la dolce vita (w&d federico fellini; w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, brunello rondi, pier paolo pasolini)

The fascinating thing about watching unarguable classics comes in part from observing the way in which the director frequently approaches his or her film with no regard for the conventions of storytelling. Dolce Vita is a collection of bravura sequences rather than any kind of coherent, identifiable narrative. There’s the helicopter sequence, the miracles sequence, the Ekberg sequence, the aristocrats sequence etcetera. Each sequence could act as an extended short on its own. Fellini isn’t interested in telling a story in the conventional understanding of that term, he’s interested in creating a world. The brilliant world he creates, that of a paparazzi journalist in good-time Rome, is evident enough, but the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ are more complex. The movie is in effect a kind of prose poem focussed on the dissolute life of the charming Mastroianni. No-one quite exudes sophisticated hedonism like Mastroianni and he’s so charismatic that you can buy the idea that this is actually the perfect way to live. Yet as the film unfolds, the cracks begin to appear. His night with Ekberg is charming but converts him into a dogsbody, fetching milk for a stray cat. His relationship with his father is distant and less fulfilling than it should be. The one time he comes clean and declares an emotional attachment, the object of that declaration mocks him. He becomes increasingly misogynistic. The final scene is protracted, gratuitous, the tedious fag-end of a party which has gone on for far too long. Mastroianni is dressed like a roué. He has become abusive. No woman in the audience is going to like him anymore. His is the rake’s progress. Clearly there’s something in Fellini’s own psychodrama playing out here, which would require a more extensive knowledge of the context of the film within the director’s oeuvre. It feels as though it’s on the border of what is called in Montevideo ‘auto-ficcion’ which might just be the film’s skill. What is perhaps more curious is the way in which the film seems to wilfully seek to tire the viewer out. Yet another character says: ‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen the dawn”, something which we have witnessed several times in the course of three hours, something which is an elemental part of Marcello’s disrupted rhythms. It’s as though the filmmaker wants us to realise not just the beauty and bright lights of the world that Marcello inhabits, but also the erosive, draining impact of this lifestyle. He wants you to stumble out of the cinema, stunned, ready for your bed, never wanting to go out on the town again.  

shosha (isaac bashevis singer)

We went to Krochmalna Street, the street in Warsaw that Singer’s narrator, Aaron Greindinger, was raised on and the street Shosha, the woman he fell in love with as a child, still lived on when Aaron returned many years later, so that he fell in love with her all over again, in spite of the fact that they now had so little in common. It’s not clear to the narrator or the reader how much this second infatuation is with Shosha or with a romanticised vision of his own childhood, described so briefly in the opening pages of the novel. Walking down the street as it now stands makes the protagonist's act of nostalgia seem even more nostalgic, for the street full of Jewish life which Singer or Aaron would have known is no more. In its place is a long road with several stunted tower blocks. In one corner of the street there was a small stall under a tarpaulin, selling vegetables and pickles, maybe the only ghostly hint of the smells and the bustle which Singer so vividly describes. The Jewish quarter is no more. Almost all of Warsaw was destroyed in the war, and though much has been rebuilt, the Jewish quarter wasn’t. A whole world vanished. People, buildings, synagogues, customs. Nevertheless, it can still be visited in the pages of Singer’s novel. Literature transcends even genocide. The novel was published in 1978, so the world the novelist conjures was already an act of memory. The novelist would have been aware, when he wrote the book, of the alchemical nature of his craft. These characters might have died in the war; on the road, as supposedly happened to Shosha; in the camps; or in the ghetto, but in the writer’s happy-go-lucky prose they live on. As does Krochmalna Street. Because the truth is that I visited it twice when I was in Warsaw. Once when I walked down the street which is still called by that name in googlemaps, and a second time as I strode through the words of Singer’s novel. And of those two visits, the one that seemed most real, or most alive to me, was the latter.

the time by the sea (ronald blythe)

Blythe’s memoir is a warm-hearted, discursive ramble though the years he spent living in Suffolk, mostly in Aldeburgh. He describes his friendships with Britten, Imagen Holst and many others. A whole host of writers whose work is little read today, like Blythe himself, populate the book’s pages. The book is redolent of a lost post-war Britain. There’s far more poverty, but far more idealism as well. It feels as though the Britain Blythe describes still retains its ties to the nineteenth century and those  that preceded it. Much of the book is written in the shadow of George Crabbe, a figure more or less forgotten today. There are anecdotes about Samuel Palmer, Shakespeare, Clare. The romantic link between countryside, art and daily life is celebrated in the works of writers, composers and artists.  Nowadays it feels as though the British countryside, (particularly in Suffolk) has become a privileged retreat, colonised by second home owners and the wealthy; transformed from a county whose hardship people like my grandparents sought to escape. Blythe’s book therefore captures something that feels as though it is irretrievably lost. The car, central heating, out-of-town supermarkets: all these things have transformed rural life. A glimpse of how the author lived that transformation, for better or for worse, is also to be gleaned from this memoir. 

trans-atlantyk (witold gombrowicz, tr carolyn french & nina karsov)

This is one of the stranger books you will ever read. The story as such of the writer’s journey from the Baltic port of Gdynia to Buenos Aires at the outbreak of the Second World War. The writer, struggling to survive, falls in with a bunch of aristocratic, febrile emigrés. He gets caught up in a psychodrama involving a count and his son, who is being seduced by a wealthy Argentine, Gonzalo. There’s a fake duel and a potentially murderous denouement, when a whole host of Poles arrive and sing and dance a traditional Krakow song, even as the country itself is tottering to defeat at the hands of the invading Germans. This denouement, which by happenstance I read this morning in Krakow, is reminiscent of the final scene of Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds. War and defeat haunt this short novel which at the same time seems to be doing everything in its power to escape this haunting. The language is jaunty and mannered, even Joyceian. The tone is ribald, comic, scathing. The author’s intentions feel hard to decipher. Perhaps, in the face of absolute despair, the only option left is a demented hilarity. 

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This note from the introduction by Stanislaw Baranczak is of interest: “During most of the war years he was…struggling for survival, coping with extreme poverty and wasting his energies on a job as a bank clerk offered to him by a Polish banker in Buenos Aires. According to Gombrowicz he wrote Trans-Atlantyk on his desk at the bank, hiding the manuscript in a drawer whenever his superior entered the room.”

grâce à dieu (w&d ozon)

The journey of the protagonist. If you want to watch a film which shows why you don’t need to obey any of the so-called screenwriting rules, this might not be a bad example. Ozon’s film switches protagonist three times. Each protagonist has their own mini-narrative. These narratives overlap, but they don’t map onto each other within the overall narrative structure. Each character has their own journey to go on, and each one is protagonist of the film in their own right, for a while. 

Ozon has a scarcely credible 20 features listed on IMDB. One has few doubts that being this prolific, and working within a system where he presumably knows his next film is going to get made, no matter what happens to his last one, permits the director to take what might be seen to be a more unorthodox approach. There’s also a coherent thematic logic for the approach. Grâce à Dieu (like the Oscar winning Spotlight), takes on the issue of pedophilia in the catholic church. It tells the true story of a priest in Lyon who abused young boys for decades, whilst the bishop chose to turn a blind eye. It’s a very recent case, with individuals being sent to trial even as the film was being made. There were perhaps hundreds of victims. The film can’t tell all their stories, but by refusing to select one ‘heroic’ protagonist, it sets out to at least broaden the scope of its representation. Perhaps it’s this fragmentary approach which permits Ozon to approach the subject with such subtlety, revealing the way in which his characters are flawed rather than heroic human beings, individuals who have been scarred by their abuse. Grâce à Dieu is revelatory in its nuanced handling of one of the more complex, awkward stories out there, one that needs to be told, but if it is to be told, needs to be told right.