Three Films

I seem to go to the cinema quite rarely these days. I see the big Marvel films like 'Black Panther' and 'Avengers: Infinity War' but that tends to be about it. So it was quite a surprise to find myself seeing three films in three weeks about three people.

'The Happy Prince' is the culmination of Rupert Everett's love affair with Oscar Wilde and tells the tale of what happened to Wilde after he was released from Reading prison and went to live in exile on the Continent. I saw Rupert Everett play Wilde in 'The Judas Kiss' a few years ago and that production apparently helped to get this film off the ground. With all the production agencies, producers and assistant producers in the credits at the end, he's obviously put in a lot of work to raise the finance to get the film made.

Rupert not only plays Wilde but he also wrote and directed the film, clearly a labour of love. The film took a little while to get going but it was worth it and I loved bookending various episodes in Wilde's life  by him telling the story of 'The Happy Prince' to a couple of street urchins.

'McQueen' is a documentary about the short life of Alexander McQueen and his rise to prominence in the fashion world before his death at the age of 40. The film is a thing of beauty in itself, very elegant and measured. There is lots of footage from the time as British fashion took off in the '90s, with clips of Isabella Blow and others who were all at the centre of it with McQueen.

There was also footage of some of his spectacular fashion shows and a gob-smacking moment when robots open fire with paint onto a beautiful, pristine white dress the model is wearing. That was a wow moment and I preferred the dress after the paint job (such clever robots). The thing that was missing for me was the lack of explanation or exploration of what went wrong to rob him of his joy - drugs are mentioned and there's footage of McQueen speaking about cocaine, but nothing about what set him off on that path. The film ends with his suicide the night before his mother's funeral - all that creativity snuffed out by success and money. If you get a chance to see the film then please do so, it's well worth seeing and is beautiful in its own right.

'Carrington' is a film from the '90s about the artist Dora Carrington and her love for Lytton Stratchy. That puts her into the Bloomsbury group of artists. She was a star pupil at the Slade School of Art before the First World War alongside Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash and others. She wasn't bothered about exhibiting her work, she painted because she wanted to paint for herself and for Lytton and that's probably why she isn't more well known. The film was screened as a one-off at the National Gallery.

Carrington is played by Emma Thompson and Lytton by Jonathan Pryce and it's a strange and touching tale of their platonic and deep love for each other, having their own lovers but always coming back to each other and sharing their joys, tears and lives. It ends with Carrington's suicide after Lytton dies.

Three films about three people, all artists, all dead while still young (Wilde was 46, McQueen was 40 and Carrington was 39) and all have left their own legacy. There's currently a year-long season of Oscar Wilde plays in the West End, the V&A put on the big exhibition about Alexander McQueen a couple of years ago so what we need is a big exhibition of Carrington's works. She was prominent in 'The Crisis of Brilliance' exhibition a few years ago but it's time for a proper retrospective exhibition - yes, Tate Britain, I'm looking at you.

'Sweeney Todd' at The Coliseum

Do you like meat pies and a nice, close shave, the closest shave in London? If you do then you're a bit late to see the latest production of 'Sweeney Todd' at the Coliseum, the home of the English National Opera. The production closed last week but I was lucky enough to catch it before it ended. This was 'Sweeney Todd' with Emma Thompson and Bryn Terfel.

The Coliseum is terribly ornate and old school but, when I walked into the auditorium, my spirits fell slightly when I saw a line of microphone stands at the front of the stage with the orchestra behind. O, I thought, it's a concert version. Not what I was expecting but it should still be good (I hoped).  After all, it was Emma Thompson's first time on the London stage since the '90s and Emma is always worth watching.

And then on came the cast carrying their songbooks, Emma and Bryn in the centre with the rest of the cast along the front of the stage. Bryn started singing and then after a minute or so stood at his microphone, picked up his songbook and dropped it on the stage. Emma tipped hers into the orchestra pit and the others started throwing their songbooks around. The other leading ladies went up to Emma and pulled the sleeves of her frock off and all of them began ripping clothes, moving around the stage, upturning the grand piano to make it a small platform and generally causing mayhem. This was more like it!

Bryn has a big operatic voice and menacing presence that needs a similar voice to challenge it so Emma didn't even try. Instead, she went for comedy and acting to hold her place against Bryn and she more than succeeded with her comedy East End accent and taking over the stage. I loved how she used the orchestra at the back of the stage, taking the conductor's baton at one point to help give Sweeney a hair cut, swiped the double bassist's stool to give Sweeney his first barber's chair and walked to the violin section when talking about pie made of fiddlers. Emma was great fun and easily ruled the stage. She seemed to be having a ball!

I'm very pleased to have seen this production - and seen Emma on stage at last. It certainly wasn't what I expected but that would've been boring, to just put on a standard version with a couple of big names. No, this was different and deservedly so and a production I'll remember for a long time.

'Saving Mr Banks'

I was taken to see the new Emma Thompson film, 'Saving Mr Banks', at the Ritzy in Brixton this evening. It tells the tale of Walt Disney persuading PL Travers to allow him to film 'Mary Poppins'. Obviously he was ultimately successful but it took 20 years.  Emma plays Mrs Travers and Tom Hanks is Disney and there's a great and warm cast supporting them. I particularly liked Paul Giamatti who played her driver in Los Angeles.

The film flits between scenes in the LA rehearsal studios where the film is painfully born and the outback in Australia where Mrs Travers grew up with her alcoholic father and weak mother. We see scenes from her childhood and how her father encouraged her flights of fancy, see him gradually becoming more obviously an alcoholic until an accident that signals the end for him. We then meet her aunt with distinct Poppins tendencies...

I don't know how 'true' the film is, of how Mrs Travers gradually thawed from her prickly and demanding start to becoming more human and I don't really care. Disney is cast as the hero, sharing her story of a loved but flawed father and gradually wearing her down until she signs over the rights to the book. Both Emma and Tom Hanks were excellent and worked well together - I thoroughly enjoyed the fillum and would recommend it to anyone with a smidgen of imagination.

There are a few clips from 'Mary Poppins' in the film and they just served to underline how little time I have for Dick Van Dyke's cockerney Burt the chimney-sweep but he's part of the overall Poppins experience so that's that. I have two distinct memories of 'Mary Poppins':

1. Seeing the stage show in the West End and, at the end, Mr Banks going up to the bird lady on the steps of St Paul's with his tuppence and asking if she would do him the honour of feeding the birds on his behalf; and

2. Being in the audience for the first rehearsal of the 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony when Lord Voldemort and Cruella DeVille were menacing the children and then Mary Poppins floats down to save the day (lots of her actually - well, she is practically perfect after all). I remember exclaiming 'Poppins!' out loud when I saw her floating down with an open umbrella but I don't think anyone noticed...

I now have a third memory. 'Let's go fly a kite...'.