Gropius wrote:As John mentioned Timecode above, one thing that will certainly be making my list is the better (IMHO) film that came after it, Hotel. This is a guilty pleasure of sorts: Mike Figgis's second attempt at a roaming split-screen digital extravaganza finds a film crew (meta-points) trying to make a Dogme-style production of a Jacobean tragedy (Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, a play dearer to my heart than most of Shakespeare) in Venice. It's full of shameless mugging from Hollywood types trying their hand at improv (Salma Hayek, David Schwimmer, etc.), and Rhys Ifans doing his angry Welshman, but one doesn't really go to this for the acting, except for the glorious Julian Sands in a small role as a tour guide, who I like to think is a reprise of his Yves Cloquet from Cronenberg's Naked Lunch.
It is probable that most will hate this, actually (current IMDB rating 4.6, with plenty of outraged reviews). My defence of it is based on a general preference for atmosphere and setting over plot and 'good' acting (and this film has atmosphere, however intermittently ridiculous), and an enthusiasm for anyone trying new visual experiments (the four-way split-screen points to a future of even more fragmented frames). However, I haven't actually seen it for some six years (was there really a subplot about cannibalism involving John Malkovich?), and am afraid to go back to it in case the original ambiance has worn off.
While I agree totally with Timecode, I recently sought out Hotel and was left cold by it. I liked the idea but felt it dropped into indulgence and incoherence after a relatively strong beginning (I thought the best part was the pre-credit sequence of Malkovich booking in to the hotel while being eyed up by the staff (including Danny Huston as the clerk), followed by the shock cut to the underground dinner scene where the participants have a very refined conversation all the time passing condiments and meat through the metal bars to Malkovich sitting caged at one end, but seemingly not bothered by his confinement!)
It is certainly a film with many bizarre moments (Schwimmer and Ifans growling at each other, with Hayek giving it a try herself! The Burt Reynolds cameo. The ending which I must admit went inconclusively over my head!), but I did feel that the cutting to the performance of Duchess of Malfi in widescreen to signify it as the play within the film, as opposed to times when the characters are in period dress but the emphasis is more on the filmmaking around the action of the play, was good. I also liked some of the splitscreen sequences though they felt far less motivated, and more arbitrary, than in Timecode - while some worked well to show simultaneous actions occuring in different parts of the Hotel that commented on each other by their pairing together (i.e. the producer's relationship with his wife contrasted with the relationship between the vampiric staff, and the way we follow a plate of tainted food from kitchen creation to the room housing the film crew), sometimes the choice to go into multiple screens felt rather arbitrary and I wasn't exactly sure what the need for such a technique at a particular moment was for, apart from just the use of the technique itself.
There was one sequence near the beginning which I thought was great though which involved nice, fluid seques from groups of characters in the Piazza getting ready for a performance in period garb among the crowds of tourists ("use the crowd! Use the pigeons!"). Ifans plays a parody of a horrible producer, driving one actress to tears and making crude suggestions to the actors to 'inform' their performance. He seems as single minded and purposeful in his approach to the character in the play as Sands' tour guide seems when he passes by the filmmakers (shouting out "the Duchess of Malfi was a slut!"). There is then a nice move into a couple of sequences from the play where the strange idea of period dress against a contemporary crowd actually seems to work, especially when Burrows wanders through the Piazza in her finery. Then there is another shift of tone which follows a passing lady up to the producer's office, where she 'performs' for him while he takes telephone calls, and she herself takes a call from a mysterious stranger, who could be a vampire and also seems to be a hitman with a target in Ifans himself. In this scene I think the film works well and has a bracing kind of fluidity to the action, but otherwise everything felt forced through to me. Saffron Burrows impressed me again after her role in Timecode (though Miss Julie was her best Figgis role, probably because it was her biggest), but she has little to do outside of her Duchess incarnation as the other more powerful and flamboyant personalities take over the verite portions. Though I wonder if that is intended, in order to show that the actress she is playing is separate from the more petty squabbles surrounding the production, similar to the way that her character in Timecode seems apart from the rest of the action to a certain extent?
In the end I felt it was a series of semi-ideas in search of a coherent story. I do not really regret seeing it, but I would likely recommend to others only with caveats, and suggest that ,Timecode should be seen first just to see if they will be interested in that kind of semi-improvised filmmaking, just without even the slight threads of plots that ran through that earlier film. Though I am not familiar with the Duchess of Malfi, which might have been an impediment. I would be very interested Gropius to see how well you feel it adapted the play? Are there aspects of the film that would have been richer from a good understanding of the play?
I'm glad to see though that even this film will have its supporters in the project! It just adds to the eclecticism!
Oh and Mark Kermode fans: since he loves Jason Isaacs (who departs the filming early, to the jealousy of much of the rest of the production, because he's landed a big film role on a Ridley Scott picture!) and cannot stand Julian Sands, I wonder how he would judge this film? Perhaps someone should message him to find out!
