Anne Billson on Film 2011

By Anne Billson

For three years, Anne Billson wrote a film column for the Guardian newspaper which became obligatory reading for anyone interested in the world of cinema. She combines in-depth knowledge of her field with an eminently readable and unpretentious style and makes sometimes surprising and controversial observations with wit and elegance. Quite simply, she's a must-read for anyone who likes movies.

Billson, born in the UK, is a well-known film writer with thirty years experience (including eight years as film critic for the Sunday Telegraph) and half a dozen books about film and three horror novels to her name. After reading her vampire novel Suckers, Salman Rushdie called her, "a superb satirist"; Jonathan Carroll described it as, "a rare and impressive piece of literary juggling" while Christopher Fowler called it, "dark, sharp, chic and very funny."

Nicholas Lezard of the Guardian wrote of Spoilers, another collection of Billson's film writing, "she's on the ball, and funny with it." Ian Freer in Empire magazine called her monograph on the Swedish vampire movie Let the Right One In, "a fun, stimulating exploration of a modern masterpiece."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anne Billson
• Release date: Apr 16, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476272085

Anne Billson

Anne Billson is a film critic, novelist, photographer, screenwriter, film festival programmer, style icon, wicked spinster, evil feminist, and international cat-sitter. She has lived in London, Cambridge, Tokyo, Paris and Croydon, and now lives in Antwerp. She likes frites, beer and chocolate.Her books include horror novels Suckers, Stiff Lips, The Ex, The Coming Thing and The Half Man; Blood Pearl, Volume 1 of The Camillography; monographs on the films The Thing and Let the Right One In; Breast Man: A Conversation with Russ Meyer; Billson Film Database, a collection of more than 4000 film reviews; and Cats on Film, the definitive work of feline film scholarship.In 1993 she was named by Granta as one of their Best Young British Novelists. In 2012 she wrote a segment for the portmanteau play The Halloween Sessions, performed in London's West End. In 2015 she was named by the British Film Institute as one of 25 Female Film Critics Worth Celebrating.

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Foreword

The following pieces were originally published in the Guardian's Film & Music section from January 2011 to January 2012. The cleverer ones among you may have already worked out that you could probably read them for free on the Guardian's own website, if you were dogged enough to run each one to ground, so what can I offer here to make you feel your outlay of 99 cents has been worthwhile?

Firstly, of course, there's the convenience of having all these columns collected under one cover, whence they can easily be downloaded to your e-reading device, thus absolving you of the need to scour the web, and ensuring you don't accidentally skip a single gleaming nugget of my accumulated wisdom. Then there's the knowledge that the pieces are you are about to read are the raw unadulterated texts, unmodified by well-meaning subeditors and untrimmed by the necessity to accommodate last-minute advertising on the printed page.

And then - I'd like to think - you will have the satisfaction of knowing you are helping, in some small way, to sustain the career of a struggling writer. It could well be that, in the very near future, the job of arts journalist or film critic will cease to exist as a paid profession, and will instead become the stamping ground of people with lots of time on their hands or private income to sustain them, or who are just out of school or university and are willing or able to work for nothing. I'm not suggesting this change will necessarily a Bad Thing, just reflecting that it may now be too late for me to sign up to learn a more useful trade, such as plumbing or dentistry.

But as an extra sweetener, I have added to the end of this collection The Accessory Theory of Film Criticism, the second article I ever had published (the first article was a piece on inflatable sex dolls for a short-lived magazine called Event), as well as free samples of two of my other books.

I'm afraid I've had to remove all the accents from the following texts, as I'm told unusual key combinations can play havoc with e-publishing. So apologies to Francois, Francoise and Melanie, and of course to readers who may find themselves momentarily flummoxed by references to fiancees or to trends being passe.

In any case, whatever you think of the finished results, I'd like to thank you for buying and reading. Please feel free to tell me what you think (preferably in a civilised manner) via Twitter or on one of my blogs, links to which you can find at the end of this collection.

Anne Billson, 2012

Chapter 1: Storyville

Who was it who said that story is just a trick to keep you watching? I was reminded of this as I stared at Amer, trying in vain to get a handle on the stream of beautiful and startling imagery. But even beautiful and startling can wear thin after a while. If I'd been a civilian as opposed to someone trying to write for a living, I would have run up the white flag long before those 87 minutes were up, having already suffered through too much narrative-free pain (Jean-Luc Godard's Numero Deux!) in the 1970s, when I vowed never again to venture into plotless territory unless the ordeal could be softened by sexual or financial reward.

Amer, co-directed by Helene Cattet and Bruno Forzani, is a Franco-Belgian homage to the Italian giallo thriller, and runs the gamut of that subgenre's visual tropes, from split-screen to extreme close-up to colour filters, then overlays it with amped-up sound effects and music originally composed for genuine gialli with titles like The Black Belly of the Tarantula or The Case of the Scorpion's Tail. The very fact that Cattet and Forzani haven't called their film something like The Curse of the Crimson Death Poodle suggests they didn't fully enter into the spirit of things.

You could reproach gialli for many things - violence, misogyny, preposterousness - but you could never accuse them of not having plots. Admittedly, most of these consist of psychopaths running around murdering women, but at least the narrative poses a couple of questions to keep an audience hooked, such as whodunnit, who's next and why must there always be someone who announces, I'll tell you who the murderer is! But not right now. Let's meet tomorrow, preferably in a dark and lonely place.

As Cattet and Forzani told bloody-disgusting.com, Amer is an enigma and only the spectator has the key. I'm sorry, but if I wanted a DIY plot I would have written my own. You can get away with this if you're Luis Bunuel, or if you're making a short (Cattet and Forzani's 10-minute La Fin de Notre Amour is perfectly watchable) but feature-length is pushing it. Eighty-seven minutes of giallo imagery without a coherent narrative adds up to nothing more than an exercise in style - and not even original, envelope-pushing style, but a pastiche of one already pumped to the max by Mario Bava, Dario Argento or Sergio Martino.

Story is simultaneously the most and the least important element in a movie. Most important because it provides the viewer with a guide-rope; least because, in the best movies, it doesn't actually matter that much, which is why we can watch them repeatedly, even when the ending no longer packs the element of surprise. Alfred Hitchcock understood this, which is why he didn't blink at giving the game away well before the climaxes of Vertigo or North by Northwest. And he it was who perfected the art of the MacGuffin - the secret formula or tchotchke which sets the plot into motion. As he told Francois Truffaut, the best MacGuffin is, the emptiest, the most non-existent and the most absurd...

Hollywood movies never shy away from exploiting a narrative hook, though since so many of their screenwriters suckled at the same teats (UCLA, Syd Field, Robert McKee) it leads to endless regurgitation. Most of last year's action flicks, for example, shared a scenario in which special ops agents are framed or targeted by their own people - as seen in The Expendables, The A-Team, The Losers, Red, Salt, Knight and Day, Machete et cetera. But hey, at least these films had a plot. Even if it was the same one.

But story is scorned by self-consciously serious artists, who, with breathtaking arrogance or blinkered stupidity, reckon they're above all that populist nonsense. There's a feeling in some quarters that if a film is easy to watch, then it can't possibly be worth watching, and that if artists suffer for their art, then their audiences should jolly well suffer for it even more. But we all need some sort of MacGuffin when we watch a movie. And the story is the emptiest, most absurd MacGuffin of them all.

Chapter 2: Body Double

Much as I enjoyed Black Swan (tutus, blood, evil ids - what's not to like?) I thought it was a shame Natalie Portman couldn't do all her own dancing. Don't get me wrong - the girl done good. She nailed the bun, achieved a creditable facsimile of the neurotic thoroughbred physique, and managed OK with the expressive arm-flapping.

But anyone can dance with her arms. What I would call the proper dancing had to be performed by a professional with Portman's face CGI-ed in. It's not her fault she didn't have the technique; she's an actress, not a ballerina. To pull off the highlight of the Odette/Odile double-role - the 32 fouettes en tournant - you would need to have practised 25 hours a day, from birth, on a diet of Silk Cut, and with no time to do fun things like go to Harvard or make The Phantom Menace.

I suppose if you're going to have a stand-in, it might as well be in a movie set during a production of a ballet which hinges on a doppelganger. But Portman's arm-flailing stirred memories of Anne Bancroft posing her way through Anna Karenina in The Turning Point, and Jessica Harper as a ballet student whose one big dance scene in Suspiria requires her to stagger around and fall over.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger were indeed fortunate when they were able to cast professional dancer Moira Shearer as their lead in The Red Shoes, since Shearer could both act and dance, unlike poor Leslie Browne, whose Oscar nomination for The Turning Point must have been for her dancing, since there's no way on earth it could have been for her acting. It's a pity Mikhail Baryshnikov didn't find his own Powell and Pressburger and had to make do with the likes of Herbert Ross and Taylor Hackford, since there are moments in both The Turning Point and White Nights when his gravity-defying jetes or mufti pirouettes take your breath away.

When did stars stop doing their own dancing? I first started getting distracted by stand-ins during 1980s bopsicals such as Flashdance, in which Jennifer Beals clearly wasn't doing her own spinning-on-her-bum (in fact it was uncredited Marine Jahan, who finally got a credit of her own in Walter Hill's Streets of Fire) or Footloose, when Kevin Bacon clearly wasn't turning his own mid-air somersaults, or Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, in which Sarah Jessica Parker clearly wasn't... you get the picture. Instead of surrendering to the spectacle of the dance, I became obsessed with pinpointing the precise moment when the actor was replaced by the substitute, whose features would be obscured by tricksy lighting and camera angles.

There's something to be said for movie stars earning their spurs in vaudeville, where they were obliged to dance and sing as well as crack jokes. Not long ago a friend showed me a marvellous clip of Bob Hope and James Cagney tapdancing on a table in The Seven Little Foys; neither was chiefly known for his dancing (though Cagney's Best Actor Oscar was for the musical biopic Yankee Doodle-Dandy rather than one of his more famous gangster roles) and they wouldn't measure up to Fred Astaire, yet both display a skill and panache that wipes the floor with, say, Richard Gere's effortful hoofing in Chicago.

Nowadays we have Neve Campbell and Julia Stiles, who draw on their own early dance training for The Company and Save the Last Dance, but with results that are respectable rather than soul-stirring. The true heirs to Hope and Cagney are probably multi-taskers like Christopher Walken and Hugh Jackman, whose terpsichorean skills have been displayed on stage, in Fat Boy Slim videos and ice tea commercials more than in cinema, though Walken fans have long treasured his pimp striptease in the film version of Pennies from Heaven. But why has no-one yet built an entire movie around Jackman's dancing? Or better yet, why not scan the ranks of bona fide ballet dancers for one who, like Shearer, might turn out to have screen presence as well as flawless technique? Then maybe next time a movie like Black Swan comes along, the leading lady will be able to do her own fouettes.

Chapter 3: Call of the West

True Grit is going great guns at the American box office, making it the Coen brothers' highest-grossing movie ever. Some might see this as a sign that the Western is making a comeback. But, honestly,