Competition No 3854
Set by Grace Elegy, 18 October
We wanted classics redone by foreigners, along the lines of Bride and Prejudice.
Report by Ms de Meaner
No room (again). Most of them stunning. £20 to the winners. The best (G M Davis) also gets the Tesco vouchers.
Gin and Bitters signals Ingmar Bergman's return to screen directing in a film surprisingly woven from a number of short stories by P G Wodehouse. Bergman challenges the clubbish humour and light-mindedness by introducing the notion of Original Sin as the paradigm of Bertie Wooster's existence. As the director explains: "Cinema should not literalise its narratives, imprison them in realism. To see Wooster simply as a faineant social parasite is to ignore the larger spiritual implications of his condition. Cocktails and flirtations are not merely the entertainments of the idle rich, but a symbolic displacement of the fear, greed and egotism that are, according to Swedenborg, the individual's hell. Jeeves is the promised Saviour, but each time he must save Bertie anew." The setting moves from Mayfair to Malmo, and the most impressive sequence has Bertie pondering his right to kill the cockroach he has found in his herring salad.
Basil Ransome-Davies
In Troy Story 2 (Fahrenheit 1211BC), Michael Moore uncovers the Iliad that Homer would have preferred you didn't know about. Interviews with Artemis, Poseidon and Zeus reveal how the abduction of Helen was merely an excuse for a war planned by Agamemnon, a chip off his father's block, years earlier. Helen's was a face that clearly could not even have launched a rowing boat on Lake Michigan. Moore exposes the true casus belli as a ruthless trade war between rival kebab empires, between them responsible for an alarming rise in obesity throughout the Mediterranean and Asia Minor. The pervasive spear-and-sword culture made war inevitable. Moore finally uncovers the conspiracy behind Achilles's tendon injury and the vexed question of the "Trojan horse" which, he demonstrates with characteristically incisive reasoning, should be termed a Greek horse.
David Silverman
Akira Kurosawa's Demon Dog of the Baskerville Warrior is the story of a lonely man who has to pretend to be a great detective, and the film is an emotional look at this sympathetic character and his curious medical sidekick. It contains magnificent shots of the northern Japanese island of Hankaitio, and there is a visually stunning scene on top of a cliff. Kurosawa's approach differs in pace from earlier versions by more pedestrian directors. For example, in place of the Baskerville estate, we have Tokyo's flaunting skyscrapers, with the moors a golf course in Hankaitio.
The film opens with Sir Charles's ritual hara-kiri, witnessed by a white hound with magical powers; it ends with Holmes being made a fool of by the Hankaitio police for not quickly spotting the barking solution. A subsidiary motif is the debate between Holmes and Watson on sword-fighting.
John O'Byrne
The Merchant-Ivory production of Zola's Germinal brings to the screen the taxing lives of miners and their families in the 19th-century northern French coalfields. Seen through the eyes of Etienne Lantier (Jude Law), the story unfolds among the downtrodden workers in their harsh struggle for existence. The unparalleled visual artistry of the Merchant-Ivory team paints with unforgettable vividness the joy of making love in open fields or gathering in a homely dwelling for a frugal meal. Slag heaps have never looked so beautiful, and the scenes at the coalface play wonderfully with the chiaroscuro texture of miners' lamps, sweat and coal dust. True to the spirit of the novel, yet resisting Zola's overemphasis on suffering and poverty, the film ends not with the false promise of revolution, but with the departure of Etienne and his pregnant lover for a fulfilled life in the New World.
G M Davis
No 3857 Set by Gavin Ross
Apologies from St Paul to the Galatians, Samuel Johnson to the Scots, Betjeman to the people of Slough, or any other insulter of a place or people (sorry, Boris).
Max 150 words by 18 November. E-mail: comp@newstatesman.co.uk
