la chimera (w&d alice rohrwacher, w. carmela covino, marco pettenello)

There has been a lot of hype around La Chimera, which can be a recipe for disappointment. It is a strange, indulgent film, with the central motif being that the protagonist, Arthur, played with a glorious annoyance by Josh O’Connor, is seeking a thread that will reconnect him with his lost lover, even though she is dead. That motif sometimes seemed to stand for the film itself, as it seeks to find a path through the maze of its multiple tones and references. At once winsome, comic and faux-thriller. A film that interrogates our relationship with the past, whilst never wanting to take that interrogation too seriously: more Fellini than Antonioni. Fellini feels like a touchstone for a film with an offbeat humour and a wealth of extravagant but essentially loveable characters. The director’s sister has a cameo role as Spartaco, a dealer in stolen antiquities, and the film isn’t afraid to venture towards the far-fetched, as Arthur’s motley band storms her ship. Yet, somehow or other, all this hangs together. Arthur’s irascible journey as the unexplained gringo with his merry band of brothers becomes a sentimental journey of the Sterne-ian kind, one where emotion and ridicule go hand in hand to create a strange alchemy, aligned with ley lines and divination and the cruel workings of fate. 

the rider (w&d chloé zhao)

I watched Zhao’s second film during lockdown on a small screen. At which point she might have been the most feted up-and-coming director on the planet, fresh from Oscar success and the Marvel call-up. Which, watching The Rider again, seems such a confusing career step, for someone whose art appears to be baked into the nuanced, anti-climactic possibilities of cinema. The Rider is a film where almost everything has already happened. Brady, the protagonist, has fallen off his horse and damaged his skull. Lane, his friend, has fallen off his horse and become irreversibly damaged. This is a film about coming to terms with trauma, not seeking it. As such it is obviously a wonderful corrective to the idea of the western as a proving ground for a man’s machismo. These men have proved and lost and now they have to face up to living in a world where all their aspirational values are worthless, or even suicidal. Zhao’s slow burning take on Brady’s crisis is filmed with such assurance that it makes up for the lack of action. There is an ingrained tension in the idea that he will seek to get back on the horse, but even this tension is underplayed to an extent, the filmmaker emphasising the aesthetic as much as the the dramatic elements. This is the golden hour sunset of the western and all the baggy messed-up dreams it carries with it. 

meek’s cutoff (d. kelly reichardt, w. jonathan raymond)

Reichardt’s western is a beautiful, immersive take on what it might have been like to be a pioneer on the great trek west. It’s a film of elegant long takes, punctuated by moments of classic western action. The appearance of the Indian, the stand-off, the runaway cart. A party of pioneers finds themselves lead by Meek, a cowboy cowboy, who talks the talk but doesn’t appear to walk the walk, leading them into barren hills as their water reserves diminish. Under the parasol of the question: will they survive or not, the film stumbles forward in their company, with every obstacle that holds up their progress hardwired into the viewing process. An axle breaks and the audience really gets the significance. A steep hill isn’t just scenic, it’s potentially fatal. It’s a masterly treatment of the lost art of the Western, one which unsurprisingly forefronts gender as Michelle Williams emerges as a counterweight to Bruce Greenwood’s macho Meek. However, Reichardt’s treatment of gender is in many ways just another element in the authenticity of her tale, one which insists on a more nuanced take on the historical actualities of the myth. 

the napoleon of notting hill (g k chesterton)

The Edwardian decade is a ghost decade. That lost era between Victorianism and modernism. Between a kind of European peace and the wars that were latent. It’s also a curiously empty decade, from a literary perspective. The modernists had yet to get properly going, and the great Victorians were gone or going.

Chesterton’s comic novel might warrant a proper Barthesian exegesis. Here is a novel which doesn’t seem to want to make much of an effort to be a novel. There’s not a single female character in the book, so far as I could glean. There’s a refusal to take anything seriously. It’s a jaundiced critique of empire and nationalism, but one that sees it all as an absurd game, whilst the ramifications were soon to lead to global conflict and the rapacious aspects of Empire were just beginning to be confronted. Set in 1984, supposedly, a mad king awards London boroughs the status of medieval cantons, complete with heraldry and uniforms. When three of them gang up to attack Notting Hill, its leader, Adam Wayne, fights back. The war happens after decades of peace, and is almost viewed as an aesthetic gesture, in keeping with the heraldry and colours. The fact that a decade later, the citizens of Notting Hill, Hammersmith, etc, would find themselves caught up in a war that was, perhaps, equally senseless, is one of the disturbing aspects of Chesterton’s satire. The aestheticisation of war, the insistent irreverence and the name Adam Wayne feel like they could be something out of the Marvel universe. Both representative, perhaps, of societies unprepared for the shit that will soon be hitting the fan.  

the last englishmen: love, war, and the end of empire (deborah baker)

Baker’s tome seeks to encompass a multitude of historical nodal points, which over and underlap. The fall of the Raj, Gandhi and Nehru, the poets Spender and Auden, their brothers, their brothers’ lovers, the conquest of Everest, the impact of the second world war on geo-political history. Perhaps inevitably there are moments when it feels as though a certain shorthand is being employed by the writer. The book is lengthy, but could easily have been ten times as long if it were to fully investigate every strand it takes on. Nevertheless, there is much to be gleaned here. The way in which Auden and Spender’s brothers were part of teams that set out, unsuccessfully to conquer Everest as part of a colonial project, and how both came to realise the vanity, even stupidity of this, in spite of their personal ambitions. Also the way that the scientific work they did in the Himalayas and Karakorams would contribute indirectly to the war effort. In the process, Baker analyses the turbulent decline of the British empire in India, held together by an outdated ideology of British exceptionalism. As such, the book dovetails neatly with Baker’s husband, Amitav Ghosh’s account of the origins of the British empire in India, Smoke and Ashes. 

kobieta z… (woman of…) (w&d małgorzata szumowska, michał englert)

Kobieta Z taps into the wave of trans films that reflect the post-Foucaultian changes in global society, or at least western global society. Aniela Wesoly starts the film as Andrzej and the film follows the journey of their transformation over the course of forty years. Boldly, the film resists making Aniela an attractive woman, pushing the journey of transformation into middle age. Andrzej is a dreamy young man, confident in his sexuality, making the conversion all the more impactful. Deep down they feel themselves to be a woman in a man’s body and they remain true to this belief, no matter what it costs them. Which is almost everything: their social status, their livelihood, their loving marriage, their looks. There is an upside to all this at the end, when their sacrifices appear to be rewarded with another kind of happiness. But the journey is long and bleak and follows the journey of their country from tightly buttoned communism to something far more liberal. The edit style is pacy and sinuous. Scenes are rarely given time to settle, and when they do, the film pulls out of them as soon as possible. This curtails the possible melodrama which Aniela’s story is liable to, as family and friends react to their transformation. What the filmmakers seem to aim for is an epic vision of Aniela’s struggle, one where we too will come up against the relentless antagonism of the forces ranged against them. 

white noise (don delillo)

Once upon a time I used to read DeLillo. And then the reading stopped. Returning to the writer, twenty years later, is a curious experience. White Noise feels by parts frustrating, by parts brilliant. It has the feel of a sophomore work, full of tricks and conceits and authorial presence. Then I learn it was his eighth novel. The conceit of the narrator being a professor of Hitler studies at a remote US university, one who doesn’t speak German, feels like a brilliant idea, but doesn’t really go anywhere. The conceit of the narrator’s world being threatened by a toxic cloud, which takes up the central portion of the book, likewise seems a brilliant, Camusian idea, but again, it doesn’t really go anywhere. This is a novel bubbling with tricks and ideas, but one which delivers no coups de grace. Perhaps it’s in the vein of the nouveau roman, almost Barthesian, but there’s something showy about the whole contraption, made of bells and whistles that articulate the author’s intellectual chutzpah but fall short of ever really saying anything. 

la bella estate (w&d laura luchetti)

The Pretty Summer might be an English variant on this title, which would seem appropriate, as this is a pretty film with pretty people enjoying summer. And some winter. A slightly episodic drama which takes place from the summer of 1938 to 1939, it follows the coming of age of Gianna, a pretty young woman who has recently come with her brother to Turin from the countryside. She falls under the sway of artist’s pretty muse, Amelia, who leads her towards a life of moderate decadence. The shadow of what is to come hovers at the back of the film - there can be few better years in which to set a period film, with the sense of doomed youth that it portends. No matter how pretty you are, if it’s Italy 1938, the writing is on the wall. 

fuenteovejuna (lope de vega)

Fuenteovejuna is a story about citizens who take a terrible, courageous risk. In the face of oppression, they chose to unite and fight back, killing the oppressor. In the seventeenth century, this kind of action rarely ended well. I don’t know enough about Spanish history but Shakespeare’s take on the Peasant’s Revolt in Henry VI, and rebellion in general, makes clear the price that anyone who went against the established rule had to be prepared to pay. (Of course it is not so very different today.) So, how should this affect the staging of the play? Clearly the element of risk is fundamental. Lope’s play incorporates what they call in modern screenwriting terms, ‘jeopardy’. How should jeopardy be introduced into the staging? There must be a million ways, this is the beauty of staging a classic text, but one thing that has to happen is that the contract of the play, which is between those staging it and those watching it, should not be too cosy. To get to the heart of the play’s intentions and communicate this with the public, in other words to honour the writer, involves being prepared to incomodar the audience - to make them uncomfortable. This isn’t a cute classic comedy, it’s a cry of defiance and courage.

Watching a recent staging made me think about what radical risk takers the Golden Age theatre practitioners were, in both Spain and Britain. The plays repeatedly engage with stories, characters and perspectives which questioned the established social and political order at a time when theatres could be arbitrarily shut, when playwrights died in duels, when the very action of participating in theatre implied positioning oneself on a crepuscular margin of society. With luck, you made money and retired to Warwickshire. Without luck, you died in a ditch.

The trouble with the staging of classics, something the RSC also struggles with in my experience, is that there is a desire to tell the audience: don’t worry, we know this is a challenging watch, but we’re going to hold your hand and make sure you don’t suffer too much. When what is essential to the process of the play is a sense of danger, or unease, of uncertainty. Will the villagers be hanged for their valour? Will the forces of law and order bulldoze them in a pit? How scared are they? How scared are we for them? Without this tension, the play becomes an exercise in speaking verse, no more than an archeological process. How to achieve these ends is the great challenge the director faces. Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb: better to fail valiantly than to anaesthetise the play’s radical premise.

Juan Rojo: So what do you think the town should do?

Alderman: The town should die, or kill these tyrants. We are many, they are few. 

pat garrett and billy the kid. (d. peckinpah, w. rudy wurlitzer)

A strange, episodic masterpiece from Peckinpah. Two hours that rumble along towards a long-awaited climax, which is inevitably anti-climactic, and deliberately staged as such. One of the two protagonists has to die, this much is known, only the manner of their death will be revelatory. That Kristofferson’s Billy is killed in such an unheroic fashion speaks to the filmmaker’s sympathies. There is no glory in Pat Garrett’s victory. As in the case of The Getaway, Peckinpah is rooting for the outsider; the villains are the cattle barons who have seized the land and with whom Garrett has made an uneasy alliance. He has sold his soul, his wife tells him, and no matter how much James Coburn’s implacable countenance might try to hide this truth, he knows and we know that she’s right. The existential struggle that underpins their conflict is artfully related by a director whose subtlety is masked by the vigorous masculinity of his films. This is as insightful a deconstruction of the western myth as you could hope for, and its relevance  in an era of snake charming capitalists is as valid as ever.

A note on Dylan. His puckish performance counterpoints the machismo of the other characters. He isn’t just acting: he’s infiltrating his whole cryptic take on art into the performance. A character that goes by the name of Alias, who doesn’t use a gun, who instinctively sides with the outlaw.