Nobody 2 and Jane Austen Wrecked My Life are in cinemas.
Firstly, I need to acknowledge the passing of the great Terence Stamp at the age of 87. He was from my part of the world — you could call it “my manor”. He went to school with the father of a pal I went to school with. Son of a tugboat stoker, he was working class but made it to grammar school and then a combination of his remarkable good looks and the socially mobile 60s meant he a chance to break out entirely and become one of the faces the era.
Despite being identified so completely with the 60s, Stamp only made nine films in the decade but what films they were: Academy Award-nominated for his first role, Billy Budd for Peter Ustinov, then The Collector (Wyler), early comic strip adaptation Modesty Blaise (co-written by Harold Pinter and directed by Joseph Losey!), Poor Cow for Ken Loach, Teorema for Pasolini.
After that he was constantly being rediscovered by new generations. General Zod in two Superman films in the 70s, then in the 80s he showed how his stillness could blow everyone off the screen in Stephen Frears’ The Hit. In the 90s he blew everyone off the screen with a feather boa in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and — my favourite of that period — The Limey for Stephen Soderbergh.
I recommended that film here back in October 2024:
The film is famous for using a Stamp performance from 1967 (in Ken Loach’s Poor Cow) for the flashbacks, and it works wonderfully well, but the device also serves to point up the parallels between Stamp’s ex-con Wilson and his target, Peter Fonda’s Valentine. For both of them, their heyday was the 60s. Indeed, Fonda tells his new young girlfriend at one point something like, “the 60s weren’t really the 60s, it was just ’66 and a bit of ’67″. Both of them are out of their time for different reasons.
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Back to the present and Bob Odenkirk returns to the role that made him an action movie star, the ‘ordinary bloke who is also a retired hitman’ Hutch Mansell, in Nobody 2. It’s a simple but satisfying premise: take the most unlikely actor and put him at the centre of a John Wick-style bloodbath. Odenkirk famously only just survived a heart attack while working on Better Call Saul, so if I was him I’d be home with my feet up about now, but he seems intent on putting himself through the physical ringer once again.
In this new film, Mansell is on the kind of dreary professional treadmill that’s familiar to so many of us. The work is never ending, but not particularly satisfying. The boss (Colin Salmon) doesn’t understand — or if he does understand, he doesn’t care. There’s so much overtime, Mansell never gets to see his kids or hang out with his wife (Connie Nielsen).
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Despite the fact that he still owes the mob thirty million dollars, Mansell takes his family on a holiday to the ageing water park and holiday resort he once went with his father (Christopher Lloyd) and brother (RZA) and where he made his happiest memories.
Unfortunately, trouble is never far behind and — once the premise has been established — what we get are some balletic set-pieces staged with some panache by Indonesian action auteur Timo Tjahjanto and edited by Icelandic Elísabet Ronaldsdóttir. It truly takes a global village to make these pictures.
The kills are inventive — especially the use of the water park location — and gruesome, but the idea that sometimes extreme violence is the only option is starting to wear me out and the fetishisation of firearms is never questioned. There is a hint of interiority as Odenkirk’s Mansell realises that he can’t escape his nature, and that his nature is also a family trait that will be passed on to the next generation, but that’s only there for the blink of an eye before it’s gone.
Somehow managing to become bigger than the sum of it’s not very promising parts, Jane Austen Wrecked My Life is a French romantic comedy about a blocked writer, working in Paris’ most famous English language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. A failure in love as well as art, Agathe (Camille Rutherford) seems resigned to drift along wishing things were different but not actually doing anything about it.
Her co-worker, Félix (Pablo Pauly), sends a sample of her work to an English writers’ retreat. She is selected and has to overcome her anxiety about transport, publicly reading her work, and having to reveal that she hasn’t actually finished anything. Charlie Anson channels Notting Hill-era Hugh Grant as the Austen heir who is unenthusiastically managing the two-week retreat and, of course, some romantic sparks are kindled and the arrival of Félix means there is a brief competition for Agathe’s feelings.
The reason why this one gets a tick from me is that Rutherford as Agathe is actually quite grounded, despite the ridiculousness of the conceit, and the budding relationship with Anson’s Oliver feels like one you want to succeed.
Film buffs will be distracted by the presence of the great documentarian, Frederick Wiseman, as a poet reading at Shakespeare and Company, and writer-director Laura Piani takes the bold step of using Woody Allen’s famous Windsor font in her closing credits, suggesting she’s not averse to comparisons with some of the greatest films of the 20th century.
