..“Geordie”
(which the Danes renamed ‘Skotten svinger hammeren’), “The
Belles of St Trinians” and ‘The Titfield Thunderbolt’ were
soon to delight us with their gentility and niceness. No, these were films of
gritty realism, difficult subject matter and controversy. Films that made one
think rather than leave the cinema with a warm fuzzy feeling.
I watched ‘(Wee) Geordie’ again recently and had a quiet tear for
the long departed Alistair Sim and the rather tall but equally deceased Bill
Travers. This naturally started the memory train that Travers was married to
the rather lovely Virginia McKenna who played the resistance fighter Violette
Szabo in the moving WWII film ‘Carve her Name with Pride’ and that
they both starred in the film ‘Born Free’ which had the eponymous
Academy Award winning title song warbled by Matt Monro, that then led them to
create the Born Free foundation. Animals were saved and lions made happy. Ah
so many memories.
Including the realisation that my favourite TV series of all time ‘Misleading
Cases’ that starred Alistair sim and Roy Dotrice is unobtainable - in
fact it seems that most of the episodes are lost. The series was based on the
work of A.P. Herbert the English humourist, novelist, playwright and law reform
activist whose legal peregrinations such as can a cow be considered a cheque
have been taken as fact by more than one American news organisation.
But back to the course or stars that I initially steered by…….
Margaret and David, those doyens of what was the ‘Movie Show’ and
is now ‘At the Movies’, are usually an adequate guide to what to
go and see at the cinema. Having grown to know and love their personalities,
idiosyncrasies and filmic foibles over the years one usually has an idea of
how good a film is and whether it marries to one’s taste and expectations.
Usually we agree, and especially with regard to the classic movies of all time
where we obviously grew up watching the same Fellini or Kurosawa movies. Without
them I would have missed such eccentricities as Aki Kaurismäki’s
‘Le Havre’, or Wes Anderson’s ‘Moonlight Kingdom’.
But sometimes they may just get it wrong – and in the good company of
my deluded brother. Ladies and gentlemen I give you ‘Tabu’ - and
please take it. A pretentious piece of art-house twaddle, Monty Python meets
Portuguese cinema that was rated by the dynamic duo with four stars and four
and a half stars. Why?
Well it has all the requisite calling cards of a movie ‘to be taken seriously’.
It’s in black and white, the story unfolds non-sequentially, and there
are mysterious and enigmatic characters that seem to serve little or no purpose.
There is a crocodile – albeit small. There are, naturally, long periods
where characters stare soulfully into middle distance, do prosaic things slowly
and speak between long meaningful pauses. The film has infidelity, sex, death
and betrayal and looks of great intent parsed in an old-fashioned style apparently
inspired by the German director F W Murnau - the German expressionist director
whom we know best for his spooky vampire film ‘Nosferatu’. Murnau
travelled to Bora Bora in 1931 and made a film called also called ‘Tabu’.
A week prior to the opening of the film Murnau died in a Santa Barbara hospital
from injuries he received in an automobile accident.
I suppose we should love the references which are not even ironic as the film
is essentially a very old-fashioned fruity melodrama. There are plot similarities
between the two movies which of course you haven’t seen nor read about
before you ventured into the cinema. Nor do references make a better movie;
witness the Odessa steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship
Potemkin (1925) that is almost duplicated in the Brian de Palma’s ‘The
Untouchables’.
Just like Murnau’s film the new ‘Tabu’ has two chapters but
rather than the first being "Paradise" and the second "Paradise
Lost", they are reversed and preceded by a traumatically funny sequence
of a dubiously bearded 19th Century explorer wandering somewhat aimlessly through
the bush with only his native bearers and the ubiquitous voice-over narrator
as company. He arrives at a water hole into which, according to the narration,
he throws himself into the jaws of an unseen crocodile as a sacrifice for his
love. The camera cuts away before we get to see if he is messily devoured by
some suitable saurian to the natives stumbling into a dance where they go round
in circles stamping their feet and possibly warbling Mariah Carey tunes. We
then segue into part one, Paradise Lost.
This occurs in or around a rather depressing contemporary Lisbon where Pilar
is worried about her neighbour, the elderly Aurora, who is looked after by her
African maid Santa. Aurora is drifting into senility and paranoia, eventually
dying in hospital after unsuccessfully trying to have Pilar contact an old friend
before she slips away. As a diversion cake is consumed and a child doesn’t
come to stay.
After the funeral of Aurora the old friend Gian Luca tells about his past doomed
and naughty love affair with Aurora in Africa at the foot of Mount Tabu. This
is ‘Paradise’ where there is music, sound effects but no dialogue.
Only voice-over narration. This part is only partially redeemed by the good
looks of Carloto Cotta as the young Gian Luca and the appearance of a classic
Morris Minor. There is also a small crocodile. It all ends badly and the affair
may have even started an uprising against the Portuguese colonists.
So why is the considered opinion of two of Australia’s leading critics
at such variance with mine and a great many other viewers? The majority of those
who have posted comments on the ‘At the Movies’ web site have been
negative and wondered why others in the audience had been able to better spend
their time by sleeping.
Personally I think it is that cinema is in the grip of risk free commercialism
with tag-teams of intellectually challenged executive producers throwing yellow
post-it genius notes at directors and script-writers to stop any semblance of
individuality getting through.
So when a movie that seems reminiscent of the good old days comes along intellectually
starved critics throughout the world leap on it as if it were Lassiter’s
Reef, a mythic vein of cultural gold. Sometimes it’s merely dross.