night flight [saint exupéry]

Curiously I finished the last ten pages of Saint Exupéry’s tale whilst in the sky above South America, which is where much of the novel takes place. (The rest takes place on the ground in Buenos Aires). I’d begun it a month or so ago, and although it’s short, the pressure of land-living lead to a fallow period of reading, and I only managed to recover the book once I myself had taken flight. It’s a short novel with an existential twinge. Curiously, again, I watched a documentary on the flight about a free climber, Alex Honnold, the man who climbed the sheer cliff face of El Capitan without ropes. (Free Solo, d. Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi).  Both Free Solo and Night Flight are meditations on society’s relationship with death. In Free Solo the climber, a naif, categorises himself as someone who has a warrior spirit, who finds value in life through the act of occupying the edge on which life and death is balanced. Saint Exupéry’s pilots explore similar celestial territory. Situated between the earth and the stars, they roam a neverland where the day-to-day realities are left behind; a celestial sphere which soars, Nietzschian, above humanity’s mundane glories. Night Flight, however, makes it very clear that this intergalactic consciousness is actually at the service of the mundane. The pilots are part of a system which has been carefully organised in order to deliver the mail from South America to Europe. Their existentialism is assimilated by society. Similarly, the free climber becomes part of a system, his individualism curbed by the presence of a camera crew and his growing awareness that the freedom he encounters in his perilous escapades is no longer something he can keep to himself. The world will claim its share. Both Saint Exupéry’s pilots and the free climber have been blessed to see and inhabit another world which mere mortals never get to experience. The longing to go beyond, to explore that space which is sacred, private, is still out there. But modernity curtails this instinct. We live this longing vicariously, through books or films. These adventurers are our high priests, our shamans, eccentrics communicating from the other side, revealing another way of living which the ‘civilised’ world has banished. 

the world of apu (w&d satyajit ray, w. bibhutibhushan bandyopadhyay)

The rain falls in Montevideo. I sleep in my new bedroom for the first time. The house has come close to flooding twice of late, and as the lightning flashes I can’t help worrying that if I were to sleep it will do so again, this time in earnest. The house is full of strange noises. Hungover, I try to adjust to the novelty but it isn’t easy. 

These kind of domestic details spring to mind because Ray’s film is so absorbed in similar details, transforming the mundane to something magnificent. The sequence where Apu and his bride, Aparna, learn to live with each other, is a celebration of the domestic; the simple joys which Apu learns to love, and then laments when they are cruelly curtailed. 

Having been fortunate enough to have seen films by Ray, Kurosawa, Bergman and Bertolluci on the big screen in recent months, what these filmmakers have in common is the ability to turn the screen into a world, one which transcends genre, or even classification. Humanism may be a common thread., but above all, the filmmakers seem to be embarking on a desperate quest to leave behind the traces of the worlds they have known or imagined. 

In which sense the great art of cinema is not so far removed from the great art of cave painting. These are the things I have seen. Marvel at them. 

our time (d reygadas)

It feels as though half the city is participating in the Montevideo film festival with the cinemas constantly full. The slew of films permits one to take in a range of cinema you would never normally process in such a short period of time. An inevitable fatigue begins to set in. Many of the films are over two hours long. Almost all have something challenging about them. These aren’t popcorn movies. 

It requires something remarkable to stand out, to grab the viewer with a sense of astonishment and wonder. Our Time achieves this. The opening hour is as good as anything you could hope to see in a cinema. The camera roves around a country estate near Mexico City. There are four groups of people. Young children, adolescents, servants and adults. Each one is its own defined unit, but the edges wash and overlap. There’s a sense of inhabiting a moment, which is extraordinary. (It made me think, obliquely of Virgina Woolf and the almost cubist quality of her writing.) Gradually the threads of a narrative become discernible, but there is no rush: the primary objective is to immerse us completely in this world with all of its layers and subtleties. 

Then, the film becomes extraordinary for other reasons altogether. The narrative kicks in, a narrative which recounts the gradual decay of the protagonists’ marriage. This is told in raw, even embarrassing detail. The husband’s jealousy transformed into a grotesque voyeurism, as he becomes a Shakespearian cuckolded fool, wilfully participating in his own fall from grace. The twists and turns of the marital collapse are traced with an excessive, masochistic glee. It is as close to watching the reality of a break-up as one imagines cinema could get. A sloppy, ineditable narrative which barrels all over the shop, dragging on, remorseless, driven by a logic that seems greater than the will of the two protagonists. Which is very much a mirror to the messiness of a break-up in real life; because break-ups are never clean, they always involve pain and humiliation in one guise or another.

When one then realises that these protagonists are portrayed by none other than the filmmaker and his wife, Natalia López, it adds a jaw-dropping layer of complexity to the experience. What kind of crazy fool would dare to expose him or herself in this fashion? Or are they not really exposing themselves at all? Where does life and end art begin, or vice versa? Is this an act of courage or stupidity? Our Time is one of the most insane pieces of filmmaking ever made. It’s like Charlie Kaufmann stoked on cocaine and tequila. A rambling, chaotic brilliant dark night of a movie that is unlike anything else you will ever sit through. 

barbara (w&d mathieu amalric, w. philippe di folco)

Barbara is a radical biopic. It’s ostensibly about the French singer, Barbara, played by Jeanne Balibar. But it’s also about the limits of cinema to capture truth; the possibilities and weaknesses of artifice. Director Amalric makes no attempt to tell a linear story. What we get are fragments, moments, recreations. The presence of the film crew is a constant: the trick of playing a scene and then pulling back the curtains to show the machinery functioning on the other side of the camera is used on various occasions. At one point, one of the real characters from Barbara’s life watches the filming of a scene in which he is fictionally represented, then permitting him to step in and explain to the crew that the room they’ve recreated doesn’t tally with the real room. Amalric himself appears frequently in the film as the director, frustrated by his inability to recapture the woman he knew in her entirety. This ludic film is held together by a barnstorming performance from Balibar. She both embodies the singer, and also embodies herself  as actress impersonating the singer. We see her rehearsing Barbara’s gestures. We see the line between the actress and the character elide to such a degree that at times it’s hard to tell which is which; a considerable achievement to both play the role and reveal the playing of the role at the same time. At the end of the film I was little the wiser about the details of Barbara’s life; but much the wiser about both her music and her idiosyncratic soul. 

about him or how he did not fear the bear (w&d nariné mkrtchyan, arsen azatyan)

Another film from the fringes of the former Soviet republic, describing, as the none-too-subtle title makes clear, the relationship of Armenia with present day Russia. The film’s opening titles state that it is based on a true story. A Russian soldier runs amok and kills an entire Armenian family. He then flees and seeks refuge in a Russian army base. The film follows three men who seek to go about the process of revenge by killing the soldier, one of them a priest. There is use of actual documentary footage, presumably taken from the protests that occurred at the time of the incident. There’s some stunning scenery in the mountains. There’s a near ten minute steady cam shot to open the film. There’s fruitful use of a children’s dance performance, complete with dancing bear, interspliced into the action. In short there’s plenty of lovely moments and promising ideas, but never enough to create a film that really grips the attention. 

monos (w&d alejandro landes; w alexis dos santos)

The producer, local boy Fernando Epstein, answered questions at the end of this screening of Monos, a Colombian film, made with money from at least half a dozen countries. Producers aren’t often invited to speak after the screening of their movies, usually it’s the star or the director. Obviously, part of the reason Epstein was there was because this is a Uruguayan film festival, but on another level it seemed highly appropriate. Because, as much as, or even more than the creative input of script and direction, Monos is a feat of production. As Epstein observed, this is cinema on a scale that is rarely seen in Latin America. The obvious physical challenges the filming must have demanded add value to what’s on the screen. There’s an ambition at work which makes for an unusual and powerful film.

The film is constructed around the premise of a cell of child soldiers in Colombia. Whilst it feels at times like a Hollywood conceit, the idea is inspired by experiences of real kids in the long-running civil war. The teenagers, known only by their nicknames (Lady, Wolf, Dog, The Swede, Bigfoot, Smurf etc), have been put in charge of an American hostage. They exist in an isolated mountain hideout, with nothing to do except squabble, party and get on each other’s nerves. The set-up is pure Lord of the Flies, and soon enough things start to unravel. Following an attack, the group move to a new base in the jungle, where the pressures of collective living ramp up. When their gutsy hostage tries to escape, things really start to get out of hand and there’s self-conscious nod to Apocalypse Now, as the film hurtles towards its conclusion. 

The script does somersaults as it tries to maintain a narrative thread, but the film is carried by the visceral camerawork, the completely convincing acting, the wild landscape and a portentously brilliant score by Mica Levi. It’s a real example of the way in which cinema depends on the contribution of multiple talents in order to make its 100 minutes or so of screen time work. It’s possible to criticise Monos as overblown or sensationalist. Or it could be viewed as one of those films which comes out of nowhere with a freshness and pulsating vision which mark it out as truly distinctive.