MAY 26 2018 LISTENER 57
of junkies who spent thousands of dollars
of band money on smack.
More recent scenes have Beazley and
Regan discussing life on methadone. Not
for this film a happily-ever-after rehab
epilogue. There are contemporary scenes
of Beazley, tolerant wife Tamzin and their
twins at home on the Kapiti Coast. It sug-
gests them as the Otaki Osbournes.
The film’s chief relationship focus,
though, is on Regan and Beazley, who
were private-school chums before they
were bandmates. The pair remain the
shaky heart of the HLAH operation.
Early post-reunion scenes find Beazley
stuck in hospital suffering from a foot
infection due to a “self-inflicted needle
wound” then undergoing an angiogram.
Cut to a gaunt Regan ruing his mate’s
tour-postponing ill-health as part of the
curse upon his band.
He opines that HLAH could have gone
overseas and sold millions but for a few
“poor decisions”. Whether they actually
had the songs to do that with – their zany
metal beginnings gave way to a more
sedate pace over the years – isn’t up for
discussion.
The doco does suffer from a haphazard
structure, which makes for a confusing
chronology. Even with the occasional
date-and-place annotations, it requires
keeping track of haircuts, beard length,
waistlines and cheekbones to guess what
year it is or what crummy venue the band
are backstage at.
The final scene has them at the 2012
New Zealand Music Awards where their
post-reunion comeback effort Blood Will
Out was nominated for best rock album.
It lost. Beazley, so sure of victory he’s
come dressed as a rock Viking, heckles the
winners.
It’s a sour ending to an unflattering
portrait, though one that stokes the band’s
legend as its participants might have
hoped. Old fans should lap it up. But even
they will find, as it was with Spinal Tap,
that rock’n’roll ridiculousness wins over
music.
IN CINEMAS NOWHayward begins quizzing the clan, one
by one. Among them is as Lady Edith
(Glenn Close), who is introduced in
tweeds, blasting moles to bits on the front
lawn. “A shotgun best expresses my feel-
ings,” she says menacingly.
Gillian Anderson, in a severe goth bob
and crimson lipstick, is a deliciously boozy
and laconic Magda. Christina Hendricks
appears as the seductive and much
younger wife of the “bloody midget”
(though one hopes that, at some point,
she will get a role that doesn’t rely exclu-
sively on her capacity for sultriness).
Lady Edith describes the titular house
as a “hothouse of suppressed passion”,
though the “suppressed” bit is stretching
it: no character tries to hide a hatred of
the patriarch that often seems hysterical.
They’re all slightly ridiculous, and equally
distrustful and untrustworthy.
Things proceed in the approved Christie
manner: a series of interviews, thwarted
suspicions, and conflicting allegiances.
Unlike Christie’s other sleuths, Hayward
doesn’t deduce so much as stumble upon
crucial information. As detectives go, he’s
certainly no Hercule Poirot.
Christie said Crooked House was one of
her favourite novels, perhaps because of its
portrait of an extended family corrupted
by petty jealousies and its decidedly bleak
reveal. We’re not approaching the same
level of moral torpor as in, say, Roman
Polanski’s Chinatown, but for Christie
adaptations, it’s as twisted as it gets.
Director Gilles Paquet-Brenner (Sarah’s
Key) captures the mood well. And above
all, Crooked House succeeds where recent
adaptations, such as Kenneth Branagh’s
Murder on the Orient Express, failed: the
how is just as important as the who.IN CINEMAS NOW
NUMBER ONE
directed by Tonie MarshallI
n this plain and workmanlike French
drama, Emmanuelle Devos plays a
businesswoman recruited by a clique
of feminist champions who want to
catapult her through the glass ceilings of
Paris business district, La Défense.
They campaign to make her the first
woman to helm a CAC 40 (the French
equivalent of the NZX 50) company. In
doing so, they must contend with the
old boys’ club: an entrenched system
of “faultless male solidarity” (as one
character vituperatively describes it)
instinctively averse to having anything
female anywhere near the corridors of
power. Bosses and fixers unleash a bar-
rage of dirty tricks against her, including
blackmail, extortion and defamation- designed to punish her effrontery in
pushing for corporate equality.
Number One may observe the conven-
tions of a thriller, but there’s precious
little intrigue in it, certainly nothing
like the cynical machinations of Michael
Clayton, for example. It is simultane-
ously overstuffed and prosaic. Significant
plot threads are dropped without warn-
ing, while tedious ones are introduced in
their place.
A lengthy television series in the vein
of Borgen could easily be spun from the
many provocative ideas suggested here.
You need time, in other words, to prop-
erly unpack and understand how deeply
these structures of power penetrate
into the heart of society, and just how
viciously men will defend them.
IN CINEMAS NOW
James Robins
Films are rated out of 5:
(abysmal) to (amazing)Emmanuelle Devos:
precious little intrigue.SHORT TAKES
Head Like A Hole’s
early line-up: left, Nigel
“Booga” Beazley.