campo (d. tiago hespanha)

Campo is a dreamy, immersive documentary which describes a world which the film’s texts, taken from the likes of Carl Sagan, suggests might be a simulacrum for the world itself, if not the universe. This world, the opening banner informs, is the site of the largest weapons training site in Western Europe, a place where NATO troops play their war games, blowing up doors, running through nightfields, shooting at targets. However, the film’s art is in the way it recognises that the military grandstanding is only part of this world. The natural world flourishes in an environment that cannot be inhabited by humans - the military are always transient, bivouacked in tents, on the point of moving on. There’s a neat juxtaposition of a bird watcher, whose notes detail another ‘campo’, that of the birds who squabble over their territories, cutting to soldiers admiring the manoeuvres of fighter planes, before segueing on to a group of model plane aficionados who also use the Campo. This sequence is typical of the film and its intention to highlight how the warlike element of the Campo merely co-exists with the other natural world elements. As such, the Campo contains multitudes, and the film seeks to honour all of this variety, from the birth of a lamb to the discovery of a dead pregnant sheep. It’s a cunning piece of filmmaking whose deceptive simplicity masks the profounder elements of its investigation into the condition of existence, something which a sequence with some amateur astronomers teases out. On a more technical level, it might be worth observing the film’s commitment to editing from light to dark; it has no fear of a jarring edit, for example cutting abruptly from nighttime military manoeuvres to the quiet calm of a wilderness morning. There is, natch, something biblical in this approach, and Hespanha’s film, with its nods to Guzman and Eisenstein, (perhaps) carries off its dry ambition with a masked aplomb.

death in her hands (ottessa moshfegh)

Death in her Hands is something of a shaggy dog story, almost literally, as the narrator’s dog plays a key role in the narrative. Out walking her dog Charlie, the narrator, Vesta Gul, discovers a note which states: “Her name was Magda. Nobody will ever know who killed her. It wasn’t me. Here is her dead body.” The novel opens with the discovery of this note, which prompts the elderly Vesta to go on an increasingly unhinged journey to discover what really happened to Magda. Suffice it to say there is no body and what we, as readers, discover is entirely the product of Vesta’s curious imagination. Which is also, one deduces, the author’s curious imagination. In essence this is a short sharp novel about delirium. It is reminiscent of Thomas Bernhard, in the way in which the reading of his novels compels the reader to enter into the consciousness of the narrator. Similarly, this is a journey through Vesta’s consciousness, made all the more curious because she is not so much an unreliable narrator as an unhinged one. We know that Vesta is constructing a mystery out of nothing - there is no body - but at the same time the shadow of her imagination seems to cast its spell and suggest that there is something there to be discovered, even though we know there probably isn’t. Maybe Robbe-Grillet would be another point of reference. The novel as a construction of insanity, the process of reading as one that is complicit with this process. All of which makes it sound more challenging than it is to read: Death in her Hands rattles along at a fair old lick, the greatest obstacle to completing it being the reader’s tendency to scratch his or her head in bemusement on a regular basis. 

nostalgia (w&d tarkovsky, w tonino guerra)

Cinemateca still has a limited foro, something like 50%, at a guess. So it’s not a surprise that this screening of Tarkovsky’s penultimate film was effectively sold out. What was a surprise, was the demographic of the audience. Impossible to say if I was the oldest person there, but what was evident was that the majority were younger than me. One normally associates venerable art movies with a more elderly public, but that wasn’t the case last night. Which was refreshing. Even more so, given the reaction at the film’s conclusion. The final shot is a lengthy, artistic, as close to the transcendent as cinema perhaps gets. The film concluded and there was a tangible silence, an immobility. No-one rushed to get up. As though we were all gradually returning to the other world, after our deep immersion in Tarkovsky world. 

Nostalgia is a film which at times feels almost playful, bordering on the melodramatic. The relationship between Gorchakov and Eugenia is charged with soap opera tension. There’s a glorious scene where Eugenia psychs herself to run up some stairs but instead goes flying on her high heels. She gets up laughing. She’s a belligerently anti-Tarkovskian character who undercuts the film’s solemnity, refusing to kneel in the opening sequence when they visit a church. Perhaps because of this lightness, the moments of alt-poetry feel all the more bewildering and astonishing. The film plays with Gorchakov’s memories, which infiltrate the narrative like a ghost dog, the same dog that crops up in both the Italian world of the action and the Russian world of memory. This more playful Tarkovsky refuses to let the viewer settle into anything close to reverence. The sound of drilling, of Chinese music, invades and distracts. The viewer isn’t sure where to place themselves, anymore than the Russian visitors seem to know how to place themselves within the complex faded glory of Italy. 

This disorientation, perhaps most cruelly expounded in a scene where a clown mocks Domenico, the holy fool who has set himself on fire, eventually builds towards the harrowing, over processed finale, whose very intensity acts as a release. Finally we understand where we are. Finally we realise that this has been as close to an act of prayer as we’re likely to get in this sacrilegious world. The seriousness comes as a relief. This is what we need. We need the snow to fall on the ruined abbey of our modern world.

mirror (w&d tarkovsky, w aleksandr misharin)

There are moments in Mirror when it feels as though Tarkovsky is exploring the outer boundaries of the possibility of fiction, and he has no option but to concede that fiction will not do what he needs. In these moments we see images of war, as soldiers trek through mud-wracked fields, or alternatively, more curiously, a mass of Chinese wave Mao’s little red book. These Chinese images fall out of apparent context into the film. The images of the Soviet war have a logic in this memory piece, reflecting the ubiquity of the second world war in post-45 Soviet filmmaking. The images of Russian soldiers lock us into the world of Tarkovsky’s children and describe the terror that helped form that world. But the images of the Chinese seem to push the narrative further, seeking to locate it in a more universal twentieth century experience, something which is amplified by the curious Spanish section, when unexpected characters appear, talking in Spanish about bullfighting, again contrasted with documentary footage of the Spanish Civil War.

Who are these Spaniards, or these Chinese, and what are they doing in Tarkovky’s delicate memory piece? But then our memories are not confined to the details of family or place. Our imaginations even as children engage with the morbid fears of the age. At another point, there’s footage of the nuclear bomb exploding, and any child who grew up in the shadow of the cold war had the bogeyman of nuclear annihilation lurking somewhere in their consciousness. Fiction can only go so far, at some point the filmmaker has to declare that his imagination has been formed by the actuality of the world. 

Having said that, in Mirror we see again the breathtaking scope of the auteur’s imagination. The way he painted poetry with a camera that glided, like a ghost, through the scenes of a child’s past. There are so many moments for the high priests of cinematic criticism to dwell on that we could be here all year. Ideas and images thrown together in a style that sometimes borders on the Dada-esque, Tzara racing around fitting pieces together that don’t appear to match, but somehow do anyway. There is something almost childlike about this investigation of being a child. The construction of the film foregoes the adult demands of coherence, delighting in a language that is being created anew, for the very first time, all over again. In this film, more perhaps than any of his others, there is a connection with Godard, both employing a seemingly haphazard process of assemblage to stretch the boundaries of cinematic possibility. 

kentuckis (samanta schweblin)

As astute and devoted readers will be aware, I was underwhelmed by Fever Dream, Schweblin’s breakthrough novel, now being adapted as a major motion picture. It was smart, but wafer thin, and perhaps in my usual curmudgeonly style I reacted to the hype by putting it down and talking about Cortazar. Kentuckis is also smart and slightly chunkier, albeit still brittle, but on a personal level I found myself warming to it as I got into it. If the subjective experience is of any value.

The novel is a sort of low high concept. A new gizmo, which has a lot in common with the turn-of-the-century Tamagotchi vogue, is on the market. The kentuckis is a cute object which communicates with its owner, albeit non-verbally. It needs charging every night and there are different versions with animal designs, (owl, rabbit, etc). The twist is the ghost in the machine: each kentuckis has an owner but there’s also a shadow owner who is reviewing the data from the kentuckis’ camera on their device. Hence is set up a game of suspense. Who is on the other side? Or if you are a viewer rather than an owner, what is really going on in the world you are being invited to spy on?

It’s great literary device, which allows the writer to talk about globalisation, our obsession with screens, and the vanity of being watched by the all pervasive cameras . Given that the kentuckis can die if they are not recharged on time, and the small vulnerable creatures can go about alone in the world, there is also a lot of scope for dramatic tension, which the novel mines effectively. The kentuckis end up being passive agents of truth, disclosing unpalatable revelations to owners on both sides of the digital divide. What does it mean to ‘be connected’? Schweblin employs her conceit to investigate this modern concept in ways that surprise both subject and reader. As such the conceit is also a sly meta take on the very act of reading: what does the book tell us about the characters? And what do the characters reveal about us, the readers?

taxi driver (d. scorsese, w. schrader)

De Niro’s lopsided grin. The inner madness of the outsider who will conquer the world. A direct romantic link between Les Fleurs Du Mal, (the taxi driver as the modern flaneur), and the lunatic apostles of Trump. 

De Niro as cowboy. Keitel calls him a cowboy. He polishes his cowboy boots. He’s the vengeful hero of a Western come to clean up the land. Shades of Midnight Cowboy, a decade later. 

The logical conclusion of the conquest of the natural world, is to turn in on itself, to wallow in an orgy of supposedly lost freedoms. (The right to roam wild, the right to kill, the right to commit crimes. The freedom to carry weapons, to curtail another’s freedom.) 

Keitel as Gatsby - the use of the word “sport”.

The imperfections of an iconic movie. The narrative drifting with the rhythm of the night. 

The secondary characters who create the world. The other cab drivers. The Latino bodega owner. Iris’ companion. The man who interviews Travis for the job. Scorsese himself. The secret service agent. A world is made of people. Film can accommodate a local galaxy like no other artistic medium. 

The slogan of Charles Palantine: “We are the people”

The dry witty interchange between Brooks and Shepherd, like something out of another movie, an NY romcom running alongside the dystopia Travis is living. 

midnight cowboy (d john schlesinger, w. waldo salt)

This is one of those iconic films of my youth, another one I will have seen on late night TV back in the eighties, lodged there as a reference point, the details all but forgotten. I revisited it as part of a new project which might be set in NY of that era. That Velvet NY, a rat infested Factory farm with a winsome charm that has supposedly been long since lost, is at the forefront of Midnight Cowboy. All the semiotic placeholders are present. The underpasses where the zombie world lives. The Italian families, speaking Italian. The outrageous sub-Velvet art party which is a haven for freaks, petty criminals and anyone who wants to get out of the cold. 

Schlesinger’s film cleverly frames its vision of NY through the dreams of the would-be cowboy gigolo, Joe Buck, played with a disarming naivety by Jon Voight. He comes from Texas to use his body and make something of himself, Candy Darling style. The film plays on the myth of NY as a city paved with gold which turns out to be strewn with rubbish and conmen. One of whom is Hoffman’s Rizzo, a presumably gay down-an-out who at first cons him and then befriends him. The fame of Midnight Cowboy was down to two things: one is Hoffman’s bravura performance, and  the other is its portrayal of love between men, even if it’s clear this love-hate relationship is never anything other than platonic. Hoffman, who had once been a struggling actor who knew this world like the back of his hand, succeeds in portraying Rizzo as a bona fide creature of the streets, someone who might have literally crawled out of the gutter. His off-key smile and unexpected gentleness lend Rizzo a pathos which that type of character is rarely offered on the big screen. He seems like a survivor, until it becomes obvious that the thing which bonds him to Joe Buck is that they are both inveterate losers. 

The film is also distinguished by its willingness to go off-piste. The neo-Roeg editing style was in danger of becoming slightly cliched, but in Midnight Cowboy it permitted Schlesinger to go beyond naturalism and seek out a more percussive register to convey its vision of a city which never sleeps, but also one that never gives a sucker an even break. 

capital (john lanchester)

The prologue of Lanchester’s novel promises much. The premise is set out: a street where every home is worth is a million pounds. The great London victors of the property wars, those blessed to have been in possession of a house in a desirable barrio of London in the late years of the twentieth century, early twenty first. Who, as the writer explains, just by sitting still in their homes day after day were racking up capital, getting rich. The street is called Pepys Road and would appear to be on one of the more salubrious streets of Clapham. The absurdity of the London housing boom is a subject that begs to be interrogated and there’s no better place for investigating it than in a novel.

However, the novel never really seems to follow through on this premise. It’s another in the current vogue of novels told from multiple perspectives (see Coe’s Middle England and Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other), a format that by and large feels more effective in theory than execution. In theory the potential for crossover, for one household to effect another, with great dramatic possibilities, is strong, but this never really happens in Capital. In addition, in the end at least half of the book’s key characters don’t actually live on the street. And if they do, the impact of their undeserved wealth on their psyche is never examined. Whist being an entertaining enough read, it feels as though Lanchester never nails any of his targets. Rather the novel drifts along towards what feels like a sort-of happy ending, except for the fact that one of the protagonists has ended up in a detention centre, under threat of being sent back to her native Zimbabwe and facing whatever kind of horrors she might have to face there. Whilst it is in some ways admirable to compose an overarching novel about London, its winners and losers, there’s always a danger that the presentation of the losers ends up seeming trite. 

Capital could have been a correlative to Who We Was, Krauze’s take on the criminal underclass. It could have shown the complex underside of the other world, that of the unwitting millionaires. There is a  hint of a darker storyline where the residents of the streets are sent the same menacing postcard, but this is never thread which feels undercooked. The man behind this menacing campaign, an angry frustrated artist, is at one point described as going through his Dostoyevski stage. And naming Dostoyevski makes one wonder what the Russian would have made of this story, as well as realise how much modern London needs and lacks its own Dostoyevski. 

la vie et rien d'autre (w&d bertrand tavernier, w jean cosmos)

Tavernier’s film is set in the aftermath of the first world war. Philippe Noiret is Major Delaplane, in charge of recovering the bodies of dead soldiers whose remains have not yet been identified. In the course of his job he meets the aristocratic Irène de Courtil (Sabine Azéma) who is searching for her lost husband, even though it becomes clear that they were estranged and that he was the lover of another woman, whose path she crosses, looking for the same man. The premise (reminiscent of Guzman’s Nostalgia por la Luz) is fascinating, allowing the film to meditate on the hypocrisy of the veneration of the dead soldiers by those who continue to use their sacrifice for their own advantage. The relationship that evolves between Noiret and Azéma is well constructed, with Noiret a man who suffers no nonsense, and both characters overcoming an initial antipathy to discover that the things they have in common bind them far more than they realise. The budget was clearly expansive, and there are several set piece scenes whose artistry is impeccably executed. Unfortunately the script feels baggy and lends the film a discursive tone. Some of the strongest moments come towards the end, when the film foregoes dialogue in a moving sequence where both soldiers and those searching for their lost ones find a moment of consolation at an impromptu cabaret night. The atmosphere and music of this moment invoke a pathos which the film at other points seems to strain to achieve. 

prater violet (christopher isherwood)

Who says there’s anything new under the sun? The notion of auto-ficcion is sometimes bandied around as a post-modern concept, but here’s a resolutely modernist Isherwood constructing a novel wherein the central character is one Christopher Isherwood and reads for all the world like a piece of non-fiction. The conceit helps to lend authenticity to a minor text, which describes the author’s experiences as a screenwriter working for a Viennese film director, Friedrich Bergmann, (modelled on the real life director Berthold Viertel), contracted by a British studio to make the powder puff movie. The details of movie making in the thirties are enjoyable and suggest a world that hasn’t changed all that much. In the first decade of this century I spent a fair amount of time drifting around the edges of the old film world in Soho and the characters who crop up in Prater Violet are dead ringers for the down-to-earth figures one would meet there. The novel’s twist occurs with the Austrian Anschluss when the director’s family is threatened by the Nazi takeover, which in turn puts the film in jeopardy. Isherwood’s novel is too discursive to really engage with the implications, but even so, the way the people working on the film react to an event in a distant country which will eventually have unimagined consequences in Britain feels disconcerting, the insularity contributing to a blasé lack of concern, something Isherwood is aware of. The novel was published in 1945 and one can imagine Isherwood working on it during the war, mindful of the way in which the events that lead up to the catastrophe were ignored; in the words of Auden: “How everyone turns away, quite leisurely from the disaster.”