UNDERSTANDING SCREENWRITING: Catching Up

The critics are right.

A Haunting in Venice (2023. Screenplay by Michael Green, based on the novel Hallowe’en Party by Agatha Christie. 103 minutes)

Film critics have liked this film more than the two previous films based on Agatha Christie novels, Murder on the Orient Express (2017) and Death on the Nile (2022), all three of which were written by Michael Green and directed by Kenneth Branagh. And rightly so.

Book critics, on the other hand, disliked Christie’s novel when it was published in 1969. Also rightly so. They thought both Christie, late in her career, and Hercule Poirot, were “weary.” Later critics were a little kinder, but not much. (All this is from the Wikipedia entry on the novel, as is my discussion of the novel that follows.)

The novel is set in one of those English country houses where murders are bound to occur. There appear to have been a lot of them lately and the latest is a young girl who is murdered when she is bobbing for apples at Halloween. Poirot’s friend, mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (a nice self-parody by Christie) calls Poirot in and he solves the case, leaving as critics noted a number of bodies unaccounted for.

Green has the advantage in adapting this novel that he did not have on the first two films. They were based on the most well-known of Christie’s work and had been filmed before, most notably in the seventies. There was only so much he could do with the material. You can see what I mean in my review of Death on the Nile here.

The first big change Green makes is moving the whole story to Venice. Instead of an English country house, we are now in an Italian palazzo that was once an asylum for orphans. Many of whom died of the plague. And may be hanging around as ghosts. One of the inventive ways Green gets this across is having a bunch of kids at the Halloween party at the palazzo watching a shadow play about the palazzo’s past.

After the kids leave, the party for the adults starts. It is not just a party, but a séance in which the mystic Mrs. Reynolds is going to try to contact the dead daughter of the lady of the manor. (The lady of the manor, Rowena, is played by Kelly Reilly, in a rather different register than her Beth of Yellowstone.) Mrs. Reynolds is not in the novel, but in the film she is played by Michelle Yeoh, who gets to have some great dialogue scenes (written by Green of course) with Poirot. He does not believe in séances and she does. Green gets as much out of that as you can, so much so we really miss Yeoh when she leaves the picture.

Ariadne has brought Poirot to the party to expose Mrs. Reynolds so she can write about it in her next book. Green has given Tina Fey, playing Ariadne, some more great lines and scenes with Branagh.

This may sound odd, but a large advantage Green has here over his two previous Poirot films is that he is working on a smaller scale. He does not have to worry about the Orient Express or the boat in Death. You might think that having all that spectacle would have made the films more “cinematic,” but the opposite is true. The spectacle scenes drew the attention away from characters and the actors playing them. That does not happen here. Green (and Branagh, doing a great, simple job of directing the actors) keeps the focus on the story and the people involved in it.

He also has a great palazzo to play with so things go bump in the night, phones ring in odd places, and people who are supposed to be dead show up, maybe alive, maybe still dead. Green gets a lot out of the skeptical Poirot dealing with some things he can expose and some he cannot explain. The set for the palazzo is beautifully designed by John Paul Kelly, although the cinematography by Haris Zambarloukos is a lot murkier than it needs to be, even in a haunted palazzo.

No, I am not going to tell you how it ends, partly because I am not sure. When I watched it, Green seemed to be making sense of it all.

Oh, the ‘stache. Poirot is known for his elaborate moustache and the care he takes of it. In Orient Express Branagh had a huge mop that covered up most of the lower part of his face. The moustache was a little better in Death. It is perfect here, which proves my point that if you start with a good script everything else falls into place.

A Real Popcorn Movie.

Past Lives (2022. Written by Celine Song. 105 minutes)

Past Lives, although it is a Korean language film with a copyright date of 2022, opened in the United States in June 2023. It has very good reviews and I thought I would get around to see it while it was still in theatres. I did not (well, one had to deal with Barbenheimer after all), but it hung on in the art house theatres for weeks, and then months. And then it was gone.

I finally caught up with it in October, where I was limited for some medical reasons to seeing things at home on television. It showed up on Amazon Prime, the only screening service that I have. So I figured I had better give it a shot before Netflilx stole it and hid it forever.

Ordinarily, if I make popcorn to watch a movie with it is for a comedy or an action picture like a western or a war movie. But I was so caught up by the charm and elegance of Past Lives that I hit the pause button and started popping. It was worth it.

Song (who also directed; her first time in the director’s chair) starts with a static shot of three people sitting at a bar in New York. One is a Korean man, one is a Korean woman and the third is a white man. We cannot hear them talking, but we do hear some other people trying to guess what the relationship is between the three. Song ends the scene with a close-up of the Korean woman, Nora (Grace Lee) staring straight into the camera…and saying nothing. The historical precedent of course is “Rosebud.”

We cut to 24 years before and see the Korean boy Jung Hae Sung (later played by Teo Yoo) and the Korean girl Na (later Nora) Wong (later played by Lee). They are about ten and the best of friends. Except Na is crying because for the first time Jung has gotten higher marks on a test than Jung. They are walking up a long flight of stairs, and Song and her cinematographer Shabier Kirchner (and the steadicam cameramen, listed in the film credits but not on IMDb) in one of the most elegant shots I have seen in recently movies, hold the camera on them as they move up the stairs. You know you are in good hands with this shot, and there are more to come.

The kids are playing in a park, but it comes up that the future Nora’s father is moving to Canada and eventually New York. Nora is happy about going because she wants to be a writer and notes accurately that “Korean writers do not win the Nobel Prize.” Listen for the mileage Song gets out of that.

We jump ahead 12 years. Nora is writing plays in New York and Jung is studying to be an engineer. He tracks her down online and they spend a lot of time talking and messaging each other.

Most Hollywood directors (and writers, at least when forced to by producers) would turn this into a big slushy romance, but Song does not. This is simply not that kind of movie. It is an incredibly nuanced look at two who people who love each other, but not in a typical Hollywood way.

Jung and Nora talk about the possibility of him coming to visit her, but at the time they can’t work it out. He has to go to China to increase his knowledge of engineering. Meanwhile, she goes off to an artist’s colony to work on her new play. He meets another writer whom we learn later is Arthur. We do not learn much about him…but then learn they have gotten married.

Song is really smart in not giving us a lot about Arthur at this point. She is saving the details about him and his character until later. As in when Jung comes to visit them in New York. Then Song gives us more nuanced scenes of all three of them together or with one or another. One scene is a long two-shot of Nora and Arthur in bed discussing all the feelings he has about Jung and him being here. We get similar scenes with Nora and Jung. Nora and Jung consider how their relationship may have gone differently, but they know it did not and they are now living the life they most want to live.

Anybody who has had experiences that are in any way similar will likely find themselves touched.

Finally, Jung is going back to Seoul and Nora walks him to his Uber. It is not there yet, and they have nothing more to say to each other. Sometimes what not happens can be as interesting as what does. Did they teach you that in screenwriting class?

No Popcorn for This Movie.

Aftersun (2022. Written by Charlotte Wells. 102 minutes)

This is definitely not the movie to see two days after you see Past Lives. Everything that is rich, elegant and nuanced in Lives is bungled here. And yet it got a lot of rave reviews. We will explore why later.

Aftersun has many, many producers, as small indie films often do. So what happens before the movie actually starts is we get company logo after company logo and after company logo, ad infinitum.

And then the credits start with many different title cards with one or more of the companies we have just seen all the logos for. Eventually, we get to the movie, which starts with a lot of abstract shots, not unlike Oppenheimer but without Nolan’s control. Then we pick up the two main characters, Sophie, who may be 11 or 13 depending on which review you read, and her father Calum. They are on a vacation at a downmarket resort in Turkey. It is a bit difficult to tell what is going on, since this scene is shot by Calum’s video camera. And shot badly, which is true of most of the other video bits we see.

Calum, who is divorced from Sophie’s mom, whom we never see, is taking Sophie on vacation. So they hang out at the resort and nothing much happens. There is a lot of dead air in most of the scenes because Wells (who also directs) has not written reactions for the characters to have. Hmm, a resort in a sunny area of the world. Where is Jennifer Coolidge when you need her?

Some things happen, but Wells does not give us a clear picture how Sophie and Calum are reacting to them. You do remember that I have beaten you over the head about the importance of reaction shots in your scripts, don’t you?

Sophie seems to be, well, not interested, but willing to hang out with some other kids, but we don’t see how she feels about that, even when one of the boys kisses her.

So we are getting all these bland, airless scenes, assuming that they will pay off in some way. Only they don’t. Eventually, Calum sends Sophie home. And at some point in here, we cut to a couple of women in their thirties in bed. One of them gets out of bed and the other says, “Happy Birthday Sophie.” So we assume we have jumped ahead in time, but the film then cuts back to Sophie and Calum at the resort.

The flash forward is apparently not the first time we have seen the adult Sophie; in the cast list at the end credits, where the actors are listed in order of appearance, the actor playing the adult Sophie is listed as number three. At the beginning of the film, intercut with the Christopher Nolan-like abstract shots are shots of people disco dancing done in quick black and white flashes. The adult Sophie may show up in them. But we do not know who she is at that point.

Eventually, we settle on a shot of the adult Sophie holding her father’s video camera. The End.

Huh?

I defy you to tell me just from watching the film what is going on.

You need a little help, which the critics got from the producers. When critics see films, they generally do it in screenings set up by the film’s distributors. The critics are given press packets with information about the film, including a synopsis of the story. I see movies without the press packets in regular theatres or on cable or streaming systems, which I did in this case. I have often seen movies that are unclear only to read reviews that give us details of the movie not in the film.

This is one of those cases. I have not seen the press packet for this film, but the description of the film on IMDb is provided by one of its producers A24. Here is their description of the end: “Sophie's tender recollections of their last holiday become a powerful and heartrending portrait of their relationship, as she tries to reconcile the father she knew with the man she didn't.”

If you have read this column long enough, you will recognize that as a classic “How do you show this?” line. That’s a line that makes sense in prose, but does not tell us what we are going to see and hear that will get that idea across. The adult Sophie does or says nothing that tells us what the synopsis tells us.

The producers of this film should turn in their logos and go back to a screenwriting class.