EdgarST

Miguel Gomes is a Portuguese director, iconoclast and postmodern. His work may seem strange to us if we are used to the "Hollywood diet". However, his idea of adapting W. Somerset Maugham in these times became «Grand Tour», a story of contemporary resonance. In the film someone says that Westerners will never understand Eastern cultures, and the film is the evidence, but Gomes came out of the test with flying colors with the visual and sound solutions he gave to this great journey, for which he was awarded the Best Director award at the Cannes film festival in 2024.

I think many of us may like «Canticle of All Creatures» (2006), about St. Francis and St. Clare; the passionate romance of «Tabu» (2012) and the experimental short «Redemption» (2013); we may find the musical docudrama of country life «Our Beloved Month of August» (2008) or the self-referential film made during the pandemic «The Tsugua Diaries» (2021) rather complicated, but we all agree that he is an author of great wit.

In the plot of the film, set in 1918, an Englishman named Edward Abbott (Gonçalo Waddington) who lives and works in Rangoon arrives in Mandalay in his wedding suit to meet his fiancée Molly, but he suddenly decides to leave Burma and flee to Singapore. At his destination, a telegram arrives from Molly announcing that she will follow him there, so Edward decides to escape to Thailand by train. When the train derails, thanks to a guide and his three wives he reaches Bangkok, but another telegram from Molly arrives there and Edward flees to Vietnam and from there to the Philippines, Japan and finally China. Along the way he meets fascinating people, but Edward's escape, after an hour, becomes iterative, when suddenly, 63 minutes into the film, we do not see Edward anymore and so enters the scene Molly (Crista Alfaiate), a determined and passionate woman who will dominate the rest of the plot and raise the tone and rhythm of the film until reaching the beautiful poetic ending that the scriptwriters gave to these characters with such an ungrateful destiny.

The story of Edward and Molly is inspired by W. Somerset Maugham's story «Mabel», all the details of the trip were suggested by his travel book «The Gentleman in the Parlour. A Record of a Journey from Rangoon to Haiphong», and I suppose that the allusions to Edward being a spy are based on the fact that Somerset worked for the British Secret Service during World War I. And indeed, the Cannes award is well deserved for the visual and musical resources it proposes: to illustrate each city of the "grand tour" in 1918, instead of giving us BBC-style period reconstructions, Gomes uses contemporary images of each city, suggesting that these stories take place at any time in history.

Gomes combined black and white with colour images, introduced shadow theatre and puppet sequences, and shot in studio scenes in sets of jungles and interiors of mansions of great plastic beauty (thanks to the Portuguese cinematographer Rui Poças, the Chinese Guo Liang, and the Thai Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, a frequent collaborator of Apichatpong Weerasethakul). The musical selection ranges from Johann Strauss II's "On the Beautiful Blue Danube" (1866) to Charles Trenet's "La mer" (1946), in a 1959 version by Bobby Darin, to Gabriel Ruiz Galindo's classic "Amor" (1944), performed by a band of old Chinese jazzmen in the film.

My only complaint is that the film drags on a bit, especially in the montages of modern views of each place on the tour, which is a brilliant idea, but could have used some trimming. However, «Grand Tour» is different, healthy cinema, not a recycling of old vampires or a story of people of confused gender, but a refreshing take on adventure film and romantic drama.

In the small Irish Catholic village of Doon, the shopkeeper's wife gives birth to twins, revealing to the quick-witted and the gossip that it was the shopkeeper who impregnated the village seamstress, who has two twin girls and four more children by five different men, one of whom died in World War II. The shopkeeper tries to get her removed from the village or her children taken away, as she considers her an immoral woman.

When I sat down to view the conditions of a copy, I liked it so much that I ended up watching it all. I was touched by its ease. A 1958 film that spoke frankly about a single mother with multiple children from different fathers in a humorous tone and without condemning her? I later read that the film was banned in several cities, probably by one of the "leagues of decency " that Christian churches used to organize in the 20th century.

In 2001, the Irish Film Archive re-released the film shot in Technicolor, almost 50 years after it was made. Based on Una Troy's novel «We Are Seven,» it was directed by Cyril Frankel, a filmmaker who made two notable films for Hammer Film: «Never Take Sweets from a Stranger», a drama about pedophilia, with a rich old satyr who is one of the most fearsome "monsters" in the history of cinema; and Joan Fontaine's last film, «The Witches,» a folk horror drama about Satanist agrarian rites.

Frankel made movies and television for 40 years. Early in his career he made an ethnographic film called «Man from Africa» (1953), about the migration of the Bagika people in the territory of Uganda, at low cost and with a crew of seven people. When he went from documentary to dramatization, Frankel used the people of the tribe and achieved a natural portrait, far from the mocking stereotypes that were made of blacks at that time. The film was restored and shown in 2011 with the presence of Frankel, who was 90 years old and showed his erudition in the subsequent dialogue with the public. This work is very well evaluated and is perhaps his best film.

In «She Didn't Say No,» in a different tone and in a less wild environment, Frankel shows his affection in the good handling of the material, adapted by Troy, a novelist and also a playwright. It is a story told in several voices and the seamstress, her six children, their living parents, the wives of those men, plus the doctor, the sergeant, the teacher and the town judge receive equal treatment and screen time. Scottish actress Eileen Herlie (who played Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, in Laurence Olivier's classic 1944 film version) is the dressmaker at the center of the story here, and shines in her scenes for her sensitivity and restraint.

If there's one thing that can be criticized about the film, it could be that it is hyper-optimistic, with not one, but two or three happy endings. But who can dislike a 1950s story that cleverly and good-naturedly takes on its most dramatic details (such as the seamstress's abuse by four men in her search for a surrogate father for her eldest daughter)? The script by Troy and T. J. Morrison links all the stories together very well and leads us to a happy resolution. Highly recommended.

With the recent hype surrounding Robert Eggers' «Nosferatu», I was curious to see the remake of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's 1922 expressionist classic. This version was released in 2023, with the same original title, «Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror», directed by David Lee Fisher, who had previously made a version of another expressionist classic, Robert Wiene's «The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari» (1920).

Fisher's film was shot in 2016, with most takes recorded against a green screen by cinematographer and visual effects specialist Christopher Duddy, and then images taken from the 1922 original were added and colorized. Post-production took seven years, until the finished work was released on November 11, 2023, to mixed reviews. Almost all critics praised Doug Fisher's performance as the vampire protagonist.

In truth, I was surprised to find that this movie, made and released without fanfare, is more effective in some ways than Eggers' proposal, who aspires to the title of new "master of horror cinema." To begin with, Fisher's film is more measured, restrained and direct (it lasts 92 minutes, that is, half an hour less than Eggers'), Jones' performance is indeed excellent and surpasses Bill Skarsgård's, and the story contains details that are more faithful to Bram Stoker than any other adaptation of his novel «Dracula.» For example, there is a moment in the novel where Stoker alludes to Dracula's terrifying gaze from a great distance. His gaze burns like two embers. Here, the woman victim and victimizer perceives the force of his eyes from her window to the ruined slaughterhouse that the vampire bought to live in, where he is watching her. And above all, it is a reserved film, without the gory effects of Eggers' film.

Both films suffer from the same thing: impertinent dialogue worthy of a soap opera (which Murnau was spared from, as he preferred silent films and narrating only with images and music). However, Fisher does stumble in the selection of the performers of the young real estate salesman and his wife (Jonathan and Lucy Harker in the novel and Werner Herzog's version; Thomas and Ellen Hutter in Henrik Galeen's script for Murnau's film, which inspired Eggers and Fisher). Emrhys Cooper has a bad start as the greedy young man that Fisher describes, playing Thomas Hutter as a frivolous guy, whose love for his wife Ellen is unconvincing. And Sarah Carter is a voluptuous blonde who conflicts with Stoker's idea of the pale, fragile and languid antiheroine (whose ideal interpreter to date has been Isabelle Adjani).

The visual work is plausible and it is surprising that not even the American Saturn Awards for horror and fantasy films have considered the film in their annual nominations and awards. Curiously, like Eggers' movie, Fisher's film does not inspire fear or shock. However, his respect for Murnau's work grants it a certain distinction and admiration that I find praiseworthy.