Downhill (2020)

It wasn’t nothing – at all. It was something. Pete Stanton (Will Ferrell) and his lawyer wife Billie (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) are holidaying in Ischgl, Austria with their young sons Finn (Julian Grey) and Emerson (Ammon Jacob Ford) when a close call with an avalanche brings all the pre-existing tensions in their relationship to the fore after Pete runs with his mobile phone instead of ensuring his family’s safety. Publicly, Billie says it’s because Pete is mourning his father, dead eight months earlier. Their sexually forthright tour guide Lady Bobo (Miranda Otto) makes them uncomfortable but Billie starts to feel the seven year itch. Pete is in contact with his colleague Zach (Zach Woods) who’s on a whistlestop, country-a-day trip to Europe with girlfriend Rosie (Zoe Chao) and he invites them both to visit without informing Billie who promptly tells them about how he left the family in the lurch when he thought the avalanche was going to kill them. Then she has an assignation with a very forward ski instructor … Dad ran away. The American remake of Swedish filmmaker’s Ruben Ostlund’s fantastic 2014 black comedy Force Majeure is that rare thing – it works of itself, it’s subtle, funny, striking and just the right duration. If its sketchiness occasionally lacks the dark dynamism of the original and doesn’t capitalise on Ferrell in particular, it replaces it with some obvious sexual jokes but never loses the central conceit – the total failure of communications between two grown ups who cannot face the truth of their relationship. We’re in a stock image right now. Louis-Dreyfus’ outburst in front of Zach and Rosie is astonishing – and using the kids to back her up is a step even she eventually concedes is a bit de trop. Ferrell’s riposte – going apeshit in a nightclub off his head – doesn’t play the same but he’s a simpler, selfish beast. This is real battle of the sexes territory. The conclusion – when Billie tries to make Pete look good in front of their sons – suggests that this icy marriage might not even last to the end of the credits. Directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash who co-wrote the screenplay with Jesse Armstrong. Every day is all we have

Phantom Thread (2017)

Are you the enemy? It’s 1954.  In post-war London, renowned dressmaker Reynolds Woodcock (Daniel Day-Lewis), a fey, fastidious, fussy aesthete, and his unmarried sister Cyril (Lesley Manville) are at the centre of British fashion, dressing royalty, movie stars, heiresses, socialites, debutantes and dames with the distinct style of The House of Woodcock. Women come and go through Woodcock’s life, providing the confirmed bachelor with inspiration and companionship, until he comes across a young, strong-willed woman, a foreign waitress Alma (Vicky Krieps), who soon becomes a fixture in his life as his muse and lover: she is literally his house model. Once controlled and planned, he finds his immaculately tailored life disrupted by love and Alma becomes jealous particularly when Reynolds agrees to create the trousseau for a Belgian princess and removes the message ‘not cursed’ from the lining. Then she poisons him on the eve of the wedding to try to create a catastrophe instead of a work of art…. That’s the theory. Everything about this is beautiful, detailed, pointed. What we don’t understand in the cheap seats is how a man like Reynolds Woodcock falls for a plain frumpy dull bovine German (or is she Danish? Dutch?) who to the untrained eye has absolutely nothing interesting about her except an unsophisticated desire for control and an uncontrolled appetite for jealousy. She’s a toddler, as one of his clients tells him. Yes, forty years younger than him and unformed, unlike his designs. This is a character study of three fusspots who don’t like each other and it’s pretty silly, like most couture. Paul Thomas Anderson makes fascinating, idiosyncratic films that mostly have a message be it about culture or circumstance. There are themes running through this like thread through a gown – jealousy, food, sex, creativity:  but they don’t go anywhere and the threadbare plot quickly unravels. Woodcock is clearly modelled on a couple of London couturiers and Cyril is out of Mrs Danvers but ultimately is soft centred. Alma? Don’t ask me. A German seeking revenge for the war?!  I care less. This is hard to fathom, often makes little sense and the conclusion is plain stupid no matter how it’s dressed up.

Snowbound (1948)

Terrifically tricksy adaptation of the Hammond Innes (remember him?!) novel The Lonely Skier.  Dennis Price (you had me at hello!) is a former soldier recruited by his WW2 CO Robert Newton (Price is an extra on his film set) to pretend to be a screenwriter at an Alpine resort where a motley assortment of characters is gathering – the most English Englishman ever, Guy Middleton, Italian comtessa Mila Parely, Marcel Dalio. Stanley Holloway and a self-announced Greek, Herbert Lom (yeah, right!).  Price is producing reports for Newton in between ski runs and it eventually transpires that they’re all in search of a horde of gold stashed during the war. There’s wads of tension, a Christie-esque scene in which Holloway laughingly disrupts a gun quarrel by dint of opening a door, a marvellous torchlit search on the mountains when Price is inevitably injured by Lom – a Nazi, obviously – and left for dead, and a conflagration for a conclusion. It’s a bit too clever by far but give me mountains, give me snow, give me gluhwein, I’m there. Wonderfully atmospheric. Adapted by Keith Campbell and David Evans directed by David MacDonald. A Gainsborough production.

Winter Sleepers (1997)

Was hast du wahrend der Weihnachtsferien getan? Gegessen. Gelesen. Geschlafen. A cinema projectionist with memory issues unwittingly causes a catastrophic accident when he ‘borrows’ a sports car that is left unlocked outside a house. The father of the injured child swears revenge;  meanwhile the projectionist starts sleeping with a nurse who lives at the house, where her translator roommate is dating the car’s owner, a ski instructor. A deadly chain of events is set in motion. This adaptation of Anne-Francoise Pyszora’s novel Expense of Spirit by writer/director Tom Tykwer, making his debut, is one of the best films of the Nineties and remains his best work. Simply brilliant, layered storytelling in a great snowbound milieu with screwed up twentysomethings trying to live like adults in the post-Christmas gloom. Terrific.

The Passionate Friends (1949)

In which David Lean commences his passionate affair with le cinema du tourisme. This adaptation of HG Wells’ novel of adultery (of which he knew a little) is full of fabulous awkwardness between banker hubby Claude Rains and perpetually cross wife Ann Todd, who relives her early affair with pre-WW2 lover research scientist Trevor Howard – who turns up unexpectedly in their destination Alpine hotel one fine day after the war, where she awaits her husband’s arrival. His unfounded suspicions drive the old lovers back together and social homicide awaits them all in London… Adapted by Eric Ambler, Stanley Haynes and Lean himself, who did like a bit of Freud, this is a fine exploration of marital issues, decency and class, with an exceptional score by Richard Addinsell underlining the wracking feelings bedevilling the lovers and the betrayed. Rains is brilliant, undercutting the relegation of this to ‘woman’s picture’ and entering into something closer to finely tuned emotion. His upstaging of Todd after a romantic evening she has covered up by a supposed theatre trip is outstandingly tense;  his speech about German romanticism a chilling reminder of the times in which it was made. Todd isn’t up to communicating anything of real value despite the flashbacks she narrates but Howard reminds us of Brief Encounter and all those things that remain unsaid. The ending is quite shocking in many respects and brings it close to those Russian classics we love and admire but don’t really want to experience.