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.