I saw three films at the cinema last month. The first was a French-made job, with subtitles, called A Prophet. It was awarded the accolade of ‘best film’ at Cannes in 2009 and I drove the 20 miles to the arthouse cinema full of optimism. In the café beforehand for a cup of green tea and a slice of carrot cake (I know, I know — ponce), I asked the woman behind the counter if she’d seen it and what it was like.
The still-handsome, slightly intimidating woman in a green apron must have been a real stunner when she was young. She looked at me carefully before answering, as if deciding whether I was worth an honest opinion or not. She’d seen it in London, she said. What had stood out for her was the violence. It was a violent film from start to finish. If I wasn’t prepared for it, I should brace myself.
I wasn’t pleased that she’d put me down as the sensitive type. Oh, violence was fine by me, I said, airily. In fact the only reason I went to the cinema, I said, was to see violence. Violence and maybe special effects. Otherwise I had a low opinion of the medium of film as an art form, and I certainly didn’t take it seriously enough to become emotionally entangled by it.
A Prophet was indeed a violent film. When a homosexual encounter concluded with one chap’s throat being slit with a razor blade, about one in four of us audibly gasped. One thing about the film that truly surprised me was its lack of a discernible moral. Maybe it was too subtle for the likes of me, but I couldn’t think of a single possibility. And I thought this lack of a moral was highly unusual and very much in the film’s favour. Films with an uplifting moral message nauseate me. But of course if the French can’t make an amoral film, then who can?
Three days later, I went again to the same arthouse cinema, this time to see A Single Man, a film based on a novella, which some critics claim to be his masterpiece, by Christopher Isherwood. I again popped in to the café beforehand and again the handsome woman in the green apron was there behind the counter. She was not wrong about A Prophet, I told her. The film was a shambles. And I liked that there wasn’t a moral. Because there wasn’t a moral — was there?
Today she seemed deeply unhappy, as though her life wasn’t going to plan and things had very recently gone from bad to worse. As she poured my tea, she testily dismissed the idea out of hand that a film ought to have a moral. And then one occurred to her. Perhaps if you’ve had a miserable, unloved kind of upbringing (of the kind that Malik, the hero, had clearly had), she said, violence and opportunism is the only way of operating. Perhaps that was my moral, she said. Dog eat dog, I said in agreement— and a slice of your delicious carrot cake again, please.
The only violence in A Single Man occurred near the beginning, when we saw the beautifully photographed aftermath of a fatal car crash, in snow, which has killed Colin Firth’s long-term partner, Jim, and their beloved fox terrier. We assumed Colin Firth’s barely controlled grief might explode into violence at some point in the film, and perhaps I was not alone in looking forward to that moment, but the explosion never came, and the film remained faithful to the book’s absurdly lame ending. A Single Man was an intelligent film, however. Which is to say I sensed that my own intelligence was not quite up to the job of enjoying every nuance, but I congratulated myself for at least being aware of the deficiency.
Two days later I was back again in the café ordering another green tea before going in to see the ‘rockumentary’ Oil City Confidential. Once again the woman in the café seemed barely able to conceal her frustration. The café was deserted, so it couldn’t have been caused by overwork. I began to wonder whether it wasn’t my gender that was antagonising her. But when I suggested to her that the moral of A Single Man as I’d understood it was ‘life goes on’ or ‘there are always plenty more fish in the sea’, she seemed suddenly to despise me a bit less. Oh yes, she said, in an unexpectedly confidential tone, you can get over anything eventually, I suppose.
Of the three films, I enjoyed Oil City Confidential the most; mainly because in the middle distance of one of the long, loving, orange-tinted shots of an oil refinery, I recognised the house in which I was born and which I still think of as home.
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