1899

Ersatz
Entertainment

1899
Germany/USA 2022
Eight episodes

Warning: All the spoilers right from the outset. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

I primarily started watching 1899, not because I’d heard of the co-creator’s former series Dark (don’t worry, it’s now on the list) but because the show stars a British actress I quite like, Emily Beecham, as lead protagonist Maura. I loved her in Daphne (reviewed here) and Little Joe (reviewed here) and I was interested in seeing her in other things.

This one has an interesting central idea for a TV show but there were some problems putting me off binge watching it too. Number one being that, from a few minutes into the show it pretty much telegraphs itself that what you are watching doesn’t take place on a steamer ship, with a diverse range of multinational protagonists all trying to escape their past... and probably isn't really set in the year 1899. I was pretty sure from very early on that what I was looking at was not represented at face value and this was especially highlighted in a really nice little moment where Maura is sitting in the huge dining hall of the ship and... there’s a glitch where she notices everyone in the hall suddenly drinks from their tea cups in synch. Like I said, it’s a nice moment and it’s subtly timed but, yeah, it certainly confirms the unreality of the setting, for those who already suspect.

Now normally I would have said that this was telegraphed way too early but, by the end of episode two, the final reveal is a bank of TV screens monitoring just what’s going on in the ship (which has stumbled across a lost ship, Prometheus, where there is no crew left except for a young boy who Maura takes into her care). So it’s not like they were saving the big twists as an end game. And then the Christmas holidays came around and, because I felt disappointed by already guessing that much from very early in on the first episode... I kinda gave up on it for a while.

Big mistake because, the other thing which then put me off watching it a little more at first, was the fact that the greedy corporate studio who are the sole(ish) venue of where this thing can be watched, cancelled the show in January 2023... so a second season is not expected to surface now, to carry on with whatever the big reveals and accumulated world building would have amounted to in the final episode of the first season. Now, I gave my view of the sad state of TV subscription chanels in my 13th anniversary blog (right here) but, suffice it to say, this didn’t encourage me to bother pursuing the show to its conclusion.

But, of course, I also felt like I didn’t want to start another TV show and have this one hanging over me as unfinished business so, yeah, I eventually finished it and was pleasantly surprised to find that the various layers of the reality as presented to the main characters in the show, start peeling back to reveal a much bigger picture of things each week, like a series of Matryoshka nesting dolls that keep leading onto something else each time you open it up.

Beecham is absolutely brilliant in the lead role and, I’ve noticed this about her before but she’s one of those actresses who can do ‘silent acting’... or perhaps I should call it the ‘acting of the inner, mental landscape’, really well. Vast periods of the episodes have her going without much dialogue but, as I’d seen from the films mentioned above, she’s one of those performers you can trust to carry those kinds of moments and, yeah, 1899 sure is full of them. She’s ably supported by a great ensemble cast too, including the likes of Andreas Pietschmann, Isabella Wei, Yann Gael and Aneurin Barnard.

And, yeah, I was a little disappointed at the ‘that old Chestnut’ nature of the plot, which is pretty much a 1950s or 1960s Philip K. Dick story come to life. As in, people trapped in an ersatz world not of their own making and not even knowing they are trapped. It’s an old plot but the actors pull it off and the whole look of the thing is pretty good. And it’s pretty dour too, it has to be said, in terms of lightning and set design but it’s ‘designer dour’, so to speak... so it looks pretty fantastic, it has to be said.

Now, 1899 has been cancelled but, do we need another series or is it self contained? Well... a bit of both. It seems to be pretty much self contained in that the reality and original period setting of the show seems to be somewhere Maura doesn’t need to go back to, as she wakes Matrix-like from a simulation with the other characters sleeping away in a virally corrupted computer programme... and she finds she’s adrift with them in a starship in the year 2099. But, the answers aren’t all there yet since we don’t know anything about the bigger picture and what role her brother, who seems to be a character of some evil intent, is up to in this newly discovered reality (which might well be a backup ersatz version again, for all I know).

So yes, it does kind of need another season (or at least a one off special to tie things up) and it does mean that, although I found myself really entertained by the various twists and turns of the surreal imagery of the show, I can’t really recommend 1899 to anyone else because... well... it won’t ever have an ending from what I can make out. Which is a real shame. I’m hoping this show doesn’t just disappear quickly into the ether to join many other shows by this particular company that have shared the same fate but... yeah, it probably will, I think. Oh, well... just another argument that the current model of TV development is broken and, actually, is destroying the potential audience for any new series that may be starting. Because trust from the audience that the show they are watching has an ending is being quite undermined by this kind of behaviour from several companies... and there’s no real excuse for it either.

Little Joe

Pollen Goods

Little Joe
2019 USA Directed by Jessica Hausner
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Some minor spoilers as to the plot mechanics here.

I hadn’t heard of this film until about a week ago and, at first, I dismissed it as something to not bother with because I just assumed from its title, Little Joe, that it would be another look at Warhol’s Factory through the eyes of Joe Dallesandro. Luckily, I caught a look at the poster a few days later and realised that this was nothing to do with that. Instead, we have a home grown British sci-fi/horror movie which is, unbelievably, yet another in... I dunno, four or five ‘unofficial reworkings’ in the past 12 months, of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. The difference being that, in the case of Little Joe, it also happens to be a really good movie and something I can see myself watching again.

So the plot involves the main protagonist Alice, played by the brilliant Emily Beecham who was so good in Daphne (which I reviewed here), heading a team to meet the deadline for a new engineered plant. The plant is named Little Joe, after her own son Joe, played by Kit Connor and the idea is that the plant is not as resilient as some and needs love and care to grow. In return, it rewards the owner with a pollen that makes people happy. Due to various commercial reasons, the plant is engineered so that it is not able to reproduce itself and this turns out to be an important plot point when it comes to the plant’s own survival instincts. Alice gives a plant to her son while they are still in the testing stage but it’s soon apparent to the audience, as well as a member of the team played by Kerry Fox, that the plant is doing a little more than what it’s supposed to.

And it’s a neat little movie full of great performances by those three and co-star Ben Whishaw, who plays Alice’s assistant with a crush on her. The way each of the characters and the other people who work for the same company are set up is presumably so that Hausner, who also wrote this, can use deviations from what the audience can see are their normal behaviours to ratchet up the paranoia as we begin to realise that anybody who has sniffed the pollen has become a host being with the main directive of protecting the future of the plants at all costs.

The cinematography is interesting too. The film starts off with a credit sequence of a slow camera pan above the room full of plants at the factory and the rest of the movie takes its cue from this. There is camera movement throughout almost all of the movie. Not very fast camera movement, think the opening of A Clockwork Orange with that slow zoom... there are some static shots in the movie but they are very few and far between. The movement isn’t too obtrusive but it does tend to call attention to itself a lot. The film therefore feels more European because there is no focus in the shots on any particular person at times...

It’s like that shot in Scorcese’s Taxi Driver where the camera pans away from the main protagonist and looks at a blank hallway instead while the scene plays out. This film achieves the same thing and focuses your brain on what is being said by not matching up the content of the frame exactly to the action and it gives the film an almost constant, voyeuristic, fly-on-the-wall feel to it... which is helpful in some ways because the film is mostly split between two locations... Alice’s work space and her house... which both have very carefully delineated shapes, patterns and colours giving an almost artificial feel to the environments depicted.

In at least two shots at different points in the movie, she takes the camera's deliberate lack of focus on the content of the shot to extremes where she has conversations taking place between two people, one at each side of the screen... and then slowly but surely zooms into the middle space of the frame where there’s absolutely nothing happening, in kind of an unfocussed area of the shot, as the heads disappear off the sides of the shot and we are just left with, effectively, dead space as the conversation plays out. Which is an interesting and, for me at least, unexpected choice to make.

The film is a slow burn as various characters are slowly ‘going over’ to a kind of hive plant mind but the real fright moments are caused by the friction and tension created by the music of Teiji Ito, which is amazing. I don’t know if it was composed specifically for this film or whether it is needle-dropped in from existing works (having trouble finding out that info at the moment) but I would love to get a hold of it. It’s like listening to a chorus of slowly boiling, whistling kettles which are then suddenly punctuated by harsh percussion with a real lack of harmony and... I hope I can find this stuff on CD somewhere is all I’m saying about that.

So yeah, the maybe slightly disappointing stuff is the fact that, by about three quarters of the way through the movie, they feel the need to start hitting us over the head with plot points which are, by now, blatantly obvious... almost like the film-makers weren’t confident of the job they’d done earlier in the picture. My companion as I watched this one remarked to me, “How stupid do they think we are?” at the end of the movie. I think the film just about gets away with it myself but the ending, too, is something you can see coming a mile off. It’s problematic anyway because, honestly, I can’t think of a better ending for Little Joe but, yeah, don’t expect to be going to see a movie that’s full of surprises here. Instead, go to see a wonderful and interestingly made piece which is somewhat hypnotic in the way it washes over the audience. Definitely one I’d recommend to anybody who’s remotely interested in the moving image and certainly one of the more subtle and effective remakes of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers I’ve seen in quite some time.

Daphne

Gift Of The Stab

Daphne
UK 2017 Directed by Peter Mackie Burns
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Minor spoilers here.

Wow. I didn’t know about this movie until literally, the day before I went to see it. I was going to have to go into London anyway and I saw the BFI tweet about a new film which wasn’t playing at my local so I decided to take a look at the trailer online. What can I say? Sometimes I just get really lucky.

Daphne is one of those minor masterpieces of cinema which totally utilises the art form to give you something which really shows what the medium can achieve. I’ve talked about certain films being what cinema is all about before and I might cite such films as Amelie and The Big Lebowski as great works of art that give you a sense of pure cinema and, like those films, it can sometimes be the fabrication of a larger than life spectacle that you can’t see anywhere else which qualifies it. Sometimes, though, it’s the smaller, more intimate works of the art form which deliver equally valid and awe inspiring moments and films like, say, Educating Rita, Mike Leigh’s Naked and I, Daniel Blake (reviewed here) are just such films. Well you can add Daphne to that list because this one’s a real corker.

The film does not have a story as such (something which my regular readers will know I applaud) and it’s more a character piece with an actress called Emily Beecham giving a truly blisteringly good performance as Daphne, a chef who has a fair few cynical quirks of character and who you really care about by the end of the movie. I mean, everyone in this movie is great, including Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Joe, her kindred spirit boss, Nathaniel Martello-White as potential dating material David and Gerladine James as Rita, her mother who is quite probably dying of cancer.

It’s Beecham, though, who gives an absolutely stand out performance in this one as the film focuses on, to be honest, a character who has not accomplished much with her life and who is just trying to survive each day... filling her evenings and weekends with various drinking and sexual shenanigans with men who mean nothing to her and generally just trying to keep on top of her situation. And the totally naturalistic style of her acting is truly convincing . You can almost read the character’s silent thought processes on her brain as Beecham breathes so much life into this role with her facial expressions and body language that you are just rooting for her all the way through.

Then, fairly early on in the film, she witnesses a stabbing up close and personal and, from then on, her thinking seems to deteriorate a little as she processes the incident that took place and tries to make some kind of emotional sense of it. This is when the cracks start to appear in her cynical, earthy facade and the audience starts to worry about just where all this is going. Well, I did anyway.

And the final solution to things are... almost but not quite, nowhere to be found on screen. This isn’t a movie that builds its way up to any real sense of closure to events. Instead, this is an observation piece about Daphne and the way she deals with life and, frankly, I found the movie almost jaw dropping in its intensity and beauty.

It’s not just performance alone, however, that keeps you watching this (although it’s a pretty fiercely awesome performance, to be sure). It’s the way the director chooses how he shows things which also make this amazingly interesting. He obviously likes vertical patterns and comes back to compositions which utilise these time and again. One of my favourites was when Daphne goes into a shop at night and we look at the shop in long shot from across the road but we have one of those big bus stop standing adverts in the foreground, filling up the entire left hand of the shot. However, we can’t actually see the advert in the display stand because of the way the street is lit. Instead, we have the exact opposite of the right hand side of the screen behind the advert reflected in the glass of the board housing the ad. It’s a great little moment in a film which is filled with interesting compositions.

The proximity of the camera to the central character in that shot is something which is common to the film too. Quite often the director will cut to a long shot and this gives the film a very voyeuristic feel to quite a lot of it, giving an extra weight to the ‘fly on the wall’ method of catching the characters in conversation that feels like a running element of the film. There are lots of shots taken from overhead, for example, like Alfred Hitchcock would often use in his films to give a bit of an overview of the characters in a kind of, almost detached manner. The audience members become observers complicit in the eavesdropping of this person as she goes about her daily routines. Yes, I know that sentence could apply to most of cinema history in a way but the means by which this director expresses these performances visually seems to heighten that sense of casual observation more overtly than a lot of other movie makers out there at the moment, I think.

He does a lot of things with the camera in this which you wouldn’t normally expect to see in a film and, especially with the kind of modern ‘ultra kitchen sink’ style of content that you get in works of this nature. For instance, there’s a brilliant shot of Daphne in head and shoulders walking towards the right of shot with her face in profile always at the centre of the shot and we see the fence behind her whizzing behind from right to left. It’s a little like that shot which opens up the credit sequence on Tarantino’s Jackie Brown and, for a minute, I had to wonder if the actress had some kind of body cam strapped to her like earlier incarnations of directors Martin Scorcese or Darren Aronofsky might have used. Or was it just a bloody good cameraman who was able to keep up with the subject brilliantly (I suspect so).

Another striking shot which doesn’t make much sense is where Daphne is in a glass building and walking from the back of the screen towards two glass doors at the foreground of the camera. As we cut to a closer up version of the shot, Daphne gets more and more out of focus until she leaves the shot and the camera finally decides to go into deep focus, on the empty environment where she had just been. It’s almost as unusual as the shot of Daphne and David on their ‘first date’ where they are siting in a restaurant or pub behind a glass window... the glass window is completely steamed up and it stands between the camera and its subject so we can only make out the rough shapes of the lead characters without actually seeing them. The only thing in focus throughout the whole sequence is the condensation caused by Daphne’s finger as she draws a huge penis on the window.

The film is a real milestone, at least with this particular audience member and, although it does have a certain sense of an ending in some way, where Daphne reconnects with a specific element of her traumatic confrontation in the earlier part of the movie, it certainly didn’t go anywhere that I thought it would go and the ending came as a complete surprise because I though we were going to get another twenty or so minutes as the character decides to get certain elements of her life back on track and, instead, the film finished and the credits started to roll. However, I didn’t in the end feel I really needed any more ‘closure’ to Daphne’s plight and it was like we were visiting with a character and keeping an eye on her up until the point where she might... just might... be about to turn her life around and start taking an interest in making the right decisions for her personal well being. And I loved it. The film is truly wonderful.

And that’s all I have to say on this one. If you want to see an amazingly jaw dropping central performance coupled with some truly striking compositions and mise en scène then you need to get yourself to see Daphne. In short, if you call yourself an admirer of the art form that is the moving picture, you would be seriously doing yourself a disservice, actually, if you didn’t check this one out. I know I count myself really lucky that I saw that BFI tweet in time. I just hope they release a Blu Ray of this one soon.