We have had two Culture Vultures send us in reviews of This Must Be the Place, which is playing at the Hyde Park Picture House every evening until this Thursday (12th April).
First, Morticia Maguire-Broad (Twitter: @LadyLugosi) gives us her take on the film:
This Must Be The Place is an endearing, bittersweet, moving mish mash of a film. Directed and co-written by Paolo Sorrentino and Umberto Contarello it is part road trip, part revenge and atonement coming of age tale with some wonderful moments of verbal and physical comedy – the game of ping pong is a delight to look out for as is the solo dancing to Iggy Pop’s The Passenger.
At times heart-warming and others equally heart-rending. All wrapped up in some superb cinematography and a soundtrack featuring David Byrne in person at one point and different versions throughout the film of This Must Be The Place by Talking Heads.
Sean Penn plays an ageing goth rock star called Cheyenne who in a certain light is a dead ringer for Robert Smith of The Cure fame – the dyed black back combed birds nest hair, the bleeding red lipstick, black eyeliner and apparent fear of flying are held in common. I don’t think Robert Smith has such a lilting affected voice though – nor does he wear glasses on a chain. Sean’s character is by turns childlike, childish and for those of us who have a fondness for black hair dye, black clothes and miserable pop songs he has the ‘blowing the fringe ineffectually out of your eyes’ mannerism and the hang dog slouchy slow walk of someone who has never quite grown out of their teenage rebellion years down pat.
Filmed in both Dublin and America the film starts with Cheyenne getting ready for the day applying make up and his noose shaped earring and follows him as he goes to the supermarket, listens unenthusiastically to a dubious friend’s tales of sexual conquests, plays ineffectual but well meaning matchmaker, paying respects at a cemetery, trying to provide succour to a woman whose son is missing and just chilling with his firefighting wife – played brilliantly by Frances McDormand of Fargo fame.
He is told his father who he has not spoken to for 30 years is dying. His father spent his life trying to track down a concentration camp guard from Auschwitz, and using his father’s diaries Cheyenne takes up the search on his behalf, encountering a famous nazi hunter marvellously played by Judd Hirsch , the war criminal’s descendants, a tattoo artist, the man who came up with the idea of putting wheels on suitcases – a wonderful cameo by Harry Dean Stanton (honestly this film is worth going to see just for that bit alone) and most bizarrely the world’s largest statue of a pistachio nut along the way. Finally, and most tellingly of all his father’s camp tormentor.
It’s a beautifully slow paced film which doesn’t drag, preach or spell everything out for you along the way – some things only become clear as the film progresses and it was a joy, albeit tinged with sadness to watch. My only quibble is that instead of making me reach for my Best of Talking Heads – it’s making me go through my Cure back catalogue instead and wonder whether Robert Smith fans (and Robert Smith) will be flattered or offended.
You can find Morticia on Twitter: @LadyLugosi
And Tom Koszel gives us somewhat of a counter-point.
Smith, Monroe, Keaton. Nobody thought any film this year would be led by a character who’s a bastard combination of The Cure’s frontman, The ingenue with the high-flying dress and Old Stoneface himself. Nobody except Paulo Sorrentino, a director who seems to delight in obscuring the normal, in grafting lumps of weird onto straightforward things.
Let’s start with the plot. It’s tale of redemption, revenge and roads. Potentially normal? And Nazis, make-up wearing rock-stars and Talking Heads. Ok, just plain weird. Cheyenne (Penn) is a retired Rock Star who rushes to the bed of his severely estranged Father only to find he’s arrived too late. In one of the cooler methods of making peace with a lost loved-one, Cheyenne, upon discovering his Dad was tortured in Auschwitz, sets out to find the Nazi Guard who inflicted such suffering on him in order to exact revenge.
If you want a point of reference for This Must Be The Place then you’d do worse than thinking of Paris, Texas. This film reeks of that arty classic. Harry Dean Stanton – the prototypical arty film wanderer and Paris, Texas‘s protagonist – is even shoehorned in. Take this as a very big shout out to Wim Wenders. Sorrentino’s clearly a fan.
Take that as a very qualified compliment though. This Must Be The Place bores, confuses and bores once more before it’s even hit the half-hour mark. I’m not sure if there has ever been a first act committed to film that felt more like a first draft. If you’re worried about being late for a showing of this film, don’t be. There is a God and he’s the one making you late. He’s helping you out by cutting the crap opening half-hour and leaving you with just the good stuff.
Once the beginning is out of the way, the middle hums with cool things, like an actual plot, causal relations between events and characters that feel less like affected sketches and – gasp – a little like real people.
It’s weird and affected but this isn’t arthouse, really. It doesn’t score your soul with marks of its fury, it doesn’t go out of its way to discomfort you. It doesn’t really even do long takes. Instead, it does the most wilful, shameless, outright crap crane shots at very regular intervals. Sorrentino has apparently never entered a scene quietly. Why rely on guile and clever mise-en-scene when you can swoop in on your protagonist through the eyes of a sozzled kestrel?
Really, this is a little movie about people, like they used to make in the seventies. Think Altman, Ashby and, more recently, Moretti – dial back your expectations a fair bit, and you’re there.
No Brit or American would make a film quite like this. There’s a refreshing unselfconsciousness that marks the film. It takes a certain joie de vivre to cram a white-suited David Byrne – a man most famous for singing ‘Psycho Killer’ in a put-upon fey style – onto the same reel as a confrontation with a Nazi Concentration Camp guard.
It’s a russian roulette of a film; bullets of beauty next to blanks of insensibility. Far less talented people than Sorrentino would balk at some of the choices he makes. They’d be right to do so, but only in a dry, unsatisfying, cooler-than-thou kind of way. There’s a shot of Cheyenne (Penn) and a Bison/Buffalo type-creature late in the film. It’s apropos of little more than nothing, but it’s going to stay with me.
I’m not sure this is a good film, but it will make you see the world very slightly differently for a while. That’s not a bad thing.
With that balance of perspectives, see it for yourself, any evening up until Thursday at 6.10 and 8.40 at the Hyde Park Picture House. Let us know whether you’re more with Morticia, or with Tom.