Reviews
Leave Your Chair and Hit the Road
There's always something of a lull in the movie market in early January, as the distributors recover from the holiday blockbusters and gear themselves up for the Oscar season. Consequently, the schedules tend to fill up with reissues and minor offerings like Man in the Chair, which feels like a teleplay that has stumbled on to a big screen.
There's no denying that Michael Schroeder's gutsily nostalgic Tinseltown comedy has its heart in the right place. But an air of calculation pervades every scene, as teenage misfit Michael Angarano rescues Citizen Kane gaffer Christopher Plummer from the Motion Picture Retirement Home to work on his film school audition piece. Schroeder packs the action with subplots, involving Angarano's troubled home life, Plummer's obsession with an animal shelter and his strained relationships with washed-up screenwriter M.Emmet Walsh and wife-stealing producer, Robert Wagner.
As in that OAP charmer Cocoon (1985), the emphasis is on sentiment, feel-good and reclaiming the elderly from the scrapheap. But the performances are nowhere near as subtle, with Plummer particularly seizing every opportunity to showboat, whether heckling Charlton Heston in a fleapit screening of Orson Welles's A Touch of Evil or embarking on another of his periodic benders.
Veteran Ismail Ghaffari gives a more guileful display of scene stealing in Half Moon, the latest outing by the king of the Kurdish road movie, Bahman Ghobadi. Inspired by Mozart's Requiem, this magic realist odyssey combines melodrama, poetry and absurdist comedy in a tribute to the human spirit that also recognises the inexorable prerogative of fate.
On the fall of Saddam, Ghaffari's ageing musician vows to return to his Iraqi homeland for the first time in 35 years. However, in order to play a celebratory concert, he needs to assemble his ten scattered sons and smuggle female singer Hedieh Tahrani past the Iranian border guards. Overcoming each obstacle with an obduracy that's as craggy as the passing landscape, Ghaffari embodies his people's indomitability. But it's Ghobadi's deft discussion of culture, politics, gender and family, and his unflinching depiction of the region's tragic lunacies, that prove most affecting.
No director is more associated with road movies than Wim Wenders, and the BFI Southbank in London opens its two-part tribute with an extended run of Alice in the Cities (1974), which helped forge the German's international reputation.
However, the project nearly collapsed in development, as Wenders considered quitting cinema altogether after he discovered that Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon had anticipated his idea about the unconventional relationship between a loner and a little girl. Fortunately, he was persuaded to rewrite the scenario by Hollywood maverick Samuel Fuller and it introduced themes that would recur throughout his career.
Providing an amusing, affectionate and yet quietly critical portrait of 1970s America, this monochrome picaresque often employs a subjective camera technique that places viewers at the heart of the action, enabling us to experience the sights and sounds of the eastern seaboard along with photojournalist Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottlander, the nine-year-old companion who's been entrusted to him by her free-spirited mother. Indeed, the search for the girl's grandmother becomes increasingly irrelevant, as Wenders and his inspired cameraman, Robby Müller, concentrate on the odd couple's reactions to each other and their ever-changing environment.
A missing senior citizen is also central to the week's other re-release, The Lady Vanishes (1938). A close second to The 39 Steps as the best film of Alfred Hitchcock's British period, this sublime comedy thriller was co-scripted by Alma Reville (Mrs Hitchcock) and the dynamic duo of Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat.
There isn't a wasted frame as Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood search a Balkan express train for dotty May Whitty, whom Lockwood suspects has been abducted by enemy agents. Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne drew plaudits as the cricket-mad Charters and Caldicott, but the support playing of Paul Lukas, Mary Clare and Cecil Parker is also first-class.
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