Blogger's commentary / preview of coming attractions

Work, as Oscar Wilde inimitably put it, is the curse of the drinking classes. It’s also a necessary evil for those of us who have a mortgage.

Mid last year, I jumped ship from a firm that was going rapidly downhill and, through an agency, landed a temp-to-perm position with a salary that would have cured my financials worries. At the end of the four weeks’ temp part of it – and just a week before my wedding – they decided the role wouldn’t go permanent after all and I was left with my you-know-what hanging in the wind.

Six months of temp positions followed, mostly data entry; repetitive, boring as hell. The last position was a reception/admin gig at a grim industrial unit. The firm provided training services to a rag-tag clientele including individuals referred over by the Probation service.

On the plus side, I was left alone in the office for most of the time and I had full internet access. Blogging a-go-go! On the minus side, there was insufficient training, no support and no security and I felt more than a little vulnerable.

Just under three weeks ago, when I was threatened with physical violence, I figured that an hourly rate less than 50 pence above minimum wage didn’t cover that kind of shit, and walked out.

Result: a week and a half without work. Pros: getting up late; lounging around the house; blogging a-go-go. Cons: no income; necessity of signing on. I’d just steeled myself to register a benefits claim when the temp agency I was registered with called me: an admin job, immediate start, decent rate of pay, placement until end March at least.

That was Monday afternoon. I’ve spent the rest of this week integrating myself into the new job (and, I must admit, quite enjoying it). Evenings have been spent working on the novel, which currently stands at 33,000 words (closing in on the halfway mark).

But The Agitation of the Mind has not been forgotten. In the last fortnight, I’ve seen ‘The Reader’ and ‘The Baader Meinhof Complex’ on the big screen. The latter got me thinking about how German cinema has developed a muscular and fearless capacity to re-examine its own dark history; and the latter has convinced me that mainstream cinema has identified this movement and decided to jump on the bandwagon.

Accordingly, February on The Agitation of the Mind is going to kick off with a German mini-season (including two personal faves), ending with an overview of how ‘The Reader’ exemplifies the current mainstream US/UK fascination with the holocaust. It won’t all be heavy sturm-und-drang film-making, as I’ll be throwing inspired high-concept satire ‘Good Bye Lenin!’ into the mix.

And once I’ve got the whole German thing out of my system, finished off the Becks Vier and got back to drinking Batemans and Newkie Brown, and ousted the bratwurst in favour of the Full English, I’ll be hosting a six-film Hitchcock-fest including another personal fave. Crop-dusting planes, mistaken identities, Mount Rushmore and Bernard Herrmann’s most memorable score will be high on the agenda.

Give me a week to finish getting to grips with the job and immerse myself in the DVD collection, and it’ll be business as usual.

See you next month.

PERSONAL FAVES: The Straight Story

It was David Lynch week on Out 1 last week, an occasion fittingly marked by some of the best writing Out 1 have yet published. My commitments to the Diane-fest meant I couldn’t join in at the time; however, this week’s Personal Fave is a belated salute to Out 1’s assessment of American cinema’s most idiosyncratic of auteurs.

I’ve seen me some weird stuff in the oeuvre of David Lynch. I’ve seen dancing dwarves talking backwards. I’ve seen Dennis Hopper snorting oxygen and getting medieval on some guys ass the moment Roy Orbison comes on the radio. I’ve seen nightclub acts to slit your wrists to in the Club Silencio.

But I ain’t never seen anything as weird as the opening credits to ‘The Straight Story’:

WALT DISNEY PICTURES PRESENTS

A FILM BY DAVID LYNCH

Think about that for a while. Really think about it. As Lula observes to Sailor, “This whole world is wild at heart and crazy on top.”

‘The Straight Story’ is easily the most non-David-Lynch David Lynch film, and yet it’s quintessentially Lynch. No-one else could have put such a quirky and individualistic spin on the story.

Let’s start with the title. ‘The Straight Story’. It’s a statement of intent: the film is straight (ie. the narrative has a traditional beginning, middle and end – man needs to go on journey, goes on journey, arrives at destination), whereas Lynch normally employs fractured or curiously circular narratives (I’m convinced the true beginning of ‘Mulholland Drive’ is about twenty minutes before the end credits) … and that’s only when he can be bothered to pay lip-service to narrative.

It also tells a story – a true story. A huge departure for Lynch: everything from ‘Eraserhead’ to ‘Inland Empire’ by way of ‘Twin Peaks’ has played out within its own self-contained and nightmarishly internalised boundaries. Twin Peaks, for example, isn’t a place – not like the Iowa of ‘The Straight Story’ is a place – it’s a state of mind. Its director’s mind – and that’s a way scarier place to be than anywhere in the U S of A.

‘The Straight Story’ recounts the odyssey of 73-year old Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) from Iowa to Wisconsin, desperate to mend bridges with his stroke-victim brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) before time runs out for either of them. Not in the best of health himself, and unable to drive a car, he opts to undertake the journey on a ride-on motor mower.

En route, he meets with bad weather, mechanical breakdowns, the kindness of strangers, memories of the past and reminds of his own mortality. Everyone he encounters is won over by his homespun wisdom and hard-earned experience.

I am soooo glad David Lynch directed this film. In the hands of almost any other director (except possibly Michael Bay, who would have made the lawnmower turn into a robot and blow shit up), ‘The Straight Story’ would have been two hours of saccharine whimsy. Imagine Spielberg calling the shots! Christ, being force-fed treacle for the entire running time would be less sickly!

Lynch channels the essential quirkiness of the story; his sense of the bizarre, coupled with Farnsworth’s perfectly nuanced, slightly irascible but ultimately dignified characterisation, are the reason ‘The Straight Story’ is such a gem of a movie. Take Alvin’s abortive first attempt, his ages-old Rehds mower conking out on him before he’s reached the next town. The mower roped down to the back of a pick-up truck, he’s unceremoniously driven home. Cut to: daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) and next door neighbour Dorothy (Jane Galloway Heitz) sitting at the kitchen table. “A man in a pick-up brought my dad back,” Rose recounts. “What kind of pick-up?” Dorothy asks. Alvin comes limping through the kitchen, shotgun in hand, a perfectly deadpan man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do expression on his face. He heads for the screen door; goes outside. They watch him in silence. The door closes behind him. “A Ford,” Rose replies tonelessly, glancing through the window as Alvin raises the shotgun and fires both barrels into the mower.

(He buys a John Deere as replacement and it gets him to his brother’s. As ‘The Italian Job’ was the best advert the Mini ever had, so is ‘The Straight Story’ to the John Deere company.)

Or take Alvin’s encounter with the hapless motorist who, on an empty stretch of road with nary a sign of life to either side of it, manages to plough into a deer – “my thirteenth in seven weeks”. Alvin asks if there’s anything he can do. “There’s nothing anyone can do,” she wails. “I’ve tried driving with my lights on. I’ve tried sounding my horn. I scream out the window. I roll the window down and bang on the side of the door and play Public Enemy real loud ... and still every week I plow into at least one … And I love deer.” Hysterical, she stomps back to her car, slams the door and accelerates away. Cut to: Alvin roasting a chunk of deer meat over a campfire, any number of the deceased’s herd gathering accusingly behind him. (A pair of antlers decorate his trailer for the rest of the trip.)

There’s humour here, too, another unusual ingredient for Lynch. The screenplay (by John Roach and Mary Sweeney) is a masterwork of dryly-observed and absurdist wit. A scene in a hardware store – where Alvin haggles over a grabber the storekeeper doesn’t want to sell because it’ll take him weeks to get a replacement on order – plays out like Oscar Wilde gone rural and getting no further sartorially than a pair of dungarees.

The emotional core of the film, however – and I’m willing to stake a tenuous claim that in this respect Lynch channels the aesthetic of Sam Peckinpah – is its treatment of the protagonist as anachronism. A man out of time. Alvin is among the last of his generation. Indeed, many of his contemporaries died in World War II. In the film’s quietest – and most devastating – scene, Alvin and another old-timer share reminiscences of the war. Alvin recalls that he still sees “my buddies’ faces … they’re still young”. The longer he lives, the more acutely aware he is of how little time they had. And it’s not just his dead comrades he mourns. The loss of life transcended national boundaries. “By the end, we were shooting moon-faced boys,” he says of the supposed enemy. A dozen times or more I’ve seen this film, and that one line has me in tears.

But Lynch never milks it. “The worst thing about getting’ old is remembering when you were young,” Alvin muses at one point, and there’s nary a hint of the weeping violins that would swamp the soundtrack on a Spielberg or Zemeckis film. Here, it’s a statement of fact, delivered with the conviction of one who knows.

Richard Farnsworth was 80 when he played Alvin Straight. A stuntman for 40 years before becoming an actor, he was debilitated by arthritis and had been diagnosed with terminal cancer when ‘The Straight Story’ went before the cameras. And he gave a performance of such grace! Of such beautiful characterisation! His Best Actor nomination was well deserved (unfortunately he had uncharacteristically strong competition, including Russell Crowe for ‘The Insider’ and Kevin Spacey – the winner on the evening – for ‘American Beauty’).

Richard Farnsworth died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound (and I’ll step outside and raise fists with anyone who makes a judgemental comment about suicide) shortly after the film was completed. ‘The Straight Story’ stands, alongside Dirk Bogarde’s ‘These Foolish Things’ as perhaps the loveliest, most elegiac swansong any actor could hope for.



I’ve reached 1,250 words. Enough is enough, even though there are still so many things about the film to be said. I saw it at Nottingham’s Broadway cinema when it was first released in 1999 and loved it completely and wholeheartedly. I love it more every time I watch it. It’s David Lynch’s most open and emotionally perfect film as director. The more I think about it – and having now written so indulgently on it – the more I think ‘The Straight Story’ might just be my favourite film of all time.

Unfaithful

Discounting his 1976 short ‘Mr Smith’ and 1990’s ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ as exceptions to the rule, there’s a definite thematic through-line to Adrian Lyne’s work as a director. Here’s a list of his films, accompanied by a thumbnail synopsis and a brief encapsulation of the subtext:

‘Foxes’ – in which a group of teens experience growing pains/rites of passage/sexual maturity. Subtext: if it’s pleasurable, you pay for it.

‘Flashdance’ – in which a welder pursues a second career as an exotic dancer (occasioning the classic ‘Full Monty’ line “hope she dances better than she welds – them joints won’t hold fuck all”). Subtext: ‘woman in a man’s world’ as a cloak for sexual objectification a-go-go.

‘9½ Weeks’ – in which repressed woman meets shag-happy but dangerously unpredictable stranger. Subtext: if it’s pleasurable, you pay for it.

‘Fatal Attraction’ – in which a rumpled middle-aged bloke married to the eternally gorgeous Anne Archer inexplicably decides to indulge in a bit on the side with a demented bunny-boiler. Subtext: dumb bastard had it coming.

‘Indecent Proposal’ – in which a hard-up couple agree to a $1 million/one night/one off carnal agreement with a rumpled middle-aged über-rich bloke. Subtext: sleeping around isn’t good for your marriage.

‘Lolita’ – in which a rumpled middle-aged academic gets hot under the collar for a somewhat-under-the-age-of-consent nymphet. Subtext: this kind of behaviour is a really bad idea. Seriously. Don’t go there.

‘Unfaithful’ – in which the wife of a rumpled middle-aged boring corporate dude does the wild thing with a hunky Latino bookshop owner and all manner of complications ensue. Subtext: sleeping around isn’t good for your marriage.

So, in summation, the World According to Adrian Lyne operates on the fundamental principle that fornication is the venal curse of the human race and only regret, recrimination and disharmony can ever come of it.

Which should make Adrian Lyne the most presbyterian director in the history of cinema. Except that he revels in it. ‘9½ Weeks’ in particular comes across as little more than a Zalman King (who co-wrote ‘9½ Weeks’) or an A. Gregory Hippolyte production but with a bigger budget. A case could be made that King and Hippolyte are more honest in that they acknowledge the sexual content of their films as the raison d’être and – with the possible exception of Sherilyn Fenn’s weepily confused heroine in ‘Two Moon Junction’ – depict it as pleasurable.

There’s a whiff of hypocrisy to Lyne’s work. Whereas European directors depict sex as natural and erotic (Julio Medem’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Sex and Lucia’ is an ideal example), sometimes complicated and maybe destructive, but always pleasurable, Lyne wants to have his cake and eat it. Or rather have his soft focus trouser-arouser scenes and make his characters pay for them.

‘Unfaithful’ would be easy to dismiss but for Diane Lane. If she transcends the material in ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’, she positively reclaims it here.

The stand-out scene takes place before Constance (Lane) has even embarked on her affair with Paul (Oliver Martinez). So torn-up with guilt just for visiting him (even though nothing, at this point, happens between them), she goes to see her husband Ed (Richard Gere) at his office and takes him a gift she’s just bought. They talk but Ed breaks off to take a phone call, during the course of which he throws his toys out of the pram and harshly berates a flunkey. The reaffirmation Constance has been looking for crumbles as Ed shows his true colours. Lane communicates the emotional crux of the scene through her eyes and it’s a good, subtle piece of acting.

‘Unfaithful’ isn’t all that much of a film, nor is Lyne all that much of a director (he shoots everything in the bland tightly-framed style of a commercial for designer kitchens), but he fell on his feet with his leading lady.

Hollywoodland

George Reeves has some notable credits on his filmography: ‘Gone With the Wind’ (the event movie of 1939), ‘Blood and Sand’ opposite Rita Hayworth, ‘The Fighting 69th’ and ‘From Here to Eternity’.

So you can understand why it was galling for him, returning from a wartime stint in the army and finding it difficult to resume his big-screen career, to don a padded suit and a pair of tights to play Superman in a popular TV series. That TV was, at that time, derided by film-makers and movie actors as a novelty at best and a bastardisation at worst, would only have added salt to the wound.

Reeves died on 16 June 1959, of a gunshot wound to the head. A verdict of suicide was arrived at, though controversy and unanswered questions continue to linger. Indeed, Reeves’s mother engaged the services of a private detective to look into the circumstances surrounding his death.

This fact provides the jumping-off point for Allen Coulter’s slow-burn drama ‘Hollywoodland’. The private eye here is a fictional character, Louis Simo (Adrien Brody), whose burgeoning obsession with the case is comparable to Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal)’s obsession with the Zodiac killer in David Fincher’s film.

Simo is two-bit operator, struggling to maintain a relationship with his troubled son and keep things civil with his ex-wife (Molly Parker). A recent case has gone pear-shaped, his client murdering the allegedly unfaithful spouse he’d hired Simo to follow – a woman Simo dug up no dirt on.

Hired by Reeves’s mother (Lois Smith), this new investigation gives him something to focus on; to delve into; to get too personally involved with. Simo’s sleuthing plays out in counterpoint to a series of flashbacks which chronicle Reeves (Ben Affleck)’s life, beginning with his chance encounter with Toni Mannix (Diane Lane), a woman a decade his senior who enjoys an open marriage to MGM troubleshooter Eddie Mannix (Bob Hoskins) – ie. they both consort with other partners and Eddie’s only going to get pissed off with you if you don’t treat his missus right.

Which makes Eddie a suspect when Reeves splits up with Toni the better to enjoy the attentions of younger society playgirl Leonore Lemmon (Robin Tunney), leaving his former – and eminently supportive and generous – mistress distraught. But as Simo comes to understand just how volatile Reeves’s relationship with Leonore was, he begins to wonder if the solution isn’t significantly closer to home …

Kudos to Coulter and screenwriter Paul Bernbaum: they don’t try to impose a solution on the film. ‘Hollywoodland’ is a mystery sans resolution, like the aforementioned ‘Zodiac’, or Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’. In fact, like that latter film, it’s more a rumination on image and perception. At three key points, Simo finds himself drawn back the house Reeves died in, standing sepulchrally outside while a different possibl scenario plays itself out inside (ie. in Simo’s imagination).

Brody, playing very much against type as a wiseacre P.I., channels the likes of Jack Nicholson in ‘Chinatown’, before peeling back the layers and finding the lost soul within his character. Affleck does some of his best work onscreen, his matinee idol looks and slightly artificial air of suavity ideally suited to a 1950s leading man. Hoskins’s American accent wavers occasionally, but he’s suitably pugnacious as Eddie Mannix; you have no trouble believing that when this man deals with things, they stay dealt with.

The ladies of the cast excel: Lois Smith gives a potent performance as the grieving but irascible mother; Robin Tunney goes all out for white trash high camp as a floozy with a mouth as loose as her morals; and Diane Lane provides the human core of the film, a glamorous and intelligent woman just beginning to fear the future as she edges into middle age. Lane projects grace and dignity, which makes her profanity-spiked comment about Reeves’s new squeeze all the more shocking. It’s the best line in the film and it’ll make you wince. (It’s about smoke rings, by the way.)



Tomorrow: the Diane-fest concludes with 'Unfaithful'.

The Big Town

To the best of my knowledge ‘The Big Town’ is the only feature film helmed by prolific TV director Ben Bolt. Which is a shame since it’s one of the better American movies of the ’80s, free of the artificial visual stylisations which render much of that decade’s filmic fare hideously outdated. To indulge in a sweeping generalisation, it was a decade marked by high-profile directors seeming hell-bent on generating indulgent and excessive throwbacks to the Hollywood of old – ‘The Cotton Club’, ‘One From the Heart’ and ‘Heaven’s Gate’ spring to mind – and ending up with costly flops that marred reputations and even bankrupted studios.

‘The Big Heat’ pays homage to old school Hollywood – the films noir of the ’40s – but manages to be small scale, reined-in and focussed on telling a pacy story. Bolt’s direction is clear-sighted and unpretentious. He loses no time in establishing character and location. The opening credits, playing out to Johnny Cash’s mournful rendition of ‘Home of the Blues’, sets up not-quite-hero-not-quite-anti-hero J.C. “Cully” Cullen (Matt Dillon) as a small-town boy from a farming community, holding down a grease-monkey job in an auto shop by day and proving himself a craps shooter extraordinaire by night.

Equally swiftly, Bolt and scripter Robert Roy Pool (adapting Clark Howard’s novel ‘The Arm’ have him blow Nowheresville for the big town (Chicago). Sponsored by hard-nosed businesswoman Ferguson Edwards (Lee Grant) – whose embittered husband, referred to only as Mr Edwards (Bruce Dern), was a renowned dice shooter until he was blinded in an acid attack by a vengeful opponent – Culley breaks every game in town, strikes up a non-committal romance with hometown girl Aggie (Suzy Amis), and enjoys the easy money, flashy clothes and the cachet that comes with the Edwards’s protection.

But it isn’t enough. Cleaning up with their money is one thing, but Culley wants to make a big score with his own stake. He hears tell of a game run by club-owner and mobster George Cole (Tommy Lee Jones). He attends, flashes his money around and wins big. In doing so, he rubs Cole up the wrong way. In a further complication to his continued personal safety, he falls hard for Cole’s exotic dancer mistress Lorry Dane (Diane Lane). They are soon conducting a full-blown affair.

With Cole out to bring Culley down a peg or two, and Lorry leading him a merry dance, into the picture comes Phil Carpenter (Tom Skerritt) who swiftly replaces the Edwards as a mentor of sorts. But is Carpenter the man Mr Edwards has been dreaming of revenge against all these years? And to what lengths will he go to get that revenge?

With its naïve but corruptible protagonist, duplicitous femme fatale, sardonic gangster, tangle of divided loyalties and milieu of back rooms, bars, shadowy streets and gaudy neon, ‘The Big Town’ is straight-up film noir. Perhaps only the ending, where Culley at least gets one of the girls (as well as the chance to resume his old life), hits a wrong note – the happy ending. The rest of it, though, is compellingly cynical, particularly when Culley realises just how thoroughly he’s been used.

Dillon captures both sides of Culley: the wide-eyed country boy suddenly exposed to a flashy, addictive lifestyle; and the inveterate money-grubber for whom materialism is everything. Jones, Skerritt and Dern are on top form. Suzy Amis, in only her second film appearance following a bit part in ‘Fandango’, is luminous as the romantic heroine with a chequered past.

And then there’s Ms Lane: seductive, smouldering, fantastically foxy in her show-stopping fan dance. In the pantheon of great burlesque routines in the movies – after singling out Rita Hayworth’s immortal “Put the Blame on Mame” turn in ‘Gilda’ for the number one spot – Lane’s fan dance is definitely Top Three material alongside Lolita Davidovich’s voluptuous bit of bump ‘n’ grind in ‘Blaze’*. She’s everything a femme fatale should be, viz. enough to make a priest kick a hole in a stained-glass window.



*Davidovich (billed as Lolita David) has a small role in ‘The Big Town’ as, presciently enough, a stripper.


Tomorrow on the Diane-fest: ‘Hollywoodland’.

Under the Tuscan Sun

As a non-fiction literary sub-genre, the moderately-successful-writer-buys-old-house-in-picturesque-European-village-befriends-the-locals-and-writes-bestseller-about-it is a fairly narrow field. Three titles pretty much define it: ‘A Year in Provençe’ by Peter Mayles, ‘A Valley in Italy’ by Lisa St Aubin de Teran, and ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ by Frances Mayes.

There have been two attempts at capturing Mayles’ summery prose onscreen: the ill-advised BBC adaptation with John Thaw, and Ridley Scott’s ‘A Good Year’ starring Russell Crowe. I mean, come on – Russell Crowe as a fictionalised Peter Mayle! Lounging around in a vineyard! (“At my command … uncork another bottle.”)

St Aubin de Teran’s book, perhaps the most elegant literary work of the three, has yet to be subjected to the big screen treatment.

‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ was filmed in 2003, writer-director Audrey Wells’ only film to date apart from 1999’s ‘Guinevere’, a decent enough rites-of-passage movie starring Sarah Polley. ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’ is middlebrow, middle-of-the-road, inoffensive and somewhat pedestrian in its direction.

It would be so easy to criticise this movie. You could call it a chick flick (if you wanted to be really cruel, you could call it a middle-aged chick flick). You could call it chocolate box film-making (cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson’s camera positively bathes in the glorious scenery). You could accuse it of revelling in cliché (if you don’t see the last half dozen scenes coming like the QEII on a duckpond, you’re clinically dead). You could write off the last half hour as an excess of saccharine (seriously: the final reel isn’t just sugar-coated, it’s wound in clayfloss, dipped in whipped cream and drizzled with melted chocolate).

But I’ve got to admit … and it’s not just because of Diane Lane’s presence … I have a soft spot for ‘Under the Tuscan Sun’. And with my recent movie-viewing including ‘Che – Part One’, ‘Hell Drivers’ and ‘Emperor of the North’ – dark, intense films – ‘UTTS’ provides a pleasant change of pace: light-heartedness, sweeping sunny vistas, the laughter of friends, the flowing of wine and the transient joie de vivre of a May-to-September romance.

Having said that, the romantic subplot is probably the worst aspect of Wells’ fictionalisation of Mayes’ memoir, giving the film its clumsiest scenes and its single most awkward visual image.

On the whole, though, watching 'UTTS' it is like sinking into a bubble bath or getting that slight fuzzy feeling from your second or third glass of wine (or your second or third bottle, depending on your personal tolerance levels). It clears the palate before you reach for, say, ‘Unforgiven’ or ‘Deep Red’.

And to give the film its dues, it owns up to its clichés. My favourite scene comes fairly early on. Novelist Frances (Lane) has divorced her cheating bastard of a husband and moved into a gloomy apartment (“you’re a writer?” the realtor says; “you can help the others [tenants] write their suicide notes”); her best friend Patti (Sandra Oh) endeavours to cheer her up by treating her to a package tour of Tuscany. One of her fellow tourists, stumped at what to write on an obligatory postcard to his mother, calls upon Frances’ literary talents. She glances around the piazza, sees a gaggle of nuns eating ice cream, an expatriate British woman chatting with the locals, a small car weaving non-too-discreetly through a throng of pedestrians, a couple of bronzed and oleaginous types checking out women, people buying food and two small boys positively drooling over a gleaming red Ferrari. “It’s market day in Cortona,” she writes; “the piazza is an ongoing party and everyone is invited. Clichés converge at this navel of the world. You almost want to laugh, but you can’t help feeling these Italians know more about having fun than we do.”

It’s a nice moment, slightly self-deprecating. Much of the first half works on this level: a patchwork quilt of gently played-out scenes, such incident as there is deriving from character and observation without the need to force anything resembling a narrative arc on the proceedings … until, that is, the last forty minutes or so. Still, it’s just about forgivable. Wells might be a pedestrian film-maker, but her cast are perfect: Diane Lane transcends the material time after time, Sandra Oh makes an excellent foil and Lindsay Duncan is memorable as the expatriate British actress still living in a fantasy world of Rome à la Fellini. There’s a nod to ‘La Dolce Vita’ that could easily have been cringingly embarrassing, but comes off as curiously poignant.

My advice: crack a good bottle of Italian wine as the movie starts, enjoy a terrific first half with its celebration of female unity, then drink yourself into a pleasant stupor wherein the convergence of clichés no longer detract from the sheer gorgeousness of the Tuscan locations … and of the delectable Ms Lane.




Posted to coincide with Diane Lane’s 44th birthday. Up tomorrow on the Diane-fest: ‘The Big Town’.

A rare political interlude (2)

He cleared his desk ...

... and he fucked off.