jude the obscure (thomas hardy)

three possible readings:

1, Perhaps the preferred reading. Hardy skewers a system which is weighted against the less fortunate, which promotes mediocrity in place of honesty and talent, which is a damning mirror of a society which hasn’t evolved in over a century. Jude’s calvary, from aspirant man of letters to stonemason martyr remains a pertinent lesson for Britain, where privilege continues to trump endeavour. Most glaringly in the faux glory of Oxbridge, that sham system which has perpetuated class divisions over the course of centuries. 

2, This is a novel which destroys the self-esteem of its supposedly heroic protagonists, Jude and Sue. The writer curses them with a fallibility neither deserve in order to make his polemical point, in the process reducing their struggle to a mean, petty romance, doomed to disaster. The writer’s personal marital hang-ups get in the way of his own characters, whose endless procrastination diminishes them. 

3, This is not a novel about the class system, or even about education. It’s a novel about the pernicious influence of societal norms, driven by reactionary forces, in this case represented by the institution of marriage and the church. It’s Hardy’s counterblast to the conservatism of Shakespeare, to the false happy-ever-after occidental romantic myths, which continue to be perpetuated by the gender stereotypes inherited by females and males alike. As such Jude the Obscure is genuinely radical text, not so much because of its critique of Oxbridge and the education systems, but because of an altogether more radical critique of marriage and monogamy. A critique which was a precursor of the sexual revolution of the sixties/ seventies and the identity revolution of the 2010’s.

Of course there’s no reason why these readings are mutually exclusive. Suffice to say that Hardy’s last novel is a slippery, complex beast, which frustrates straightforward interpretation. With moments when it feels as though even the writer isn’t exactly sure where his novel is headed, what he’s going to do with the troubling characters he has created. Mulling it over it’s curious to think how close Hardy’s world was to Laurie Lee’s. Which suggests that for a brief time in the twentieth century, social mobility became more feasible in the United Kingdom, although one fears that at some stage the tide has turned and we are receding back towards the obscurity of the Britain whose pathways Jude forlornly patrolled. 

days (rizi) (w&d tsai ming-liang)

 This is the type of film which depending on your point of view:

Offers a transcendent view of humanity

Gives art cinema a bad name

Only exists as a result of the existence of a festival circuit.

Of all those, the third is perhaps the hardest to argue with. The opening shot, which might be five minutes long, of a man staring out of a window as a storm rages outside, unseen, sets the tone. The film is composed of single shots, most lasting at least 90 seconds, if not much more. A man prepares food. A man has some kind of acupuncture treatment. A man has a massage. For the first half of the film I speculated that this was all leading towards some kind of revelatory finale. The man is a boxer or a hitman or an astronaut. In fact, the denouement is the ten minute (?) massage scene. The man then pays his masseuse, and then finds himself missing him. Apart from the slightly salacious aspects of the massage, which is far from erotic, there is no pay-off, no denouement. The film marches on with its rigid, inflexible portrait of humanity, tightly managed within the single shot, with no need for dialogue or artistry. It’s painting by numbers, rudimentary, tedious, perhaps revelatory. Only the act of memory will determine the film’s true impact. 

lillian (w&d andreas horvath)

Andreas Horvath’s unorthodox road movie, wherein the protagonist is only seen in a car on one occasion, feels like an instant classic. A classic because it taps into that most elemental American narrative, the travelling hobo. We are on the road with Lillian, as she embarks on her Quixotic quest to cross the US from New York to Alaska. Lillian never talks. There’s no back story. We don’t know why this Russian woman takes this decision, what has driven her to these extremes. It’s the journey laid bare. In the process we are introduced to what might be called the real America. A land of thrift stores and local radio stations. Of laundrettes and security cameras. Also, tellingly, a land of little kindness. Only two people in the film makes an effort to help this wandering stray. A sheriff lends her his coat, a woman gives her some drinks. In part it could be said that this is due to Lilian’s refusal to interact, for reasons we never learn, but it also shows up a land with at least 70 million people who seem diametrically opposed to the notion of the good samaritan. Obviously there’s a scripted element to this: the filmmaker chooses what he wishes to show, but the loneliness of the long distance walker is never interrupted as she marches towards death. The film is replete with cinematic references. There’s the bus from Into The Wild, Grizzly Man’s black bear, Antonioni’s death valley and, perhaps, Lilian’s end echoes that of the wanderer in Kalatozov’s Unsent Letter, alone on an ice floe. Lilian has much in common with Kalatozov’s film. The growing tension that is generated through the mere act of survival. We root for Lillian, played with a blank-face brilliance by Patrycja Planik, and the worse things get the more we root for her. Her journey feels absurd, doomed, but that doesn’t matter. As long as she keeps going, there’s hope. The starkness of her journey is one that the film’s producer Ulrich Seidl, would be proud of, and his influence can be felt. However, this film belongs to Planik and Horvath (who not only directed but also photorgaphed, edited and composed the music). Once again, the cinematic act of defying the odds, striking out to create something that seems absurd, makes for an astonishing film, putting similar Hollywood fare (Into the Wild, The Revenant, etc) in the shade. 

la vida invisible de eurídice gusmao (w&d. karim aïnouz, w. inés bortagaray, murilo hauser)

Aïnouz’s film is a melodramatic love letter to a lost Rio de Janeiro. The recreation of 1950s Rio, in this tale of sisterly love, is spellbinding. A place of wild, ragged gardens, of steepling views, of steamy clubs and stifling families. But, significantly perhaps, no guns, no gangs. A poverty which transcends race, but also unites above and beyond race. I have too little knowledge of the city to know whether Aïnouz’s vision is idealised or not, but it is always beguiling and fascinating to see a Latin American film aspire to the sweeping grandeur of early Coppola. The story itself is hung in a somewhat contrived narrative device. Two sisters are separated, pine for each other, both believing the other to be in Europe, when in fact both are stuck in Rio, facing their personal challenges. It’s all slightly clunky, with the separate narratives evolving side by side. There’s one lovely moment of dramatic tension, when their respective offspring meet unknowingly, but as the device is spun out over two hours is starts to lose traction. However, in a sense it feels as though the narrative is just a hook upon which the director can hang his primary theme, which is the role of the female in society. One sister, Euridice, battles to be able to continue playing the piano, at which she is extremely talented, in spite of being a mother. The other, Gilda, fashions a life for herself despite being driven out of the family home, working in a factory, eschewing the role of prostitute which at one point beckoned. The film is full of physicality. Convincing sex scenes, filmed from a female perspective, a gruelling childbirth scene, and more. In these visceral moments, the film becomes more than the story, painting a vivid portrait of womanhood in an evolving Rio. 

love me tender (w&d klaudia reynicke)

Reynicke’s film is essentially a tender portrayal of mental illness. Seconda is a dance obsessed young woman who suffers from agaraphobia. When her mother dies and her father does a runner, she’s left alone in the house. What can save her? Although there’s something faintly predictable about the initial set-up, with its echoes of Repulsion, the film takes wing when Seconda, played with a gamine intensity by Barbara Giordano, finally escapes the house. She collects a lover, kidnaps another would-be lover, and goes on an extended flight of fancy in the woods. The film is whimsical, floating between dirty naturalism and heightened fantasy sequences. Whilst there are echoes of Lanthimos’ Dogtooth, it is also reminiscent of another recent Swiss movie, Alloys, (d Tobias Nölle), which in a similar manner dealt with the threads linking society, alienation/ atomisation and mental health. It makes one wonder what they’re putting in the Swiss water. This seeming land of plenty is actually peopled by lost souls struggling to come up with a means of coping with the complexity of the big wide world; the lure of escaping into a fantasy world proving far more enticing. 

mumbo jumbo (ishmael reed)

Well now… this is perhaps the ur-text of 2020. Pandemic/ BLM/ Conspiracy theories. Mumbo Jumbo’s got it all. The Jes Grew pandemic is sweeping the States, making everyone dance to its crazy rhythms. The Knight’s Templar are desperate to repress it. They set out to discover the secret blockchain code which will reveal its Egyptian mysteries. A race war plays out on the streets of New York. In the midst of which Reed gives an erudite and definitive guide to the history of Osiris and Isis and Moses and the origins of just about everything. Mumbo Jumbo is as the title suggests a rip-roaring nonsensical blast of glorious imagination, strident enough to blow down the walls of Jericho. Ishmael Reed’s novel is Pynchonesque in its scope and refusal to take itself too seriously. Its brash, prophetic prose suggests that not much has changed in a hundred years of the USA. Perhaps because it refuses to pander to a conventional downbeat minority narrative, or perhaps because it’s just so out there, Mumbo Jumbo would not appear to be part of the canon, either of US literature or US Afro-American literature. But as 2020 has blessed us with all the ingredients which seemed so outlandish in Reed’s imagination, perhaps people might start to recognise Mumbo Jumbo for what it is: one of then most astute portrayals of the USA ever written. Egyptian founding myths and all. 

the audition (w&d ina weisse, w daphne charizani)

The Audition is one of the most effective examples of a tight script and an even tighter edit that you could ever hope to see. We’re in deep in Piano Teacher territory, the highly strung violin teacher, Ana, played meticulously by Nina Hoss, seeking to channel her frustrations via the tutoring of a talented but fragile student. Unlike Haneke’s film, The Audition never veers towards sexual abuse, although there are two moments of physical intensity in their relationship which hint at the passion both have in common, a passion which finds its outlet in music. There’s a taut subtlety to the narrative which is constantly in play, something which is never flashy, a pot that simmers, threatening to boil over, finally reaching a heightened dramatic finale. The script weaves its multiple elements together effortlessly. One might say that the script is far from seamless - there are abundant seams. Ana has relationships of differing intensity with four different males (the student, her son, her husband and a cellist lover). She is also managing the demons of her own stress related abandonment of concert playing, a woman whose talent buckles in the fact of her temperament. The elements are many and varied, but the edit keeps the film moving at all times, with a suitably musical precision, scenes cut just at the point when their kinetic energy is sufficient to drive the next scene forwards. Hence even a scene as seemingly banal as Ana walking to work is inveighed with menace and meaning. The craftswomanship at work in the film, on every level, makes for an absorbing tale which never crosses the line into melodrama, no matter how close to the line it walks. 

los conductos (w&d camilo restrepo)

Another low budget movie, shot on 16mm, a Colombian film made with the support of the French group, L’Abominable. This tells in a roundabout fashion the story of a hitman, who wants to discard his gun and escape a life of violence. The story is presented in images, grainy, arresting. The choice of location becomes in itself key in a film that clearly has little budget for art design. An illegal factory, making rip-off Adidas and Kappa sportswear. A disused warehouse. A forest with a view over the city of Medellin. The city hovers at the edge of the film, seen in occasional glimpses, an escalator, a person on the phone in the background. Perhaps as a result of its shorter span, the images feel as though they have a greater economy. The film concludes with a poem and there is indeed something poetic about the recurring use of imagery, the handle of a gun, the mesmeric claustrophobia of an underpass, the ball of copper that is stolen from the city’s wiring. Los Conductos maintains its pace and intrigue to its somewhat stagey end. There’s a real sense of the underbelly of a Latin American city in its portrayal of Medellin, a place where survival can be found in the most remote, dirtiest corners of the city and in its search for this representation, the film transcends its limited budget. 

the metamorphosis of birds (w&d catarina vasconcelos)

Catarina Vasconcelos’ film has the feel of a prose poem. The narrative is sketchy. As the film unfolds we gradually realise that this is the story of a family, a homage by the filmmaker to her mother who died too young. But these elements emerge elliptically. The film is constructed from artfully staged frames. A woman tries to right a fallen tree. A man stares out of a porthole. A boat with a tree sets out onto open water. A woman submerges in a river. The film is an assemblage of these moments. It’s slow, immersive, without the current of narrative to drive it along. At the same time, the meditative approach contains beauty. A Mapplethorpe-esque montage of flowers opening. A sequence of African stamps. A language of images, assembled to reveal the story of a family. 

the lover (marguerite duras, tr. barbara bray)

Duras is a name whose resonance perhaps surpasses the knowledge of her work in the Anglo-Saxon world. I had an extremely vague memory of having read her most famous novel about thirty years ago, but if this was the case, few memories remained. The novel is a strange hybrid, reminiscent in many ways of the writing of Annie Ernaux. A feminine frankness married to a deliberate flouting of narrative norms. The story roams from point to point, at times a fictionalised account of a love affair in French Indochina between a rich Chinese man and a poor French teenager, at other times a family narrative, describing the trials of the narrator’s experiences in the colonies and her turbulent relationship with her mother and her brothers. In general told in the first person, the writer has no qualms suddenly switching to the third person if she wants to change the framing. The result is easily digestible, on the edge of salacious, and incontrovertibly auto-fiction. The writer as subject, the doyenne of her story. With scope to lie and elaborate, no doubt, as a cursory read-up around the novel reveals. Perhaps the most telling aspect of the novel from this reader’s point of view is the description of the torpid world of the colonialist. Never capable of integrating into the society they inhabit, seeking to construct some kind of false entity which represents a homeland but which can never become one. As such the colonial project always seemingly doomed to failure and, more than that, a form of existential despair, an eternal failure to connect. The mother’s depression, the older brother’s psychosis, the treatment of the Chinese lover and his own neuroses, all seem to reveal the hollow foolishness of this imperial reach, one which comes at a cost to all involved. 

the third reich (w. bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

After an extended Bolaño hiatus, the blog returns to its most-read writer. In times of crisis turn to a sure bet. Unfortunately, Third Reich proves to be strictly minor Bolaño, a long shaggy dog story about a German war games champion who gets stuck in Catalonia when a holiday friend of his girlfriend mysteriously vanishes in a windsurfing accident. This brief synopsis instantly marks the novel out as being in prime Bolaño territory, even more so if it’s added there’s a scarred Latin American beachcomber who plays a prominent role in the narrative. However, the novel itself feels baggy, it’s wide Bolaño, rather than focussed Bolaño. It goes round the houses as it plays out its central device which is a board game reenactment of the second world war between the protagonist and the scarred beachcomber. The second world war took six years from start to finish, and if the novel isn’t quite that long, there are undoubtably moments when it feels as though it’s being played out in order to accommodate the twists and turns inherent in the device. The narrator also tends towards the cold intellectual Bolaño rather than the warm poetic one. One imagines the novel as an earlier work, and in this context it is of course fascinating to see how the writer evolved, how he chiselled his craft, to merge ideas with content with emotion. On the other hand, it might be that this was not an earlier work at all. In which case this kind of ad hoc observation should be labelled as trite and indicative of nothing. 

bacurau (w&d juliano dornelles, kleber mendonça filho)

Bacurau is a curious case of the film itself being far better than its script. How can this be, you might say? But the truth is that the script has more loose ends than you can count. The female protagonist who hardly figures in the plot. The water crisis that isn’t left just unresolved, but also forgotten. The shallow attempts at characterisation of the mercenaries. Udo Kier’s motivation for turning on his own. And there’s plenty more. However, somehow, in spite of all this, Bacurau more or less triumphs. Firstly because it uses the classic trope of the Western, and turns it on its head, making the gringos the bad guys. Secondly, and above all, because of the portrayal of the small town of Bacurau itself, with its large cast of diverse and engaging characters, its communal events, its resident DJ, its solidarity. The last element is perhaps the most telling. As mentioned, it looks as though Teresa is set up to be the protagonist as she arrives back in the threatened town, but her narrative is never developed. Instead it’s the town itself which emerges as the protagonist, the town which fights back and triumphs over the gringo invaders. The narrative is wafer-thin but a wafer filled with ice cream. There are so many details to enjoy, so many telling moments, and above all such conviction in the acting and the directors’ capacity to capture what the interior of Brazil is really like whilst adhering to a genre format. 

everything is cinema (richard brody)

Richard Brody’s biography of Godard is monumental. It’s an epic journey through the life of a filmmaker via his films. One feels as though Godard ought to be grateful to the gods for granting him such a dedicated, comprehensive biographer, although one also feels that he, Godard, probably doesn’t give a shit. The tension between Godard’s professional and working life is constantly in play, and Brody delineates this tension forensically. From his relationships with his leading actresses to his squabbles with contemporaries (most notably Truffaut) to the fraught working conditions on set. For Godard, film-making would appear to become, increasingly, a calvary, an inexhaustible source of both suffering and joy. Brody traces the evolution of this process film by film, both reawakening the reader’s fascination with the films themselves but also the filmmaker’s enthusiasm for the process.

One of Brody’s theories is that Godard’s later films, far less well known than those which established him back in the day, are in many ways more profound and deserving of praise than those earlier gobstoppers. (He’s particularly harsh on Bande Á Part). Of course, these films, as the book acknowledges never reached the audiences of Breathless, La Chinoise, Weekend, Contempt, etcetera. Most readers won’t have seen the later films, and I belong to that most readers category. It feels, as we enter this zone when Godard struggled more and more to get films made, and struggled more and more in the making of them, as though the second half of the book occupies a darker, sadder process, albeit one which Brody assures us, in our ignorance (or at least mine) is one whose artistic richness has been neglected.

From a filmmaker’s point of view, the book is inspirational. It highlights how Godard’s quest for innovation meant he was always at the forefront of new cinematic possibilities, sometimes as a result of his own investment (in the development of hand-held cameras, for example), and sometimes as a result of good old fashioned ingenuity. Making cinema is a technological process but the gurus of technology so frequently blind with science that it can start to feel like an exclusive process, one that belongs to those with access to vast funds and equipment. Godard made films like this, but he also concocted films out of the bits and pieces lying around in his Swiss back yard. There are dozens of ways of creating cinema, and Godard’s enthusiasm for trying all of them shines through, and inspires. Similarly, if anything comes across in Brody’s book, it is that Godard was a filmmaker in the sense that he couldn’t not make film. He was/ is constantly in the process of creation. Some of the ideas come to fruition, some don’t, many are recycled to emerge years even decades later. Scraps of footage for one project appear in another. We have now reached the iPhone epoch of filmmaking and as ever, Godard was there decades earlier, working out how to transform the stuff of daily life into the stuff of art or cinema. 

the unsent letter (d. mikhail kalatozov, w. grigoriy koltunov, valeri osipov, viktor rozov)

As regular readers to this column (?!?) might realise, the writer is somewhat beguiled by the achievements of Soviet cinema. One aspect of cinema is that it has little option but to function within the parameters of the socio-political structure it inhabits. Because cinema makers on the whole need money. What emerges in Kalatozov’s work is perhaps a prioritisation of technique and aesthetic over content. Content is dangerous, it can get the filmmaker into trouble. Technique, on the other hand, in particular in cinema, a new art with fervent Bolshevik roots, permits an innovative freedom. With his crossfades and his heightened art direction, Kalatozov exercises this freedom with remarkable panache. The narrative of The Unsent Letter is straightforward. Four geologists are sent to the Siberian taiga to discover diamonds, which will be a key development in the industrialisation of the Soviet republic. After much fruitless searching and a certain amount of Chekhovian angst (one of the geologists, Andrey is engaged to another, Tanya, but a third, Sergey, develops a smouldering passion for Tanya), they do indeed discover the diamonds, charting the location. Mission accomplished, they prepare their two boats to head back downriver. However, the night of their departure, a terrifying forest fire strikes. The boats are lost, Sergey dies, and the remaining trio have to make their way out by foot. Planes fly overhead but can’t see them for the smoke. The radio packs up. Andey is wounded and cannot walk. A seemingly innocuous tale becomes darker and darker. It turns into a survival story (pace The Revenant). Who will live, who will perish? Given the prosaic nature of the narrative, it’s perhaps hard to see how the film can sustain itself over the course of the closing hour. If this was Hollywood, the cliches would be coming thick and fast. But Kalatozov pulls it off. This is deeply immersive cinema. The lingering smoke, the Siberian marshes, the onset of Winter snow, are all realised with a cinematic flair which captivates the viewer. The camera makes us the other party in this journey, albeit from the safety of our cinema seats. We urge the three characters to survive and mourn those who don’t. 

Clearly there’s a hard-fought propaganda element to all this. The struggle of the Soviet peoples etcetera. The dream-montage which shows the development of the region has, to 21st century eyes, a dystopian air, pure nature subsumed by industry. Nevertheless, the pure skill of the filmmaking succeeds in ensuring that the human story, that of the heroic instinct to survival, supersedes any political preconceptions the viewer brings to the screen. The Unsent Letter is as gripping a film as one could imagine, which ranks alongside films like The Wages of Fear, Duel or Alien to reveal cinema’s capacity to immerse the viewer in a terrifying reality. 

the runaways (fatima bhutto)

Fatima Bhutto’s novel aspires to enter the minds of the young, enfranchised or disenfranchised, who headed out to participate in Jihad in the middle east. It follows three characters, Sunny, from Portsmouth, Monty, from Lahore, but an Anglicised Pakistani family, and Layla, a young woman from a poorer district of Lahore who has nevertheless found a way to an education in the same American school as Monty, where they meet and have a fling. A fling which drives Monty to follow Layla to Iraq when she becomes radicalised, where he finds himself paired with Sunny as they trek across the desert on a mission to Nineveh, where they will meet up with Layla. The novel is far stronger in the non-Iraqi sections. The writer’s understanding of Karachi and its social codes is evident. Sunny, with his confused sexuality and thwarted ambitions, is similarly a more interesting personality in his native Portsmouth. Once the novel hits Iraq, it starts to feel more speculative, less convincing. It’s never clear why Sunny and Monty are marching across the desert, nor why they get on so badly, something that seems to constrain the narrative, and the transformation of Sunny from a lost soul to ruthless psychopath feels forced, no matter how much it might be based on actual events. In the end, it feels as though the writer’s understanding of life in Iraq under ISIS is tentative at most and for all the book’s noble intentions there’s a slightly cynical air to the characterisation of these unfortunate figures who have become embroiled in a phenomenon which appears to be way beyond their understanding. 

ran (w&d kurosowa, w. hideo oguni, masato ide)

I had two thoughts whilst watching the glorious spectacle that is Ran. The first, pure nostalgia. The peppered memories of watching the film at the Lumiere on Saint Martins’s Lane, a great lost London cinema, a time when watching a film from Japan felt like watching a film from Mars, so rich and strange, such a remove from the England of the eighties with the grim purview of Thatcher, unemployment, strikes, a country which felt as though it wanted to kneecap its youth. Youth, nevertheless can’t help but maintain its enthusiasm, its curiosity, the lust for life is insatiable, the need to experience the new, discover that which lurks on the other side. Ran was part of this. Part of this discovery, part of this unfolding of the world.

The second thought, which occurred to me in the closing half hour, as the final battle is painted on the cinema wall, was that Shakespeare himself would have loved watching Ran. It would have delighted him. He who robbed and rewrote the plays and stories of others, including King Leir, would have delighted in Kurosowa’s gender flips, the upgrading of the Fool, the development of the brilliantly scheming Goneril/ Regan role, Lady Kaede, who is given perhaps the greatest scene in the whole film. Shakespeare would have wondered at the use of cinema to realise the battles that existed in his imagination, he would have been thrilled by the way in which another culture appropriated this story, his story, which is one he himself appropriated. For a while, as I watched the horses charge, the awesome choreography of battle, I imagined I was Shakespeare, watching my play brought to another life, and I could feel his excitement, his wonder at the legacy he has left, allowing artists from other cultures, other times, to ransack his work for their inspiration.  

the bad sleep well (w&d kurosowa, w. hideo oguni, eijirô hisaita, ryûzô kikushima, shinobu hashimoto)

Kurosowa’s modern day take on Hamlet is in stark contrast to his other Shakespeare versions. Any film that opens with a twenty minute wedding set piece can hardly be called pared down, but in contrast to Ran and Throne of Blood, this is a sober vision of Shakespeare, with Nishi, his Hamlet, a superbly tailored, charismatic protagonist. (As an aside, the tailoring in the film captures the eye just as much as it does with the more flamboyant period films. Kurosowa’s eye for detail is always both exquisite and to the film’s benefit.) There’s a brooding confidence in this opening. We are introduced to a large cast, located in a complex plot. It’s too much for the viewer to take on board; nevertheless details - the drunken brother-in-law, the second wedding cake, the crippled bride - leap out. As the film unfolds, everything we have seen begins to makes increasing sense. The opening is a puzzle which the film will resolve. Nowadays, there’s a phobia of losing the audience in the first ten minutes, which prohibits this type of approach, (reminiscent of The Deer Hunter), but Kurosowa reveals how effective it can be. 

As the film takes shape, the connections to the source material start to become apparent. This is a film about corruption and families, which feels just as relevant as ever. The Shakespearian element maps onto 1950s Japanese politics, not to mention 21st C USA politics. Kurosowa’s Nishi-Hamlet is an unashamed hero, the doubts articulated by Hamlet himself are kept at bay. The Japanese director’s fascination is focused on the way he exercises his revenge for his father’s death, infiltrating himself into the confidence of the company boss by marrying his daughter and making himself indispensable in the workplace. The more brilliant his strategy, the more terrible his eventual fate. The Bad Sleep Well is a jaunty 140 minutes, which never drag, a kind of vertical insertion into the closed world of post-war Japanese power which feels like a hybrid of The West Wing and The Sweet Smell of Success. 

throne of blood (w&d kurosowa, w hideo oguni, shinobu hashimoto, ryûzô kikushima)

Cinemateca blesses us with a brief season of Kurosowa’s Shakespeares. For which one is grateful. Grateful to Cinemateca, grateful to cinema, grateful that we are allowed to sit in a cinema at all. Throne of Blood, the director’s take on Macbeth goes unashamedly epic. There’s a lot of galloping horses, a lot of dust and smoke and mist, some of the greatest costumes ever worn, and a truly brilliant closing sequences as Washizu, Kurosowa’s Macbeth, is pinned with arrows fired by his own men. This isn’t the only radical variation on Shakespeare’s narrative the director employs. The relationship between Washizu and his Lady Macbeth, Lady Washizu, is dark and compelling, as it shuold be, with Isuzu Yamada giving a mesmerising performance. But K introduces the twist that she’s pregnant, a fact which helps to justify Washizu’s decision to murder his old friend, Miki (Banquo). Kurosowa also has Washizu visit Lady Washizu as she frantically washes her hands, having gone mad at the end. Washizu has to confront the result of his actions in a way Shakespeare doesn’t make him. This leads to the closing sequence, where Toshirô Mifune’s, bravura acting feels completely right. This is a heroic, warrior Macbeth, brought down by his own code, in spite of his earthy, military goodwill, seen in the earlier scenes with his friend, Miki. The director relishes the clash between the theatre and cinema. There’s a grand theatricality of the spectacle at work in the film, something one can’t help thinking Shakespeare might have been jealous of. The martial elements of Macbeth operate on a thematic and aesthetic level. In the battle scenes the cinema screen becomes a vast stage; one which is in contrast to the pared down intimacy of the scenes with Lady Macbeth or the banquet. Macbeth becomes someone trapped between the exaggerated grandeur of war as spectacle and the intensity of the reduced palette of domestic life, a tension which overwhelms him. At least he dies spectacularly. A fitting end for a man whose machismo cannot be pinned down in the normal sphere of existence. 

dandelions (w yasunari kawabata, tr michael emmerich)

It’s rare to come across such an enigmatic text. This short novel recounts less than 24 hours, as Ineko’s mother drops her off at a sanatoriam for the mentally ill. Accompanying the mother is Ineko’s fiancé, Kuno, who doesn’t approve of what’s happening but goes along all the same. Ineko suffers from somagnosia, which means she occasionally goes partially blind, unable to see specific things. (A table tennis ball whilst playing, for example.) The odd couple drop off her off and then walk to a small nearby seaside town. They talk as they walk. This is a highly conversational text. Their dialogue is roundabout, debating Ineko’s fate, recounting incidents from her past, including the strange event of her father’s death, who rode off a cliff whilst on horseback, a traumatic event which Ineko witnessed. The description of the horse falling through the air, alongside the father, who loses his prosthetic leg in the process, is vivid. The novel ends inconclusively. Kuno has plans to break Ineko out of the sanatorium, but we never learn whether these will be realised or not. All in all, Dandelions feels like an enigma wrapped up in a riddle. It’s a short, but remarkably dense read, which leaves the reader mystified, staring into an opaque blind spot, more conscious of what he or she doesn’t know (or see) than what they do know (or see). 

cuentos de la selva {jungle tales} (horacio quiroga)

Quiroga is one of those writers who, if Disney ever get hold of him, will make a fortune for his descendants. His life was turbulent, so I have no idea if he has descendants. Perhaps, like him, they ended up lost in the jungle, struggling to get by. In which regard he would appear to be a quintessentially Latin American author, making him a highly atypical Uruguayan one. (Uruguay has its doubts regarding whether it’s part of Latin America or not.) The stories in this volume, which Claudia tells me all Uruguayan children grow up with, relate episodes from this jungle, and are just as exotic to a Montevidean as it would be to a Londoner. Stories of the flux and interaction between man and nature. Crocodiles that fight with warships, turtles which rescue explorers, giant rays which fight panthers to save a man who stopped people dynamiting the river. In this regard the stories are both elemental in their simplicity, and sophisticated in their complex understanding of the interdependence of mankind and the natural world. An understanding which was in short supply when Quiroga wrote, at the onset of the industrial age, and still in short supply today. 

 

last year at marienbad (d. alain resnais, w. alain robbe-grillet)

This remains an astonishing, formally brilliant film. In spite of the archness of the narrative and setting, there’s an undercurrent of brutal humanity. Delphine Seyrig’s enigmatic posturing conceals the fact that this is a film about choices. The choices made in relationships which are pivotal, determining our fate: a relationship might be a stay in a luxury hotel or it might become a stay in prison. Like the film’s recurring motif, the game of Nic, which is always won by Seyrig’s husband, our capacity to determine our own fate is denied by the logic of a game we fail to understand. Someone else is always winning. In this sense there also appears to be a strong echo in Robbe-Grillet’s radical script of Beckett’s quiet nihilism. The characters are trapped in a Godotian conundrum, one whose logic the viewer can intuit without ever really understanding. This lends the film an interpretative ambiguity. Is the hotel heaven or the hell of a concentration camp or the decline and fall of Western Civilisation? Watching the film for the first time in twenty five years, (when Mr C and I watched it on video in his Kilburn flat, a viewing which clearly influenced the Boat People), it resembles nothing so much as Jaramuschian zombie film, a far more complex and darker narrative than that director’s faded aristo opus, Only Lovers Left Alive. Marienbad has the prophetic power of a greek tragedy, no more so than in the director/ screenwriter’s use of the statue of a man and a woman poised on the brink of danger. In a more classical screeenwriting scenario, it might have been suggested that the interpretations of the statue not be articulated (who’s holding who back, what it really means, etc). However, here the novelist’s articulation works, precisely because it is not done to elucidate or clarify, but to further confuse. Words are part of the puzzle, a puzzle the viewer is constantly failing to solve, and the watching process is far more engaging for our failure to understand than it would be if we had a clear idea of what the film was trying to say. 

shame (skammen) (w&d bergman)

Shame is one of the bleakest most brilliant films I have seen in a long while. Bergman’s narrative takes a couple, Jan and Eva, violinists who have retreated to live a quiet life in the countryside (an island). In today’s language, Jan and Eva might be said to have dropped out. The world around them seems to be in turmoil. There are military manoeuvres and low-flying jet fighters. But they do their best to wilfully ignore the world, content in their bubble, receiving news from neighbours. Their only real interaction with the real world is their radio, which doesn’t work, although they sometimes take the ferry to go to the nearest small town where they sell their fruit. Their marriage is very Bergmanesque: volatile, loving, the fortnight Ullmann a perfect foil for the more neurasthenic Von Sydow. Then reality catches up with them. Undefined opposing forces occupy the island. One army makes Ullmann record a propaganda statement on their behalf. Island folk are murdered. Planes bomb the land at will.  The couple try to flee but they are arrested and rounded up and threatened with being sent to a concentration camp for having collaborated with the enemy. It emerges that Ullmann’s Eva has slept with the local mayor to secure their freedom. They are allowed back home to their island, but when the mayor visits, Jan discovers what’s happened. The mayor is then captured by the other side, who have Jan shoot him. His personality has changed. He’s not the meek violinist anymore. (His violin has been destroyed along the way). He’s a desperate man who will do anything to survive. In a final, breathtaking sequence, the couple flee the island on a boat, which would appear to be a boat to nowhere.

There’s so much going on in this film, that it seems from a resumé, excessive. But the cumulative effect is overwhelming. More so in this era of chaos and fear. Bergman’s use of sound is quite brilliant, from the noise of the bombing to the silence of the boat at the end. The film keeps punching, becoming more and more harrowing. It’s clearly set in a metaphorical world (to the best of my knowledge there was no civil war in Sweden in the sixties), but not only are the effects brilliantly realised (apparently using models), but also the film is all the more powerful for occupying this unclear, open-ended space. It’s a mystery who’s fighting who and why, but what is clear is the destructive effect of the war on the psyche of those caught up in it. Both Ullmann and Von Sydow give grandstanding performances which are rooted in their completely believable marriage. Perhaps the film might be read in more peaceful times as a metaphor for a marriage, but it also feels like a sentient warning of the dangers of an apolitical lifestyle, the impossibility of truly dropping out, no matter how tempting. 

the dead (sebastian kracht, tr. daniel bowles)

The Dead, portentous title aside, is like a delicious if slightly unsatisfying first course. It’s a slim novel, which takes a lot on. The narrative recounts the story of a Swiss film director, Emil Nägeli, who is commissioned by a Nazi director of culture in the early days of the Third Reich to make a German language film in Japan. This offers the novelist Pynchonesque scope, which he takes advantage of. The action flits from Japan to Switzerland to Berlin, back to Japan, to Hollywood and finally Zurich once more. It takes in figures including Chaplin, whose visit to Japan is skilfully interwoven into the narrative, Lotte Eisner, Fritz Lang, and others. The Berlin sequence, where Nägeli spends a whirlwind few days, is brilliantly realised. One half-expects Nägeli to run into a pre-GI Slothrop. However, the bittiness of the book ultimately works against it. The pages end up feeling like fragments from a larger novel which hasn’t been written. The narrative hop, skips and jumps until it runs out of steam. 

dressage (d. pooya badkoobeh, w. hamed rajabi)

Why do the Iranians have such an innate grasp of how to do cinema? It’s a question, which, knowing so little about their culture, I cannot answer, but it’s a curiosity that Iranian directors of various generations are able to construct films which feel well nigh perfect. Dressage is that latest of these, a tale of a girl, Golsa, living in a provincial town, who effectively goes rogue.  Interestingly, it’s not set in Tehran, but in a small town. We’re a long way from Farhadi. Golsa starts the film hanging out with a group of spoilt teenagers who get their kicks out of robbing shops. However, their escapade goes wrong when they realise they haven’t removed the video recording of the theft captured by the store’s CCTV, and they bully Golsa into going to fetch it. She then hides the video tape, refusing to return it. What she wants in exchange for the tape seems increasingly unclear. She finds herself in conflict with the friends, with her family, even with the stable where she helps out and develops a strong affection for one of the horses. The film allows the director, Pooya Badkoobeh, to show us various strands of Iranian life. The narrative touches on local corruption, class division, and in a telling sequence, the maltreatment of an Afghan immigrant. Through all this, Golsa, brilliantly portrayed by Negar Moghaddam, seems to be waging a lone battle against the inevitable injustice not just of society but the very condition of being alive. Her battle is always understated, carefully constructed, with low-key twists coming thick and fast, building the tension. Beside the fact it’s beautifully filmed, acted, and conceived, this is also a superb example of how to conjure a compelling script from the most minimal of ingredients. Dressage is Pooya Badkoobeh’s first feature, and one waits expectantly to see what he does next. 

un ange (w&d koen mortier)

Un Ange tells the story of a Belgian cyclist who travels to Senegal to hook up with his brother and party. There he meets Fae, a woman who isn’t officially a prostitute, but unofficially appears to be. This moot definition arises as a result of the carnet de salud  which official prostitutes are required to have. Thierry meets Fae in a  bar and appears to fall head over heels in love with her. They spend a crazy night together, where he proposes to her. This unlikely love affair is thrown off course when Thierry isn’t allowed to bring Fae into his hotel, as she doesn’t have the carnet de salud. He takes some drugs which freak him out, they go to another cheap hotel, he becomes paranoid and delusional and then he dies. 

The first hour or so of An Ange is brilliant. All the elements of film, sound, camera, lighting, edit are used to the max. Nicolas Karakatsanis’ camerawork is mesmerising. The set-up itself is fascinating, with Senegal providing the perfect setting for these artists to go to work. The film generates tension and empathy with both Fae and Thierry. However, as the brief resume of the narrative perhaps suggests, the trouble is that the narrative doesn’t hold up. The final half hour feels undercooked, as though this is a short which has been stretched out for all its worth. At the heart of this narrative problem, perhaps, is the issue of what them film is about. It opens with a voiceover from Fae talking about prostitution. The scenes in Senegal perfectly capture the uneasy first world/ third world sexual tourism issue. However, this issue feels as tough it’s ditched or ducked at the end, as the pivot of the film becomes Thierry’s drug addiction. A cutaway to his funeral in Belgium feels awkward. The fact that Thierry has become an addict as a result of his doping feels like a curveball the film doesn’t need and doesn’t entirely warrant (there’s even a reference to Armstrong in there). 

This is a shame, as so much of Un Ange is so well done. For a long time it feels as though we’re in the hands of a director of great skill. The edit, which includes flashbacks and one great dream sequence, is terrific. The film drives forwards in a flare of colour and dynamic camerawork and committed acting. Then, in the final straight, it runs out of gas. 

fleuve noir (w&d erick zonca; w, lou de fanget signolet)

Have started reading Richard Brody’s biography of Godard. Wherein he notes early on the post-war agreement, at the time seen as an assault on French cinema, that “each French movie house show four weeks of French films per quarter”. This was seen then as a way of opening the door for the US to take over the cinemas in “nine out of every thirteen weeks”. However, in the long term, as Hollywood and free market capitalism and soft cultural power developed their takeover, this accord would protect the French film industry, guaranteeing the presence of French films in every cinema. In large part it might be down to this that the French cinema industry remains so robust, churning out movies with homegrown stars and a guaranteed local audience. This might also explain why so much French cinema, (which for reasons that demand another line of investigation ends up being screened in Montevideo), is highly generic.  Zonca’s Fleuve Noir is a prime example. The narrative is in so many ways a routine cop story. Dishevelled and destroyed flic, Vincent Cassel, one part Bad Lieutenant, another part Morse, struggles with his demons as he seeks to discover who is responsible for the disappearance, presumed death, of teenage Danny, a kid the same age as Cassel’s own wayward son. The slightly pedestrian narrative is bolstered by the presence of Romain Duris as would-be novelist who gets so excited by Danny’s disappearance, (he is a neighbour who at one point tutored Danny),  that he starts to meddle in the case, arousing Cassel’s distaste and suspicion. The narrative always feels a bit clunky; the strand with Cassel’s son never really goes anywhere, the ending feels slightly overdone. It feels likely that if this got anywhere near to being made in the UK it would be as a TV drama, perhaps split into three episodes, and given the relative mundanity of the material, perhaps it might have functioned more effectively in that format. However, there is one thing that would have been lost, which is probably the thing that makes the film worth making in the first place. Which is the opportunity for some grandstanding acting from Cassel and Duris. Cassel rocks a truly manky beard, he goes full-on ugly, even developing a weirdly loping walk. It’s an old-school performance, which could have come out of a fifties black and white policier. Duris seems to be enjoying himself immensely as the marginally deranged would-be novelist who quotes Kafka and Camus. He too has a particular walk, a jaunty straight-backed mechanism which perfectly suits the character. Fleuve Noir reminds us of how we go to the cinema to watch actors perform, how the material is so often a mere canvas upon which they paint their art, with its nuances and exaggerations. It’s not a great movie, but it has a despotic charm, the pleasure of watching artists at work. 

the ascent (voskhozhdenie) (w&d larisa shepitko, w. yuri klepikov)

There are so many films from the USSR or Russia set in the second world war that it’s not hard to think there’s nothing new to see. The Ascent, a film I had never heard of, proved this thesis wrong. It has to be one of the most remarkable, harrowing films I have ever seen. The director, Larisa Shepitko conjures an astonishing bleak, visceral film which drives itself forward over the course of two hours to a gut-wrenching conclusion. The first hour of the film sees two partisans, Sotnikov and Rybak struggle through a snowbound landscape in search of food to take back to their group. This is almost all filmed with hand-held camera, which tumbles through the snow with the two partisans, sinks up to its waist in the snow, genuinely makes us feel as though we are also there, fleeing for our lives. Cinema as immersive experience. Just as it seems they’ve succeeded in their mission, Sotnikov and Rybak run into a German patrol and Sotnikov is wounded. Rybak saves his life, but seeking to hide in a farmhouse, they are captured. This is a plot twist that it complete contrast to anything Hollywood might have come up with. What we assume to be a film about how the plucky heroes’ escape, turns into something completely the opposite. A tale of torture, betrayal, collateral damage, death. In short, a stunningly convincing and unsettling portrayal of the realities of having an enemy force invade your homeland and the price that is paid in both physical and spiritual terms. The Ascent is another example of the remarkable talent of Soviet cinema. The Soviets didn’t just lose the Cold War, they also lost the culture war, but in their cinema we can discern a sensibility in complete contrast to that of their enemies, a capacity to create cinema that is immersive, compelling, terrifying and beautiful. Perhaps Soviet cinema whispers to us that there was another course for humanity to take, another way to put the technology into practice. Or perhaps this is just a wilfully romantic notion on my part.

madame bovary (flaubert)

Madame Bovary. A name everyone knows. It stands for something, represents some kind of idea of womanhood, but what exactly? Reading Flaubert’s first and most famous novel, one is struck by the almost (but perhaps not quite) misogynist treatment of the protagonist. She is married off to someone she soon she realises she doesn’t love. She’s seduced by a miserable rake, who ditches her when she demands to be taken seriously. She treats her husband appallingly. She racks up huge debts, allowing herself to be manipulated by the local tradesman. She has another affair with a younger man which is clearly destined to end badly, and does. Her debts bring ruin to her family. She’s a half-hearted mother, at best. She commits suicide rather than face up to the consequences of her actions. She drives her husband to an early grave and her orphaned daughter to a miserable fate. She is venal, selfish, capricious, unfaithful, in all senses of the word. Yet her name is venerated and she is held in mystical esteem. How to explain this paradox? How to rationalise the author’s near misogyny with his creation of an iconic female heroine? In the end, this must come down to the potency of naturalism. Because, no matter what you think of Emma Bovary, she feels like a completely convincing, authentic character. And of course, her flaws, manifold as they are, are elemental in this authenticity. Great fictional characters are, as the books tell us, flawed characters, servants of their whims, their desires. Emma Bovary might the most perfect example of this thesis and what might be termed, clumsily, the paradox of idealisation. 

paths of glory (w&d stanley kubrick, w. calder willingham, jim thompson)

It’s always intriguing to watch the early work of a maestro. What one sees in this film is Kubrick striving and occasionally achieving transcendence over material whose profundity is undermined by some B-movie tropes. Hence we have the secondary character actors with their quirks; the melodramatic set-up of a trial; the chiselled jaw of the leading man. The opening scene feels stagey, as two generals bat back and forth some heavy-handed dialogue. Initially, one struggles to see what’s distinctive about the film, what’s going to set it apart. Then, all of a sudden, we hit a battle sequence. It’s relentless, noisy, unpleasant, and lasts a good five minutes. Men try and cross No-Man’s-Land and they are cut to ribbons. The noise is positively off-putting and more than this, the sequence is purposefully anti-romantic. The sequence is the godfather of other famous war scenes: Saving Private Ryan; Atonement; Dunkirk. It’s far more shocking and savage than anything in Mendes’ recent 1917. It’s the first time the film reveals Kubrick’s brilliance at constructing epic moments and more soon follow. The editing and the cinematography of the court room scene is both precise and done with a flourish. Daringly, rather than keep the camera close on Douglas as he delivers his crucial, grandstand speech, we follow him from behind a chair, the camera tracking him as he strides back and forth. Kubrick’s cinematic vision subsequently shines through in two further grand set-piece scenes: the closing bar scene where a young German woman brings French troops to tears with a song and, most impressively, in the austere execution scene, which  foregoes any dramatic histrionics to deliver a terrifying representation of harsh injustice. It’s in these elaborate scenes that the film reveals the nascent craftsmanship of Kubrick, a director seeking to elevate his art above and beyond any kind of commercial imperative, something that feels remarkable and unusual for a 1950s Hollywood financed movie. 

curious footnote:

The actor Timothy Carey was fired during production. He was reportedly extremely difficult to work with, even to the extent of faking his own kidnapping, holding up the whole production.

ivan’s chidhood (w&d tarkovsky, w vladimir bogomolov, mikhail papava, andrey konchalovskiy)

 The face of a goat. A tracking shot across a field. A ruined church. An icon. Trees in water. Birch trees. Albrecht Dürer.

There are a thousand and one images to be harvested from Tarkovsky’s first film. He was a painter. He was also a philosopher. He married the two disciplines and came up with cinema. An art form he did indeed invent, even if some say it had been around for nearly a century when he got going. 

The war. The sudden drastic switch to documentary footage. Dead children, Goebel’s cowardly offering. A death cult. The documentary footage jarring, all wrong compared to the aesthetic splendour of all that has preceded it, but all right too, for this is a film about a boy who died, who was captured and executed. A boy whose life was enshrined in childhood. 

Sound, like water, a relentless rebarbative rhythm, the rhythm of being alive. 

Image on the front line, language left behind in the rearguard. Words are for the moments when joy or tears are called for. Words are for joking or flirting. Not for when you reach the frontier between life and death. A frontier Ivan crosses, never coming back. Neither to his companions, nor to us, nor to language. 

the blizzard (sorokin, tr. jamey gambrell)

Sorokin is such a curious writer. His novels feel like fantastical B-movies. Full of melodrama and cheap horror. Yet at the same time they feel as though they’re hitting the contemporary Russian nerve. The Blizzard describes a doomed journey by a doctor to deliver a vaccine to a remote town in the depths of Mother Russia. A journey he seems destined to never complete as the conditions conspire to thwart him. Gradually the world the story occupies becomes stranger and stranger. Giants, nano technology, dwarf horses. Meanwhile, deep Russia remains unchanged, a world of vodka and stoves, tiny communities which are islands of warmth in a world of snow. This mish-mash, hotchpotch, is weirdly compelling and ends up feeling entirely allegorical, a telling portrait of a country which seems to concurrently exist in both the past and the future, with the present being of only minor importance.

correction (thomas bernhard, tr sophie wilkins)

 I’m not sure where this novel sits in the oeuvre of the Austrian arch-miserabilist, Bernhard. A figure both shunned and venerated. Years ago, when I was friends with Mr C, we used to discuss his work and I guess I used to read his novels, but it’s all a blur now, all part of that hinterland life which is also known as ‘the past’. 

It might be that I came to Correction expecting something more nuanced than I encountered. In so many ways this feels like a piledriver of a novel, reminiscent of the sound of the road being dug up outside your window when you’re trying to work. It’s a meditative, relentless, exasperating noise, yet not without its fierce beauty. This novel of two parts, the first half dedicated to the narrator’s account of his friendship with the misanthropic Roithamer, the second a reworking (or correction) of Roithamer’s text stroke diary, which he was keeping in the weeks leading up to his suicide. Reading the text is like stumbling forward in a blizzard. Sometimes the words overwhelm, threaten to asphyxiate; at others the snow clears and the clarity seems all the more so for the text having been so dense and illegible moments before.

“…all the decrepit garbage of this totally decrepit European civilization, or rather, to hold nothing back, this totally decrepit modern world of ours, this era that keeps grinding out nothing but intellectual muck and all this stinking constipating clogging intellectual vomit is constantly being hawked in the most repulsive way as our intellectual products though it is in fact nothing but intellectual waste products…”

thus bad begins (marias, tr margaret jull costa)

 After finishing Marias’ novel, the third of his I have now read, I sought out some commentary, mostly Anglo-Saxon. There was praise, but there was also criticism. Notably from McCrum in the Guardian, who wrote: “The problem is simple: Thus Bad Begins is far too long. Vanity is the thing that kills successful writers and too much of Marías’s 14th novel reads like a self-conscious parody of earlier work. It is, as Hamlet might say, a bad case of “words, words, words”. So: countless elegant, and serpentine, sentences, sinuous meditative passages mixed with provocative paradoxes, but not enough substance.”

I quote McCrum in order to open up some kind of dialectic between Anglo-Saxon literary trends and, let us say, Hispanic literary trends. Because., and one hopes Marias might agree, it is precisely the words, words, words which lend Thus Bad Begins its remarkable power. The narrative as such is banal, even melodramatic, as the author himself suggests. Literature is made up of banal stories, which are little more than the warp and woof of everyday gossip. A man is cruel to his wife. His wife is unfaithful. Another man, a confidant of the husband, sleeps with the wife. There is nothing new under the sun (or as Marias prefers, beneath the light of the moon). What distinguishes this tawdry story, is the author’s capacity to extort shards of moonlight, which shine through his purple prose, and which reveal that the reason the story has some bearing in his hands is because it tells us something about the banality and the exceptionality of our own lives.

As such McCrum’s vapid criticism seems to gloss over at least one of the most brilliant passages I can recall reading. One where Marias talks about the moon and rumour and Shakespeare. His narrator, whose shallowness as a character within the story is beautifully shadowed by his nagging wisdom as a narrator, recounting the story twenty years later, succeeds in elevating this banal tale to another level altogether. Only, and here’s the rub, it isn’t quite so banal, because this is also a tale about evil, about vile acts, and how we compartmentalise our lives and learn to accept this evil, letting it seep into our everyday normality, even accepting that this evil should be rewarded, both in financial and affective forms. Setting the story in 1980, shortly aft4r the end of Franco’s dictatorship, Marias’ tale highlights the way that those who profited and indeed were permitted to indulge their vices under Franco’s regime were never brought to justice, were never forced to come to terms with their actions. Society turned a blind eye (Muriel, the film producer at the heart of the story, is literally one-eyed), and the perpetrators found a way to carry on doing their thing. The relevance of this scenario echoes today in the country where I am writing; and in the articles upon the release of the novel in the USA, many noted that it came out just as Trump was about to ascend to the presidency. In a world of Epstein and Trump and Manini Rios and Bolsonaro, it’s not just the monsters that need to be taken into account, it’s all those who benefitted from society’s’ reluctance to look evil in the face, to allow it to “get away with it”.

There are other layers of subtlety to the novel. Notably in the way it treats Muriel’s misogyny towards his wife, Beatriz, a misogyny which leads to tragedy. Marias must be aware that this will alienate his female readership. The narrator, De Vere’s, lackadaisical criticism of his boss’ misogyny will also be held against him, not to mention his actions. As such, Marias would appear to be seeking to vilify a whole generation, using a stiletto rather than an axe. De Vere pardons and even effectively condones Muriel’s cruelty, just as Muriel pardons and effectively condones Van Vechten’s vice. The tendrils of fascism reach out and corrupt everything, even the country’s finest sons. It’s a cold-eyed vision, one which is stitched into an Ellroy-ian interperation of power, offered by the remarkable sub-plot of the real life US producer Harry Dean Towers and his relationship with actors such as Herbert Lom and Jack Palance. For anyone of my generation, the extended scene with Herbert Lom is one of the most amusing. unlikely but ultimately plausible scenes you will ever read.

Marias’ novel is not bite-sized. It is vast, sweeping, ambitious. It is composed of a glory of words, words which rush up against the reader like the relentless tide. Words which have the fluency and power of the tide. Thus Bad Begins is a remarkable achievement, a devastating vision of the sweeping infiltration of vile deeds and rumour into the warp and woof of civil society. 

among the lost (emiliano monge)

Perhaps it is easiest to talk about this novel in terms of references. The novel itself quotes Dante’s Inferno, including passages from the poem in italics. The conceit here is the passage of the damned. Dante chronicled a journey through the circles of hell. Monge’s tragic pilgrims are Central Americans, trying to find a passage from their cursed lands to the Eden of the USA. However, they find themselves caught in the brutal trap of Mexico, where they are sold into slavery, or murdered. This summons up the spirit of Cormac McCarthy, another quasi religious writer who saw in the lands south of the Rio Grande a medieval fresco of good versus evil. It is the evil whose story Monge tells. His story is presented through the eyes of the people smugglers, those who treat the pilgrims as cattle to be milched and ultimately butchered. The protagonists are a doomed couple, themselves victims turned oppressors, abused by a trafficking ring run by a cruel, immoral priest. The narrative seeks and perhaps succeeds in engendering sympathy for its unlikely anti-heroes, who find themselves, just like the cargo they traffic, unable to fend off their violent fate. Which perhaps summons up a final point of reference, which is Milton, the poet who placed Satan at the heart of Paradise Lost. 

I confess to having found this mannered novel somewhat discomforting, which is presumably the intention. There is something about the literariness of its tone and ambition which sits awkwardly with the untold stories contained within its pages. Victims remain nameless. Their presence little more than background noise in Monge’s dystopian tableau. They are the bizarre figures in Bosch’s vision of hell, struggling to escape the frame, forever trapped in their anonymity.

the hatred of poetry (ben lerner)

Lerner’s slimline elegant dissection of the problematics of both writing and reading poetry can be devoured in one sitting. Essentially, of course, The Hatred of Poetry is a love letter to poetry. Lerner’s neo-Platonic thesis is that all poetry is measured against an archetypal and fictional idea of ‘poetry’ to which the poet can aspire but never reach. “Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the utopian ideal of Poetry…” As someone who struggles with the act of reading poetry for altogether different reasons, reasons wrapped up in the relentlessness of modern life, the presence of so much else that needs reading, the lack of space for poetry, (utopian or otherwise), I felt as though there were many aspects of the poetry debate, and the decline of poetry (If such a thing exists) that Lerner skirts around.  Even if the universal Whitmanesque poet appeared (a possibility he challenges), would anyone actually read him/her? How universal can a marginal sport be? The sense of academics shouting at each other in empty rooms perhaps permeates the text; nevertheless it is an engaging, nimble-footed read. Even if it left me wondering whether I shouldn’t have dedicated the time I spent reading the book in reading some actual bloody poetry…

the spark that lit the revolution (robert henderson)

Henderson provides a dogged account of Lenin’s years in London, in the course of which he provides a great overview of the strange half-life of the Russian revolutionary movement. Reading about these insular figures, who had very little interaction with local culture, be it in London, Paris or Geneva, it seems astonishing that they would change the world beyond recognition. The accident of the Russian Revolution or the Marxist inevitability? It’s hard to imagine who might be their contemporary equivalents, or imagine a society which is any way developed or contained within the geopolitics of the modern world succumbing to the kind of revolutionary zeal of Lenin and his contemporaries. Who might now  be sitting in the British Library, seeking to bring about the downfall of political structures as we know it?  

the fallen (carlos manuel álvarez)

 The realities of Cuba, as this blog has noted before, are difficult to decipher. Manuel’s elegant novella tells the story of a family coping with the harsh end of the revolution. Armando, the father, is an honourable son of the revolution who runs a hotel and tries to do so without being corrupt. It doesn’t help that his daughter, Maria, who also works in the hotel, has a small smuggling gig going on. Or that his wife, Mariana, is suffering from epilepsy brought on in the wake of her cancer treatment. Meanwhile, their son is in the barracks, doing his national service. The novel is constructed from five chapters within which each family member has their own section. Assembling the narrative in this mosaic style, Manuel puts together a desperate portrait of a revolution which is eating itself. Out on the edges, events have taken a decidedly Soviet turn, society controlled by petty corruption and secret police. The idealism has long gone, and in its place is a claustrophobic struggle to make ends meet and stay onside. The Fallen makes an effective companion piece to the Havana based Miguel Rey’s Habitat. Dreams of the the twentieth century foundering on the rocks of the twenty first.  

girl, woman, other (bernadine evaristo)

The novel opens at the National Theatre, where Amma is about to have her play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey staged. This is such an engaging idea. It sets up the requisite skewering of the system, one which, as has been much noted over recent weeks, retains its historical prejudices, for all the lip-service paid to change and ‘inclusion’. No wonder people are excited by Evaristo’s novel, which appears to hone in on the pressure points of contemporary London life. Race, gender, ambition all cooking up together in an of-the-moment novel which resonates just as strongly as Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, back in the eighties. However, rather like Wolfe’s novel, Girl, Woman, Other, doesn’t quite succeed in skewering the apparent targets. Instead it becomes a gentle, affectionate collection of portraits of various characters whose lives barely overlap. Twelve women have a chapter each, which is supposed to capture their lives, loves, hopes and fears These women are diverse, of different social, racial and intellectual heritages. However, this is not a structure that lends itself to a profound investigation of their lives. Instead we are offered snapshots of contemporary society. Another novel which might be a point of reference is Jonathan Coe’s Brexit fable, Middle England. Similarly to Coe’s book, it feels as though the novel struggles to get beneath the surface of the characters and the issues it broaches. The reader, understanding the structural form of the novel, knows they will be moving on shortly, that their engagement with these characters will never be expected to be overly profound. As such it almost feels at times as though it is bolstering a system as much as questioning it. A perfect candidate for the Booker Prize, one which allows middle class England to be tourists in the more marginal corners of its empire, without really compelling the reader to feel the need to call for any kind of radical change. Amma’s play goes on at the National and it’s a success. Evaristo’s novel is feted. Things can’t be that bad, can they, if the greatest controversy is whether it should have won the prize outright or not? Woman, Girl, Other is an enjoyable read, a welcome window into underrepresented corners of modern UK, but it’s frothiness, which makes it bestseller material, also restricts its potency. 

don’t look at me like that (diana athill)

Athill’s novel has that quality of feeling eminently autobiographical, without being autobiographical. We know this from the mismatching dates of birth of the protagonist, Meg Bailey, who is 27 when the Suez crisis occurs, and Athill herself, born in 1917. This then begs the question, what is the quality which lends the book this sense of absolute authenticity, which in turn we are inclined to describe as autobiographical? Don’t Look at Me Like That is a relatively slight book, which spans ten years or so. A coming of age story, at the forefront of the narrative is Meg’s affair with Dick, the husband of her best friend, Roxane. Apart from the fact that the author makes her protagonist the betrayer, rather than the betrayed, there’s nothing radical about the subject matter. It’s domestic, kitchen sink, and the milieu of Britain in the fifties, feels of a piece with this. Post-war London is just getting going again, a city where a young woman can carve out a career for herself if she’s resourceful or lucky, a world of bedsits and rented rooms, of shared bottles of wine at the kitchen table, of turbulent, over-intense relationships crying out for air. What marks the novel out, however, is not the description of place or time, acute those these are. It’s the singular modernity of Athill’s heroine. In two senses. On the one hand, in the sense that it’s rare to see the travails and challenges of being a woman seeking to find a place in the world dissected with such clarity. On the other, in Meg’s psychological honesty, transparency. Meg comes to realise that she is attractive, and she also comes to realise that her attractiveness is a tool she can employ, as well as being a burden she needs to carry. Athill traces the entire journey of this young woman’s evolution, with such precision that at times it’s hard not to feel that this is the voice of the author herself speaking. Pinpointing those moments of awareness, such as when she forces herself to cause a scene with Jamil, the Egyptian lodger who is besotted with her, discovering in the process her capacity to be an active rather than a passive protagonist. Meg’s honesty and clarity regarding sex, both the way in which it was viewed by an adolescent girl (as something vaguely unpleasant, a bridge to be crossed) and something she struggled subsequently to enjoy, in spite of various one night stands, also feels revelatory. You don’t get Virginia Woolf or Willa Cather or Rosamond Lehmann tackling this risky topic with such sangfroid. As such, Don’t Look at me Like That feels ahead of its time. As though literature is a progressive event, one that constantly seeks to address the simple issue of living with greater and greater honesty; in that context, Athill’s novel is another step on that journey, one which stretches into the unknown future. 

alpha city (rowland atkinson)

Alpha City is a dissection of London’s growth as a haven for the über-wealthy over the course of the past decade. It casts a cold eye over the property boom and the rise in luxury goods. More than anything, however, the author seeks to emphasise how a surge in consumption within the city actually does very little for the majority of its citizens. Wealth remains trapped in select bubbles. If anything, the insulation of wealth from the day-to-day running of the city means that those with most power feel little need to help develop civic space. Libraries are shut, One-O-Clock clubs are nothing more than inconveniences taking up valuable real-estate, as indeed is any use of space for the public rather than the private good. The book shows how the show-homes and prime real estate are in fact little more than piggy banks for the rich, a way of securing capital. Whilst everything Atkinson says rings true and hits home to the sympathetic reader, there is a slight sense of preaching to the converted. The book might have benefitted from presenting the counter arguments which would be espoused by the likes of Johnson, Hannan and other sundry fanatics of Brexit, in order to bring them down. The current political drift in the UK is to say that the arrival of foreign wealth only confirms London (and, supposedly, the UK’s) importance in the world and justifies the madcap plans that are being instigated. It’s easy to back this argument up with the double argument that the desire of the wealthy to ‘invest’ in London is good both strategically and economically. It never feels as though Alpha City nails this canard in spite of the evidence it collects. It feels like a significant book, but one which perhaps wears its heart too much on its sleeve. To defeat the gangsters, cold, hard, heartless strategies will be needed. Meanwhile the London skyline continues to be debased with toy-town towers just as much as British politics has been by toy-town politicians. The two go hand in hand.

born slippy (tom lutz)

As much as I love literature for its ability to move me, for its capacity for transcendence, for its philosophical artistry, I also love literature as a means of being informed. Of knowing what’s going on in the world. Literature has the capacity to disembody history, to remove the limbs and put them back together again in a fashion which allows one to see it, history, anew. Or, to overdo the metaphor, to provide a bird’s eye view. To alert one to things that one didn’t know existed. Literature, no matter how recherché it might aspire to be, emerges from a culture, and a political-cultural perspective. I might suggest that in these feverish times, Anglo-Saxon literature seems too often to me to drift towards a neutral ground which does not exist. A means of avoiding and escaping the political realities that underpin Anglo-Saxon society. To put it simply, in order to get by in such an age of mass hypocrisy, it’s easier to look the other way, and it feels as though the publishing industry, which is a part of the socio-political culture, is far too often complicit in this. Particularly when it comes to the art of fiction. 

Which was part of the attraction for picking up Born Slippy, whose intentions appeared to be to tackle in part some of the banal hideousness of the wealth machines which make the world go round. A hideousness personified by Dmitry Heald, a Liverpudlian born trader who works for the big banks and sets up his own shadow scheme to rip off a percentage of the dark money which he manages. Names like Putin are bandied around. The story is told from the point of view of his distant friend, Frank, a North American builder whose fascination with Heald is akin to Faust’s fascination with Mephistopheles. Indeed, Frank makes his own Faustian pact, and one of the curious choices the book makes is that it allows Frank to sail off into the distance in the end, rich on the back of Heald’s depravity. The novel’s set-up is effective, flipping between timelines as it constructs the story of the two men’s friendship. But after Heald manufactures a fake death, one which Frank believes in although the reader doesn’t, the plausibility of the tale begins to wane. Frank is too much of a boludo to be a viable central character and it feels as though, for all its strong-minded intentions, the novel fails to address the issues it sets out to. Lutz has a crack at demarcating the socio-cultural hypocrisies of our times but seems reluctant to follow his own logic towards the kind of resolution it demands, one which Elroy, for example, whose praise appears on the cover, would not have shied away from. 

doña perfecta (benito pérez galdós)

Galdós is unknown in the UK I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. He’s in that bracket of being amongst Spain’s greatest modern writers, sin dudas, but in the Anglo-Saxon world I don’t remember his work ever being referenced. I was trying to think this through last night, on completing the novel. The UK is knowledgeable about French literature and Russian, perhaps the Germans get more of a look-in, but beyond those shores, there are few nineteenth century writers not writing in English who get a look-in.

It was with some trepidation that I started grappling with Galdós. What happens if the novel feels dated or irrelevant? Would a hundred years of Anglo-Saxon neglect be justified? The novel starts prosaically, with the engineer, Pepe Rey, visiting the provincial town of Orbajosa, where he is due to meet and possibly marry his cousin, Rosario, daughter of the book’s eponymous anti-heroine. It feels fairly mundane, until the narrative starts to take an unexpected and slightly gothic twist. Rey finds the whole town turning against him. Progressive Spain is confronted with the forces of regressive Catholicism. He is accused of being an atheist, thrown out of the cathedral when he visits and accosted by law suits as opportunistic town folks see him as a means of making money. Deep Spain makes a misery of his life. He would flee if it wasn’t for his newfound passion for the cousin. 

This passion is in some ways as instinctive, as primordial as the reaction of the citizens of Orbajosa to himself. As though a kernel of this superstitious, medieval way of seeing the world is boring deep into Rey’s progressive heart. In truth, Dona Perfecta is an early horror movie, which you could perhaps connect with Jordan Peele’s Get Out. We know Rey should listen to his head, but his heart is running the show. 

This makes for a sly novel which constantly takes the reader by surprise, even down to the formulation of its very final chapter. There are moments when it feels as though Galdós is veering off on a tangent, but the acuity of his representation of this cursed town is brilliantly achieved. The heartlands of Spain feel as though they could belong to another century, any time since the Moors were expelled, and Galdós steers us into these dark waters with glee. 

england’s dreaming (jon savage)

The country is going to the dogs. Young, semiotically charged, apolitical dissidents set out a campaign of national provocation. It all ends in tears.

A great “logline” for a feature. Reading Savage’s sometimes astonishing account of the rise of the Sex Pistols, it strikes one as how ignorant we are about the emergence of punk. The realities of the movement. The Sex Pistols remain one of the most famous bands on the planet. Anywhere you go in the world, you will find people of indeterminate ages who know the lines: “I am an anarchist, I am an anti-christ”. Yet, unlike the Beatles and the Stones, for example, the true story of the Pistols remains opaque. They were, indeed a shooting star. Their legacy, punk, (and it does feel on reading Savage’s book that this is the legacy of McLaren, Lydon, Jones, Cook, Matlock and Vicious), is immense. The punk (a name derived from Elizabethan slang) became as identifiable a signifier of Britishness as the Queen. The semiotics of this initial transgression subsequently transformed into marketing.  

Savage’s book, which deals with the broader movement of punk, but revolves around the narrative of the Pistols, shows how the pieces came together. McLaren and Westwood’s odd-couple marriage, which spawned the image; Jones and Cook’s neo-cockney ingenuity, is the quasi-Dickensian strand which roots the movement in working class London values; Lydon’s neurasthenic charisma; Sid Vicious’ post-adolescent nihilism. The book traces how all of these factors stirred together in the pot, at a time of national decay, lead to the great counter-cultural movement. There’s a sense of the way in which, unlike so many British cultural movements, which tend to be insular, navel-gazing, punk embraced a cultural cosmopolitanism. A smattering of Debord and situationism coupled with a strong dosage of USA/ New York individualism, forged by the likes of Iggy and New York Dolls. Even a strong hint of mental European Dadaism. Perhaps this helps to explain how Punk evolved into something that imposed itself as a global movement, not just musically, but semiotically. 

As the logline states, it all ends in tears, but then it was the very volatility of the movement, a Molotov cocktail, which meant that it burned so bright, and was destined to bun out so quickly. Savage was there and his diary entries, allied to the extensive interviews mean it really feels as though we are getting the inside story on something that went from a few oddballs rehearsing in any old corner of London to global stardom in the space of two years. He’s also very good on the early days of McLaren and Westwood, with their chameleon shops, Sex, and Seditionaries. This is the only strand of the story which feels as though it isn’t followed through. With hindsight it seems obvious that the true victor of the punk movement, the one who reaped the most eventual success (in terms of prestige, finance etcetera) was Vivienne Westwood, who succeeded in maintaining the uneasy balance between edginess and commercial viability for decades. Her shop at World’s End was still, when I worked on the King’s Road in the early nineties, a beacon of counter-cultural chic, which you entered with heart in mouth, like an outsider intruding on a clandestine world. 

Savage’s  book should really be on the school syllabus. At a time when the notion of Englishness is once again in a state a crisis, when the need to assert a national identity seems to have overwhelmed all common sense, it dissects that curious anti-establishment strand of Englishness which can lead to the most astonishing creativity. The Sex Pistols were a product of disenchantment (Chant Chant Chant) which flowered for a day, before withering, only to be adopted by British mercantilism as it lay dying, resurrected as a stock image in the panoply of English eccentrism. We remain caught on the horns of the clash between establishment and anti-establishment, struggling to impose an identity on the conflict, trapped in bondage trousers and the discordant violence of disaffection.