joker (w&d todd phillips, w. scott silver)

So, just to follow the thread. The Joker came out, was lauded, was a box office smash, then came the backlash. Bradshaw in the Guardian really has it in for it: “a shallow, ugly, boorish film”. I missed it when it came out, and sometimes it’s better not to catch a movie until the froth of the hype is over and done with. Given its box office success (apparently close to breaking $1billon) and given the backlash, I went out of a sense of duty more than anything else. I am firmly in the Scorsese camp when it comes to the Superhero franchises, a genre which holds about as much appeal as a Brazilian soap opera. So I wasn’t expecting much. The film started and there was some neat retro footage of New York, an understated chase sequence, some evocative titles. Sad protagonist with sick mother was kind of predictable and for a while it felt like I was watching You Were Never Really There all over again. Then came the implausible romance, which was curious, and all the time this slow, increasingly compelling narrative build. Who is the Joker? Is he hero or anti-hero? When the Bruce Wayne character appears the answer to that question still wasn’t clear, to the script’s credit. This character, sure he’s got a bit of De Niro in him, but more than that, he’s got a lot of Mersault, or someone out of Cannetti’s Auto da Fe, and gradually the power of Phoenix’s performance began to crystallise into something extraordinary, something that isn’t De Niro at all, it’s far closer to Dean or Zbigniew Cybulski or Kinski. And it began to dawn on me that this director, Todd Phillips, whose credits include The Hangover (parts 1,2&3) and, get this - Starsky and Hutch, the 2004 movie - was making what in the good old days they called an “art movie”. Not only was he making an art movie, he has also somehow convinced $1billion worth of audience to pay up to see his art movie.  

And yes, it’s also completely zeitgeist. It flips the tedious Batman narrative on its head. The ersatz strong guy is in fact a bastard. This is a movie about a country that can elect Trump, (or Johnson), one that can be manipulated by the media like zombies. It’s Jungle of the Cities or Drums in the Night, as we wait for the sheeple to finally be snapped out of it by some masked anarchic joker.  That’s the reason the film has resonated. It’s not the narrative beats. This is a slow, lumbering film, which glories in a cello score (kudos to Hildur Guðnadóttir) and a downbeat grade. The violence is actually restrained (three incidents), it’s earned and it’s cathartic. Above all it’s a film that creates a platform for the finest actor of his generation to remind us that great screen acting is something that should be dredged up from the depths, from a place deep inside, the darklands of the mad, the vain and the brilliant.  

chacabuco (d roberto suárez)

Suárez is the maverick genio of the Rio Platense stage. Roberto Arlt meets David Lynch. HIs characters are oddballs, wackos, weirdos, but bizarrely loveable. They’re loveable because they all belong to the same family. Literally, in so far as all the characters in Chacabuco are related, metaphorically, in so far as they are all off the spectrum somewhere, and theatrically, in that Suárez takes several years to develop, rehearse and produce his shows, meaning his band of actors become as tight and incestuous as a family unit. Sometimes this kind of process might not pay off, but in Chacabuco it does so, spectacularly. The players interact like a finely honed machine, aware of every look, every nuance of their companions' behaviour. It’s a play where it’s just as compelling observing those who aren’t speaking as those who are. The word is shared around between the company, something to be usurped or exchanged or held on to sometimes, as a character makes a bid for the attention they believe they, as a character in this unlikely tale, deserve. However, above and beyond the word, the feature which defines Chacabuco is the quality of the silences. A silence speaks as much if not more than words. Silence is that moment of strange uncertainty on stage, as though the characters and the audience are given pause to think: where are we going? Are we on the right course or are we completely fucked? The spectators, like the characters, are never really sure. In fact we’re not even sure if we’re living in the present or some other, parallel Borgesian time. There are about fifteen endings to Chacabuco, which is normally not a good sign. But when you’ve worked on a play for several centuries, you can get away with it. The wonder is that each ending is an advance or improvement on the last one, until we finally get to the last delirious end, which blows the mind and then comes back to stroke the mind with a send-off full of strange tenderness.  

nightmare abbey (thomas love peacock)

It’s curious the way in which some novels from the many novels written are selected to be put aside for posterity. Not being a scholar of early nineteenth century British literature, I don’t know how many other novelists there were out there when Nightmare Abbey was published but I’d wager there were several that were as worthy of immortality as Peacock’s flighty tome. Which is not not to say it’s terrible, it’s just not particularly good either. Its longevity hinges on the author’s links to the romantic poets, and the fact that the novel is a gentle satire on Shelley and Byron. What little plot there is revolves around the book’s protagonist, Scythrop, the heir to a gloomy East Anglian pile, Nightmare Abbey, getting caught up in romantic misadventures with two different women, Marionetta O’Carroll and Celinda Toobad. As the names suggest, the novel doesn’t take itself too  seriously. The author has a lot of fun reproducing the pretentious conversations had by Scythrop and his various visitors, another manifestation of the way in which the British adore anti-intellectualism. And fair enough, one might think, because the book has a certain wry charm. In the 21st century it might have made for a 2 series Netflix comedy, à la Addams Family, one of those whose first series is an unexpected success but then fizzles out by the time it gets to second series, with the realisation that there wasn’t that much meat on the bone in the first place. 

the third bank of the river: power and survival in the twenty-first century amazon (w chris feliciano arnold)

Feliciano Arnold’s book is the result of various trips to the Amazon, during the period between the 2014 World Cup and the Rio Olympics of 2016. Using Manaus as a base, the book is composed of several strands. The fate of the indigenous peoples is a central plank, but this is incorporated into a concise understanding of the forces at work in the Amazon, much of them finding their focal point in Manaus. Illegal deforestation, drug smuggling, dam building, mining, and the never-ending conflict between ‘virgin territory’ and the pressing demands of modernity. One of the most effective aspects of Feliciano’s book is the way in which he begins to establish the back story behind the myth of the ‘primitive’ tribe, explaining how tribes located in what is now Brazil have used the jungle as a safe haven to retreat to, a haven which has always been eroded but even more so now, when mining concessions and drug smuggling routes mean that the non-native people are penetrating deeper and deeper into the jungle. The book is also very effective on the debate over whether ‘unconctacted’ tribes should be left to their own devices or whether there’s a moral obligation to try and protect them before danger strikes. It’s a discursive read, with some engaging personal touches. Feliciano, (with his Brazilian blood), isn’t scared to go into the bars where the gringos wouldn’t normally go, and knock on doors which few gringo journalists would be interested or willing to approach. It’s this capacity to go deep not just into the jungle, but into more ‘Brazilian’ world which is parasitically feeding off the jungle which lends the book an added dimension. The line between the “virgin” Amazon and encroaching “civilisation” is one of the most urgent pressure points on the planet, but this can’t be studied from above. The forces which determine where this line is drawn (and it’s being constantly redrawn) can only be understood on the ground, talking as far as is possible to the ones who are pushing that line further and further into territory that was previously the preserve of the indigenous peoples. 

an elephant sitting still (w&d hu bo)

Film and context. I’ve just read the wiki entry for Hu Bo, the film’s director, writer and editor. One paragraph instantly throws the four hours of film I watched yesterday into a different light, a prism through which this film is bound to be seen forever more. 

The film itself takes place over the course of a single day. Á la Magnolia or Amores Perros,  it interweaves the stories of four characters in a backwater Chinese city, one which has yet to reap the full benefits of China’s economic transformation. The city is post-industrial, cold, filmed with a washed-out grade, as though colour itself struggles to thrive in this environment. Over the course of four hours we participate in this fateful day, when Wei Bu accidentally kills the brother of a local gangster, Yu Cheng, who himself has witnessed a man committing suicide at the start of the film, after discovering that the gangster has slept with his partner. Death stalks the screen; sooner of later it seems its going to catch up with at least one of the protagonists. 

Four hours is a lot of screen time. The pace is wilfully slow. There are myriad shots of the back of people’s heads as they walk towards the next point in their day’s journey. The director compels us to experience the same lassitude, the same sense of creeping, omniscient despair, that his characters face. Secondary characters, parents or school staff, live in a vortex of rage or petty corruption. When the hunter Yu Cheng and hunted, Wei Bu finally meet, this despair gives way to a Beckettian humour. Both laugh bleakly together at the absurdity of the game they have been caught up in. The poetic motif of a motionless elephant, which is part of a travelling circus in another city, nearby, unites them. For both, life is like the elephant, a vast, useless alien which just sits around, provoking curiosity by the mere fact of its existence. And, of course, the film itself is also the elephant, this extended, unwieldy body of time, which seeks to be so vast that it encapsulates every aspect of these characters’ harsh lives, but does so going nowhere. It too has provoked curiosity by the mere fact of its presence, an unwieldy suicide note.

Because, I learn from Wiki, Hu Bo himself is no longer with us. He committed suicide after the film was completed. A startling fact which seems to warp the density of this movie, giving it an immortal element. The director might not walk the earth anymore, but he lives on through his art. As though it is sending a sign that the sitting elephant can and will move at some point. And when it does, be careful, because it will tread on you.

the years (annie ernaux, tr. alison l strayer)

Ernaux’s text is the kind that one would love to be paid to write. Fragments of a life, bottled up in some kind of a chronological order, and served up on the plate. It’s a rambling, sub-Proustian voyage which captures the rapid scale of change post-war, the loss of innocence that came with the digital age, the sexual revolution and the highs of May ’68, the anti-climax that followed May ’68, and haunting of post-68. Ernaux’s personal experience is mapped onto the changing position of women within her society, one which allows her to break with the model inherited from her parents, and essentially relive her twenties in her forties. Everything is in there, from philosophers to politicians, from Concorde to 911. Small details like a solar eclipse unexpectedly resonate, “Blind faces raised to the sky seemed to await the coming of god or the pale rider of the Apocalypse. The sun reappeared and people clapped. There wouldn’t be another solar eclipse until 2081 and we would be long gone.” She’s also unafraid to address the rise of identity politics: “One no longer heard the words “goodness” or “good people”. Pride in what one did was substituted for pride in what one was - female, gay, provincial, Arab, Jew, etc.” There’s a laconic quality to much of her writing which allows Ernaux to flirt at the edges of her themes, never quite disclosing her personal take on them, letting them ride on the froth of her prose, leaving the reader never quite knowing where the wave will fall. 

the irishman (d scorsese, w steven zaillian)

What a strange experience it watching The Irishman. A bloated film, in keeping with late Scorsese, that has its high points and its low points. Which is woefully self-indulgent, but has moments of quiet genius. It was said that The Joker, which I have yet to see, was a homage/ pastiche of early Scorsese, but the same might be said of The Irishman. Much of the film is like watching someone doing Scorsese well enough to feel as thought they truly studied at the feet of the master, knowing that they could never quite attain to the standards he set. The same could be said for the acting; De Niro is too old to really carry the menace he once did, (although Pesci pulls it off), and Pacino has long since moved beyond being capable of being directed, treating acting like a party piece, which perhaps it is. We go not to watch great performances, but to watch the ghost of great performances. It’s not all that different from going to see the Stones or Dylan in concert. Perhaps the strongest acting comes from De Niro right at the end, when he’s confronting his weakness, and imminent death.

Indeed, this is an old man’s film. It makes one sorry in a way that the director didn’t follow the example of one of his idols, Kurosawa, and do a version of Lear. In the final half hour, when all the deeds have been done, De Niro is alone with his frailty and all of a sudden a tenderness, totally out of keeping with the rest of the film, creeps in. Something more honest, more homespun. Beyond the gratuitous budget-busting explosions and the ham-fisted violence. The scene with the nurse, whom he asks if she knows who Hoffa is, has a surprising pathos. De Niro finally laughs at himself, the wannabe who history has outrun. All his enemies and allies (who are all potential enemies) are dead, and he’s left isolated, philosophical. There’s a jarring scene with a daughter who has barely appeared in the script, the counterweight to the under-developed storyline of his relationship with another daughter, Peggy, who banishes him for his wicked ways. There’s a great scene with a coffin-salesman. Everything feels as though it doesn’t quite hang together, as though Scorsese wants to tell a hundred stories and he’s only got space for three or four, which is one or two too many. 

However, this sequence is the film’s coda, which comes 200 minutes in. After a potted history of the mob with De Niro & co trying to act down their ages. Kennedy’s come and go. The same old story is played on the old joanna. If anything it makes one wonder why no-one has ever tried to film the political novels of James Elroy, who did all of this so much more convincingly. Maybe the novels defy the scripting process. The mobsters progress is ramshackle, predictable, melodramatic. Again, this seems more like decoration, a giant arena wherein the old timers can strut their stuff. We come for the Pacino grandstanding, the De Niro bum-rush or his little-man-caught-in-a-big-man’s-game-face. We come for Pesci’s squeaky well-dressed psychopath. We come for Keitel’s suave arrogant charm, but that is merely hinted at, as it feels as though his part must have been written out in the edit. People haven’t swooned over The Irishman because it’s a great film. They’ve swooned over the Irishman because it allows them to remember what a great film felt like, back in the day.