Two more movies

I have watched two films from my video collection this week. The first was Mike Leigh's All or Nothing. Mike Leigh is a celebrated film director lauded in Europe but a minority taste in Britain and America. Secrets and lies is perhaps his best known movie. In this 2003 film Timothy Spall is the only well known actor and he plays the part of Phil, a fat and feckless driver of a mini-cab in South London (the famous London black cabs reputedly won't go south - pronounced 'sarf' - of the river). He is the common law husband of Penny who works on a supermarket checkout. They have two children, fat Rachel who mops up at an old people's care home, and fat Rory, who inhabits a sofa from where, he eats junk food, watches junk television and shouts abuse at his parents in junk language. They live in a council flat in a tower block. Their neighbors are Ron who also drives a mini-cab, but keeps on having accidents, always blaming a woman in a Volvo which at least sometimes is imaginary, (Volvos are legendary non-cool cars in England and women drivers - well, women drivers! - are the butt of every poor driver's ire), and Carol who is perpetually drunk. Their daughter is the local tart, practising her wiles on a strange young man who hangs around beneath the tower block. The other neighbor is Maureen, a single mother who takes in other people's washing. Her daughter is another hopeless case who gets pregnant by a foul-mouthed lout, Jason. His reaction is to thump her and then protest that he will do the decent thing; he will drive her to the abortionist rather than make her take the bus.

Phil's life is so terrible that he survives by living on another planet with his phone and radio switched off. Penny holds things together resentfully. Maureen is the only upbeat character. She sings (well) at a Karaoke pub about the one who made her brown eyes blue. She knows she can cope with hardship and keep smiling.

This is not a movie that many people will like. The foul language will deter many and the relentlessly depressing subject matter will put others off. It is undoubtedly a masterpiece of film making - the acting is wonderful, the characterisation Dickensian and the direction and editing superb. But is it true? I suspect that the picture of Britain portrayed is exaggerated. I could believe this of 1979 but surely life has got better. If the characters are really true to life then there is little hope for London. I could well see a future fascist party deciding that they would make good cannon fodder in some future war.

The White Countess, directed by James Ivory, is another movie by a well respected director. Set in the Shanghai of 1936/7 it stars Ralph Feinnes as Jackson, an American diplomat who was there at Versailles and whose career has taken him to China where he lost his wife, child and sight in two separate urban bombings. He has prostituted his good name by allowing it to be appended to some business firm's letterhead in return for a stipend. Natasha Richardson plays Sofia, a Russian countess driven out by the Communists and now living in penury with her in-laws (which includes her real life mother and aunt, the Redgrave sisters). While the family puts on airs, she is sent out to work as a night club hostess with a bit of prostitution on the side to earn enough to keep her daughter and in-laws fed. They despise her for what she does. Jackson drinks too much, but has one ambition which he shares with Matsuda, a mysterious Japanese. He wants to create the perfect night club as a work of art. After some luck at the racetrack this is what he does and invites Sofia to become his centerpiece - she will no longer have to sell her body.

The nightclub lack political frisson and to remedy that Jackson turns to Matsuda to provide Nationalists, Communists, Chinese soldiers and Japanese businessmen. The relationship between Feinnes and Richardson, which is the real centerpiece of the film, is kept simmering without ever boiling over by the sang froid of the English actors. It suggests passion under control. It takes the Japanese invasion (as we knew it would) to unleash their true feelings. Some have thought that Jackson was modelled on Rick in Casablanca, but I think he more closely resembles the English Colonel in Bridge on the River Kwai.

Some Merchant/Ivory aficionados were disappointed in this, the last of their movies, but I thought it better than that. The 1930s were such an important decade. The generation that lived through them is beginning to die off. Films like this that hark back to the style of that tumultuous era get my vote every time.