hard eight (w&d paul thomas anderson)

I can still recall the posters for Hard Eight going up in the tube and a certain buzz about the film which put it on my radar although I never got round to watching it. No-one knew at the time that this was the first offering of one of the modern masters of the art. There’s something quite affecting about watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s cameo appearance, which is so distinctive and at the same time so unlike Hoffman, because of the youthfulness, the cockiness of his performance, which looking back retrospectively almost makes it look as though he was cast against type. The film is full of future stars, not the least of them Gwyneth Paltrow who gives a performance which suggests the potential of a greater actress than the media personality she has subsequently become, capable of portraying an erratic emotional instability. Not to mention Samuel L Jackson, even if he had already broken through with Pulp Fiction. Hard Eight revealed Anderson to be a director who knew how to get the best out of his actors, also including Philip Baker Hall and John C Reilly, how to make the most of their tics and mannerisms. The film is essentially a character study, with the narrative rather less consequential than it initially purports to be. A sub-Mamet movie which in the end out-Mameted Mamet, by somehow ignoring the intricacies of the gambling world, using it as a backdrop rather than a focal point. The film hinges on a just about credible sequence of events which feel, nevertheless, contrived. As though the writer-director is giving a nod in the direction of narrative, but is more interested in tone and ‘clima’, the mood of a man walking through a Vegas gambling parlour of more importance than anything he actually does there. There’s already something stately about Anderson’s filmmaking, hinting at the more operatic path he would soon follow. 

white noise (d. daniel lombroso)

White Noise follows three figures from the US alt-right, Richard Spencer, Mike Cernovich and Lauren Southern, following them over the course of the years 2016 to 2018, more or less. The film is an investigation into the phenomenon of the far right, which at its most extreme takes the from of Nazi salutes, and saying the unspeakable, but can also have a more insidious influence in shifting the terrain of debate, pushing previously extreme views towards the mainstream. The British have suffered from this as much as any nation, although the guiding light of Daniel Lombroso’s film, unsurprisingly, is Trump, to whose bandwagon Spencer and Cernovich were inexorably tied. As Trump’s campaign starts to falter, their post-election euphoria starts to wane and the glow of success begins to wear off.

However, the film is most acute in those moments it reveals the way in which all three are, to a lesser or greater degree, grifters, flying their kites more from a sense of expediency and opportunism than conviction. Cernovich’s amiable wife is Iranian, and their baby is mixed race. He ends up selling pills for skin care like some modern day quack doctor. Cernovich comes across as a slightly bumbling fool who made his name by being controversial but has no real political beliefs beyond saying things that will help him sell his products. Southern, starts the film as an ingenue 22 year old, and is shown gradually beginning to become aware of the murky moral waters she’s getting herself into, even though she’s reluctant to face up to them. The clinching moment comes towards the end when, pregnant, she is asked about the colour of her partner and we learn that this white ethno-warrior is another who will have a mixed race child. Spencer is an eternal man child, who ends up living with his mother, and shrugs off any responsibility for anything he has ever said or done.

As such, the film is a useful and effective vehicle for debunking these would-be sacred cows of a movement which has caused untold damage. At times it feels as though the director might have gone a bit harder on his subjects, especially Southern, but part of the complexity of constructing the intimacy necessary to debunk these figures, to hoist them on their own petards, is that you have to be close enough to get past the carefully curated facade and discover the reality. 

la promesa [the promise] (silvina ocampo, tr suzanne jill levine & jessica powell)

Ocampo’s novel is more of a collection of fragments towards a novel than a novel in its own right. The Promise consists of a series of anecdotes about a succession of individuals who have featured in the writer’s life. As such, it offers a whimsical insight into a lost Argentine world, full of feckless men and confused women, caught up in awkward social relationships which leave the participants feeling frazzled. The novel is constructed around the conceit of a woman falling overboard into the Atlantic Ocean, with her past flashing before her eyes as she wrestles with the waves. It’s a brief novel which shouldn’t be read in a hurry, as each sequence carries its own particular weight, although the fact that Ocampo is better known as a writer of short stories is reflected in the fragmented nature of the text. The detail that Ocampo was working on such a slight novel for over 25 years speaks of the fact that this is an unfinished text, one that was perhaps never destined or even meant to be completed. 

martin eden (w&d pietro marcello, w maurizio braucci)

Cinemateca’s programming sometimes has a random feel. Every now and again it throws up a gem which I would never have got to see on the big screen if I were not a socio, who goes two or three times a week. As such I will go and see a film purely on the basis it is showing. I knew nothing about Martin Eden or the director before watching it. There was no danger of being seduced or betrayed by the hype. What I discovered was a film whose complexity and verve, both aesthetic and political, took me by surprise.

Martin Eden is an adaptation of a Jack London novel, published in 1909. My grandfather liked the work of Jack London, as did so many born at the start of the 20th century. London’s writing appealed to a working class demographic, fully aware of what they had missed out on by not having had a secondary education. My grandfather was not a widely read man but he respected the power of the word, and treasured poets like James Elroy Flecker. The narrative of Martin Eden follows the eponymous hero, a working class man who sets out to acquire an education and become a writer. The film, adapting the novel to southern Italy, follows this Italian Eden as he struggles against rejection, determined to be recognised as a writer, something he finally achieves, albeit at the cost of his soul.

Pietro Marcello and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci’s adaptation of the novel to an Italian context is of itself bold, but the streets of Naples, both the poverty and the opulence, make for a perfect setting for the tale. However, the director goes further in his re-imagining of London’s novel. He sets it in an ahistorical zone, which could be 1929 or could at times be 2020. For long periods it feels like we’re in the first half of the twentieth century, the time when the book became popular, at other times, a container ship glides past in the background and we are given a Brechtian jolt, realising that the story could be happening today. As indeed it could. The war on education is something that has become more and more endemic in the twenty first century. In constructing the tale in an anachronistic fashion, the film draws out parallels between this century and the last. In so many ways, when you remove the surface patina of technology, smartphones and the like, so little has changed. The adroit use of music reaffirms this, as does the utilisation of vintage footage, which is inserted into the fabric of the film, lending depth and complexity to its texture.

Finally, there is the complex issue of the film’s politics. Eden goes on a journey towards Fascism, after having rejected socialism as being anti-individual. The way that Martin Eden maps on to the nuances of Italian politics is clearly one of the reasons Marcello has chosen to adapt the novel. The rise of an individual ‘liberty’ seeking right wing has become prevalent all over the world and has echoes in the protagonist’s journey. It’s to the film’s credit that it sets out a more complex political worldview than the standard right-left dialectic, one that perhaps has far more relevance to the way that the world is headed than the more standard Loach-Hollywood dichotomy. The issue is too complex to be addressed here in a single paragraph, but it is rare indeed for a filmmaker to be exploring politics with such a nuanced, potentially controversial perspective.

Martin Eden isn’t flawless. In the adaptation of the novel, there are gaps and threads which feel somewhat loose. Nevertheless there’s a bravura and ambition to the film which reminds one of Bertolucci at his best. The film taps into a tradition of politically aware, neo-operatic Italian cinema which used to be so potent but seems to have been on the wane. It’s as bold a piece of contemporary filmmaking as you are likely to encounter. 

on time and water. (andri snær magnason, tr. lytton smith)

Magnason’s book seeks to instil the reader with an awareness of the perilous course the world is taking as temperatures rise inexorably. His focal point is the worldwide demise of the glaciers, with particular attention to those of his native Iceland and the Himalayas. Magnason writes clearly and passionately about the way in which the vanishing glaciers are part of a trend which is going to have drastic impacts on the natural world and the human world. The book itself is a hotchpotch affair, including two conversations with the Dalai Lama, visits to the coral reefs of the Caribbean and the mountains of Nepal and lengthy reflections on the way the world his grandparents were born into has changed beyond recognition. He speculates about how the world will be in the epoch of his grandchildren, noting how, within the wider scheme of the earth’s timeline, five human generations is a drop in the ocean. The book addresses these issues with clarity and the author’s intentions are clear and honourable, even if the fragmented nature of his book at times means that his argument seems to ebb and flow. Furthermore, On Time and Water only helps to consolidate the thought expressed by Amitav Ghosh in The Great Derangement, that it is only through the writing of fiction and the construction of modern myths that a narrative will emerge whose impact might match the hopes and aspirations Magnason espouses for On Time and Water.

amour (w&d haneke)

This was not perhaps the wisest of weeks to finally catch Haneke’s paean to old age and death. At a time when I have recently witnessed how fast decay can take hold of the body, Haneke’s splenetic description of Emmanuelle Riva’s demise was a gruelling watch. As ever, he goes about the task of charting this demise with rigorous efficiency. Although it might be that the trope of the sudden moment of extreme shock, witnessed in so many of his films, was beginning to lose its edge here. When Piccoli articulates his love in an act of brutal kindness, it comes as no real surprise. There is also a curious dream sequence, with its bona fide jump scare, which seems somehow coarse for this most frostbitten of directors. Haneke’s lingering camera always invites reflection. Watching Amour, a film that engages with the realities of dying in a way that cinema almost never does, one can see why death in cinema veers towards the cartoonish or the symbolic. The awareness of death is not something we cannot bear too much of. One can applaud the director for having the courage to confront the issue, but one is also relieved that one doesn’t have to face it all that often. 

directamente para video [straight to video] - (d. emilio silva torres)

I was informed about the existence of this film by a Welshman I had never met before in a zoom conversation. He told me about the existence of a cult Uruguayan film, about a cult Uruguayan film, neither of which I had ever heard of. Nor had I heard of their directors. The Uruguayan cinema world is inordinately small. It’s very hard not to know or at least be the gym buddy of most people working in the medium, and if you don’t know an individual personally, then you’re sure as hell going to know someone who has fought or slept with or drunk with them. It’s a tight circle, so when the Welshman told me about this film, it sounded apocryphal. However, I did a bit of investigation and discovered the film did indeed exist and an actor I know, Alfonso Tort, was apparently in the movie. Then, in an even more unlikely turn, I was told by an acquaintance who learned I was going to the Sitges film festival that the director was going to be going there too and that he had been sitting at the table with her in a rundown bar on San Jose when our paths had last crossed, a month or so previously.

So I sought this director out and we drank a coffee under the Mediterranean sky and he told me about his movie and said that it would soon be released in Montevideo and we should meet up again there. I returned to Montevideo and his film opened and I went to see it. The film is a wonderful box of tricks, part documentary, part fiction, part Borges fable. It tells the story of a mysterious director who lived in Ciudad Vieja, as do I, and made the cult film, Acto de Violencia en una Joven Periodista, in the 80s. There are clips of the film within the film, images of a Montevideo which doesn’t look so very different to the Montevideo of today, because nothing ever changes here, we are trapped in a clock that never reaches midnight. It is a land of melodramatic films and empty streets, enigmatic clues which lead nowhere, promising change that never materialises.

Directamente para Video captures all this beautifully. It captures, above and beyond the mystery of the film and its absent director, the way that Montevideo is a puzzle which doesn’t want to be solved, in a way that no film I have ever seen has quite managed to do. Most want to capture empty streets and melodrama. But there was no sign of the director. He has vanished into the night. The man sitting at the bar with the producers, who I know, because in the world of Montevideo film, everyone knows everyone, was not the same person, I am sure, as the one I met in Sitges. The director of a film about an absent director has now gone absent himself. Perhaps he has fled to a Borgesian Patagonia, or a Bolaño-esque Catalunya. Perhaps in thirty years someone will be making a film about him, and, should I still be alive, they will come to interview me about that fleeting meeting in Sitges, when the world was still up for grabs.

jane eyre (charlotte brontë)

Not for the first time, it’s hard to know how to write about a classic. The classics have already constructed their frames of reference. Victorian psychoanalysis. Imperial hauntings. The gender wars.

One, of course, wonders what a West Indian reader of the book thinks, more than one wonders what one thinks oneself. The monster in the attic. The ‘other’ Frankenstein. The hideous implications of colonialism. The unwitting zombie movie.

The way that the novel now makes us question the society from which it emerged in ways the author perhaps intended, or perhaps didn’t. The whole twentieth century shitshow, already nascent like a baby acorn, in the prose of a woman writing to keep her sisters entertained.

With a happy ending suitable for a twenty first century horror movie. 

la marrana (w&d josé luis cuerda)

It’s not every film you come out of thinking about how the art design stole the show. La Marrana (The Sow) is a picaresque journey through Spain in 1492. The film opens with a voiceover setting the historical context: Colombus, the banishment of Jews and Muslims from Spain, etcetera. It then picks one ordinary man, Bartolome, whose story it will follow. Bartolome is hungry, and he has his eyes on the pig which another vagabond on the road, Rey, says he’s taking to Portugal. The film proceeds to follow them over the course of a few days as they wander round the countryside, hoping to enlist as sailors on Colombus´ voyage. Not a lot of any great significance happens. In essence this is a buddy movie, which to my mind promised rather more than it delivered. There’s something of Lazarillo de Tormes about this rustic yarn, and one can see how it would have appealed to a local audience. Having said this, the beauty of the art design deserves highlighting. When we enter a 15th century tavern, it really feels as though we’re there. Down to the tone of the soft Spanish light. The production design on imdb is listed as being by Rafael Palmero, set direction by Gonzalo Thovar, costume by Javier Artiñano. Even if nothing of great note is occurring in the film, you can always luxuriate in the images, and at cinema’s capacity to bring a past era to vibrant life. 

vernon subutex, part 1 (virginie despentes, tr. frank wynne)

The fame of Vernon Subutex is Manchurian. It grinds sausages. It provokes electoral fraud. It plummets to previously unknown depths. The fame of Vernon Subutex far outweighs the content of the novel which bears its name. As though the novel had been written with the clear intention of creating a myth, which it has succeeded in doing. The reality of a myth never lives up to the aura of a myth. Vernon Subutex has whispered sweet nothings to me in Mexican bars, has brutally attacked my long lost enemies on a deserted Moscow street, has hypnotised me into swimming with sharks off the coast of Recife. It, or he, has managed to do all these things without my having needed to read the novel. Having now read the novel, I suspect that I am in danger of trashing the myth.

Because the novel is a picaresque stroll through a post-Houllebecq 21st century Paris which never really hangs together. The novel goes on random digressions, it exploits its two dimensional hero in order to talk about abuse or transsexuality or a hundred and one other things which might concern the characters of a near contemporary Paris but only barely assemble themselves into what we might expect or demand of a novel. But this is where we go wrong. Because Despentes isn’t constructing a novel. She’s constructing a myth.

madame deffand and the idiots (marias, tr. margaret jill costa)

Marias’s brief account of the lives of five writers (Madame de Deffand, Nabakov, Djuna Barnes, and  Emily Bronte) is a brilliant piece of economic writing, which benefits from the sympathy Marias has for the travails of the process of composition, be that letter-writing or novel writing. It’s a book that can be read in its entirety on a flight, in between multiple films, no sleep and terrible food, and still seem inordinately enjoyable and there’s really no greater compliment that can be paid to any book than that. It will only take you an hour, but it might be the best hour you’ll ever spend doing anything at all ever. 

titane (w&d julia ducournau)

Interesting to see Titane after having seen two Carax films recently. Titane feels as though it’s the bastard child of Carax, who in turn is the bastard child of high-Godard. Perhaps throwing a few garlands in the direction of Clare Dennis whilst we’re at it. Which is perhaps another way of saying that the film, for all its stylised violence and energetic gender politics, has a classically French feel. It is a dislocated narrative of the image, rather than the coherent narrative of story. Even the unifying structural line, which is Alexia’s pregnancy, is constantly interrupted by scenes where she doesn’t appear to be in the least bit pregnant, contrasted with other scenes where her pregnant belly is displayed in all its glory.

The effect is a film which is stitched together by image and shock. A Rumsfeldian bravura, which is at its goriest in the opening half hour. The audience is rapidly crowbarred into submission and thereafter meekly surrenders to the director’s caprices. We just want to get out unscathed and whenever the tone changes towards something that hints of warmth or humanity, we are duly grateful.

Through this there emerges the line of Alexia’s complex (to say the least) relationship with the automobile. Which firstly scars her for life, then goads her into killing, seduces her and finally becomes the father of her child. This child, like Alexia, is far from standard operating procedure. The child will be a hybrid, part machine, part human, like Alexia herself. On one level Titane could be viewed as an eco parable - this is what our petrolised world has done to humanity, ripping out the love. Or it could also be read, conversely, as a paean to the dying petro-culture, the sleek, erotic age of the car, which is on the wane. There is also, clearly, many a dissertation to be written on Alexia’s pregnancy, the film’s elemental treatment of a process which rarely gets the cinematic dues it deserves. Titane´s capacity for interpretation, its openness, is part of its Gallic appeal.

Finally, a feeling which was exacerbated by walking through the Reina Sofia the following day, Titane also belongs to a surrealist tradition. Bending the framework of the body to fit the artist’s vision of a world which has become disconnected from its natural roots. A hundred years ago, as the world entered a period of terrible change, surrealism emerged as a methodology for communicating what it was like to inhabit this change. Now, in an era of bio-politics and gender fluidity, all the old certainties of liberalism going up in smoke, perhaps surrealism once again is the most exact science for seeking to engage with our brave new world.