nadja (andre breton, tr. richard howard)

Nadja is a curiosity. The name of Breton is like a beacon of modernism, but his novel feels strangely flat, lacking texture or surprise. It recounts in a semi-autobiographical fashion (auto-ficción) the poet’s affair with a woman who he meets by chance, with whom he is briefly infatuated, but whose increasingly erratic behaviour eventually leads her to the asylum. Breton narrates their affair in a neutral tone, eschewing any romanticism, which is all very well except for the fact that it helps to depict him in an increasingly unsympathetic light. He is attracted to Nadja, but as she fails to conform to his idea of how a partner should behave in an unlikely affair, he loses interest in her. As she heads towards some kind of psychosis, he distances himself altogether. Towards the end of the novel he writes: “Yet I never supposed she could lose or might already have lost the gift of that instinct for self-preservation which permits my friends and myself, for instance to behave ourselves when a flag goes past, confining ourselves to not saluting it; so we do not side with whatever we feel sympathetic to on every occasion, nor permit ourselves the unparalleled joy of committing some splendid sacrilege, etc….” The net effect, surprisingly, is to make Nadja appear a more intriguing personality than the poet himself. As though, in choosing to write about someone who fascinated him but ultimately bored then escaped him, he is seeking to appropriate her uniqueness whilst, through the act of writing, exercising control over their relationship in a manner he never could when they were together. There are untold subtexts here regarding the (exploitative) relationship between poets and their muses. 

the man who surprised everyone (w&d aleksey chupov, natasha merkulova)

What an unexpected, extraordinary film. A man living in Siberia, diagnosed with cancer, facing imminent death, is told a story by a drunken shaman and feels compelled to start dressing as a woman. Which, in his deeply conservative village, is deemed a provocation which unleashes untold hellish consequences. Those are the bald narrative facts, but they don’t disclose the compelling, complex nature of a film which starts as a seemingly light, predictable drama then veers off into altogether stranger territory, building a growing tension as it does so. Quite apart from the more obvious commentary on rural Russian life and homophobia, what this film does so astutely is to make a feminist film which is targeted at men just as much as women. All of which is wrapped up in the leaves of a miracle. It manages to be both brutal and warm-hearted, without ever veering into sentimentalism. The performances of the two leads are remarkable. Evgeniy Tsyganov’s doleful charm means he completely convinces as a good father and a vulnerable woman. It’s a remarkable piece of acting, where every movement feels weighted and near perfect. In the last hour of the film I don’t think he says a word, but in spite of this we as an audience just grow closer and closer to him. The editing has that effortless mix of precision and surprise of all great editing. Finally the wonderful thing about this film, which I think in narrative terms gives it its power, is that we are never given any logical coherent clues as to why Igor chooses to do what he does. There’s no crafty set-ups, no insinuation, just an abrupt, illogical leap. And we make this leap with the character, holding hands with him/her as he plummets into the unknown. 

a moment of war (laurie lee)

I picked this memoir up under the arches of Waterloo Bridge, with Sedley. The bookstalls under the arches feel like a throwback now. Firstly as we now live in a digital age, secondly in the allowance of the use of prime public space to such a marginal enterprise as second hand bookselling. There’s always a book there you feel like buying, one that will take you by surprise.

Lee’s Spanish Civil War memoir felt an appropriate find. Lee is an unfashionable writer. He was a background voice in the childhood of anyone growing up in the second half of the twentieth century in the UK. A connection to another, supposedly more innocent age, allied to the romantic, Hardyesque notion of the wanderer, the rural exile. In this sense Lee’s journey echoes those being taken in other parts of the globe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, as the countryside is emptied with people seeking work in the great cities. Yet as ever, the ideals of romanticism and the actuality exist at arm’s length. Lee’s account of his year in Spain is a hard, dispiriting document. He arrives late, with the war already being lost. The in-fighting, which Orwell also wrote about, means he spends more time incarcerated than he does fighting. There’s more chance of him being killed by a Republican bullet than a Fascist one. It’s an account of someone on the losing side, trying to understand why. His poetic but always accessible prose escorts us through a strange year of defeat, even if at times it reinforces the sense that he was but a visitor, lending his time to the cause. Having said which, he is clear in his account that the Spanish civil war was the precursor of the war that followed, and as such there was no real escape to be had from the fascist enemy. You could flee the battle, but the war would catch up with you in the end.

When they remove the second hand booksellers from beneath Waterloo Bridge, perhaps this will be the day that we realise the battle has well and truly been lost, there is no escaping the war. 

ray & liz (w&d richard billingham)

So I’ve just left England behind for a while. I’ve left behind the rancid divisions, the pub Brexit knees-up, the clown prince PM, the xenophobia, the sense of a country shrinking into a shrinking shell. I’ve arrived back in Latin America and the first thing I do, pretty much, is go and see a film about England. In truth, I went to see it because my friend Dhiraj, who is not normally one to wax lyrical, told me it was a great film. And he’s kind of right. Ray & Liz, Billingham’s quasi autobiographical piece, is a nicely-structured tale, moving between three timelines, each one competing to be the most depressing. Richard Billingham is about my age and although I didn’t grow up in the kind of poverty he describes, I remember the sense of a society that was introspective, pickled in its own ignorance, revolving around the joys of booze and the paucity of anything else. The director captures this world with a surgical eye, as befits the fine photographer he is. There is some affection in the portrayal of the world of Midlands family which is supported by the state, notably in Tony Way’s ebullient but cursed Lol, but any affection is trumped by the harshness of this world. It’s not a land for children, but somehow or other the two brothers have to find a way of growing up with as little psychological harm as possible. Clearly, the fact that the director has reached the point where he can Terrence Davies his past means he’s done OK. Ray & Liz feels like a companion piece to Hogg’s The Souvenir, its dirtier, snottier little cousin. The two films should be compulsory viewing for the new “British curriculums” that the fresh prince government is likely to be pushing any day now. 

the genius and the opera singer (d. vanessa stockley)

January was inundated with visions of my nemesis city, New York. Vanessa Stockley’s sly documentary captures a corner of the city which even now has been lost. It’s a straight-up observational doc, which follows the lives of two women, Ruth and Jessica. Ruth, the onetime opera singer, is 90, whilst Jessica is her daughter. They live in a rent-controlled apartment in the West Village. The apartment is a valuable commodity and the Kuchneresque powers that be want them out, but that’s not the story here. The story is about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, the former close to death now. Two people who have lived boxed up in a small flat together for many years, who bicker and fight and sing and sometimes betray the fact that they love each other more than either can say. - a love which can only be expressed through song. It’s a fully embedded piece which captures every nuance of the relationship: Jessica’s intolerant wit and Ruth’s birdlike all-seeing gaze. In this sense it’s also a tender portrait of age, “second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. The film is accompanied by several sequences where Jessica, (who is just as New York as Howard in Uncut Gems), patrols her barrio, and in these sequences the combative energy and argot of the city comes alive, a chaotic energy which is mirrored in the ongoing skirmish between mother and daughter in their flat high above the streets.

bleeding edge (pynchon)

Travelling in Poland earlier this year I frequently found myself thinking; Pynchon was the only one who really understood what the second world war was about, above and beyond these concepts of victory and defeat. Gravity’s Rainbow soared above all that, like the parabola it describes. Of course, you then expect all his novels to be equally revelatory, especially if the issue underpinning this one is that great known unknown, which goes by the name of 911. For a while it feels as though the novel might take you closer to the heart of the mystery, that Pynchon’s New York will be a palimpsest, the script within which another truth will be revealed. It bubbles with signifiers and characters. The novel ties in the dotcom crash with property development with PROMIS with false flags and mercenaries on roofs with Stinger missiles and the brew is so heady it’s hard not to get high on it. Pynchon employs the kind of semiotic shorthand which he excels at to throw everything into the mix, including the great bouffant clown himself. There are so many possible readings of what happened on the that day, and he does his level best to cover as many of them as possible. But if the point of a mystery is that it conceals a secret (and maybe it isn’t?), then the novel ultimately disappoints. Although that disappointment is determined more by expectations, expectations that have haunted Pynchon for fifty years now, than by any kind of literary failure. Where Gravity’s Rainbow felt as though it not only soared above, it also plumbed the depths, it seems significant that when Maxine, Bleeding Edge’s Oedipa Maas, sees something underground, in Montauk, something so terrifying that it might just be the thing that unlocks the mystery, she flees and the novel never goes there again. As though the revelation is too much for the author to bear, so he leads his protagonist and readers on a wild goose chase instead. Maybe they got to him? (Triple question mark) Or maybe as a character in the novel says “paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much."

uncut gems (w&d the safdie bros, w. ronald bronstein)

No-one who saw their previous film is going to be surprised that the Safdie brothers have succeeded in upping the ante, taking its most effective elements and ramping this up by a factor ten. This is splendidly frenetic filmmaking which throws the kitchen sink at the wall and hopes that it sticks. When it doesn’t, they just throw it even harder. You have to admire their chutzpah. The movie revels in the operatic energy of the city of New York, where bullshit and glory live side by side in perfect disharmony. In truth, Sandler’s Howard is such a sap, such a boludo, that it becomes harder to root for him: he seems to have wilfully put himself on a self-destructive course, heading back to the frying pan just as he’s escaped the fire. (In which regard he’s very similar to Pattinson’s character in Good Time). However, the rollercoaster is what matters, and Howard’s stupidity keeps the ride going. In this sense he’s a classic Trumpian figure, and it wouldn’t be hard to make an argument that underneath the bravura and bling (the film is literally constructed around the idea of ‘bling’) there’s a scathing political subtext. Fair play to the brothers and let’s hope they don’t get sucked into the franchise business. Whilst its possible to think their schtick is way over the top, it feels as though they’re some of the few filmmakers out there who are capable of creating narratives which understand and function in ‘the market’ but are also capable of saying something about it, without having to resort to CGI or glossy special FX. 

el inglés (martin bentancor)

There’s a school of literature in the Americas which might be described as stoic rural. Willa Cather, Jack London, Faulkner, Quiroga,  Juan Rulfo, Twain, even Marquez, perhaps. Of course there are variations on the school, but essentially these are novels about those who made a home for themselves on the edges of the new world, imbuing these new territories with mythical figures, slightly larger than life, gods of the new frontiers. El Inglés belongs to this category. Set over the course of a wake taking place over the course of a single night, as a mysterious friend of the deceased narrates a story to a handful of men about el Inglés, an Englishman called Collingwood who settled in an Uruguayan backwater. It’s a tale which is bigger on detail than it is on action, although it neatly succeeds in rounding up the story of the Englishman and the deceased into the same bundle, seen through the eyes of the schoolmaster, who is himself a stranger to these parts. Where Bentanor comes up trumps is in the way he succeeds in evoking the idea of a timeless world, unchanged and unchangeable. Furthermore, by framing the story against the backdrop of a single night, he captures the languorous rhythms of this rural backwater, where present, past and future seem to eddy in the same waters, washing up against each other in an inseparable dance. 

nights of cabiria (w&d. fellini, w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, pier paolo pasolini)

There’s a beautiful quote in the helpful back page of the BFI (NFT) notes from Fellini: “The film doesn’t have a resolution in the sense that there is a final scene where the story reaches a conclusion so definitive  that you no longer have to worry about Cabiria. I myself have worried about her fate ever since.” This quote strikes such a chord because it talks both about the film and about the act of creation. The filmmaker has constructed a character (played by his wife) with whom he has, you could say, fallen in love. At the end  of the film he has to leave her. Had he left her in a resolved ‘happy ending’ scenario, it would have been easier for Fellini to let her drift away, just another of his many characters. As it is, he leaves her deliberately in a state of uncertainty, and so he is compelled, as the quote says, to return to her fretfully, an uneasy god. 

The quote also feels relevant in so far as the happy ending the film almost postulates for Cabiria doesn’t seem faithful to her story. Cabiria is from the margins. This is by and large a cheerful film, one which celebrates its lead character and her world, in spite of its harshness. Cabiria is a survivor, a fantasist whose feet are nevertheless on the ground. Nevertheless, how many poor prostitutes struggling to get by in post-war Italy were granted a happy ending? Had Fellini given her this kind of resolution, it wouldn’t have felt truthful to the world he depicts. It would have been closer to Pretty Woman than Rome Open City. As it is Nights of Cabiria treads a fine line between social realism and something approaching disfunctional romcom. Cabiria is the sort of gutsy character producers dream of because they know an audience will fall in love with them. Giulietta Masina plays her with an irreverent delight. Even the breeze block shack she has created seems adorable on the inside. (A shack so reminiscent of the buildings in slums all over the world.) But, as much as the film delights in Cabiria’s joie-de-vivre (Chaplineque), the realities of her existence are discernible at the edges. A pitiable fate, living in a hole in the ground, lurks. We’ll never know whether Cabiria succumbed to this fate or escaped it. Fellini opted out of a definitive resolution, but in so doing he found a way of being truthful both to the spirit of his times and the spirit of his character.