Theater Review: "Brief Encounter" -- Hokey, Charming Takeoff on Noël Coward’s iconic film

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Sunday, 26 December 2010 00:32

Written by Lucy Komisar

I can’t remember when I’ve seen a play as hokey and charming and full of fun as “Brief Encounter.” Okay, I take that back. It was “The 39 Steps.” But not surprising, it is also a spoof of an iconic British film, that one by Alfred Hitchcock. This one is by Noël Coward. If you want to have a very good time, go to this production. But notice the deeper meaning underneath it all.

Brief Encounter was a one-act play before it was a film, so Emma Rice has done a good turn by bringing it back to the stage, this time as a musical! We are in Milford Junction, in Surrey, England, in 1938.

By chance, two people meet at the train station café when Laura (Hannah Helland), a housewife, gets a speck in her eye, and Alec (Tristan Sturrock), a doctor, takes it out. From there grows true love.

But they are already married. We see Laura’s husband Fred (Joseph Alessi), older and rather boring. We never know Alec’s wife. The lovers meet from time to time at the station, at lunches in London, and in a borrowed apartment during an affair that seems as much consumed by anguish and guilt as by joy.

Laura wants to be free, to have a life that is exiting and fulfilling, not to be stuck in the humdrum middle class home we see ruled by her husband.

Pretty hokey in our time, no? So adapter/director Emma Rice goes with the hokey. We hear the movie’s overdone style of their dialogue, from her “Please we must be sensible?” to his, “I love you and you love me too. There’s no use pretending this hasn’t happened, because it has.”

We see the characters push through a screen to appear in the real film. The video of a toy train gets pulled along a clothes line of hanging sheets. We see and hear films of waves crashing on rocks during unseen moments of passion. (When did crashing waves come to symbolize sex?)

Helland and Sturrock are perfect in the roles, with just the right level of controlled ardor and overwrought speech. They could have been cast in the original film.

A couple of other romances play out with the excellent cast: the over-the-top tea shop owner (Annette McLaughlin) and her railroad employee boyfriend (Alessi) and a very erotic couple, the tea shop worker (Dorothy Atkinson) and her suitor (Gabriel Ebert).

A first-rate band featuring accordion, trumpet, bass, banjo and piano presents a host of Coward treats, including a satiric, sexy “Mad About the Boy.” And that gets most directly to what is agreed to be Coward’s underlying, unspoken theme of the play, which was the difficulty of having gay relationships in the 1930s. They were as forbidden as sex outside marriage.

Then, desire and disappointment in love is universal. It is to Rice’s credit and the audience’s great enjoyment that she turns this very serious drama into a lark.

Brief Encounter
Written by Noël Coward
adapted and directed by Emma Rice
Kneehigh Theatre of London production
Roundabout Theatre Company at Studio 54
254 West 54th Street
New York City
212-719-1300
Opened Sept. 28, 2010 and closes Jan. 2, 2011.

Kevin's December Digital Week I

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 04 December 2010 05:00

Written by Kevin Filipski

Blu-rays of the Week
Knight and Day
(Fox)
Those who aren’t fans of Tom Cruise or Cameron Diaz may find their repartee in this labored James Bond spoof forced. Director James Mangold sets up  many outlandish action sequences in this comic adventure that end up blending together. If you can get excited over Tom and Cameron in a motorcycle chase alongside the running of the (obviously CGI) bulls, then you might find this entertaining, even though there’s too much smugness and tasteless casualness as people are routinely killed.
 
It all looks gloriously slick on Blu-ray, with genuinely atmospheric location shooting in Boston, Brooklyn and Jamaica, but the two stars are simply cashing checks here. Extras include on-set featurettes and a Black Eyed Peas video which I won’t be watching.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
(Disney)
The famous Fantasia segment is brought to life in an homage about halfway through this convoluted, entertaining but finally exhausting adventure about an immortal sorcerer (a hammy Nicolas Cage) who reluctantly joins with a New York City teenager to fend off an evil sorcerer (a hammy Alfred Molina). Jon Turtletaub’s sledgehammer directing (the same as in National Treasure) gleefully drives through the huge plot holes, and on Blu-ray, everything looks so magically strange that it doesn‘t matter, especially for its target audience.
 
Extras include deleted scenes, making-of featurettes and a gag reel, along with cast and crew discussing the original Disney short, from Paul Dukas’ music (which Trevor Rabin, the score composer, wisely quotes.)

DVDs of the Week
The Boys, Waking Sleeping Beauty, Walt and El Grupo
(Disney)
These fascinating documentaries give viewers valuable insights into three separate periods of the Disney company’s storied if checkered history. Walt and El Grupo follows Walt Disney on a wartime trip to South America in 1941; The Boys chronicles the close but rocky relationship between the Sherman brothers, composers of immortal songs in Mary Poppins, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Jungle Book; and Waking Sleeping Beauty shows how Disney shook off the ‘70s and ‘80s doldrums to retake the animated world by storm in the ‘90s.
 
All of the documentaries are well worth watching in their own right, but numerous bonus features (commentaries, deleted scenes, even the original 1943 release of Saludos Amigos) make these discs a must for anyone with an interest in Disney...meaning anyone.

Restrepo
(Virgil Films)  
Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s look at a group of American soldiers in the worst area of Afghanistan is 94 tense minutes of sheer visceral terror, as close to actual war anyone should ever want to get. Restrepo records the day-to-day lives of men in the platoon the directors were imbedded with. Although the Korengal Valley is deep inside the belly of the beast—where the most lethal fighting occurs in this endless war—there’s not a pointedly political comment made by anyone.
 
There are statements about the nearly impossible task given to these brave young men, some of whom look barely old enough to drive, let alone fight in a war. Restrepo singlemindedly places us in the midst of the fighting, showing off its (and its subjects’) integrity.

CDs of the Week
Bryn Terfel: Carols and Christmas Songs
The Welsh bass-baritone’s first holiday CD shows off his powerful voice on carols like “Silent Night” and “What Child Is This?”, along with less obvious candidates like two German-language carols, “Still, Still, Still” and “O Jesulein zart.” A less than felicitous posthumous “duet” of  “White Christmas” with Bing Crosby is an obvious low point, but his “live” duet with Rolando Villazon (“El Nacimiento”) is charming.
 
For good measure, a second disc of carols sung in Terfel’s native language includes Welsh versions of “O Come All Ye Faithful” and “Away in a Manger,” and he also sings “To Bethlehem,” “Christmas? Who Knows?” and “The Baby’s Day.” Terfel sounds engaged throughout, and you can hear the grin on his face as he relives winter nights back in Wales, singing carols with his family.

Wagner’s Ring: Clemens Krauss
(Orfeo)
Among the greatest of all recorded Ring cycles, conductor Clemens Krauss’s 1953 live recordings from Bayreuth, with what’s by all accounts one of the best casts ever assembled, have been remastered and re-released. The 13-CD set omits the libretti which are readily available elsewhere; more important is that this stunning, dramatic interpretation of Wagner’s still-potent 16-hour saga is available once again, sounding cleaner and fresher than ever.
 
Krauss takes fairly quick tempi, which some might dislike, but it undeniably makes the drama more urgent. And what voices: Hans Hotter (Wotan), Astrid Varnay (Brunnhilde), Wolfgang Windgassen (Siegfried) and Regina Resnik (Sieglinde) are peerless throughout the four operas.

Paris, France, Fall 2010

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 02 December 2010 14:39

Written by William Messer

The French are not known as a culture which has difficulty with visible sexuality in art, but this ceased to be the case when it came to exhibiting American photographer and filmmaker (Kids, Ken Park) Larry Clark’s 200-plus piece retrospective photography exhibition Kiss the Past Hello at la Musée d’Art Modern de las Ville Paris this October, 2010. For what is believed the first time, entrance to an art exhibition was restricted to those 18 or older.

Ironically, Clark’s photographs document teen aged lives, and more specifically teen age lust (also the title of Clark’s second book), a lust for sex, drinking, drugs, guns etc., often quite explicitly. They also reflect a disturbingly problematic affinity for his subjects which suggests an inability to grow up beyond this post adolescent excess.

Thus 17-year olds (and younger) were prevented from viewing the recorded lives of other 17-year olds (and younger) in another place and time and learning from the way those other lives were lived.

“You can’t show images that are disturbing to minors,” explained the exhibit’s curator, Sébastien Gokalp, “so we banned them from attending.”

Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoë weighed in to defend the Museum’s actions, claiming some of the most objectionable work had never been exhibited before and violated French law which may prohibits showing pornographic or violent imagery to minors.

"The 2007  Maison Européenne de la Photographie Larry Clark exhibition did present some images from Teenage Lust, but none of the ones that have been classified as too violent or shocking." In fact, Delanoë adds, the New York museums which own Teenage Lust have never shown all of the images that constitute the controversial work.

Additionally, the editing of the exhibition’s catalogue as a book was moved from France after six of the images made the Museum’s publishing house, Paris Musées, uncomfortable; it now will be published by Luhring Augustine and Simon Lee, Clark’s London and New York galleries.

Clark reacted to the restrictions calling them “ridiculous,” “censorship” and “an attack by adults against teenagers” preventeing them from recognizing themselves, and suggested the ban be reversed, allowing teen agers to see the exhibit and preventing adults.

Other charges of censorship were raised by the Green Party (calling the banning “an excess of prudence” and “a dangerous precedent”), human rights groups and the International Art Critics Association (AICA); while the leftist daily newspaper Liberation went so far as to place one the the offending images designated by the City of Paris on its front page and all on its websites.

Following the controversy at MAM in Paris, the director of the Centre Paul Klee de Berne, Switzerland decided to remove two Clark photographs from its exhibition about the Seven Deadly Sins, stating that the removal of the Clark photographs was done in light of the controversy at the Paris exhibition.

Barely 100 meters down the hill from the Clark exhibition at the MAM is a venue previously unknown to me in the Fondation Bergé Yves Saint Laurent, exhibiting new work by British artist David Hockney, entitled Fleurs fraîches (Fresh Flowers).

It’s no mere coincidence the the three images illustrating the exhibition on the brochure, posters and illuminated billboards around Paris represent flowers on window ledges; many of the pieces in the exhibition are images of the fresh flowers Hockney’s companion began putting in his bedroom window each morning.

But more importantly the work about light, how light defines a subject, even light itself as subject, as it is work in which luminosity is created by the work, as the work itself contains its own light source. These are “drawings” made, and exhibited, on iPhones and iPads.

The play between light often depicted within the images and light projected by the images propels the work and compels enhanced appreciation of Hockney’s artistic awareness and aptitude, as well as his skill as a draughtsman.

It’s tempting to term these works finger paintings, although no paint is involved, as they draw on the skillful application and manipulation of the artist’s fingers and nails and draw on the technology of painting programs available as applications). Especially on the iPhone, Hockney often drew with his thumb. “I could hold it in my right hand and my thumb could reach every corner of the screen... I could then have a cigarette in my left hand to help me concentrate.”

It sounds rather casual but the results are impressive, sometimes seeming flat and decorative as wallpaper, other times not only representing three dimensional space convincingly but effectively evoking the sense of light permeating the space.

Kiss The Past Hello Exhibit
la Musée d’Art Modern de las Ville Paris
October 8, 2010 - January 2, 2011
11 avenue du President Wilson
75116 Paris
Tel: 01 53 67 40 00