SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK
Odeon: April 9-11
David O. Russell’s wonderfully unconventional ‘bipolar’ romantic comedy has a lot of interesting things to say about this disorder, cleverly wrapping its traumas in a frothy off-beat comedy that is pitch perfect, compassionate and sharp. Jennifer Lawrence’s Best Actress Oscar is well deserved. ‘For all its high-flying zaniness the movie has the sting of life, and its humor feels dredged up from the same dark, boggy place from which Samuel Beckett extracted his yuks’ (New York Times). ‘Manic as it might be stylistically, emotionally Silver Linings Playbook maintains too even of a keel. It’s a film about the alienated that makes sure to alienate no one, a movie depicting wild mood extremes that never rises or falls above a dull hum of diversion, never exploding into riotous comedy or daring to be devastatingly sad’ (Village Voice). ‘Pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end’ (New Yorker).
CITIZEN KANE (1941)
The British Institute: April 3, 8pm
with Orson Welles, Joseph Cotton, Dorothy Comingore
Herrmann’s first film score and a very good start to an exceptional career, as it was for the boy genius Orson Welles, directing and acting in his screen debut at 26. The accolades for this movie are legion, and it has almost since its appearance been top of the list in the critics’ choice for the greatest movie of all time (slipping to second place in 2012). Welles’ brilliantly veiled attack on press baron William Randolph Hearst is a treasure trove of cinematic tricks, with Herrmann’s remarkable score a worthy accompaniment. ‘Citizen Kane was completely different from any other film I ever made. The score, like the film, works like a jigsaw,’ says Herrmann of his neoromantic/indigenous American blend. ‘Its imagery (not forgetting the oppressive ceilings) as Welles delightedly explores his mastery of a new vocabulary, still amazes and delights, from the opening shot of the forbidding gates of Xanadu to the last glimpse of the vanishing Rosebud (tarnished, maybe, but still a potent symbol). A film that gets better with each renewed acquaintance’ (Time Out).
JANE EYRE (1941)
The British Institute: April 10, 8pm
with Orson Welles, Joan Fontaine, Margaret O’Brien
With its gothic effects and exuberant melodrama, Robert Stevenson’s adaptation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel cries out for a sensitive and intense soundtrack, and Herrmann obliges with what he called his first ‘screen opera.’ Wagnerian in its theatricality, Herrmann’s music is full of ‘Gothic extravagances and poetic morbidities’ much praised by Paul Bowles, who went on to say ‘Mr Herrmann shows a fine understanding of the psychological relationships which exist between drama and music, particularly between mood and orchestral timbre; and this is the determining factor in making the score an outstanding one.’ ‘Charlotte Bronte reduced to straight Gothic romance, but surprisingly effective right from the opening shot … always looks as though Orson had at least one eye behind the camera. And the cracks (notably the discrepancies in acting styles between pallid Jane and full-blooded Rochester) are neatly papered over by a fine Bernard Herrmann score’ (Time Out).
