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SO
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
Why I Hated Some Recent MoviesLost
won three golden globes at the
Oscars, and Francis Coppola’s daughter, Sophia, an ex-actress
for very
good reasons, got the director’s award and now walks the
cakewalk with
celebrities at Spring Fashion shows in My
loathing of Lost stems from recent disappointments
at the cinema. As
boardrooms have taken over from auteurs, screens
have grown bigger and
actors smaller, as though auditioning for television spin-offs. You
watch them
through the wrong end of a telescope. Incredibly shrinking. And the
special
effects diminish their voices, so you have to strains your ears. In Cold
Mountain (2004), deafening torrents of blood and guts
crosscut with
pastoral scenes back home before the war (girlish laughter, blackguard
jibes,
bull dancing - all in slow motion, like the field of corn in Elvira
Madigan
(1967) without the Mozart piano concerto, just the odd bucolic whoop).
It’s enough
to make The Guns of Navarone
(1962) seem sophisticated. Nicole
Kidman has etiolated herself to play the young Penelope in a
mid-nineteenth
century backwater, knitting and nattering with the other war wives, but
looks
as though she’d be more at home joining up. She once pumped
iron (To Die For,
1994), and will again, when movies come to their senses. Meanwhile,
temporarily
on loan to the world of representative people, Nicole Kidman folded
herself
under Tom Cruise’s wing and, when their marriage broke cloud,
the dainty morsel
was dropped at the foot of the I
walked out of Breasts
too have shrunk to virtual nipples. I long for bodicerippers like The
Pride
and the Passion (1957), with Sophia Loren bursting out and
Cary Grant as
Anthony Quinn bursting in. Bunkum unbounded, unrestrained by taste and
distracting details. All eyes were fixed on the décolletage.
Would it pop out
on the horse ride? Unlikely as it may seem, the preppy, prissy
mother’s boy
Cary Grant fell for ‘the promise of pneumatic
bliss’ in the ‘uncorseting’ of
Sophia Loren. (Archibald Leach, aka Cary Grant, was an inversion of TS
Eliot,
an English American rather than an American Englishman). And when Loren
sent
him packing, low rumours had it he consoled himself in the arms of
other men,
likewise smitten, unrequited. She unmanned Anthony Quinn in Heller
in Pink
Tights (1960). I
see
you, Sophia Loren, swagger your priceless cargo through the streets of Sophia,
you had the pick of Clark Gable, Steve McQueen and Gregory Peck and,
goodness
gracious me, you ended up going ‘Boom boody boom boody boom
boody boom’ with
Peter Sellers (The Countess of Hong Kong, 1967).
Popular choice,
Marcello Mastroianni, fell asleep before you could finish your
striptease (Marriage
Italian Style, 1963). Another mother-lover made impotent by
smotheration.
So you put the dummy in the baby’s mouth. You
who were in everybody’s arms in dreams before the sixties
went skinny, and what
did you do but marry Charlie Bridges (alias Carlo Ponti), and now you
are
appearing on the Terry Wogan Show wearing Dame Edna spectacles and
talking
bambino English. It is as shamefully sad as Grace Kelly lowering
herself on to
the throne. The pulping of the pulpeuse… O
Doctor I’m in trouble. They Won’t Be Making a Movie About ThisBertrand
Cantat, lead singer of
Noir Désir, and soi-disant poète
of Pop, apologises for killing
Marie, the daughter of Jean-Louis Trintignant. I take it personally,
having
been Trintignant for several years in the seventies. He always looked
embarrassed (And God Created Woman, 1956. Or was it
Roger Vadim who made
Camille Javel into Brigitte Bardot?) and sorry to be himself (Il
Sorpasso,
1962), which made his priggish performance in Ma Nuit Chez
Maud (1970)
mine. The embarrassment may have had something to do with his name, the
least
memorable and pronounceable in any language I know (or don’t
know). ‘Easy’,
says Welsh. ‘ Trant-eeng-yong.’ (But you have to
allow for a butt stuck to his
desiccated lower lip.) Trintignant
was the second best assassin in movie history, The Conformist
(1970).
The best was Alain Delon in Le Samourai (1967)
directed by Melville, who
was a genius compared to the flashy Bertolucci, who aged badly (like
snow that
stays too long on the ground, precocious auteurs
tend to end up
producing slush). It
should be said that Delon was also the best cinema boxer (Rocco
and his
Brothers, 1960). Eat your heart out Robert de Niro (Raging
Bull,
1980) and spit it out Burt Lancaster (The Killers,
1954). Tough and
tender as a street boy, everyone was his mother. And when the champion
had him
on the ropes, the audience wept. Delon, the Frank Sinatra of French
cinema, and
he didn’t need to sing. In Court Bertrand Cantat thinks he is performing in a movie of his own making, the Trintignants as his supporting players. He is going for the minimal sentence, pleading regret, about as convincing as Fats Waller’s mugging of it, or Edith Piaf’s lack of it. He’s Ronald Reagan’s domestic rat in The Killers (1954), and wants to be exonerated. As though accepting an Oscar, he lists the thanks in advance for ‘forgiving him’, with special mention for Marie’s mother (who’s published a book wishing him canned for cat food). Only J-LTrintignant’s name is omitted. Difficult to pronounce, it’s true. But why tempt the second best assassin in movie history? French
people tend to makes themselves tout petit when
speaking of Marie
Trintignant. They speak of her ‘bright little life’
extinguished by four
blows to the head. Four is a significant number in Cantat got his seven years (three off for good behaviour, some more for ill health and a transfer to an open prison, outside which his fans will regroup). He will be back. Chabrol, who made Marie Trintignant immortal as the unhappy housewife in Betty (1992), said, ‘She gave herself totally. Too much. I used to say to her ‘Marie, come back to earth’.’ Maybe I, as Trintignant, should send Delon a gun. He’s still around, unloved by the gods for going on and on while conspicuously going off. Maybe he has one last performance as an assassin under his slouch hat. Carry On Welsh
I say to Welsh, ‘mon frère, mon semblable, mon hypocrite lecteur’ (he pretends to read my work to keep me off his back). The bastard paints an evil flower, but Baudelaire annoys him. ‘Brother can you spare me a dime’, he quips. His bottom line is money, as mine is Les Fleurs du Mal. That’s what I think. Welsh’s
life is
like his paintings. You think you get them. But look again, and
something has
changed that changes everything. He is a one-man trompe
l’œil. Welsh
sees himself as a character actor contracted to Rank in the late
nineteen
fifties, who plays bit parts so often that when he doesn’t
appear in a Carry On
film, a radio SOS would be broadcast. He left Welsh
would have made a perfect Tarzan. Spry as a monkey on his Charles Atlas
regime
(‘without the milk’), and more intelligent than
Johnny Weissmuller. Though the
roll-ups have slowed him down, he would have been his own stuntman,
possibly
inventing slow motion in the age of Keystone cops. Special effects
would have
been second nature to him. Tarzan’s cry, that is Johnny
Weismuller’s shout
played backwards on a dictaphone, could have been his after the sale of
a
twenty-year-old canvas (‘I always knew someone would want
it’). A pity they
went for the lounge lizard Lex Barker when Weissmuller went to fat. His
last
role before a stroke killed him was as a When I tell Welsh this he nods with exaggerated approval, but adds, ‘I think once I was a television extra in a beach scene in Canet. But I missed the emission. I went to the pub to celebrate. Those were the days. My only regret was missing out on Shakespeare. I would have been a great gravedigger.’ ‘Digging
your own grave. I think I can arrange that’, I say.
‘Or Cassius in Julius
Caesar.
I always regret missing the school play.’ |