The films I watched this week were as strange as the week itself. I only had two cases in court, but both were causing me a decent (and as I discovered having done them, unnecessary) degree of stress. In any event, my unproductive Tuesday was a great opportunity to binge watch several films. I then found that there was a lot of work to catch up with and so I delayed writing up, with new films building up uncontrollably. If I had to summarise them in a song it would be this song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (which is a show that at some point will need to get a lot more of my attention, and which also inspired my title today). But to talk about them more I had to organise, so I have put them into 10 categories.

1. Crazy stories

My binge started out with Maps to the Stars (2014, dir. David Cronenberg). I expected an acty-talky-not-much-happens sort of film which I usually quite enjoy, like, say, Clouds of Sils Maria (2014, dir. Olivier Assayas). I remember that film being quite big when it first came out, with an interesting cast of Juliette Binoche, Kirsten Stewart and Chloe Grace Moretz. But I only watched it last year while doing things around the house. It is a very enjoyable 2 hours of pretty landscapes with actors talking about acting which I will probably appreciate more when I am older. Indeed, I want to re-watch it, because there are bound to be things I’ve missed.

Maps to the Stars started out with some similar premises – we had a selection of big names essentially being themselves but with somewhat more messy stories. We had Julianne Moore as an actress suffering from being daughter to an even more famous actress trying to free herself from the past of some unspecified abuse she attributes to her mother through some very unconventional therapy. We had Robert Pattinson pretending to be a taxi driver with little backstory. We had Mia Wasikowska in the main role acting her usual crazy girl character type. We had what now seems to be an obligatory Carrie Fisher cameo. There was a certain amount of gratuitous nudity (but the sort of non-sexual nudity you find only in pretentious films which is supposed to be artistic).

But none of that quite matches the frankly crazy plot which seems to revolve around the taboo of incest and a lot of poor parenting decisions. There is little connection between the different story lines, and none of them seem to be fully developed. Worse still, the key message of the film seems to be: remember, kids, incest causes schizophrenia, and schizophrenia will make people commit suicide and kill others in the process. Now I am not saying that an incest story can never work (goodness knows, there is a lot of fan-fiction out there to prove otherwise) – but this is not one that did. There were just too many crass over-dramatisations of serious mental health issues which serve only to stigmatise what must be the most taboo mental illness anyway. But hey, it was interesting and I enjoyed it.

A film that dealt with mental health somewhat better was The Girl on the Train (2016, dir. Tate Taylor). This was an engrossing drama which takes an unusual premise and executes it incredibly well. Emily Blunt plays a woman who has been a victim of domestic abuse, dumped by her husband in favour of another woman, and taken to drink as her consolation. It is an unusual example of a film where the oppressed themselves take on the oppressor, without help from heroic bystanders, and it is ultimately a victory of women over men.

The film also deserves a particular mention for its soundtrack, which was composed by Danny Elfman. He also composed and sang the music to one of my favourite films ever, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993, based on a book by Tim Burton, dir. Henry Selick) – a film which I was first dragged to by my husband when it was re-run in the cinemas, but was so impressed that I have re-watched it a couple of dozen times since, learnt a couple of the songs, and last year went to the 25-year anniversary concert. Elfman’s music here is completely different – suitably minimalist and obviously more in the background than it is in The Nightmare Before Christmas, but it is very effective, and I particularly appreciated the intentional nod towards Bizet’s Habanera from Carmen (an opera about abusive relationships).

N.B. While we’re on contemporary music, I think it’s worth mentioning Pavel Karmanov, a modern-day Russian composer whose music I came across while looking for something to work to. I don’t know how well-known he is yet, but he is certainly one to look out for.

2. Really crazy stories

If I found Maps to the Stars to be a little wacky, it was nothing compared to another very different film I watched over that last week. The Tiger Who Came To Tea (2019, Channel 4) is a story based on the original illustrated book by Judith Kerr, about how a tiger unexpectedly comes to this family’s house, proceeds to eat everything they have and play with the child, and then leaves. Everybody online seemed to love this, probably because they have positive childhood memories of it, whereas I do not. And indeed, if you were a fan of the book, the short film is a faithful adaptation, with lovely pictures and a great cast doing voiceovers.

I, however, struggled to find the moral of the story. The social worker in me was concerned about the mother’s decision to allow potentially risky strangers access to the family home and then unsupervised playing time with the child. The socialist in me judged the mother for her scathing remarks about the tiger’s manners and wondered where the social housing and welfare state were to ensure the tiger was not so hungry. The middle class twat in me wondered why they didn’t simply ask this tiger to leave and tell him that he could not have any more food. I just could not think what to make of the story, and I found the overall atmosphere of it incredibly uncomfortable. Is it a political allegory for what will happen to our nice middle class families if we accept refugees (the race markers were there for sure)? Is it instead a story designed to make us think how taxes would be a better way to ensure that this tiger was fed? Or is the tiger what the mother calls the nice man who comes round to see her while the father is at work? Perhaps if someone reads it and is horrified by this they could write to me and explain what it is about.

A slightly less uncomfortable watch was The Snail and the Whale (2019, BBC), based on a story book by Julia Donaldson, and with a far clearer moral matrix. First the snail is saved by the whale, and they make friends, and by the end of the book the whale is saved by the snail. It is a nice safe story to raise your children on, although watching it as an adult I wondered how likely it would be that the story would have a happy ending in real life (bearing in mind the sad fate of the Thames whale back in 2006).

Overall, a watchable story, although not nearly as emotionally engaging as The Snowman and the Snowdog (2012, by Raymond Briggs), which was as good as its prequel, The Snowman (1982, by Raymond Briggs). I won’t spoil the plot of this one, but it really had me in tears by the end. A highly recommended series for anyone not already acquainted with it.

3. Less crazy stories

The next film in my perusal of the iPlayer collection was The New Girlfriend (2014, dir. François Ozon). The film is about a transwoman. It takes you through the stigmas surrounding this and really forces you to search yourself for why we still find this a bit uncomfortable. The film cleverly makes the characters around her too judgmental so that you find yourself obviously sympathising with her.

Having said that, this may simply be the French attitude to transpeople (I am not aware of what those are), and for me it was a French equivalent of The Man Who Surprised Everyone (2018, dirs. Chupov and Merkulova, nb. properly translated as The Person Who Surprised Everyone). That was a Russian film about a man who finds out he has cancer and begins cross-dressing, which was my favourite of the films we saw at the Tromso Film Festival last year, and we were lucky enough to get a Q&A with the directors as well. The film is set in a small Russian village and it does not soften any of the reactions he faces from his neighbours. It is very moving, and it is very hard not to feel sorry for him.

My one criticism is that both films suffer from the need to give both of these characters a reason to suddenly ‘change’. The New Girlfriend sets events so that she had always enjoyed cross-dressing, and towards the end of the film, she clearly identified as a woman, whereas The Man Who Surprised Everyone never explicitly changes the gender he identifies as, and it is not clear if this is just a weird superstitionary measure to try and cure the cancer. Either way though, both are stories that need telling, and both are incredibly effective and really make you question whatever degree of transphobia you still have.

4. Oldy talky stories

Two other films similarly about the human condition communicated through a number of scenes of people talking, which I came across in these two weeks were Love & Friendship (2016, dir. Whit Stillman), based on Jane Austen’s novel Lady Susan, and Mrs Brown (1997, dir. John Madden).

To me, while both were eminently watchable, Mrs Brown was significantly more effective that Love & Friendship. Austen adaptations are always hard, because so much is lost through the impossibility of dramatising the narration and social commentary in quite the biting way in which it is written. This is however one of the few books of hers which I have not read, although Stillman has apparently got the rights to re-write the novel in a different format, so perhaps it’s not as good as the others.

Mrs Brown, on the other hand, did manage to grip at my heartstrings, although this seems to happen with every film which stars Judi Dench. It is a true story of Queen Victoria’s friendship with one of her servants, Mr Brown. Apparently this caused significant scandal at the time, much like Harry and Meghan’s announcement of stepping away from the Royal Family is doing now. The film made it quite clear that the role and the impossibility of quitting is immensely pressured for those who happen to have been born a royal. It reinforced my views that the idea of having royal families is no good either for those at the bottom of the system or for those at the top.

5. True stories

Aside from Mrs Brown, there were another two films I watched that were based on actual historical events. These were True Story (2015, dir. Rupert Goold) and Hatton Garden (2019, dir. Paul Whittington).

The aptly named True Story is described on Wikipedia as a ‘mystery thriller’, but I would personally put it into my acty-talky-not-much-happens genre. The story is a true story, which perhaps makes it all the more perplexing, because if ever there was a crazy story, this was it. A man (Christian Longo) murders his family and then goes about using the name of some relatively well-known journalist (Michael Finkel). The journalist finds out and goes to work out why he is doing that (following which he writes the book on which this film is based). They do a lot of talking, there is a lot of unreliable narration, and ultimately a lot of convincing character acting from Jonah Hill and James Franco. In the end this is a story about the boundaries of truth and the reliance that we place on it in our criminal justice system.

As a lawyer, I am normally all over this sort of theme. There probably isn’t a lawyer on earth who hasn’t at some point been asked “How do you defend someone if you know they’re guilty?” The answer is simple – how on earth do I know they’re guilty? I can guess, I can suspect, I can believe. But unless I was there and I am fairly certain I could not have been mistaken, I don’t know it. (If indeed, a client was to tell me, there are rules preventing me from lying to the court, so I would be spared the need to make any suggestion that they did not do it – I would merely mitigate or question the evidence.)

So the film was good in that it went quite some way in exploring the muddy nature of truth and genuinely making you doubt at various stages whether or not he murdered his family. But then it shies away from committing to this uncertainty and instead makes it very clear that Longo is guilty. Yet it does not do this through the presentation of incontrovertible evidence but through two fairly ambiguous scenes. One is particularly awkward – Finkel’s wife goes to see Longo in prison and tells him he’s a narcissistic murderer who will never escape who he is. It is hard to see the point of this scene – how would she know if he’s guilty? Why would she even go to see him in prison? The second scene which suggests he’s guilty is that Longo winks at Finkel at the end of his trial – apparently it is from this that Finkel knows he’s guilty.

Longo’s actual plea was guilty in respect of his wife and one child, and not guilty in respect of the other two (shockingly, this was considered to be too complicated for the jury to understand). The evidence in respect of the other two is not clear, and I can find no reference to Longo having ever admitted to killing all four of them. Bearing that in mind, there was a lot of scope for the film drawing the conclusion that his story was true, that the truth can never be known, or even coming up with some way in which he was not guilty (but perhaps pleaded guilty because of mental illness that caused him to be narcissistic). It could have looked at the background for why he killed in more detail. But it did not – it did not even really explain why Finkel was so fascinated by Longo (other than suggesting that Finkel understood Longo’s experience of being tried for murder to his experience of being fired as a journalist for making up a person). Essentially, it was a story with a lot of potential which seemed to fall slightly flat for me.

Hatton Garden, a 4-part ITV drama, was a rather more convincing attempt at a true story. With the usual cast of actors in working class roles (Timothy Spall, David Hayman, Alex Norton, Kenneth Cranham, etc), it managed both to tell the factual story accurately and to make it an interesting human story. To put it simply, by the end of the film I had real empathy with the perpetrators of the burglary and was rather hoping they would get away with it (so much so that I had to google the actual events to check if it was true they were caught).

6. Other crime stories

Crime dramas are always a fave of mine, so I was excited when Bancroft (Series 2, 2020, wr. Kate Brooke, dir. Lawrence Gough) returned to ITV earlier this month. As it’s not quite finished, I won’t say much, but from episode 1 I was reminded that it can compete with Luther (2010-2019, wr. Neil Cross) for the level of excessive drama, except that Luther is perhaps more entertaining, as at least with Luther one feels a certain degree of dilemma about his actions, and half the time his decisions lead to the right result, whereas I struggle to find anything positive about Bancroft and rather think that the faster the show ends the better the outcome will be. (NB. I have just checked, and apparently the series was so bad I did not even realise it had ended…)

A completely opposite sort of crime drama which I have been indulging in this fortnight has been Father Brown (a BBC drama now in its 8th series, 2013-present, based on the stories of G.K. Chesterton). It is a real joy to watch – the stories are always original, its setting is a real USP, and the music is wonderful (composer Debbie Wiseman). In a world of crime dramas which have to depart from reality to feel like they are engaging enough for an audience not trusted with being able to follow a real case, Father Brown has a good excuse for the detectives not working like a real 21st century police force. And again, I always like it when a film/TV series inspires me to pick up a book, and I have certainly added Chesterton to my list of authors to read.

7. Actually true stories

Very occasionally, my procrastination takes me to non-fiction content, and the two programmes I watched in the last couple of weeks were rather interesting.

The first was Lost Home Movies of Nazi Germany (2019, dir. Martin Davidson and Nick Watts) – a compilation of home videos made by Nazi Germans before and during the Second World War. Given two days ago (27 January 2020) was the 75-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it is a most relevant time for a film which will reiterate how normal the people who did awful things actually seemed. Short of visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland or the Deutsche Historisches Museum in Berlin, this is one of the best introductions I have seen to the reality in which the Nazis gained so much support for their terrible ideas.

The second film was on a completely different theme. Seamus Heaney And The Music Of What Happens (2019, dir. Adam Low) was a documentary film about, of course, Seamus Heaney, a prominent Irish poet from a working class farming background. It was a throwback to my GCSE English, as the film included a decent selection of his poems being read out by various people close to Seamus Heaney. I felt that it balanced this well with a chronology of significant events in his life, and I found it a very relaxing programme to watch. Twelve or so years ago I did not think much of him as a poet, but only now do I realise how important his story is and what a good choice of poet he was to study then. And even despite my previous indifference, the following lines from his poem Digging have stuck with me since those days and have been an inspiration any time I have written anything:

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

8. Singing stories

Continuing on a musical theme, this was the week in which I finally watched The Sound of Music (1965, dir. Robert Wise). I have been intending to watch this film for years because it was a regular reference point in our college choir (mainly because our musical director has a slight crush on Julie Andrews), and we even sang a beautiful arrangement of The Hills Are Alive With The Sound Of Music. But student musicians are a disorganised unreliable lot (you know who you are), and our intended group viewing of the original simply never happened.

Now, let’s clear something up. If last week, we were dealing with criticisms of Jojo Rabbit (2019, dir. Taika Waititi) for setting a film in Nazi Germany and not making the Nazis evil enough, then The Sound of Music deserves a hundred times more criticism. Here we are in 1938 Salzburg, the Nazis trying to get Captain von Trapp to join their Navy, all sorts of other atrocities going on at the time, and we focus on a carefree, most oblivious nun seemingly possible, dancing, singing and falling in love. I seriously did not even realise what the background to the film was until the last section of the film where the Nazis turn up looking suitably evil. And it is hard to think that any of the adult characters are entirely blameless given their reluctance to even think about politics.

But I don’t really think that is a helpful criticism of The Sound of Music, any more than it is a helpful criticism of Jojo Rabbit. It is not the point of the film to concentrate on the Nazis but on completely different issues – issues of parental warmth and of the importance of song and dance as an expression of feeling and freedom (even though the story is not a very accurate representation of the von Trapps). Jojo Rabbit echoes this with its focus on dance as a metaphor for freedom. A similar metaphor is used in one of the exhibits in the Krakow Contemporary Art Museum, by Jane Korman – a video of an Auschwitz survivor and his family dancing to Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. All of these works highlight the importance of music to freedom.

And so I enjoyed The Sound of Music and would recommend it to all. The music is great, and I finally learnt the Do Re Mi song, which today I sang while walking through the snowy mountains in the countryside not far from Krakow in Poland (the comparative merit of the location not being lost on me).

N.B. While we are on last week’s films, I would like to make a brief detour to Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker (2019, dir. J.J. Abrams), or more specifically to a critical review thereof by Jenny Nicholson, who produces a significant amount of Philomena-Cunk-style critical comment on many aspects of various blockbuster franchises (although the likeness is slight and coincidental as far as I can tell). This review is far more comprehensive and can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GErIPKjwuDg. And while you’re there, also watch this short expose on the BB-Gate, which could not be more true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UNWEEPqLos.

A music-related film with far fewer political connotations that I came across was Florence Foster Jenkins (2016, dir. Stephen Frears), which could have gone into the true stories category here and could have competed with True Story for the craziness of its story. This was a film which involved Meryl Streep showing off a rather impressive coloratura range and Hugh Grant playing a failed actor (a role he again does rather well in Paddington 2 (2017, dir. Paul King), living at her expense but somehow not being a completely unsympathetic character. It is crazy that this was a true story, but it makes for a lovely film to watch (and it includes a cameo of Aida Garifullina singing the Bell Song).

9. Singing without the stories

My weeks rarely pass without some opera in them, and this week I was re-watching one of the Jose Carreras/Agnes Baltsa concerts (a pair that created the only Carmen I have truly enjoyed watching to date), and I also watched the 2007 Saltzburg production of Eugene Onegin, which I found a very convincing interpretation. I liked the use of the spinning stage for the opening quartet, and I liked the recurring appearance of the Nanny. I didn’t have a lot to say about the singers, except that as always the Olga was far too heavy-voiced for the part and had far too many frowns to be the playful carefree girl she is supposed to be in the opera.

But I also this week found myself listening to a compilation of Tatiana Bulanova’s songs – a completely different style and a completely different reference point in my life. Bulanova, who is very well-known in Russia but not so much outside it, is a popular singer who gained her popularity in the 1990s with songs which tugged at heartstrings and almost always invited tears. It is hard to describe what makes her music so special, but for many people she brings on feelings of nostalgia, oddly for some very hard times, and for me she always takes me back to 2001-2002, when we first moved to the UK, and when I awfully missed home, which is why her music is so important to me and why I felt the need to mention her. She is certainly a cultural icon who manages to be down-to-earth and continues to produce ever new music.

10. Not even stories

In the very opposite genre of contemporary political commentary, my selection of random things to listen to included a variety of Russian radio podcasts from 2016 with discussions which provided me with enough entertainment for long car journeys but did not contain enough context for me to learn very much. The only one worthy of mention was a discussion about life in Switzerland with Peter Lidov on Dmitriy Puchkov’s podcast Razvedopros (for anyone Russian-speaking, this is a very interesting podcast with a whole host of speakers, including my grandfather, whom I will probably discuss another time). But this was a particularly good episode which I felt brought something new and interesting to the Russian understanding of countries other than their own, and it would be one I would recommend without doubt.

The other commentary series which I had been looking forward to was Cunk & Other Humans on 2019 (2019, written by Diane Morgan and Charlie Brooker). However, it turned out that the 6 episodes were of about 5 minutes each, which was a bit of a disappointment, although made sense, because to me the Philomena Cunk character can only work so far. Personally, I still long for the return of Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe and would have loved to see the equivalent 2019-wipe, but at the moment it looks rather like that might not happen.

Perhaps I should not really use the word crazy

In all honesty, I am not sure what the point of this piece is, or indeed if it is possible to link together all of the many and various films which I have wasted my time over 2 weeks watching, and my time over the last 1 week writing up. Are any of them more crazy than the others, or perhaps is the the real world events underpinning them and my interpretation that has something crazy about it? And what would that even tell us?

The answer is, probably nothing. But hey – it was a fun selection of things to watch, and it is certainly a better form of procrastination now that I have given it a point.