Britannia Waives the Rules
Seitz, Michael H.
Britannia Waives the Rules The once proud British movie industry has been deep in the doldrums for more than a decade. Several of the best filmmakers have left for Hollywood, and much of the...
...Britannia is a busy film, featuring an unusually large number of fast-paced scenes packed with understated comic material...
...The filmmakers steer an artful middle course between canned theater—the mere recording of a stage production—and the urge to use all the elements of cinema...
...their relationship becomes as stormy off stage as on...
...The drama focuses on complex and shifting relationships that evolve over a period of years among Robert (Ben Kingsley), Emma (Patricia Hodge), and Jerry (Jeremy Irons), three sophisticated members of the British upper middle class...
...As Robert attempts to make literary small talk with his friend, fissures begin to appear in his normally controlled demeanor, ending in a bizarre and shattering eruption...
...But despite his best efforts, the grand occasion sputters into a debacle...
...the persistence of class distinctions and social privilege...
...But after a year or so of encouraging stirrings, we have two British exports that must rate among this year's best films...
...She has been married to Robert for years, apparently quite happily...
...But Britannia is a much more original film than Chariots, and every bit as entertaining...
...Set in the psychoanalysis "community" of New York's Upper East Side, the plot hinges on "counter-transference"—an analyst falls in love with his patient...
...Britannia Hospital takes a straight, unsentimental look at the woeful state of British society today...
...Several of the best filmmakers have left for Hollywood, and much of the remaining talent has been channeled into television drama or runaway American productions seeking hi-tech work at bargain prices...
...Britannia Waives the Rules The once proud British movie industry has been deep in the doldrums for more than a decade...
...This sequential arrangement is no gimmick but a most effective dramatic strategy...
...But despite modern artifacts, including innumerable shots of late-model cars, the film has a distinctly dated feel...
...they refuse to serve special menus to the private patients, declaring, "It's the same for everyone or nothing at all...
...Privileged Extreme low-budget production—part social drama part love story—realized by two American students at Oxford...
...Lovesick A delightful romantic comedy, written and directed by Marshall Brickman, who collaborated on several early Woody Allen scripts...
...Jerry is a married literary agent, Robert's best friend since college and the best man at his wedding...
...King of Comedy The talented Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) hits a foul ball with this one, though he does manage to get a lot of wood on it...
...At the same time, the camera provides multiple perspectives, expressive framing, and close-ups—all of which are unrealizable on the stage...
...the unwillingness to face up to contemporary realities...
...Emma, associated with an art gallery, is attractive, selfassured, rather enigmatic...
...They are joined by an angry mob of black demonstrators protesting the special treatment accorded—in a public institution—.to President Ngamai, an African dictator who is said to devour children...
...Off-duty employees block entering ambulances at the hospital gates, insisting there be "no admissions except by union dispensation...
...It is essentially a work of ensemble acting: There are about seventy speaking roles, many filled by actors with whom Anderson has worked in the theater and in previous movies-—Leonard Rossiter, Graham Crowden, Joan Plowright, Malcom McDowell, Vivian Pickles, Alan Bates, and others...
...Britannia Hospital is a devastating satire on the unresolved conflicts, contradictions, and crippling social infirmities afflicting post-imperial Britain...
...Inside, a heart patient dies on a table in the reception area while attendants, exercising their contractual rights, insist on taking their tea break...
...the assumption that universal mediocrity connotes equality...
...Around the hospital, the city burns while rioters and looters stalk the streets...
...He tries to ingratiate himself with the snooty palace advisers on protocol (a sexagenarian dwarf and a male in frumpish drag), mollifies union leaders by inviting them to lunch with the Queen, and attempts to appease the demonstrators by expelling all private patients...
...Choice of Arms Fateful gangster thriller, written and directed by French filmmaker Alain Corneau...
...Each of the main characters compromises his or her moral integrity, and the cumulative effect is somewhat depressing (although Pinter's rigorously unsentimental perspective finds humor in the way his characters react to each other and to events...
...The surrealist depiction of amour fou—mad love, spiced here with incest and necrophilia—is brought to the screen with New Wave visual effects and music...
...Betrayal, a film adaptation of the play by Harold Pinter, is as perfectly realized a motion picture as I've ever seen—tensely vibrant and consistently engaging...
...The theme is the inevitability of disillusionment and lost love...
...The bonds of friendship and marriage are obviously betrayed, but there are also several self-betrayals...
...Several numbers are also belted out by secondgeneration gospel stars, the Barrett Sisters and O'Neal twins...
...Robert De Niro is abrasive and unsympathetic as a monomaniacal fan who stops at nothing to win his shot at fame...
...When the film was first released in England, during the nationalist frenzy of the Falklands war, it was generally deplored by native viewers...
...apparently inconsequential remarks always seem charged with consequence...
...It is also, paradoxically, the best sign in years that there may still be some creative vitality in a British film industry that had come to seem moribund...
...they are free to concentrate on all that brings about the breakup...
...the contradiction between the worship of royalty and the profession of democratic ideals...
...the faith in fatuous technological fixes—such are the targets of this deft and perceptive film...
...Betrayal moves readily from the stage to the screen...
...Though a bit contrived, Privileged is an interesting first effort...
...The script was written by David Sherwin, author of the screenplays for Anderson's...
...It was directed by wily old Lindsay Anderson, sometime critic, stage director, and filmmaker who helped found the British "Free Cinema" movement of the 1950s...
...The Pythonites aim their satirical barbs at easy marks, and the level of humor runs from pre-pubescent to adolescent...
...A university production of The Duchess of Malfi brings together a talented young man and a strongwilled woman...
...Britannia Hospital has much of the look and feel of a film by Robert Altman...
...The kitchen workers go on strike...
...Invitation au Voyage Winner of a special prize for "Best Visual Achievement" at last year's Cannes Film Festival...
...The narrative is structured in reverse chronological order, beginning with a sad and loveless meeting between Jerry and Emma a couple of years after their breakup, and ending with the evening, nine years earlier, when Jerry first declared his love for his good friend's wife...
...That sets the film's protagonist (Dudley Moore) against the psychoanalytic establishment...
...Throughout seven of the nine years covered by the film, Jerry and Emma have been carrying on an affair...
...All three starring actors give superlative performances, but Kingsley's is especially notable...
...and O Lucky Man...
...The film provides a sobering antidote to the imperialist nostalgia and contrived moral uplift of Chariots of Fire, the most widely acclaimed of recent British films...
...Yves Montand, Catherine Deneuve, and Gerard Depardieu star...
...Monty Python's The Meaning of Life An hour and a half of various comic skits, loosely organized around a common theme...
...Jerry Lewis, by careful underacting, delivers a superb performance as the reigning King of Comedy...
...The film focuses largely on trailblazers Thomas A . Dorsey and "Mother" Willie Mae Ford Smith, alternating rousing performances with recollections of hard times (and the initial resistance against bringing this music into the church...
...Hits and Misses Say Amen, Somebody Spirited and affecting feature documentary about the history and practice of gospel music...
...He's outgoing, has retained a certain boyish innocence, and in some ways is the least honest of the trio...
...Depardieu's performance as a homicidal punk is the strongest...
...Robert is a successful publisher: sensitive, articulate, emotionally stable, and ultimately untrustworthy...
...An English hospital, celebrating the 500th anniversary of its founding by Queen Elizabeth, serves as a metaphor for a nation on the verge of collapse...
...The drama is pleasantly and typically Pinter...
...They are connected by marriage, love, and friendship...
...In a deliciously ironical conclusion, Professor Millar unveils his "Genesis" experiment, a huge electronic brain that recites Hamlet's paean to the nobility of mankind...
...The absence of civic virtue...
...Choice of Arms is something of a Franco-American transplant, grafting themes and attitudes of 1940s American film noir to a contemporary French setting...
...In one stunning scene, Robert, who has just learned of Emma's affair with Jerry, lunches with Jerry, who does not know that Robert knows...
...With its gaze turned resolutely toward a glorified national past, Chariots promoted an elegiac, distinctly Thatcherite vision of Britain when it was great...
...A contemporary Dr...
...This is a juiceless, sardonic, occasionally black comedy, focusing on the desire to find self-fulfillment in celebrity status...
...The least unnerved by these events is Sigmund Freud (drolly portrayed by Alec Guinness), who makes spectral appearances as Moore's superego and confesses that he never meant for psychoanalysis to become a rigidly regulated industry...
...Frankenstein, Professor Millar, performs maniacal transplant experiments and the hospital's anniversary, it turns out, is also the occasion for the royal christening of the Millar Centre for Advanced Surgical Procedure—a glitzy sci-fi facility graciously funded by Japan...
...The man conducts himself like an arrogant renaissance courtier, and the violence and passions of the stage drama seem to spill over into his real life...
...He sparkles in a role as different as one could imagine from his successful portrayal of Gandhi...
...The film's imagery, however, is often more trite than truly evocative, and though this is supposed to be a tale of consuming passion, what we see on the screen is more kinky than transcendent...
...Amidst this chaos, exacerbated by dead telephones and inexplicable power failures, the hospital's chief administrator is busy arranging for a ceremonial visit by Her Royal Highness...
...Because the denouement is witnessed at the outset, viewers are not kept wondering what the end of the affair will be...
...The playwright Pinter is also a knowledgeable and experienced screen writer, and director David Jones boasts a background in stage and television drama...
...The play is "opened up" in a few location shots but the theatrical intensity of the stage work is preserved...
Vol. 47 • May 1983 • No. 5
