MARC ISAAC’s This Blessed Plot (Cert. 15) is a drama-documentary set in the north-Essex village of Thaxted. Some of its more famous inhabitants feature as ghostly presences in the film, notably the “Red Vicar”, the Revd Conrad Noel, and the composer Gustav Holst.
A young Chinese filmmaker, Lori (Yingge Lori Yang), arrives intent on capturing a slice of English traditions. We are left wondering how much she will find that is similar to, or different from, those of her own culture. In narrative terms, Lori provides the classic outsider element necessary for plumbing the depths of what, on the surface, could seem like just another everyday story of countryfolk.
Lori’s landlady, Maggie (Margaret Catterall), takes her to the Parish Church of St John the Baptist with Our Lady and St Laurence. “You really can’t make a film about Thaxted without coming in here,” she says. “This church is kind of centre of everything that goes on, and there is so much to see.”
We are then treated to shots of various artefacts such as Randall Wells’s Arts and Crafts candelabrum and furnishings, ending with a banner on which some words of Bach are embroidered: “The aim of music is the glory of God and pleasant recreation”. Another one quotes from “Jerusalem” by William Blake. It forms the immediate prelude to our seeing Gertrude Hermes’s bust of Noel, and acts as a signifier of this former incumbent’s twin passions for God’s righteousness and music as a conveyor of spiritual mystery.
He was Vicar from 1910 until his death in 1942, a man with strong left-wing views who founded the Catholic Crusade, a Christian Socialist organisation. He enjoined his congregation to take on its political causes. Controversially, he hung the Red and Sinn Féin flags in church until forbidden by a consistory court. Maggie tells Lori that Conrad Noel was such a good man, “a real Christian Socialist”. Lori asks what’s Christian about Socialism. “Well, if you think who Jesus was,” comes the reply.
In 1911, Noel welcomed the newly founded Thaxted Morris Men into church. He embraced an association of Jesus with choreography. One of the church bells is inscribed “I ring for the general dance”. This inspired Holst to compose an arrangement of the Cornish carol “Tomorrow shall be my dancing day”. It received its première at the village’s annual Whitsun Festival in 1918.
Holst also wrote the majority of his suite The Planets while living in Thaxted. The film’s soundtrack makes much use of the “Jupiter” movement. The tune derived from it (Thaxted) accompanies the hymn “I vow to thee, my country”. Noel challenges Lori: “How can we talk about love, loss, and life without music and dancing?” It reminds us that another world is possible.
Lori begins to have visions and conversations with Noël and other ethereal presences. When he mentions Socialism, she says: “Let’s not talk about politics.” Noel responds: “Politics in the sense of social justice is part of the gospel of Christ.”
Morris men in Thaxted Parish Church, from This Blessed Plot
The documentary’s other strand is the aftermath of a death. Sue (Susan Mallendine) implores Lori to dissuade Keith (Keith Martin) from stating on her headstone that she was loyal. She needs him to know that she wasn’t. Use a line from our song, she says, meaning Tim Hardin’s “Reasons to Believe”. Puzzled, Lori asks Noel: how can that make it better? He counsels that he believes the right song in the right place can make everything better.
Adam Ganz (also the screenwriter) provides the voice of Noel. Given the priest’s aristocratic demeanour and firebrand reputation, it seems far too gentle a rendition. The Keith-Sue storyline also feels something of a distraction; for it hardly gives Lori new insights into rural England. Human beings here behave rather as they do anywhere else.
Keith, at one point, uncharacteristically quotes John of Gaunt in Shakespeare’s Tragedy of King Richard II, from which the film takes its title. The speech is both a panegyric to our country’s virtues while lamenting in conclusion its present shamefulness. As such, it summarises Noel’s own outlook: there is so much to admire in our heritage, but we are still a long way from building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.
IS THE veteran director Abel Ferrara’s Padre Pio (Cert. 15) a biopic of a sainted priest, an exposé of ruling-class oppression, or ecclesiastical collusion with power, or what? Francesco Forgione (1887-1968), known as Padre Pio (Fr Pius in Italian) was mainly associated with the Friary of Our Lady of Grace in the poverty-stricken rural area surrounding San Giovanni Rotondo: a Capuchin Franciscan, distinguishable by hoods (hence the name), unruly beards, and asceticism.
Shia LaBeouf plays the title role. He arrives at Rotondo on a donkey. This would have been 1916. Soon after, according to the movie, erstwhile soldiers start returning from the Great War. Relatives anxiously scan the ranks for loved ones. It is a momentous occasion in these downtrodden people’s lives.
Meanwhile, Pio is in spiritual torment. He frequently contends with the devil — whether a naked temptress, Tall Man (Asia Argento sinisterly masquerading as a penitent), or even the Blessed Virgin Mary. Haunted by unworthiness and revolted by satanic jibes at his Christianity, he strikes a lone figure, despite being part of communal life. In fact, there are long absences from the screen by LaBeouf.
Shia LaBoeuf in Padre Pio
We fare better with the film’s picture of southern Italian deprivation. The plight of those re-engaging by the sweat of their brows in backbreaking drudgery becomes, in effect, a separate story. This feels at odds with the real Pio, who was, among other attributes, noted and much loved for his outspokenness: his prophetic qualities. What we get here is one unending season of gathering up stones on behalf of their pitiless landlords. On the eve of Italy’s first free elections, they make it clear that these labourers are “nothing”. In the face of this, the most that Pio ever does is suffer with them in a Christlike manner. Pio’s famously controversial stigmata get shown on screen very late in the film, whereas reports of this phenomenon occurred much earlier in the friar’s life.
You will have realised by now that Ferrara’s film doesn’t really seek to be a factual account of its subject. One would need to look to the numerous documentaries, including his own Searching for Padre Pio, or something like the Padre Pio: Miracle Man movie. Biopics seldom cover the whole span of someone’s life — take most of the Churchill films, for instance — but fasten on a particular era or incident. Even so, this new addition to the Pio canon hardly does that, either. Rather, it seems like the director’s latest excursion into faith-based anguish, which first came to prominence with his Bad Lieutenant in 1992: someone ill at ease with himself, fearful and needy.
And, while the Pio of this film behaves in a far godlier way than the Harvey Keitel character did, enough of the self-abasem*nt abides for the viewer to note some common ground, including the frequent bursts of profanities and bad temper. In both films, salvation is central. This time, though, it is not just about an individual’s attempts at redemption. Interestingly, Padre Pio’s closing credits dedicate the film not to the saint, but the suffering people of Rotondo and Ukraine.
POOR THINGS (Cert. 18) is the story of Frankenstein, but not as we know it. Based on the philosophical novel of Alasdair Gray, who also painted church murals, it traces the development of Bella Baxter, played by Emma Stone. She is an infantile young woman beholden to her scientist creator (Willem Dafoe — Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ) and known to her as “God”. His forename is Godwin, directly connecting him to Mary Shelley’s actual father, William.
As in several of the director Yorgos Lanthimos’s other films — Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Favourite, etc. — we witness an attempted journey from alienation to finding hope through a wider social circle. A central preoccupation in his work is how control is exercised over us and by us. Can one ever be truly free, and what would that consist of? We are watching a coming-of-age movie with a difference; for this ingénue, when unrestrained by the loving but, in effect, repressive influence of her “God”, is initially all Freudian id. Nothing inhibits an inexhaustible taste for riotous living, whether it be sexual adventure or ignorance of social cues.
Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in Poor Things
Having overthrown one oppressor, she contends with another, in the shape of Duncan Wedderburn (Mark Ruffalo, here discarding his former acting personas with hilariously consummate success). He is a cad, if ever there was one, intriguing, Mephistopheles-like, the guileless Bella. They engage in a danse macabre that will inevitably lead to death unless one or other cries halt. Duncan doesn’t really want to see his protégée grow up, to perceive how empty and tawdry a life he leads. Ultimately, the relationship is about power and its slipping through his fingers.
From what I have said so far, this could resemble just another one of those morality tales and would thereby fail to acknowledge the ways in which Lanthimos tells a story. He is the antithesis of ethical certainty. The distorting cinematography and lighting tell us as much. We are furnished with a far-from-clear world-view, and a mise-en-scène that transcends the furnishings of its supposedly 19th-century setting. Touches of Metropolis and Mary Quant, for instance, give Poor Things a contemporary relevance. And there are bucketfuls of post-modern irony and surrealism, pointing up the absurdities as well as the attributes of our flawed humanity.
One can see how Lanthimos was set alight by Gray’s work. The Òran Mór ceiling that Gray painted in Kelvinside Church asks the same questions as Gauguin (not to mention Blake) did: where do we come from? what are we? and where are we going? This new film reflects our confusion, poor things, in striving to provide satisfactory answers. We may now be looking through a glass darkly, but the film more than hints that this could be a divine comedy with its deadpan humour and laugh-out-loud moments. Taking our leave of “God” and inhabiting a far country are means by which we can know ourselves as we are known. Stone, whose performance is a tour de force, takes us on a pilgrimage from tottering inarticulacy to genuinely spiritual inquiry.
