Category Archives: film

Easy Virtue’s Silent Incarnation, Plus Captions!

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“Here you are, a beautiful young woman immersed in scandal, about to be divorced. I could find you guilty, or you could come home with me.”

Easy Virtue Stats:
Noel Coward writes play 1925
Alfred Hitchcock makes silent film in 1928
Idiots make bad film in 2008

The glib charm of Noel Coward’s social comedy must come through better on stage, since the 2008 film blew it. The latest film version with Kristin Scott Thomas, Colin Firth, and Jessica Biel had a chance at capturing that charm, but something went wrong. Alfred Hitchcock 1928 film does them one better. Hitchcock’s silent film obviously loses the clever dialogue and, instead of a comedy, the film becomes a sentimental melodrama, albeit with a rather emancipated heroine. Yet the framing of the story in a courthouse, the transitions, the theatrical acting and the mooody orchestra pieces all make for a fun watch.

The film might be hard to find, but amazingly there is a website that has 1,000 film stills telling the story scene by scene. I started to wonder halfway through if silent films weren’t a perfect opportunity for audience creativity. Like Mystery Science Theater, you could create the words to the movie…


“No, really darling, I only take gin in my teacup.”


“Golly–I’m smoking a cigarette. A flagrant sign you’re stuffy mother will hate me!”


“Darling–why is your father still holding my hand—I’ve gotten into scandals over such things.”


“How charming. But if you don’t get me out of here, I insist on a second divorce.”


“If only I could read.”


“Wait a sec–she looks familiar!”


“There goes the family reputation. I should have listened to Mother.”


“Migraine my ass! I’ll dance in my slutty satin gown if I please.”


“It’s true I shouldn’t dance with my husband’s friend. But then, virtue is never easy.”

A Lone Bad Review of Summer Hours

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Summer Hours, a French film with Juliette Binoche, just opened in New York city and made a bit of a stir on some art blogs for wrapping a Corot in bubble wrap. The synopsis sounded charming, and I did the unthinkable a watched two films in a week, this time after paying $12.50 (!) for a ticket.

$12.50 did not quite buy me the charming, artsy French film I was expecting. The idea is that three siblings are left to divvy up the inheritance of a house and art collection upon their mother’s passing. The film built up well but it didn’t resolve at all–when the credits came on, I was surprised and most unsatisfied. Whatever happened to good old build up-conflict-resolution cycles? Aside from the beginning of the film before the mother dies, and the character of the housekeeper throughout, I felt like the story telling became an unravelling of separate pieces of thread with no end. So the director abruptly cuts the thread.


I’ve checked. I’m the only person on the Internet who left nonplussed. This film got a rave review in the NY Times and most everywhere else, has the lovely Juliet Binoche, and was sponsored by the Musee D’Orsay who let it use some of its works of art. (In return for funding the film, the Musee only asked to be included in the film in some way, which is an interesting concept.)

So maybe you shouldn’t take my word for it. The treatment of the adult children and the decisions left to them is matter of fact and unsentimental, and the wisteria is indeed lovely. That’s worth something.

Preference for Fictional Fiction

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In the absence of my boyfriend and thus a live-in excuse to procrastinate, I took fate and a glass of wine in my own hands and decided to watch a movie last night. We don’t have a TV and the boyfriend downloads any movies we watch, so to secure and watch a film is a feat for me.

Watching The Queen with Helen Mirren made me feel a little as if I were peering with binoculars into the palace windows. The film used the royal handling of Diana’s death as its plot; I felt like a I was reading an imaginative, physchoanalytic tabloid. (Is the news footage of Diana’s mourers real? I think I remember hearing it was.) It was a well-done film, but it shares much the same problems as the novella The Uncommon Reader, also based on Queen Elizabeth. It’s a weird mix of real and immagined. The Queen is even more factious than the novella, if only because the novella’s plot was imagined and the film’s was real. I prefer my fiction more fictional, and my biographies factual. It’s handled as if a conflation of art and life would take on a greater degree of realism, but it comes across as celebrity speculation.
I quite like it when Lord Byron or Oscar Wilde conflates art and life to dramatize themselves; it just feels different here. Is it a function of the Queen Elizabeth’s reticence that people like to imagine her private inner life or does her position as Queen transform her into a public figurehead at the service of the arts?