yek tasadef sadeh/ it was just an accident (d. jafar panahi)

It Was Just an Accident opens with all the hallmarks of Iranian cinema: neorealism, long scenes in cars, an opaque layer of mystery. It also won the Palme D’Or, an instant source of scepticism. However, I would suggest its roots are more tied to that rare genre, the camper van drama, which includes Little Miss Sunshine and the Sorin’s Historias Minimas. In Panahi’s tale, the minivan contains five clearly defined characters and a kidnapped torturer. Unless the kidnapper, driver and owner of the van, Vahid, has made a mistake and kidnapped an innocent man. This becomes a twisted road movie, which is also a meditation on state abuse and revenge. Panahi’s narrative has a straightforward, traditional brilliance: we need to know if the kidnapped man is indeed the torturer, and if he is what actions his victims will take. It deserves all the garlands and prizes it has received. Cineastes don’t need to spend big bucks to construct a film which is gripping and thought-provoking. The irony is that this film is reflective of issues in so many countries: the next night we went to see a documentary about the Uruguayan dictatorship, and Panahi’s story speaks eloquently to that time: the cruelty and damage inflicted by state terrorism on defenceless people who might, one day, seek retribution.

three days of the condor (d. sydney pollack, w. james grady, lorenzo semple jr, david rayfiel)

At the time of writing, the USA is on the verge of attacking Venezuela. Since Pollack’s film was released, the USA has invaded Iraq, and intervened in Libya.

Redford is a CIA desk jockey whose job is to analyse literature for clues of global turbulence. He stumbles across a text linking Iraq, Libya and Venezuela without at first joining the dots. But his discovery triggers the summary execution of his colleagues. Someone desperately needs to make sure that what Redford has discovered doesn’t get out. The narrative plot points might be tenuous, but the underlying thesis is as valid as ever. At the end of the film Redford confronts the head of the maverick CIA within a CIA - and realises it’s all about the oil. Same as it ever was.

Besides its ongoing geopolitical resonance, Three Days of the Condor remains a terrific thriller, blessed by extravagantly good Hollywood performances from Redford, Dunaway and Von Sydow. Pollack’s camera roams New York, with a protagonical role for the World Trade Centre, where the CIA office is based. Dunaway and Redford somehow manage to convince in their star-crossed one-night stand. This is a Hollywood thriller par excellence, which also happens to be an endlessly relevant treatise on the political systems of the past 50 years.

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As I post this, as ever weeks after watching the film, the USA has just bombed Venezuela. 

el desfile del amor/ the love parade (sergio pitol, tr. george henson)

Pitol’s rangy whodunit offers a vivid portrait of DF from both 1942 and twenty years later. The narrative is constructed around the enquiries of a historian into a murder at a house split into apartments in a fashionable barrio, during the war. The historian was a child living in the house at the time. Now married with two children, he has been living in the UK, but plans to return to his roots. The premise allows the writer to introduce a medley of colourful characters from the Mexican capital’s arts and social scene, highlighting its cosmopolitan nature. The narrative is slightly stop-start, and something of a shaggy dog story, but it gives an insight into the feverish atmosphere of wartime Mexico City.

la maison sous les arbres (d. rené clément,, w. sidney buchman, eleanor perry, arthur cavanaugh)

A star vehicle for Faye Dunaway, this is a curious mash-up of US actors in Paris stuck in a ludicrous plot. The setting lends a glamorous quality to a narrative in which a shadowy, very seventies, ‘organisation’ is controlling Dunaway’s husband, for reasons that are never particularly clear. In general the film seems to have been set up to permit Dunaway a few set-piece scenes. You can’t help but laugh when she has to make a getaway from her neighbour’s flat in a nightie and the neighbour hands her some thigh length red leather boots and an exotic coat, which just happen to be on-hand. In a similar vein, the film opens, with a hint of Atalante, with a long sequence of Dunaway drifting through Paris’ canals looking moody on a barge. As such it becomes an intriguing study of how the star system both permits and limits the making of movies, in France as in the USA. 

ugetsu (d. kenji mizoguchi, w. hisakazu tsuji, akinari ueda, matsutarô kawaguchi, yoshikata yoda, isamu yoshii)

Mizoguchi’s fable is far darker than one might expect. It’s a long way from Disney, in spite of its fantastical nature. The film shifts through the gears as it narrates the story of an ambitious potter, caught up in the wars of medieval Japan. Moving between comic and tragic registers, it finally settles in a fantasy world of spirits, incorporating a spiritual embodiment of death and what death might mean. The director delights in the spectral, the ghost ship that drifts through the mist to find us all, sooner or later.

london and the south east (david szalay)

Seeing the author awarded the Booker, and investigating his back catalogue, this seemed like a good entry point. A novel set in London in the world of telephone sales, and, as the title suggests, the South East. It’s a world I once had some knowledge of. My first “job” in London was in an institution very similar to the one where the protagonist, Paul Rainey, works, selling advertising space in spurious magazines. Unlike Paul’s world, which is white and predominantly masculine, based in Holborn, my workplace was in Cricklewood, and my most notable companions were from Ghana and Nigeria, as well as Meli Rome, an Italian former model who had a bedsit in Knightsbridge and had fallen on hard times. It was a world shadowed by the cynicism of the world Szalay depicts, but also a gateway to the more cosmopolitan universe of London, which also included IRA pubs and old colonels.

I only lasted a month, and was rubbish at it. Rainey has lasted 15 years, even if he too appears to be rubbish at sales. Something he recognises and wants to escape from. The novel follows his descent into a tepid midlife crisis. Paul, like his colleagues, his partner Heather, and anyone else he meets, is not a sympathetic figure. It feels as though we’re skirting the edges of the land knowns as Amis-country, a jaundiced trek through the sufferings of the lower middle class, men who spend their lives in pubs, women who are decidedly secondary figures. The book rolls along efficiently, and Paul’s misadventures boil up towards a comic denouement. Nevertheless, this feels like the kind of novel that the British literary establishment adores, a somewhat patronising peregrination leading to a foreseeable resolution. 

die my love (w&d lynne ramsay, w. alice birch, enda walsh)

It turns out that Scorsese, who sent Ariana Harwicz’s novel to Jennifer Lawrence, and I have similar taste. The complexity of translating first person prose to all-seeing-eye cinema was always going to be challenging, and the film has a hit-and-miss approach, with moments of visceral Ramsay-esque filmmaking and other moments where the story just seems to rumble along. Lawrence loves being a fucked-up mother, something she has a real flair for, but in some ways the star turn is Sissy Spacek’s. She retains a luminosity which seems made for the screen, a counterpoint to the film’s emotional extravagance. 

mirrors no. 3 (w&d christian petzold)

Petzold paints his films as much as he writes them. The value of a scene without dialogue, or a scene boxed in music, an actor’s look, a raised eyebrow, all these things are part of an understanding of the subtle power of the image. Language only serves to join the dots, and sometimes the story is richer for the dots not being joined. His films tend to be chamber pieces. Mirrors no.3 is a four hander. The premise is simple. A mother whose daughter recently died meets a woman who is lost. The equation works until it doesn’t. Whilst Paula Beer and Barbara Auer fulfil their roles beautifully, the film is notable for the performances of the two secondary male leads. With less to work with, Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs conjure concise, astute portraits of men not necessarily cut out for emotional complexity facing up to a situation where their masculine virtues serve little purpose. The quiet desperation is captured by actors and director with the skill of a great portrait painter. Mirrors No.3 is an elliptical, cryptic, obvious, and quietly brilliant study of grief.

war and war (lászló krasznahorkai, tr. george szirtes)

László Krasznahorkai looks in his younger photos a bit like Thom Yorke. There’s something of the recondite, complex musicianship of Radiohead in the prose of Krasznahorkai, which drives around in circles looking for an exit that never opens up. So the driver starts talking about how he’s been driving in circles for hours, spinning plates, and how the way things are going petrol consumption is going to be the end of the world, but he can’t help it, he still needs to find a way out and if he stops the car that’s never going to happen, so he has to keep going and if he does ever find a way out he knows it’s going to lead to the great revelation of why the world is neither round nor shaped in a manner that anyone could ever possibly imagine. A secret some people have known at various times in history which keeps getting misplaced or forgotten, because the world is an amnesiac structure, but if he can ever find a way out of this circular motion, these circular structures, then he might just let us in on the secret, if the narcos don’t narcolepse us first, because they too want the secret or the money or the car or your soul. And the narcos usually get what they want, because that is the way of history.

In short, a hypnotic read. 

lights in the dusk (w&d kaurismäki)

The film opens with a group of Russians discussing Russian literature, naming Gorky, Pushkin and Tolstoy. This sets up the most Dosteyevskian of the director’s films. The narrative follows the grim fate of Koistinen, a night watchman who is targeted by a femme fatale in a honey trap, setting him up as the fall guy when the people she works for steal jewels from the site he is supposed to be guarding. Things keep going from bad to worse for Koistinen. He encounters fate’s barbs with a stoicism that seems almost perverse. The Helsinki which Kaurismäki shows is one that has become ‘modernised’. Neon and new builds dominate. But the space for human kindness has shrunk. Whilst retaining Kaurismäki’s deadpan humour, this film feels closer to his nordic neighbour Bergman in tone and mournfulness.