You gotta give Ralph Fiennes credit for the size of his balls. Not only does he make his directorial debut adapting Shakespeare, but he does so with one of the Bard's lesser known plays and one that has never previously been filmed. That takes chutzpah.
One of Shakespeare's tragedies, Coriolanus is set in ancient Rome. The title character is a gung-ho general in the army, happy to charge into fierce battle with his men and with a prideful disdain for the common citizens. Events take a turn for the worse when Coriolanus is pimped up for a place on the Senate and two slippery types decide to turn the people against him. He is banished from the city; from the home he has fought and bled for and surrenders himself to the city's great enemies, to help them overthrow the Roman people. Through prideful vengeance he turns on the people of his home and visits ruination upon them.
So, it is a play with a lot to it; with a lot of meaty themes to chew over. And Fiennes updates the setting to modern times; to a modern Rome as an obvious stand-in for the United States. He makes ample use of CNN and "action-news" style cutaways to cover a lot of exposition. But where, say Baz Luhrmann invested his retelling of Romeo & Juliet with fizz and glam, Fiennes keeps things sombre.
Frankly, I've never really been a big fan of the Bard. Perhaps that is thanks to years of dreary high-school and University lectures and monotone recitations by students who don't understand the language. But in a film like Fiennes', and with the mouths of such skilful actors as Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox playing with the poetry, the language truly flows and lives.
I don't really know if the rest of the film does though. The story seems almost too big for the film. I know this will be seen as an impossible heresy by some, but I couldn't help thinking that this would have been better with the story used as a jumping-off point for a miniseries or TV series. In this way, the modern setting could be more fully embraced and there could be more time to delve into these characters and their lives. Coriolanus is not the most sympathetic character around - he is prideful, vengeful and full of contempt for those ordinary citizens who make up the masses but fight in no army. But there is much to intrigue about him - his anger is understandable, he has a domineering mother constantly pushing at him and he has little interest in parading himself and his wounds to "prove" his service to Rome. He is a complex and intriguing, but haughtily unsympathetic, tragic figure.
Coriolanus is an interesting adaptation that so very nearly works. And again, the sheer stones on that man Fiennes.
The small indie musical Once made waves around the world; I still vividly remember the impact it had on me at the time. A tale of deep, thwarted love the film still had a happy ending with the reportedly blossoming relationship between the two leads, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova.
They started seeing one another and touring with their band, the Swell Season. This documentary is a telling of these two people's lives after their phenomenal success (including an Oscar win for Best Original Song) and the strain in places on their relationship.
As they both struggle to redefine themselves in terms of their new-found fame they're also touring, being overwhelmed by fans and waking up in new cities. While Hansard, after years of struggling and working as a musician, seems to take to the exposure like an Irishman to whisky, Irglova finds herself struggling to maintain some sort of sense of identity. It's easy to forget how young she was (19-20) and how unlooked for the fame was. She never comes across as precocious or resentful, but intelligent about her own feelings about it. Which, unsurprisingly, Hansard simply doesn't understand.
At times it all feels a little voyeuristic as you watch this relationship, this relationship that seemed like such a real-life romantic fairytale (with music!), collapse in on itself. Footage from the road is interspersed with interviews and concerts. The interviews span a term of years with no clear indication given as to when or what stage of the relationship they're given. The clearest indicator of the intervening years is Hansard's shaggy hair and beard (or lack thereof). The bias, if any in the film, really leans more towards Hansard. There are interviews with his family (including his now deceased father) and more time spent with him and his backstory. Irglova is more generally defined in terms of how she relates to Hansard and his story.
I haven't revisited the film Once since I first saw it, and it may be some time before I do. The Swell Season was an interesting follow-up to the story, with a fair amount to recommend it, but I wonder how entirely necessary it was.
The starkly black & white animated film Alois Nebel covers the transition of Czechoslovakia from Communism to Democracy, aka the Velvet Revolution. And it does so through the experiences of a station master at a remote train station, the fellow station employee involved in less than legal dealings and a mute man out for revenge.
And dammit. It's actually kinda boring. Alois Nebel is the title character, the station master who finds himself committed to an asylum and then cut adrift. He's a passive, nigh useless character who is difficult to follow. You can't sympathise with Alois; not because he makes poor or evil-minded decisions, but because he makes no decisions at all. He floats from station to asylum to Prague main station and then back to a smaller station in the mountains; all through absolutely no decision of Alois.
Perhaps the fault is mine. Perhaps these characters carry a deeper allegorical meaning that would be easier to understand with more knowledge of Czech history. But seeing as how I don't have more than a passing knowledge of the Velvet Revolution and the events surrounding it, I cannot approach the film in this manner.
The animation is, as I expected, gorgeous and often beautiful to look at. There is that starkness, the high contrast that soaks the film. The film is rotoscoped, allowing a fluidity and real human motion to infuse the characters but giving enough of a distance, as opposed to the more high-tech performance capture.
Ultimately, it is a film of dense atmosphere and history with only a smattering of character and story. How much you get into to it or out of it will depend entirely on how willing you are to have yourself enveloped by that rather than a compelling character.
