Two Flemish peasant women walk on a country path at sunset, amiably chatting, probably heading home after a day of work. We follow their cheerful strolling for a while until the silhouette of a top-hatted man grabs our attention from the background. He is sketching in a notebook. Of course, we know who he is. It’s a striking opening shot, yet not as defining as we’ll get to realise in retrospect, while the film unfolds.
Something extremely exciting or terribly dull typically comes from art recounting itself. To treat someone like JMW Turner as an extraordinary man—when extraordinary is indeed what he was—would have been tempting, if anything. But Mike Leigh does things differently, taking us down a far more fascinating route. Avoiding to fall into the facile celebrative clichés of the genre, he reminds us that genius is nothing but the result of extraordinary efforts made by very ordinary human beings. His Turner gropes maids, disavows children, and grunts like a pig, but he is essentially as bad or good as any creature on this bloody earth.
The amber perfection of Mr. Turner’s photography had initially put me off. Its relentless golden hour lights are arguably unlikely, all the more in Chelsea and Margate. Then it occurred to me that such a cinematographic obstinacy couldn’t be just a rootless aesthetic choice, but maybe an attempt at filtering the world through the voracious gaze of a man in love with the romantic violence of colours. ‘Colour is contradictory,’ says Turner to Mrs Somerville with piercing eyes. His art is ferociously passionate, so the palette of Mr. Turner—the film—or so it is as maybe.
Although not being one of my favourite Mike Leigh’s films, Mr. Turner does leave me with the vivid memory of some really superb moments. The way it ends for instance, those last two shots on the most important women in the artist’s adult life—again, so contrasting and yet somewhat complementary—really are the touch of a master.
Pedro Costa abstracts grief and hardship into stylised images of electrifying beauty—sensuous and gritty at once. Cavalo Dinheiro’s dramatic lighting is almost reminiscent of a late caravaggesque chiaroscuro. Its staging is designed with still photo sensitivity. Figures emerge like statues from the darkness, they are surrounded by it—perhaps they should be called models, à la Bresson. Statues belong to the night, and the deranged creatures who live in it, says Costa in an interview. Cavalo Dinheiro is not about spirits and dreams but rather the coexistence of present and past—the physical being of the latter, the torturous attempt at feeling it in order to leave it behind. Films themselves are made to forget, according to Costa. Dialogues are few, their economy makes them even sharper. The contrast between sensuous and raw is always there, taking at times a moving shape, others ironic. ‘Showing off your ruffle shirt, embroidered slacks, high-heeled boots . . . razor in your back pocket,’ whispers Vitalina to Ventura in a vaguely hallucinative scene—and it’s almost an artistic statement.
A bunch of flowers on the street is one of the most poignant symbols in the collective imagination. We see it, we know immediately what it means, and we suddenly find ourselves helplessly sinking in a deep, irrational sadness. But so much more do flowers mean if instead of leaning against a wall they are in a vase on a table, nicely displayed at an event, if the hands of a man are taking care of them or those of a woman bring them close to her cheeks as she loses herself in their scent, in a memory, somewhere far. With words spoken by the colours of flowers on the gloomy tints of a misty weather, Loreak explores incomprehensions, loneliness, affections, and the exhausting human rebelling against oblivion. There’s a very thin line between living in the present and in the past, a line stretched not only by the fear of being forgotten but also and above all, by that of forgetting.
