Reviews

Films

Closing the Ring

Directed by Richard Attenborough, starring Shirley MacLaine, Christopher Plummer, Mischa Barton, Neve Campbell, Pete Postlethwaite

Richard Attenborough made his movie debut as a naval rating in Noel Coward's wartime morale-booster In Which We Serve, served in the RAF himself as a gunner cameraman and like many of his generation has lived his life in the shadow of World War II. In the 60-odd years since his demobilization he's appeared in numerous war movies, most famously perhaps in The Great Escape, and beginning with Oh! What a Lovely War has directed a succession of pictures with wartime settings. So it's not surprising that he was attracted to Closing the Ring, the first script by playwright and TV writer Peter Woodward in which events in the present are connected to those in World War II, and septuagenarians in Ireland and America look back to the war and reveal their experiences to a younger generation.

The movie begins by cutting between two settings on either side of the Atlantic in 1991. In Branagan, Michigan, there is a funeral of a wartime US Air Corps flyer attended by former comrades, though his elderly widow (Shirley MacLaine) seems oddly detached from the event. (The town's name is possibly a private joke about Brannigan, the thriller about Anglo-American relations in which Attenborough co- starred with John Wayne.) Meanwhile on a steep hill outside Belfast a man in his sixties (Pete Postlethwaite) is excavating the site where a US bomber crashed in 1944.

The movie is about digging up the past both literally and figuratively, about coming to terms with life, and the need to honor the promises we make. Eventually through a complex series of flashbacks the connection between these opening events is revealed, and the film reaches an emotionally and physically explosive climax in the streets of troubled Belfast.

Woodward's script is more than a little contrived as well as over- emphatic. But Attenborough has infused it with warmth and mature insight, and older members of the audience are likely to find it extremely moving. He also handles a large cast of young and older actors with his customary skill and sympathy, and there is a particularly fine performance from Christopher Plummer as a former American bomber pilot who has carried with him all his life an undeclared love for his best friend's wife.

Don't Touch the Axe

Directed by Jacques Rivette, starring Jeanne Balibar, Guillaume Depardieu, Bulle Ogier and Michael Piccoli

Back in 1994 the French cinematographer Yves Angelo made an impressive directorial debut with an adaptation of Balzac's novella Le Colonel Chabert, starring Gerard Depardieu as a Napoleonic cavalry officer returning belatedly to find himself an outsider in the heartless, transformed Paris of 1817.

Now the 79-year-old New Wave veteran Jacques Rivette has taken a similar Balzac story, La Duchesse de Langeais, set in the same period and filmed it as Don't Touch the Axe (Ne Touchez Pas la Hache) with Depardieu's lookalike son Guillaume as an aristocratic Napoleonic general finding it difficult to adjust himself to the brittle, snobbish Paris of the 1820s.

In particular the film centers on his search for a coquettish married woman (Jeanne Balibar) who has fled from the fashionable world where their public game of courtship and seduction has became a matter of widespread, censorious gossip. She's become a Carmelite nun, and the film unfolds in flashback after a five-year search has brought him to her convent in Majorca. It's slow but not intolerably so, subtle and beautifully mounted. The Guardian

(China Daily 01/03/2008 page20)