On Ondine Time

Trying to decide what to watch for Saint Patrick's Day last night, I searched for "Neil Jordan" on HBOMax and only Ondine and Mona Lisa came up. So I started watching Ondine, though I reviewed it back in 2013 and, though I liked it, I didn't remember it making a big impression on me. It still doesn't blow me down but the cinematography is awfully pretty, as is Alicja Bachleda.

Where's she been since Ondine came out in 2009? According to Wikipedia, she hasn't made a movie since 2016 and her latest credit is a 2019 Wolfenstein video game. I hope she retired out of choice.

She had a son with her Ondine co-star, Colin Farrell, in 2009, the same year Ondine was released, but she and Farrell separated the next year. So much for the fairy tale.

They both give good performances in Ondine, which is kind of like an anti-Secret of Roan Inish. Like Secret of Roan Inish, it's about a woman believed to be a selkie and there's an adorable, precocious little girl involved in the story. In Ondine, she was born with a diseased kidney and at her young age, Annie (Alison Barry) is forced to go about in a motorised wheelchair.

There's an incidental plug for the Irish healthcare system. A girl from a family of like economic circumstances in the U.S. would probably have to make do with crutches. Though I imagine crutches from a hospital in the U.S. don't go for less than two grand.

If there's a real problem with the film, it's that it spends too little time on the moral problem of the third act, when someone dying unexpectedly ends up benefiting the main cast. The movie completely glosses over how Annie feels about it.

The film's at its best when it's just a sweet, well photographed romance. When Ondine (Bachleda) is traipsing about half naked and Circus (Farrell) is watching her, perplexed by her beauty and her ability to summon salmon by singing a Sigur Ros song.

I had grilled salmon for dinner last night while watching the movie, along with boiled cabbage and potato I'd boiled then fried in butter. It seemed decently Irish to me.

Ondine is available on HBOMax.

The Man for a Free Ireland

If you're looking for a slow and rigid political biopic, don't see 1996's Michael Collins. With its action and pacing, its passionate performances led by an extraordinarily fervent and magnetic Liam Neeson, it's almost an action film. It's also beautiful, bearing Neil Jordan's usual great aesthetic sense, and more great work from Sandy Powell, his regular costume designer in the 90s.

I love this olive tweed suit Neeson wears for most of the first third of the film, despite Collins being described as a man who operated riding a bicycle in a pinstriped suit in plain sight. His advantage, he explains more than once, is that the police don't know what he looks like. We watch as Collins' techniques escalate in ferocity to the point where he's ordering hits on all collaborators, Irish citizens who go to the police to inform on Collins' and other Irish Republicans.

The movie makes clear why Collins finds this step necessary as the story opens with the defeat of Republicans by British military in the 1916 Easter Uprising. But the movie focuses primarily on tactics and the impact of acts of war, be it the Republicans, the British, or the Dublin police working for the British. A particularly horrific scene shows an armoured vehicle opening fire in the middle of a football match, the image of a gun protruding from an expressionless metal cylinder reminding me eerily of a Dalek.

And it's hard to see what else the British want here but ultimately the extermination of the Irish people, particularly when Charles Dance shows up as a cold blooded SIS agent. There's no time spent on what arguments were being made for or against British rule as it impacted the daily lives of the Irish people. Which is fine, it's clearly not the story Jordan has set out to tell.

We don't really get a look at the politics until the last part of the film when a rift occurs between Collins and the president of the Irish Republicans, De Valera, played with impressive subtlety by Alan Rickman.

But Liam Neeson is unquestionably the heart of this film. Even in his other 90s roles I'm not used to seeing him so energetic and he helps paint a portrait of Collins as a man inseparable from his work, his heart and mind completely consumed with weighing what needs to be done and the costs of every policy and individual campaign. There are also some fine supporting performances by Brendan Gleeson, Julia Roberts, and Stephen Rea.

The Unsettled Interview

It'd been at least sixteen or seventeen years since I last watched 1994's Interview with the Vampire. I used to watch it over and over again in high school, in the late 90s. Nowadays if I feel like watching a Neil Jordan movie I'm more likely to watch The Butcher Boy, the movie he made three years after Interview with the Vampire. Though with murderous little Claudia in Interview with the Vampire it's easy to trace a path of ideas from one film to the other. Both films are fantastically beautiful, as Jordan's films tend to be, and this is one of the things I loved and hated about Interview with the Vampire. In itself, it's great, but its more appropriate for the books Anne Rice wrote after the first book in her long running series than for the first one. The 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire had a kind of bleakness, a sense of terrible nihilism, that Rice's later novels lacked. A proper film version of the novel may have been served better by Lars von Trier or David Cronenberg. It's been almost as long now since I read any Anne Rice novel as it's been since I've seen this movie but I feel basically the same way. Still, the movie is terrific in so many ways.

Tom Cruise as Lestat is the same kind of inspired casting that put Heath Ledger in the role of the Joker. Before actually seeing him in the movie, he seems absolutely wrong; seeing him in the movie, it's hard to imagine anyone else in the role. And of course, given the relatively small emotional breadth covered by the character in this story, star quality and charisma are the most important things, things you only get with a star like Cruise. Though he's almost upstaged by the brief appearance of the deflating Tom Cruise puppet created by Stan Winston.

There is cgi in this movie but relatively little, not much more than the kinds of transformation shots already seen in Willow and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. One is used to change Kirsten Dunst as Claudia from a Linda Blair-ish dying kid into a perfect porcelain doll vampire girl.

I don't find Dunst's performance as impressive now as I did back then; her delivery and on-beat head tilts seem like the product of obvious coaching. But finding a decent child actor is hard enough, finding one for this material even harder, probably impossible in the U.S. to-day. Even in the 90s they had to age up the character six years from her age in the novel.

In addition to the practical effects, there's a magic in the deliberate artificiality of the sound stage locations which often look like they came straight from a Hammer film. I found myself thinking of 1970's The Vampire Lovers and Ingrid Pitt's (perhaps unintentionally) sympathetic portrayal as the vampire Mircalla. Interview with the Vampire came from a period in which books like Grendel or Wide Sargasso Sea took villainous or monstrous characters from classic literature to recast them as protagonists of their own stories, not necessarily changing the facts but asking the reader to consider an alternate perspective. Rice's work brilliantly reveals the implications inherent in extending this project to vampires. Instead of their typical role in stories representing ideas about heathens and the wealthy as near caricatures, Rice's book and Jordan's film is about people trapped in a physical state with physical needs that they feel varying levels of guilt about. As Louis seeks answers for what vampires are, he asks, as Armand tells him, the wrong questions. They can intellectually rationalise their nature, they can even find aesthetic or moral justifications, but then something happens that reveals a contradiction and they're back to square one. It's always an itch that can never be scratched.

This is why newer vampire stories don't work as well--when that guilt is just a metaphor for forbidden love, like in Twilight, it's too easy for the audience to say, oh, the poor, handsome, misguided soul. In Interview with the Vampire, these are people who are naturally compelled to live off murder. It's a much more interesting question with broader applications to human experience. It's not about thinking you might be wrong and then finding out you're not in the happy ending of the story; it's about never knowing, always having good reason to fear you're wrong, but still needing anyway.

I love the makeup. This is one of the few movies where they really get around the cakey look of pale makeup--all the vampires have visible veins drawn on their faces. It has the perfect effect of making them look eerie and vulnerable.

Twitter Sonnet #1165

The glasses fell for lighters clogged with rain.
A working bike emerged from soggy sand.
The dog removed his leash aboard the train.
A case of dollars showed upon demand.
The sep'rate thoughts create a feeling sight.
Determined sleeves create a proper shirt.
Remembered loops complete a yearly night.
A focused fork preserves the knife from hurt.
A waiting straw consumes a canvas face.
The light upon the stage was even dark.
A trick of moving eyes was pulled with grace.
A big fatigue invites the sleeping shark.
The liquid decks degrade the wooden hulls.
Divided brains create united skulls.