We like it when our friends become successful

On Monday night, 6 Music won UK National Station Of The Year at the Sony Radio Awards. None of your rubbish, and about time, too. We’d sort of half-expected a nomination in the immediate wake of our pardon from execution in 2011, but we were overlooked in the heat of that particular moment and understandably half-wondered if we’d ever win. (If not then, when?) I say “we”, even though I have not been a permanent presenter on the network since 2007, as I am still made to feel part of the family by the nice people pictured above, and anyway, I have my own pigeonhole! I was there at the Sonys nine years ago, at the Grosvenor House Hotel, when the first Digital Terrestrial Station Of The Year award was handed out and we lost to Saga. (Not knocking Saga, but we felt robbed.) I was also there in 2010, too, when Jarvis won the Rising Star award for the station, and Adam and Joe won the Comedy award. It was fantastic to be able to bask in reflected glory around  the 6 Music table, as I am now a friend of the station, a presenter and a fan. I wished I could have been there on Monday to drink in the crowning glory of ten years on the air.

Thanks to Christine Shanks for this photo of Jim Bob, playing some tunes on his acoustic guitar, having read from his new novel Driving Jarvis Ham at its launch in the rather less glitzy surroundings of Bookseller Crow, a gloriously independent bookshop in Crystal Palace in South East London last Thursday. This was not a case of reflected glory, as it was Jim’s night, and the book – if anything even better than his first novel, Storage Stories, but wrought in a similarly dark-whimsical style with Kurt Vonnegut-channelling illustrations – is his achievement. I was there to pay homage.

Jim and I go way back to the old Carter days, and I consider myself a delicate hybrid of fan and friend; I have certainly made it my business to promote his good works ever since in whatever modest way that I can (when his School album came out in 2006, I was able to get him and his guitar onto Radio 2 when, preposterously, I was asked to fill in for Mark Radcliffe and was allowed to choose my guest; I also think I might have made the introductions that put him inside Robin Ince’s pluralist circle of trust, which led to his glorious, 23-piece-orchestra rendition of Angelstrike! at Nine Lessons and Carols in 2009, and his subsequent casting in White and Ward’s Gutted musical at Edinburgh).

So it is that Jim flatters me by caring what I think and asking me to read his books before they are published, and I flatter him back by supplying a quote (luckily, I have liked them all so far!), and then he flatters me back by printing my quotes in his press releases. For Jarvis Ham, he and his publisher have made me especially proud by putting one of my quotes on the front cover. And it’s a hardback! I wouldn’t have missed the launch for the world. It’s slightly odd when you are a friend and a fan, I concede. But I’ve been standing and watching him play, or speak, for years, and you get used to tapping a toe and joining in the warm applause – and, in the case of that gig at the Bull & Gate in September 2010, shouting out stupid drunken things like some prick of a heckler – and that’s what happened on Thursday. It was a happy occasion. I don’t get out much in the evenings, but you make exceptions when it’s important.

Last night, Michael Legge and I had our second date in less than a week when we attended What Is Love Anyway? at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London. (He’d be at Jim’s launch, too. He is also a friend-fan.) This is the latest one-man show of another of my friends who is successful. I have seen every show Richard Herring has done since 2001, when, in Edinburgh, I saw Christ On A Bike: The First Coming. As I used to like to point out when he and I spoke more often than we do now, I paid to go and see that show twice, as I also saw it when it transferred to London. In the ensuing years, I stopped paying as he and I developed a friendship via 6 Music and Banter, and I guess it’s ironic that by the time of The Second Coming at Edinburgh in 2010, I was his comedy partner. As such I was a combination of friend and fan and partner, which is a heavy load to bear, I can tell you. The “partner” part sometimes enhanced the “friend” part and at other times seemed to destroy it, but even in our darkest days, I remained a fan.

This was the penultimate performance of What Is Love Anyway?, and this means I was seeing it at its most honed and perfected. I’m glad I waited, as I’m pretty certain this is his crowning achievement thus far. Of all ten of his shows that I have seen (many of them twice), this is the most mature, and the most ambitious, and most moving. It flows beautifully from one passage to the next, and the climax involving his grandmother, Alzheimer’s and glitter is one of the most expertly constructed of his long career.

I was proud to know him. It actually seems preposterous that he and I once stood and sat on the same stage at the Bloomsbury and entertained a similar audience. But we did. Of course, of the two of us, Richard is the one who’s still doing it, and improving, and honing, and perfecting. It’s his gig. Not mine. I had blagged some comp tickets last night, but aside from that luxury – a luxury based on a friendship that may have become a little more formal but survives as such – I was there as a fan.

It would seem churlish to hate it when your friends become successful. After all, you would hope they would share in your success. 6 Music is now so successful, its own presenters get into fights when they are nominated for the same awards, where once they weren’t nominated at all. Jim Bob is carving out a second career as a novelist – I met his literary agent and everything! – which he is able to blend with his career as a musician. Like Jim, Richard has to work hard for his money, and perform constantly, but he is building upon his existing career and he still spends way too much of his time in cheap hotels or driving on motorways at night, but he is also settling down, too, which is nice to see, as a friend.

(Funnily enough, I’ve just realised that I am a friend and fan of Michael’s too, which seems to be working out. But I would like to stress that most of my friends are just friends, very few of them work in the media or showbusiness, and thus none of us are fans of each other’s, we are just friends.)

Tags: 6 Music, Books, comedy, gigs, Jim Bob, Richard Herring, Sony Awards

Breaking up is never easy I know

Here’s another interesting, random connection between two films seen close to each other: Café de Flore is a French-Canadian film, mostly in French, and Goodbye First Love is a French film, completely in French, and they share a fascination with love that is impossible to give up. The big difference being: one works, the other only partially.

I was filled with trepidation about Goodbye First Love, as writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s previous film, her second, Father Of My Children, rubbed me up the wrong way, despite glowing reviews and a laurel of some kind at Cannes. Actually, they’re French films, let’s give them their native titles: Le père de mes enfants; Un amour de jeunesse. Now, those with schoolboy French will have spotted that, while Father Of My Children is a literal translation of Le père de mes enfants, Un amour de jeunesse comes out as something like A Love Of Youth, or A Love Of The Young; Young Love, I guess. Even First Love. But the Goodbye part seems to be peculiar to the official English title. It gives a little more away, as this is a film about the first meaningful relationship of a Parisian girl, Camille (Lola Créton), aged 15 when we first meet her, and her tousle-haired boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), who doesn’t just have a roving eye for the ladies,  but a roving eye for the map. Here’s the goodbye part – and it’s given away in the trailer, which, again, I think I’ve seen about 50 times at various Curzon cinemas , where it’s an understandable shoo-in – Sullivan goes travelling in South America and ends the relationship. Typical boy.

There they are, in the top picture, young and in love and mistaken in the belief that their love will last forever. Hey, we’ve all been there. Hansen-Løve, who apparently based the story on her own experiences, captures the guileless optimism of this life-stage with a lightness of touch, and eliciting believable performances from her two leads; the way Camille puts up with Sullivan’s evident failure to live up to her many-splendoured plans for their relationship, and the way, in turn, that her needy demands on his heart and silly threats about not being able to live without him actually start to drive him away. When he hops it, she puts up a map of South America, and they exchange letters, but these letters dry up, and eventually, she tears the map down.

There’s nothing startlingly original in making a drama about saying goodbye to first love, and going over such adolescent ground could have spelled Twilight without the vampires as Camille moons about, her cheeks permanently moist with huffy, heartbroken tears (“When will you get over him?” asks her mum), but in playing the story out over a number of years and haircuts, Hansen-Løve shows how durable that first bond can be, and even when Camille has signed up to an architecture course and found a new distraction in her middle-aged tutor (a louche Norwegian, played by Magne-Håvard Brekke), the flame for Sullivan still burns.

I won’t roll out any more of the plot, other than to say it’s confidently and carefully seen through, consistently engaging and even occasionally surprising, so any trepidation about Hansen-Løve based upon my disappointment with Le père de mes enfants was misplaced. Maybe I just didn’t buy the trajectory of that one – which I won’t spoil – even though I’ve since read that it, too, was autobiographical and actually happened! I do have a massive soft spot for French films – just seeing the bread on the table and the red wine in glass tumblers, and recognising that all-pervasive air of bohemian ease, never mind the aesthetically pleasing rhythms of the language – but I’m not blind to individual faults. Elles, for instance, was awful, and its Frenchness did not save it. Goodbye First Love is superb.

Café de Flore isn’t. Having read a one-star assassination by not Peter Bradshaw but one of his lieutenants in the Guardian, and passed a five-star rave by the redoubtable Alan Jones for the online database of my very own Radio Times, I went into the cinema with one eye wide open and the other wide shut. Would it be a “narcissistic and fundamentally unpersuasive mosaic” with “the most stupid movie twist of the decade”? Or a “bold … uncompromising, passionate … intoxicating triumph that bristles with sly innovation”?

Well, it was a bit of both. From French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée, who, oddly, made serviceable heritage drama The Young Victoria, this is a striking collage of imagery built from fragments that represent not just actual memories but sometimes imagined ones. It cuts together two parallel stories: one about the domestic mid-life hari-kiri committed by a crashingly unsympathetic 40-year-old superstar DJ, Antoine (Kevin Parent), who, when he’s not at home in Montreal is out tickling clubs full of ravers with his supreme deckmanship, and when he’s not doing that, he’s leaving his angelic and lovely wife Carole (Hélène Florent) for a younger “bimbo”, which leaves him socially exiled by his parents and daughters; the other about a poor young single mum (Vanessa Paradis) in late-60s Paris who raises her Down’s Syndrome son Laurent (an amazing Marin Gerrier) with so much love it threatens to engulf them all.

Like Goodbye First Love, Café de Flore effectively depicts that unquestioning brand of love, the kind that can drive you mad. You can trace parallels between the lovey-dovey passion of Camille and Sullivan, and the similarly pubescent devotion of Antoine and Carole as young teenage Goths listening to The Cure’s Faith album, and making vows in eyeliner. In both films, we see that intoxicating brand of first love develop, although in the latter case, the pair get married, have kids and then split up. She even clingingly forgives him for straying with the blonde “bimbo” (as she’s called constantly by the eldest daughter), but he won’t go back as for him, the love is gone. It’s not as if his wife is old and worn out, or that his bimbo is particularly stunning and nubile, but it’s enough to cause this preening ninny of a man to make a bonfire of his marriage.

Throughout the film, and this is where it gets infuriating, we are teased with possible connections between the present and the past. When, in the final act, we are offered something concrete, it is in fact balsa wood, and although the final twist isn’t “the most stupid of the decade” (we are only two years into the decade), it’s not enough to hang a two-hour film on. And certainly not when that film seems to revel so arrogantly and confidently in the cosmic clues that are constantly dropped. Vallée seems to want us to keep asking, “How are these two stories linked?”, and we do, because he jumps from one to the other throughout, but if you demand an audience asks questions, you have to answer them in a meaningful way. (For instance: the coincidental party of adults with Down’s Syndrome who come through an airport arrivals hall in the present when Antoine is leaving for a foreign gig – he disappears into a blur; they emerge from a blur and come into focus – it’s an arresting image, but playing with the focus and putting it in slo-mo does not fool anyone; it’s actually a pretty manipulative coincidence. It’s never explained. But it’s hardly subtle enough to be called a visual rhyme, or an allusion.)

Goodbye First Love got better while I watched Café de Flore. Hansen-Løve sees no need to muck about and tantalise; she just tells her story, in order, and we’re with her. Vallée is clearly of a more experimental mindset and while his ambition can be applauded – and, to be fair, some of the fragments do pay off, like the vapour trail in the sky, and the sheer audacity of using a modern piece of dance music to link contemporary Montreal with 1960s Paris takes some front – but it veers towards pretense too often. And it’s way too forgiving towards Antoine’s infidelity. Typical man.

Tags: cinema, France, French cinema, French-Canadian cinema, love

Middle of the road

Telly Addict is up, with the finale of Homeland on C4; Britain Beware (with added Tufty) on ITV1; Awake on Sky Atlantic; and Planet Earth Live on BBC1. Be careful out there. Don’t be like Willy.

Tags: BBC1, C4, Guardian, ITV1, Telly, Telly Addict, TV

Dansk in real life

I won’t add to the chorus of approval for Channel 4′s wisely-chosen US import Homeland, which came to a satisfying conclusion at the weekend. Mark Lawson was the latest to have to argue against British TV drama from its long, persuasive shadow in the Guardian on Monday. But for my money, The Bridge, aka Bron in Swedish, aka Broen in Danish, is even better. The latest Scandinavian import to arrive on BBC4 – following Wallander, Forbrydelsen and Borgen – it is surely the perfect encapsulation of what makes the region so fertile in terms of drama and setting. In fact, if you’ve immersed yourself in the Denmark of Forbrydelsen and Borgen, both set in Copehagen and linked by an interest in the politics peculiar to that country, you’ll have a decent head start on The Bridge (which I’ll call The Bridge rather than have to juggle the subtly different Swedish and Danish translations).

I hardly need to go over the set-up, but I will: a body is discovered at the exact halfway point of the elegant, five-mile-long Øresund Bridge, which links Malmö to Copenhagen by road and rail and thus unites two police jurisdictions in solving the crime. (The body, which turns out to be two halves of two separate bodies, has been placed there to get the attention of both, and that’s as far as I’m going to go with the plot, so worry not, those who have yet to catch up, or plan to box-set it.)

It’s as if the dark police procedural of Forbrydelsen has been linked to the more brightly-lit corridors of power of Borgen, mixing social issues with a good old whodunit. In the leads, Kim Bodnia and Sofia Helin create a fabulously mismatched detective duo, one that surely has legs far beyond this one case. Martin Rohde, a rotund, homely, good-humoured, rumpled maverick from Copenhagen is everything that Saga Norén, of Malmö, is not. She’s borderline autistic, socially inept, emotionally stunted, professionally by-the-book, but her powers of deduction are keen and her no-nonsense attitude (and lack of meaningful home life) ensure she gets the job done.

Unlike Sarah Lund, Saga is more overtly sexual in her leather trousers and slash-neck tops (which in the first episode she kept whipping off in the office and changing); she is seen picking up a man in a bar for functional, no-questions-asked rumpo. And yet, she is cold and efficient, and in many ways asexual. Rohde has been emasculated by a vasectomy and feels the need to assert himself sexually but he’s more of a teddy bear. I won’t say how but if there is any sexual tension between them it is subsequently defused in a very surprising way.

There’s real humour in the writing, despite the Gothic nature of the crimes, and much of this emerges in the sparring between Rohde and Norén. There’s also a lot of subtle stuff about the differences between the Danish and Swedish way of doing things – and in the intricacies of language and pronunciation. (This is a Danish-Swedish co-production, a coalition that actually pays dividends, and slices straight down the middle. I mean: can you think of a cleverer pitch than The Bridge in terms of setting out its geographical stall? Usually footage of cars going over a bridge in drama is there to provide a bumper; here, it seems vital. And it’s a beautiful bridge, especially at night against that amazing Scandinavian sky.) We’re six episodes in, with four to go, and all six are available on iPlayer, so get in there if you haven’t already.

I know “Scandi drama” is a phrase that’s tiresomely overused at the moment, and I sympathise if you’re put off by yet more Guardian-reader hype, but The Bridge drew over a million to BBC4 in its first week (more than The Killing), which is hard to argue with. I find the bendy sound of the Danish and Swedish language to be easy on the ear, and I guess I’m used to it, having previously organised my own home-schooling crash course in the works of Ingmar Bergman. About ten years ago, when his back catalogue started to come out at a rate of knots via Tartan, I eagerly got up to speed, and titles like Winter Light, The Silence and Wild Strawberries became instant all-time favourites.

At the weekend, I went to the Curzon Chelsea to see Ordet on the big screen, my first taste of Carl Theodor Dreyer, the father of Danish cinema and often cited as one of the greatest directors of all time. I feel a little late to the party, but what a way to start! Ordet (The Word) is one of his later films, made in 1955, when Bergman was enjoying his first international hit with Smiles Of A Summer Night. Dreyer had made his name in the 1920s, helping to forge the medium. I must now delve into that early work – notably The Passion of Joan of Arc and Vampyr (which I’ve always been aware of, thanks to all the history of horror books I used to devour as a boy), and what I know to be his 1940s classic Day of Wrath. I loved Ordet. It is utterly captivating; hypnotic stuff.

Based on a 1932 play, although I assume the film is set in the 1950s, it has a theatrically staged feel, with characters standing in rows, coming in and out of doors, and enunciating very precisely and slowly against flat backdrops, but it opens melodramatically on location in the dunes around a rural farm, where the haunting character Johannes (Preben Lerdoff Rye) who has gone insane and thinks he is Jesus Christ, declaims to what he considers to be a Godless universe. The rest of the Borgen family – yes, you may spot links between Ordet and the previously mentioned modern Danish culture – find themselves caught between God and science, tradition and progress, birth and death, true faith and cold, hard reality. They also come into conflict with a neighbouring evagelical Christian sect, for whom faith is grim and joyless, while the Borgens’ is about warmth and celebration. (Having said this, it’s all relative, and the Borgens are not exactly dancing around the place, flinging flowers in the name of the Lord.)

It’s mesmerisingly slow and deliberate, and everybody seems to walk at the pace of Frankenstein’s monster, and if this is what Danish theatre was like in the 1930s, I want to go there. It’s been hailed as a masterpiece, and I can see why. Not only is the subject matter profound, and heart-stopping at one crucial juncture (which I won’t ruin), but, again, there’s humour here. Surely Dreyer was anticipating a laugh from the audience when Johannes’ condition is explained by his father (Henrik Malberg) to a visitor who assumes it was “love” that sent him mad, but in fact, he explains bluntly, “It was Kierkegaard.” (It’s a gag worthy of Woody Allen.)

Unlike Peter the Tailor in Ordet, I’m not here to convert anybody. This kind of cinema is not going to be for everybody. I would understand if you found it irritating and punishing, and that you found Johannes comical – which I feel sure he’s not meant to be, and anyway, it haunted me. I just find myself with a real urge to soak up Danish culture. Denmark is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

Tags: BBC4, Danish, Denmark, Dreyer, Scandi, Sweden, Swedish, The Bridge

I’m hired

I hope. This week’s Telly Addict represents my first birthday. I am one. Happy birthday to me. This is the 52nd Telly Addict that has gone out into the world. Alright, 53rd, as the lively and hardworking Guardian contributor Stuart Heritage did it for one week when I was away. (I won’t make that mistake again. It’s a doggy-dog world etc.) But it’s been a year for me, so … as well as randomly reviewing Week 7 of The Apprentice on BBC1; Foxes Live on C4; and the delectable Grandma’s House on BBC2, there’s an intricate “previously on …” montage, which I hope you enjoy. And congratulations to Cameron Robertson, who I believe is the heroic soul who edited it together. (See how I credit other people?)

Tags: animals, BBC1, BBC2, C4, foxes, Telly, Telly Addict, The Apprentice, TV, wildlife

London’s rubbish

It’s not. London’s Rubbish was the title of a spoof of London’s Burning Stuart Maconie and I wrote for our first radio series in 1993, which – and this is pretty clever – instead of the fire brigade centred around the capital’s refuse collectors. (We were, historians will note, a year ahead of Common As Muck, William Ivory’s BBC comedy drama about binmen.) Although I was a permanent resident of London in 1993, Stuart lived in Birmingham – as indeed he still does – and had a more circumspect relationship with our glorious capital than I. Having spent my first 19 years in Northampton – a town I have a strong emotional bond with, and where the bulk of my family still reside – I fell for London within six months of emigrating here in 1984. I have never wished to live anywhere else. Except for Galway.

The important thing to note, on the day that the results of London’s Mayoral and Assembly elections come in, is that when I arrived here, in the mid-80s, all fired up by the left-wing politics of the NME (which provided me with a much-needed political education after indoctrination in Tory selfishness from my Dad), Ken Livingstone ran the place. Under siege from Margaret Thatcher’s ideological hatred of “Loony Left” policy, for which he was a lightning rod, and the public sector in general, his GLC was both a beacon and a blot on the landscape. It would be disbanded within two years after the Local Government Act of 1985. (ILEA, the Inner London Education Authority, which controlled the art school I went to, was also on the block, dissolved in 1990. Its decision to amalgamate the four London art schools in 1985 lit the spark under my first student demo, which took us to County Hall, Ken’s home, with our hand-painted placards.)

Because of the turbulent times, and a conversion to Labour that led me to joining the party in time for the 1987 General Election, I have only positive memories of “Red Ken.” He introduced “Fares Fair”, which reduced public transport costs through subsidy, proposed a statue of Nelson Mandela, and – whatever your feelings on the issue – was bold enough to conduct a dialogue with Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams in 1982, which was exactly what New Labour did some years later but was considered in poor taste at the time. The right-wing press was full of nonsense about the “Loony Left” and it would have been easy to get sucked into it, but my memory of Ken is one of admiration and a feeling that he was on the side of ordinary Londoners.

By the time of the 2000 Mayoral elections, Ken was out-manoeuvred by the Blair government and forced to stand against the Labour candidate, Frank Dobson. Again, I cheered him on, being well past the honeymoon period with Blairism and gung-ho for anyone who’d stand up to Blair. I voted for him. That he won seemed a moral victory as well as one for common sense. (He’d run London before; he was well qualified to do it again.) By the time of the 2004 Mayoral elections, he was readmitted to Labour, and I voted Green. Same again in 2008, by which time, unfortunately, a reinvigorated Conservative party had shrewdly fielded lovable TV buffoon Boris Johnson, and he swept Ken aside.

I would say, as a London resident, that the biggest issue is always public transport. Ken froze bus fares when he first got in, and introduced the Oyster swipe card to reduce queuing and delay on buses and trains, which definitely had the desired effect. It meant that travellers without an Oyster had to pay more per journey, which was seen as a disadvantage for visitors. I was against Oyster for years, mainly because I didn’t want to be electronically tagged every time I used a bus or Tube, but I gave in, as it was so financially advantageous to pay this way.

Ken introduced the infamous “bendy buses”, which because of their length were easy to sneak onto, wreaked articulated havoc on other drivers, cyclists and pedestrians, and some of them caught on fire, and these have since been scrapped by Boris. But Ken was always against the Public Private Partnership as a way of regenerating the Underground, a point on which he and I agreed. He was also powerless to stop it going through, and, I think, unprincipled enough to still rejoin Labour when they courted him. Fares, especially for those commuting in from the outer reaches of Greater London, have shot up under Boris. Whether Ken could have stopped this, I don’t know.

The results are not yet in. Because of the make-up of the Assembly, and proportional representation, it’s actually worth voting Green, as you can actually place them in power. There are two Greens on the Assembly as I type. This pleases me. So, pretty much physically unable to put a cross next to “Labour” yet (the scars of betrayal are still weeping), I voted for Jenny Jones, the admirable Green candidate. You get a second choice, so I was forced to put a cross next to Ken, as a protest vote against Boris. (I almost bumped into him on the campaign trail in 2008 in a high street in South West London, and a schoolboy shouted out, as he passed, “Boris Johnson’s got a big fat head.” I admired this boy for his astute political observation – and the fact that he didn’t swear.)

I like going out to vote. I like clutching a polling card. I find it a novelty to walk into a church hall, which is not something I would normally do. I like to think I was one of the first to cast my vote yesterday morning, popping in at 7.10am on my way to get the paper. I don’t imagine my first- or second-choice votes really made a difference, as Londoners seem more invested in the cult of Boris (and perhaps a historical distaste for “Red Ken”) than in the party he stands for – a party who are surely close to being discredited forever nationally? I have a lot of time for Liberal candidate Brian Paddick, but the Liberal Democrats are as dead to me as the Tories.

I think what I like about elections is that they focus your mind. It’s all very well shouting at the news and throwing your newspaper down in disgust, but on a daily basis, you are powerless to do anything more meaningful about it. On election day, you get a cross, or four crosses in the case of yesterday’s.

London is a huge city with massive problems. We’re currently looking down the barrel, literally, of the Olympics, which promise to bring the place to a halt for weeks. (There are helpful posters up all over London advising us to leave for work earlier or later, or stay at home, or walk to work, or cycle, or if that’s not feasible just go and fuck ourselves, during the games.) It takes three hours to get into the place by airport. There are missiles mounted on a tower block in East London. The local paper, the London Evening Standard, is now almost totally given over to propaganda about the Olympics, and has been a parish magazine for Boris, who thinks that earning £250,000 a year for a newspaper column is “peanuts”.

As I publish this, he’s in the lead. I am delighted to see that Jenny Jones is ahead of Brian Paddick, as that feels like a slap in the face for the party that seems happy to act as David Cameron’s houseboy.

Whoever gets in, London will continue to be dirty, overcrowded, dangerous and slow, and the Tube will continue to fall to bits. But I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. Except Galway.

Tags: Labour, London, Politics

Trouble downstairs

After all the Oscar and Golden Globes heat, I was looking forward to seeing Albert Nobbs, despite my sentimentality needle going into the red every time I saw the trailer. I remember this film with the weird name standing out of the speculative longlists during the first flush of “Oscar buzz” at the start of the year as it was pretty much the only one I didn’t recognise. I was quickly up to speed: it was the one in which Glenn Close plays a man.

Albert Nobbs is a woman in 1890s Dublin who has adopted the persona of a man in order to get better-paid work. Or at least, that’s what I took away from it. She is also a lesbian, although a repressed one who dreams less of getting it on with another woman, than settling down in respectable marriage with one, so that she can be the husband. Working as a waiter in an upmarket hotel, run by Pauline Collins, one of the few non-Irish actors in the film who manages a decent Irish accent, Nobbs – prim, proper, upright, stiff, reticent, deferential, all those things – meets Janet McTeer’s painter and decorator, a man who also turns out to be a woman in disguise. Except McTeer – who steals the film from under Close’s prim, proper etc. nose – has a wife. We see the couple at home, a lesbian couple who must maintain the dressing-up-box pretence of heterosexuality even in their front room, in case a neighbour should walk past the window.

Now, I know what you’re thinking – apart from: what are the chances of two cross-dressing lesbians in male professions meeting up by pure chance in 1890s Ireland? – this sounds like an original and interesting premise for a period drama. A landmark in “Queer Cinema” but, like Brokeback Mountain, disguised as mainstream entertainment. What a wasted opportunity it turned out to be.

The film’s backstory is far more interesting than the film itself. Based on a 1918 novella by James Joyce-influencing writer George Moore (published in 1927), Glenn Close played the role in a stage adaptation in 1982 and has been trying to bring it to the screen ever since. It’s a passion play for her. And you have to admire her tenacity. The trouble is, if was shocking in 1927, and still a bit shocking in 1982, it’s just not shocking at all in 2012. Indeed, it’s all rather quaint. Directed by Rodrigo Garcia (son of Gabriel Garcia Marquez!) in flat, muted colours and at a stately pace, it has the feel of a Sunday night episode of Upstairs Downstairs or something by Catherine Cookson.

It’s a 15 certificate, but needn’t be. At one stage McTeer flashes her breasts at Close as a big reveal that I’m afraid we all saw coming, even if Albert Nobbs didn’t, and Brendan Gleeson is seen going down on Maria Doyle Kennedy, but under the sheets. Beyond that, it’s a U. Not that it needed sex; after all, Nobbs, despite his name, is very much above the belt. But it could have done with a bit more lust, or a bit more colour in its cheeks. It opens so well, with a fabulously mixed parade of hotel guests trooping into Pauline Collins’ formal dining room, including the always-brilliant Gleeson, a gay dandy played by Jonathan Rhys Myers (he gets two scenes in the whole film), and servants fleshed out by the talented likes of Mark Williams, Antonia Campbell Hughes, Mia Wasikowska, Brenda Fricker and the aforementioned Doyle Kennedy.

Such a lot of acting talent to so slender an end. Aaron Johnson is the handyman with eyes for Wasikowska, and their affair is supposed to engage our interest, but doesn’t. (Johnson’s accent is possibly the worst on screen.) She was perfectly ornate in Alice In Wonderland and I bought her as a modern teen in The Kids Are All Right, but Wasikowska fails to breathe life into her mousy maid. Doyle Kennedy and Gleeson are onscreen not enough, and Rhys Meyers hardly at all. The interiors are claustrophobic – all poorly lit corridors and pokey bedrooms – but when we go outside, the period streets scenes were clearly limited by budget, and little air blows through.

I didn’t hate it or anything. There’s not much in it to like, or dislike. Close’s performance, hobbled by an inconsistent accent, is delicate and precise, but Nobbs is hard to understand, she comes across as a cipher, an otherwordly figure who rarely laughs or comes alive. I’m sure this is true to the text, and the play, but far from complex, she’s a bit like Forrest Gump in a bowler hat.

I emerged from the cinema underwhelmed. I wonder if others, tempted by the Oscar buzz, felt the same? It should have been the performance of Close’s career – and some kind souls said it was – but if Robin Williams had played it, and facially he could have, Nobbs might have pulsed off the screen rather than remain skulking in the background.

Tags: cinema, lesbian, Oscar