the death of grass (john christopher (sam youd))

The Death of Grass is one of those strange dystopian post-war texts. There are obvious points of comparison with Butler’s Parable of the Sower, with Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids, not to mention more obliquely, 1984. Part of the reason for this could be attributed to the nuclear angst which gripped so much of the world in the aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowing that weapons of mass destruction were at hand. The Death of Grass postulates a British prime minister planning to use nuclear weapons against his own cities. The other reason, perhaps, is that society needs dystopian narratives just as much as it needs utopian narratives. Christopher’s book is great at puncturing the myth of the British stiff upper lip. Following famine in the Far East which has lead to terrible food riots, the British characters are convinced that “the same thing would never happen here”. And then, of course, it does.

The book is also prescient in so far as it sets up the idea of a virus that will destroy civilised society as it is understood. The virus, as the title suggests, is one that affects grasses, destroying the world’s food supplies, leading to famine and social breakdown. Christopher’s narrative traces the build up to the crisis breaking, before it hones in on the efforts of John to get his family out of London and then across the country to his brother’s stockaded farm in the Lake District. The action is compelling and strangely believable, with the author examining not just the social breakdown but also the moral breakdown of the individuals participating in the flight from London. Englishness is no defence against the desperation that comes with just trying to stay alive, in fact it would appear to be a hindrance.

It might be seen that The Death of Grass is as much as takedown of Britain as it is a prophetic text. Like Orwell and Pinter, he roots out the weasel beneath the cocktail cabinet. It seems ironic, given this, that the writer’s greatest success came following the adaptation of another of his dystopian novels into a major BBC children’s series. 

happy together (wong kar-wai)

In between Fallen Angels and Happy Together, according to Imdb, the prolific director only made one film, a ten minute short where: “A Japanese-Chinese couple hangs out and shoots each other.” If this short feels like standard Kar Wai material, the subsequent film must have come as a shock. Firstly in that the director abandoned South East Asia for Argentina, of all places, and secondly because in his next film no-one dies and there’s very little violence. Instead it’s a doomed gay love story. It was a smart move, as Happy Together won him best director at Cannes. Again the film blooms with cinematographic fecundity. The grade flips from washed out black and white, perfect for a tango-vision of Buenos Aires, to washed out colour, which is equally perfect. The play of light and shade which was so integral to the lighting of In The Mood for Love, is investigated with a severity which means that sometimes Tony Leung’s face is almost entirely cast in shadow. The director seems to revel in the Rioplatense winter, that dank, monochrome fever dream which I am presently inhabiting, which gives the lie to any notion of a tropical continent. However, beyond the aesthetic joys, this film is also a fierce investigation of both love and home. By filming abroad, in a society so remote from his own, Wong Kar Wai finds himself investigating the meaning of exile, the lure of the return. The last sequences, in Taipei and Hong Kong, act as a bookend and give Leung’s journey an uplift after all the grief his lost lover has bestowed on him.

The examination of a fierce, doomed, romantic love is peerless. The attraction between the two protagonists Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-Fai is indisputable, and rendered with wit and grace. They dance like a couple, they fuck like a couple and they bicker like a couple. It’s perhaps in the final part of this equation that the director’s portrayal of romantic love comes into its own, because he is prepared to even dwell on the tedium of love, as Autumn turns to Summer and the sun comes out of the Bonaerense gloom, but the two men remain trapped in their room and their torpor, unable to escape the knot of their hopeless dependency on each other.

Another notable aspect of the film, seen from this side of the world, is the way in which it evokes Buenos Aires so effectively. The musical score is spot on, but so is the identification of a place which can seem, from the point of a fixed camera pointed at the Obelisco, like a teeming metropolitan world, but is also a place of lonely streets with warm corners, where people dance as much to keep the cold at bay as out of desperate passion. Seen through an exile’s eyes, the peeling beauty of a faded Boca pension possesses a tragic charm, even if the reality of living there has less than zero glamour. The way the Argentine characters react to Po-Wing and Yiu-Fai, just two more characters in the barrio, where the exotic has no great premium, also seems spot on. It’s a land which seems rooted in a Borgesian timelessness, impervious to change, a place to play out elemental human dramas in peace, isolated from the rest of the world and its teeming chaos. 

fallen angels (w&d wong kar-wai)

Watching Wong Kar Wai’s early film I was struck by the similarities with Jarmusch’s early films, which I saw last year. Plot is at a minimum, style at a premium. Fallen Angels is a mess, plot-wise. What is it actually about? A hitman, which allows the director to include some balletic and completely gratuitous shoot-outs, his business partner, a beautiful woman who masturbates a lot, and blondie, a live-wire who screams and falls for the hitman, who rejects her. The only narrative logic that emerges from this potpourri is that the hitman will do one last job after deciding to get out and it doesn’t need a narrative genius to work out what will happen on that final job. The story offers little to inspire. If there is any socio-political content, it passed me by. (There might be, someone more versed in South Asian politics would have to fill me in.) But what there is is style to swoon for. The unsung hero of Kar Wai´s early film is Christopher Doyle, his cinematographer, whose woozy, sub-aqueous imagery utterly beguiles. What Kar Wai displays in Fallen Angels is a heady aesthetic, which proved more than sufficient to propel him into the mainstream of contemporary filmmakers.

on connais la chanson (d resnais, w. agnès jaoui & jean-pierre bacri)

The film’s titles are composed of fetching little cartoons of the characters we are about to meet. Then there is one of Dennis Potter, who had recently died, and the note that the film is a tribute to him. The film’s use of music is a clear homage to Potter, but In so many ways other ways On Connais La Chanson feels nothing like a Potter project. Resnais’ trick in the film is that the cast of his romantic comedy will suddenly start lip synching to popular French songs, not one of which I recognised. This intervention feels at times extremely effective and at other times laboured. Sometimes it’s expositional and at other times it offers a striking insight into a character’s mind. All in all the film feels like an intellectual exercise with little of the pathos Potter managed to wring from his use of popular music. Having said which, The Singing Detective and Brimstone and Treacle and Pennies from Heaven felt, in my memory at least, like punchier, more challenging pieces. On Connais La Chanson is beguilingly French, a soft-edged Parisian comedy of thwarted passion and small betrayals. All the characters are white, middle class, and potentially, one imagines if one was French, irritating. This is the same world that La Haine and early Gaspar Noe emerged from. It’s a world where mobile phones are just starting to be a thing, where property development (a theme also picked up in Paris, 13 Arrondissement) is starting to change the Parisian landscape. Resnais touches on these themes, but they are couched within a doggedly bourgeois narrative, which gives the film a slightly clumsy apolitical air. For all its formal playfulness, we are a long way from Marienbad and Hiroshima. 

je t’aime, je t’aime (w&d resnais, w. jacques sternberg)

Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime is a remarkable and brilliantly conceived movie. A man is put into a time capsule in an experiment to travel back in time. He is on a beach on the South of France. Then he jumps into another scene from his past life. The experiment isn’t working as it should. The scientists are puzzled. The man’s life is relived as fragments, cut up, 30 second clips. He was in love with a woman who wasn’t happy. They went to Glasgow. He might have killed her. He wants to kill himself. He tells a friend about it. She doesn’t believe him. She does believe him. The film assembles fragment after fragment, piecing them together in a way that makes no linear sense, but gradually the viewer, and the man, the subject of the experiment, begin to discern a pattern, a shape. He’s back on the beach. He’s in a restaurant. We have to play catch up. Time is eddying and flying, forwards and backwards. All the time it is also shaped by the passing of real time, which is the time of the movie and the time of the experiment. Eventually the scientists give up. They can’t get him to come back. He’s on a beach. He’s chatting to his lover. He’s waiting for a tram. He’s gone.

The film is Borgesian in the extreme and there are echoes of elements of Performance, another film from the time which references Borges, in the cut-up nature of reality they both depict. It is a masterpiece of editing and narrative construction. The closest popular cinema has come to Resnais’ film is Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, which may or may not have been influenced by Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime. It is a film which takes us to the heart of the beast, as it explores and challenges the way in which time functions, reminding us that time and its passing are the cornerstone of the cinematic experience.

hiroshima mon amour (d. resnais, w. duras) & nuit et brouillard (d. resnais, w. cayrol)

There is a lot said and written and thought about this movie and if I’m honest I don’t feel as though I have much to add. I recognise its venerated status in the cannon but a few days after watching it it has merged in my mind into a single shot of Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada talking endlessly as they mosey through the Hiroshima night. It felt in many ways akin to another film that I struggle with, which is Linklater’s Before Sunrise (whilst recognising the influence is of course the other way round). Some films tiptoe the line between pretension and art and some films run the risk of falling into the abyss. Whilst the split Cortazarian narrative is a neat device, with Elle reliving her past in Nevers as she embraces the post-atomic, post-war era, it neither felt as mind-bending as anything Resnais achieved in Last Year at Marienbad, nor as challenging as Nuit et Broiullard, his devastating Holocaust short which was shown before HMA. The use of politics as a semiotic tool is fraught with danger and Resnais’ employment of Hiroshima, the city and the event, feels problematic. Would a filmmaker today get away with a mawkish love story between a Westerner and a Syrian set in Aleppo? We are nearly into Blier territory, and if anything it is the relative lack of confusion which left me cold in HMA. If the film had pushed its characters closer to the abyss, or maintained the cinematic language it adopts in the opening fifteen minutes, perhaps the semiotics of Hiroshima would not seem so ponderous, but it doesn’t and in the end it just feels immeasurably French. 

paradais (fernanda melchor, tr sophie hughes)

Fernanda Melchor’s short novel is another to add to the compendium of contemporary visions of a Mexico which has been scarred by violent crime. Reviewer notes at the front of the book mention 2666, but this novel feels closer to Escalante’s Heli, as a touchstone. Melchor interrogates the crudeness of a macho violent culture through two characters, Polo and Franco. Franco is the wealthy Fatboy loser who lives with his grandparents in a gated community. Polo is the young odd-job-man who Franco befriends with free alcohol. Polo despises Franco, who lusts foolishly over a middle aged neighbour, but his own desperation means he allows himself to get sucked in to Franco’s plan to rape her whilst Polo plunders. This frightful and foolish mission is described at the end of the book in pages of machine gun prose. Behind Polo’s desperation there lurks the presence of his cousin, Milton, who has been coerced by the narcos into working for them, something which has obviously destroyed Milton but which Polo envies. For Polo, Milton’s new status means money and power, whereas for Milton it clearly means moral degradation and hopelessness. This is a short, brutal novel, steeped in the evil of men and the things men do. Mexico bleeds through its pages, a Mexico where no-one is safe, even those living on a gated community, seemingly immune to the violence of the world that prowls beyond the confines of the perfect lawns and swimming pools. But most of all, Melchor represents the violence through the hopeless cynicism of Polo and Franco, two characters who are devoid of moral compass, having no need of this in a world which has no respect for morality. 

mirador (w&d antón terni, w. patricia olveira)

Antón Terni’s film is a slender, beautiful thing. It is an intimate study of three blind people who spend time together in the Uruguayan countryside. Terni’s camera is a silent observer, as the three play cards or go swimming in the ocean or even, on one occasion, get lost. This sequence when Oscar, searching for firewood for the barbecue, loses his stick and then his way, is heart stopping. Whilst the film is on the whole an affecting and life affirming study, this moment opens the door to the viewer on the vulnerability of the blind. It also draws our attention to the presence of the filmmaker and there’s a paradox here because we know that in this moment Oscar will be ok, because someone sees what is happening to him, but in another, when he is not seen, disaster could strike. Terni seeks to keep himself out of the story, but it’s an impossible task. In some ways the luscious use of the camera as it drifts, in keeping with the slower rhythms of its subjects, would appear to be his way of acknowledging this. The filmmaker’s eye is distinctive, it is a counterpoint to all that his subjects cannot discern, or rather, that which they discern in another fashion, which the camera could never capture. 

the secret agent (joseph conrad)

There’s a history attached to this novel. The first week or so at university, we were given Conrad’s novel to read and write an essay on. I spent those days holed up in my room, avoiding the Freshers escapades, suffering from migraine, reading the book and writing about it. When the seminar arrived, no-one else wanted to read their essay, so I volunteered. My thesis, I remember, was that the real secret agent in the novel was humour. The essay went down well, it might have been the only good essay I ever wrote, because I later ceased being a model student with migraines and became the chaotic student I have remained for the rest of my life. That seminar group was, in its way, something that would radically affect my whole life and way of seeing the world, for better or for worse, and The Secret Agent was a big part of that process.

It has been in the background ever since, over the course of thirty plus years. As is the way with books you read in your youth, I have retained a clear but erroneous memory of it. I realise it was erroneous as, for some reason to do, I suspect, with ageing, I recently chose to revisit the novel. It is not as funny as I might have remembered it to be (suggesting my thesis was wide of the mark). It is a strange, unwieldy book, which shifts point of view almost chapter by chapter, which rambles, whose central dramatic moment happens offstage (something I had not remembered). Characters come in and out of the text with no-one establishing centre stage. Just as a dismembered body is at the heart of the narrative, so this is a dismembered story, with the writer choosing to scatter its parts across Edwardian London.

On another level, the novel, which deals with Russian interference in British politics, feels astonishingly prescient. Terrorism, state terrorism and the shady characters who make up that world, have been leitmotifs of the twenty first century. In a world where centralised geopolitical power is waning, Britain is susceptible to the Machiavellian wiles of opponents it doesn’t even realise it possesses until it is too late. Little men representing an ideology that holds no real interest instigate actions which threaten the fabric of society. Conrad’s vision is cynical and prescient.

Still, I struggled with the novel. I wanted it to return me to a place I had known once upon a time, an Anthony I had been once upon a time. But the novel resisted, insisted on disabusing me of any intimacy with the previous version of it and myself that had existed. The reading of a novel is like the living of a life. Our perception of the novel is contingent on our surroundings, our sense of self at the time we read it. The secret agent isn’t humour. It’s time. The most dangerous, destabilising agent of all. 

young ahmed (jean-pierre & luc dardenne)

You know exactly what you’re going to get with the Dardenne Brothers. You’re going to get a well-crafted movie dealing with social issues. Which is exactly what Young Ahmed delivers. Instantly, the efficiency of the storytelling grabs the viewer. Simple scenes with little flannel, told from the protagonist’s perspective, which present their portrayal of the film’s eponymous protagonist. No great science. Ahmed with his family. Ahmed at the mosque. Ahmed with the teacher who will become the focus for the conflict within the film. Ahmed commits the action which changes his life.

The trouble with the efficiency of this approach is that it runs the risk of feeling more about the way in which stories are presented than the issue the story seeks to present. In the case of Young Ahmed, whilst the representation of his ablutions and prayers felt urgent and necessary, the viewer comes away with little insight into the issue of the clash between the Muslim world and the West and the associated desire for Jihad which Ahmed has somehow accrued. We see an adolescent in crisis, as we might see in many a Dardenne movie, but the specific crux of his crisis, the aforementioned conflict, feels as nebulous at the film’s end as it did at the start. A few grainy moments of an on-line video and the mutterings of a manipulative mullah don’t quite seem to explain how Ahmed has become so disconnected from his society that he can now carry a burning desire to kill in the name of Allah.

Some might say that the Dardenne Brothers, white males, don’t have a right to tell Ahmed’s story, that it is a form of colonialism in itself. This writer doesn’t hold to that, stories belong to everyone and representation matters, no matter how it gets to the screen. But Young Ahmed does leave one questioning the issue of the formula as a storytelling mechanism. The Dardenne brothers have a formula, which works effectively within the constraints of cinematic narrative (90 minutes, two dimensional etc). But when a film starts to feel formulaic, it strips the blood from the body and what is left is in danger of seeming robotic.

guilty of romance (w&d sion sono, w. mizue kunizane)

Sion Sono has recently made a film with Nick Cage and been accused of abusive behaviour on the set of his many films. He is a prolific Japanese auteur who I had never heard of. I discovered the above information after watching Guilty of Romance, a Grand Guignol mix of sex, crime and hysteria. The film knits together three women’s stories, one of whom is a police investigator who is investigating a grotesque crime which might involve one of the other two women. They are Izumi, a straight-laced wife of a famous writer who starts to go off the rails when she is chosen for a soft porn photo shoot. The other is Mitsuko, a literature professor by day and prostitute by night. The three tales become more and more outlandish The timeline feels constantly on the brink of being out of synch and storylines are thrown around willy nilly. What starts as a compelling if lurid police thriller becomes an increasingly self-indulgent fable which tries to shoehorn in mutiple Kafka references and rambles towards its end. From this one film, one can see the attraction of Sono, whose overblown narrative, heightened lighting and over-the-top set pieces seem like a Japanese version of the alt-Korean cinema, but with Guilty of Romance it felt as though he could have done with an editor who was as ruthless as the cruel matriarch who is revealed to be the kingpin of Sono’s criminal empire.