dogs of europe (belarus free theatre, d. nicolai khalezin & natalia kaliada)

When is a work of art more than a work of art? When does its very existence transcend the macrame of the critical reaction or the aesthetic judgement?

Dogs of Europe is a play about the expansionist tactics of Putin’s greater Russia. I booked to see it a month or so ago, when the makers of this play knew exactly what to expect, but the rest of the world did not.

Now we do.

I thought that there is within the dark matter of Eastern European art, or perhaps that should be Mittel European art, a hard conceptual muscle. It’s there in Kafka or Havel (even Stoppard) or Gospodinov, or Bela Tarr, among those I know. As though the world is so volatile and precarious that regular human emotions are almost on loan, to be used sparingly in their art, as these societies are susceptible to the power block plays of forces beyond their control. Dogs of Europe embraces a meta fictional scenario of Greater Russia confronting Western Europe, a scenario that places Belarus, as well as Ukraine, on the border of this schism. The acuity of this theory has been born out to devastating effect. The play was conceived and up and running ahead of history meaning that, in a tragically Benjaminesque turn, history is playing catch-up with art.

All of which is to in no way communicate the comings and goings of Dogs of War, which seemed to marry the search for a poet of Bolaño’s Savage Detectives with the pan-European delirium of Three Kingdoms and the earthy truths of a folk tale.

Nor is it to communicate that sensation of inadvertently stumbling into history. The director came on stage at the end to give a brief speech, wherein she informed the audience that the designer of the graphics that had graced the stage was Ukrainian and was there now, fighting for his country. It is wrong, as well, to focus on Ukraine at the expense of Belarus, as this is a work of art carved out of the resistance to oppression, the need for art to speak to power, both the power within and the power without.

Perhaps that sentence should be broken down. ‘The need to speak’ alone is enough. The articulation of the existence of an idea gives that idea existence, even if only in those fleeting moments that it has been articulated. The idea is complex and simple. It is to do with Belarus and Ukraine, but it is also to do with the importance, as humans, of our right and capacity to say things others don’t want us to say. Without being sent to prison or killed. In the theatre, as has happened time after time, the transgressive is given word, the world is reconvened, the dictators do not rule. 

red rocket (w&d sean baker, w. chris bergoch)

There’s a downbeat charm to its characters and the storytelling of Red Rocket. The set up of a former porn star who arrives back in Texas on the east coast of the USA, fleeing the west coast, battered and bruised, is a terrific way of showing the other side of the country, the rundown clapboard houses that look like they could fall over in the next hurricane, set against the backdrop of a refinery which is far from the most environmentally friendly place in the world to live. The late Brenda Deiss as Lil, Mikey’s mother-in-law, gives one of the most convincing performances of what might be called a ‘real’ person you are ever likely to see. This is a long way from Hollywood, in every sense. The editing and cinematography are great, with Baker composing his narrative using big set piece scenes but also a wealth of tiny, fragmented scenes which help to build up the sense of time passing in a concrete world.

At the film’s heart is Mikey, a character who appears at first to be a likeable dork, akin to a Paul Newman character in, say, Cool Hand Luke. An alt-American, with the swagger and charm and none of the guile. However, as the film goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Mikey is far more than a dork. The storyline begins to revolve around him grooming the precocious seventeen year old, Strawberry, to become a porn star. A mission he is wholeheartedly committed to, with not the slightest moral compunction. I don’t know if it’s the directors intention to confuse the fuck out of us, but it became harder and harder to square the likeable dork with the pimp. Sure, he gets his comeuppance, but on another level it felt as though the film was still rooting for him. He is, in so many ways, Dirk Diggler’s elder brother, but his very charm becomes problematic as his seduction of Strawberry becomes the central thrust of the second half of Red Rocket’s narrative. Not everyone I have spoken to about this agrees with me, but the film left me feeling as though it wanted to have its strawberry cake and eat it. 

the orphanage (serhiy zhadan, tr. reilly costigan-humes & isaac stackhouse wheeler)

Serhily Zhadan is a cult writer of novels and poetry from Kharkiv, a city I had never heard of a month ago, but one which has now joined the list of names that will forever be associated with the evils of war.

The Orphanage was published in 2017. It should be compulsory reading for two reasons. Firstly because, if you want an idea of what it is like to exist in Ukraine right now, this book gives you that. The Orphanage is set across three days of war. The down-at-heel Pasha is someone who ignores the news and doesn’t realise that conflict is about to break out once more in his Eastern corner of the Ukraine. When he finds out how bad things have got, he sets out to bring his nephew, Sasha, back from the orphanage he has been put in by his Pasha’s sister, who works as a stewardess on the long distance train to Kyiv. Pasha gets on the bus which doesn’t get far and then begins a journey into hell. The novel traces his movements across a battle scarred terrain. Death is always one step ahead or one step behind. He befriends people and then fears that the building they were sheltering in has been shelled after he’s left them. Life is transitory and endlessly, exhaustingly terrifying. Three days is a chaotic lifetime where nothing matters except getting through the next hour alive. In some ways the novel is reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, except that the tone is more deadpan and mordant. There is no real sign of poetic redemption to be gleaned from the mess of the world that the conflict is creating.

The second reason has to do with the date of publication. The Orphanage is five years old. I remember watching Bartas’ Frost in 2017, a film which revealed the extent of the ongoing war in Eastern Ukraine. What is occurring now is not new or unforeseen. This conflict has been armed and dangerous for many years. Which suggests that the fact it has escalated should not come as such a surprise, and also make one question the statescraft or lack of it that has failed to build in measures to prevent the escalation. Looking back now, Zhadan’s novel was a clear warning of what was happening and what might go on to happen. It has become a prophetic work, one whose prophesy has been ignored to everyone’s cost. 

petrov’s flu (w&d kirill serebrennikov)

Contemporary Russia is a big, complex country. Writers like Pelevin or Sorokin or Lebedev or Prilepin, to name a few, pay testament to this. Petrov’s Flu, a big, complex film, opens with a scene in a bus where various downtrodden Yekaterinburg citizens are complaining about how much better it was in Soviet times. In contrast to the more elegiac Leto, the world Kirill Serebrennikov conjures in Petrov’s Flu is bleak, cold, alt-Russian, in the Dostoyevskian sense. A writer commits suicide, a meek librarian becomes a serial killer, the dead rise from their coffins and walk. This is a portrait of a society teetering on the edge of insanity and violence, fuelled by vodka and disillusion. Perhaps this helps to explain, above and beyond the psychotically repressive elements of the regime, why Putin and the oligarchs lumber forward into infamy. The Lower Depths don’t have the energy to contemplate a better future, let alone campaign or aspire to it.

Against this vision, in a film that rambles chaotically over the course of two and half hours, are set sequences from the past, which surge up and take over the last act of the film. These visions are beautiful and chaotic, as we return to a dreamy Soviet era moment where the child Petrov meets a young woman who is playing the Ice Maiden in a New Year’s Eve shindig. The camera glides, a la Gaspar Noe, the film oscillates between washed out colour and black and white, in contrast to the dull harsh colours of the contemporary world. Petrov’s parents runs around in an Edenic nakedness, poets come and go, the world is touched with a strange magic.

These final sequences feel as though they might have been a film on their own, and the truth is that Petrov’s Flu, constructed around a conceit that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, is a distended, overblown film which feels both astonishingly self-indulgent and scarily brilliant. It’s an immersive fever dream, the kind of thing which gets thrown out at the first round of an Anglo-Saxon script development meeting. (Although, oddly, during the extended flashback sequences I found myself thinking of it as a Russian correlative to Licorice Pizza.) However, it’s also a film that seems to be trying to get to the heart of the modern Russian condition. The trigger for the flashbacks occur when Petrov’s sick son takes aspirin which is from 1977, which sends us all back to 1977, which is where Serebrennikov’s film posits that this terrible delirium emerged from.

The director has himself had his run-ins with the Putin regime. I am not sure of his current status. But Petrov’s Flu reminds us yet again, in spite or perhaps because of its sprawling excesses, that art is the most effective tool we possess for understanding the complexities of any given human society. 

licorice pizza (w&d pt anderson)

3 things about LP

Running. LP reminded me of early Godard. I think it’s Bande a Part where the characters seem to spend half the film running around Paris. In a similar way to Godard’s characters, LP’s star crossed lovers’ energy cannot be contained, and boils over into several running sequences. This ardent youthful energy drives the film forwards, even when they and the film lose their way. Because this is a film that meanders, (PTA has rarely been a fan of the succinct), it tries to cram more in than it really can get away with, sometimes seeming to throw in sequences just for the hell of it, or to see Sean Penn fall of a bike. In this sense it’s a wonderful adolescent mess and the best way to get out of a mess is to run away from it.

Fellini. There was one moment, I think when Gary is arrested, where the ubiquitous Johny Greenwood score kicked in and it felt like pure Fellini. The whole movie is bathed in a kind of Fellini-esque nostalgia. It has the feel of what they call a passion piece, a homage to the director’s youth, also akin to Cuaron’s Roma. Not many directors get to make their passion pieces, so fair play to PTA, even if…

Politics. As regular readers will be aware, I went to see Boogie Nights not that long ago. Quite apart from its PTA-esque flair, Boogie Nights felt as though it contained a subversive commentary on the American dream. A commentary wrapped up in a tremendously entertaining movie, but one whose punch corresponded to the force of its sly message. The same could be said about Magnolia. LP has much of the flair but little of the commentary and less of the subversion. You could make an argument that the Nixon/ oil crisis reference is doing this, but it feels shoe-horned. People will love LP and part of the reason they will love it is precisely because it doesn’t ask its audience to think too hard. They can bask in its meandering flow. (In this sense if feels like a sister piece to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another film that ranges the hills without dying on any of them.) Many will be delighted by Anderson letting them off the hook, but to this cussed commentator it sometimes left the sensation of a beer with too much froth. 

the mighty dead - why homer matters (adam nicolson)

Nicolson’s book about Homer is compelling. The challenge is laid down by the title and the book, to my surprise, lived up to it. Nicolson’s remit is broad, from Keats to Simone Weil to Sinuhe, an ancient Egyptian writer. His speculation about the origin of Homer’s twin poems takes him from the Irish coast to Bahrain. The key theory that emerges from the book is a fascinatingly counter-intuitive one to our common understanding of what it means to be Greek. Rather than being the great seers of civilisation, Nicolson presents Homer’s Greeks as savage warrior people, emerging from the steppes of Central Asia. The Iliad charts their confrontation with the far more advanced civilisations of Asia Minor, which they both ransacked and stole from. The book’s historical range is vast, covering at least ten centuries, which clearly gives scope for a great deal of more speculative hypothesis. Still, it’s the very scale of the book which gives it weight. Nicolson is looking at history through a long lens, and through that lens we discern the ebb and flow of power as it has been exercised across the Mediterranean and Western seaboard of the Atlantic, over the course of thousands of years. Within this, Homer’s tales capture a more elemental version of our origin myth (the ‘our’ standing for all those peoples and civilisations locked into that geographical zone), and indeed, through Homer, Nicolson traces the conflicts which existed prior to the birth of the idea of Europe or classical civilisation, as we now understand it.

nb - The above was written a few weeks ago. It would be more than feasible to view the current war, initiated by Russia against Ukraine, within the terms of Nicolson’s Homer. Ukraine’s much lauded European values standing for the Trojans, against the more Philistine band of Russians, coming from the Eurasian steppe, who have no hesitation in raising cities in order to achieve predominance. This observation is offered in order to reaffirm that Nicolson’s innovative reading of the historical impulses which lead to the writing of the Iliad and the Odyssey feels persuasive, and it is one of the book’s great achievements to show how culture is a thread that binds across the centuries, how Homer was writing for a society so ancient that we don’t even really know where it existed, but he was also writing for every generation that came since in this place we call Europe, and beyond. 

the power of the dog (w&d jane campion)

 As I sat in the Renoir’s boxy downstairs Phoenix screen, having paid a small fortune, I thought to myself that, from the point of view of this blog, it is for the best that by and large in Montevideo I don’t get to see the hot new releases and that this blog is not part of that conversation. Because the issue of hype contorts everything. I went to see Power of the Dog with much anticipation, and after half an hour or so, as these lines attest, I found my mind drifting somewhat, on the verge of a kind of ‘is this all you’ve got’ disappointment, which had more to do with my expectations than the actual film. The film is beautifully realised, (that word which in the lexicon of Spanish cinema does so much good work), and in many regards impeccable, and perhaps that was part of my problem with it. It felt so highly polished, with barely a loose end flapping, that it seemed as much a finely rendered product as a distinctive work of art.

On a more discursive note, it’s interesting to place Power of the Dog within the orbit of the reimagined 21st C Western. The work of Kelly Reichardt, with Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow, comes to mind and I am sure there will be others. There is not a gun fired in Power of the Dog, or even seen. The West becomes a space where personal relationships have room to evolve, for better or for worse, in a relatively ungoverned environment, where societal pressures exist at arm’s length. Where power doesn’t function as it has been depicted in the work of Hawks et al, but in a more cerebral fashion, which Cumberbatch’s Phil, who graduated from Harvard, has sought to reject, but eventually finds himself snared by. These films are made from the perspective of the conflict the cowboys eventually lost. Modern USA is festooned with faux cowboys, who stride around cosplaying values which their prosperity has helped to defeat. Campion’s film negotiates these choppy waters with restraint, subtlety and anthrax. It’s a curious and perhaps beguiling combo, only I wish I had got to see it a year later, in the relatively hype-free environment of the city I normally inhabit. 

travelers (helon habila)

I want to say: read this book.

I want to say, read this book so that you can go through the door and see the other side of the stories on the news you look at and think, how terrible, and then move on from.

At least give those souls, those African souls, the space to breathe before the world swallows them up, the space that Habila permits them in his novel.

I want to say that there is one moment, which is a contrived literary twist, which is a writer’s trick, that is so powerful that it kicked me in the belly like a child trying to get out.

I want to say: burn the borders.

I want to take my hat off to a writer whose portmanteau novel manipulates narrative and character with the dexterity of a magician.

I want to remember how this took me back to the once upon a time of Peter and Supergirl, the Nigerians who came to London and didn’t want to leave, who a naive Anthony didn’t drive to the airport, who were the Royal Court play that the Royal Court would never stage, because history is banal and cruel and our stages don’t know how to represent that.

Although Habila´s novel does.

I want to think of Peter, the actor with the hat pulled over the brim of his eyes, an actor of sheer charisma, the one the female director said could have been her Benedict or her Woyzeck, but who threw in all that so that he could clean floors in office buildings in West London, forever looking over his shoulder, because that was better than waiting for something which Nigeria was never going to offer him. Whilst his friend told me on the drive to the airport: “They will ask me - why did you come back? And they will look at me with disrespect because no answer will be sufficient."

Habila’s novel makes you want to talk about so many things, because it talks about so many things. Three continents, two cities, one sea, a myriad of stories.

Read this book.