A Canterbury Tale. Michael Powell. 1944. ⚂

[half an hour passes]

I’m struggling with this movie: It’s the sound that’s the problem. It’s not just that it’s crackly and stuff, but often I can’t quite make out what they’re saying. If I pump up the volume so that I can hear what the American is saying, all the En-Un-Cia-Tion by the Brits blast my ear drums.

And it’s just a very odd movie — it starts out like one kind of a comedy, and then turns into a quite different type of comedy.

I’m finding it hard to concentrate. Perhaps I should find some pirated subtitles…

[ten minutes pass]

I couldn’t find any subtitles for this specific version, but I found a version for a version that’s a bit longer? A different frame rate? So now I can turn the volume down a bit and lessen the eardrum rupture…

[half an hour passes]

This is a very difficult movie to screenshot. Most of the frame is usually out of focus… did they only have a single f1.4 lens or something? I mean, it’s a wartime cheapie movie to keep morale up, and there aren’t many… technical… qualities here.

The action (what there is) is pretty amusing, but the actors seem really… stiff? Yeah, stiff. Were all the good ones off killing Germans?

:

Although the film initially had very poor reviews in the UK press, and only small audiences, the film became a moderate success at the British box office in 1944.

The film was the first production of Powell and Pressburger not to be a major box office draw.

Makes sense. But then:

The film was fully restored by the British Film Institute in the late 1970s and the new print was hailed as a masterwork of British cinema.

I feel like there’s a [by whom?] missing there.

[the end]

Well, the feeling of having an awl in my ear whenever a particularly British person was speaking kinda dimmed my appreciation for this, but it’s also just a very messy movie. I could possibly have appreciated that more… it’s apparently a movie that many people like, and I can sort of see why: It’s got a real nostalgic thing going on, and it’s showing real, actual scenes from a bombed-out Canterbury, so I assume that it has lots of sentimental significance for people.

But I just couldn’t get into it: The auto-of-focus er “cinematography” and the er “actors” and the er “plot”…

Your mileage will vary.

The War Game. Mai Zetterling. 1963. ⚄

This is a short that won a bunch (?) of awards, and it’s… really tense. OK, so perhaps the ending isn’t very deep and stuff, but it’s pretty gripping.

Loving Couples. Mai Zetterling. 1964. ⚂

OH MY GOD! This movie has everybody I love! Harriet Andersson! Gunnel Lindblom! Gunnar Björnstrand! Eva Dahlbeck! ETC!!!

I’ve never seen any of Zetterling’s movies (as a director), but a recent issue of Sight & Sound magazine mentioned than one of her movies is totes da bomb, so I got her Collected Works DVD box… from Italy, I think it was. Because it’s totally sold out everywhere.

Here’s the first movie in the set. I’m all excited.

[ten minutes pass]

This is, of course, teensily slightly itsy bitsily influenced by Bergman ahem, but there’s a bunch of striking shots that Bergman would never have done… but what I’m pausing for now to type (and get another glass of wine) is that it’s also striking how the technical qualities here are a bit eh. For instance, the lighting looks odd, and not on purpose, and the audio could have been clearer, and the camera movements are choppy.

I’ve seen Bergman in documentaries, and he would have shouted at the lighting, audio and camera guys SO MUCH to make them suck less, and apparently Zetterling
didn’t.

[twenty minutes pass]

It’s structurally really interesting… it’s based on three women checking into a maternity ward, but most of the time is spent in flashbacks that aren’t marked very heavily.

The time period isn’t totally clear either, but I’m guessing it’s supposed to be from Zetterling’s mother’s generation; i.e., the teens and the twenties?

It’s mostly pretty riveting, except the lesbian camp counsellor:

That’s not the way!

[more time passes]

I feel that it’s lost its focus now. Instead of being very centred on the women in the hospital and their direct memories, those remembrances have gotten… kinda… excessive. And not really about what they could have remembered much at all.

It feels like Zetterling is dropping in a complete costume drama in here at random, featuring all the characters we’ve seen so far. Is that supposed to be a fantasy? Or is it tying these characters together for real?

It’s just… diffuse…

The way they have people playing their characters over a large number of years doesn’t help with the confusion, so you have a 40-year-old woman apparently playing… mother? to a 27-year-old woman… it’s just hard to parse sometimes what Zetterling is trying to say.

[even more time passes]

So that wasn’t a fantasy? They’re all from the same household? (Ish.)

OK, I’m a bit drunk.

[the end]

The movie started off really well. It was structured as flashbacks from the women in the maternity ward and it was interesting. But then, halfway through, it switched to farcical costume drama. Badly done.

It’s just odd. And not in a good way.