Fittingly for a film called Melancholia, Lars von Trier’s (I think the word is ‘controversial’) latest effort begins with the end of the world. Set to Wagner, of course. We see a pretentious and stunning procession of slo-mo apocalyptic scenes: Kirsten Dunst with some moths, a horse falling over, that sort of thing. Then the planet Melancholia crashes into Earth. (Honestly, who calls a new planet ‘Melancholia’?) It’s much more fun than Terrence Malick’s sub-Fantasia bit of CGI dinosaurs and classical music in The Tree of Life, in any case.

After that it’s largely an exercise in dramatic irony. ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world’, says Dunst’s new husband. Lucky you. At the wedding, rich people I don’t care about mope and bicker in a luxurious country house. The sense of doom drains from me like Kirsten Dunst urinating on a golf course. Maybe I wouldn’t mind if these people died in flames after all.

Trier (he made up the ‘von’) makes you feel melancholic. Melancholic as in when there doesn’t seem to be anything nice left in the world. When there’s nothing to miss except some squabbling over privileged people. The feeling of melancholia was captured for me in one marvellous sequence of a straggly haired Charlotte Gainsbourg basking uncomfortably in sunlight no longer warm and golden but sickly pale. ‘The Earth is evil’, or so Kirsten Dunst says. Maybe I was meant to be bored by the squabbling. So when the world finally ends it doesn’t seem all that much of a bother.

Scottish director Lynne Ramsay returns to the screen after almost a decade’s recess with a deeply upsetting adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s prolonged waterboarding session of a book, We Need To Talk About Kevin. Thought provoking and emotionally draining, the film is a powerful rumination on the difficulties of parenthood in the face of tragedy. It focuses on the day to day life of Eva (Tilda Swinton) as she struggles with memories of her son from Hell and deals with the aftermath of his violent actions. If you’ve ever wanted to see a toddler express pure contempt, this is your film. 

Exploring maternal ambivalence and mental disturbances, Ramsay’s aggressively rendered narrative is bathed in scarlet symbolism, using the colour red as both sign and signifier – a harbinger of danger, a portent of the blood that will inevitably be spilled and an indicator of both shame and sheer rage. The colour seeps through the fabric of the film in almost every scene – during a mass public tomato fight in Spain, a paint bomb attack on a white house, Kevin’s making of messy jam sandwiches, and the presence of Warholian soup cans in the background during an unnerving encounter at the supermarket. In this regard, it feels like a student film – no offence to any readers – with its over the top metaphors becoming running jokes for the audience. A film that’s already so bold in so many other ways doesn’t need to be so heavy handed.

Nevertheless, Tilda Swinton more than compensates for this fault. It’s her most empathetic yet exhausting performance thus far, manifesting every feeling with subtle physicality and humility. Each muscular twitch and contraction of her pupils conveys the fear and distress stirring within her as she lives with what has happened. Ezra Miller’s portrayal of the elder Kevin is not as potent or perfectly pitched, seething perhaps with a little too much malice, whilst father-figure John C. Reilly gives a performance of consummate John C. Reilly-ness. I didn’t quite get the sense of a plausible family here, but maybe the casting represents the alarming ambiguity and domestic dysfunction that’s at the heart of the novel. Tilda Swinton certainly wipes the floor with them all – unsurprising given that the film appears to be playing out inside the dark recesses of her own mind through nightmarish visions and half remembrances. At times it’s like being shown the most miserable family album in human history. 

It’s too early to tell whether this film will attain the cult resonance of Ramsay’s earlier films (Ratcatcher and Morvern Callar). Maybe it’s too blunt, too on the head, too hermetically sealed to require repeat viewings. That said, We Need To Talk About Kevin is still a powerful beast. This is a thrilling and frequently discomforting piece of cinema which proves beyond a doubt that Ramsay is one of the more original film talents that the UK has to offer, and I certainly don’t want to have to wait another ten years to talk about her next film.

I went to see Drive recently, arriving at the Odeon on George Street in Oxford excited and ready, only to be told in a ‘just so you know’ way that the screening I had selected would be subtitled. Puzzled, I asked why. The staff informed me that they had to show a few subtitled screenings a day now, and one told me that it was no big deal – it just meant the dialogue would be written at the bottom of the screen.

I thought about it for about a minute, and decided that, no, it was in fact a big deal. Imagine reading the dialogue on the screen as you then hear it delivered. All the drama would be sapped out of the cinema from the constant pre-emption, and any prospect of tension surely obliterated from the beginning.

Of course, when it comes to foreign cinema this is somewhat inevitable. Often you will discover a crucial plot development not by watching a Spanish character tragically deliver the news that she’s got cancer by moving her own mouth, but instead, quite jarringly, by reading the words, ‘I have cancer’ two seconds earlier. Nobody would deny that this is a pain, and it definitely detracts from the pleasure potential of foreign cinema in an unfortunate way. But at least, given that you are unable to discern all the emotional nuances conveyed in the tones of voice anyway, the experience is necessarily an imperfect one. The subtitles just soften the blow by making any sort of comprehension possible. 

The reason it is intuitively worse when watching films in your mother tongue is that the opportunity is available for the full-blown cinematic experience, no strings attached. The subtitles would be unnecessary toxic baggage, and I don’t think I’d see my favourite English language films with them if somebody paid me to.

This is not, I must stress, to say I object to cinemas showing films subtitled. It is just to note that I could never watch them personally. Clearly the intention is to be hospitable to the deaf, and to this I can make few objections. 

My favourite films derive a significant proportion of their power from the audio – from GoodFellas’ soundtrack to The Social Network‘s rapid talking – but this doesn’t mean no worthwhile experience remains in stone cold silent cinema. If anything, I would think good reasons could be found for arguing that like the legal provisions now available for lifts, braille signs and disabled toilets, however few the number of people needing these may be, some films shown should have to be subtitled in the name of equality and social harmony, ensuring an already marginalised section of society is not excluded even further.

Having opted for a non-subtitled screening of Crazy, Stupid, Love instead of Drive, however, a trailer prior to the film alerted me to another possibility that was less easy to reflect upon and form judgements about. An Odeon advert informed me that, not only did they show subtitled screenings, but they also had versions of films with ‘audio description’ enabled. A clip from How To Train Your Dragon explained how this works: as the boy jumps on the back of the dragon and flies off, the film plays normally with sound and video, but over the top we also have a narrator saying ‘the boy jumps on the back of the dragon, and flies off.’

Now this type of cinema experience is unfathomable. There is no way someone with the gift of sight could stomach it. But a more interesting question is – would blind people even appreciate it? I don’t want to be so arrogant or paternalistic as to claim I would know what all blind people would enjoy, but something just tells me that to pay to sit in a cinema and listen to what is, to all intents and purposes, an audiobook, would be an exercise in absurdity. But, then again, if you have no conception of sight and, music aside, this is the purest art form available to you, perhaps it would not be so strange after all. It’s not like you would be thinking ‘Damn, I wish I could also see the film,’ however counterintuitive this sounds to our ears. And I suppose the same defences I made of legal provisions to secure inclusivity also apply here. Just keep me out of the screenings, and don’t tell me the experience would somehow be the same.

WIth less than a month to go to the triennial Oxford Greek Play (Clytemnestra, Oxford Playhouse, 6th Week), I caught up with the director (Raymond Blankenhorn), translator (Arabella Currie) and lead actress (Lucy Jackson) to discuss the project’s progress so far

The production of a play in ancient Greek may seem like one of Oxford’s more bizarre traditions but all three are Classicists and clearly passionate about the value to be gained from original language performance. ‘In the sound of words and in the metre there’s a kind of stage direction that’s been written in by Aeschylus, so getting to work so thoroughly with the Greek is wonderful,’ Raymond tells me. Lucy (who plays Clytemnestra) also talks about her realisation in rehearsal that ‘intonation and the sound of things changes what is meant.’ Rather than a dramatic oddity, the director sees finding a dramatic purpose behind the ancient Greek as his production’s central aim – it affects the pacing and rhythm of the production – but Blankenhorn’s Clytemnestra will still be very much a play, as opposed to the more operatic Agamemnon (the last Cambridge Greek Play).

That said, Raymond tells me that ‘there is a very in-depth musical soundtrack but it’s more like a soundscape, – this even includes the incorporation of dubstep into one scene. In this Greek Play, he assures me, ‘there is something for everyone.’ This sums up the inclusiveness that the production is trying to achieve – not all the actors involved had any prior knowledge of ancient Greek, in fact ‘three out of five people in the chorus don’t know any Greek’ and for some of the production crew the language ‘might as well be Klingon.’

For the audience, Arabella’s translation will be projected as surtitles, something which, she tells me, brought its own challenges: ‘I didn’t edit anything out of the Greek – it has to be pretty much word for word but the meaning has to be clear if people just glance up. We don’t want to detract from what’s going on onstage – so it’s actually made it more interesting because you’re writing for something visual.’Being part of such a long tradition potentially opens up all areas of the production to scrutiny, but, for Raymond, ‘subverting the tradition is interesting’. He contrasts his production with the ‘more archaeological approach’ of his immediate predecessors – this play will not use masks and costumes inspired by Japanese culture, with the chorus wearing Butoh-style make-up and Clytemnestra in ‘a costume which is not quite a kimono.’ The decision to change the play’s title (from the Choephori or Libation Bearers) may also be questioned by purists but all three agree that this is a minor deviation.

‘One of the most important things for the academic interest is respecting the text, so we’re not making changes to that – we’re performing the full text without any cuts – that will go some way towards justifying some of our departures.’ The project has also provided many challenges. Lucy talks about her approach to performing Clytemnestra: ‘When she speaks there are so many layers, so a lot of what I’ve been doing now is thinking and discussing – what are those layers? And, stepping outside the character of Clytemnestra, what is the meaning of the line in the context of the rest of the play?’ Raymond has been inventive in his use of the chorus – he tells me, the chorus members have come to view themselves as individuals when ‘at a conceptual level, they’re not characters – they’re not really human.’ In performance he has tried to give the chorus   a sense of playfulness: ‘One thing we’ve done is randomise the lines for certain sections so they all know the lines and they have to figure out who is going to say them.’

The production looks set to be an innovative and engaging take on a play which ‘is unjustly under-studied and under-valued’. For those who watched the previous (Oxford or Cambridge) Greek Play it should be a ‘mirror up against the Agamemnon, not just a continuation of the plot’ but it is also a stand-alone piece with ‘the journey of one protagonist’ (Orestes – Jack Noutch) at its centre. Aeschylus, Arabella argues, was ‘trying to do something new with Greek, something that had never been done before’, and an opportunity to hear this in the original is not to be missed.

It’s been a long time since I saw a preview so polished that it could be transferred to the stage that very same evening. Yet this production of Amelia Bullmore’s Mammals could well make it. The scene seems familiar enough: a frantic family breakfast with Jane and her two young children, Betty and Jess, full of tantrums over bananas, refusals to get dressed and probing questions about ‘hairy fannies.’ 

Husband Kev comes home from a business trip to reveal that he loves another woman and, right on cue, friends Lorna and Phil arrive 9 hours early. It reminds me almost of a Friday night television sitcom offering, starring a certain Hugh Dennis. Do not be fooled, however – Mammals is far from the ordinary. It’s hard to know where to begin with such an accomplished performance.

The acting is sublime; there is not a single weak cast member. Sam Carter is genuinely very funny and utterly convincing as quick-witted and charming Scotsman Phil, and Rhys Bevan as Kev gives a masterclass in dramatic timing, especially when it comes to Scene Two and his confession to Jane. A special mention must also go to Martha Ellis-Leach and Jessica Norman playing Betty and Jess, who both manage to successfully convey pre-pubescent children without giving into the temptation to lisp, skip everywhere and overemphasise the vowels in every other word.       

Crucially, the direction by Ruby Thomas is very smooth, maintaining good fluidity of action and uncluttered blocking despite the restrictions and chaos of the acting space, allowing her to tease out the very best from her performers. A note, of course, must also be given to Bullmore’s writing. While at times the plot can seem a little rushed (perhaps because this production is an abridged one-hour version of the original), there is nonetheless a real energy and originality to the scenes she writes, which move seamlessly from the farcical to the moving, and fizz with fantastic one-liners – ‘We’re a three-year-long one night stand.’

And to complement it all, the no frills, simple yet effective set gives a real intimacy to this production, something that thankfully will be well preserved transferring from a small room in Regents Park College to the Burton Taylor. If the rest of the play continues the trend set by this fifteen minute preview, you will definitely want to get your tutorial work done early. This is top-drawer student drama.

4 STARS

Dead Funny is awkward, embarrassing and very amusing. To be performed at the sparkling new Simpkins Lee theatre, the play surrounds the Dead Funny Society – a group of 30-something men (and Lisa) who are obsessed with old school comedians.The play begins with a comical tension between the married couple Richard (Jordan Waller) and Eleanor (Charlie Mulliner) who met through ‘serious professional misconduct’ (in Richard’s words). 

The pair initially picked up lots of laughs, but there was a lull in the comic potential of the marital dissonance mid-scene. That said, the pair manage to portray the ennui of 10 years of married life in bitterly funny fashion.The laughs pick up when the pair get naked for some couples therapy. Although we can’t see any of Richard’s supposed hefty waistline (both Waller and Mulliner look fantastic in their undies), you feel part of the ailing relationship. Brian (Lloyd Houston) has the first awkward interruption of the play, which occur repeatedly at predictably embarrassing moments. His exaggerated character offers less to the extract I saw, but has potential for the later scenes.

The second interruption by Lisa (Lauren Hyett), and Nick (Will Hatcher) revitalises the performance. Their prancing entrance into the living room during a sexual counselling video provides early evidence of the group’s great chemistry when together. Also facing a challenging relationship, Hyett and Hatcher act strongly and consistently in this scene. I look forward to seeing the culmination at Benny Hill’s remembrance party in 4th week.Rather outdated comedians (such as Benny Hill) written into the play may pass over the heads of audiences next week. However, light-hearted throughout, Dead Funny looks set to be a professional production in 4th week. The five strong cast carries the comedy throughout.

3.5 STARS