My Week with Marilyn is based on memoirs by filmmaker Colin Clark, reflecting on how in , when Clark was 23, he broke into the British film industry via a combination of family connections, utter inoffensiveness and minimal persistence, and how his maiden voyage as third assistant director brought him into close proximity with not only Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh but also Marilyn Monroe, who took a shine to Clark for a little while and sort of broke his tender heart before moving on to other projects, other hearts, other nervous breakdowns.
The film, directed by veteran TV-movie helmer Simon Curtis, is very pretty and tasteful, very nicely recreates period and milieu, and is all but devoid of stakes. Actually, nothing much matters here. No hidden depths behind those eyes are plumbed, our hero comes of age while remaining a total cypher, life goes on. But hey, Colin Clark went skinny-dipping with a sex goddess!
So high-fives all around, boys. Good for him. Tuesday, November 15, Le Havre: waylaid in Normandy. Another one bites the dust. Marcel Marx, the French shoeshiner, has been around; he once was a bohemian in Paris, or so he says, but now ekes out a humble but contented existence and comes home every night to a devoted wife and a very cute dog.
Soon the wife will be hospitalized with cancer and in her place will appear an African boy named Idrissa Blondin Miguel , whose clandestine journey by shipping container to the UK got interrupted and is now on the run in this forgotten French port city. Yet for all that, the film feels very much alive, engaged and enraged, full of ragged but persistent hope, less resting on laurels than shaking them back to life.
Monday, November 14, Melancholia: bad vibes all over. Birds tumble softly from the ether; a woman gazes at her hands as they give off sparks; a horse collapses to the ground like an old barn; a woman clutching a child sinks deeper into a darkened golf course; a bride sinks into the surface of a stream or trudges through forest only to be snared by roots. All of this unfolds in extremely slow slow-motion, as though some collective will is urging time to a standstill.
