cochranpeter Reviews

Broken Flowers (2005)

An enigmatic film whose enigma can be unravelled

[9/10 · 24 October 2005]

Bill Murray's character doesn't know what's best for him, and the whole plot shows how everyone else, from his well-meaning next-door neighbour (Jeffrey Wright: but is he so well-meaning?) to his most recent girlfriend (Julie Delpy, a bit too young), conspire to hit him where he's weakest, and to create alternative, chimerical visions of self-fulfilment by which he's bewitched and led astray.

It all centres on the Pie Jesu from Fauré's Requiem, to which Murray is listening when Wright first enters and starts his mind racing in the wrong direction. Murray has found peace in the music, and is able to see, on the television, an image of himself as he has nearly become – Douglas Fairbanks as a way-over-the-hill Don Juan, in a film made after his career had finished. But Wright turns the Fauré CD off, and puts on one which he'd bought Murray earlier. Murray has almost come to terms with the fact that he's no good at relationships, and that he may find peace in solitude. Then comes the letter on pink paper, and Wright, to plan the whole downhill plot without Murray lifting a finger. Wright is, or poses as, a family man, and has the perfect wife, whose cooking is divine. He keeps down three jobs to feed his charming and intelligent children, one of whom is very mature and concerned for his smoking. But he seems dissatisfied, and still has to live through Murray. Under his guidance, Murray is doomed to look for a son, whom his mature reflection tells him doesn't exist.

His first three past girlfriends (any one of whom may be his son's mother) – especially Sharon Stone, the only one with whom he sleeps – has a dead-end job, a parasitical job, despite their enthusiastic explanations as to how wonderful it is. Only Frances Conroy, as the real-estate agent, tells him by looks that she knows her life to be fake. Sharon Stone's Lolita-daughter implies that her mum's career as a closet consultant is dumb, but Stone won't agree, jokingly as she describes it. Jessica Lange as the animal communicator who may be having an affair with her own female secretary (Chloë Sevigny), seems the most fake, and is the most dismissive of Murray.

Tilda Swinton as his last ex-girlfriend is the only one who has found a role – mother-figure to a biker gang, exiled from the world in the back of beyond, who are most protective of her happiness, and who lay Murray out for his rudeness and insensitivity towards her. Do we gather that she really did have a son (not Murray's), and that he died? Part of the excellence of the film lies in the quality of the art direction (set decoration by Lydia Marks), which skilfully creates the different ambiances in which each woman lives. The only one the interior of whose house we don't see is Tilda Swinton, the only one who actively dislikes Murray from his first appearance, and whose domicile is in no way one which he will be allowed to enter.

By the end of the film he's totally trapped in the fantasy world which Wright has created for him, though we know he sees through its falsity, knows he's not a father, and has guessed that it was probably Julie Delpy who set him up with the first pink letter. He approaches one young man of the right age, and, when he runs off declaring Murray to be crazy, Murray is stuck in the middle of the road imagining every young man who rides past to be a potential son – even the one in the car who looks at him with offensive hostility.

As Jarmusch's camera does a 360-degree pan round and round Murray at the end, we ask, will Murray ever be able to listen in peace to the Fauré Requiem again?

Byron: Ballad for a Daemon (1992)

Very confused dull and misleading account of Byron's death.

[8 June 2002]

A Graeco-Russian co-production focussing entirely on Byron's last months at Missolonghi might be expected to bring a new kind of gravitas to the Byron filmography. Greeks and Russians, after all, worship Byron (don't they?). He is a different kind of icon in their cultures – the greatest martyr for national liberty on the one hand, and the inspiration of Pushkin and Lermontov on the other. What could go wrong? Alas, Nikos Koundouros' 1991/2 film Byron, Ballad of a Demon (aka Ballad for a Daemon) does not redress the usual Frankish imbalance towards fantasy and trash. Manos Vakousis plays the hero rather as Klaus Kinski played Aguirre on his journey over the Andes and down the Amazon – intense, staring eyes, pale, sweaty complexion, sick as a parrot and going slowly mad. He's ugly, and bald. The film opens well – Byron and his party are silently paddled ashore at Missolonghi, in flat-bottomed boats through marsh and fog, with frogs croaking ominously all around and Turkish cannon- and musket-fire in the distance. No-one greets him, no-one smiles. The production design seems most authentic, with all the Greeks, wearing goatskins, visibly unwashed for many months. But the good effect is at once lost as the poet sighs, `Is this sunny Greece – the Greece of my dreams?' in flat contradiction to what we know to have been the real Byron's awareness of what he was letting himself in for. The next nail in the coffin comes at once, as a British figure looms out of the fog, says, `This is the Greece of the Greeks – and don't forget it, Byron!' and introduces himself as `Major Leicester Stanhope'. In vain we protest that the idiotic Stanhope was a colonel, and that his intuitive understanding of the Greeks was summed-up in his desire to establish a free press – well before most Greeks could read. Missolonghi – to the film's credit – is portrayed as a filthy town, covered in mud, slime and fog. Later, William Parry turns up. He and Byron, instead of getting p***ed and making jokes about Jeremy Bentham – as did the real pair – strip a prostitute naked, and compare amorous experiences. `I'm here to get rid of my useless sperm,' Byron informs the lady in a later scene; `these trousers have always been too tight – or maybe I've just grown fat.' Byron has no dogs to keep him company. At intervals, he falls asleep, and lo! Augusta turns up. She's played by a beautiful Russian actress, Vera Sotnikova, who wears the thickest eye-makeup since Liz Taylor's Cleopatra, plus lots of fur, most of which she obligingly removes, to enhance the poet's incestuous dreams. In one scene, they cross-dress, each enacting the part of the other. `So hate me!' he screams at her; `… because hate … is a more lasting pleasure!' (the English dubbing is extremely professional). At intervals, Loukas Chaladritsanos floats in and out, Byron lusting hopelessly after him, and he rejecting Byron's advances consciously in favour of military action, something the historical Loukas was far too dumb to do. At intervals, a crowd of Greek peasants turn up (many of them with strangely Slavonic features) – stare at Byron meaningfully – and leave, having advanced the plot not an inch. Why they're all at Missolonghi – who they are – exactly what the relationships are between them – what the political and military situation is – are questions the film chooses not to answer. After an hour or so, you stop expecting anything to happen, and are thus not disappointed when nothing does. One counter-theme seems to be a huge church-bell, which arrives in town as Byron does, and is, before a crowd of true believers, hoisted into position in the manner of Andrei Rublev (last reel). Is the film – made by Russians and Greeks, don't forget, cousins in Orthodoxy – trying to say that the Greeks of 1824 needed the real God, not an ersatz western-European import? `You're not God,' Byron assures Dr Bruno at one point. `And who is – Byron?' demands Dr Bruno, his cryptic syntax perhaps voicing the film's cloudy central enigma.