The End of the Affair (15) General release The excitement was palpable at the discovery of Neil Jordan's first feature film, Angel, at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. An unknown quantity when it surfaced in the crowded Cannes marketplace, the film generated such positive word-of-mouth that extra screenings had to be held. To celebrate its success, there was a small party at the Hotel du Cap where the guests included Bertrand Tavernier, Anthony Burgess and Graham Greene. Staying behind in Dublin to promote the Irish release of Angel, Jordan, the fiction writer and newly turned film-maker did not meet Greene, the novelist who despaired of how the cinema had treated his books.
Eighteen years on, and nine years after Greene's death, the paths of Jordan and Greene converge in Jordan's mature, intelligent and deeply affecting film of Greene's 1951 novel, The End of the Affair - of which, we can speculate, the author himself could well have approved.
The narrative unfolds in an artfully devised time-shifting structure covering the years from 1939 to 1946, meticulously establishing the background period detail as it explores the passionate relationship which blossoms between the self-absorbed, narcissistic novelist, Maurice Bendrix, and the emotionally repressed Sarah Miles, the wife of a dour, asexual civil servant, Henry.
The turning point of the story, a cataclysmic event vividly illustrated by Jordan from the different points of view of its protagonists, is best revealed in the film for those unfamiliar with the novel. Suffice to say that it introduces a fourth character - God - into the triangular relationship at the narrative's core.
As with the central revelation of Jordan's The Crying Game, this dramatic incident and its consequences demand a leap of faith and a willing suspension of disbelief from the viewer already so deeply immersed in these protagonists and their fates. The viewer is rewarded by Jordan's masterful handling of the moral dilemma raised by this event as he acutely integrates the notoriously difficult - and potentially tedious - process of replaying events from multiple perspectives.
Greene's original novel was suffused by his preoccupations with the themes of sex, jealousy, God and death, and it mirrored his own adulterous affair with Catherine Walston, to whom he dedicated the book. Greene had good reason to be dissatisfied with the glib, all-too-literal 1955 film of the novel, directed by Edward Dmytryk.
Jordan's altogether superior treatment employs spare but eloquent dialogue to heighten the rich expressiveness of his three principal players: Ralph Fiennes in one of his finest, least mannered performances catches Bendrix in all his obsessive and possessive nature; Stephen Rea, in his eighth film for Jordan, transforms the potentially stereotypical character of Henry Miles in a wrenching performance which delineates the man's disintegration into a brooding, broken wreck; and the gifted American actress, Julianne Moore, is magnetic as Sarah in all her radiance, sensuality and vulnerability.
The unbridled passion of the illicit affair reaches its apex in an intense scene of sexual intimacy while outside bombs drop on London and on the soundtrack Michael Nyman's lush score swells. By contrast the subtle, more muted sequences - and the drama's complex reflections on the nature of faith and the spiritual - reaffirm Jordan's perceptive and abundantly cinematic skills as a storyteller. Seeing his film for a second time last week rendered it all the more haunting, resonant, meaningful and quietly devastating.
Toy Story 2 (PG) General release
By Hugh Linehan
Given that critics spend so much time bemoaning the current state of affairs in their allotted field, and pining for past glories, it's only right and proper that genius should get its due when it makes its rare appearance. That John Lasseter is so far ahead of his contemporaries in animation as to be out of sight is surely beyond dispute. That he is the best animated feature filmmaker we have ever seen is becoming increasingly clear with this, his third, magnificent full-length movie.
Like the first Toy Story, this sequel has all the elements of a classic adventure - thrills, spills, surprises and fun. Also like the original, it manages that difficult feat of working superbly and simultaneously on several different levels - this is the movie you can bring your kids to and have a great time at yourself. Not just once, either - this viewer left the cinema longing to see it all over again. The wit, inventiveness and economy of the story-line means that it's well-nigh impossible to take in all of the superb visual detail at one sitting.
Toy Story 2 picks up where the first film left off - back in the safe sanctuary of Andy's bedroom, with the world in its proper order and the toys assured of their place within it. In particular, Woody the cowboy, Andy's favourite, is looking forward to his holiday at cowboy camp. But things go rapidly wrong when Woody is slightly damaged and gets left behind. Soon, he finds himself falling into the clutches of an antique toy collector, and transported across the city to the collector's high-rise apartment.
Although it doesn't quite have the surreal darkness of the first movie, Toy Story 2 has all the depth and resonance of classic fairytales. At the core of the film is Woody's realisation that, some day, he will be discarded by his owner. While trapped in the apartment, he discovers that he's actually the star of a long-forgotten TV show (beautifully rendered in scratchy black-and-white). He is now the centrepiece of an antique collection which includes a cowgirl, a pony, and the Old Prospector - who, after all these years, is still proudly "box-fresh". When the cowgirl (voiced by Joan Cusack) tells Woody of her own abandonment (in a Randy Newman song so mawkish it actually, astonishingly works), he is forced to confront the meaning of his own, inexorable fate: change is inevitable; loss is part of life. Andy will grow up and Woody will be forgotten.
The genius of Toy Story 2 is that, like the best fairy tales, it makes these grown-up themes work in the context of a story for children. It's not all existential angst; while Woody is trapped, his pals are navigating the city in a series of brilliantly-staged escapades.
Lasseter and his team at Pixar have embraced digital technology as a means of re-making the world in strange, exhilarating and beautiful ways: tarmac, glass, leaves and metal are re-imagined and reinvented from a miniature perspective in an extraordinary palette of colours. There are good-humoured nods to Jurassic Park and Star Wars, although, when it comes to fantasy filmmaking, Lasseter makes both Spielberg and Lucas look like amateurs these days. He and his team are, quite simply, the best in the world at what they do.
The Beach (15) General release
By Hugh Linehan
Sun, sand, sex, drugs - all this and Leonardo Di Caprio too. The adaptation of Alex Garland's best-selling pot-boiler for slackers must have seemed like a certain winner to the financiers at 20th Century Fox. Add in the production team of director Danny Boyle, writer John Hodge and producer Andrew McDonald and you can almost hear the pitches at breakfast meetings: it's Lord of the Flies meets Trainspotting; The Blue Lagoon with street cred.; Swiss Family Robinson with a chemical twist . . .
Actually, The Beach is not as bad as that. For a start, it's gorgeous to look at, with cinematographer Darius Khondji making the most of the stunning Thai locations. And the depiction of backpacker culture in south-east Asia, in all its hedonism, vulgarity and naivety, is pretty spot on. It's this Thailand Uncovered world which Di Caprio's character, a solitary traveller with Apocalypse Now fantasies, seeks to escape, seizing on the map left behind in a cockroach-infested Bangkok hotel by deranged suicidee, Robert Carlyle. The map indicates the existence of a secret, idyllic beach on an uninhabited island in the South China Sea, which Di Caprio sets off with two French companions (Guillaume Canet and Virginie Ledoyen) to find. When he gets there, he discovers the beach is inhabited by a community of like-minded refugees from consumer culture, led by the matriarchal Tilda Swinton.
So far, so interesting, but it's from this point onwards that The Beach starts running into difficulties. The main problem is Di Caprio - not his acting, but his status as mega-star of the moment, which seriously mis-shapes the film. In theory this is a movie about a utopian community imploding in on itself. But with Di Caprio in the central role, it becomes a study in post-teen male angst, and a rather tedious and unconvincing one at that. With the exception of Swinton, the rest of the community is so sketchily drawn that it's hard to give a damn when things start going wrong for them.
Where the pre-Titanic Di Caprio (one of the best young actors of his generation, lest we forget), would have fitted perfectly into the ensemble movie The Beach should have been, he now seems to be afflicted with Tom Cruise Syndrome, whereby every minute of screen time must include several close-ups. Someone should tell him - or his people - that narcissism is no substitute for storytelling.
This is the first venture into big-budget, studio-financed production by the Boyle/Hodge/McDonald triumvirate, still best known as "the people who made Trainspotting" - a tag they're surely desperate to lose at this stage. Boyle directs competently enough, but there's a lack of conviction in the final third of the film, and a throwaway quality to its denouement, which suggests too much tinkering in post-production, while the law of diminishing returns is beginning to apply to the Trainspotting soundtrack formula, with a rather predictable line-up from the likes of The Chemical Brothers, Leftfield and Moby.
The Beach is by no means unenjoyable, but ultimately - as holidays go - this one is more predictable package than thrilling adventure.
Time Regained/Le Temps Retrouve, (members and guests only) IFC, Dublin
Many directors and screen writers have plunged into the unstanchable streams of Proust's vast novel, A la recherche du temps perdu, and floundered. Visconti, Orson Welles, Joseph Losey and Harold Pinter have made vain attempts to screen it, and despite two creditable microcosmic versions - Schlondorff's Swan In Love and Adlon's Celeste - it has become a truism that Proust is unfilmable.
The independent Chilean filmmaker, Raoul Ruiz, has bravely immersed himself in the 12-volume novel and re-surfaced with this fluid, dreamlike work, which opens with the image of a river and closes with waves breaking on a Normandy beach. Ruiz's ambitious, sweeping film avoids the alternate traps of literary adaptation: slavish, literal fidelity, or flippant anachronism. It is less an adaptation than an extended, loving, meditation on the themes of Proust's novel, celebrating the potential of film to explore the realms of the subjective imagination and the unconscious.
By approaching the novel through the prism of its final volume, Time Regained, in which all its themes converge, the film attempts to look back at the entire work. It glides between past and present, between memory and fantasy, between recollected experience and retrospective projections. As the film opens, the bedridden Proust conjures up the ghosts of his past and of the characters of his novel; we are uncertain which is which.
Ricardo Aronovich's camera sweeps gleefully through scenes from the narrator's childhood in Combray, to elaborately choreographed scenes from the sumptuous salons of the Parisian aristocracy he mingled with, before and during the first World War. There's no point in worrying about the exact relationships between the characters and their complex genealogies; Ruiz doesn't attempt to explain them, mercifully, and the film can be appreciated even if you've never read a word of Proust. The narrator figure, Marcel (the excellent Marcello Mazarella) drifts through the scenes as an acutely sensitive observer, reflecting on his multiple past selves, on perceptions of time, on the death of love, and finally on death itself.
What first appears to be a conventional, big-budget costume drama complete with starry cast - Emmanuelle Beart, Catherine Deneuve, John Malkovich, Marie France Pisier and Vincent Perez - impeccable period detail and gorgeous set and costume design, slides into a highly poetic and symbolist work, as figures are grouped in tableaux like frozen statues or dummies, phantoms appear and disappear, characters appears as older and younger versions of themselves and images of disparate objects are juxtaposed and dissolve into each other, in allusion to Proust's theory of involuntary memory.
Ruiz also introduces a playful technique whereby parts of a carefully composed image slide away and appear to swim: a piece of furniture, the trees at Combray, or a row of spectators moves independently of the rest of the frame - most effectively during the final recital sequence at Madame Verdurin's salon, which unites all the characters like an eerie gallery of waxworks. These gliding images recall the trompe l'oeil effects of turn-of-the-century theatre and beautifully convey a sense of the fluidity of space as well as of time.
For those who know the novel, there will be some jarring notes, inevitably: John Malkovich is too strident as the Baron de Charlus, Emmanuelle Beart seems too pouty and precious as Marcel's former love, Gilberte, Catherine Deneuve has too weighty a screen presence to play the demimondaine, Odette, especially in her younger years - but these do not detract from Ruiz's achievement. He has transposed the exquisite melancholy of the novel's narrative voice into a different key, and has offered us the enormous pleasure of experiencing Proust in another form.
On Saturday, February 26th, Dr Johnnie Gratton and Catherine O'Beirne from the Department of French, UCD, will chair a public discussion of Proust at the Meeting Room, Irish Film Centre, at 3 p.m. Further information from: 01-6795744.
From tomorrow the Reel News column will appear on Saturdays in Weekend.
