Mrs. Brown: Top Drawer for the Post-Hogmanay Viewing

 

 

 

MRS. BROWN  (1997)

Directed by John Madden

Miramax, 103 minutes, PG

★★★★★

 

New Year’s Day is a holiday, but most people party on New Year’s Eve. Scots certainly do; for them, December 31 is Hogmanay. It roughly means gala day but whether it’s a Scots word, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, or French is up for debate. Today it bears similarities to First Night celebrations, but some places have bonfires, special foods, gift-giving, folk customs, and pipe bands.  

 

It just seemed the right time of the year to rewatch one of my favorite films, Mrs. Brown. I’d not disagree with charges of sentimentality, though I’d counter that it demonstrates how fine acting can carry a film in which relatively little action occurs. One reason why British films are, on the whole, superior to Hollywood movies is that many U.K. actors are classically trained and are hired for their chops, not necessarily their looks. Hollywood creates drama through pyrotechnics, loud music, and over-the-top speeches; British cinema finds drama in human interactions, even if the ”star” is a queen.

 

If you know about the British monarchy, you will have noticed there is a strict protocol for being in the presence of royalty. It prevails, though the monarchy has had no political power since 1689. Royals are to be treated regally and behave as such. You probably also know that little shocks U.K. tabloids as much as a good royal scandal. (Think Lady Diana, Sarah Ferguson’s divorce, and Prince Andrew for starters.) What we learn is that royals aren’t special when it comes to human foibles.

 

Mrs. Brown deals with one of Britain’s most revered monarchs, Queen Victoria (1819-1901). She took the throne weeks after she turned 18, married Albert (her first cousin) when she was 21, had nine children, and was quite happy until Albert died in 1861. We now associate Victorianism with a certain morbidity because the Queen went into mourning for most of the rest of her 63-year reign. When Albert passed, she stayed at Balmoral Castle draped in mourning gear and out of sight for two years. That was not a good thing for two powerful political figures vying for the prime minister’s chair in Parliament, Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone. As we see in Mrs. Brown, Disraeli (Antony Sher) and his party are sinking in popularity and hope to lure Victoria (Judi Dench) out of mourning to boost Disraeli’s electoral chances.

 

The question is how to get Victoria out of Balmoral Castle in Scotland and back to London’s Buckingham Palace where she can regularly wave to the citizenry. Enter John Brown (Billy Connolly), a former soldier who was once Albert’s ghillie (a gamekeeper).  He is called to Balmoral is to get Victoria to go riding and recover her health so that her closest advisors, Henry Ponsonby (Geoffrey Palmer), Dr. Jenner (Richard Pasco), and her son “Bertie,” the Prince of Wales (David Westhead) can convince Victoria to leave Scotland. (As the English often felt, they hated it there.) Problem: John  Brown was loyal to the queen but not to the toffs surrounding her. Brown reveled in being a rugged Scot who liked tweaking upper-class snobs. A bigger problem: Victoria adored Scotland and Brown. The film correctly infers that the two of them may have been intimate. There was also a rumor that they secretly married, hence the film’s title. (Recent evidence has revived that possibility.)

 

Mrs. Brown is also a story of intrigue and of hubris. As Brown’s star rose at Balmoral, his plotters sought ways to discredit him. Victoria is persuaded to make a triumphant return to London and, for a time, Brown’s ego got in the way and he was out of favor. Still, Victoria refused to dismiss him. He was head of security in 1893, when he died (not of pneumonia as in the film, but of a bacterial infection).

 

What a stroke of genius to cast Connolly as Brown. Billy Connolly is a seriously funny man who is far more coarse and irreverent in real life, just as Dench could herself be. I could go on about the crackerjack acting of this film, including Sher’s wiliness and Gerard Butler’s first role as Brown’s brother. The takeaway is the same; fill the screen with superb actors and let them metaphorically play winner-take-all chess. It was a surprise hit in 1997 and won numerous prizes despite being stiffed at the Academy Awards. Wha’ a bunch o’ glakits!

 

Rob Weir

 

Petite Maman is Touching and Enigmatic

 

 

 

PETITE MAMAN  (2021)

Directed by Céline Sciamma

Pyramide Distribution, 72 minutes (not rated)

In French (with English subtitles)

* * * *  

 

Petite Maman (“Little Mum”) is an enigmatic film. It’s clearly a meditation on grief, but everything else is up for debate. I would call it a work of magical realism, but I suppose it could be a deep dream, a fantasy, or a hallucination. However you interpret it, it’s unusual.

 

Perhaps the name Céline Sciamma sounds familiar. She directed Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), a celebrated and steamy lesbian romance. Because of that and other works such as Tomboy (2011), some analysts expect everything Sciama does to have lesbian subtexts. Petite Maman was actually up for gay film awards, though it would take someone with an agenda and a college sophomore’s misunderstanding of Freudian symbolism to find anything sapphic in Petite Maman. It doesn’t get any more sensual than a pair of 9-year-old girls hugging, and the actors happen to be twin sisters in real life. Were it rated for U.S. audiences, it would be PG-13, and only because it deals with death.

 

It begins innocently enough. As is her custom, 9-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) goes room to room bidding “au revoir” to everyone she sees in an assisted-living facility. When she reaches the room in which her namesake grandmother Nelly was housed, it’s empty; she has died from an unnamed hereditary condition. Nelly’s father (Stéphane Varupenne) and her mother, 31-year-old Marion (Nina Meurisse), are left with the grim task of clearing out the home in the woods where Marion grew up. Marion is shattered by her mother’s death and not even her daughter can cheer her. Marion flees and Nelly and her dad take care of the packing.

 

So far, so sad. Here’s where things get weird. Marion has told Nelly of how she built a fort in the woods when she was young. Nelly goes off to see if anything is left, and encounters a little girl in the act of hauling tree branches to a site and building a skeletal lean-to. Nelly is surprised to learn that the girl’s name is Marion (Gabrielle Sanz) and that her mother’s name is Nelly. When they depart from their daily building project, Nelly returns to her grandmother’s house and Marion goes the opposite direction. Nelly is also surprised on a deeper level by how much small Marion looks like her. As their friendship deepens and a cloudburst soaks them, Nelly accepts Marion’s offer to play at her home. A path leads them to a house that’s identical to the one Nelly’s grandmother lived in, except it’s not overgrown or rundown. When she reciprocates and invites Nelly over, Marion is similarly startled to see a house that looks like the one where she lives with her mother (Margo Abascal).

 

In a scene that some have found hard to fathom, small Marion scarcely registers disbelief when Nelly tells Marion she is Nelly's mother and that Marion’s disabled mother is Nelly’s grandmother. Somehow, time has come unfixed in a way in which the present and the past of 22 years ago coexist. In the short time the two girls are together, Nelly learns a lot about her mother, such as her unrealized desire to be an actress and the deeper roots of her melancholia. In this context, the abrupt and surprising ending makes complete sense.

 

At 72 minutes, Petite Maman is a very short film, yet it is punctuated with still moments that tell us just enough for us to feel the film’s weight. How did either girl get caught in the disruption of chronological time that led to their meeting? Sciamma does not tell us, and that’s a good thing. The point of the film isn’t the particulars of whatever sci-fi or magical explanation is at play, it’s about how a 9-year-old connects with her mother.

 

The Sanz twins are, in a word, sensational. That’s because they are 9 and act 9. (Watch them make pancakes!) They reminded me of my nieces when they were 9, by which I mean they were old enough to question, but not old enough to be cynical about things adults say make no logical sense. As the 17^th-century French moral philosopher Jean de La Bruyère put it, “Children have neither past nor future; they enjoy the present, which very few of us do.”

 

Rob Weir

 

This Poetic Realism Film Rewards the Patient Viewer

 

 

Port of Shadows (1938)

Directed by Marcel Carné

Osso/Film Alliance of the United States, 91minutes, not-rated

French (with English subtitles)

★★★ ½

 

For a modern viewer, Port of Shadows is an odd film to watch. Though it’s only 91 minutes, it seems longer because of its casual pacing, it’s comparative lack of dialogue, and its drab tones. It helps to know that director Marcel Carné was interested in a film-making style popular in the 1930s and 1940s known as poetic realism. Despite its name, it was more associated with film than poetry. The poetic part is that directors often used symbols as metaphors for realistic details. In this one, for instance, we know that its central character of Jean (Jean Gabin) has rough edges bordering on uncouthness because he eats with his knife rather than customary tableware.

 

The look of Port of Shadows is so much like film noir that it is sometimes viewed as one. Perhaps, but you would need to replace many of the blacks with dull gray. The namesake port is Le Havre in Normandy, a major industrial and trade center. It is socked in by fog when Jean arrives, though talking about the fog is a forbidden subject. Allegedly that’s because it hurts the tourist trade, though this could be a joke within a joke as it’s hard to imagine 1930s Le Havre, whose waterfront and factories were too grimy and the city too run down to pass as an outing destination. Plus, it’s on the English Channel, whose chilly waters have seldom been associated with beach culture. Jean is there because he plans to catch a freighter and escape from France. An overnight at Panama’s throws a kink in that plan.

 

Panama (Édouard Delmont) runs a bar and flop house on the edge of the city. He asks no questions and volunteers no information. He is content to play his Spanish guitar and  offer hospitality to anyone who ventures through the door. On the night Jean arrives, it’s the town drunk, a cynical and depressed painter (Robert Le Vigan), and Nelly (Michèle Mogan). At some point during the night gunshots ring out, but apparently no one is injured, though a man named Zabel (Michel Simon) cuts his hand on a splinter. Jean and Nelly are immediately drawn to each other, though they first play a game of tough guy and vulnerable young girl. Nelly is just 17 and has run away from her godfather, Zabel. She insists she’s trying to find out about the fate of her boyfriend, Maurice, who several people have asked about.

 

When it seems clear that Maurice has been killed, Nelly turns her full attention to Jean. Those gunshots outside Panama’s were fired by hoods posing as dangerous mobsters, but Jean recognizes their leader, Lucien (Pierre Brasseur) as a common street punk with a big mouth and the courage of a kitten. (When Lucien, who also yearns for Nelly, tries to confront Jean, Lucien is slapped on two occasions and can hardly contain his tears.) After a date, Jean and Nelly spend a concupiscent night in Jean’s room at Panama’s in the arms of Cupid.

 

Poetic realism films are usually more fatalistic than romantic. Is this one of them? I shall say just these things: a change of clothing, face-shaming, a threat that borders on incest, suicide, mistaken identity, a murder, and another on the streets of Le Havre. Think of Port of Shadows as a film that slowly establishes deep atmosphere as a prelude to several bursts of action. The musical score by the masterful Maurice Jaubert greatly enhances moods without resorting to cliché. The film is in French, but if you’re a person who hates subtitles, no worries; there isn’t much in the way of substantive dialogue.

 

I liked it quite a lot, but my rating is lower because I’m not sure it’s a film for everyone. Much of the plot and relationships between characters is doled out in asides and inference. Although it’s widely available online and on DVD, some prints of Port of Shadows are not well-preserved. Poke around online to find a good one and, by all means, avoid a colorized version. In this case, color is neither poetic nor dramatic. Be patient; the slow roll out of the drama is worth it.

 

Rob Weir