Coming of Age Movie Month Days 17 to 21

After two and a half weeks I found that even I needed a little breather from watching the same genre of movies at such a high rate.  I will be finishing out my list of 28 films for this project, but it may take me into March.

However, I will also be continuing the series with a weekly double bill of coming of age movies and reviews, those films will largely be new to me, but I'll also include a few I've seen but not reviewed here before.

Slap Her She's French

Dir: Melanie Mayron

Slap Her, She's French passed me by at the time of its release in 2002 and it's not hard to see why; this high school comedy, pitched somewhere between Clueless and Single White Female, which sees Piper Perabo as French exchange student Genevieve who deliberately overshadows the popular girl (Jane McGregor) whose family she is staying with, came right at the end of the late 90's/early 2000's revival of the teen movie and just wasn't up to the standard set by many of the films that had preceded it.

Slap Her, She's French is actually rather better than its (shit awful) title might imply.  Having an unsympathetic protagonist in Jane McGregor's Starla works quite well, because it enables writers Lamar Damon and Robert Lee King to give her some amusingly bitchy dialogue.  There are also some fun set pieces, few more amusing than when Genevieve 'helps' Starla with her homework and teaches her sexually suggestive phrases to use in her French oral exam.  It also wins points for a big final laugh, with a disclaimer before the end credits.

Melanie Mayron gives the film a bright, brash style that matches the broad style of the screenplay and she directs the cast to similar ends.  Perabo and McGregor both put in big performances, but the film is so heightened that it works, at least to some degree.  There are two ultimate problems here.  First of all, while it has some laughs, the film isn't consistently funny enough and secondly Perabo's deliberately awful accent may be a joke in and of itself, but it's not that funny and makes the film's 'twist' one that seems to have a neon sign flashing above it from the very first second she speaks.

Slap Her, She's French is a perfectly fine time passer if you like high school comedies (and, as I believe we've established, I do), but it's not among the best of its era and there are other lesser known teen films from this time much more worthy of rediscovery.

★★

36 Fillette
Dir: Catherine Breillat

I have lately become more interested in the work of Catherine Breillat, having, it seems, found a way into her filmography through her recent fairytale films (which also deal in coming of age themes), so I decided to go back and look at an earlier example of her work for this series, hoping that a theme I am interested in would hook me into her earlier films.  Nope.

I've enjoyed quite a few of the more controversial French takes on first experiences with love, relationships, and sex and I appreciate the fact that they are unafraid to be confrontational and sometimes explicit in their depictions of these things.  I'm not sure what it is, perhaps I simply have a disconnection with Catherine Breillat's style, but like so many of her other films, I found 36 Fillette rather boring.

This is, typically of its director, a very talky film that finds a 14-year-old girl (Delphine Zentout) making a connection with a playboy type (Jean-Pierre Leaud) and becoming more and more determined, over about three nights, to lose her virginity to him.  Zentout is good, but I don't especially believe her as a teenager.  Like so many of Breillat's characters, she feels more like a mouthpiece for the director, except that here Breillat doesn't even have that much to say.

The relationship at the film's centre is creepy, which is to be expected, it's between a 14-year-old and a 40-year-old, but it's not creepy in any particularly interesting way (as the relationship in, say, Beau Pere is) and for me the film didn't seem to say anything about coming of age or relationships like the one between Zentout and Leaud that hadn't been said much better in any number of other films.  36 Fillette isn't terrible, but it did, for me, seem both bloodless and curiously pointless.

★★

Maske Ku' Vi

Dir: Morten Arnfred

This seems to be something I'm saying a lot in the course of these reviews, but once again, Maske Ku Vi [Could We Maybe?] seems almost to be two films that have been glued together.  The film is by substantially the same team that would go on to make You Are Not Alone, and initially, it doesn't feel too far away from that film.  

Maske Ku Vi begins with an almost Loachian approach, taking a close up and rather uneventful look at the lives of two young friends.  I found this stretch of the film enthralling.  It establishes a social realist tone, grounding itself completely in the experience of two 14-year-old boys growing up in Denmark in 1977.  Little happens - they go out drinking, they jokingly flirt with prostitutes plying their trade from their windows, they hang out together - but you get a real sense of their friendship and their lives.  This changes when Kim (Karl Wagner) is asked to go to the bank for his mother.  During his visit, there is a holdup and he and a 14-year-old girl named Marianne (Marianne Berg) are kidnapped by the gang.

This second act, with the kids held captive by the gang but, at least in Kim's case, treating it more as a liberation from home, is where the film goes off the rails a bit.  The performances are still as naturalistic and as strong as they have been, especially between Wagner and Berg, but the scrupulously down to earth realism of the first act is thrown out of the window, becoming more and more distant as the film goes on. The change of tone doesn't entirely work.  The idea is to see bad events through the kids eyes, the fact that even a kidnapping can, if you don't like your home, feel like an opportunity, but the first act doesn't really suggest that Kim has that sort of disdain of his home life, merely that he's a typically dissatisfied teen, so this doesn't really come off for me.

The third act develops the little romance between Kim and Marianne believably and in typically frank style, but the overarching plot still feels too neat and too fanciful.  It's frustrating to not be able to recommend Maske Ku Vi more wholeheartedly because there are wonderful things in it.  The whole first act is great and there are some beautifully acted moments between Kim, Marianne, and the bank robbers, not to mention the sweet romance between the kids.  However, the mix of realism and more fanciful storytelling never quite meshes.  Still, flawed as it may be, this is an obscurity that will hold much enjoyment for anyone who likes these kinds of movies.

★★★

A Little Romance

Dir: George Roy Hill

If it is now of any interest at all this film must chiefly be a curio based on the fact that it features the (charming) debut of Diane Lane.  With the exception of her fans, I would struggle to recommend A Little Romance to anyone.

Lane plays Lauren the stepdaughter of an American director working in France.  She meets a French boy named Daniel  (Thelonius Bernard) and... well, you've read the title.  The complicating factor is that Lane's mother (Sally Kellerman) doesn't like her new boyfriend (not entirely unreasonable of her; he can be a smug little shit) so they have to sneak around.  One day while they're out, Lauren and Daniel meet Julius (Laurence Olivier), who enchants Lauren with romantic stories about his days as a young man with his wife.  When Lauren and Daniel determine to run away together they enlist Julius' help.

One thing you can tell from this film (and from another early role in Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains) is that Diane Lane was meant to be in movies.  She's hardly stretched here; her character is supposed to be extremely smart, but it's a pretty typical teenage role, but she is just glowing and has a presence that completely eludes her co-star Thelonius Bernard.  Some of their scenes have charm, particularly when they're joined by their less intelligent but somehow nerdier friends (Ashby Semple and Graham Fletcher-Cook), but I don't quite buy their discussions about Nietzsche, even smart 14-year-olds don't often talk that way.  The familiarity of the whole thing is also a problem, there's little to distinguish A Little Romance from a hundred other similarly themed films, aside from Laurence Olivier. 

I confess I've not seen much of Laurence Olivier's work from when he was a leading man (though I thought he was great in Hitchcock's Rebecca), so I have to take his reputation as one of the greatest screen actors somewhat on trust, but he is terrible here.  Olivier hams outrageously through a completely stereotypical and pretty awful Franch accent.  His presence completely unbalances the film, which is reasonably well played until he turns up, immediately alerting us to the fact that we're watching a movie because there is no sense when watching Julius that we are seeing anything other than an actor chomping all the scenery he can lay his hands on.

The plot grinds on, chugging through predictable twists with broadly written adult characters and Olivier always on the sidelines, undermining the moments of sincerity the film does have.  Lane and Bernard try hard, but the love story never caught light for me.  A Little Romance is perhaps worth a look for Diane Lane fans, but I found it rather irritating.
★★

Kundskabens Træ
Dir: Nils Malmros

Until I began doing the research for this series I had never even heard of this 1981 Danish film, apparently it is regarded as something of a classic in Denmark, and it isn't difficult to see why.  

In common with many Scandinavian coming of age films, Kundskabens Træ (Tree of Knowledge) has a more downbeat take on the process of growing up than is generally common in mainstream teen and coming of age films, especially those from the US.  In this case, the film follows a whole class of roughly 13-year-old students over a few weeks.  We see the cliques that they form, but what writer/director Nils Malmros is especially perceptive about is how young people's friendships and relationships can shift almost day by day for the tiniest of reasons.  The focus is most frequently turned on the popular Elin (Eva Gram Schjoldager), who is slowly and systematically frozen out by her friends after she refuses the advances of Helge (Marin Lysholm Jepsen).

While it is strong on the drama  Kundskabens Træ also has a great feeling for the playfulness of its characters, whether they are sneaking around in a boring lesson to play tricks on their teacher or getting involved in a game on a school trip (in a scene that feels heavily improvised).  It is perhaps best when it combines these two aspects, showing the kids being kids and having fun, but also what they are doing to Elin.  On the school trip there is a beautifully observed scene where an acronym, PTH, starts to be used to refer to Elin and the way it is passed in whispers from kid to kid is perfectly realised, it's something we all saw and heard during our own school days and is relatable whether you were 13 in 1953, when the film is set, or in 2013.

Eva Gram Schjoldager, who only ever made one other film, also for Malmros, is brilliant as Elin.  You can see her lack of comprehension about what she's done wrong to be frozen out by her friends, but also her determination to be strong in the face of that and of her awful, awful parents and their 'advice' (which, in the only poor piece of writing in the film, feels almost abusive at times).  She's most moving though the few times that she cracks; you can see the hurt behind her stoic face when her friends blow off her party to attend another, to which she's not invited.  It's a sad story, but one that is all too real.

The other kids are equally excellent.  While they are all playing in a particular period there is still a feeling of easy naturalism to the performances and though there are a lot of characters to keep track of most of the actors manage to give their roles enough personality that their characters and their relationships are clearly defined.

If you were ever 13 then you will find something in Kundskabens Træ that will prick at your memories of that time in a relatable way.  It may make you laugh, it may make you cry, but either way, it's well worth taking the time to track this rare little gem down.  For my part, I'm going to try to find some more of Nils Malmros' films.

★★★★

Interview: Shell Director Scott Graham

Scott Graham’s first feature film, Shell was one of my highlights of the London Film Festival last year, and showcases a great performance from newcomer Chloe Pirrie. Last week I sat down in a rather posh London hotel and chatted with Graham over a cup of tea.

24FPS: I wanted to start by asking you how you got started; we all grow up with film now, so was there one film or one filmmaker that, growing up, made you say: That’s what I want to do?

Scott Graham: Not really…

24FPS: or just what it was that was the trigger for wanting to go into film.

Scott Graham: I’ve been writing short stories since I was a teenager, but I wasn’t a particularly avid reader, I was more into films from a young age. I used to watch Moviedrome on BBC 2, that was my film education growing up, then Faber started publishing screenplays, I read Taxi Driver and I think a couple of Hal Hartley’s as well, and while I think my writing is very different to Paul Schrader’s and Hal Hartley’s I think that’s when I realised scripts were written and not just improvised. So once I understood that I could begin a film by writing it, that was a way in for me, because I think I’m a writer first and I’ve written my way into filmmaking. Then in terms of influences, the things that interested me, it was American 70′s cinema; films like Badlands and the remake of Postman Always Rings Twice, films like that interested me and I was interested in that empty, sparse world.

24FPS: Shell started life as a short, so did you have the feature in mind when you were making the short and what was the biggest challenge for you either in expanding it for the feature or contracting it for the short?

Scott Graham: I didn’t have a feature in mind until we were cutting the short. It was my second short, and I was very much learning as I went; I hadn’t gone to film school, so I was making all my mistakes in my films. Bert Eeles edited it, a great Scottish editor who’s no longer with us sadly, but he cut David MacKenzie and Peter Mullan’s short films, the editor to go to really as a new Scottish filmmaker. When we were cutting it, Bert really loved the world of the story, and we could see that there was a bigger story there that we could tell. If not right then then very soon afterwards I realised I had a different story I wanted to tell. In the short Shell’s Father is old and bedridden and dying, and Shell’s waiting for him to die before she can leave the garage, and you’re often seeing Shell from other characters points of view, I’d kind of lost interest in that, and I didn’t want to make films that way, and so the feature is very much from Shell’s point of view, and the relationship with her Father is very different, it’s the heart of the feature film in a way it isn’t in the short.

The most challenging thing when writing the feature was that, while it’s very limiting for Shell and Pete, you could do anything as a writer in a location like that, so I had lots of different ideas, and because I wasn’t really basing the feature on the short, and not returning so much to the characters as to that world, it took a while to find the story.

24FPS: The other thing I noted about the short is that you have an entirely different cast, and given what you said about returning more to the world than the characters, was that new casting by design, and did it change your view of the characters by who you cast?

Scott Graham: No, my view of the characters had changed, and that’s why the cast changed. It took quite a long time to find them, Chloe I’d seen in a short called Solstice, so I’d had her in mind for a while but we wanted to cast a believable father and daughter, because they said so little they had to work just by looking at them, it took a while to find that dynamic. Now, at least the character in the feature, I can’t imagine anyone else playing her but Chloe.

24FPS: The relationship between Shell and her Dad is very complex, did you have rehearsal time with Chloe and Joseph, or what other preparation did you have them do, because I imagine you must have had a short shoot?

Scott Graham: It was fairly short, four weeks, but we were up there for about six. Chloe and Joseph lived together by themselves for two weeks before we shot. I was there in the Highlands, but the idea was to leave them alone and let them get to know each other, get past that awkward stage where you’re getting to know someone, get past the polite stage, so they’d get comfortable with each other, learn each other’s mannerisms, have their first arguments and all of those things. That was important for their relationship, and also they both live in London, so it gave them the sense of place, because both of the characters grow out of that environment in a way, so they needed to get in touch with the setting. That was the main preparation that we did, we didn’t rehearse scenes, or even read together, until we got to the location.

 

24FPS: and did you find the location in the Highlands?

 

Scott Graham: We thought we would find it, but all the garages I remember had been pulled down and all we found were piles of scrap, not even abandoned garages. We thought we’d find an abandoned garage, or one that was seasonal, that we’d be able to take over because we were shooting in Autumn and Winter, but they were all gone. We found a lookout, a deserted area, and we built the garage there, and also collected bits of old garages we found as we were looking around.

 

24FPS: It’s safe to say that the third major character in the film is the landscape of the Highlands, and it’s quite bleak but the film is very beautiful, so can you talk a bit about the collaboration with your DP Yoliswa Gartig, and the look you were going for with the film?

 

Scott Graham: Yoliswa and I had shot short films together previous to doing Shell, so we had a way of working together already, we just wanted to create – well, not so much create as capture – that sense of beauty and bleakness that the Highlands has; it’s really expansive and yet claustrophobic. We talked a lot on site about how to capture that, and also how to walk in Shell’s shoes, how to keep close to her and to feel an intimacy between them and to feel the difference between the very claustrophobic environment they live in and the very expansive one they work in.

 

24FPS: Without spoiling the film, coming out of it and talking to people one word that kept coming was that they felt it was bleak, and I didn’t really agree with that, I felt it was more hopeful. I wondered where you stand on that, what you think about the feedback people have had on the ending, and where Shell’s going from it?

 

Scott Graham: I find the ending hopeful, I think she’s doing the right thing. There’s something tragic about it I think, but I’m glad that she does what she does. The main thing I think is important about her final scene is that she’s asked if she likes something, and she says that she does, but no one ever really asks her that during the film, it’s a small moment, but I definitely find it hopeful.

 

24FPS: You said earlier that a big thing about going into film was realising that they were written, and that you see yourself as a writer first. Does that translate into your directorial style, are you quite script focused on set, or do you do a lot of improvisation with the actors?

Scott Graham: No I don’t do much, if any, improvisation. I’ve only made one feature, and I think it would depend on the project, the scene, and my relationship with the actors, but with this film, both me and the actors needed to have a clear idea of what we wanted to communicate in each scene and in each moment, precisely because there was so little dialogue. I found I needed to be quite sure of what I was trying to communicate with an image or with a look. Of course within that you invite, you depend on actors bringing life to what you’ve written; truth and honesty is the most important thing but we all knew within each moment what it was we were trying to do. Basically what the script contained was quite simple descriptions of what the characters were doing, what they were looking at.

 24FPS: I imagine the budget was quite small but what was the biggest challenge, and do you think there was any benefit from having those limitations?

 

Scott Graham: Limitations can be very inspiring and push you to be more creative, and push you to focus on what would be most effective for an audience. If we’d done interiors in a studio it would have been less expensive. That meant the shoot length was shorter, but it was worth doing that because it was important to be in the place where the story was set. In terms of limitations though, I try to respond to that positively as a writer. Shell became a single location film not because I couldn’t afford to move around but because that’s where the story is most interesting.

 

24FPS: Do you have a next project set up, and what can you tell us about it?

 

Scott Graham: Yeah, the next project is about a young woman who returns with her teenage son to the island of Iona, to a Christian community where she was born and raised, but left when she was 15, and they return to hide, essentially. I probably shouldn’t say more than that, but I’m developing that with the BFI.

 

24FPS: Finally, old or new, what’s the last great film you saw?

 

Scott Graham: [Long pause] Gosh. It’s been a while since I’ve watched anything great. I’ve got Spirit of the Beehive on order, and I’ve a feeling I’m going to like that. [Pause] I actually think To The Wonder is a great film, I had the same experience with Tree of Life where you can re-edit the film in your head and you find things that didn’t work so well for you fading into the background. In terms of experience I thought it was great. There’s still something very brave in what he’s doing, and I’m not sure whether it matters if you like it or not.

 

Thanks to Scott Graham for talking to me, and to Rabbit Publicity for setting it up (and for the tea). Shell opens in selected UK cinemas on March 15th and is excellent.