..“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.