Salome/ Wilde Salome/ Live Q&A with Al Pacino hosted by Stephen Fry.
Directed by Al Pacino. Starring Al Pacino, Jessica Chastain, Kevin Anderson. 75 mins/ 95 mins.
For one night only September 21st.
According to Oscar Wilde, “Each man kills the thing he loves,” and his play Salome is a tale of destructive passion. Al Pacino's great, overwhelming passion is acting. While most of his contemporaries have allowed their method fervour to slip and fade as they slump into the world of idle celebrity, his has only grown with age. For him it is not a self destructive love but it is a crazy love and totally indiscriminate, it spills out all over the place. So though this evening is billed as a celebration of Oscar Wilde it is much more a celebration of acting, any acting, good or bad.
What you get for your money is an old fashioned triple bill. First up is Salome, his film version of a stage production (a reading actually) he starred in of Wilde's play, directed by Estelle Parsons, that was performed in Los Angeles in 2006 and was Jessica Chastain's big breakthrough. The movie was filmed during the day between rehearsals.
Next is Wilde Salome, the documentary that mixes up the filming of the play with Pacino finding out about Wilde's life and the background to the play. It is in the style of his Looking For Richard film about Richard III. After that you will get a Q & A with Stephen Fry making polite inquiries of Pacino and Chastain, beamed to your cinema screen live from the BFI Southbank, unless you are actually at the BFI Southbank in which case it is there in front of you. It's a bit like watching a film on Blu-Ray and all the extras in one big go.
Salome is the worst of both worlds really – neither a faithful record of the stage production nor actual film. The performances are still theatre large but it is shot and edited like a standard film drama with lots of close ups, reaction shot. Stuff that looks great on the stage is likely to be cruelly exposed by such an approach and if you are in any way Theatre Averse then it is going to be a little bit like hell. How can all this caterwauling really be entertainment? The play seems to consist of people saying that something very bad is going to happen for the best part of an hour, and then seeming put out when it actually does. (In fairness, it is still way better than Ken Russell's version, Salome's Last Dance, the memory of which can still trigger a slight involuntary slither of revulsion.)
It also showcase one of Pacino's worst performances. He plays Herod like he is rehashing his I'm A Fan Of Man speech from Devil's Advocate but with an outrageous lisp that has you waiting for him to denounce “several seditious scribes from Caesaria.” Whenever stage productions escape on to the big screen I'm always struck by how the actors seem to be acting around the lines, doing whatever they can to put their own little inflection on a line, often through some unexpected shift in sentence stress. They are all guilty of this it here, particularly Chastain, though she is the best thing in it. It is largely down to her intensity in the title role that the final ten minutes generate some feeling of horror.
Wilde Salome though is rather better. Pacino's over the top performance as himself is much more entertaining than his over-the-top performance as Herod; probably because the passion behind it is so much more genuine and so large that only the most over the top performance can do it justice. He loves all acting, regardless of quality and the film is more interesting as a study of him and what motivates him, than of Wilde and what lies behind the play. The film has interesting contributions from Tom Stoppard, Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner into Wilde's life, though there is a horrible moment when Bono appears as an expert witness and I swear there was an involuntary collective groan from the whole audience.
It does though run out of steam and towards the end it just repeats large chunks of the film we have only just sat through which seems like a cheat, particularly as by this stage, three hours into the evening, the audience will be keen to get on to the Q & A.
Directed by Al Pacino. Starring Al Pacino, Jessica Chastain, Kevin Anderson. 75 mins/ 95 mins.
For one night only September 21st.
According to Oscar Wilde, “Each man kills the thing he loves,” and his play Salome is a tale of destructive passion. Al Pacino's great, overwhelming passion is acting. While most of his contemporaries have allowed their method fervour to slip and fade as they slump into the world of idle celebrity, his has only grown with age. For him it is not a self destructive love but it is a crazy love and totally indiscriminate, it spills out all over the place. So though this evening is billed as a celebration of Oscar Wilde it is much more a celebration of acting, any acting, good or bad.
What you get for your money is an old fashioned triple bill. First up is Salome, his film version of a stage production (a reading actually) he starred in of Wilde's play, directed by Estelle Parsons, that was performed in Los Angeles in 2006 and was Jessica Chastain's big breakthrough. The movie was filmed during the day between rehearsals.
Next is Wilde Salome, the documentary that mixes up the filming of the play with Pacino finding out about Wilde's life and the background to the play. It is in the style of his Looking For Richard film about Richard III. After that you will get a Q & A with Stephen Fry making polite inquiries of Pacino and Chastain, beamed to your cinema screen live from the BFI Southbank, unless you are actually at the BFI Southbank in which case it is there in front of you. It's a bit like watching a film on Blu-Ray and all the extras in one big go.
Salome is the worst of both worlds really – neither a faithful record of the stage production nor actual film. The performances are still theatre large but it is shot and edited like a standard film drama with lots of close ups, reaction shot. Stuff that looks great on the stage is likely to be cruelly exposed by such an approach and if you are in any way Theatre Averse then it is going to be a little bit like hell. How can all this caterwauling really be entertainment? The play seems to consist of people saying that something very bad is going to happen for the best part of an hour, and then seeming put out when it actually does. (In fairness, it is still way better than Ken Russell's version, Salome's Last Dance, the memory of which can still trigger a slight involuntary slither of revulsion.)
It also showcase one of Pacino's worst performances. He plays Herod like he is rehashing his I'm A Fan Of Man speech from Devil's Advocate but with an outrageous lisp that has you waiting for him to denounce “several seditious scribes from Caesaria.” Whenever stage productions escape on to the big screen I'm always struck by how the actors seem to be acting around the lines, doing whatever they can to put their own little inflection on a line, often through some unexpected shift in sentence stress. They are all guilty of this it here, particularly Chastain, though she is the best thing in it. It is largely down to her intensity in the title role that the final ten minutes generate some feeling of horror.
Wilde Salome though is rather better. Pacino's over the top performance as himself is much more entertaining than his over-the-top performance as Herod; probably because the passion behind it is so much more genuine and so large that only the most over the top performance can do it justice. He loves all acting, regardless of quality and the film is more interesting as a study of him and what motivates him, than of Wilde and what lies behind the play. The film has interesting contributions from Tom Stoppard, Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner into Wilde's life, though there is a horrible moment when Bono appears as an expert witness and I swear there was an involuntary collective groan from the whole audience.
It does though run out of steam and towards the end it just repeats large chunks of the film we have only just sat through which seems like a cheat, particularly as by this stage, three hours into the evening, the audience will be keen to get on to the Q & A.
