The Telegraph: “I trudged to this production with all the enthusiasm of a schoolboy making his way to a double maths lesson on a dank Monday morning.

One of the peculiarities of my job is that you are sometimes required to see the same play twice in close proximity, and it was only last week that I endured Stephen Unwin’s punishingly dour production of Ghosts (1881) at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. The idea of a second dose of a work that is grim even by Ibsen’s demanding standards felt almost unendurable.

But Richard Eyre’s superb staging, in his own fleet and vivid adaptation, held me in its grip throughout. Unlike Unwin, he stages the piece without an interval, so that the dramatic tension isn’t dissipated, but the real difference is the in-the-moment intensity of the acting.

It is a production that creates a strong sense of impending doom, and when the worst happens, as we know it must, it does so with a raw, unbuttoned passion that leaves one reeling. The dramatic effect is exactly the opposite of Unwin’s production. There the play’s climax seemed merely depressing. Here one feels unexpectedly elated by the reckless emotional truth of both Ibsen’s play and the superb performances of the actors.

But as well as penetrating to the dark heart of a drama that deals with the syphilis a son has inherited through the debauched sins of his father, Eyre also finds a good deal of dark humour in the piece.
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As Pastor Manders, the self-anointed spiritual adviser to Helene Alving and her troubled son Oswald, Will Keen hilariously suggests a man who is convinced of his own rightness while getting things spectacularly wrong. With his grating voice, bald, dome-like head and strange nervous hand gestures, this sanctimonious cleric is irresistibly entertaining even though the consequences of his actions invariably prove malign.

There are also fine comic touches in the performances of Brian McCardie as the disreputable builder, Engstrand, who ruthlessly exploits the Pastor’s almost criminal gullibility and Charlene McKenna as Engstrand’s daughter, a pert maid who hopes to win Oswald’s heart with her facility in French.

The heart of the play though is the relationship between Lesley Manville as Mrs Alving and Jack Lowden as her ailing, anguished son. Manville presents the mother with an extraordinary sense of accumulated tension, capturing a woman who is haunted by bitter memories of the past and fearful of dreadful developments still to come. She also movingly reveals Mrs Alving’s courage in finally acknowledging that her own part in the family tragedy hasn’t been without blame.

Meanwhile Jack Lowden, big, shambolic and increasingly distraught as her bohemian artist son, conveys the ugly egotism of the chronically sick, and the sheer terror of his terrible illness. The play’s closing moments are almost too upsetting to watch.

Tim Hatley’s design, with translucent walls that make people in the adjoining room actually look like ghosts, and Peter Mumford’s often dramatic lighting, with the play ending in a blood-red dawn, both add greatly to the intensity of a production that does full justice to this thrilling, harrowing play.”

Ghosts [Almeida Theatre 2014].mkv

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https://nitro.download/view/F26E3A68092BEFC/Ghosts_Almeida_Theatre_1.mkv

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Henrik Ibsen & Richard Eyre – Ghosts: Almeida Theatre (2014) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Phil (Timothy Spall) is an overweight taxi driver who gets up late in the day and works intermittently, barely communicating with his family except for a few grunts. His philosophy of life is expressed as “We’re all born alone. We die alone. There’s nothing we can do about it”. Mike Leigh has given us powerful portrayals of the underclass in his previous films Naked, Secrets and Lies, and Life is Sweet but none more powerful and moving than his latest, All or Nothing.

In this film, Leigh looks at three families living in a dreary South London housing complex and captures their lives with an intimacy that is almost unbearable. All or Nothing has a documentary feel, almost as if the camera was just planted in the middle of the living room to observe. The conditions are familiar: unemployment and underemployment, alcoholism, teen pregnancy, isolation, and the inevitable loss of self-esteem and despair. It is, however, more than a drama of oppressive social conditions, but also of lack of communication between people who desperately need love but are too afraid or lethargic to ask for it.

Spall’s performance is a revelation. His unshaven face, disheveled hair, and hangdog expression communicate deep resignation. The film is bleak but Leigh mixes its heartbreak with joy. When a neighbor Maureen (Ruth Sheen) sings ”Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” at a karaoke bar, her eyes shine with a glow that seems at odds with the rest of her life but is so contagious that even her most dispirited friends take notice.

It is obvious, from the start that something is amiss. Phil says nothing when his obese son Rory (James Cordon) hurls words of abuse at his common-law wife Penny. Rory is an overweight bully who does nothing but lay around the house, watching TV and hurl insults at everyone in his path. Sister Rachel (Alison Garland) has a job cleaning up at a nursing home but also seems to be going through the motions of living except when she is interacting with patients. Penny works in a supermarket and does just about everything to keep the family going, but it never seems to be enough. The film’s sub-plots add to the feeling of life reeling out of control, but none of these are fully developed and are just dropped without tying up the loose ends. Maureen’s teenage daughter is pregnant by some lout that doesn’t give two hoots about her. Another resident, unemployed Samantha (Sally Hawkins) hates her parents and finds herself seducing a very strange young man (Ben Crompton) lurking in the shadows of the complex grounds.

The second half of the film concentrates mainly on Phil and his family. When a medical emergency occurs, the family begins to open up and express long buried feelings of hurt and resentment. The final confrontation between Phil and Penny achieves an explosive power. Phil tells Penny that when he’s had enough, he just switches off the meter on his taxi. Penny responds that she doesn’t have the luxury of turning off a switch and making everything go away, that she is still responsible for the daily chores and the condition of the family. After Phil finally reveals his deepest fears, a transformation occurs that is unmistakably reflected in the family’s facial expressions and body language.

Leigh does not offer simple solutions, but seems to be telling us that although life is painful, we can reach beyond the pain to get in touch with the beauty. He shows us that love is the glue that holds families together and that either there is love or there’s nothing. As a result, All or Nothing pulsates with a humanity that, in spite of its bleakness, is life affirming and ultimately uplifting, reminding us that beyond bitterness, there is love, and beyond suffering, there is grace.

1.84GB | 2h 02m | 1280×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/98095A733B91560/All_or_Nothing-2002-Mike_Leigh-HDTV-720p-17_Subs.mkv

Language(s):English, Arabic, French
Subtitles:hardcoded subs in 18 languages

The post Mike Leigh – All or Nothing (2002) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Mike Leigh is often accused of talking down to his characters. With Another Year, this fan of the British auteur can see why. Leigh’s latest is a lovingly told but insufficiently nuanced story of four seasons, a year in the lives of a happy couple and their miserably single friends. It begins in spring with a close-up of a face locked in abject misery: Asked by a counselor how happy she is on a scale from one to 10, Janet (Imelda Staunton) says one, in effect setting the tone for much of the film. The only happiness here belongs to Gerri (Ruth Sheen) and her husband, Tom (Jim Broadbent), whose relationship is as organic as the vegetables they grow in their backyard, but what’s their secret? No one’s asking, including Leigh.

The filmmaker, like Eric Rohmer before him, is a keen observer of emotional character, but Gerri and Tom’s relationship, though never sentimentalized, suggests in its apparent perfection a kind of impossible ideal; from Lesley Manville’s perpetually frazzled Mary, who our own Matt Noller smartly dubbed a “tragic photo negative” of Sally Hawkins’s Poppy from the more ambitiously conceived Happy-Go-Lucky, to Peter Wight’s obese Ken, a heart attack waiting to happen, no one seems capable of the couple’s sense of bliss. But while Leigh may not adequately probe the secrets of Gerri and Tom’s great joy, and how they’ve passed it on to their sarcastic son (Oliver Maltman), the filmmaker at least makes clear that they don’t wish to throw it in anyone’s face.

Indeed, by the time winter comes, and with it the death of a human life, it becomes abundantly clear that this droll little patchwork pretends to capture nothing more, nothing less than what its title declares—just another year in the life of a small community of friends whose emotional ups and downs, like the seasons, wear on them but do not defeat them. That we don’t know what Mary did to anger Gerri and Tom sometime between autumn and winter ultimately matters less than the warm embrace Gerri gives Mary after seeing how her friend’s guilt has robbed her of her spirit. Leigh, a lover of misfits and strange ducks with funny faces and even funnier voices, wants us to understand that a house of forgiveness is one without condescension. It’s a minor lesson but a heartfelt one that reflects kindly on the man that gives it.

2.15GB | 2h 9mn | 1024×432 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/2E36E87920A528C/Mike_Leigh_-_%282010%29_Another_Year.part1.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/D67C900A28EC3C9/Mike_Leigh_-_%282010%29_Another_Year.part2.rar
https://nitroflare.com/view/4810A85FEF135BA/Mike_Leigh_-_%282010%29_Another_Year.part3.rar

Language(s):English
Subtitles:English

The post Mike Leigh – Another Year (2010) first appeared on Cinema of the World.