HUGO: a cracking story and a celebration of cinema

I'm not sure exactly what's inspired cinema's current fascination with its own past but I'm very happy about it.
This year's Oscar nominations are dominated by two films celebrating the earliest days of the movies. 'The Artist' is a beautiful and incredibly faithful recreation of 1920s silent Hollywood, and is reviewed elsewhere on this blog. The other is HUGO, a fictional tale about cinema's first genius film maker Georges Melies, and directed by cinema's current greatest living director, Martin Scorsese.

Scorsese's had a lifelong fascination with cinema and is one of the driving forces in the preservation of old films which might otherwise have crumbled to dust, so it's perhaps surprising that it's taken him so long to get around to actually making a film about about his passion.
In choosing to focus on Georges Melies, Scorsese has employed many of the same techniques that made Melies a pioneer in the industry. He was one of the first to recognise the storytelling potential of the newly invented movie camera, which had up till then been used simply to record simple scenes of everyday life, such as workers leaving a factory, or a train pulling into a station. Melies released his first film in 1896 and over the ensuing twenty years made another 500 more, telling increasingly sophisticated stories and employing ever more elaborate special effects, many of which he invented.
While considerably less prolific than Melies (who isn't?) Scorsese has similarly demonstrated a willingness to explore a wide variety of topics over his career, and now with HUGO he not only employs 3D for the first time but also creates his first truly child-friendly family film.
HUGO (Asa Butterfield) is an orphan living surreptitiously behind the scenes at a grand railway station in 1930s Paris. He maintains the station's giant clocks (a skill he learnt from his late father) and survives by stealing food from the shops on the station concourse. His obsession with restoring an automoton left to him by his father brings him into contact with Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), an elderly man who runs a toy repair shop in the station. Melies is an angry and bitter man who seems inexplicably determined to prevent Hugo from completing his mission, but he's figured without the young boy's resilience and resourcefulness, and piece by piece Hugo begins to discover that the old man may have a past he wants to keep concealed.

Scorsese's skill is in concealing his history lesson (about Melies invaluable contribution to the development of the cinema) inside an exciting adventure story that's about something else entirely. HUGO is absolutely not a biopic about the life and work of Georges Melies, but through the eyes of young Hugo we learn almost as much about the pioneer film maker as we would have done from a biography, but how big an audience would there have been for such a film?
Scorsese the cineaste succeeds in blending his passion for the history of film-making with the expectations of the multi-screen audience not much interested in that kind of thing to create a dazzling film designed to appeal to everyone, and which looks as good as the story it tells. And who knows - you might even leave the cinema convinced of the importance in preserving old films while there's still time. Now that is the mark of Scorsese's brilliance as a film maker!

THE ARTIST: just give this film every award going and be done with it

THE ARTIST, in the humble opinion of this lifelong viewer and reviewer of films from all decades and countries, is the most faithful recreation of old Hollywood ever. And yes, I'm including 'Singing in the Rain' in that pool of contenders.

THE ARTIST is not a pastiche or a tribute to the great silent movies of the 1920s. It is a 1920s-era silent movie. The attention to detail is just incredible, from the exact shades of black and white in each frame to the gestures and facial expressions of the characters you'll believe this is a newly rediscovered 85 year old film that has somehow survived in pristine condition in the vaults of one of the older Hollywood studios.
The film has deservedly been cleaning up at award shows and is tipped to win big at the Oscars later this month. Jean Dujardin as silent star George Valentin gives what I confidently predict is a career-best performance - and that's without having seen anything else he's done, and taking into account anything he may do in the future. This guy channels Douglas Fairbanks Sr with the gusto and confidence of someone who's dedicated their entire life to researching every aspect of cinema's first action hero.
The story borrows liberally from the various versions of 'A Star is Born' but never steals as it charts the decline of Valentin with the coming of sound and the rise of Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a star struck fan whose chance encounter with Valentin at a movie premiere launches her on the path to fame and fortune as a star in her own right. Bejo's performance is similarly pitch perfect; my only reservation is that she doesn't have the face of a late 20s Hollywood actress. Bejo's an attractive woman but her looks belong to those international jet set movies of the 1960s when actors of all nationalities and accents rubbed shoulders in big budget productions set in exotic locales across the globe.
I've hesitated to mention that THE ARTIST is also a silent film because of the modern day prejudice associated with that word. How can a film where no one speaks be worth an investment of your precious time? "If no one talks how will I know what's going on?" I hear you complain, "And do you really expect me to watch a silent black and white film?" (I can feel the moisture from the contempt dripping from those last five words).
I'll resist the urge to launch into a diatribe about how such an ignorant attitude is shameful, and simply say that you will forget that this is silent film within the first two minutes. Firstly, it's not entirely silent - there's music and sound effects - but more importantly the story is so engaging and so beautifully told that you just won't care that no sound actually emits from the characters mouths.
Director Michael Hazanavicius has created an instant classic - a film that will enchant and entrance and leave you with that warm glow of intense satisfaction so seldom experienced when watching mainstream movies these days.