The Lady In The Van

Sometime in the 1970's Mary Shepard decided to park her beaten up old Bedford van in one of the nicer leafy streets in London's Camden Town area. The street with it's expansive Georgian houses was home to several professional upper-middle class Brits that included a smattering of famous people such as the widow of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, and now it was to become Miss Shepard's home too.  The van that is.  As a devout Catholic she was prone to get 'messages' direct she believed from the Virgin Mary who told her to park her beaten up home-on-wheels there.\, and at precisely exactly 1.5" from the sidewalk.

The elderly Miss Shepard was a determined and rather belligerent force to be reckoned with and although the residents of the street bitterly resented the presence of her and the unsightly dilapidated van, they were far to British to come out and complain directly to her. In fact she relied on the fact that she intimidated them and consequently took advantage of any slight kindness they felt obliged to proffer, without even a hint of gratitude. None more so than that of playwright Alan Bennett who had just moved in to the Street, and when the sudden arrival of street parking restrictions were imposed in the area it was he who came to her rescue when he somewhat reluctantly offered to allow Miss Shepard to move the van into his driveway instead.  He intended it be to for just a few weeks, however she ended up staying 13 years, and only eventually left when the undertaker came to collect her body.

As the opening credits of this wonderfully warm new comedy remind us, this is in fact a mostly true story. There was a real Miss Shepard (although it turned out that wasn't her real name) and she did indeed camp out in the driveway of  Alan Bennett's nice North London home. She was such a colorful and somewhat difficult character she was too good a subject for him not to write about.  At first Bennett made this eccentric woman's life into a play for the radio, which he  converted into a hit stage play in London's West End before ending up now as a movie.  

There is talk that the mysterious Miss Shepard in real life wasn't always quite as amusing and funny as Bennett makes her appear in the movie.  He has imbued her role with a great deal of his own dry sardonic wit and has written her some gloriously hysterical one-liners that has the audience in stitches. The back story of her history of how she ended up living in the van unfolds slowly in the movie and is based on fact and heresay and probably more than a small part by the writer's imagination.

In the movie Bennett is portrayed as two parts of a split personality (both excellently played by actor Alex Jennings) : one is Bennett who is living though the experience and seemingly little else other than the rare visit of the occasional hunky man later at night, and 'other' Bennett is the observer and writer who sees the potential of Miss Shepard as good copy.  The 'two' Bennetts argue with each other until there is eventually a real live-in boyfriend/partner who insists that he has simply got all this talking to himself.

In every incarnation of Miss Shepard from the radio play onwards she has been played dead straight by a poker faced (Dame) Maggie Smith in a role that she was destined to play. In reality she is simply a carrying on with even more of the same attitude and disdain as if a grander version of Dowager Countess of Grantham was now a homeless bag lady. This sheer joy of her spectacular tour-de-force performance is every inch worthy of an Oscar that it shamefully did not even get nominated for.  

The movie reunites Bennett with (Sir) Nicholas Hytner who has directed all of Miss Shepard's outings to date as well as both of Bennett's other plays that were adapted into movies.  In fact sharp eyed audience members will spot that almost the entire cast of "The History Boys" from James Corden to Dominic Cooper etc have cameo roles in "The Lady In The Van" .... with the notable exception of the late Richard Griffiths. Shot in the actual house in London's Grosvenor Crescent where Bennett and Miss Shepard lived cheek by jowl, we are actually rewarded with a cameo of the writer himself as he comes to witness the last few scenes of the movie being shot.

It's a wonderful quintessentially English movie that tells it as it is, and doesn't try to pretend that being homeless is anything but rough even if you are an educated woman,  and  even if the rest of us as guilt-ridden liberals would want to pretend otherwise.

★★★★★★★★

Closed Season

The year is 1942 and Avi a German Jew gets stranded in a Forest as he tries to escape to Switzerland.  He is rescued by a Fritz a burly local farmer who provides him with a safe refuge in return for Avi's help as he has been running his rather isolated farm with just his wife since his last farmhand had been conscripted for war service.

Emma, his rather uptight wife is opposed to them harboring a Jew and resents Avi's presence but as Fritz constantly reminds her, he is the undisputed boss of their household, so she has no choice than accept it.  Once a week Fritz takes himself off to the village pub and get drunk playing cards with his cronies whilst he ignores Emma so much so that she has never even had a birthday gift from him, that is until Avi comes along.  As he starts to fit into the household, Fritz approaches him with a special request that he expects Avi to agree too in return for being kept safe on the farm.

Fritz is unable to get Emma pregnant and so he very matter-of-factor asks Avi to do it for him so that he can have a son and heir to eventually inherit the farm.  To the surly farmer who has no time for emotions or feelings, this is just like a business transaction where everyone will get what they want. Emma however, is extremely reluctant to go along and initially just goes through the motions every time Avi tries to keep his end of the bargain. However as up till now all she has in the way of sex is her older husband's clumsy perfunctory attempts, she soon warms up to Avi's visits when she discovers that making love can be really enjoyable.  

She quickly gets pregnant but keeps the news from Fritz so she can continuing making out with Avi who by now she is totally besotted with.  He is also really getting into, so much so that even Fritz starts to notice the different atmosphere at home.  That however will soon come to a very sudden halt when the local Nazi boss turns up and captures Avi and hauls him off.

We learn all this in  a series of flashbacks as the story is told 18 years later in Israel by a reluctant Avi who has been confronted by a young German man who has turned up on his doorstep demanding to know the story of how he came to be his father. Emma has just died and the boy is fulfilling one of her last dying wishes and delivering her note to Avi as she asked. He hopes that this will encourage Avi to come clean about what actually happened during the War, and in fact the letter eventually reveals that they were not exactly all what we had imagined.

This rather odd moving story from German first-time filmmaker Franziska Schlotterer carefully avoids any of the brutality of WW2 by just focusing on this remote part of Germany where the most menacing thing is the nosey bumbling solitary local Nazi official.  It's a tale of pure survival which uncannily turns out in a way that neither man had planned or hoped for even though they both entered into it with totally different intentions. 

Essentially a three-hander, the drama really rests in the hands of Emma (Brigitte Hobmeier) as the obedient wife who up too now never questioned meekly playing her part in this rather feudal system but who now comes alive when she realises that there is more to life than just milking the cows and attending to her husband's every whim in all weathers.  It is a touching performance that adds such an interesting dimension to this very unusual wartime experience of a German jew that panned out so much better than the vast majority.

★★★★★★★★

Censored Voices

On June 5th 1967 the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan were amassed on Israel's borders threatening to annihilate the country. However six days later, Israel won an historic victory, conquering lands and tripling its size.  In the immediate weeks after this several different kibbutzniks got together to discuss and record their feelings.  They had no interest in making another victory album, or a story collection on how they overtook, outdid, shot and conquered.  What they set out to do was instead of talking about what they did in the war, was to express how they felt about it all now that it was over.

This did not go down at all well with the Israeli Authorities at the time, and the Army strictly censored these conversations only allowing 30% to ever be played.  Until now that is, and here for the first time they are played back in full, and witnessed by the very same men who made the the recordings almost 50 years ago.  The tapes serve as a useful and accurate record of so many people's deeply held concerns at the time especially as so much of history is mis-remembered later on, particularly when it involves a case of nationalistic pride.

Many of the returning Israeli soldiers immediately started to question the whole purpose of going to war, expressing their believes that what had driven them to want to play their part was a desire to defend their country and their people.  Whereas in fact the reality soon became that they ended up evacuating thousands of civilians from their homes, and expelling them and their families from their lives that they had led for years.  When they were made to witness this and also the relentless killing of unarmed civilians, some of the Israeli soldiers felt that that they were treating the Egyptians like they themselves had been treated in WW2 and they could really sympathize with them.

War is by nature nothing to be proud off, but when one young Israeli soldier picked up the wallet from the Egyptian he had just killed and saw the photographs of his young  children inside, it hit him hard that he had just robbed them of their father.

This is by no means the first movie that has looked hard and questioned the futility of war in this region through the eyes of the soldiers as they have returned. Israeli filmmaker Yariv Mozer did the same after the country's second war with Lebanon in 2006, and in his movie 'My First War' he examines the fierce loyalty of the foot soldiers whose very lives are endangered by the sheer incompetence of their Generals.  Censored Voices may not be about incompetence but it is definitely about the unbridled ambition of a new nation that was not going to stop at anything to safeguard its own interests. The soldiers where aware however that even though they know that the way they treated the enemy was totally unacceptable, that if they had indeed lost, then the Egyptians would have been just as ruthless with them.

Interesting enough as the old men sat and listened to what they had said all of those years ago, none of them regretted what they said, or changed a word. With more than a little foresight one of the men said back in 1967 “Are we doomed to bomb villages every decade for defense purposes?” 

Like the  2012 Oscar nominated documentary "The Gatekeepers" which featured interviews with all surviving former heads of Shin Bet the Israeli security agency whose activities and membership are closely held state secrets, "Censored Voices" extends the dialogue of some of the different viewpoints within Israel about both it's history, and inevitably its future. It is a very compelling and necessary record that allows us to form our own opinions about the the rights and wrongs of this very controversial era.

★★★★★★★★