From Miserable to Magical

This week I watched two DVDs about that one thing Hollywood generally avoids like the plague: middle-aged life.

Such people, of course, also have lives and loves. Hell, sometimes they even have sex.

The one film is much lauded and really bad. The other is much less awarded but quietly brilliant. Let’s get the former out of the way as soon as possible.

The script for Mike Leigh’s Another Year was nominated for an Oscar and the film got a special mention at Cannes. It should have got the Dorothy Parker treatment. That is, it shouldn’t have been tossed aside lightly. It should have been hurled across the room with great force.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are quietly happy and content. Their names are probably a gentle dig at Hollywood cartoons, but that’s the least of the film’s irritations.

He’s a geological engineer and she’s a therapist. Their son is a lawyer for the under-privileged. Oh, and they have a black friend too. She’s a doctor. All very cozy, very correct, very middle class.

Tom and Gerri are all cuddles, quiet contentment and endless patience as they work on their allotment in London in their spare time, but they seem to be living in a bubble. There is no news of the outside world in their lives - not regional, national or international. They do not discuss that outside world whatsoever, and they either have perfect sex or, perhaps being British, are happy not to have it all.

Whatever the case, there is not even the slightest smidgen of tension between them, whether sexual, social or familial. Perhaps this is Leigh’s attempt at celebrating the great and alleged sense and sensibility of being English.  

But Tom and Gerri are surrounded by human miseries. One of their best friends and certainly the most frequent one is a woman who works with Ruth. Mary, the deservedly lauded Lesley Mandeville, is one of those neurotics who is so self-obsessed that she undermines her own natural beauty.

We are subjected to the endless minutiae of her dull, uptight existence. She’s in her forties and life is rapidly slipping by. It’s a very astute portrait of such a type but by emphasizing it at the end Leigh is either condemning her or saying we should all try to be like Tom and Gerri, who mysteriously don’t spend any time on screen with people of their own social and professional standing.

If that is the case then they are not merely tolerant of all the struggling miscreants around them, they’re just unbelievably good – or intensely patronising - souls.

Another Year makes the occasional attempt at comedy but it isn’t funny and Chekhov was much, much better at this kind of existential farce. Nor is it the realism Leigh is supposed to be a master at – it’s Britain with its head right up its own deluded, white, liberal arse.

***

By contrast, Cairo Time stars one of the sexiest women on the planet, Patricia Clarkson. At the “ripe old” age of 51 this American actress isn’t sexy because she looks so much younger than her age but because she’s so confident and strong in her age.

Her wide mouth, corn-coloured hair and calm confidence express an American generosity that certainly echoes a more golden age of that country, let alone its film industry. But if the likes of Marilyn Monroe represented a tragic glamour, Clarkson represents a real, up-to-the-minute one.

Here she plays Juliette, the wife of a United Nations official, who is going to meet her husband for a holiday in Cairo. But he gets stuck in Gaza and asks his assistant, Tareq (Sudanese-born Alexander Siddig), to keep her company and, well, blonde West meets swarthy Middle East.

There are all kinds of tensions in the air. She finds it difficult to comprehend the fact that men openly leer at her on the streets, though she is not entirely disgusted by the fact. So too the fact that there are men-only restaurants, that women wear burkas in that heat, that underage girls work on the kinds of carpets she nevertheless has at home.

In one very telling scene Tareq asks her how many hours a day she works on her women’s magazine. After admitting that she can work up to twelve hours a day in that work-obsessed country, he replies in that understated Afro-Arabic accent of his: “This does not sound like a good life.”

If she is represented by a slightly sentimental French piano soundtrack, he’s represented by that mesmerising Middle Eastern music that is shot through with sensuality and danger.

The big question, of course, is: are they going to have an affair or not? There is no hint that she and her husband are unhappy. If she and Tareq do have a sexual affair there are those who will call her liberated and others who will say if her husband did the same he’d be an adulterous bastard.

Like life in the Middle East, it’s all very tenuous, tense - and deeply erotic.

Though it has some negligible continuity mistakes and even less seems to happen in this film than in the aforementioned mess, Canadian director Ruba Nadda comes up with such a quiet, elegant solution to the “problem” of these two individuals that it might well leave you gasping at its powerful simplicity. 

It certainly made my week after the Springboks and their comical coach, Peter de Villiers, seen below right before the Samoa match and with rising star Pat Lambie practising in the background, were beaten by Australia and a New Zealand referee.

Neil Sonnekus