COLUMNISTS Midsummer madness takes many forms. But what could be madder than a film week that twins the gloppy glitz of the newest Narnia epic – all gleaming battles, kindergarten Armageddon and crypto-Christianity – with an independent film as funny, brave, cheap and helplessly pessimistic as A Complete History of My Sexual Failures ?
We have all been to the first movie before, umpteen times in different ages. Hollywood’s C.S. Lewis-inspired franchise is C.B. DeMille with a coat of treacle: yahooing battles, scenery to smite the eyes, and Jesus (disguised as a lion) to wrap it all up and call it Christmas-come-early.
But who has ever seen a film like Chris Waitt’s tragical, comical confessio amantis? The sexual paranoia is off the chart, while the production values are off the chart in the opposite direction. (What did it cost? £1,000? £100?) The hero-documentarist is a dead-end Don Quixote, an irresistibly lank and tatterdemalion thirty-something, with a daft gleam in his eye, who carries his microphone boom like a lance into his jousts with the windmilling spectres of bygone romances.
His mission is to discover why his past girlfriends all dumped him. Happily for us, he doesn’t look in a mirror. He would realise he is first cousin to Worzel Gummidge: stubble beard, uncombed straw hair, jeans that seem to have been picked apart by crows. His social manner is worse, a lugubrious, beady-eyed semi-catatonia. “I’m taking a guerrilla approach,” he explains down the line to an ex he keeps wanly ambushing by phone. “A gorilla would do a better job,” she says.
Woody Allen has done this routine before, romantic dysfunction spiced with manic depression. Waitt is no Woody, but he may be Britain’s best answer. He keeps a notebook in which he lists the ex-partners’ complaints and grievances (“a jerk”, “always late”). When his virility starts letting him down – it is a long time, he says, since it regularly kept him up – he tries Viagra. But a year’s supply, he computes, would cost him £100,000: “I don’t think I can afford to have sex.” A last desperation takes him to a dominatrix. But spanking and flogging don’t do it for him either.
Towards the end the film runs too hard to keep up with itself. It didn’t need the knockabout street-filming stunt in which a Viagra-overdosed Waitt, suffering from runaway tumidity (we don’t believe it), careers from stranger to stranger asking each to have sex with him. The more desolate, whimsical Waitt is far funnier. He speaks up for every man in the movie theatre, and beyond, in his portrait of the subtle terror and consuming absurdity of the male sex drive: the kind of drive that will end up wrapping a man around a lamppost if it doesn’t wrap him around worse objects and life forms first. Perhaps the kindest thing about sexual dysfunction is that a man is reduced to wrapping himself around himself, his safest and most faithful partner.
During the two and a half hours of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian I formed a love relationship with the green sign over the exit door. Beyond that glowing light lay an enchanted kingdom: one where a person could get a drink, read a newspaper, swear at a dog, smell the Soho fast food. Instead I was stuck with the dimension-hopping kids in the squeaky clean, eunuchoid land where good forever fights evil.
The director Andrew Adamson, coming to Narnia from Shrek, tries to pep up this pie-eyed material. The swashbuckling mouse voiced by Eddie Izzard and resembling Shrek’s Puss in Boots – is he in the book? Surely not. (Too long since I read it.) The talking badger probably is; certainly the handsome, vapid, goody-goody Prince Caspian.
C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien – O don fatal, as Verdi sang, or double don. Whatever does an Oxbridge teaching career do to tender minds? Grown old and authorly, these men churn out their Homeric whimsies. They set out their folklore stalls, supplied with secondhand goods from the ancient history kiosks. Here in Caspian are minotaurs, fauns, centaurs and other Romano-Hellenic hand-me-downs, deployed as decor – or perhaps as decoy – in a tale that wallops us, as we know it will, with Christian messaging at the end. Perfectly awful. But for many, undoubtedly, who see as in a mirror brightly, it will be awfully perfect.
Superpowers are so common in modern adventure cinema that people without them are becoming a virtual under-race. What, no power of flight? X-ray vision? Strength to lift fuel tankers? Tsk. Get to the back of the citizenship queue.
Will Smith appears to be a dishevelled, fond-of-a-drink bum at the start of Hancock. But he is just an übermensch who likes chilling out between planet-saving projects. Single-handedly he can toss a criminal into the stratosphere or stop a train speeding towards a car gridlocked on a rail crossing. When he meets beautiful Charlize Theron, married to the PR wiz (Jason Bateman) who is trying to improve his (Hancock’s) public image, he gets a kismet alert. Don’t they know each other? From long ago?
The superhero film turns into a time-leaping romcom, then into a mixture, then into a mess. As genres collide the filmgoer needs a phone booth in which to quick-change, each scene, from giggles to gasps and back again. As the variety show goes on, the only grim consistency is provided by the visuals: a meltdown of garish colours in the still infant art of large-screen high definition.
Same look, same chaos of story-styles in Wanted. Angelina Jolie plays the mystery-woman who recruits superpowered James McAvoy – the latest talented British actor (Atonement) lost to the Hollywood shilling – into an ancestral gang of assassins. The Russian director Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch) films so many bullets that curve round corners, slice clean through cerebella and whiz out into the auditorium that they kept severing my ability to make synaptic connections. My brain surgeon’s report will reach Universal shortly.
Sandrine Bonnaire’s Her Name is Sabine is a touching documentary made by the French film actress about her institutionalised autistic sister. Superpowers? Some people, like Sabine, just pray for the miracle of normal powers. To speak; to think; to relate to other people. Egged on by the cinema of hi-fi inanity, we risk becoming too greedy for more to notice those who have far, far less.
