Elizabeth (1998)

 "It is no easy thing to be loved by the Queen. It would corrupt the heart of any man".

Before I praise this wonderful film, I'll get a few criticisms out of the way. 

So... the opening text- in a terrible font, incidentally- misspells the word "fervent"and has "halfsister" with no hyphen. And the closing text has England as "the richest and most powerful country in Europe"... er, no. Pre-industrial England, indeed pre-agricultural revolution England, was a middling country whose population was never going to be as big as a France or a Spain- England, I suppose, was more of a Netherlands or a Portugal.

Also, a lot of history is telescoped into a short time and the chronology is inevitably off. William Cecil is shown asan old man in the 1550s and dismissed early in Elizabeth's reign. Francis Walsingham is spymaster and Machiavel from day one. And did the future King Henri III of France really wear dresses and have sex with his aunt, the Queen Regent of Scotland?

And yet, I think, we have to accept this as a creative necessity. History is not easily crammed into two hours of screen time without being adjusted to fit. And this film, text aside, is magnificent.

Too often, history in cinema is shot in a dull, staid, Merchant Ivory way. Not here. Shekhar Kapur uses light, colour, claustrophobia and perspective wonderfully. We open with a truly shocking scene of three martyrs being burned at the stake, the sheer horror of it all being emphasised. Mary's court is dark and without joy, Kathy Burke giving us a Mary who has always been the underdog, and even as queen is humiliated by her neglectful husband and the nature of the cancer that kills her. She is bitter, resentful... yet cannot sign her sister's death warrant.

Elizabeth's accession is symbolised by two flashes of white light. We see the aftermath of the bloody battle in Scotland via the camera panning across the River Tweed running with blood. The look of the film is exquisite. Yet so are the performances. Cate Blanchett is, of course, a revelation, but the performances of Joseph Fiennes, Christopher Eccleston and Geoffrey Rush are equally superb.

This film is a triumph. Just try and ignore the text.

A Dangerous Method (2011)

“Angels always speak German...”

I've been watching a lot of David Cronenberg films lately, something which stems from both an increasing admiration of the diversity and extraordinary quality of his work and their ease of availability, particularly as several of them have been available on Amazon Prime of late. Sadly, I've seen rather more of the later films which tend to be subtitled than the older, more stereotypically Cronenberg "body horror" films which Amazon Prime seems unable to subtitle although its rival Netflix seems to have no trouble subtitling everything. Still, this superb film can't be blamed for that, and is another example of Cronenberg's late career peak.I hope, with increasing desperation, that he hasn't retired.

Superficiall this is a typical late Cronenberg film in that the camerawork and mood feel like Cronenberg and, of course, Viggo Mortensen plays a prominent role. Yet this is anything but a typical sort of film for Cronenberg to helm, being an adaptation of a period stage play that eschews the visual in favour of psychology. In every sense.

This is a fascinating portrait of three figures in intellectual figures- the well-known figures of Sigmund Freud and Paul Jung and the less famous yet pivotal figure of Sabina Spielrein.The film deals with several themes which echo those of psychoanalysis- father figures, sexual repression and guilt, and a very Belle Epoch approach to kink and kink-shaming, but also such things as social class and the tension between a comfortable yet repressed bourgeois life and a Bohemian life of freedom without security. It's a fascinating film of ideas, in that sense reminiscent of Cronenberg's Cosmopolis, but also a film full of repressed passion.

The whole thing is anchored by the three central performances of Mortensen, Michael Fassbender and expecially Keira Knightley, whose performance is simly extraordinary. A splendid film.

Eastern Promises (2007)

"London is a city of whores and queers."

I confess that I need to see more early period avid Cronenberg for his trademark body horror, and I will. Yet up to now I've only seen some of his late period non-fantasy stuff- Crash and Cosmopolis, both excellent. So what will I make of Eastern Promises?

Well, the directing is excellent, of course, from the framing of the first shot onwards. This is Cronenberg's London film, a tribute to what remains very much an imperial capital long after its empire has gone, a melting pot, a metropolis and world city far out of proportion to the nation of which it is capital, and a city which now, alas, faces the catastrophe of Brexit.

And yet... despite the excellence of Naomi Watt and the superbly ambiguous Viggo Mortensen, this is a very good but hardly superlative gangster film with both a conscience and an aesthetic for violence (which is excellent throughout). The famous twist is... fairly predictable, and what we have is a film about the Russian mafia, albeit a perfectly good one, and fascinating about the context with the tattoos and that depressingly prevalent Russian homophobia, but this is less good than either of the other Cronenberg films I've seen so far.

What it does show, though, is how many in less fortunate parts of our continent still see London as being paved with gold, so they come, and are abused and disappointed, hopefully not to the extent of poor Tatiana. But what we have here is a good film that, while well-directed, feels more like television than film.,

Black Swan (2010)

“Get ready to give me more of that bite!”

This is only the second film helmed by Darren Aronofsky that I’ve seen ( I reviewed π a fair while ago), and already he’s threatening to become one of my favourites. The previous film, an early effort, was low budget and independent, while this is a big Hollywood film, but the directorial style is just as uncompromised. This film, essentially, rocks. It’s intense. It’s clever. Once again there’s a focus on the inner life of one character, although I suppose I‘d have to see more of Aronofsky’s films to know whether this is a thing of him. But this film rules. Sod it, it’s about ballet, and I loved it. Do you have any idea how little I knew or cared about ballet?

In reality, though, this film could be set within any milieu where the competition is intense and overpowering. It’s hard to see a more extreme example of this than in the life of the ballerina, though; out of a large chorus there are only a few who make it big. The dietary restrictions are impossibly draconian. Joints are cracked as part of a regular ritual sure to guarantee consequences later in life. The sacrifices made are huge, and yet it may lead to nothing, as was the case with Nina’s mother, who simultaneously places her hopes in her daughter and jealously puts her down.

This is not a healthy lifestyle in any sense. In the case of Nina there is disturbingly graphic self-harm, sexual favours given for the sake of a good role, and ultimately derangement of a kind which is beautifully demonstrated throughout the film; only towards the tragic denouement do we realise just how many of the events have happened only in Nina’s imagination. The film is a slow unravelling of one obsessed young woman’s life, and it’s riveting.

Natalie Portman carries the film, with credit also due to Mila Kunis as the grounded and stable Lily and Vincent Cassel, so great in La Haine, as Maestro Thomas LeRoy, in the first time I’ve seen him in an English language film. LeRoy is a deeply creepy individual, using his power over these desperately ambitious, attractive young women in ways which are desperately predictable. Also worthy of praise is Winona Rder as Beth, whose fate prefigures the horrors which await Nina and point towards the meaninglessness of such obsession. Only those such as Lily, with a sense of perspective and a life outside ballet, survive relatively unscathed.

The climactic scenes, of Nina’s performance, are deeply clever, sublimely directed, and lead us to question much of what we’ve seen. This is a very clever, very visual and delightfully weird film which takes an art house sensibility and puts it into the relative mainstream. It’s a must see, whether you follow ballet or not.