Monday, May 18, 2015

A SIFF 2016 request - SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON (1964)


Last year I spotlighted nine films that I'd seen at the 2014 Seattle International Film Festival, and this year I'm going to publish another round-up article, hopefully reviewing many more films than my relatively paltry run last time.  This year I'm going to at least one of the special revival screenings featuring an older film rather than a new one, and SIFF always has a few of them each year - one year I saw the deeply unnerving Mother Joan of the Angels and left the theater shaking.  The revival I most want to see this year (and my schedule allows me to see) is The Color of Pomegranates, long on my TO WATCH list and most likely one for your list, too, and I'm really peeved I'm going to be missing Cave of the Spider Women.  While I've had some good luck in catching Midnight Movies and historical screenings at various silver screens (catching rarities like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and The Best Man utilizing original prints) I've recently been thinking of a list of older gems I'd love to see in a packed, darkened theater at SIFF or elsewhere, including a bunch of movies I've reviewed here.  Today I'd like to spotlight a film that not many people have seen but those who have hold it dearly to their hearts as a gem of 60's British filmmaking, Bryan Forbes's Seance on a Wet Afternoon.  Only fitfully available in the U.S., Seance has never been a huge moneymaker but its superb artistry and singularity in its genre make it a must-see for fans of psychological nail-biters, and I'd like to think of my article as my bid for its inclusion in SIFF's 2016 festival.

Myra (Kim Stanley) and Billy (Richard Attenborough) never really recovered from the death of their son Arthur.  Having been left to their own devices for far too long, Myra has unglued herself into the role of a professional medium and Billy laid down as her doormat long ago.  Myra hatches a plan - the two of them kidnap the young daughter of a wealthy couple and send a phony ransom letter.  Keeping the child in their son's old room masquerading as hospital staff treating her for "double German measles", Myra plans to step forward offering her services as a medium and eventually help the family and the police "find" the child.  As neither of the pair are professional criminals things can't exactly go as planned, and Myra's continued "communication" with Arthur may only be the least of their worries.

Botched kidnappings have long been a great plot device for crime thrillers, including After Dark, My Sweet, Fargo and Julia, but Seance tops them all in its exposure of the kind of loneliness and desperation that drives someone to take another family's child.  Largely eschewing the typical setpieces and pacing of its thriller genre, Seance uses silence and calm to crush the viewer's soul.  It's one of the slowest crime dramas I've ever seen yet it's never boring, the total stillness of Myra and Billy's insular existence so stifling at times to make the viewer want to claw their way out of their own skin.  There are rarely more than four or five people on screen at a time, the scenes mostly confined to drawing rooms and bedrooms, and when the action finds its way outdoors its surroundings are so entropied and forgotten some of them could double for a post-apocalyptic landscape.  Its through this acute emptiness and loneliness writer-director Bryan Forbes (working from a novel by Mark McShane) draws an indescribable and frightening atmosphere, playing off tight angles and stark confinement so well the viewer can feel the proximity of walls and taste the dust in the air.  I could feel the influence of Jack Clayton's The Innocents through much of the film, and why not take influence from one of the greatest horror films of the 60's to make a kidnapping film?  Both films illuminate how madness feeds off the echoes of the human mind left in the dark, as Myra's increasing instability and Billy's insurmountable weakness to her demands create a psychological moebius strip, each decision to dig their hole deeper dovetailing into the next.  The range of questions raised when someone decides to become a medium is a large and fruitful one for fiction, but Myra's need for her "gift" is both unsettling and enormously sad, and Billy's painful loyalty to her does little more than delay an inevitable point of psychological destruction.  The performances here are extraordinary and most likely career bests for both Stanley and Attenborough - Stanley teetered on a razor's edge so long the skin finally breaks, and Attenborough more regret than human.  The cinematography by Gerry Turpin (who would later photograph the heartbreaking senility portrait The Whisperers) is crisp and cold, accentuating each dry crack in living room walls and making sure neither the characters nor the viewer have any means of escape.  The music by John Barry (yes, the James Bond John Barry) has moments of shimmering, heartstopping simplicity and sensitivity, and the outdoor locations need little help to be engulfing.

Seance on a Wet Afternoon is hardly a thriller, and its insistence on forcing the viewer to live out the arc of its characters' madness in real time most likely contributed to its difficulty in finding an audience outside of England, even in spite of its mostly positive critical reception.  After briefly seeing the light of day on a VidAmerica VHS release in the 80's the film remained hidden until a 2002 DVD release by Home Vision Entertainment, the company behind the Criterion Collection that once had a DVD line under its own name that had a similarly high standard of its catalog without Criterion releases' high price tags and exhaustive print restoration.  The cover above is from that release, and I deviated from my usual practice of using original posters as headers for my reviews because I feel the HVE DVD cover is a better representation of the film's mood and atmosphere than any of the posters.  The release has its flaws, though - there's nary a special feature to be found and the sound transfer is poor, with people's voices creating ripping distortion at any dynamic above mezzo piano.  If I were a less jaded viewer I might be able to take the release's stifling sound transfer as another dimension to Myra and Billy's physical and mental prison but I've long outgrown the phase where I'd hold on to a fullscreen DVD of The Ring just because the movie is about video tapes.  I wonder why HVE didn't think the film wasn't good enough to be included in the Criterion Collection, as it's a hell of a lot better than a lot of movies they've featured (And the Ship Sails On, anyone?) and they later inducted The Innocents, anyways.  While we might not see a re-issue anytime soon some enterprising fans have made it easy for us and uploaded the film to YouTube, so until a revival comes your way you can at least see Seance for yourself in all its harrowing power.  It's a great reminder that sometimes prisoners are kept not so much so they can't get out but because their captors can't live without them inside.


~PNK

No comments:

Post a Comment