belle de jour (w&d buñuel, w. jean-claude carrière)

That curious moment in history when men were permitted to make contentious films about women, something that is less and less condoned. And perhaps, looking at Belle de Jour, one might say that it was a prime example of why this shift has happened. Does it really make sense for a male director to make a film about a beautiful woman who has perverse fantasies and decides to take up prostitution for no very good reason? Is this either plausible or praiseworthy? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that Belle de Jour is an uncomfortable watch, which might be a virtue was as well as a vice. Is this not actually a film about Freud and bourgeois manners? No-one comes out of the film looking good, from Deneuve herself to her husband to the madam who runs the very genteel brothel Deneuve decides to work for. Part of the complexity of the film arises from the fact that the director would not appear to be in the least bit interested in naturalism or psychological accuracy. Rather, he is using the story of Severine as a lens through which to gaze at the fucked up nature of desire in the civilised world, something the film undoubtably achieves. Few have had the nerve to go beyond naturalism to explore the subconscious mire of the modern mind and watching Buñuel now, albeit it feels dated in some ways, one is also made aware that when a director is willing to use cinema as a tool to prise open consciousness, it leads to the most unexpected of places. 

malina (ingeborg bachmann, tr phillip boehm)

This novel reads like the genius clandestine work of a marginal figure. It comes as some surprise to discover after finishing it that Bachmann was a central pillar of Austrian culture, a reference for the likes of Bernhard and Jelinek, who adapted the novel for the screen. Malina is a dense, complex read, structured around the thoughts of a woman who lives with one man, Malina, and has an affair with another, Ivan, although her relationship with Malina is probably platonic. The book is composed of three sections, one where the primary emphasis is on her relationship with Ivan, another, the last, with Malina, and a section in the middle where the focus is her father. This section is the most nightmarish, as it becomes increasingly evident that the relationship between father and daughter was incestuous.

There is so much going on in Malina that the threads sometimes seem to run away from the reader, perhaps even the writer, but that is part of the novel’s complex glory. The game of the novel involves following these threads, sometimes getting caught up in their unlikely logic, sometimes trying to make sense of them. The phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ is perhaps used too much when discussing female writers, but it’s clear that Bachmann delights in leading the reader up the garden path and back again, at times with sequences that don’t even pretend to make grammatical sense, at others with a ragged challenging brilliance. At the same time, this is also a novel which explicitly details the joys and sufferings of being an independent Viennese woman.

“I’ll sleep on my questions in a deep intoxication. I’ll worship animals in the night, I’ll lay violent hands on the holiest icons, I’ll clutch at all lies, I’ll grow bestial in my dreams and will allow myself to be slaughtered like a beast.”

twenty four seven (w&d shane meadows, w. paul fraser)

Has anyone ever laughed as much as I did in an Uruguayan cinema upon hearing the words ‘Edwina Currie’? I doubt it. This reference to the erstwhile politician and lover of the former prime minister actually taps into the wider themes of Meadows’ engaging early work. The central character, Darcy, played by Bob Hoskins with an irascible glee, keeps a diary, which one of the lads who make up his boxing team later discovers. In it, he writes, and narrates, that he was one of those left behind in the Thatcherite boom of the eighties. Which is why he finds himself down on his luck, identifying with the gang of kids who hang around and get into trouble. His mission to set up the boxing club and give the kids a focus in life is a communitarian reaction to the warped individualism of Thatcherite Britain.

The film rides on the back of Hoskins’ charm, the director’s verve and the humour of the kids. Meadows’ future as a spinner of stories for TV can be noted here, as there are more than enough sub-stories and narrative strands to fill out another three movies at least. The closing credits come over the scenes of Darcy’s funeral, a few years after the film’s events, picking out the lads and their new families. The film is carried by Hoskins, whose commitment to the boxing club presumably reflected his commitment to the film itself, an actor with a notable track record mucking in with a rookie director and an even more rookie cast.

The film’s depiction of a depressed Midlands town, where multi-racial youths feel as though there is nothing to do except look for trouble, feels acute and authentic. It is also a telling prefiguration of a country which, no matter how wealthy it has appeared, has been in many ways running on empty for forty years.

alexander the great (w&d angelopoulos, petros markaris)

The frame is set up. Someone enters. Action occurs. The camera follows the action. The sequence ends or is interrupted. People leave. Someone remains.

This cinematic sequence is repeated many, many times in Alexander the Great. It becomes mesmeric. The viewer is always an active participant in the action, attentive for clues and details. Each set-up is a minor mystery which may or may not be resolved. This is evident from the very first shot, which we are informed happens at the dawn of the twentieth century, as a great house sits in darkness, remains in darkness, and then, of a sudden, the lights are switched on, people appear in profile in the windows, the world is alive, the sequence ends.

The story itself is deceptively simple and in so many ways it feels as though Costa Gavras’ recent Adults in the Room contains echoes of Angelopoulos’ epic. A group of British aristocratic capitalists are kidnapped by Alexander, a legendary brigand, who takes them to his mountain village, which is undergoing a radical egalitarian program. Some Italian anarchists arrive, seeking shelter. The political-military machine starts to close in as the British send gunboats to the Greek shore. Tensions rise in the village and the villagers turn on Alexander. There is an assassination attempt. Alexander seizes absolute power. Anyone who tries to flee the village, including the anarchists, are killed by the military. The film ends with Alexander taking the lives of his hostages before he is killed in a sequence reminiscent of Mifune’s demise in Throne of Blood.

This is an epic narrative, which plays out over the course of nearly three and half hours. What this timeframe permits the director to do is twofold (at least). On the one hand it emphasises the epic aspects of his vision. Alexander’s story is played out in the shadow of his namesake and in a Greece to come, with a child named Alexander escaping the village and, in a final shot, approaching modern day Athens. The story of Alexander, with its greatness and its flaws, is destined to be repeated endlessly. The length of the film also allows the director to immerse the viewer in the complex world of this simple village. We come to understand the geography of the village, its bridge, its central square with a tree, its cliff facing the river, like the back of our hand. We know how they dance, how they celebrate, how they argue. The village is the other character, the counterpoint to Alexander, whose aspiration to greatness struggles to come to terms with the notion of the free social individual, it can only function within a wider concept of power.

This is movie making on a grand scale, with a socially conscious political drive which would appear to have been more or less eliminated from the cinema, sublimated to the more narrative driven demands of TV series. It is cinema in the tradition of Eisenstein, Gance and Griffith. The Bertoluccis, the Tarkovskis, the Ciminos - those who saw cinema as a canvas on which to paint examinations of great social upheaval and complex political order, have been exiled. 

el año de la furia (w&d rafa russo)

Authenticity is a strange thing in cinema. Russo’s film deals with events in Montevideo in 1972 which lead up to the coup which brought on a decade of military dictatorship. However, if this film was made to be watched anywhere, it probably isn’t Montevideo. The North Americans have done this for years, but casting actors whose accents are clearly not from the place where the film is set instantly jars. Most of the secondary actors are recognisable Uruguayan faces, including my compinche Fernando Dianesi, but they are just background noise, like the moodily filmed Ciudad Vieja exteriors. The lead actors are Spanish or Argentine. Hence, the film becomes a curious study in cultural appropriation. The confusion around casting extends to the rest of the film as it seeks to engage with its political context whilst incorporating genre elements of a romantic thriller. The result is uncomfortable and consistently unconvincing. El Año de la Furia feels indicative of a trend which has been driven in recent years by the streaming giants who have significant budget to invest and are desperately seeking stories. Recent political history works as a canvas upon which a story can be drawn. The true historical events and players are exploited for the purposes of mainstream ‘entertainment’. The result is a two dimensional exposition, which cannibalises real events. Cinema is always waging a Borgesian war with actuality, (cf The Map and the Territory), but recent developments have meant that the bad habits of Hollywood have now permeated the global industry.

(Whilst not a particular fan of Tarantino, one of the most interesting elements of his work is the way he transparently manipulates and deviates from assumed ideas of historical truth in his films, as though to say it is not the duty of cinema to seek authenticity. A film like El Año de la Furia, with its closing notes and aspirations to historical accuracy fails to recognise the way in which its use of narrative and character inevitably distorts audience perception of actual events. In its defence, the filmmaker might say, ‘So did Shakespeare…’)

mudar de vida (w&d paulo rocha, w. antónio reis)

Rocha’s 1966 offering is a beautifully shot tale neo-realist tale set on the Portuguese coast. Adelino has returned after years in exile in Angola. The coastal community he returns to is desperately poor, and his former sweetheart is now married to his brother. He returns to his former life, labouring and working on the fishing boats that crest the Atlantic, but the hardship of this life is destroying his health. He falls in with a younger woman and begins a tremulous affair with her, which arouses the ire of a conservative community. The film ends with the couple looking as though they are on the point of perhaps leaving together to start a life somewhere else. The narrative is very much in the Neo-realist vein. The images of the fishermen rowing on the open sea and bringing in  the boats and the nets are shot with an urgent, vivid clarity. There is one devastating scene where the family’s beachfront timber house begins to collapse as the high tides undermine the wooden scaffolding that holds it up. People scramble to break it down and recover anything they can, including the timber. It’s an astonishing scene of coastal erosion. Other scenes of the villagers participating in the local festivities are just as brilliantly shot and the film builds up a compelling vision of this impoverished seaside community. It felt curious watching it to think how this world would transform in the second half of the twentieth century with the arrival of mass tourism. The insidious poverty would presumably be alleviated, and this landscape which in the film is harsh and unforgiving would soon come to seen idyllic to German and British visitors. As such the film offers a fascinating portrayal of the transformation of Europe over course of the past fifty years (my lifetime), both in terms of labour and comfort, and consciousness. That which was considered abrasive and harsh is transformed into the supposedly idyllic. What has subsequently befallen the communities Rocha depicts would be fascinating to discover. Have they survived or has tourism hollowed them out?

brodeck’s report (phillipe claudel, tr. john cullen)

Brodeck’s Report is one of those slightly deceptive books, set in an undefined, postwar village in a country which is never stated. The writing includes the use of a foreign language which feels like a variant on German. The village has its own language, as well as its customs and its sins and its secrets. It is narrated by Brodeck, a man who was sent to a concentration camp and lived to tell the tale, only to return to his village to find that the evil is still present. Brodeck is commissioned by the village elders to write a report about the killing of a mysterious stranger who has descended on the village for no obvious reason and whose understanding of the village’s crimes eventually provokes a violent, fatal response. The novel is constantly allusive, swathed in mystery and a certain mysticism. In the closing notes the writer acknowledges the work of Primo Levi. The use of the holocaust as a literary device is always problematic and in Brodeck’s Report, it engenders a certain unease. The descriptions of Brodeck’s time in the camp feel sketchy, relying on the power of images, whose power perhaps never feels as compelling as they ought to, to describe the evil they represent. That these images are then juxtaposed against similar images from the village leaves the reader in an awkward position: should the reader interpret the villagers’ actions as equivalent to those of the Nazis? Or is the book saying that all middle European societies have inevitable Nazi tendencies? The book’s poeticism only seems to shroud these issues in more confusion. 

flee (w&d jonas poher rasmussen, w. amin nawabi)

As we settled down to watch Flee, we realised that we had seen it before. It was in Sundance last year, I believe, alongside Censor, which permitted us to watch it on their platform. However, within a few minutes of that strange sensation when you re-acquaint yourself with images that you’ve forgotten you’ve already seen, the film took over and it felt like the first time all over again. Flee is a film about a refugee, but it approaches the subject matter using animated recreations of filmed scenes, something the final image makes clear. The effect is enormously powerful. There are limits to the possibilities of naturalistic representation. There comes a point when the presence of an actor representing a supposedly real event interferes with the audience’s reception of that event. The scene doesn’t feel quite “true”. Rasmussen’s use of animation as he tells the story of Amin’s flight from Kabul to Moscow and eventually Copenhagen, erases this doubt. Using animation allows the viewer to avoid the question of literal, documentary truth and engage with the story on another register. The use of interspersed archive footage, from Afghanistan and Russia (something I don’t recall from the Sundance cut - was it added later?) helps to root us in the reality of these places, but we identify with Amin all the more because his story is not framed by an actor playing him. It’s a highly subtle form of storytelling which has the effect of making Amin’s experiences feel achingly real. 

adults in the room (w&d costa gavras, w. yanis varoufakis)

Adults in the Room is a fascinating and unlikely work from the veteran director, Costa Gavras. He’s 89 years old and still hard at it, an inspiration to us all. This is clearly something of a passion project. The film is a fictional account of the events surrounding the Greek financial crisis which began in 2009, following the global crisis and rattled on for years and years. The film picks up with the election of Syriza in 2015, with Tsipras as the new prime minister and Yanis Varoufakis his finance minister. The events the film describes are based on the book by Varoufakis, who is credited as co-writer.

The Greek financial crisis has been lengthy and complex and not, in this day and age, obvious material for a feature film. It is remarkable how the director succeeds in recounting the intricacies of the negotiations of the Greeks with the Troika of financial organisations, managing to both maintain the film’s rhythm as well as never lose the spectator. Part of the film’s thesis is that this is something that the financial organisations desire. They want to obfuscate, they seek to make it seem as though their decisions are beyond the understanding of the common man or woman, and hence have to be taken on trust. Varoufakis and Costa Gavras go about deconstructing this mystical thesis highly effectively. We always understand both points of view, and at the times the conflict makes for great drama. The film feels as though it belongs to a register which cinema has abandoned: a Brechtian exhumation of contemporary political economic history, where cinema seeks to engage the viewer in issues that normally are supposed to go over their head. (The work of Adam Mackay might be one of the few contemporaries working in this vein.) This quasi Shakespearian approach is generally despatched to be dealt with via documentary, with the suggestion that it’s in slightly bad taste to taint the hallowed halls of fictional cinema with these mordant details.

It’s a film which feels as thought it shouldn’t really work and yet it does. I remember following the Greek crisis for years with no real idea of what was occurring. I left Adults in the Room enlightened. The counter-argument to that of the charismatic Varoufakis might perhaps be underplayed, but the issues are clear. It’s also fascinating to watch the presentation of Varoufakis, played by Christos Loulis, a man who for a while seemed like the epitome of some kind of undefined counter cultural messiah. It’s curious how Varoufakis seems to have subsequently dropped off the global radar, no matter how influential he might still be in Greece. The film succeeds in making the viewer contemplate the possibility of another order of things, even if, looking through the prism of Brexit, the endgame feels more ambiguous than the film suggests. 

trick mirror (jia tolentino)

Trick Mirror is a collection of 9 essays. Many of these essays address the issue of feminism, or being a woman in today’s (post?) feminist western world. Others dovetail and overlap with this theme as they explore notions of identity in the age of the internet and social media, and the construction of the self. There are essays on university life and marriage, but also the way in which the USA has always been a huckster’s paradise (which lead to Trump) and another on the link between religion and ecstasy, that being ecstasy the drug. The essays which most struck this reader were the ones that dealt with the relationship with the internet and another titled Always be Optimising.

The latter again interrogates feminism: “Today’s ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form.” Tolentino then goes on to question to what extent feminism has been sublimated by capitalism, and the cult of the spectacle, and how far this has truly made for the liberation of women. It’s a thesis that seeks to ruffle feathers, and is all the better for it. “The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite - de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.” It is also one that perhaps, as we live in a world where the commodification of the image is ever more prevalent, goes beyond the gender divide.

Tolentino’s article on the internet is one of the sharpest critiques of a thematic that has erupted in the 21st century and is only destined to become more problematic. “The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us”, she writes. The way in which knowledge has been neutered by being located in the virtual world, whilst the real world goes about its process of removing rights and restricting education is something that requires writers like Tolentino to shout about as vociferously as possible.

However, in contrast to reading, say, Virilio, who might be said to explore similar cybernetic territory, Tolentino writes with a relaxed, intimacy. She is willing to add her own autobiographical experiences and put them to the test, holding the reader’s hand as she talks through the complexities of being a woman in the internet age. It’s no doubt this capacity for the candid that has helped to build a solid base of readers, and gives her leeway to move from a specific, personal to a more general, philosophical viewpoint. Whether you agree with what she’s saying or not, she is always readable and engaging. The fact that she is also skewering some of the biggest problematics of capitalism, feminism and modernity, is a bonus.