Poetic evocation

Sleep Furiously
U, Key Cities

Fireflies in the Garden
15, Key Cities

However, the images are by no means random, and Koppel is certainly making a point, knows what he wants to evoke. Modern life, for example, has been suspended. No resident uses a phone, goes to the supermarket, watches telly, although they must do all three, surely. But Koppel’s point isn’t about the new; it’s about the passing of the old. It’s an ageing population, the local school is threatened with closure, and it ends with an auction of rusted farm implements and shots of a dilapidated cottage with signs that someone has recently departed (died?). It’s about the passing of traditional rural life and, while usually I wouldn’t buy into such bucolic nonsense, I was evoked

And now, a change of tone — one can’t be poetic all the time; it’s very tiring — and on to Fireflies in the Garden, which is one of those dysfunctional family melodramas in which a dysfunctional family gets all melodramatic, and here is what I would say to this family if I could: ‘Get over it or, failing that, go away and bother someone else.’

Here, we have Julia Roberts and Willem Dafoe as Lisa and Charles who, at the beginning of the film, have a young son, Michael. Charles, a university professor, is pitilessly and cruelly abusive to Michael although there is never any explanation as to why. Also, Lisa has no compelling reason to stay and yet the film never explains why she doesn’t tuck Michael under her arm and just get the hell out. (Here is what I would say to Lisa if I could: ‘Lisa, look in the mirror! You’re Julia Roberts! You can have anyone!’) The film flits between Michael as a boy and Michael 20 years later, when he returns home after his mother’s death along with various family members — including Emily Watson, woefully wasted as an aunt — so they can all sit around nursing their various hurts and resentments, like we care, or don’t have our own hurts and resentments to nurse. Michael, by the way, is now a writer, as these characters always are. One day I would like to see the dysfunctional son of a dysfunctional family return as a butcher, famed for a particular kind of sausage (lots of garlic, I‘m thinking).

I suppose the two films offer a good lesson about film-making, if only I could think what it was. Maybe it’s just that a good, thoughtful, intelligent film-maker can make the seemingly banal interesting while a bad one can suck the life from anything. Or, as Tolstoy never said at the opening of Anna Karenina but should have: “Unhappy families, aren’t you sick of them? I’m off to bake a sponge.’