cemetery of splendour (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

Acknowledging that there might be much in the way of context which I could not grasp, and that perhaps it was overkill to watch three Apichatpong films in a week, I have to say that Cemetery of Splendour was the first to try my patience, and not really work for me. Which, as noted, might be down to circumstances. At the same time this also appears to reveal quite how delicate a process this kind of meditative filmmaking is. A hair’s breadth too drawn out, which is what the long cemetery sequence at the end felt like, or too solipsistic, and the experience runs the risk of becoming torpid, and the film of appearing self-indulgent. Cemetery of Splendour is constructed around the idea of sleeping sickness affecting soldiers in Thailand, but I struggled to understand who these soldiers were and why they had been struck down. All the questions which shouldn’t come to mind started to interfere and I felt as though I has been left outside of some kind of magic circle with all the real action happening over there, behind the screen, just out of sight. 

le père goriot (balzac, tr ellen marriage)

Reading Balzac, in a similar way to reading Zola or Proust, is to dive into a corner of a vast sea. La Comédie Humaine, “consists of 91 finished works… and 46 unfinished works” (cf wikipedia). To read one of these works on its own seems a bit akin to watching a single episode of an endless TV soap. There is no way of placing the work in context, because the reader is lacking the other 140+ pieces of context, and to spring to quickfire conclusions seems an act of ignorance.

So, having completed my first novel from this vast collection, Père Goriot, to offer any kind of commentary feels ‘atrevido’. The novel tells the story of an impoverished father who continues to support his two daughters, in spite of the fact that they are married to figures from high society and are ostensibly well-off. Goriot lives in a boarding house with the young legal student Rastignac, among others, whose own ambitions to move into high society will be conditioned by his strange friendship with the devoted father, who is taken advantage of by his ungrateful daughters.

The thrust of the novel’s moral education for both Rastignac and reader is clear and the study of Paris’ social worlds is effusive. One of the most intriguing elements of the novel concerns its pre-history. Goriot, we are told, made his fortune in the wake of the revolution. At a time of food scarcity, he began to control wheat supplies and this lead to him becoming rich. Later in the novel, impoverished and near his end, he repeatedly says he will go to Odessa to return to the wheat business. Within the course of a single generation, the whole upheaval of the revolution, as described in the novel, has been forgotten. The aristocracy have regained complete control of society and absorbed any social differences. Goriot’s sole ambition is to get his daughters into that society, which he achieves, only to find that this offers none of the security either for them or for him he imagined. The result is that the revolution, the most seismic event in the recent history of Europe, as well as Goriot’s life, is reduced to a footnote. It becomes, in the novel, a kind of black hole, with Parisian society accelerating away from its centre at warp speed. The poor are poorer than ever and the rich more venal than ever. History has moved on without, it seems, having taken on any of the lessons that the years of strife might have imparted.

mysterious object at noon (d. apichatpong weerasethakul)

Mysterious Object at Noon would appear to be Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first full length feature. A doc/ drama, it combines an immersive trip through rural and urban Thailand, with the narration of what appears to be a folk story about two sisters/ teachers who are the same person, or who replace each other, which is of course something of an Apichatpong trope. At one point the film shows a set of travelling players giving an open air performance of the story to a village, with the actresses wearing identical, beautiful costumes. The viewer has to do quite a bit of work to stitch the story together, and the fact that there is no definitive version is revealed by the sequence at the end, where a group of school kids offer up their differing versions of how the story should end, which all seem to feature a bewitched tiger. Many of the tropes of his later work are therefore present, like tantalising clues. It was also notable, the day after watching Memoria, how similar rural Thailand looks to rural Colombia. The film helps to determine the director’s aesthetic, taking the viewer into a sensory exploration of modern Thailand in all its languid diversity. 

memoria (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

I picked the perfect evening to go and watch Memoria. There are some days in your life when you want nothing more than to be plunged into a dense, visionary spectacle. Memoria delivered in spades. Only the goofiest, most irreverent of creators gets to smash the system with so much glee. In which regard this film made me think of other Latin based films which somehow manage to interrogate the edge-of-life feeling which the islands of life and empty spaces lend to Latin America, those being the films of Reygadas and the recently viewed Latin excursion of Wong Kar Wai.

I don’t know why Apichatpong chose to film in Colombia, but in so many ways it works. From the flash scene of kids dancing in the square of a remote town to the moment a man falls to the floor in Medellin, scared he has been shot, and then starts running, the film locates pinpricks of Colombian life that pepper the movie, that make it feel it is of that place, despite the multinational creative team. The scene set in the uni courtyard is another, as is Swinton’s character just drifting into a jazz rehearsal in a cramped room, with other students watching with blank but attentive faces. The detail feels both improvised and pitch perfect. Something that surprised me about the film, was the sly humour which Swinton embraces as well, with several scenes provoking an entirely unexpected laughter.

Memoria is a quest film, as Swinton goes looking for the source of her auditory hallucination and finds that it was either to do with someone hiding under a bed in a remote tropical village or it was the departure of an alien spaceship, or both. It is also, one supposes, a premonition of a death she has already lived. At some points it could almost be said that everything gets a bit M Night Shyamalan, not that anyone else would probably think that.

Don’t watch this film at home unless you are properly stoned, or it is the middle of the night when nothing and no-one is going to disturb you. If possible, watch it in on a vast screen in a near empty sala. Let the sounds disconcert you. Strain to hear every word. Watch Tilda’s face become a mask of Tilda’s face. Watch the dead walk amongst you. Dream about your origins as you ride the clouds with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in no particular hurry to discover where you are going or where you have come from. 

crimes of the future (w&d david cronenberg)

Crimes of the Future feels like a bonne bouche served up by the bastard child of Genet and Foucault. It’s at the same time frothy and intense, revolting and enticing. It’s also a fitting return to body horror, and although it’s likely the director will not have seen Titane before he devised and shot his latest film, there’s a weird feedback loop at work here. Foucault was the first writer I know of to elucidate the concept of the bio-human, and Genet’s writing eroticised the scar. Cronenberg spins the beguiling idea of the potential for the internal organs to evolve in a post-human fashion. This also sets up the conceit of a beauty pageant for the organs, judged on their aesthetic merits. This is a glorious subversion of the idea of the external beauty pageants, or at least if would be if Cronenberg’s casting didn’t seem so reliant on established beauty norms. Every woman in the film more than lives up to contemporary notions of movie star beauty, and we don’t get to see their insides, only those of the hawklike Vigo Mortensen.

As such, the film is perhaps less radical than it might aspire to be, and the absence of a clinical through line also seems to stymie the film’s philosophical growth. Nevertheless, this is a film which is almost inebriated with ideas. The fact it takes place in a futurist Greece only adds to the mix. One of the many strands that evolves is the notion of a post-human which can regurgitate the plastics and other synthetic human products which are polluting and potentially killing the planet. This seems like a great idea, on a cinematic but also a practical level. However, the narrative eventually hinges on the efforts of the vice squad to eliminate these bio-ecologists, for reasons which remain nebulous.

It’s one of those films that is almost overripe for post doctoral analysis. At times brilliant, at times frustratingly slight, as with the throwaway conclusion. Still, the post-humanists are going to be happy. 

the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity (david graeber & david wengrow)

It would be foolhardy to attempt to parse a book which sets out to do what the title suggests. To respond to it with anything less than a fifty page dissertation feels somewhat blasphemous. As such, perhaps the best way of approaching this brief review is to be as personal and subjective as possible. A few years ago, Guillermo Amato and I travelled to Michoacan to work on a documentary about the influence of Thomas More on the Purepecha, an indigenous people from that region, whose language and customs live on. What became increasingly apparent is that More’s book, Utopia, was itself indebted to accounts of the new world which were filtering back to Europe. More frames Utopia as a rendition of the account of a sailor from Amerigo Vespuccio’s expedition to the new world, so in many ways what we realised was nothing more than a statement of the obvious. However, whilst Utopia is perhaps one of the most read theoretical texts from the 16th century, few seem to analyse its origins.

Graeber and Wengrow only mention More in passing. But the whole slant of their investigation echoes, in infinitely more detail, our own journey. The book opens with the stated aim of both offering the perspective of the indigenous people’s of their European visitors, and also investigating the nature of these indigenous societies, not merely at this point in history, but over the course of 5000 years. The authors specialised in anthropology and archeology and they employ these skills and many more to their investigations. The result of these, as the title suggests, disrupts our Eurocentric, post-Enlightenment consciousness, questioning everything about the society we have constructed and inhabit in a western orientated world. (The very use of words such as ‘western’, ‘indigenous’, even ‘society’ become problematic through their lens, but for now they will have to suffice.)

Of course, there has always been the doubt as to the viability and desirability of this society, all the more so now that we know to what extent it would appear to be an inadvertently suicidal one. The authors tend to steer clear of environmental thinking, preferring to investigate notions of equality and political and social structures, although what I think Marx might call the fetishisation of the object (and property) is strongly critiqued by their research. Just as importantly, perhaps, is the notion that this is in fact an optimistic book. It is one which declares: there are other, better ways of organising society; of being free; of consciousness.

My grandparents’ generation, still in the shadow of colonialism, was profoundly ignorant about the world beyond its ken. It was a generation that emerged from great poverty, and put this down to the fruits of industrialisation. Those societies that had alternative methods of contemplating ideas of possession or satisfaction were barely acknowledged. I am not sure if anything has changed all that much. This book is a superb tool in the rethinking of the course of human history: where we might go as a species, where hope, in spite of all the doom that haunts the planet, might be found. 

nightmare alley (w&d guillermo del toro, w. kim morgan)

Nightmare Alley starts somewhat clunkily, with a lot of awkward edits as the plot sets itself up and introduces the world of the circus which Bradley Cooper’s Stan is about to become a part of. In this sense it feels like the adaptation of a novel to the screen, where the novel has limitless time to build its rhythm, whereas film, in particular narrative driven film, needs to hit the ground running. Stan’s journey towards becoming a key part of the circus company seems to happen almost overnight. The mystery of his past is left hanging (and never really resolved). At first it looks as though he’s on a mission of revenge, or seeking out a lost lover, but this turns out not to be the case and the film never makes any real attempt to justify why the good-looking protagonist needs to inhabit this world, rather than any other. It will turn out that much of this set-up is required to deliver the punch-line (or remate) with which the film concludes. It’s a pretty good punchline, so it’s just about worth it. As the would-be love story emerges, the film seems to settle down. The thematic of ambition and greed starts to take over, with the protagonist’s journey becoming more clear cut.

It feels worth dwelling on the plot to such an extent, because the most intriguing element of the film might be the tension between the requirements of story and the director’s desire to paint big set piece scenes. This is why we spend so much time in the circus, getting acquainted with a whole raft of characters who will be ditched at the halfway point. The circus, as many a director will attest, is a visual treat, a through-the-mirror wonderland. There are echoes of Pan’s Labyrinth in this fantastical world, but the demands of the narrative mean that the film has to move on and leave this spirit world behind. The film recreates this to an extent with the Mentalist scenes, but by now the issues of character and plot predominate.

The issue of the mentalist comes to the fore in the film’s second half. It’s a fascinating trope and the scenes where Stan manipulates his marks felt like they could almost come out of a PT Anderson film (specifically The Master). The issues of wartime loss and human susceptibly give Nightmare Abbey a weight, albeit a kind of unbalanced weight. The mentalist operating in high society represents a similar exploration of the sub-conscious to the world of the circus. The film isn’t lacking for ideas, and it feels as though one of Del Toro’s strengths is his ability to take the Hollywood world and give it a distorted Latino twist. (There were times when Nightmare Alley reminded me of the work of Juan José Saer.) It’s an unbalanced, contrived vision, which teeters on the edge of self-parody, but just about dragged this viewer with it to the film’s coda, a bathetic sucker punch. 

bonfire of the vanities (tom wolfe)

Tom Wolfe’s novel was a key text for us back in the late eighties. It was both the zeitgeist novel and our zeitgeist novel, with its Dickensian portrayal of the Big Apple, the other York. At one point the novel even mentions Limelight, (given the article ‘the’ in front of it), visited by the degenerate British hack, Fallow. This article by Bruce Bawer says a lot of the things I might say here, acclaiming the novel as both influential and one of the few that has survived the test of the time from that epoch, another world, another New York. Wolfe’s tome was modelled on the great novels of the nineteenth century, initially serialised in Rolling Stone, before being reworked prior to its final publication. Even if the author was perhaps prone to caricature, he was still operating on a vast, challenging scale. Rereading the novel today, it feels as though it successfully captures that pre-Giuliani era of a city with sharp edges, which seemed headed for inevitable conflict and societal collapse. As Bawer notes, these things never took place, even though the culture wars that Wolfe denotes rage just as fiercely, if not more so, today. In a sense it might be that they have been subsumed by the third estate in the novel, the media, for whom these culture wars are grist to their mill. Wolfe’s novel might be said to flirt with Debord’s concept of the society of the spectacle, where real political change is chewed up and spat out by the recurring requirements of the media machine. One aspect of this is the way in which the novel’s narrative remains unresolved at the end, even with a coda set a year later: as though the characters are caught in an endless media cycle. The greatest survivor of this New Yorican era is presumably Trump, who no matter what else he did, learnt to ride the back of the media tiger with aplomb and has used it to his advantage ever since.

Contemplating this world with hindsight, one can’t help thinking of all the elements of the city that Wolfe chose not to include. (Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Springsteen, Warhol, Basquiat, the New York Dolls, Jarmusch, Spike Lee etc) This more artistic, less polarised vision of the city doesn’t fit with the thesis of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Whilst the race wars and urban decay which the novel appears to predict have not quite come to pass over the following thirty years, what does seem to have remained constant is the culture war matrix which the book constructs. This matrix has shaped subsequent political and social development, with the alternatives from beyond the matrix pushed to the margin. In our era, you are either a so-called woke-ist or a preppy neo-capitalist. Anything else barely gets airtime. Wolfe understood this societal evolution all too well, and in this sense Bonfire of the Vanities is distressingly prophetic. 

la niña santa (w&d lucrecia martel, w. juan pablo domenech)

Last year Lucrecia Martel came to Montevideo and screened a short she had made during the pandemic. It was a twenty minute short about her life in the north of Argentina. Afterwards, her partner, a singer, did a set. There were questions and answers, many of them about Woody Allen, whose season in Cinemateca was ongoing. It was a slightly dispiriting affair, none of which felt like it had all that much to do with her four feature films, all of which I have seen at one point or another. So I returned to Niña Santa, a film I haven’t watched since it came out, nearly twenty years ago, uncertain of what to expect. Would it live up to the memories, or would it prove as underwhelming as the night in the Zitarossa?

Thankfully, it was the former. Martel has only made four films and they are all small masterpieces. La Niña Santa is a waspish, delicate, pitch perfect film. Martel has talked a lot about the importance of sound. The film opens with girls singing. A recurring motif is the playing of a theremin, the setting for the initial contact physical contact between Amalia and the doctor. Martel explores the balance of power between Amalia and the doctor, pursuing a contentious line which suggests, perhaps, that the weaker party is in part complicit in events. It’s a film which has some affinity with Harrower’s Blackbird, not to mention Lolita, dramatic works which are prepared to go beyond the obvious tropes of blame in their investigation of teenage sexuality and the way adults manipulate or find themselves beholden to this.

There isn’t time or inclination on the part of the reviewer to go into the ethical dimensions of the film, buy him a drink and it can be discussed to the small hours. On an aesthetic level., however there is time to note Martel’s flawless composition and almost too perfect shot selection. Every shot is beautifully set up. The location is a hotel, with the film only occasionally venturing out into the street. Yet Martel makes this hotel into a small town. Secondary characters are allowed to steal the scene, (the maid with the spray and the bad timing offers the kind of comic touch which belies the film’s seemingly serious nature), and the action of the hotel is always humming in the background. The director succeeds in giving the impression that the whole wide world is contained within the hotel’s walls. Lastly, it’s worth noting the sublime pacing of the film, as it seems to pick up pace and accelerate, acquiring more and more dramatic tension as it heads towards its baleful climax.

Let’s hope Martel hasn’t gone to ground altogether in Northern Argentina, and that her fifth feature film is in the pipeline and coming soon. 

delo (home arrest) (w&d aleksei german, w. maria ogneva)

German’s delicate tale of domestic incarceration builds slowly as layer upon layer of oppression and grief is placed on the frame of David, the professor whose denunciation of the local mayor for corruption has lead to his own house arrest. David, an educated man who speaks six languages, has a Farsi mother and a Georgian father, sometimes sports a Chinese mask and practices Japanese calligraphy, begins the film with a certain arrogance as he wages his campaign. But bit by bit that confidence is chipped away. His mother dies, his friends desert him, and save for his kindly female lawyer, he finds himself alone against the machine of the Russian state. David’s hero is Tolstoy and there’s a cast iron sculpture of Lenin on his front lawn. He is the haunted by the tragedy of a Russia that has traded in any sign of integrity. The film is loosely based on the case of Kirill Serebrennikov, who was also placed under house arrest. Only, where Serebrennikov was a Moscow celebrity who has emerged to direct operas in Amsterdam and have his film screened at Cannes, the case of David is an unknown academic in a small Siberian town. His campaign is not going to attract International attention and no-one is coming to his rescue. At times, David recognises the inevitability of prison, and his case also feels like an echo of Navalny’s. However, part of the film’s strength is the way it functions on a small scale, never leaving David’s house, only sometimes straying outside., We are incarcerated with the protagonist, and experience the physical and mental decline that goes with this injustice alongside him. It’s a low key film of surprising power and terrible pertinence.