Neil Jordan

  • The End of the Affair (1999)

    The End of the Affair (1999)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2021) I was surprised to realize that I’d never seen The End of the Affair — as a multiple Academy Awards nominee during the period where I was actively chronicling the films I saw, I probably gave it a miss considering how little I cared about sordid affair dramas. I still don’t, but at least I can now go half a review without snidely dismissing the film as mushy claptrap. Or, um, maybe not. Directed by Neil Jordan from a Graham Greene novel and featuring no less than Ralph Fiennes and Julianne Moore, it’s not as if you can’t figure out from those four names what kind of film you’re going to get — something well-mannered, languidly paced, well-written but never energetic and almost hermetically consumed with the navel-gazing of two adults behaving badly. The End of the Affair is romantic drama given maximalist treatment with plenty of pauses, delays, torpid pacing and moments meant to evoke erotic tension. It does sort-of-work — There’s a lot more nudity than you’d expect from Moore or Fiennes, and it’s actually quite tasteful in its specific way. It does feel like an inheritor to the doomed-romance British tradition of films like Brief Encounter, and there’s never any doubt that it’s not going to end well. (Especially when the film begins with “This is a diary of hate” from someone who’s not an emo teenager.)  One of the reasons why I’m happier seeing the film now rather than in 1999 is that I’ve grown more sympathetic to the result: it may not be my cup of (intensely simmering) tea, but I can appreciate the maturity of the results, many of the good lines, quite a bit of the restraint in which it’s executed and the overall atmosphere of doomed lovers. The End of the Affair is a very specific kind of film, but it’s not badly executed as those go.

  • The Company of Wolves (1984)

    The Company of Wolves (1984)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, April 2020) Moody, dark, stylish, gauzy and fantastic more than horrific, The Company of Wolves takes a far more dreamlike (and female-gaze-friendly) approach to werewolf horror than most of its contemporaries. Director Neil Jordan works from an Angela Carter script (adapting her own short story) and delivers a collage of striking images loosely based on the Little Red Riding Hood fairytale, except with more hairless male chests and werewolves running around. Creating a misty, gothic atmosphere on a limited budget isn’t without visible seams, but Jordan makes it work. Unusually enough, the script doesn’t settle for a clear narrative as much as a mixture of episodes and shorter stories bound together as a sort-of-anthology within a realistic framing device, further adding to the surreal, oneiric feeling of the entire film. Its closest recent equivalent may be Catherine Hardwicke’s work on Twilight and Red Riding Hood. Interestingly enough, in retrospect, The Company of Wolves is a closer fit to the fantasy film boom of the early 1980s than the horror movies of the time. Fortunately, that still ensures its distinctiveness today.