balnearios (d mariano llinás)

Llinas’ first film is a blink-and-you-miss-it 80 mins long. Watching this, if he reminded me of anyone as a filmmaker it’s perhaps, no matter how tangential this might feel, Adam Curtis. An idiosyncratic vision which gives free rein to an intellectual playfulness. (Curtis might not like this word but all the same it seems appropriate). Llinas headed off towards the waters of fiction, whereas Curtis is all heavy-hitting politics, but watching their films feels like a similar experience. We are in the hands of a conjurer who will come up with unlikely associations and unpredictable combinations. They also both leave the viewer with the feeling that they are basking within the timeless waters of cinema. Even this reduced length film felt like it had an elastic timeframe. You never quite knew where you were headed or when the film might come to a natural conclusion. 

Balnearios, a word which is probably best translated as ‘resorts’ opens with some lovely archive footage of the Argentine and Uruguayan coast. The film is constructed out of various parts. There’s a section on the balnearios’ annual cycle, the transformation from the dead times of winter to the frenzy of summer. The film ends with an extended, warm-hearted section about an eccentric sculptor. At times the film feels like a slightly cobbled-together piece, a bricolage if you like, hints of a student movie, albeit one touched with brilliance. Towards the end of the first half of the film, however, there’s a section which is pure Llinas, anticipating Historias Extraordinarias. The story of a once-glorious, now decayed hotel is related via photos and recreated footage, detailing  how the hotel has passed through various hands in dodgy business dealings, at one point being owned by a fraudulent playboy with a French chanteuse wife. One of her songs plays balefully over images of the crumbling hotel. The sequence has a lazy Borgesian charm; an epic narrative recounted in ten minutes with a few broad brushstrokes, no more than a subset of the movie itself. A clear pointer for the direction in which this idiosyncratic filmmaker was headed.

woman under the influence (w&d john cassavetes)

Cassavetes' film is a gruelling, grimly compelling watch. Now regarded as a modern classic, it seems superfluous to offer anything other than a few observations.

Violence. The most disconcerting aspect of this film might be the very final sequence, after the kids have gone to bed, after Peter Falk’s Nick has slapped Mabel for the second or third time, after she has cut herself. It’s disturbing not because of the violence, but because of the way that the director seems to want to present this moment, as Mabel and Nick tidy up together, return to domestic normality, as an upbeat ending. The music is cheerful, Rowlands smiles, there appears to be complicity between the parties. I haven’t read commentaries on this and prefer to come at it cold: it feels almost crass. Just as much as this is a film about female psychosis, it’s also a film about domestic violence. Nick is a bully. A charming bully but also a violent one. HIs normalisation of violence (both physical and psychological) is surely the key driver in Mabel’s need to become insane to cope with it. Is Cassavetes being wilfully provocative with this conclusion? Or is it a testament to an era and a culture where this kind of patriarchal violence was the norm? However you look it, it’s a coup de grace, after all that has preceded this moment, that it should feel so chilling precisely because nothing shocking is happening. 

Acting. Without doubt, Rowlands and Falk offer masterclasses of a kind. What the film perhaps shows is how limited is the day-to-day palette of psychological representation. Cinema demands a shorthand approach to characterisation. Scenes are generally kept short and sharp; the emotional status of a character is conveyed through metaphor and elipsis. In Woman Under the Influence, the handbrake is off. Rowlands and Falk are permitted to explore in great detail all the ticks, mannerisms, weaknesses, strangenesses of their characters and their relationship. The long scenes permit a descent into the moment, captured by the camera, which is harrowing, bordering on the absurd (which is what any domestic dispute inevitably and tragically becomes). Hence a degree of reality infiltrates the camera which more conventional scriptwriting/ storytelling doesn’t permit. The nearest point of contemporary comparison is Reygadas’ Our Time. Acting in film is so often about minimalism, (think of Caine talking about how everything can be communicated by the face), but here Rowlands’ whole body seems immersed in the character, a body which seems to hum with inner tension and a secret inner life which is repressed by the restrictions of her day-to-day existence.

los últimos romanticos (w&d gabriel drak)

It would be tempting to use Los Ultimos Romanticos as a template for a less than perfect script development process. The film is essentially a buddie movie, constructed around the affable characters of Perro and Gordo (to Spanish readers those names alone perhaps suggest something slightly too easy), who get by selling marijuana plants in a small Rio de la Plata balneario. The off-season seaside village is deserted, as most of the residents are Europeans summer there in the European winter. However, one Hungarian couple have remained. Perro finds them dead in their bed. He also discovers a stash of four million euros in their home which he removes and hides with Gordo’s help. The title of the script refers to the fact that the two are in theory writing a film script, (although they seem to have no connection at all to the film business in any shape or form), hence the maverick cop who will prove to be their nemesis ascribes the duo the titular nickname. A couple of bohemians living their lives free from the system. The problems with the film are thus: firstly, neither character seems in any way ‘romantic’ (in the poetic sense of the word). Secondly, the discovery of the money should be a Maguffin, rather than the driver of the plot. Thirdly, the twists feel predictable. Fourthly, there’s no tension at all. In the end, Los Ultimos Romanticos falls into that dangerous comedy-caper territory which is so hard to pull off. For undisclosed reasons, filmmakers all over the world choose possibly the hardest genre of them all to carry off with recurring frequency. The bonus is this allows the script to include jokes for the locals to enjoy. The downside is that it’s very hard not to make a pedestrian comedy-caper movie, especially when the caper element is as contrived as it is here. 

the wind will carry us (w&d abbas kiarostami)

The film’s title makes it sound as though this might be an Iranian version of a Douglas Sirk movie. In practice this film couldn’t be further from melodrama, or even drama. Essentially, it’s a study of an engineer who visits a remote rural village with a team of work companions who are never seen and spends most of his time trying to find reception for his mobile phone. His phone has no problem ringing, but he cannot hear what’s being said. So he runs across the village, gets into his car, drives up a hill, gets out of the car, and speaks to someone in Tehran. Either his boss or his family. This happens approximately 75 times. The use of repetition is clearly deliberate, but the intention behind this use of repetition remained cryptic. The engineer’s desperate need to communicate? The chasm that exists between rural and urban Iranian society? All of the above? The engineer also befriends a boy, who is constantly (repeatedly) sitting exams. At the end of the film someone falls into a hole they have been digging but gets out alive. Which in some ways felt like a metaphor for watching the movie. I realise that Kiarostami is considered a genius, and I think I’ve seen other films of his which I engaged with more readily, but I have to confess to a feeling of bemusement brought on by The Wind Will Carry Us, a film whose hermitic qualities escaped me upon this occasion. Having said that, there is always the subjectivity of the moment to consider when watching cinema; perhaps on another day the film might indeed have blown me away. 

dolor y gloria (w&d almodóvar)

Sometimes a filmmaker succeeds in occupying a role within their culture which permits them to grow old gracefully, like an artist or a novelist. There’s no need to worry about commercial viability, because there are stars who will line up to take part; the filmmkaker is free to indulge their whimsy or their genius as they see fit, without the interference of script development or production executives. Almodovar has never been near Hollywood, no matter how much his aesthetic contains elements that tally with that other culture. There’s nothing austere about his films, or overly intellectual. They possess a design elan, a delight in colour, music, artifice, which would sit happily across the Atlantic. But he’s never strayed far from Madrid, where he’s allowed to get on with doing what he wants, with budgets that more than meet his needs. The fact that the films are produced by his own production company no doubt facilitates the process.

This allows him to make this kind of film; one which is about a topic that doesn’t get much airing: the ageing of a middle-aged man. Salvador, played by Banderas, is a film director stricken down by illness. His youthful brio has faded. He mopes. Banderas plays this in a splendidly low-key tone. At one point, pace Hamlet, he offers advice to an actor: don’t cry, don’t force the emotion. Which is precisely what Banderas succeeds in doing. He offers a portrait of a man who has everything but at the same time feels as though his life is lacking. He tries heroin, (a slyly subversive twist, for those who might say that Almodovar has lost his punch; how many other directors casually introduce heroin into their films without it being for heightened dramatic purposes?), he visits old friends, he finds a lost lover, he drifts through doctors’ appointments and, above all - he remembers. Age accrues memory and the more we age, the more memory there is to process. Dolor y Gloria articulates this in three ways: firstly through the reconstructed scenes, staring Cruz, from Salvador’s childhood. Secondly in the lucid and brilliant theatre sequence, where the actor who has appropriated Salvador’s memory text, delivers a soliloquy about the lost lover (which the lost lover happens to see), and thirdly in conversation. There’s something almost Beckettian about all this, albeit a gaudy, gay Beckett, who lives in the kind of apartment with the kind of art one imagines would have made Beckett deeply uncomfortable. 

The sum of all these parts is a meandering movie, with characters who appear and then slip away, with a narrative which is tenuous, contrived, charming. It’s a film of quirky moments and high tenderness. It’s ostentatiously and gloriously self-indulgent. It’s as akin to reading a novel as cinema can be, a loose-limbed novel that celebrates the process of ageing and the exquisite library of memory. 

tale of two cities [dickens]

Dickens is such a canonical part of British culture, whilst at the same time there’s something so relentlessly pedestrian about him, that it’s hard to know how to engage with him. A contemporary of Flaubert or Eliot, lacking any real psychological insight; a political writer who rails against injustice and yet manages to feel profoundly conservative in his approach to the act of writing. The connection between Loach and Dickens runs deep. A very British instinct to disassociate content and form which makes for the creation of stylistically barren works of radicalism. The British addiction to social realism writ large. 

All of which is, of course, not entirely fair. There are passages in Dickens’ writing which possess a heightened, poetic quality, one which offers another dimension to the storytelling. Not merely descriptive passages, but meditations on the nature of contemporary existence. Dickens looks down on his characters from on-high, a puppet master. They dance to his tune, which is part of the reason they never seem to be three-dimensional; they are too in thrall to the requirements of their creator. As a result, these sequences always feel slightly disconnected from the novel, they are rhetorical flourishes which frame the narrative, rather than propel it. 

Tale of Two Cities is a curious novel in so far as it’s one of the few Dickensian works which is largely set beyond the borders of the UK, as well as being set in the past.  An innate patriotism is stirred. The cornerstone of his writing, a critique of contemporary British society, is neutered. The writer seems genuinely conflicted regarding the subject matter he has chosen. On the one hand, he’s a writer who rails against social injustice. On the other, his horror at the forces unleashed by revolution is evident. Somewhere in the middle of this dialectic lies the synthesis of British moderation, a common sense or common humanity which means the British remain reluctant to engage with the forces of extremism. (There are traces of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Coriolanus to be found in this dilemma). It’s here that the Dickensian conservatism seeks its redemption. Change must be evolutionary, rather than radical. Flights of fancy might be permitted, but the characters will remain grounded, servicing the story at all times. Perhaps this is what makes Dickens seem like such a quintessentially British writer. 

How curious to find ourselves living in an epoch when it seems as though this Dickensian dialectic has been turned on its head. For the first time in 350 years it is the British who are acting in accordance with what has always been perceived, on British shores, to be a radical, dangerous continental model; whilst paradoxically seeking to move away from what is being represented as the over-regulated, straight-laced narrative constraints of the Europeans. So much of modern European history, on both sides of The Channel, can be traced back to the events of the French revolution. The Dickensian distaste for revolution, made plain in Tale of Two Cities, has been cast aside. The sober continentals look on in dismay as the furious Brexiteer tricoteurs knit their utopian dreams. 

the guilty (w&d gustav möller, w emil nygaard albertsen)

The Guilty was much heralded in the UK last year, so it was with a certain anticipation that I finally settled down to watch it. People had told me that it was gripping, compelling, an astonishing manipulation of meagre resources. Essentially the film is a fine advert for the Aristotelian virtues of time, place and action. There’s always a frisson to be had from engaging with a film in ‘real time’, watching the clock tick down. It permits the spectator to feel complicit in the action: if you were to leave now, would this affect the narrative? Hence, the edge of the seat-ness of the movie. In addition it’s a wonderful riposte to the “show/ don’t tell” brigade - because all the action occurs ‘offstage’. The protagonist, Asger, works as a police response handler, (He’s no longer on the beat for reasons which become clear as the movie unfolds), tracking an apparent kidnapping. He is trapped in the passivity of his situation, as he attempts to influence events beyond his immediate control, at the end of a phone line. The script provides numerous twists as it unravels, keeping the audience guessing. We are in the same place as Asger; we share his information and his ignorance, and as a result we ride the rollercoaster with him. It’s skilful and effective screenwriting, even if the milieu ends up feeling something out of an episode of a cop drama series, which restricts the narrative potency to a certain extent. 

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Watching the film, it struck me that there might be another reason for its effectiveness. In a way, Asger’s situation reflects and captures the modern condition. We are all prisoners in our private shells today. Incarcerated by information we receive through our phones or our computers. We stare at screens which deliver terrifying information and search for a way to influence events from a position of passive ignorance. These events, as seen through the screen, are also deceptive. The heroic anti-establishment Assange becomes a stool pigeon of the Bannonite extremists. Our judgement is faulty, unreliable. Our impotence is repeatedly exposed. We could, like Asger, smash up the furniture in anger at the destruction of the rainforest or the contamination of the seas or the latest racist comment by a politician we have no way of ejecting, but this anger serves no purpose at all. Gustav Möller’s film is an excruciating metaphor for the tragic hopelessness caused by our modern technological servitude. 

the naked kiss (w&d sam fuller)

Sam Fuller is one of the cult auteurs of post-McCarthy Hollywood, beloved of the French New Wave, among others. His films are out there, on a melodramatic edge. The Naked Kiss recounts the story of Kelly, a prostitute trying to change her ways, who falls in love with someone who turns out to be a child molester. Not a bad set-up for early sixties USA, about to tumble down the rabbit hole of that decade. The movie plays with the idea of an ideal US small-town, Grantville, which is all peaches and cream, but is actually the de facto domain of the pedophile Grant, the man Kelly falls in love with, after working in the paediatric hospital he has set up. There’s nothing particularly subtle about the movie and things that must have been shocking in the early sixties don’t come across as anything like today. Nevertheless, Fuller concocts a curious dreamlike vision of the USA (not a million miles away from either Wilder’s Our Town or Von Trier’s Dogville), where there’s a constant sense of menace beneath the surface, and the sensation that nothing is ever quite what it seems. One can just about conceive how impactful this must have been in its day, (and why Truffaut, etcetera were so enamoured), so that even the weirdly upbeat finale feels as though it carries a disturbing subtext.