judgement day (ödön von horváth, tr christoher hampton)

Horváth play comes from a recognisable Mitteleuropean tradition. Dürrenmatt, Kafka, and many more. It’s a tale of a small town whose society becomes corrupted. Hampton’s useful introduction notes how Horváth, having fled Nazi Germany in 1933, then returned with the aim, according to Hampton, of documenting through theatre the effects of fascism on society. Judgement Day takes place in a rural town where a succession of minor disturbances in the fabric of the community leads to a fatal industrial accident, when a train crashes, killing seventeen people. In this sense the play feels highly prophetic. So often in an industrial society the small tears in the fabric can lead to tragedy. (In the UK alone, Grenfell, King’s Cross, Hillsborough etcetera). These accident don’t come from nowhere, they have their roots in how society is structured, and the opening scene, where the accident happens, makes it clear that the stationmaster, Hudetz, who will become the anti-hero of the story, has been over-burdened due to cuts or “rationalising, they’re going to keep going until there aren’t any trains left at all.”

The playwright then uses this tragedy as a way of examining the mores of the small town, the fickle way in which the residents change their allegiances, depending on how the news is reported, another feature of the play that feels all too contemporary (twas ever thus). However, the play takes a sudden turn when it gets to the last of its seven scenes. Here, Horváth veers off towards more metaphysical territory. At this point the narrative embraces what might now be called horror. The use of stage elements, sound, lighting, is employed to the full and this final scene is devastating both in its judgement of the society and its theatrical originality. 

o ano da morte de ricardo reis (the year of the death of ricardo reis) (w&d joão botelho)

Botelho’s ode to Pessoa is beautifully filmed and lugubrious in its storytelling. This is a film of a book about the alibi of a poet. Saramago wrote the novel, and Ricardo Reis was a nom de plume of Fernando Pessoa. Ricardo Reis is a doctor-poet is returning to Lisbon from Brazil, where he has been fifteen years in exile. He returns to a country which is under fascist rule, with the Spanish Civil War raging across the border. For those of us who are not aficionados of either Pessoa or Saramago, much of the political context remains obscure. Reis attends a fascist rally but he is suspected of being a subversive. The police raid his home, only they are part of a movie. The film drifts through the love affairs and melancholia of Reis’s return to a wintery Lisbon. The majestic lighting and cinematography, with its perfect shadow play, means the film is constantly watchable, in spite of the longeurs.

morvern callar (w&d lynn ramsay, w. liana dognini)

Someone once sent me a copy of this film and it has been sitting on my hard drive or my cloud, or a disk drive, or some kind of infinite space construction for many years. I am glad I never watched it on my laptop and the first time I encountered it was in the cinema. Even if there was a classic Cinemateca moment when the sound vanished for five minutes. Because, like all Ramsay’s work, Morvern Callar is an immersive, profoundly cinematic experience. Ramsey feels to me like a chef who takes what seems like far too few ingredients and cooks up something completely original and unexpected. As so often, the plot is thin, a tremulous coming of age story, stitched around an unlikely twist. But it is fleshed out with beautiful and brilliant set pieces. A party or a rave or a Spanish village fiesta. The film also makes the most of two lovely performances by Samantha Morton and the lesser heralded Kathleen McDermott, as Morvern & Lanna, two friends who have adventures together. There was a moment when a kid with a Peckham T-shirt made me laugh out loud - has any film better captured that absurd combination of humour and idiocy that has defined British youth culture since the eighties, where self-knowledge goes hand in hand with self-oblivion and the greatest virtue in life is to get properly mashed? Spain became a kind of spiritual home for this way of thinking, that other world where the sun always shines and the party never stops. Somehow the film captures all this with charm and empathy. Ramsay deep dives into a British Scotland a British Spain and a Spanish Spain, and it’s always a trip. 

juha (w&d aki kaurismäki)

Kaurismäki’s film is a pitch perfect homage to cinema’s silent era. Essentially a three hander, it reminds the viewer of the virtues of simplicity and clarity in story-telling, virtues which permit the filmmaker to therefor indulge his or her chosen whims. The highly limited use of dialogue means an additional emphasis on shot composition and score. It also reminds us that cinema is an inherently technical art, involving the juxtaposition of artificial moments. The sum of these juxtaposed moments is greater than the whole. Kaurismäki seems to delight in flirting with the ridiculous and still succeeding in cooking up pathos from his morality fable, adapted from a classic work of nineteenth century Finnish literature written by Juhani Aho. 

eternity and a day (w&d angelopoulos, w tonino guerra, petros markaris)

Some classic films grab you, others don’t. Eternity and a Day, with a title which sounds like a Mills & Boon novel (this could be down to the translation), felt like it tightroped between bathetic genius and doughty self-importance. The set-up of an ageing writer taking a young Albanian immigrant under his wing feels as though it is in danger of feeling maudling, and as the film stretches towards tomorrow, that is indeed the case. At other moments, such as when the writer played by Bruno Ganz with his usual doleful charm, rescues the boy from a trafficking gang, the film has an urgent, shocking power. There are many who will be seduced by Angelopoulos’ fragrant pacing and wistful time games, but the film as a whole felt to this viewer as though it was trying to use the story of the immigrant boy to lend it an emotional heft which the journey of the writer lacked. Once upon a time I saw all four hours of the Travelling Players at the NFT and was blown away: in Eternity and a Day it felt to me as though the director was aspiring for a metaphysical power which his film never quite achieved.

northanger abbey (jane austen)

What to make of Jane Austen? Why should she be such a mainstay of the canon?

There are various angles to the answering of these questions, and the first is to say it’s quite unfair to ask them on the back of reading Northanger Abbey, the first Austen I have read in over thirty years. At the same time, her influence on the culture is pervasive, both in terms of visibility as an author and a denominator of a certain British style. So taking this early, flawed novel as an exemplar, let’s see where we get to.

Northanger Abbey is in some ways most enjoyable because of its limitations as a novel. It is composed of two main sections. The first occurs in Bath, where Catherine, the youthful heroine, is introduced to a world of balls and society. The second occurs in Northanger Abbey itself, and this section is a pastiche of the Gothic novel which Austen notes was so popular at the time. It feels as though the author herself is having a lot of fun in the writing of this slight novel. She is not afraid to mock her heroine and society in general, but it is a gentle, affectionate mockery. This is a coming of age story, which at times has the flavour of an Eric Rohmer film. Catherine, Austen notes, is a little wiser by the end of the novel, but not much. She misinterprets her suitor’s passion, we are informed in an almost waspish aside by the author: “I must confess that his affection originated in nothing better than gratitude, or, in other words, that a persuasion of her partiality for him had been the only cause of giving her a serious thought.” Catherine’s learning, where it does occur, is in realising that the darker fantasies inspired by her Gothic reading are nothing but foolish fantasies. She must come to terms with mundanity of the life she has been given to lead, one which though banal is really quite idyllic. “To begin perfect happiness at the respective ages of twenty-six and eighteen is to do pretty well”.

Austen lived in a house near my school in Winchester. There was a blue plaque there, and the tourists would stop by. I wouldn’t wonder if nearly half a century later, it hasn’t become even more popular, as her fame has grown with the multiple screen adaptations. In many ways, this part of the world was indeed, idyllic. The Georgian house might have been cold in winter but these houses are a splendid architectural design. The house is near the water meadows and the city, a lovely balance between nature and urban living. It is a kind of model which has become a paradigm in post-Thatcherite Britain. Northanger Abbey is set in Bath and near Salisbury, but these towns are very much in keeping with an idea that persists of perfect happiness if you are middle class Britons. Enough of society to keep you entertained, but also the joys of nature and the sense of possibly becoming a lord or lady of the manor. (Something Nicolson’s Arcadia touches on.) At the same time, this is a resolutely twee vision of South West England, a far cry from the land of Hardy for example, or the rural visions of Clare, Austen’s contemporary. There is no hint of politics or revolution, and the continent is a space of dark, threatening mystery, as embodied in the novels which distort Catherine’s healthy view of the world. Colonialism, which infiltrates the work of Charlotte Bronte or Thackery is not alluded to.

What we are left with is a safe, timid tale of middle class manners. Austen appeals precisely because the British, whilst they enjoy being titillated by gothic fantasies, are smart enough to untangle themselves from their pernicious threads. Northanger Abbey promises drama, and at one moment seems as though it might go down the path of Jane Eyre, but delivers something far more romantically convincing, an upbeat, feel good finale. Keep those scary visions at arm’s length, it whispers, and all your dreams might come true.

seul contre tous (w&d gaspar noé)

What a turgid, provocative film Noé’s opening gambit proves to be. Because it feels like a gambit: an opening move in a career that will seek to provoke and shock. It was, as we now know, though he would not have known it back then, a brilliantly effective ploy which catapulted Noé into the international superstar director firmament, where he has remained ever since. It is a classic case of someone putting something together that the regulation powers-that-be would have said could never work. And to be fair, it doesn’t work all that well as a film. SCT is leaden, weighed down by a misrerabilist voiceover and a crushing despondency. The lead actor, is uncharismatic, and morally odious. There is nothing about this film which suggests it will be hailed in the future as a classic.

Except - for two things. One is the shock value and Noé is bold enough to go all out here, to hold nothing back. In truth, the shocking scenes are few and far between and sandwiched between the long voiceovers as the mordant butcher walks the streets, muttering to himself. But when they come they are truly unpleasant, worthy of Lautréamont at his most savage. Noé puts a card up sometime before the last one, advising that we have 30 seconds to leave the theatre, and counts those seconds down. It’s a showman’s Godardian (Brechtian?) device which works beautifully. These stylistic flourishes complement the dour tone of the film as a whole. But the other thing SCT succeeds in doing is capturing a Parisian world which feels like it is on the point of imploding. This is not a pretty city. It is full of ugly walls and dark corners. The people are ugly. The mood is ugly. Noé wallows in this ugliness, celebrating it, in the way he will celebrate cities with colour and flair in his later films. And this celebration of ugliness is truly iconoclastic. Paris, the great beauty, is transformed into a dull post-industrial sludge.

In so doing, Noé describes an era before turbo-charged capitalism transformed so many occidental and oriental cities into showpieces for an aspirational consumerism with a surgical, Artaudian grotesqueness. The ambivalent ending is a harbinger of everything that will come in the film’s wake. You could write a whole thesis about the final shot, which leaves both the characters and the audience staring into a world/ void which could be construed as hopeful, whilst also being morally compromised beyond repair. 

hana-bi (w&d takeshi kitano)

From the very opening shot I had the strange sensation of having seen this film before, without being able to identify in my mind where or when. The film has an aesthetic which is unlike anything Western cinema ever aspires to. The mix of sentimentality and violence is jarring. Nishi is a hard-boiled cop who is also doing everything he can to share his last days with his dying wife in peace. The trouble is the yakuza are on his trail, believing he owes them money and they keep requiring him to mercilessly beat the shit out of someone else. At the same time, Nishi’s former partner, Horibe, has been left in a wheelchair following a shooting and is trying to find a reason to live through painting. (Imdb informs that these paintings were actually made by Kitano himself, following a near fatal motocycle accident in 1994.) The resultant film is a pot pourri of genre and tragedy, of colour and deadpan pacing. Even the edit is disorientating, with Nishi having flash forwards that intersperse the action, breaking it up, messing with the viewer’s mind. There are moments when this device feels like something Nolan might have stolen, cinema as a spinning vortex of time, without any of Nolan’s pretension. All of which marks Hana-Bi as a film that is curiously gentle, but insatiably violent all at the same time, a jagged combination that makes for disorientating viewing, even more so when one suspects that one has seen this all before, but cannot be completely confident that this is the case.

voroshilovgrad (zhadan, tr. reilly costigan-humes, isaac wheeler)

Voroshilovgrad is the old Soviet name for the city of Luhansk, which is currently a Ukrainian town under attack by Russian forces. Zhadan’s novel is set not long after the fall of the Soviet Union, when this town, set in a sea of wheat, was something of a Wild West land, bickered over by gangsters, locals and smugglers. The novel follows the journey of Herman who lives in Karkhiv. His brother owns a petrol station, which is a going business, on the outskirts of Luhansk. When his brother disappears to Amsterdam, for reasons which are never entirely clear, Herman returns to his childhood home to take charge. There he finds himself caught up in the shenanigans, going on an increasingly Pynchonesque journey into the netherworld of the border. This is a hallucinogenic space, where the dead walk amongst the living and the living scrap for territory. Once again we are on the farflung edges of European project. Herman has a pseudo job in Kharkiv, working for a nebulous political outfit. The sort of Macjob that so many young aimless people have in the Western world. He has no real need of a petrol station which is being targeted by gangsters, but he finds a cause there, and the cause traps him. At one stage on his journey, Herman finds himself in a travelling convoy of Tibetans and Mongolians, drifting across the Eurasian plain, in the general direction of the EU. This is where the continental plates collide. To the west, Europe, with its property. To the east, Asia, with its vast, uncharted peoples and spaces. Zhadan has Herman tread water in the lawless middle, but it is notable that this lawless middle is a place where finds himself feeling increasingly comfortable. A decade before The Orphanage, Voroshilovgrad offers a more hermetic, dreamy vision of the space that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union, one where camaraderie and local feeling still held sway. At the same time it illustrates the porous nature of this frontier between West and East, (perhaps akin to the lands of Pamuk’s Snow), a place whose borders are intangible and, as a result, a recipe for trouble.