Jonathan Glazer as a director is very singular in the respect that I don’t actually think you could point out if a film was directed by him. Where so many film-makers have their own distinct house style as it were, each of the three excellent films that Jonathan Glazer has directed thus far, as we stand on the eve of the seemingly also excellent The Zone of Interest, are so incredibly different from one another; visually, dynamically, story-wise – it is quite incredible. The first of these excellent films is of course the modern classic gangster feature Sexy Beast.
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Sexy Beast (2000)
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The only one of the three films he’s directed so far that Glazer didn’t have a hand in writing himself is for me one of the finest examples of material elevation in the world of film. But first I must elaborate, I do not think the script is bad in the slightest, as a matter of fact it reminds me most of the vulgar cockney poetry of later Harold Pinter pieces, with some even spoken word-esque phrasings of insults that are purely poetic in their brutal beauty. But I do feel that in the hands of another director this may very well have ended up another bog-standard British crime film, which there are of course ten a penny of. So what exactly makes Sexy Beast stand apart? To be perhaps overly praising, one might say a sense of pure brilliance. But let’s actually break it down instead. Beast is a film that revels in dissecting stereotypes of a genre already in the over-population stage by the time it was released. It follows Ray Winstone, already a popular “hard-man” of British independent cinema, here as Gal Dove, and where other film gangsters would love to have “one last job”, Gal is very resigned to continue living out his Spanish fantasy of Villa life with his lovely wife played by Amanda Redman. Glazer takes such time and joy with glamorising their current existence, to the extent that when we cut wonderfully abruptly to the harsh rain of London, it’s just as blunt and brutal as some of the abrupt flashback glances of shotguns being fired. Winstone is extraordinary in this film in his performance and will lead me to defend his sometimes disputed acting capability to the end of my life, it’s all about material and direction and here Winstone has both to fully delve himself into. The script itself comes from Louis Mellis and David Scinto whose work has always remained in the gangster vein, with Gangster No. 1 being another interesting experimental take on the genre, and 44 Inch Chest being an unfortunately sub-par effort – the purest example of my argument that Glazer’s effective and subtle touch is what makes this film the objective success that it is. Perhaps the most noticeable of Glazer’s touches is his frequent addition of dream sequences throughout the film, and although sometimes the budget and CGI can’t keep up with certain concluding images, each instils brilliantly the feeling that they’re trying to capture, whether it be love or pure dread. Pure dread is of course best distilled and perfected in performance by the film’s only Oscar nominee – Ben Kingsley, for his electric, hilarious, visceral and f*cking terrifying performance as Don Logan, forever in the history books as one of the finest supporting villain roles of all time. Then when the film has already created an indelible villain for the ages, it gives us another with Ian McShane’s Teddy Bass. Where Logan’s terror was fuelled by his verbal gymnastics and complete unpredictably, Bass terrifies us to our core by utilising stillness like the biggest weapon you’ve ever seen. Glazer constructs a perfect gangster film whilst also deconstructing it from the inside, along with dealing with themes of death in dynamic and visually interesting ways. Death in many ways becoming the operative theme of his next film, the similarly exceptional; Birth.
Birth (2004)
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Now, I’m going to go out and stick with saying that Birth is indeed similarly exceptional, but whereas I would say that Sexy Beast is a perfect if peculiar structured beast in itself, Birth is not on that level. Birth despite all of its mighty of ideas does fall into during its later stages a series of explainable if credulity stretching explanations and expositions to justify its brilliant plot that leave one with the final impression of confusion – not confusion around plotting or its ambiguity, but instead whether or not the film would have succeeded more with a level of ambiguity. Perhaps that opening sentence was as convoluted as the film’s conclusion itself, but why start with the ending when what proceeds is just as well made as Glazer’s previous and later efforts and in concept is for me perhaps even his most intriguing concept of all. Even now as I listen once more to Alexandre Desplat’s beautiful score, I can’t help but be brought back into the jarring beauty and tenderness that is brought to a story that is at its core deeply unsettling. Glazer worked here with writers Jean- Claude Carriere and Milo Addica to work on the story of a 10 year old boy who arrives at a wealthy woman’s house upon the eve of her second engagement to claim that he is the reincarnation of her first husband who passed of a heart attack around ten years prior. The boy knows things both broad and particular about his relationship with Nicole’s Anna and the other members in her family and bit by bit the credibility of this boy’s claim seemingly grows more and more valid especially for Anna. Now whether you as an audience member remain firmly in disbelief the whole time or for that matter toy with the plausibility of this supernatural element being a reality, the film succeeds in its level of quality down to the slow reckoning that Anna goes through. The notions of perversion, of grief and chiefly of faith all come into question as the film slowly unfolds in the effortless pace that it does.
Now, like I said, the film eventually gives way to a practical and plausible reasoning for certain elements, which lends the whole piece an air of tragedy, but the screenplay is at times uneven in what its going for. The masterstroke is Kidman as Anna who gives a performance of such subtle pain and hope that we do for the most part not turn against this woman when for a lack of a better way to say it notions of paedophilia are raised, this is not to say that the relationship Anna toys with this boy is sexual, I don’t believe that it is for her, however the connotations cannot be ignored. Glazer’s hand is steady and far less cinematically kinetic as Sexy Beast, nor for that matter as unnerving or at the alter of Kubrick that Under the Skin is at. Instead here Glazer is at a tender remove and lets the score and the fragility and subtlety of the performances take us through this provocative tale. The films cast boasts latter day excellence from Lauren Bacall, fresh from working with Kidman on another independent auteur’s detour from normal style with Lars Von Trier’s Dogville, here once again offering a stark and blunt offering of truth to the proceedings like only she could. Danny Huston offers the explosive reactionary response, largely down to being the somewhat understandable furious fiancĂ© of Anna who is possibly being emotionally cuckholded by a ten year old boy, but who still for the first hour or so feigns a composure that effectively fades away. Cameron Bright plays the young Sean and is wonderfully childlike in so many words in an acutely bizarre way and sense. There are no scruples or joy in his obsession nor is there any naivety, there is simply a stark matter of factness that is perhaps the chief factor to the films stark effectiveness. Perhaps it is the sparsity of Glazer’s cannon that leads one to look at Birth deeper rather than simply dismissing it as a well made but ultimately flawed beast. There is a façade of tenderness and romanticism and yet underneath a complete horror at its heart, noted best by the hypnotic hum that underpins much of Desplat’s score. Birth is less Glazer’s worst film, more his most flawed.
Under the Skin (2013)
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I wouldn’t exactly say the true horror and unsettling nature of Glazer’s sci-fi triumph Under the Skin was exactly surprising, as a matter of fact really all things point to this being the expected right turn into the Kubrickian – but on the surface one could perhaps suggest a detour. This sparse, brilliant and visually astounding piece of work is one of the finer horrors of the recent era and I personally would describe it as such rather than being more an out and out sci-fi feature. Now this is not to ignore the deeply effective and frequently unnerving manner in which the film toys with and is based upon alien tropes varying from those of the bodysnatching kind and even to those of the likes of the touching Starman where an alien strives to become one with the ways of this world. Under the Skin is loosely based upon a novel of the same name that was freely adapted by Glazer and his writing team, however in this case perhaps ‘loosely’ is less apt, nor perhaps is ‘freely’, for simply Glazer’s adaptation here strips and strips away until all that remains are the barest of bones of what can be inferred. The film is daringly simple almost to the point of purposeful alienation, everything is so particular and acute in the scenes that are beyond our normal world that it perfectly sends us into the mind-frame of our alien lead, to such an extent that once we begin to start looking at normal images common to the human eye (such as shopping centres and hen parties) we feel so unnerved that we begin to view them as othered. Figures remain entirely objectified and without name, spaces seem liminal, frames and images hold at such wide points that everything is viewed at a remove, we begin to see people as ants, again, as others. Glazer here adapts with such a flourish for the disconcerting and horrid that we fall under a spell of absolute nervousness at every stage. Glazer’s impeccable blending within his ensemble of performers from real life individuals shot in a veritĂ© candid camera style with unknown actors and then thrust into the centre of it all a true Hollywood starlet in Scarlett Johansson as the central alien. Johannson is stellar here with a flawless yet slightly affected British accent as at once the absolute seductress and the unnerving killer. Glazer moves the camera around her or positions it in the hidden aspects to shoot with precision and poise a figure who is completely in the wrong surrounding at all times, even as the film shifts gears and becomes in many ways a story entirely about a person wishing to become part of the surroundings, Glazer won’t allow it. It’s an ingenious sparse film that thrives in discomfort, boasts one of the great horror scores of all time with Micah Levis’ beautiful work and also for that matter boast a genuine jump scare that gets me in a way that most films simply do not. I truly am very rarely shocked by a film, but even on repeat watches, Under the Skin manages to unnerve and shock me like few other films can.
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The pain of Jonathan Glazer’s career in film is that it is just so painfully in-frequent. The man has made three truly exceptional films, each of them so wonderfully different from the other and yet I just wished I had so many more. However if it takes this amount of years each time for Glazer to achieve the quality that he makes, then I can’t argue with that. Even if I wished it weren’t so.
- - Thomas Carruthers
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