6 FINANCIAL TIMES Thursday12 March 2020

ARTS

Impressive technology: ‘Whitney’

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

Nervy times for flesh-and-blood sing-

ers: the holograms are coming. Buddy

Holly, Roy Orbison, Frank Zappa, Maria

Callas and Ronnie James Dio have all

returned to the stage in holographic

form; more are on the way. Entertain-

ment company Primary Wave Music

Publishing is a prime mover in the bur-

geoning market. Last year it signed a

deal with Whitney Houston’s estate, the

fruits of which were emblazoned in big

red letters above the entrance to Ham-

mersmith Apollo.

“An Evening with Whitney” is a holo-

gram tour featuring the digital likeness

and songs ofthe troubled star, who died

in 2012 aged just 48. When I saw her

perform two years earlier, she was

erratic and lost-looking, with a voice

ravaged by drugs. She took a run up sev-

eral times at the gravity-defying high

note in “I Will Always Love You” but

painfully failed to reach it.

At the Apollo, the holographic Whit-

ney suffered no such malfunctions. It

beamed and hit its cues and didn’t drop

a note. Costume changes were done in

the blink of an eye. The smiling Whitney

in a white frock holding a hanky that

disappeared at the end of “All the Man I

Need” was promptly replaced by a smil-

ing Whitney in a daring red bodysuit for

“I Have Nothing”. The vocals were based

on studio out-takes and live perform-

ances by the real Whitney.

Designed by BASE Hologram, her dig-

ital reanimation was technologically

impressive — but also rather flat. Liter-

ally so, for it was generated by light

beams projected on to a diaphanous

screen, creating the illusion of a three-

dimensional figure.A live band and two

backing singers flanked it, semi-hidden

behind tubular neon lights. Four danc-

ers performed occasional pieces of non-

descript choreography.

The hologramopened with a curve-

ball by singing a cover of Steve Win-

wood’s “High Life”, the bonus track

from the Japanese edition of Houston’s

third studio album.The 16-song setlist

included eight Houston-sung versions

of songs by other people — including the

big one, Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always

Love You”. Cheers and whistles greeted

the avatar as it crested the octaves.

Some have criticised the venture as

macabre. Actually, the atmosphere was

fairly raucous, with much laughter and

singing along. But it was also deficient.

The screen on to which Whitney was

projected was positioned quite far back,

which made it seem as though one were

watching a video. The staging’s combi-

nation of live elements and artifice was

lumpy and unimaginative. The light

show was compromised by the Whitney

hologram’s vampiric need for darkness.

What might make for a diverting Las

Vegas supper club show felt underpow-

ered and misconceived under the

proscenium arch of a concert hall.

Flesh-and-blood singers, relax. You’re

OK for now.

hologramtour.whitneyhouston.com

Digital Whitney is note-perfect but flat

P O P

An Evening with Whitney

Hammersmith Apollo, London

aaeee

L

et’s start with the facts and

descend into violence from

there. Last August, Universal

Pictures was set to release

The Hunt, a comic thriller

from Blumhouse, creators of such

low-budget horror success stories as

Get Out. The premise was pure mischief

— American conservatives being

poached for sport by murderous liber-

als. Then, in a series of tweets, Donald

Trump took issue. Hollywood progres-

sives were, he complained, promoting

“anger and hate”. The next day, Univer-

sal indefinitely postponed the release.

Trump, like everyone else outside a

huddle of executives, had not actually

seen the movie.

If I put it like that, am I being partisan?

A purveyor of mainstream media fake

news? Even given that I’ve tidied up the

original tweet (“Liberal Hollywood is

Racist at the highest level, and with

great Anger and Hate!”) and not said

that the president appeared to have got

the wrong end of the stick about the

film’s sympathies? Should I mention

that the marketing campaign had

already been pulled after shootings in El

Paso and Dayton? Would that make me

less biased? Or more?

Such is the pickle we find ourselves in,

the endless, attritional culture war into

which the film is now finally being

released. Without it,The Huntwould not

exist — a product of the times, provoca-

tion for profit, a loud and deliberate

coughing fit in a crowded cinema.

In the film, a cartoonish band of

“deplorables” — so identified from the

start — duly find themselves adrift in an

unnamed rural landscape. First,

though, we meet their elite tormentors,

fresh from a caviar supper. Normally, I

might say that felt too on-the-nose.

Here it could mark me out as a snob.

Touches like this go a long way to mak-

ing the film review-proof, although for a

while I’d just be reviewing a body count

anyway, a blur of splatter that dis-

patches a mob of Ivanka-likes and

scowling dudes in trucker caps.

The ultraviolence does not end there.

Over the course of the film, deadly

weapons include crossbows, stiletto

heels, an estate car, a kitchen blowtorch

of the kind used for finishing crème

brûlée, assorted booby traps and a

Second Amendment fantasia of semi-

automatic firearms.

Then from out of the carnage steps

Crystal (Betty Gilpin), a self-possessed

Deep Southerner who quickly realises

she is not in Kansas any more — or even

Arkansas, as the locals claim. So begins

the fightback. Gilpin will be familiar to

viewers of the Netflix seriesGlow. Her

performance here is quite something, a

masterclass of glassy deadpan that sug-

gests Christopher Walken’s grand-

daughter and the type of big-screen

android who eventually reveals a mess

of circuitry just below their hairline.

That so many guns are trained on

targets with NRA life memberships is an

irony embraced early, with the blank

grin of detachment the film wears

throughout. At times,The Huntlooks

like the neutral satire of mutual loathing

the makers have claimed it as. Else-

where, not so much. Crystal is clearly

our heroine, and the jokes tend to fly in

one direction, at snowflakes tied up in

knots of racial guilt, the social media

presence of film-maker Ava DuVernay,

the corruption of a grilled cheese sand-

wich — that national sacrament — with

Gruyère. You suspect the film-makers

have an answer for everything, a mass of

exculpatory small print for a Friday

night riot whose tagline could be: “Oh

no, they went there.”

Or maybeThe Hunt ays all that cur-s

rently needs saying, politics in the usual

sense a fig leaf for characters simply

moved to kill by tribe and taste. Any-

way, events overtake us. Audience

laughter will now take on a different

tone when one bloodthirsty liberal

demands a bottle of hand sanitiser. If US

cinemas were to close this weekend,

what a last frozen snapshot of American

lifeThe Hunt ould make.w

You wait this long for one bloody,

socially charged satire about humans as

big game and now, indeed,The Hunt si

joined at the bus stop by Brazil’s

Bacurau. “A few years from now”, a title

card announces — but life moves fast

these days. “Weird Western” is the genre

the film has been boxed into on the festi-

val circuit, linking it back to the 1960s

moment when cowboy movies turned

countercultural. The setting is the coun-

try’s remote north-east interior. A water

truck reaches the village of the title rid-

dled with bullet holes, from a road lined

with broken coffins. If you suspect this

doesn’t bode well, you’re right.

For a time, co-directorsKleber Men-

donça Filho and Juliano Dornelles im-s

ply let us get to know the villagers, a gag-

gle of outsiders arranged around com-

munity pillars such as the drunken,

grief-soaked doctor Domingas (Sônia

Braga). The flying saucer that hovers

above them seems to have arrived from

the same B-movie that lends the film its

woozy, spacefunk atmosphere, helped

along by a dose of hallucinogens.

Such is the Weird. The Western begins

when the story abruptly sharpens and

hardens. The UFO proves be a drone —

the people of Bacurau now prey for par-

ties still unknown. As withThe Hunt,

Mendonça and Dornelles upend the

movie cliché of urban heroes fleeing

rural maniacs, butBacurauhas a depth

of flavour not always easy to find in

the other half of this strange double

bill. “They look white but they’re not

white,” one hunter says of their quarry,

the film unafraid to push the hottest

buttons hard.

In Philippa Lowthorpe’s chipper new

comedyMisbehaviour, Bob Hope (Greg

Kinnear) fails to hear the sound of

change during the call in which he

agrees to host the 1970 Miss World con-

test. Instead, rehearsing his golf swing at

his estate in Toluca Lake, California, he

takes the gig on the say-so of his star-

struck new young secretary. “I’m hir-

ing,” he tells wife Dolores (Lesley Man-

ville). “Again?” she replies wearily. Yet

the butterfly effect is about to take wing

from a drab room in University College

London. There, prospective mature stu-

dent Susan Alexander (Keira Knight-

ley) is being interviewed for a place

reading history. As she explains why

England never had a successful revolu-

tion, a note passes between male aca-

demics — a mark out of 10, unrelated to

her take on Cromwell.

Alexander will soon become a key

player in a landmark feminist protest,

the sabotage of the beauty contest

broadcast live from the Royal Albert

Hall. Across town, with Hope in the bag,

contest impresario Eric Morley (Rhys

Ifans) now plots the next iteration of an

event whose global television audiences

were generally surpassed only by Moon

landings. Up the road in dowdy Isling-

ton, meanwhile, is the squatted com-

mune of graffiti artist Jo Robinson (Jes-

sie Buckley), whose brusque acquaint-

ance with Alexander sparks plans of

their own.

Where this all leads is a famous tale of

flashbulbs and flour bombs, Hope

stranded in the brilliant glare of

women’s liberation. A story hangs on

why it may have taken so long to tell it.

Patriarchy aside, there is also a fiendish

jigsaw puzzle of characters and narra-

tives. Scriptwriters Rebecca Frayn and

Gaby Chiappe deserve much kudos for

the nuance they pack into the film with-

out it seeming like a bulging suitcase.

The one glitch involves the other

women onstage that night. 1970 was a

milestone in Miss World history not just

for the Albert Hall protests, but as the

first time a woman of colour, Jennifer

Hosten (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), won the

title — another landmark in another

timeline, however complicated. Misbe-

haviourat least comes at the problem

face on, allowing an exchange between

Knightley and Mbatha-Raw. But a flaw

lies in the design, one woman’s story

folded inside the other, fractionally sec-

ond billed from the start.

And yet you are left with fond memo-

ries — the face of Knightley’s Alexander

watching Hope blow protesters a kiss

from his limo, Ifans demonstrating the

correct technique with which to accept

victory (“I am She”). Best of all is Man-

ville’s long-suffering Dolores Hope, see-

ing the times catch up with her philan-

dering husband, heading out into Lon-

don for a solo nightcap, enjoying a small,

private last laugh.

Carnage in the culture wars

Deadpan: Betty Gilpin in

‘The Hunt’. Below: Bárbara

Colen in ‘Bacurau’

FILM

Danny

Leigh

The Hunt

Craig Zobel

AAAEE

Bacurau

Kleber Mendonça Filho, Juliano Dornelles

AAAAE

Misbehaviour

Philippa Lowthorpe

AAAAE

Feminists and flour bombs: from left, Alexa Davies, Lily Newmark,

Ruby Bentall, Jessie Buckley and Keira Knightley in ‘Misbehaviour’

MARCH 12 2020 Section:Features Time: 3/202011/ - 17:50 User:david.cheal Page Name:ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition:EUR, 6, 1