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The Queen
This 2006 film by Stephen Frears was showered with six Academy Award nominations, winning Best Actress for Helen Mirren in the title role. It is interesting to see this movie now, relatively soon after Queen Elizabeth’s visit to Ireland, which gave a different impression of the monarch and underlined how much time has gone by since the days in 1997 when many people in Britain went crazy (my take) over the death of Princess Diana. Indeed, the liberal newsreel footage used in Frear’s film reminded me of nothing so much as film coming out of North Korea after the death of the Dear Leader. It would have been easy for Frears and screenwriter Peter Morgan to do a hatchet job on Her Royal Highness, but like our point of view character (none other than Tony Blair, as played by the chameleon-like Michael Sheen) we come to appreciate her position and maybe see the value in the institution of the monarchy. Instead, it is the anti-monarchist Cherie Blair (Helen McCrory), who comes off looking silly and a bit out of touch. The main fascination comes from the feeling of voyeurism as we watch intimate moments among the royal family that would never be documented first-hand. We come to understand why the Queen was loath to leave Balmoral, as her life approaches something normal there. We see her walking around and talking to people quite casually, using a mobile phone and driving a Range Rover. A decade and a half after the events portrayed, the Queen still endures. And her prediction to Blair (made by the screenwriter with the benefit of hindsight) about his own eventual fall in popularity has long since come to pass.
(Seen 29 December 2011)
Qui êtes-vous, Polly Maggoo? (Who Are You, Polly Magoo?)
I became curious about this odd 1966 French film when I first read about it in R.J. Jamison’s biography Grayson Hall: A Hard Act to Follow. I resolved to seek it out last month after coming across a funky/dingy pub named Polly Maggoo in the Latin Quarter during our visit to Paris. Clearly, this strange cult film is an object of fascination for more than a few people, even four decades after it was made. As a disdainful satire of the fashion world (an easy target even, or especially, back then), it is a progenitor of everything from Prêt-à-Porter to Zoolander to The Devil Wears Prada. It also takes on the media and, well, anything else that seems to have been bugging William Klein, the New York-born photographer, who directed this. Depending on your point of view, the incoherent and jumpy narrative structure either reflects a unique vision of reality or else the cast and crew were just making it up as they went along. Some sequences have a compelling quality about them, but they work in isolation rather than part of a whole. Rewards for latter-day viewers include a young Jean Rochefort—who has one of the all-time great cinematic faces and who can currently be seen in my neck of the woods as a straight man waiter in Mr. Bean’s Holiday—as the journalist making the titular Ms. Maggoo the subject of a pretentious weekly reality program. (The following week’s subject is Pope Paul VI.) The late, lamented Philippe Noiret is on hand as a reporter. Sami Frey plays a prince whose destiny may be linked with Polly’s. Or not. And Grayson Hall does a dragon lady turn as a thinly disguised version of Diana Vreeland. In the end, it’s all more interesting as a time capsule than a movie.
(Seen 17 May 2007)
The Quiet Man 
I swore I would give this a
fresh viewing. And I finally have. At this point in my life, this
1952 movie looks completely different from the first time or two
that I saw it. For one thing, the scenery is completely familiar
since I now live in the neighborhood. But the story and the
characters have more resonance for me now. Make no mistake, I am no
Sean Thornton. I have no Irish blood in me and moving to Ireland was
no sentimental homecoming. Still, it is amazing how well the film
captures the dynamics of an American-Irish marriage. This labor of
love by Irish-American director John Ford is essentially a
cartoon-ish shaggy dog story, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have
an awful lot of truth in it. Its portrait of small town life in the
west, in which the community takes an outsize interest in the
arrival of an apparent stranger and the personal affairs of a newly
married couple rings all too true. Ford’s view of rural Irish life
is largely idyllic, with the village embracing militant republicans
as well as a Protestant reverend and his wife, and this view is not
inaccurate. Still, some quaint features of the story compare grimly
with current times. Ireland is doing some serious soul-searching
these days about binge drinking and violence among its young men,
and this fact gives the movie’s good-natured portrayal of drinking
and fighting a bitter aftertaste. At the end of the day, however,
this is still the definitive film about the tenacious hold that
Ireland has always had on its American brethren. [Related commentary] (Seen
11 February 2003)
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