Reviews – Film
November 2006
Anna Wood investigates the very different worlds of Leonard Cohen and British government public information films.
Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man
Dir: Lian Lunson
Cert PG
Somewhere between Johnny Cash and Neil Young sits Leonard Cohen, nudging his way up the league of maudlin, troubled 1970s greats who we forgot about for a while in the ‘80s. It’s a shame that this film won’t do much to bring anyone new to Cohen; if you’re not already a fan, listening to Nick Cave sing ‘I’m Your Man’ in a big-band, leg-kicking style that’s more Puppini Sisters that Zen brother will not make you want to buy Cohen’s Greatest Hits. Nor will hearing Cave (a man who thinks staring off camera and sighing is the way to demonstrate gravitas and sincerity) explain what a huge whopping great big deal it was to hear his friend’s older sister play ‘Songs Of Love And Hate’ in the Australian suburbs when he was a kid. We don’t need any more pompous talking heads telling us how great anything is. Nor do we need Bono (who’s actually less annoying than Nick Cave here) explaining that Cohen is “our Keats, our Byron.” What? Why can’t Keats be our Keats? What are you talking about?
Luckily, Leonard Cohen’s contributions here blow Nick Cave gently and effortlessly out of the water. There’s a good, silly story from Rufus Wainwright about the first time he met Cohen (in underpants, cooking noodles, feeding an injured baby bird with bits of sausage from the end of a toothpick), and a few warm words from Kate and Anna McGarrigle (talking about Montreal, their home town and Cohen’s), and one great line from Bono. But Leonard Cohen gives all the best lines, as is quite fitting, really. If only Channel 4 would have all its contributors spend 30 years studying Buddhism before appearing on those Top 100 programmes, they would deserve four hours of our lives.
The performances of Cohen’s songs are even patchier than the talking heads. None is great. Antony’s voice is beautiful, but a damaged, heartbreaking tremor like his is too much on a damaged, heartbreaking song like ‘If It Be Your Will’. Rufus Wainwright nails ‘Chelsea Hotel’, but has a touch of Michael Barrymore and Saturday night TV about him. Beth Orton, Jarvis Cocker, Martha Wainwright, Rufus Thompson, and his mum, Linda… it’s a cosy, well-bred (and slightly inbred) line-up. I’d rather hear the songs sung by Leonard himself, though, and on my own or in a bar with some friends, not at the Sydney Opera House (where these performances were filmed, in January 2005, during a Cohen tribute night), with classy lighting and jazzy backing singers. The film closes with footage of Cohen at the Slipper Room in New York, singing ‘Tower of Song’, with U2 as his backing band. It’s fine, but it doesn’t half look like he’s miming. (Over the final credits we get him, at last, singing ‘I’m Your Man’. Hopefully at this point Nick Cave’s heart is sinking with the shame.)
Bono talks about wishing he’d written Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’: “Lots of writers step up to the abyss, few look over the edge and laugh when they get there.” It’s a brilliant image (Bono, you can write!), and it’s also something you can’t imagine Bono doing (Bono, you can’t write that well!). Cohen, meanwhile, is tempted to start writing again… “It’s not a bad idea,” he rumbles. “It’s becoming more and more attractive to me, as we drink.”
Cohen also reads out a preface he wrote for the Chinese translation of his 1966 novel ‘Beautiful Losers’. It’s a humble, sweet, funny preface, and he’s pleasingly, un-humbly pleased with it.
Cohen has studied Buddhism since the 70s, and the two seem to be a very good fit. “I have no regrets, and no occasions for self-congratulations,” he begins, in his belly-warming bass voice. It takes him a year to write a song, apparently. The simplest bit of maths disputes this assertion, but you get the idea. He tries things over and over again, and – patiently, Zen-like – doesn’t seem to see much difference between getting things right and getting them wrong. “You’ve got to see how it works, then throw it away,” he explains. Clear as mud. The wise diamonds trickle out of his mouth.” You’ve got to go to work every day, but you’re not going to get it every day,” and, “You abandon your masterpiece and you sink into the real masterpiece,” and “The real mandate is not to fulfil the mission [given to you by your family]. Stand guiltless in the predicament in which you find yourself.” My favourite is written on a picture he made: “I never found the girl, I never got rich, follow me.” In fact, the most dreamy-eyed he gets about anyone is when talking about the man who brought him to Buddhism, Roshi, swooning, “He deeply cared, or didn’t care, I’m not sure which it is, about who I was.” It does seem to be a satisfying and rather beautiful friendship.
Cohen’s brief comments on his own songs are, predictably, some of the most cherishable parts of the films. He famously told a music journalist that ‘Chelsea Hotel #2’ is about Janis Joplin, and he still chides himself for it. “It’s the only time I’ve been so indiscreet. So ungallant,” he sighs. “I don’t know what I was thinking.” Then adding, rather sweetly, “Janis wouldn’t have minded; it’s my mother who would mind.” It’s a beautful song, and Janis surely wouldn’t have minded: she’s “so brave and so sweet”, and why would anyone have a problem with giving Leonard Cohen head on an unmade bed? Plus, of course, the best line is hers: “We are ugly, but we have the music.”
How to Survive the 1940s, and various Central Office of Information films
Cert PG
Last month our government’s own Professor Lindsay Davies, the National Director of Pandemic Influenza Preparedness (yep, that job title is real), was advising us to use hankies and wash our hands more often this winter as part of the official defence against the likely flu pandemic. “Coughs and sneezes spread diseases,” she reminded us – echoing the 1948 public information film which created that line.
The British Film Institute, in cahoots with the Central Office of Information (yes, such a coolly, cosily Orwellian institution exists too), has just released an anniversary collection of public information films which are showing in cinemas around the country. Since 1946, the COI has made short films to warn us about perils large and small, as well as a few things which don’t even fit into that huge remit. There is, for example, a 12-minute piece about how annoying it is to be a secretary in the 1950s and how, if you’re dictating a letter to Miss Jones, it really helps if you speak slowly and clearly. Mostly, though, the films are about keeping healthy, happy and safe. The older films from the 1940s are slow, ponderous, ten minute affairs. There is gorgeous lighting, pace, drama, characterisation. They are dull but effective, like an Allen Carr book. There’s a bit of flair about them: a word straight to camera from a lead character, ‘Third-Man’-style zither music, heavy noirish shadows, slo-mo chase scenes, background music that stops when a character flicks off the radio. There are even end credits, and there are moments of existential confusion: “You may think accidents only happen to other people but remember, to someone else, you’re another person. But wait a minute, that’s absurd, you’re you!” It’s a pleasingly random selection of dangers, from food poisoning to syphilis, dealt with gently, with grace and kindness, and a few hilariously English warnings: “It may be a bore to walk to a pedestrian crossing, your feet may ache, but it’s better than not having any feet.” The whole effect is calming – odd, really, as in a way it’s very alarming viewing (Most alarming is the danger of food poisoning, which seems impossible to avoid, what with unhygienic butchers, mice-ridden cafes, housewives who rummage about in the bin while making tea, and pub landladies with filthy glasses).
It all goes a bit celebrity in the ‘70s. Teach your children to swim (with encouragement from a young Rolf Harris, wearing a little pair of trunks in 1973); don’t pull on the tablecloth (“Charley says, ‘The hot water from the teapot hurts him very much’.”); wear a seatbelt (“Clunk click, every trip,” as Jimmy Saville warned, using a gruesome loose-egg-in-a-box visual to further persuade us). I especially like Alvin Stardust warning a little girl who crosses the road recklessly: “Hey, you must be out of your tiny mind.” That’s told her.
There’s more, though, beyond the nostalgia and the laughing at the quaint English people. Watching the films in chronological order, the casual distaste for women (complete with mother-in-law jokes) gives way to raised consciousness. A 1969 film explains why young women need to invest in their careers now so that they can have more satisfying lives and greater options once the kids leave home. The one that has no place in this smooth canon of public health and reassurance is the 1975 Protect and Survive film. Without ever mentioning ‘nuclear’, it explains calmly, with diagrams rather than actors, what to do with dead bodies “after an attack is over”. Of course there is no mention of what to do to avoid the danger in the first place – how could there be? – and there’s a blackly surreal, yawning gap between the film’s ostensible target – to make practical suggestions – and it’s real one – to make citizens feel that there might be some point in taking any notice of them. The only reassurance here comes with the knowledge that this campaign sparked Protest and Survive, bolstered CND and inspired Raymond Briggs’ ‘When the Wind Blows’. And at least our government no longer pretends that, if we are annilhilated by nuclear enemies, hiding under the kitchen table and putting the corpses in the garden will help.
