enys men (w&d mark jenkin)

When I first watched Bait, the filmmaker was an unknown phenomenon, a man making film out of ingenuity, will power and an imagistic imagination to die for. Now I am only one step removed from the same director, knowing several of the luminaries in the credits. His story is inspirational, with Enys Men premiering in Cannes and breaking out of the low-fi bubble. As Mr P observed, there are posters for the film in Oxford Circus tube station. Given all this there is the nagging fear that the film will underwhelm, that it will have lost the marriage of DIY aesthetic and stop motion narrative that made Bait one of the most remarkable films of the British century. I should not have feared. Enys Men takes a gothic turn, but retains all the wonder of its predecessor. It has elements of folk horror, but it also has elements of early Buñuel. The marriage in cinema between object as both aesthetic and semiotic signifier is once again beautifully explored and constructed. The word is secondary, far more so than in Bait, and the language is constructed from image, allowing the film to hover between dream and the perceived reality of its unnamed heroine. Cornwall’s burnished tones are interrupted by a gallo scarlet, and the effect is hypnotic and delirious. 

triangle of sadness (w&d östlund)

Alfred Jarry meets Voltaire meets Lost meets Buñuel should work, shouldn’t it? It’s certainly a great pitch for a certain class of elite film financier. Östlund more or less delivers on target in a rangy, showy movie that is intermittently entertaining and intermittently overdrawn. Östlund’s greatest skill, it seems to this critic, is his capacity to forensically analyse and destroy the nuances of modern mores. So the elaborate conversation between the film’s eventual protagonists, Yaya and Carl, about who pays the bill, which serves as a kind of entree to the meal we are about to consume, is gloriously minimal and spiky and skewers contemporary discourse about gender politics, among other things. I could have watched a whole movie of this kind of dialogue and acting, but the film aspires to a wider remit, and soon moves towards broad neo-Carry On comedy. Arms manufacturers blown up by their own weapons in a homage to Churchill, projectile vomiting and a lurid battle of the quotes, which includes Reagan, Marx, Lenin and Edward Abbey (¿?). Somewhere down the line, all nuance is thrown out of the window, before we get to the Hobbes/ Buñuel finale. There’s no shortage of ideas in Triangle, in fact it feels as though there is probably a surplus and some redistribution might have been in order. But each to their own, and in its own cultish way, it is doubtless destined to become one of those films of which future generations will say, as they might now about Ubu - have you ever triangled your sadness?

far beyond the pasturelands (d. maude plante-husaruk, maxime lacoste-lebuis)

How much is a mushroom worth? Far Beyond the Pasturelands is an account of how, in the Nepalese highlands of the Himalayas, villagers take time out of their lives to go and search for a particular rare strain of caterpillar mushroom, which are worth five dollars  a pop, and presumably far more when they eventually get to market. The film’s remit remains strictly within the mushroom picking season of the villagers, so how this process fits into the wider matrix of globalisation is never revealed. At the same time, the villagers in their tents are seen watching a Bollywood movie or getting their phones charged as they camp out for the season, miles from their homes and any notion of urban civilisation. They seem to enjoy their foray into the highlands, even if the work is back-breaking and frustrating: it’s possible to go an entire day without finding a single mushroom. The wider context of their lives is only alluded to, although the desire to give their children a better education to escape poverty comes through as a common theme when we hear what the villagers have to say. 

ivan moscow (boris pilnyak, tr aaron schwartzman)

Pilnyak’s post revolutionary text is a tiny box of surprises. Structured around the brief life of the eponymous hero, it moves from Moscow to the deep Russian countryside, where Ivan Moscow is seeking to construct a factory that will produce unlimited nuclear energy. The fact that the novel is written in 1927 and the author was executed by Stalin in 1938, only adds to the unexpected nature of Ivan’s project, which is somehow connected to his love for an Egyptian mummy and the enigmatic Alexandra. Ivan fights in the revolution and dies in a plane crash, but the details seem incidental to a novel which feels like a forefather to the writing of Pelevin and incorporates in its 120 pages an interpretation of revolution, futurism, the conflict between urban and rural russia and its inherent mysteries and much more besides. 

the banshees of inisherin (w&d martin mcdonagh)

There was a time, twenty years ago, as McDonagh was consolidating his reputation as a playwright on the London stage, that an Irish friend of mine came round to supper and lacerated him as a plastic paddy, who was exploiting his roots. His argument was that McDonagh and his brother, raised in Camberwell, were essentially Londoners cashing in on their heritage by writing London-friendly versions of rural Ireland. Everyone knows that it’s never been a hindrance to be Irish if you want to get ahead in London, and most of our greatest English language playwrights have been Irish, through and through. McDonagh may not be Irish through and through but still succeeded in creating apparently authentic tales from the backwaters, often tales which played on masculine venality and stupidity. The plays were imbued with a dark humour and no little violence and were immensely successful.

Since when the playwright has been reinvented as a film director and whilst the rhythms of Irish speech still permeate his work, even when set in the USA, he has left the country in peace for a while, only to return with the Banshees, a folk tale from an island off the west coast of Ireland, imbued with dark humour and calculated violence. It’s a warped folk tale about a dull man who happens to be nice set against a charismatic man who turns out not to be very nice. There’s plenty of affection and mordant wit in a fable about friendship, masculinity and living on small islands. With some bravura acting and delirious greenery, this feels like the most McDonagh script ever written and it really doesn’t matter wether the inspiration came from Donegal or Camberwell, it’s still deliriously effective.

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Brief ps after a night in a Forest Hill pub, having touched on Camberwell & Brixton on the night of SK’s death and discussing this film with regard to the director’s relationship with his brother, among others. Noting that the tension within the film between the characters played by Farrell and Gleason so neatly reflects the fraternal tensions and silences within the director’s own environment and how the film is a fine example of the capacity of art to act as a safety valve for the travails of the artist.

aftersun (w&d charlotte wells)

My friend Ana came out of the screening saying: that’s the most Uruguayan British film she had ever seen.

The British go to a foreign country to grapple with their fragile psyches. They don’t interact with the locals, but they do learn about their deep secrets. It’s a lower middle class White Mischief, modern day economic post-colonialism, albeit filmed and edited with a low-fi charm. The holiday movie has a Rohmerian pedigree, and the director’s style is reminiscent in many ways to that of her fellow countrywoman, Lynne Ramsey. Both Ratcatcher and Morven Caller came to mind, albeit Ramsey’s delirious holiday movie succeeded in integrating the local world with slightly more gusto than the Turks who are melded into the background in Aftersun, with Turkey and the resort itself an exotic location for a delicate investigation of childhood trauma.

Why is Aftersun a Uruguayan movie? Because very little happens, and the movie sinks or swims on the audience’s capacity to be captivated by the dreamlike web spun by the cineaste. 

calle mayor (w&d juan antonio bardem, w. carlos arniches)

Franco era cinema is a fascinating topic. Reading around Calle Mayor, one learns that the director was arrested during filming and was only able to complete the movie after an international campaign to get him released, a campaign which included the film’s Amercian leading actress, Betsy Blair. In addition, the film was deliberately set up as a Spanish-French co-production to assure that it could be presented in festivals and get around Spanish censorship. As a result it premiered to great acclaim at Venice and became a massive hit in Spain when the authorities subsequently permitted its release.

These notes are relevant, not just because of the personal risk that Bardem was taking in making the film, but also to contextualise how radical Calle Mayor was at the time. In a world of Titane and Infinity Pool it’s hard to perhaps contemplate how a relatively low key drama might have resonated with such potency. Nevertheless, the narrative is quietly brutal. In a small Spanish town, a well-heeled group of amigos decide to play a practical joke on ageing but still attractive thirty something, Isabel, setting her up with Juan, a personable banker from out-of-town. Isabel falls head over heels with Juan, who realises he is being a bastard but can’t find a way out. He seeks the help of his friend, Federico, who advises him to fess up, but when Juan runs away, Federico takes it on himself to tell Isabel the truth. The film ends without any redemptive ending: Isabel and Juan will remain trapped, shackled by the realities of small town life.

Bardem’s script includes some lovely throwaway lines about the joys of US cinema and its pristine kitchens. The sound mix, particularly in the scene where Federico tells Isabel the truth about Juan, is remarkable and the cinematography is always considered. The film creates a compelling vision of the fecklessness of small town life, where the pampered sans and daughters of the middle class indulge their wayward games and fancies and no-one emerges with any great credit. 

mis hermanos sueñan despiertos (w&d claudia huaiquimilla, w. pablo greene)

Huaiquimilla’s film is a worthy if dogged dramatisation of the events leading to a fire in the juvenile remand centre of Puerto Montt, where ten young adults died. The closing titles also refer to the more than a thousand others who have died whilst within the system. The movie recounts the story from the point of view of the young adults, focusing on a pair of sympathetic brothers who don’t appear to deserve to be locked up. Perhaps one of the weaker elements of the film is that all the kids are excessively likeable, so the logic behind why they have ended up where they have, and the social conditions within Chile which lead to its youth being locked up, aren’t explored, in spite of the use of occasional flashbacks. Whilst the lead character, Angel, is known as the poet, and his brother Franco, (known as Pulga or Flea, a Messi reference) has dreams of playing for Barcelona, the edges of these characters feel as though they have been ironed out in the script, which veers towards the functional. The film has received support from various International Film Labs, and there is more than a suggestion of the construction of a vision which meets Western requirements of Latin American stories, no matter how well acted and authentic the film feels. 

the emperor’s tomb (joseph roth)

Roth’s other Trotta novel is understandably less celebrated than The Radetsky March. It’s a patchy, rangy book, which sweeps from pre-war Vienna and Slovenia through the protagonist’s participation in the war, imprisonment as a POW in Siberia, and then return to Vienna where he finds himself impoverished following the collapse of the Hapsburg empire. It feels like a 500 page novel squeezed into a hundred and something pages and doesn’t entirely hang together, no matter how fascinating the individual episodes might be. Nevertheless, the sections themselves, in particular the Siberian and post-war episodes offer an unusual vision of how these moments of history happened on a human scale. As a POW  in Siberia, (an experience my great grandfather also supposedly shared), we see the ragged edges of a war which no-one is all that concerned about. Post-war Vienna, in Roth’s vision, has a curiously modern feel, where sexuality is fluid and artistic flavours of the month come and go. People try and fail to spin businesses out of nothing, which mostly fail. All of which feels very like the twenty first century.