FILM AND NETFLIX
A RAINY DAY IN NEW YORK (AMAZON PRIME) JEFFREY EPSTEIN: FILTHY RICH (NETFLIX)
Is Woody Allen trapped in the 1950s?
A Rainy Day in New York is set in modern Manhattan, but all the references in this quite engaging comingof-age drama are to Allen's own youth 65 years ago.
The opening music is Bing Crosby's I Got Lucky in the Rain; the opening titles are in black and white, in an old-fashioned font. The two preppy leads, Elle Fanning and Timothée Chalamet, are ostensibly undergraduates today – but their fictional upstate university, Yardley, is a classical campus, straight out of 1950.
She wears a bobby soxer's outfit; he's permanently in a tweed jacket. The scenes are in the best of old New York (all a stone's throw from Allen's own house, incidentally): the zoo in Central Park; the time capsules of Manhattan's smartest hotels. Chalamet's character quotes Cole Porter, uses a cigarette-holder and is even called Gatsby, for God's sake.
You might say all this escapism is there in order to, well, escape Allen's disastrous personal life: the divorce from Mia Farrow, the marriage to his adopted daughter and the allegations of sexual abuse of another daughter.
But in a triumph of chutzpah – or narcissism – the film is full of brazen references to yawning age gaps between elderly film directors and nymphet leads.
The spine of the film is the doomed love affair between Ashleigh (Fanning, brilliant as the gauche ingénue) and Gatsby (Chalamet, convincing as the paranoid intellectual, like a much better-looking, young Allen). Gatsby is torn between Ashleigh and Chan (Selena Gomez), another young beauty.
On their trip to New York, Ashleigh is due to interview Roland Pollard (Liev Schreiber), a much older film director keen to seduce her – yes, you're supposed to think of that other disgraced film director Roman Polanski.
Once Ashleigh has met Pollard, she is swept into a world of yet more older men who want to seduce her. There's Ted Davidoff, Pollard's colleague, played by Jude Law with a good New York accent and a paranoid intellectual manner – like a better-looking, middle-aged Allen.
Then there's the impossibly handsome Francisco Vega (Diego Luna), who successfully seduces Ashleigh. When Ashleigh runs off with him, the jilted Gatsby even says, ‘What is it about older guys and younger women?' Come on, Woody – I know you're angry but you could be a little more subtle.
Written and directed by Allen, 84, the film is littered with his trademark quips. They're now more mournful and less frenetic. But they still depend on the main Allen joke – a kind of intellectual bathos, contrasting highbrow showingoff with self-deprecating pay-offs.
So Ashleigh gushes to Pollard about her heroes – Van Gogh, Rothko and Virginia Woolf – before suddenly realising they all killed themselves. She turns from intellectual and keen to impress to mortified and embarrassed –a classic Allen mood shift.
The wisecracks are pretty good but not wise enough. Ashleigh says of someone they're the ‘greatest thing to come along since the morning-after pill' – OK, but not as sharp as 1960s Allen.
The gags are laid over a fairly thin plot: a series of outlandish incidents, coincidences and sudden revelations set off mini-stories which are very quickly resolved. Some of them are pretty cheesy, not least the moment when Ashleigh is nearly discovered in flagrante and has to hide in the pouring rain on a fire escape.
It's light, frothy, pretty enjoyable stuff, but you can see why Allen had to fight for two years to get this 2018 film on screen. If there are moral questions over a writer-director's behaviour, his films have to be very good to go on being made.
To be fair to Allen, he's still been convicted of nothing, whereas Jeffrey Epstein was a convicted serial paedophile. His crimes are treated seriously and without sensation in the gripping Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich.
Epstein conducted what one commentator describes memorably as a ‘molestation pyramid scheme'. Once he'd got a girl (usually from a poor and/or broken background) into his clutches, he trapped her with his money, made her dependent on him and then got her to lure more girls into his gilded net.
The eyewitness allegations of Prince Andrew consorting with Virginia Roberts, one of those poor girls, are not edifying.
THEATRE NICH0LAS LEZARD SHAKESPEARE FOR EVERY DAY Youtube
Ever fancied seeing Helena Bonham Carter's garden? Well, now you can.
You can also see her and Dominic West, reading out bits of Shakespeare for us, loosely themed around the passage of a year, as per Allie Esiri's anthology Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year.
Ms Esiri herself opens the proceedings, and it becomes clear from the outset, with her soothing manner, that this is going to be an easy ride. I've seen audiences just before curtain-up at Shakespeare performances: it's not exactly like being in the landing craft on D-day, but there is certainly a prickle of apprehension there; they know they're in for the long haul. This, though, an hour-long meander through the Famous Bits (and some not-so-famous bits), is going to be a walk in the park – or, in this case, the garden.
Watching actors do Shakespeare is generally win-win. They either ham it up so much it's hilarious, or get it right, ie help you understand what's going on while keeping the music alive. But they tread a fine line between their respect for the text and their respect for themselves, and they know that every other actor who has ever put on a pair of tights is looking over their shoulder. Especially when they do the Famous Bits. Dominic West is so relaxed about the business that he actually performs ‘To be or not to be' while leaning against a tree.
The thing is, they're not exactly performing. They're reading the passages out. You don't notice this at first, with Dominic West in close-up. Then you see his eyes looking downwards every so often, and think to yourself, ‘Hang on.' By the end of the film (directed, under strict social-distancing protocols, by Benjamin Caron) they're walking around holding clipboards, as if they're doing a read-through before a rehearsal.
At first, I thought this was a bit of a cop-out. When West does ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow', you'd think he might have memorised possibly the secondmost famous speech in the language, but in the end I didn't mind at all: it gave the proceedings a relaxed, informal air. There was only one moment of intrusion, in Hamlet's ‘To be or not to be' speech: you hear him turning a page at the word ‘fardels'. What is a fardel, anyway?
Normally, when you see someone giving the ‘Tomorrow' speech, you can tell they've been in the wars, not just
because by that stage Macbeth is in a bit of a fix, but also because the actor playing him has done, up to that point, all the hard work that acting involves. Neither West's nor Bonham Carter's performances here will make your hair stand up like the fretful porpentine's; but there's a time and a place for that, and these days, and HBC'S enormous garden, are not the time and place for that. It is all very gently done.
Esiri is a mildly politically correct guide. I have no problem with this at all, but I did wonder whether mentioning Holocaust Remembrance Day in the context of Shylock was utterly tactful; unavoidable, I suppose. There's a bit from King John about immigrants (‘What would you think, to be thus used?'), which Shakespeare might not even have written; but it's a good bit, and I'm glad I heard it. There's an extract from The Rape of Lucrece, which, as you know, isn't even a play; Esiri proposes the theory that it was written while the theatres were shut because of the plague. Fair enough; and it's nice to go off the beaten track.
One interesting side effect of watching stage actors in close-up like this is that you start noticing their mannerisms, normally obscured by distance or the tall person sitting in front of you.
Dominic West has a kind of smiley ennui about him, as if everything is vaguely tiring, but he's going to make it as pleasant as he can for you. If he were a doctor, he'd have, you think, a very good bedside manner; just as Esiri acts like
your kindly, glamorous mum bringing you a mug of warm Ribena when you're off school with a tummy-ache. In pandemic times, this is just what we want.
As for Helena Bonham Carter, the thing about her (why didn't I notice this when she was in The Crown?) is that she does an enormous amount of her acting with her eyebrows. Once I started noticing her eyebrows, I couldn't look anywhere else, or indeed concentrate on much else without an effort of will.
My favourite is when she expresses thought, or perplexity: her eyebrows go up in the middle, like two caterpillars gearing up for a fight. However, given the sylvan setting – my, she really does have a big garden, unless it has been very skilfully filmed – this seems somewhat appropriate.
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
Nick Wallis's series, The Great Post Office Trial, prompted a protracted feeling of rage.
Told in ten 15-minute lunchtime slots on Radio 4, the story of the Post Office's corporate indifference to the suffering of loyal and hardworking sub-postmasters, falsely accused of ‘theft and false accounting', was not new. It was well covered in Private Eye last year.
Still, Wallis spent ten years hearing their moving and tearful testimonies, which made gripping listening. These people had built up loyal
communities in villages and suburbs, and then found themselves financially ruined, having to repay impossible sums or go to jail. The culprit was an IT system called Horizon, which ‘ate' money. The Post Office remained in denial.
The series culminated in the High Court trial where, at last, the good Judge Peter Fraser exposed the miscarriages of justice. Excellent.
Among many things, I hope we can keep in the ‘new normal' is the repeats on Radios 3 and 4. It has always seemed profligate to squander drama, opera, recitals and concerts in one-off broadcasts, and not to capitalise on the archive. But for the next few months we shall continue to be awash with cultural experiences, thanks to ‘Culture in Quarantine', the BBC'S decision to record stuff without audiences.
I actually heard a preview of one Wigmore Hall lunchtime concert while lazing in the back garden, as my neighbour Anna Tilbrook was rehearsing (with windows open) her piano accompaniment, with the soprano Lucy Crowe singing Schumann. Bliss. Then I heard it as recorded at the Wigmore. The 20 concerts, all available for a month, make a merciful escape from The World
at One, with its bleak reminders that the stricken global economy will cost the world ‘nine trillion dollars'.
Your Desert Island Discs, featuring frontline workers' choices, was the audio equivalent of Vogue magazine covers featuring front-line workers. Laudable, though not all the musical reminiscences were memorable. But Professor Jason Warren, neurology consultant, had heard a delicate, haunting Grieg piece ‘at the witching hour' on his night shift in hospital. He said, ‘It was like a call from a window on a world beyond COVID.'
On Saturday Live, Dame Marina Warner's inheritance tracks ( Si, mi chiamano Mimi, from La bohème, sung by Renata Tebaldi, and Beethoven's Sonata No 3 in A major, played by Alfred Brendel on piano and his son Adrian on cello) were explained in her crystalline tones: ‘What I love about chamber music is the way the musicians speak to one another – a model of how society or any group can work together.'
And by the way, said the Rev Richard Coles, Marina is the lady writer in the song Lady Writer – (‘Lady writer on the Tv/talk about the Virgin Mary'). I checked and it was true: in 1979, everyone gave her the Dire Straits record after she'd appeared on a Melvyn Bragg programme talking about her Virgin Mary book. ‘It quite eclipsed the other thing I was famous for – appearing on Double Your Money as a teenager.'
Crossing the Line proved a timely Book of the Week: the dispiriting memoirs of John Sutherland, former Metropolitan Police inspector, broadcast in the days after police were attacked and injured in the George Floyd demo, and just when an easing of the lockdown on pubs was proposed. One could only share the exasperation of the inspector, who declared that pubs are ‘ASBO generators, violence generators, crime generators, all-round-harm generators'.
There hasn't been much to laugh at – except perhaps the characters in Ambridge suddenly giving us stream-ofconsciousness soliloquies (not a popular move). So a week that contained five new Just Williams and a two-part P G Wodehouse, thanks to Martin Jarvis, was wonderfully cheering. I rang Jarvis, locked down in Los Angeles, and you can read what he said on page 28.
TELEVISION ROGER LEWIS
What a lot of tosh has been upended over us lately. Are we expected not to notice? I watched the surrogacy drama series
The Nest (BBC1), into which was flung a murdered drug addict, stabbed aunties, corrupt newspaper editors, bent social workers and him off Line of Duty Martin Compston, with a Glaswegian accent. David Hayman snapped and snarled, but he's Glaswegian anyway. Shirley Henderson was a mad old mother with a crutch and a limp, the only thing lacking being a parrot on her shoulder.
Mirren Mack, as the girl whose womb was to be hired, flipped back and forth between manipulative innocence and broken-bottle violence. Sophie Rundle was lovely to look at, especially when she emerged wet from the phosphorescent loch. She was one of those well-off mums-to-be who adore decorating the nursery and buying heaps of teddies and clothes, but who'd be hopeless with the demands of an actual baby.
The star, however, was the glasswalled house with its views of water and glen. The plot twist was that the Ukrainian hospital had mixed up the embryos in the lab – so the actual genetic parentage of the resultant child was as mystifying as that of Our Lord.
Even more daft was Hollywood. Set in the Forties, it was anachronistic blather, depicting the film-making colony as so crudely racist, homophobic and antiSemitic that it was incapable of making decent pictures. Quite how Cary Grant, Hitchcock, Fritz Lang or Humphrey Bogart happened was never explained; also overlooked were Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. Instead we had the least-convincing lookalikes imaginable, absolutely terrible renditions of Vivien Leigh, Noël Coward and George Cukor. Somebody who was meant to be Cole Porter was in a caravan with his trousers round his ankles.
The whole conception was very finger-wagging – Hollywood a sham, a hell, built on lies and deceptions. Acting was seen as a kind of pimping, which was meant to explain the rise of Rock Hudson. Well, maybe the studios were shameful places, in urgent need of enlightenment, but on its own terms Los Angeles was as exciting as Shakespeare's London. What was hypercritical was this expensive series, where in the sex scenes women kept their clothes on. The actual enemy of art is self-righteousness, where everyone is compelled by decree to be nice and kind and non-predatory and equal. Under the sententious surface, of course, people will be as cruel and competitive as ever.
Ibiza, in White Lines, with its sex, drugs and vodka, looked like my kind of place, and I wanted to rush there immediately, until I remembered I am old and fat and disgusting and within hours would be disconsolate. Nevertheless, I loved the look of the villas with their fountains and pots of geraniums. I also rather fell for Laura Haddock, her face alive and beautiful from every angle and distance. She played someone who was trying to solve her brother's murder case from 20 years earlier, and one minute she was demure and at a loss, the next she was shooting bodyguards with a harpoon and driving a car very fast through police roadblocks. It made neither psychological nor narrative sense.
Also in the sunshine were warring factions of the Balearic mafia, Laurence Fox as a greasy guru, orgies, kidnap, dead
bodies in a camper van, and a priest given hand relief by an old lady in an alcove. Daniel Mays, whose cocaine stash was hidden in a plastic banana, lost his wife to a local sleazeball, had his leg broken and saw his pet dog drown – though he brought it back to life by giving it a panic-stricken pummel.
Tom Harries, in lengthy flashback scenes as the late brother, Axel, was messianic and mad. A blond angel of death, he was meant to demonstrate the emptiness of all the hedonism, the egotism of a free spirit. His impulse was only to destroy, stirring things up, getting his pals deliberately hooked on heroin and making bonfires of everyone's money. No wonder he ended up demised.
What shocked me about the candid documentary What’s the Matter with Tony Slattery? (BBC2) was the way these elfin Channel 4 stars and university wits from the Eighties are now hefty, haggard and losing shape. Time has, so to speak, been digging deep trenches in their beauty's brow. Slattery, white-haired, virtually unrecognisable, shambles about with depression and drink, hoping to find a psychiatrist who can patch him up.
His house looks even more horrible than my own here in the Hastings slum district. Stephen Fry made a very brief appearance, and the contrast between a multimillionaire National Treasure and this broken figure who hasn't worked in years was simply cruel. Slattery, I mean, not me. Though me as well.
MUSIC RICHARD OSBORNE OPERA ON CD: OLD TREASURES AND LONG-HIDDEN GEMS
Streamed music-making may fill a private need in peculiar times, but the visual media are no friend to music.
Opera, that most visceral of performing arts, is best experienced live or on CD, where – as we used to say of radio – the pictures are so much better.
In a year bereft of summer festivals, there's been an unusually fine array of opera releases – not hand-me-down DVDS of theatre telecasts but bespoke sound recordings, handsomely supplied with texts and translations, learned essays and well-researched iconographies.
Two of the finest, in terms of their scholarship, the excellence of the music-making and the elegance of the limited-edition hardback books into which the CDS are unobtrusively inserted, come from the Venice-based Palazzetto Bru Zane.
This is a story in itself. After restoring the 17th-century Zane palace as a gift to the city of Venice, Nicole Bru, head of a family-run French pharmaceutical company, put her formidable financial expertise to the service of high-end music and culture. With arts budgets being slashed across Europe in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, and a new wave of race-to-the-bottom populism taking hold, it was a timely gesture.
The foundation's musical speciality is operatic rarities from the French 19th century. This would appear to rule out Gounod's perennially popular Faust, until you realise that here, for the first time on record, is Faust in the sharper, wittier, more down-to-earth form in which Gounod originally wrote it in 1859.
Rarer still is Bru Zane's revival of Offenbach's elegant and engaging three-act opéra bouffe Maître Péronilla, a late-flowering bloom with a Spanish setting and a Viennese lilt, which, unaccountably, has until this year never been recorded. Did Offenbach miss a trick by naming the opera after his lawyer-turned-chocolatier Maître Péronilla?
At one point, the delectable 19-yearold Manoëla is married (civilly) to an elderly dolt and (ecclesiastically) to an ardent young music teacher. Might not the title The Wife of Two Husbands have helped propel the opera towards the popularity it deserves?
There are no nubile 19-year-olds in Henry Purcell's King Arthur; only blind Emmeline, over whom Arthur locks horns with a Saxon warlord. The text of this patriotic ‘semi-opera' is by John Dryden, his ‘last piece of service' to Charles II, whose death in 1685 caused a six-year delay to the work's completion.
Dryden loved Purcell's music and thought it destined for immortality. Yet, after Purcell's death at the age of 36, the manuscript parts were scattered to the four winds, which is why it's taken conductor Paul Mccreesh the best part of 25 years to reassemble the piece.
Mccreesh's superb two-disc Winged Lion recording with his Gabrieli Consort & Players also comes in a small hardback book, nicely illustrated with black-andwhite photographs of those landscapes and trades – wool, grain, fish – that by Stuart times had made Britannia rich.
I enjoyed the photo of the Barley Mow on the village green at Tilford in Surrey. It fits well with Purcell's shepherds' dance, Your hay it is mow’d, the kind of rustic roistering Percy Grainger and the ale-swilling Peter Warlock would later love to replicate. ‘Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth,' as T S Eliot has it in his Four Quartets.
It's astonishing to think that Handel's Agrippina, the rip-roaring black comedy written for Venice in 1709, was created so soon after the Purcell. The opera provides us with a powerful line-up of celebrity deviants from first-century Rome, including Agrippina's son, the teenage Nero, a young Poppea, as politic as she is randy, the Emperor Claudius, nursing a mid-life crisis, and Agrippina herself, one of the ancient world's most manipulative tiger mothers.
We meet these people elsewhere, in Tacitus and Suetonius, Monteverdi and Robert Graves. Graves's treatment of Agrippina's story at the end of Claudius the God seems perfunctory when set beside the Netflix-style historical lash-up that the Venetian diplomat, impresario, and sharp-witted man of letters Cardinal Grimani provided for the 24-year-old Handel.
As anyone who saw Barrie Kosky's 2019 Covent Garden staging knows, Agrippina is a thrill-a-minute show, the music sensuous and vibrant by turns. It's a long opera but the numbers are short, with linking scenes that positively leap off the page, provided you have a theatre-savvy cast skilled in the free and rapid handling of recitative.
The new three-cd Erato set has it all: a near-definitive Agrippina in Joyce Didonato, a superb Poppea and a well-contrasted trio of virtuoso counter-tenors. The young Russian prodigy Maxim Emelyanychev directs the Venetian period-instrument band Il Pomo d'oro from a variety of keyboards with a style and pizzazz Handel himself might have wondered at.
GOLDEN OLDIES RACHEL JOHNSON AMAZON VS THE BEEB
When I heard that the BBC was introducing a rival to Amazon's voiceassisted speaker range, I groaned loudly.
‘I'm sorry,' came an apology in polite executive-secretary tones from the corner of the room. ‘I'm having trouble understanding you today.'
‘Shut up, Alexa!' I yelled. ‘Alexa, STOP!'
Instead of shouting ‘Tell me a joke' or ‘What's the weather?' at a female voice assistant (a son's godmother is called Alexa, which makes it all the stranger and ruder), we will have to ‘wake' Auntie's new speaker by saying, ‘OK, Beeb.'
A bit uncouth, but then Beeb is a northern bloke – a decision taken to avoid charges of sexism and to assuage the pandemic of Londoners who might superspread their influence/viral load into the regions. Beeb will play anything – anything, that is, from the iplayer and BBC Sounds app.
Does anyone welcome this? I can already get the BBC on my Alexa. The one in London is on the blink. Despite this tech fail, I ordered an Alexa Dot (£35 from Amazon) for Somerset. I could say, basically, one thing – ‘Alexa, play BBC Radio 4!' – and spare myself the fiddle of getting my iphone to connect with the wireless Bose speaker. The speaker resolutely refuses to pair with its twin so that we can play the same thing in two rooms, even though the man in John Lewis swore they would pair up and this is why I shelled out for them.
During the dreaded setting-up process of the new Alexa Dot, I had to talk into my mobile phone, to establish voice recognition – and lo! The gizmo actually seemed to work.
A few hours later, my children in London Whatsapped. Everything I was saying on Exmoor was playing through the Alexa speaker in our London kitchen, which had come back to life and had managed to pair with its country cousin as if by magic.
‘Mum, we can hear you shouting at Ziggy,' my children reported. They mimicked me. ‘ZIGGY! Stop barking!'
We are told that the tech giants Apple, Google and Amazon are ‘teaming up' in an effort to make smart home tech ‘easier to use'. Surely, that's an admission that smart home tech is too complicated and makes dummies of us all. Every time we want to play a DVD, we have to ring one of our three children and ask them to walk us through it.
Sometimes, when Ivo is doing something quietly, like making traps for the crawfish in the Exe, or constructing birdfeeders, the new Dot – which ignores our orders most of the time – will blast into life unbidden and play gangsta rap at top volume.
Will Beeb be welcomed by dutiful licence-payers across the land? I think Alexa knows the answer to that one!
NATIONAL GALLERY TREASURES HUON MALLALIEU BRITAIN'S TOP TEN
Where do you begin a bespoke tour of the National Gallery? Where to end is an easier question to answer: lunch in a Covent Garden favourite such as The Oystermen in Henrietta Street.
But where should one start in a building so packed with joys? As with any great gallery, it is important not to overdo it, or beauty-blindness and museumlimp will drain the pleasure. No more than about ten paintings, then – and a coffee break – should do it.
With choices running from goldground to Impressionism by way of the Renaissance, much depends on one's companions' tastes. If possible, one tries to weave some sort of narrative thread. My ten candidates, for the moment, are Van Eyck's Arnolfini Marriage, Uccello's Battle of San Romano, Holbein's The Ambassadors, Rubens's View of Het
Steen in the Early Morning, Van Dyke's Van der Geest portrait, Velázquez's Rokeby Venus, the little room of Claudes and Turners (counting as two),
Bonington's La Ferté and Turner's The Fighting Temeraire.
These choices change frequently and, in any case, three would have to be dropped, since, to answer my own question, I always like to begin with the Wilton Diptych, pay a visit to Francisque Millet's Mountain Landscape with Lightning and end at Lake Keitele by the Finn Akseli Gallen-kallela (1865-1931).
It is easy to forget how small the diptych is – each panel 12in by 9in – and yet how packed with detail, some still undeciphered, and perhaps now undecipherable. I would like to know more about Richard II'S sumptuous red cloak, a superb example of Opus Anglicanum, embroidered in gold with his emblematic harts. It has been plausibly suggested that the diptych was a collaboration between a French artist for the figures and one of Richard's English court painters for the heraldry. At least one of the court painters is known to have designed robes; so perhaps the collaboration went further.
Francisque Millet (1642-1679) was a Flemish painter who worked in France in a Claudean manner. When using the Gallery as a short cut, I always pause at his Mountain Landscape with Lightning, another enigmatic work and one I find oddly moving, perhaps because he gives us a near-vertiginous bird's-eye view. The subject may be Biblical – perhaps the destruction of Sodom or the flight of Ahab – but that hardly matters. We feel the wind, hear the heavens growl and know an almighty thunderclap is imminent.
Gallen-kallela's name may not spring to many visitors' lips, but his Lake Keitele battles with the Temeraire at the top of the Gallery shop's postcard-sales list. This is another painting to listen to as well as look at; it is full of breeze and birdsong.