Clive and Rob are joined again by film-makers Maria Thomas and Simon Aitken as we revisit our May Summer Movie preview. Did we see the films we said we’d watch? Did we like the films we said we’d watch? Did we watch films we didn’t say we’d watch? Did we film watches we didn’t have the time for?
From the game-changing Guardians Of The Galaxy to the tender, insightful Frank, we’ve got the whole gamut of the summer movie experience–summed up.
And we're back. After a long hot summer, in which the last thing on my mind is sitting in X&HTower's screening theatre (plush and opulent though it may be), the weather has turned appropriately autumnal. Time to close the blinds, fire up the projector and dig into the teetering pile that is the Unwrapped archive.
Today's choice was informed by the fact that Peter Strickland's The Duke Of Burgundy has lit up the Toronto Film Festival. Time to look at the movie that brought his name to the public eye: Berberian Sound Studio.
Plot dump approaching, topped with the red flag that is the Spoiler Alert.
Gilderoy and Nagra
Gilderoy (played with twitchy reserve by Toby Jones) is a renowned dubbing mixer, who is hired by an Italian sound studio to help rescue an Argento-like horror film that has run into problems. He quickly finds that the environment, people and material are hugely different to the world of pastoral documentaries and children's programmes that he knows, and quietly begins to lose his mind…
Shot on a tiny budget on location at Three Mills Studio in East London, Berberian Sound Studio is a prime example of a film-maker getting the most out of his environment. There's no questioning the authenticity of the production design, and the attention to period detail is astonishing. If you're a fan of old film gear, be prepared to fangasm now. I was especially pleased to recognise an Albrecht sound follower: a piece of kit that I still use on a near-daily basis.
Gilderoy ponders the best way to eviserate a watermelon
The action is kept completely indoors. There isn't an exterior shot in the film, adding immeasurably to the airless, claustrophobic atmosphere. It's all artificial light, pools of darkness, empty corridors.
The word that kept springing to mind while watching the film was Kafkaesque. Gilderoy is an outsider, floundering in an environment in which he doesn't understand the rules, where he keeps making the wrong impressions. His efforts to reclaim expenses are thwarted as the accounts department claim there's no record of him flying to Italy in the first place. As his work in sound-designing the film starts to become an ordeal, the walls and dark rooms of the Berberian Sound Studio start to look ever more like those of a prison—or an asylum.
Gilderoy and Santini
Let's make one thing clear, directly from the lips of Santini, the maestro behind The Equestrian Vortex, the movie on which Gilderoy labours. This is not a horror film. Sure it takes plenty of cues from the mise en scêne of giallo. Just look at the black gloves of the never-seen projectionist, the pumping, Goblin-like soundtrack from Broadcast. The film is full of attractive Italian voiceover girls, of just the kind that would find a horrible end in yer typical Eurohorror. But if you're looking for gore, best keep looking. The only things to see the edge of a blade in this movie are the fruit and veg that Gilderoy attacks to provide the sound effects for Santini. We don't even see a single frame of the film itself that the diminutive sound engineer reacts so strongly against. That being said, the sight of a witch being vaginally violated with a red-hot poker, the scene that causes Gilderoy the most problems, is one that I could do without.
Strickland's refusal to bow to expectations as to what Berberian Sound Studio is or how events in the film pan out have led many to view the film as a frustrating experience. I understand that. The film is deliberately slippery, dodging away from genre tropes and formula story beats. Santini isn't an anagram for Satan, however hard you try to make it so.
Elena: giving the film a voice
The trouble with slippery things is, of course, that they're hard to grab hold of, and Berberian Sound Studio remains opaque, asks far more questions than it answers. How much of it is real? Are we, as is suggested at the end, simply watching a film within a film? There's no definitive answer, and loose ends aplenty. It famously divided opinion right down the middle when it was screened at Frightfest in 2011. Even now, synopses of the film differ wildly and are mostly inaccurate, pitching the movie as proto-giallo when it's nothing of the sort.
Which brings us to the 64,000 lire question—was Berberian Sound Studios worth Unwrapping?
Yes, it was. Difficult but tought-provoking, it's at once a treatise on the craft and sheer hard work involved in getting a film made, and a warning of the cost that the process can exact on you. The people that Gilderoy encounters are, for the most part, monstrous. One of the ADR actors even goes by the nickname 'The Goblin'. Gilderoy, the very image of the innocent abroad, has no chance amongst these creatures.
As a stylistic exercise Berberian Sound Studio is a storming triumph, and there's enough going on to keep you watching, and guessing, until the end. And indeed after. Enter without expectations, and you just might find yourself ensnared.
This month on The Speakeasy, Rob and Clive are joined by actual honest-to-heck film composer Neil Myers. Along with adagio and strings from the mighty Keith Eyles, we highlight composers we think are unfairly overlooked, and pick out a soundtrack each that’s a bit of a hidden gem.
The problem with food movies is that they are fundamentally incapable of expressing the two most important things about their subject: smell and taste. Don't mention Smell-O-Vision. A scratch and sniff card can no more evoke a beautifully cooked plateful of food than a kazoo can accurately reproduce Beethoven's Ninth. The end results are the same: faintly amusing but not the experience you want.
That's probably why there have been so few films explicitly about the subject. And of course, they can't just be about food–as much as I enjoy the M&S adverts, I couldn't sit through 90 minutes of them. All the good food movies deal with those aspects of the human condition that we most readily connect with food: love, sex and family. Look at Babette's Feast, where a woman expresses gratitude for the community that has taken her in by cooking them an extraordinary banquet. Or Big Night, a film that tracks the struggle for supremacy between two feuding brothers, which culminates in a remarkable wordless climax where they cook breakfast together. Tampopo contains one of the sexiest scenes featuring an egg yolk that you'll ever see.
Jon Favreau, he of Iron Man and presidential speech-writing fame, has taken a risk with Chef, his latest movie. Food films don't do well at the box office, for the reasons I've mentioned above. But Chef is first and foremost a film about the sacrifices that a really good cook will make to get to the top, and what happens when he's forced to reinvent himself–a process that reconnects him with the things he holds dearest.
OK, Cliffe Notes (and note that from this point, a SPOILER ALERT is in operation). Favreau plays Carl Casper, a top chef who feels as if he's stuck in a rut. It's a feeling that's starting to come out in his cooking. He's filling the house every night, and his boss is happy. But the reviews are stinkers, and Casper is starting to lose his way. After a cake-crushing meltdown in front of his food critic nemesis, Casper buys a ratty old food truck, and goes back to basics, cooking and selling the food he loved back in the day. With his estranged son and buddy line chef in tow, Casper sets off on a road trip that takes in some of America's culinary hotspots, and finds the flavour in life again.
So, it's a bit on the nose from an elevator pitch. But Chef works, for me, because it's good on the details. Favreau spent months in restaurant kitchens, working his way up from herb-chopping to line work. The restaurant scenes feel authentic and sharply observed, down to the way Casper cleans down his station att the end of a shift. Favreau enlisted the help of food truck maestro Roy Choi and Texas barbecue pit king Aaron Franklin to give his film some old-school patina. That's Choi's Cubano that everyone's talking about, and Mitchell serves fall-apart pork shoulder just like the one in the movie every day.
The clever thing about Chef is the way it dials into modern trends in food fandom. Food trucks and real-deal meat-smoking are obsessions with many foodies. Favreau also nails the importance of social networking to the scene: Instagram and Twitter are the way a lot of people initially hear about the hot places to eat, whether that be a Michelin-starred joint or a high-sider on a street corner pushing out the greatest food you can get on a paper plate. Let's also note here that Casper's meltdown is sparked off by a food blogger, not a traditional critic.
Chef is a deeply sensual, warm and funny film, with a great soundtrack of classic Cuban cuts, reggae and blues and solid performances from Favreau and his supporting cast. John Leguziamo buzzes and pops as Casper's line chef buddy, and Emjay Anthony, playing his son, is sweet and charming. I thought it was a shame that Scarlett Johannsen and Dustin Hoffman seem to disappear once Casper gets his food truck (which is a lust object in and of itself: that chrome! that griddle!) and that we didn't see more of Carl's life pre-restaurant in Miami. Where does that love of Cuban food come from? Maybe a director's cut is in the offing. Anyway, I wanted to see more, which has to be a good thing.
With the long-mooted adaptation of chef Anthony Bourdain's autobiographical/crime novel Bone In The Throat finally looking like it's going in front of cameras, there's a chance we could be seeing more interesting movies set in the world of food. On the evidence of Chef, I'd be happy to see more. The film has the highest of accolades from me–TLC and I left the cinema absolutely starving hungry.
X-Men: Days Of Future Past. You’ve read the book. You’ve seen the film. Now hear the podcast!
Rob and Clive are joined by comic fan and Wolverine lookalike Graham Williams as we go in-depth and full-bore into the Claremont/Byrne classic. Remember: in this episode, everybody dies!*
All new, kind of different: Excuses And Half Truths Presents Rob & Clive’s Speakeasy!
Live from our new studio in London’s trendy Clerkenwell, The Speakeasy hits its first anniversary with a fresh coat of paint and a shoeshine.
Joining our intrepid podcastanauts on this new and exciting stage in our sonic journey are long time friend of the Speakeasy Simon Aitken, and first-timer Maria Thomas. Together, they share their hopes on the upcoming summer season at the movies, and give us their picks of the films to look out for over the next few months.
