ARAb StAtES diSMAyEd At WESt'S cOMPlAcENcy - Kuwait Times

SATURDAY, MAY 4, 2013
Director says spirit of
‘45 ‘only way forward’
Children pose in front of a 2.8-meter tall confectionery house called “Jiyugaoka Sweets House”, created
by Japanese patissier and confectionery artist Junko Yokoi (not pictured) in Tokyo yesterday. The
confectionery house is decorated with 1,500 cookies, donuts, breads and sugar candies to celebrate
Children’s Day on May 5 and will be displayed through May 6. — AFP
‘Maisie’ tasteful with
strong performances
Review
Abroken-family melodrama with a minimum of
histrionics, Scott McGehee’s and David Siegel’s
“What Maisie Knew” begins from scenes that will
be familiar to most viewers who’ve witnessed a custody
battle. Things get pretty orchestrated from that familiar
scenario onward, but never to the point of unbelievability.
The sad tidiness of the film’s resolution (and the way it
departs from the Henry James book it’s based on) makes
it all the more appealing.
Maisie is a six-year-old New Yorker (Onata Aprile) in a
position to know a great deal. She knows her rock-star
mother (Julianne Moore) is too busy arguing with Dad
(Steve Coogan) to pay for the pizza delivery she ordered;
she knows Dad tries extra hard to be cute when her nanny
Margo (Joanna Vanderham) is in the room. She knows
Mom and Dad aren’t going to live together anymore, and
there’s a lot of arguing over how much time she’ll spend
with him.
Most importantly, she knows how to keep some of
these things at bay - as the adult relationships around her
grow more disturbed, she coasts along as best she can,
wisely choosing ignorance when Mom asks if Daddy (now
in his own apartment, with the nanny there to help when
Maisie’s with him) is ever so happy to see Margo that he
gives her a kiss.
He is, of course, and when he marries his former
employee, Maisie’s mother Susanna feels she must compete
in the court’s eyes - making her own home just as
family-like by marrying a younger man (Alexander
Skarsgrd’s Lincoln) she hardly knows. The closest thing to
an innocent in all this aside from Maisie, Lincoln - a lanky
Southerner whose body sometimes seems to fold inward
on itself in deference to those around him - can’t help but
befriend the girl, a development that (to a perhaps
implausible degree) disturbs Susanna. “You don’t get a
bonus for making her fall in love with you,” Susanna
snaps at one point, making us wonder whether that’s a
literal comment, and she has actually paid the bartender
to be a prop husband.
What’s more emotionally abusive to a child whose parents
have split - failing to show up for days when it’s time
for her to stay at your place (both sides are guilty here), or
spending your time with her on loud, “he can’t get away
with this” phone calls to a lawyer? Steve Coogan’s Beale is
an up-front narcissist; Susanna needs her daughter’s welfare
as an excuse to make everything about her own
desires.
Moore has the most complicated part to play here, as
a woman who really believes she loves her daughter
more than anything but is blind to what such a devotion
might mean in practice. Over and over, she relies on
Lincoln to pick Maisie up from school, watch her when a
gig beckons, improvise when necessary. It’s inevitable
that he will come to identify with Margot, who fills the
same role for Beale.
And another thing Maisie knows is to trust the people
who actually take care of her - never voicing an allegiance
that would exclude anyone she cares for, but eagerly
accepting love that’s offered in the form of actions as well
as words. In this modern take on a century-old story, that
distinction remains the most valuable one of all. “What
Maisie Knew,” a Millennium Entertainment release, is rated
R for language. Running time: 98 minutes. — AP
This image shows Onata Aprile (left) and Alexander
Skarsgard in a scene from “What Maisie Knew.” — AP
British director Ken Loach arrives for the closing ceremony
of the 65th Cannes film festival. — AFP
Director Ken Loach is not impressed. “Happy films for happy
people” is the withering verdict of the man who made his
name with the likes of “Cathy Come Home” and “Kes” on
much of today’s film and television. Movies and programmes now
“don’t ask questions... like a soft cushion for the brain... the life
squeezed out of it by so many bureaucrats above,” he says. His latest
film “The Spirit of ‘45”, an archive documentary about the 1945
general election and the creation of the welfare state by Clement
Attlee’s Labour government, is the Loach antidote to such visual
“comfort food”.
At a time when the 76-year-old filmmaker sees worrying parallels
in the Britain of the 1930s, he believes it is timely to look back
and remember “how we got out of it” last time. “I wanted to say
that this (free health care, decent housing, financial support for
the old and unemployed) is possible and... not an act of God,” he
says. “That the neo-conservative idea of the free market and the
kind of raw capitalism will never provide a dignified and secure
life for people.” Loach, who is known for his socialist convictions,
argues that you do not have to look far in modern-day Britain for
echoes of the poverty that led to the establishment of the welfare
state after World War II. And he deplores the failure of television
and film to highlight and explore what is going on, viewing much
of what is on offer on our screens as increasingly “irrelevant to
what’s happening” in Britain today.
“You think what’s going on in the country-it’s a society in
chaos. There’s dysfunction, alienation amongst young people and
you look at the TV drama and it no way reflects that,” the British
director told AFP in an interview in Paris. What Loach sees in the
most deprived pockets of some parts of Britain such as Liverpool,
the northeast, Glasgow and east London is mass unemployment,
great poverty of the sort “marked by obesity rather than starvation”
and the rise of the far right. A generation of young people
whose material security less than a decade ago seemed so assured
now sees its future as “negligible”, he says.
“Talking to young people, they don’t expect to get a job, they
don’t expect to have a house, they don’t expect to necessarily
even be able to bring up a family. “They’re not thinking politically
but they’re saying that’s their future... a future without hope... I
think the (1930s) parallel is there and it’s very dangerous.” Loach
blames overly commercial and prescriptive television and film
executives obsessed with market share for what he sees as a loss
of choice. “Cathy Come Home”, written by Jeremy Sandford,
about a family’s downward spiral into homelessness, highlighted
a lack of proper housing in Britain and sparked public outrage
when it was broadcast on the BBC in 1966. Today, however, he
believes filmmakers would find it impossible to get something
similar made due to the endless layers of “bureaucrats” working
above them. “There were none really (then), it was just the producer
and the head of drama and sometimes he would see it
before it went out and sometimes he wouldn’t. “It was a very
benign supportive process. It only lasted a few years and, yes, we
had battles of course but the battle lines were drawn in a far more
generous way, so that there was far more freedom.”
Despite the difficulties, Loach’s output is prolific, with six films
for the big screen in the last decade alone including “The Wind
That Shakes the Barley” which won the 2006 Palme d’Or at
Cannes. Retirement often crosses his mind, he says, when he feels
like an “old racehorse” who is “not sure I can get round the
course”. But for now “there’s too much to do, really”, including
another film in the early planning stages with writer Paul Laverty.
“We are hoping to do something in Ireland, maybe set in the
1930s, 10 years after “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” he
adds.”We haven’t really worked it out yet, it’s just a twinkle in the
eye at the moment.” — AFP