night on earth (w&d jarmusch)

There is, as Snr Amato pointed out afterwards, a glorious faith in the latent possibilities of globalisation inherent in Jarmusch’s 1991 globetrotting movie. Alongside 21 Grams, and with a sideways nod at Magnolia, the movie adopts the portmanteau approach with five stories included under the titular umbrella of a single night on earth. Each night is captured in the exchange between a taxi driver and their client(s). The movie is set in LA, NY, Paris, Helsinki and Rome, but the globalisation is given added emphasis by fact that the two cab drivers in NY and Paris, (Armin Mueller-Stahl & Isaach De Bankolé), give two of the film’s finest performances as fish out of water looking to make a living as immigrants. Indeed, one of the best sequences is the scene with Isaach De Bankolé and two arrogant, drunken Africans whose condescension leads to him telling them to get out. From the outset there’s a heady, liquid pleasure to Jarmusch’s filmmaking, as though the possibilities are endless now, the wall is down (Armin Mueller-Stahl’s character comes from Leipzig, “near Czechoslovakia”), the Twin Towers are still visible in the background. Globalisation is going to be fun, baby, it’s going to open doors, create connections, reaffirm the kind of honest working class values that Winona Ryder’s cab driver defends. In which sense, Night on Earth, pre Covid, pre-Iraq, pre-911, pre-Brexit, Trump, Ughyurs, feels not so much like a night on this earth, but a night on another earth, one that was swapped out for the earth we are currently saddled with. Another earth which existed once upon a time, before Brooklyn became gentrified. 

stranger than paradise (w&d jim jarmusch)

Quite apart from its muted lo-fi charm, it’s intriguing to contemplate what marked Stranger Than Paradise out as the work of a filmmaker who would go on to become an undisputed star of the independent circuit. What one notes is that, beneath the apparently messy veneer, there’s a straightforward but effective narrative discipline at play. The film is divided into three parts (or acts), in New York, Cleveland and Florida. The first act introduces the characters and sets up the dynamic between Eva, the Hungarian cousin, and Willie, the good-looking but aimless protagonist. The second act develops this relationship, and the third brings it to some kind of resolution. Nothing is ever on the nose, there’s never any great sense of purpose, but the film’s structural integrity prevents it from feeling aimless or overly self-indulgent. Add to this the bewitching charm of grainy black and white, off-beat characterisation, Screaming Jay Hawkins and a dry cinematic wit and you have the recipe for a sleeper hit. I overhead someone coming out of the cinemas saying, this is the model for so many indie films, including 25 Watts, and they’re right. Stranger than Paradise and Down by Law helped to define a sub-Vigo aesthetic which has an easy-assembly feel, a textbook ‘how-to-make-a-film-on-a-shoestring’, but it’s also evident that there’s a nascent instinct for the discipline of how to make 90 minutes of cinema time feel like time well spent, something which has helped to make early Jarmusch films so iconic. 

laurus (w. eugene vodolazkin, tr, lisa hayden)

At its richest and strangest, Laurus, a meditation on death, sainthood and Russia, summons up the aura of a Chagall painting. Vivid colours which defy gravity, lovers whose love beatifies them for a moment in time (as love beatifies all lovers), a sense of infinite space beyond the edges of the canvas or the page. Vodolazkin’s tale narrates the story of a boy who acquires the gift of healing from his grandfather, a gift that it also a burden. This is another story set in times of plague when the skills of Arseny, the novel’s protagonist whose name changes several times, (ending as the eponymous Laurus), can make all the difference between life and death. The author locates two facets of Arseny’s abilities: on the one hand there is the more technological skill of being able to identify which plants offer which cures; on the other a more mystical capacity to channel a healing energy through his touch. Laurus is very much a novel about Russia, and the forces at work in the construction of the Russian psyche. This duality in Aresny feels like a commentary on the equilibrium which Russia seeks between the poles of mysticism and modernity, between the worlds of East and West. All of which is implicit rather than explicit. Arseny himself evolves from medicine man to holy fool to ambassador. The book acquires a quixotic feel as we follow his life story towards death. The writer’s take on the relationship between life and the afterlife is one of the more powerful elements of the novel; there’s a reflection on what it means to be mortal that few Western writers are willing to engage with. The sense that our travails upon this earth are part of a wider journey, one humans are very far from understanding, one that defies time (which is illustrated by the novel’s willingness to engage with anachronism). Laurus is a novel which constantly seeks to go beyond materialism to provoke a contemplation of the transcendent, the words flying off the edge of the page towards an unknown corner of the galaxy. 

a lonely man (chris power)

Power’s novel is what might be termed deceptively slight. It’s a seductively easy read, set in the life of Robert Prowse, a British novelist living in Berlin, with his Swedish wife and two children. Much of the first half of the book is ruminatory, with the banalities and frustrations of Robert’s day-to-day life addressed, the pleasures of middle aged Berlin contrasted to his youthful visits to the city when he partied hard. As such the novel touches on the transformation of that city over the course of the late twentieth/ early twenty first century as the exhilaration of freedom gave way to the mundanities of capitalism. At one point I thought the novel was going to be a Toussaint/ Chejfec like drift, but narrative kicks in as Robert becomes absorbed in the story of Patrick, another writer he meets by chance who is fleeing Putin’s henchmen. Patrick had been contracted to ghost write the biography of an oligarch who got on the wrong side fo the Russian kleptocracy and died in suspicious circumstances. Patrick has fled, paranoid, to Berlin and relates his story to Robert, who gradually finds himself caught up in the tentacles of Moscow’s thread. 

The acknowledgements show that Power has done his research and the novel forments a sense of growing dread as Robert inadvertently appears to be putting his family at risk. It’s an effective piece of writing, and a useful addition to the cannon of Putin’s novelists who include, of those I know, Pelevin, Sorokin, Lebedev and Prilepin. 

Robert and Partick connect in a book shop when Patrick picks up an early Bolaño novel and they discuss the Chilean. (The novel concludes with another nod to Bolaño). To reference Bolaño is audacious, setting the bar exceedingly high. A Lonely Man feels far more like the throwaway earlier works of the dead writer, in so far as it shares that deceptive lightness; an easy read which might contain multitudes. Having finished the novel I looked up the author and browsed his twitter feed. Besides Roberto there are references to a host of others who influence I share. SK, Pinter, Calvino, to name a few. The author himself, it transpires, is part of the literary world of the UK and seems like an eminently likeable individual. Which is something he has in common with Robert, his protagonist. There’s enough in Robert to make him feel like an essential product of 21st Englishness. Which also had me thinking about why the novel perhaps lacks the punch of some of the author’s favourites. The conclusion I came to is that the problem is that everything is just a bit too likeable. One of the elements of being a white male Englishman in the twenty first century is that we want to be clear that, unlike our forefathers, we are not on the side of the oppressors. It might be a slightly Nietzschean vantage point, but there is a decadence in wanting to be liked. You don’t find it in Elizabethan or Jacobean literature. It’s a reasonable, even admirable, life goal, but it’s not great for literature. I might be wrong. but the writers we love (including the above named) never gave a flying fuck about being liked. The desire to be even-handed, to not offend has become engrained in modern liberal British culture. It is part of the both sides approach of the media and something the neo-Fascists have taken advantage of. For some reason it seemed to me that A Lonely Man, whilst a skilful and enjoyable piece of writing, somehow fails to land the broader punches it is seeking to make, for reasons that have to do with all of this. The book walks out on to the ice, the ice is threatening  and beautiful, but the ice somehow never seems likely to crack. The surface will be described, ruffled, questioned, but it will never be broken. 

interiors (w&d allen)

Interiors, a family drama which has s tragic conclusion strangely reminiscent of Roma, is the film that reveals the filmmaker Allen might have been. A famous admirer of Bergman, among other European auteurs, this was Allen’s serious film whose Bergmanian influence is worn on its sleeve. There’s many a carefully composed shot which goes against the usual Allen grain, giving the film a somewhat ponderous air which at times has the feel of a student homage. On the other hand, there are moments and scenes, in particular the wedding scene, which suggest a more emotionally invested artist than he eventually became. (There may be exceptions to this rule, such as Hannah and Her Sisters and Blue Jasmine). Allen will always be a curious figure, very much of the zeitgeist, revered and now despised in almost equal measure. His star is waning, and has been for many years, even without the scandal, so much so it’s hard to remember how influential and loved he was back in the dog days of the twentieth century. (Or should that be the glory days.) The Allen who turned down the Oscars to play with his jazz band, the one who had mastered the art of independent film making in a way no-one else quite managed in the USA, master of his own destiny, standing apart from the system. Interiors would be an example of this, the artist who was prepared to piss everyone off, the clown who suddenly starts acting in Chekhov plays. It suggests a destiny that Allen would never be able to pursue, because the truth is that his independence was always limited; it was always contingent on working within a lighter register which would make the stars who still queue up to work with him look good. In this context it’s worth celebrating the work of his cast, in particular Keaton, Marybeth Hurt, Geraldine Page and Richard Jordan, who were willing to forego the usual pleasures of being an engaging Allen character to join him on his curious mission to discover his inner, unironic artist. 

blue jasmine (w&d allen)

What to make of Allen’s curious tale of his protagonist’s demise? What to make of the unsympathetic husband who runs off with the teenage au-pair? It’s hard to get a handle on an Allen film these days, especially one which purports to adopt a female perspective. Blanchett’s Jasmine is a wreck of a woman, and on one level, it’s to the film’s credit that it portrays her warts and all, as she unravels, stitches herself back together and then unravels oncemeore. She is the trope of the neurotic, dippy but beautiful woman whose refusal to see what it going on around her will be her downfall, a downfall she in so many ways deserves. Nevertheless, to Blanchett’s credit, we can’t help rooting for her, even if just a bit. We want things to work out for her in the end, and when they don’t, it smarts. This is indeed, a three dimensional character, and there is a certain courage to be found in the construction and her depiction. Great characters can be a pain in the neck.  

The other less Flaubertian way of reading the film is as a critique of the excesses of Wall Street, although social commentary always rings somewhat hollow in Allen’s world. He is a director whose insularity lead to him treating the world as essentially a vehicle for his movies to be set in, an attitude as solipsistic and neo-imperialistic as that of his successor, Wes Anderson, who inherited Allen’s love of guest stars and ‘exotic’ locations. However, Allen at his best also riffs off of the loss of his European soul, the paradox of having cinematic power but lacking the cinematic profundity to match up to his idols. Allen’s very fecundity, his capacity to stitch together an off-the-cuff story with a few gags, which would always be financed, year after year, seemed to be something which, at the peak of his power he railed against. The creation of an anti-heroine, in the shape of Jasmine, is the fruit of the labours of this other Allen, a filmmaker who occasionally lived up to his own aspirations. 

and their children after them (nicolas mathieu, tr william rodarmor)

There’s a moment in the book when one of the characters, Steph, starts to study literature. She gets into Robbe-Grillet, but can’t handle Proust and “the whole business of the slightest oscillation of the heart…. give me a break.” If there’s a division in French literature between Flaubert, with his pared back, precise prose, and Proust, with his art-nouveau twirls, Mathieu would appear to be coming down firmly on the side of Flaubert. This is an almost utilitarian novel about ‘ordinary people’ in an ordinary town leading ordinary lives, which allows itself precious few flourishes. At the same time, it is very much a novel which is steeped in the ‘oscillations of the heart’. So perhaps there is a bit of both worlds at play here.

The novel recounts the lives of Anthony and Hacine over the course of six years and four chapters, taking place in the 90s, with the last chapter constructed around the day of the semi-final of the 98 World Cup when France beat Croatia. The two characters are boys at the start of the novel and young men by the end. Their paths will cross over the years, with far more in common than they realise, in spite of the racial divide. Hacine’s parents are Moroccan immigrants and Hacine himself oscillates between the two countries, seeking an identity he never quite seems to locate. However, the same can be said of Anthony, whose life is shaped by the failure of his parent’s marriage and his infatuation for Steph, a girl who will always be out of his league. Mathieu describes a post-modern listlessness that only ever seems to find a release in the traditional escapes of alcohol, drugs, violence and sex. The ennui is palpable, the idea of self-determination and escape thwarted whenever either seeks to break out. Anthony joins the army to escape their hometown, but is invalided out after a football injury ruins his knee. Hacine has dreams of becoming a high-end drug dealer which only lead to domestic frustration.

The novel is beautifully constructed, resolutely readable. It teeters on the edge of the banal without ever quite tipping over the edge. It does the job it sets out to do, which is to document the hopes and disappointments of small town French/ European/ modern life. Mathieu’s unadulterated naturalism, redacted with a sparse aesthetic formalism, desperately resists any genuflection towards the transcendent. 

turtles can fly (w&d bahman ghobadi)

A Kurdish refugee camp on the border of Iraq and Turkey. The refugee camp is littered with destroyed tanks and plagued by mines. The children in the camp earn their pennies by deactivating the mines and selling them on. In the arms bazaar in the local town they exchange mines for weapons. It is 2003, the eve of the US invasion of Iraq. The Kurds in the refugee camp have been brutally repressed by Saddam’s regime. They long for the war to start, even though there’s no security that this will make their conditions any better. However, it could hardly make them worse. The refugee camp is a sea of mud and chaos, with the ever-present risk of being killed or maimed by a stray mine, or being shot at by the Turkish border guard. This is the frontier between war zone and a gateway to Europe, or even the USA.

In this world, the bespectacled Satellite is prince. He buys the antenna that permits the elders to decode the news. He announces the arrival of rain and war. The kids follow him as though he’s a kind of pied piper. but he falls in love with Agrin, a young woman with a child, an armless brother and a death wish. We are a long way from Hollywood. The war will start, the Americans will come, Saddam will be deposed, but there can be no happy endings here.

Bahman Ghobadi’s film is achingly prescient, 20 years on. It’s a drama with the authenticity of the rawest of documentaries. Bahman Ghobadi is an Iranian Kurd whose sensibility to the issues of the Kurdish refugees is at times unbearably plausible. Cinema is a tool that allows us to walk through the mud with these characters, to feel as though we could reach out and touch them, even though we know we could never save them. It seems astonishing to me that Ghobadi is not better known. Perhaps his sensibility is considered too raw, too harrowing. But I don’t know of any work of art that has taken me closer to the realities of life in the shadow of 21st century geo-politics, and the way that the machinations of men and women in power impact on the lives of innocents. This is a masterpiece of filmmaking - an art which can make the intimacy of another’s life in a land we will probably never visit touch us in a way news reporting never can. 

sole (w&d carlo sironi; w. giulia moriggi, antonio manca)

Sole is an unspectacularly brave piece of filmmaking. Its braveness comes from its commitment to being unspectacular, The action at times appears to progress at a glacial pace. Yet what is occurring is that the pieces are being meticulously assembled so that as that plot simmers it will eventually come to a searing, devastating boil. An extended shot of the protagonist, Ermanno, playing the slot machines isn’t there by chance. It’s a seed in the narrative. 

The story is on on the one hand proto-modern European, and on the other as old as time itself. A young woman, Lena, dolefully played by Sandra Drzymalska, is pregnant. We never learn who the father might have been. In return for €10K, she agrees to give up the baby to the uncle and wife of Ermanno, (Claudio Segaluscio), a sullen youth whose blank face gives nothing away. The two live in a rented apartment for the final months of the pregnancy. Both are orphans. Ermanno’s father killed himself by jumping out of a window. Emotionally stunted, the two, bit by bit, begin to discover love and meaning from the other, without expecting it. When the child is born prematurely, they became, for a few short weeks, a family, albeit one that is doomed.

The financial exchanges that underpin the movie speak of an atomised modernity, where money is thicker than blood. They tell of the choices people are coerced to make in a globalised world, where the ties of family, barrio and culture have been cut. The ending of the film parachutes one back to being 21, to being condemned to discover the cruelty of the world, to feel the cold wind blowing in your face and realising you are going to have to learn to live with that cold wind for the rest of your life. It is an ending of astonishing power, because this is a sensation we have all had to confront at one point or another. It is for this reason that love exists: to teach us that there is hope in the world, and hope brings despair in its wake. 

Carlo Sironi manages the ingredients of his film with impeccable control. The remarkable acting of the two leads; the muted palette of the art design and the score, by the Polish composer Teoniki Rozynek, which is as fine a piece of music for camera as you are ever likely to encounter. 

the verge (patrick wyman)

The book sets out to tell the story of a pivotal forty year period in European history through the stories of seven separate characters, all of them players to one extent or another. The period in question is 1490 to 1530, a period which, the author theorises, saw the beginning of the transformation of Western Europe from a provincial backwater to the dominant force in world politics for centuries to come. Some aspects of what is recounted are better known than others. Two of the seven chapters are dedicated to Columbus and Isabella, the discoverer of the New World and the queen who oversaw the final defeat of Muslim Europe, when she drove the Moors out of their last redoubt in Southern Spain. The book takes on the rise of the printing press, new technologies of war, Martin Luther and the expansion of the Ottoman empire. Most of the chapters are pithy, all of them setting out to verify the author’s thesis that it was the rise of capital and its capacity for expansive and remunerative investment that drove the changes the book describes. As such, the key chapter might be the one titled Jakob Fugger and Banking, wherein Wyman describes how one banker helped to bankroll so many of the endeavours, military and exploratory and even cultural, that were occurring at the time. I was quietly delighted to see the Fugger family make an appearance in Quixote (“My friend, tell your mistress that her troubles grieve my heart and I should like to be a Fucar (Fugger) so that I could solve them”, ch 23). In the same chapter Merlin is also cited, and perhaps nothing more sums up the shift from medievalism to modernity that was taking place from one end of Europe to another. Having said which, it feels at times as though Wyman’s thesis, and its vindication of capitalism, raises as many questions as it provides answers. In the final chapter which deals with Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, the peasants’ revolt is named as a key element which lead to the failure of Charles’ reign, without in any way broaching what provoked these revolts, in much the same way as Luther’s success is put down in large part to the commercial benefits of printing his texts, without any real analysis of why the contents of those texts had such an impact. The Verge is a highly effective and thought provoking book, but I have to confess that I bought it hoping for more of a hint of how the anonymous man or woman’s life was similarly transformed in this time, how changed the lives of the groundlings in the Globe might have been from those of their grandparents, but the book's focus is steadfastly on history's players, rather than history's followers.

los lobos (w&d samuel kishi w. luis briones, sofía gómez-córdova)

Lobo means wolf in Spanish. These particular wolves are two brothers, Max and Leo whose mother has brought them to Albuquerque, fleeing from undisclosed threat in Mexico. We never learn  much about the backstory, instead the focus is on the boys’ new life. Their mother soon gets work which means she’s out all day and the boys have to entertain themselves in a small dingy apartment. The claustrophobia is perhaps reminiscent of Lennie Abrahamson’s Room, with a similar dramatic tension. Surely, sooner or later, the outside world is going to intervene and when it does, what will it bring? The eventual fate of the brothers is surprising in that the film doesn’t go where one expects, even if the plight of the immigrants is captured in meticulous detail and the boys’ vulnerability is never less than heart-aching. There’s a great deal of directorial skill in the way that the movie maintains tension in spite of the fact it never leaves the room for long swathes of time, whilst the acting of both boys (played by actual brothers, Maxi and Leo Nájar Márquez) and the battle-weary mother (Martha Reyes Arias) is exceptional. Los Lobos is a significant addition to the gamut of films which address the difficulties and obstacles faced by immigrants around the world. 

porque todas las quiero cantar (d. florencia núñez)

If you’re a fan of Florencia Núñez there’s plenty to enjoy here. The singer returns to her roots in Rocha, and meets the songwriters who created the emblematic songs of the preposterously beautiful ocean departamento. She goes for lengthy strolls with them and then sings cover versions of their tunes, with full band, in a studio. There are half a dozen songs to match half a dozen interviews. It feels slightly formulaic, and the best moments for my money, are when the film manages to break through the formula, when the composers/ performers get to sing their own songs, once in an open air theatre, and most engagingly in a late night bar. That scene captures the essence of live music, a shared rite, whose participation breaks through barriers and unites. Whilst the rest of the film has a clear documentary value, capturing the thoughts and memories of these figures, giants in their community although barely known beyond, (even within the tiny music world of Uruguay), for my money it felt as though there might have been more magic to be conjured if the film had been prepared to be bolder in its vision of what the music truly means to Rocha.