I wanted to read Blake Morrison's novel The Last Weekend since I read a review in the Grauniad a couple of months ago but it took so long to reach my library that in the interim I had forgotten the main reason why the book appealed so much: the über-unreliable narrator. It didn't take many pages for me to remember, however, as this unreliable narrator is anything but subtle.
The premise is fairly simple: there are two forty-something couples, one of whom is rich, successful and attractive, and the other less so. The two men were friends at university--unlikely friends, perhaps, given how much more Generally Awesome Ollie is than Ian but they end up living together and indeed, Ollie meets his future partner, Daisy, through Ian (well, she was reluctantly dating Ian at the time and soon moved on to his more attractive, more confident buddy). Ollie is now a successful lawyer, Daisy a headhunter for the creative fields, while Ian is a primary school teacher and his wife, Em, a social worker. Although Ian is the godfather of Ollie and Daisy's son, the two couples have grown apart and only see each other every couple of years.
One evening, Ian gets a call from Ollie inviting him and Em to go and stay with them at the dilapidated country pile they are renting for the summer in Norfolk during the August bank holiday--the eponymous last weekend. Reluctantly--or, at least, with overt reluctance--Ian agrees and a few weeks later, he and Em make the long journey down from The North. Add fractiously hot bank holiday weather, a whole lot of booze and decades old jealousies and new secrets rise to the surface and for a novel that takes place, for the most part, over four days, there is an awfully big storm brewing.
I read the novel in a single sitting partly because it was so compulsive and, perhaps, partly because at times, we all feel like we have friends a little like Ollie and Daisy (compared to our own Ian and Em). This was despite the fact that none of the characters were very likable. At least, none of the characters seemed very likable. The problem is that we only have Ian's word for it and Ian's word, as we soon learn, is not worth much. He contradicts himself, he changes his story and sometimes, he seems to misinterpret events and actions that even we the reader can see are happening differently (this is no mean feat given that the whole novel is told in the first person). His words won't be so blatantly self-contradictory all of the time but you begin to wonder whether he is even capable of speaking the truth or whether he is completely delusional.
Particularly paradoxical is that Ollie is shown to be a compulsive liar--Ian takes care to point out dozens of examples of occasions where Ollie has contradicted himself--but if a liar calls someone else a liar, should we believe them? In fact, this component of the novel had me wondering, part-way through, whether Ollie and Daisy were going to turn out to be completely fabricated, Ollie being the "better" version of Ian that the latter sees in his mind. I don't think this is where this story was going but it could have been. Equally, can we really dislike Ian's "steady" but nagging wife who never seems to forgive him for not having borne her any children when we are only seeing her through Ian's eyes? I would like to say yes but Morrison has done such a good job of writing Ian as Iago that his character hangs like a dark cloud over every sentence (and yes, the book opens with an epithet from Othello and yes, Ollie's name begins with the same letter as Othello's, Daisy's as Desdemona's, Em's as Emilia's and Ian's as Iago's, so this isn't subtle either).
Gripped as I was by The Last Weekend, when I turned the last page, I felt quite empty as though not enough--or maybe too much--had been resolved. It seems that you can have too much of a good thing, after all; or too much of an unreliable thing, at any rate.
27 June 2010
20 June 2010
A Little Light Relief
It may be obvious from my previous movie-related posts that the majority of films I watch are angsty dramas or thrillers. Life, after all, is light-hearted enough... This weekend, however, I saw two (count 'em) comedies and I found myself enjoying them both.
I'll start with L'arnacoeur (Heartbreaker) because I saw it this morning and it was so charmingly ludicrous (or is that ludicrously charming?) that it seems to have numbed my brain somewhat. The plot summary on IMDb reads as follows:
Alex and his sister run a business designed to break up relationships. They are hired by a rich man to break up the wedding of his daughter. The only problem is that they only have one week to do so.
Now, had this been a US film with, say, Ashton Kutcher playing Alex and Kate Hudson playing the daughter, I probably wouldn't have given it a second glance but it's actually a French film and so I thought pourquoi
pas -- at the very least, it would be good linguistic practice. I got a free ticket courtesy of SeeFilmFirst, from which I had been planning to unsubscribe because after six months, they hadn't managed to offer me a ticket to a single film I would want to see (apart from when the screenings were during office hours).
French or not, L'arnacoeur really is quite ludicrous. As the film opens, we meet Florence, on holiday in Morocco with her bozo boyfriend (BB) who only wants to hang out by the pool and attend wet t-shirt contests. Florence hitches a lift to visit "the dunes" with a hot doctor--"Pierre"--who is also very charming, quotes Brazilian poetry and saves poor African children. Sure enough, they kiss but then he tells her that he was too devastated by his last relationship to get involved in another one. He even cries. So Florence realises that BB has to go and can get on with her life.
Alex and his intel experts (his sister and her husband) are hired by the family or friends of women in relationship with BBs to break up the relationship. Their MO is to do tons of research of the woman to find out how Alex can make himself into the exact guy the woman needs to realise she is in the wrong relationship, whether that be the caring doctor or the hunky window cleaner. He also owes some scary mafioso type 20,000 euros, as he is often reminded by the scarier still henchman, so when he gets a call from another mafioso type asking him to stop his daughter from getting married in ten days' time, of course he says yes.
Trouble is, the daughter is the lovely Vanessa Paradis (Juliette), a slightly cold but tough and intelligent wine expert and her fiancé is the hot guy from Teachers, who has a degree from Oxford (I guess that sounds more impressive in French), a phat business of his own and humanitarian tendencies. He seems nice enough too and certainly seems to love Juliette so why exactly daddy dearest wants to break the couple up is somewhat unclear but as this is far from the most ridiculous thing about the film but never mind. The wedding is in Monaco so Alex and the team jet on down and Alex claims to be a bodyguard hired for Juliette by her father--we spend a few minutes with her trying to escape from him but after he "saves" her from being mugged (a plot engineered by Alex's crew in disguise), she gives in and lets him be her bodyguard. And isn't it a coincidence that he also loves George Michael and Dirty Dancing is his favourite film too? (I think if I were Juliette, I would be slightly dubious of the sexuality of such a man but she is too secretly pleased at the "coincidences" to mind.)
And so it goes on with Alex slowly winning Juliette's friendship and maybe more thanks in part to his sister and her husband and their seemingly endless wardrobe of disguises (air con maintenance man, Italian racing driver, bar maid, hotel manager, etc.), who have managed to hack every CCTV camera in Monaco and pull off a range of ridiculous feats in the name of seducing Juliette into ditching her would-be husband.
I haven't seen Hitch but this film is, I imagine, the opposite -- a man who tries to break couples up rather than hook them up, although on the other hand, perhaps both Hitch and Alex are working to make sure women end up with their Mr Right. As I'm sure happens in Hitch too, things here go somewhat awry when the heartbreaker discovers he has a heart. I don't think this is much of a spoiler given that I worked out exactly what would happen before the opening credits had even rolled. Regardless, despite its silliness and its crazy plot, L'arnacoeur was funny and delightful enough to make it a perfect film for a lazy, laid-back Sunday. Paradis and Romain Duris, who played Alex, were perfectly charming--and it definitely helped that the latter was so easy on the eye.
Yesterday, I saw Please Give, which was more sublime than ridiculous but just as funny, although more in the aren't-people-weird sense than the ha-ha-look-at-that-guy-trying-to-be-Patrick-Swayze sense. Please Give is one of those only-in-New-York films, not least because the main concern most people have is how they can get more living space (by buying the neighbours' apartment and knocking through into it when the neighbours die, in this film).
There's a well-off couple (Kate and Alex) with a teenage daughter in one apartment who are waiting for the elderly woman next door to pop her clogs so they can get a new master bedroom. The elderly woman's grandchildren are caring, introverted Rebecca, a radiology technician, and Mary, a tarty, blunt, vapid beauty technician. Mary isn't the only one in the film who speaks her mind -- so too does the old lady and the teenage daughter. Meanwhile, Kate feels guilty about all her money and the fact that her swanky designer antiques store is filled with stuff she gets from "the children of dead people" (usually for a pittance because they have no idea of the value of the stuff and just want to be done with it) and so liberally scatters $20 across the homeless people who live on her block (and also, sometimes, to people who are actually not homeless at all but queuing up outside a restaurant) and wants to do more tohelp ease the guilt.
No one is happy, really, although they are all unhappy in different ways and to be honest, none of them really need to be unhappy. The teenage daughter wants some $200 jeans, which her mother won't buy for her; Alex idly starts shagging Mary; Kate turns out to be no good as a volunteer because she, like the old lady, focuses only on the negatives and just ends up depressing everyone; Mary stalks the current girlfriend of her ex "who has a really big back"; and Rebecca tentatively starts dating the grandson of one of her patients ("but he's very short"). Apart from this, not a lot happens and they all go about their lives, trying to be happier, over-analysing everything and being, by turns, selfish and kind. It really is a talkie--the film is seriously dialogue-heavy--but the characters are amusing and peculiar even if they aren't always very likable.
I'll start with L'arnacoeur (Heartbreaker) because I saw it this morning and it was so charmingly ludicrous (or is that ludicrously charming?) that it seems to have numbed my brain somewhat. The plot summary on IMDb reads as follows:
Alex and his sister run a business designed to break up relationships. They are hired by a rich man to break up the wedding of his daughter. The only problem is that they only have one week to do so.
Now, had this been a US film with, say, Ashton Kutcher playing Alex and Kate Hudson playing the daughter, I probably wouldn't have given it a second glance but it's actually a French film and so I thought pourquoi
pas -- at the very least, it would be good linguistic practice. I got a free ticket courtesy of SeeFilmFirst, from which I had been planning to unsubscribe because after six months, they hadn't managed to offer me a ticket to a single film I would want to see (apart from when the screenings were during office hours).
French or not, L'arnacoeur really is quite ludicrous. As the film opens, we meet Florence, on holiday in Morocco with her bozo boyfriend (BB) who only wants to hang out by the pool and attend wet t-shirt contests. Florence hitches a lift to visit "the dunes" with a hot doctor--"Pierre"--who is also very charming, quotes Brazilian poetry and saves poor African children. Sure enough, they kiss but then he tells her that he was too devastated by his last relationship to get involved in another one. He even cries. So Florence realises that BB has to go and can get on with her life.
Alex and his intel experts (his sister and her husband) are hired by the family or friends of women in relationship with BBs to break up the relationship. Their MO is to do tons of research of the woman to find out how Alex can make himself into the exact guy the woman needs to realise she is in the wrong relationship, whether that be the caring doctor or the hunky window cleaner. He also owes some scary mafioso type 20,000 euros, as he is often reminded by the scarier still henchman, so when he gets a call from another mafioso type asking him to stop his daughter from getting married in ten days' time, of course he says yes.
Trouble is, the daughter is the lovely Vanessa Paradis (Juliette), a slightly cold but tough and intelligent wine expert and her fiancé is the hot guy from Teachers, who has a degree from Oxford (I guess that sounds more impressive in French), a phat business of his own and humanitarian tendencies. He seems nice enough too and certainly seems to love Juliette so why exactly daddy dearest wants to break the couple up is somewhat unclear but as this is far from the most ridiculous thing about the film but never mind. The wedding is in Monaco so Alex and the team jet on down and Alex claims to be a bodyguard hired for Juliette by her father--we spend a few minutes with her trying to escape from him but after he "saves" her from being mugged (a plot engineered by Alex's crew in disguise), she gives in and lets him be her bodyguard. And isn't it a coincidence that he also loves George Michael and Dirty Dancing is his favourite film too? (I think if I were Juliette, I would be slightly dubious of the sexuality of such a man but she is too secretly pleased at the "coincidences" to mind.)
And so it goes on with Alex slowly winning Juliette's friendship and maybe more thanks in part to his sister and her husband and their seemingly endless wardrobe of disguises (air con maintenance man, Italian racing driver, bar maid, hotel manager, etc.), who have managed to hack every CCTV camera in Monaco and pull off a range of ridiculous feats in the name of seducing Juliette into ditching her would-be husband.
I haven't seen Hitch but this film is, I imagine, the opposite -- a man who tries to break couples up rather than hook them up, although on the other hand, perhaps both Hitch and Alex are working to make sure women end up with their Mr Right. As I'm sure happens in Hitch too, things here go somewhat awry when the heartbreaker discovers he has a heart. I don't think this is much of a spoiler given that I worked out exactly what would happen before the opening credits had even rolled. Regardless, despite its silliness and its crazy plot, L'arnacoeur was funny and delightful enough to make it a perfect film for a lazy, laid-back Sunday. Paradis and Romain Duris, who played Alex, were perfectly charming--and it definitely helped that the latter was so easy on the eye.
Yesterday, I saw Please Give, which was more sublime than ridiculous but just as funny, although more in the aren't-people-weird sense than the ha-ha-look-at-that-guy-trying-to-be-Patrick-Swayze sense. Please Give is one of those only-in-New-York films, not least because the main concern most people have is how they can get more living space (by buying the neighbours' apartment and knocking through into it when the neighbours die, in this film).
There's a well-off couple (Kate and Alex) with a teenage daughter in one apartment who are waiting for the elderly woman next door to pop her clogs so they can get a new master bedroom. The elderly woman's grandchildren are caring, introverted Rebecca, a radiology technician, and Mary, a tarty, blunt, vapid beauty technician. Mary isn't the only one in the film who speaks her mind -- so too does the old lady and the teenage daughter. Meanwhile, Kate feels guilty about all her money and the fact that her swanky designer antiques store is filled with stuff she gets from "the children of dead people" (usually for a pittance because they have no idea of the value of the stuff and just want to be done with it) and so liberally scatters $20 across the homeless people who live on her block (and also, sometimes, to people who are actually not homeless at all but queuing up outside a restaurant) and wants to do more to
No one is happy, really, although they are all unhappy in different ways and to be honest, none of them really need to be unhappy. The teenage daughter wants some $200 jeans, which her mother won't buy for her; Alex idly starts shagging Mary; Kate turns out to be no good as a volunteer because she, like the old lady, focuses only on the negatives and just ends up depressing everyone; Mary stalks the current girlfriend of her ex "who has a really big back"; and Rebecca tentatively starts dating the grandson of one of her patients ("but he's very short"). Apart from this, not a lot happens and they all go about their lives, trying to be happier, over-analysing everything and being, by turns, selfish and kind. It really is a talkie--the film is seriously dialogue-heavy--but the characters are amusing and peculiar even if they aren't always very likable.