yo la tengo @ museo de carnaval

There’s a healthy crowd in at the Museo de Carneval which is keen, buzzy, eager to breathe the rarified air of the Yankee muses. It feels like the kind of occasion that might have been banned under Cromwell and might not be encouraged by other authoritarian regimes. Fittingly, perhaps, when I get home I learn that Mudami has won the NY mayoral race. Yo La Tengo seem to represent the good profile of North America. Free thinking musos who don’t look like they’d ever wear designer clothes.

I saw Yo La Tengo at Somerset House about 25 years ago, when I was another person living another life. Ira Kaplan makes much play of the fact that many of their songs were written before much of the audience was born. It suggests a deserved pride in their longevity. Perhaps I have been reborn in the interim. I don’t know what got me into them. Their Hispanic name is a red herring: they’re from New Jersey and as evidenced by the brief comments, they’re not Spanish speakers. (Wikipedia offers the origin story of the band’s name.) They look pretty much the same now as they did back then. They also seem to take the same enjoyment out of playing. Their set is subtly constructed, ranging from feedback heavy rocking out to delicate ballads. The range is as impressive as the way the audience’s sensory journey is curated. They restore the faith on many levels, not least when they invite Eduardo, a young local guitarist on stage to play a song with them.

The set ends with a cover of I Do Believe by the Velvets. The song, sung a cappella, is moving. It offers a flavour of what it might have been like to watch the Velvets, veering from the melodic to the deranged. Fellow emissaries of the right kind of North American freedom.

persuasion (austen)

I turned to Austen’s late novel in a bid to go back to a classic after wading through too many contemporary novels that seemed to be saying less than they pretended to. Austen has a sanctified status in the UK. A pioneer of the female novel, a subtle investigator of the human heart. Not to mention a fertile source of eminently commercial period drama.

The novel sets out a clear and predictable obstacle for Anne, its protagonist. Eight years after declining the proposal of her suitor, Wentworth, on the advice of friends and family, she finds herself still in love with him. When he returns to her circle after years abroad with the navy, Anne is convinced Wentworth has moved on, as well as harbouring resentment against her for having refused him. At the age of 27, she feels her best days are behind her, and has to come to terms with disappointment in love and life. Part of the problem with the novel is that Anne is so damned nice, whist the rest of her family are monsters. Austen mines this for both humour and moral judgement. Her father and two sisters are vain and selfish. Next to them, any normal individual would look good, but Anne is positively saintly. Beyond her lack of confidence, she never does anything wrong. There comes a point in the novel when we long for Anne to screw up in some way, but this never happens.

Which reflects the fact that, from the moment the novel moves with Anne to Bath, not a lot seems to occur at all. There’s a long chapter of exposition on the part of Anne’s friend to tie up a subplot regarding her cousin who seems intent on marrying her; a few set-piece moments where Anne and Wentworth cross before the final resolution of their story. But it all feels disarmingly pedestrian. The penultimate chapter contains Anne’s meditation on the difference between the sexes, which one imagines marries to Austen’s view, along with her wry observation that you can’t trust novels on the subject as the medium has been dominated by men. A delightfully arch observation, but this alone is insufficient to lend the novel any real sense of depth. It’s a strange experience to read a novel that has been so lauded, adapted and fetishised within British culture, only to find oneself reaching out for a branch of significance as one drifts away on its mellifluous tide. 

pasolini (w&d abel ferrara, w. nicola tranquillino, maurizio braucci)

Ferrara’s biopic offers Dafoe one of his finest roles. This is clutch material for the director, and the film feels assured, confident, but surprisingly safe. It opens by presenting scenes from 120 Days, suggesting it will investigate the darkness or hell that Pasolini will speak of in an intriguing interview. But the film is almost too well shot and acted. Everything feels pitch perfect. Ferrara’s rough edges have been smoothed out, there are no moments that either shock or disgust. Having said which, the film, set over the course of the day of Pasolini’s death, is educative, an effective introduction to the life of the Italian poet-cineaste. 

sullivan's travels (w&d preston sturges)

A film about filmmaking. A film about filmmaking when the world is at war. What is the lodestar the filmmaker should follow? A dissertation on the state of the nation? Or escapist entertainment?

Sullivan is a successful Hollywood director who makes crowd-pleasing comedies. But his social conscience is nagging him. He wants to learn how the other half live. So he sets off to roam the country as a tramp, albeit in the company of the charming Veronica Lake. His journey is meticulously plotted, moving from broad comedy towards a suggestion of social realism, with a  twist at the end which would make any script doctor happy. At one point, at his lowest ebb, Sullivan is a prisoner who attends a prison cinema screening in a church. The screening is of a Disney cartoon, which everyone in the audience finds riotously funny. This scene, smartly meta, offers a précis of the film’s premise. Sullivan laughs and realises that cinema as entertainment possesses a healing value which social realism, he believes, never will.

There’s a couple of points about this scene: firstly it takes place in a black southern baptist church. According to Wiki, Walter White, the Secretary of the NAACP, wrote to Sturges: “I want to thank you for the church sequence in Sullivan's Travels.  I was in Hollywood recently and am to return there soon for conferences with production heads, writers, directors, and actors and actresses in an effort to induce broader and more decent picturization of the Negro instead of limiting him to menial or comic roles. The sequence in Sullivan's Travels is a step in that direction… “ So one way the film impacted was counter to the film’s eventual thesis. The other point is that Sturges originally wanted to use Chaplin instead of Disney, but couldn’t get the rights. Of course, Chaplin spent his life negotiating the same balance between entertainment and social realism, and perhaps his films triumphed as a result of their amalgamation of the two: stories about tramps that made people laugh.

Because some of the most telling scenes in Sullivan’s Travels are when Sullivan and Lake visit the marginal, impoverished world of down-and-outs, giving them some kind of representation. We’re only a few steps away from Rossellini’s neo-realism. Film always has to tread a line between entertainment and politics, laughter and the cruel realities the artform emerges from. Sullivan’s Travels does as good a job as anything you’ll see at exploring these contradictions, even if the stated resolution doesn’t exactly reflect the reasons for the film’s effectiveness. 

dengue boy (michel nieva, tr. rahul bery)

Dengue Boy belongs to that fin-de-siècle genre, the video game novel. I don’t get to read that many of them, but it reminded me of Pelevin, and I imagine William Gibson, (who I’ve never read). The virtual reality novel, where characters plug into worlds within worlds. Neva makes an explicit reference to Borges towards the end of the book, (The Aleph), suggesting a larger genealogy to the genre, and perhaps it might also be said to reference back to Huxley, Swift, More, etcetera. The invention of imaginary parallel worlds has always been the stuff of fiction. The technological gizmos of high capitalism only serve to garnish another layer of accessibility to these worlds.

Neva’s dystopian text is set in a futuristic climate-warmed hothouse world where concepts like cold are a thing of the past, only existing in expensive reproductions for obscenely wealthy tourists who travel to an ice-free Antarctica for a taste of something they have heard of in folk tales. The world is afflicted by giant mutant mosquitos which are capable of laying waste to everything in their path, spreading disease, death and destruction in their wake. These diseases are then monetised, as the bio-industry produces profitable vaccines to counter them. The reference to Covid 19 is implicit. In amongst the catastrophe porn, Neva invents a new sub-genre of mosquito splatter-gore. That the novel is Argentine is perhaps surprising, with its playful reimagining of Argentine geography post the rise in seal-levels which has liquidated Buenos Aires and the coast. Above and beyond the politics, the mash-up of ideas and excess seems to echo the trajectory of contemporary Argentina and its current Dengue Boy president. 

magnolia (w&d pt anderson)

Cine Universitario has a healthy, youthful turnout on a Friday night. I guess I’m the oldest member of the audience. They seem to drink it all in, PTA’s grandiose, operatic epic, which swoons through the course of a single night. There’s more than one reference to opera in the film - Stanley even sings opera at one point. The whole film is underscored to an extreme degree, as though the director is suggesting he is not so much writing a film as composing one. I read a Wikipedia quote of Anderson’s saying that looking back on the film he would have cut twenty minutes, which isn’t such a ridiculous suggestion but also seems irrelevant. The movie could be an hour shorter or twelve hours longer. Certainly some storylines could have been teased out more - Donny’s and Phil’s to name but two. But this isn’t so much the film of an LA night as the symphony: the characters are instruments who have their solos, but are part of a wider whole, one that can mess with the logic of time; (whilst Claudia cleans her apartment waiting to open up for the cop, half a dozen storylines are running ahead, but it doesn’t matter, within the geometry of action, all that matters is that she will open the door); with the logic of chance, as the bookending narrator declares, laying cards on the table; all of this without in any way jeopardising the coherence of the music of the film. Anderson even does this with the score, willing to lay music over music, music over dialogue, noise on noise, the parts constantly subsumed to the whole. It is indeed operatic, exhausting, but also moving, portentously moving, perhaps, Yankee style, but moving nonetheless. And as the credits rolled and the final Mann song played, the youthful audience, as though in an opera house, burst into spontaneous applause. 

jumping jack flash (kieron pim)

This is a biography of David Litvinoff, a figure from sixties London who moved between the worlds of rock and roll, crime and cinema. He moved in the same circles as the Kray Brothers and the Stones, to name but two of his extensive web of connections. He was a friend of Donald Cammell and, the book asserts, the hidden animus of Performance. Events in that film directly echo incidents within Litvinoff’s own life. His face was slashed at one point in Earl’s Court as a punishment/ warning from the Kray twins for betraying them. All of which is fascinating, and Pim’s account of the interweaving of the criminal world and the rock world is comprehensive. However, there comes a point when the reader starts to realise that Litvinoff, whilst a larger-than-life personality, might not be quita as interesting as he or the book believe. Pim threads his personal fascination with LItvinoff and their shared Jewish heritage through the book. He travels to Australia, hangs out with Eric Clapton and minor aristocracy, as he seeks to get to the nub of his subject’s mystery. The B-narrative is why the author is so fascinated with Litvinoff, and there were moments in the second half of the book when this reader wishes that the author had gone further into exploring his own personal obsession. 

the mastermind (w&d kelly reichardt)

This is going to be a shaggy dog story, I thought to myself, as the fetching titles unwound. A nod to those seventies crime caper movies, all fixed camera long shots, revealing details that might or might not be crucial for the story, demanding the viewer’s attention. The eminently likeable Josh O’Connor planning a heist, with more and more obstacles thrown up, just as the script gurus would have recommended. No point making a heist movie without speed bumps. As things continue to unravel for O’Connor, who carries on being likeable, O’Connor can’t help being likeable even if he’s robbing old ladies, the movie seems to have two possible directions: a happy ending as he succeeds in somehow reconciling with his family or a tragic denouement where he ends up estranged from them forever. Reichardt subverts this dialectic by coming up with a third outcome, what I would term the Bergman-ending, when you just drop out of the story altogether before engaging with that irascible third act. This could also be termed the Shaggy-Dog-Story ending, which I don’t recall the script doctors ever promoting, but has its advantages. Reichardt has frequently sought a way to ovoid the straitjacket of narrative conventions. In The Mastermind, with its portentous title, perhaps there is a sly critique of this idea of perfection, the notion of the perfect crime/ the perfect script/ the perfect film. 

armand v (dag solstad, tr steven t. murray)

Solstad’s novel has the beguiling premise of being an assemblage of footnotes towards the novel he might have written. Might have written in so far as - there might be a novel which exits but will never be read to which these footnotes belong, or the novel might just have existed in his imagination (in which case could it be said to exist or not?). This playful premise would seem to open the door for non-linearity, deviations, Mornington Crescent. Which it does, to an extent, even if a surprisingly coherent narrative emerges of a man who studied the sciences, then got married, had a child, became a diplomat, separated, married again (this is less clear), had a son who as a young man chose to join the army, against type and his father’s wishes,  and then suffered an accident meaning the father has to take care of the son in spite of their distanced relationship. As this storyline suggests, there is a determined narrative running through the novel, even if it is only told partially, with gaps. The novel also cleaves to that other shibboleth, character, with Armand, the diplomat, emerging as a strong, complex protagonist. All of which left this reader hankering after more disconnect than the novel provides, perhaps. It’s a staccato read, as some sequences of footnotes arrive in a rush and other footnotes are extended over several pages, including a brilliant account of Armand perceiving the head of a US ambassador as a pig’s head, in the gents of a gilded London venue. This is worth the price of entrance alone, albeit there is the lingering sense that Solstad is sketching out an idea which might have produced a more radical book than it does. 

manas (w&d. marianna brennand, w. carolina benevides, camila agustini)

Manas tells the story of a Tielle, a 13 year old girl growing up in the Amzonian state of Para. She lives in a house which can only be accessed by river, with her mum, her sister, two brothers and her dad. Her older sister ran away to Rio several years ago. The reason for her flight soon becomes obvious: Tielle’s dad is a child abuser who tells his pregnant wife he wants Tielle to sleep in his bed, having cut the cord of her hammock. Tielle is fast forwarded towards adulthood with dramatically predictable results. Manas is well filmed and acted and the script rolls along effectively. Its exotic location is part of the film’s appeal, which given this is a film about child abuse might seem paradoxical. It’s notable to see the names of the Dardennes brothers in the credits, along with Salles. There are clear echoes of the Dardennes’ themes and aesthetic (roving hand-held camera) but despite Jamilli Correa’s compelling performance, there’s a formulaic element to events which undercuts the urgency of the message.