we have Alfie’s daughter (Naomi Watts) who falls for her art gallery employer (Antonio Banderas). Is there a twist? Yes, he falls instead for her best friend (Anna Friel).
Finally we have Alfie’s ex-wife who listens to the erratic ravings of her fortune-teller (Pauline Collins) and who finds contentment with a widower who attempts to contact his wife through a seance. Is there a twist? Only that she won’t loan her daughter the money to start her own gallery, retreating instead from reality (I suspect she is the character who most represents Allen himself.)
Allen draws on the basic tropes of ye olde Victorian melodrama. I don’t think he’s read a 20th century English novel, much less a 21st century one. You keep wondering when the coal wagon will arrive or a chimney sweep will knock on the door touting for business.
Of the cast, only Lucy Punch really makes much impression. Meanwhile, Hopkins is beaten up off screen and Philip Glenister and Meera Syal turn up in nothing parts. Freida Pinto portrays an Indian who plays Spanish guitar, with whom Roy falls dreamily in love. She seems to have wandered in from another movie.
The film begins with the song “When You Wish Upon A Star” and has a basic “Be careful what you wish for” unifying theme. It does not boast a single scene that surprises, amuses or thrills. Woody Allen regards film-making like gardening, a pastime rather than a compulsion. Here, he has harvested ironic fatalism, a flower without much bloom.
When we think of Hammer, the British studio that made stars of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing in the 1950s and ’60s, we recall Dracula, Frankenstein, colour and heightened eroticism. We forget the studio’s failure to adapt to both changing tastes and the liberalisation of censorship. Its answer to the successes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist was to lapse into soft porn and self-parody.
Last year, Hammer was re-launched as a brand with Let Me In, the respectful remake of the modern vampire romance, Let the Right One In. Its second release, The Resident, based on an original screenplay by director Antti J Jokinen and writer Robert Orr, gives audiences a chance to see how the studio intends to separate itself from the modern, torture-porn oriented horror flick.
The first distinguishing feature is the presence of a double Oscar-winner, Hilary Swank, in the leading role, as Juliet, a New York doctor who moves into a spacious Brooklyn apartment and becomes the object of erotic obsession. The key gimmick is a “‘rewind”, roughly a third of the way through the film, as events are replayed from the point of view of another character.
The stalker, who subsequently drugs Juliet in her sleep, could either be the kindly singleton landlord, Max (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who has marital issues, August (Christopher Lee himself), Max’s reclusive resident grandfather or Jack (Lee Pace), Juliet’s cheating ex. You don’t need the rewind to work out who it is. The last half of the film features Juliet fleeing from her stalker and finding out how many nails from a nail gun it takes to stop a man – improbably, quite a lot.
Swank has fashioned an odd career. In recent years, she has played aviatrix Amelia Earhart and a woman who taught herself law to free her brother in Conviction. She has also done horror in The Reaping. Her (entirely understandable) mistake in managing her career is that she tries to pass herself off as an ordinary woman. It is clear that she is a star when she crosses gender boundaries.
Jokinen presents her in soft focus in a series of bath scenes and the film treads a line between reprehensible behaviour and aesthetic restraint. This actually sums up the feeling of the new Hammer horror. What we end up with is something we’ve seen many times before, done too tastefully to give much pleasure to a contemporary audience. It could have used a few more twists.
Comedienne Natalie Haynes is not a fan of Beatles’ songs. I’m not a fan of movies that take their titles from Beatles’ songs. It was exposure, aged 13, to the snooze fest that was the 1978 film of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band starring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees that did it. Now, we have Norwegian Wood, an adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s 1987 novel by Vietnamese writer-director Tran Anh Hung. The song plays over the end credits, but I could not work out why it was relevant.
I doubt whether John Lennon and Paul McCartney would have written about the love triangle that Murakami explores here. The narrator is Watanabe (Kenichi Matsuyama), a young student in 1960s Tokyo whose best friend commits suicide. Naoku (Rinko Kikuchi), the girl with whom his friend is in love, disappears. A few years on, they meet again. Watanabe learns that Naoku and his friend never consummated their relationship. After sleeping with her on his 20th birthday, and in a post-coital moment, he asks why. Big mistake. What follows is a love triangle of a different sort. Naoku seeks sanctuary at a retreat while Watanabe dates another girl, Midori (Kiko Mizuhara). Watanabe loves Naoku, but she is unable to have a normal life. Meanwhile, Midori blows hot and cold.
There is much to admire in Tran Anh Hung’s direction, including a painfully extended suicide in which Watanabe’s friend chokes on carbon monoxide inside his car. The revelation scene, in which Watanabe follows Naoku for a walk, is filmed in a single long take, as Naoku paces several hundred yards in one direction and then several hundred yards back, Watanabe just about keeping up. Watanabe is an introverted hero, who only rarely explodes. He is faced with a psychosexual problem that he cannot solve.
If the film has a subject, it is to ask about the value of sex. Watanabe’s roommate is a serial adulterer who thinks nothing of discussing his experiences with prostitutes in front of his wife and in company; he ends up a diplomat. At the end of the film – and it takes a long while to get there – Watanabe sleeps with an older woman, who was staying at the retreat with Naoku. Sex with a stranger frees her to return to the family that she abandoned seven years before, although Watanabe is vaguely hopeful that she would stay with him.
The film sounds in summary a lot more interesting than it is to watch, with its two-hour plus running time, even though individual sequences are elegantly crafted. Tragic events are meant to be profound, but audiences areun likely to be engaged.
