mandabi (w&d ousmane sembène)

Anyone who lives in the third world could relate to Mandabi. A man receives a cash giro from his nephew who is working in Paris. It’s for a lot of money. There are two problems. One is that everyone in the barrio gets wind of it and comes to the man asking for a loan or a favour. The other is that in order to cash the giro, he has to go through a whole heap of bureaucratic hoops, and the further down then line he gets, the further away the money seems to be. The chaotic results are desperately predictable, as the tensions affect the man’s family and ultimately his personal safety. Sembène’s film is also about a society on the verge of change. Once upon a time, the reach of the state was less invasive. People could get by without needing to possess an ID or even knowing the date of their birth. But by 1968, the time Mandabi is made, that innocence is fading. Now there will be few in the world who don’t have to possess all the accoutrements of citizenship and its clutter, digital or otherwise. It’s a secondary effect of globalised travel, the movement of peoples which underpins the entire narrative of Sembène’s film.

alcarràs (w&d carla simón, w. arnau vilaró)

The Spanish interior has been hollowed out. No-one wants to live in the countryside. Villages lie empty. The old ways of life are withering. Simón’s film looks at a rural Catalan family, and by implication, community, whose land where they have farmed peaches for generations is about to be lost. Small farming communities cannot compete with the big boys, and the land has more value as a solar farm, as the brother of Quimet, the head of the family, acknowledges, joining the other side, to Quimet’s disgust. Simón filters her narrative through the members of the family. The son who grows marijuana in the fields, the older daughter whose carefree life is coming to an end, the youngest daughter, too young to understand what’s happening, the mother who holds things together, the grandfather who is steeped in regret and the paterfamilias who rages against the dying of the light. It’s not hard to see why the film has proved to be so popular and received awards. It’s a doleful but vibrant lament for a Europe that is being consumed by high capitalism, along with all its traditions and values. However, and there Is a however, Simon notes the presence of the African fruit pickers who make the industry viable. These characters sketch around the edge of the film, their ghostly presence a reminder that what is happening in the peach tree fields of Alcarràs is nothing more than an extension of what is happening around the world, from Mexico to Mozambique. It is also what is happening to the film industry, which much as it might lament the passing of the small scale, the artisanal, is part of that process. The editing is superb, allowing sequences to build and then cutting abruptly to the next beat, driving the multi-person story towards its growling conclusion which will bring them all together as the past is literally ripped to shreds. 

borom sarret & la noire de (w&d ousmane sembène)

Sembène’s two short films, twinned at this screening, offer complementing visions of the struggles of the African continent through the differing tales of two characters. In Borom Sarret, the narrator drives a cart for a living, constantly on the edge of penury, until the worst possible thing happens when his cart is confiscated by the police, having taken it into the affluent neighbourhood of Borom Sarret. Sembène’s camera prowls the streets of Dakar, showing us the beggars and the griots, and the ordinary lives of its citizens. The narrator takes a pregnant woman to the maternity  ward and a dead baby to the cemetery, impassive in the face of life and death, both just a fare to help him put food on the table for his wife and children. The short film has a neo-realist feel, and is laced with a dry humour. La Noire De follows the travails of Diouana, who has been hired by a French family as a childminder. She follows them when they move from Dakar to Antibes, but finds herself trapped in virtual servitude, leading to a savage denouement. As well as relating the clear venality of post-colonialism, Sembène’s film is elevated by the subtlety of the depiction of its characters. Diouana is no meek victim. She likes to dress up, she sulks, she fights her corner. There is one telling moment where the husband and her exchange a look which reveals the possibility of attraction, something that could destroy down the social divide. The closing sequence, where he returns Diouana’s meagre possessions to her mother, is laced with an implicit danger, and the skill of the filmmaking is that the viewer wants that confrontation between the arrogant Frenchman and the Dakar locals to ignite, and makes it clear that even if it doesn’t happen now, it will do sometime soon. 

the things we’ve seen (mallo, tr thomas bunstead)

The Things We’ve Seen is composed of three sections. The first is told by a writer narrator who feels as though he could be the author, who has been sent to an island off the coast of Spain which at one point was a prison in the Spanish Civil War. This narrator then travels to Uruguay and then New York. The second section is told by a different narrator, who claims to have been the fourth astronaut to have been on the famous moon landing expedition, the one who took photos and thus never appears in the history books. This section is set in the States, New York and Florida. The final section is set in Normandy, and explicitly references Sebald, as the female narrator goes walking, retracing the steps of a journey she took with a former lover who may or may not be the astronaut or may or may or not be the writer.

The text is dense and threaded with innumerable deviations. Mallo’s erudition is worn on his sleeve. It makes for an exhausting read, and there is a sense that the writer cannot resist the lure of a rabbit hole, although this might also be the novel’s charm. Where all this leads is hard to discern. One of the stranger elements of the novel from a Uruguayan perspective, in a sequence which incorporates the Palacio Salvo, possibly Santa Catalina, and Cabo Polonio, is the writer’s wilful misrepresentation of the real. There is no train to Cabo, but the narrator takes a train most of the way there. There is also no five star hotel there, with a swimming pool, but the narrator stays in one. Quite what all this means escapes me, but it is disconcerting and  inevitably places a question mark over everything we read. Were the photos in Sebald’s books really taken from a car? Whilst the 4th astronaut is clearly a conceit, Mallo’s divergence from facts that most readers would not be able to research or know feels like a next stage post modern device, particularly when so much of the novel’s weight is carried by the details the book recounts.

holy spider (w& ali abbasi, w. afshin kamran bahrami, jonas wagner)

It goes without saying that an Iranian genre film with a combative female heroine is something to be lauded, at any time, but especially now. The film is apparently based on real events, as an ex-soldier, driven by a desire to clean up the streets, starts murdering prostitutes in the holy city of Mashhad. Rahimi, a journalist from Tehran, comes to Mashhad and sets out to hunt down the killer, using herself as bait. As Mr Curry observed, it’s a film in the tradition of Seven, with the spirit of Fincher and before that Hollywood B-movies looming large. The film decides at one point to split its narrative between the killer and the journalist, which serves to diminish a certain amount of dramatic tension, and the denouement, when the killer picks up the journalist, actually occurs at the end of Act 2, with the last act examining the social and political implications of the case. Perhaps as a result of these choices, the film sometimes seems a little like a mash-up of varying intentions, neither genre nor social drama, although, who knowns, perhaps this is a good thing. The opening sequence, which builds to the murder of a prostitute, has an elemental power which the remainder never quite matches, in spite of some graphic murder scenes, but Holy Spider is another example of the rude health of the Iranian film industry in spite (or perhaps because of?) the constraints of the society it emerges from. 

all the beauty and the bloodshed (d. laura poitras)

Poitras’ doc is split down the middle. One part the history of Nan Goldin, radical photographer, a second part Nan Goldin, radical campaigner against the Sackler family. The second part lends the movie its narrative drive; the first part has more heft and weft, because Goldin’s art and its roots are fascinating, and the window it opens on 70s New York is engrossing. At one point a photo of hers of Jarmusch, with his shock of hair, popped up, even though the director is never referenced, and the complexities of that sub-culture came rising to the surface. It is also interesting to note that Warhol and The Factory were never mentioned. Goldin’s rise through the badlands of the Bowery is well told, but the film suffers from docu-syndrome in so far as the more information you are given the more you realise you’re not being given, which is frustrating. The campaigning against the Sacklers strand was met with contempt by Mr Curry, who said he had known too may privileged NewYorkers on their hobby horses to engage with their agenda, and the truth is that, as a campaigning film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed feels a tad underwhelming. The issue the campaigners are attacking is never investigated with any real rigour, as the focus remains throughout on Goldin’s contribution to the cause, rather than the cause itself.  

this stolen country of mine (d. mark wiese)

This Stolen Country of Mine is a film about the effects of globalisation on Ecuador. The film is split into two strands. In one, a campaigning lawyer, Fernando Villavicencio who fought against Correa’s corruption is the focus. The lawyer investigated the contracts made with principally Chinese multinationals (although one imagines other unnamed countries must have been involved) for mining and petrol concessions. The contracts are found to be corrupt, the lawyer campaigns at the risk of his life, and finally, a decade later, Rafael Correa is impeached. The second strand revolves a younger man, Paúl Jarrin, who would appear to be a middle class campaigner who has joined a campaign in a remote Andean region to physically drive the Chinese multinationals out. The clash between local people and the globalisation giants around eco-issues, the retention of their rights to their land, their water, their nature, will be the defining conflict of the 21st century, supplanting the left-right divide, no matter how much this might map onto it. It’s here that Wiese’s film comes into its own, as the filmmaker follows the campesinos as they take up arms and physically attack a mining camp, setting fire to it. Confrontations with police, repression and assassination attempts are part and parcel of the villagers daily lives. At the film’s conclusion, Paul is fleeing into the mountains to lie low, like a modern day Butch Cassidy. There is clearly an element of personal courage on the part of the filmmakers which lends the footage a dramatic heft. The only curious element here is the way in which the Chinese seem to have replaced the North Americans as the regional antagonist. Even this seems to speak of the shifting geo-political sands. 

tár (w&d todd field)

It is the curious nature of having maintained this blog for over fifteen years that permits me to revisit my thoughts about a little seen film called In The Bedroom, by this director. I noted the film’s nuanced take on controversial material and its ‘none-too-likeable’ characters. It always takes courage to represent characters who are unsympathetic, and Field doubles down on this in his masterly new film, which has it nods to Haneke’s Piano Teacher and Weisse’s The Audition (which curiously also features Nina Hoss, with Blanchett’s role echoing that played by Hoss in that film). Put simply, this is an astonishingly assured film, one which is both highbrow and unafraid to use genre tropes when it needs to. It’s a film which manages to include a ten minute interview sequence discussing classical music, as well as dream sequences and at least one jump scare. There are so many elements in Tár that it feels as though it has no right to succeed (the strange neighbours, Bach’s progeny, an adopted daughter (from where?), but Blanchett’s performance and the filmmakers’ skills hold the whole thing together. The edit, by Monika Willi, who has frequently worked with Haneke, is superb, maintaining the pace, pulling out of scenes with the delicacy of a masterchef, and the sound design, (score by Hildur Guðnadóttir), so key in a film about a conductor, is exquisite. Perhaps on a second watch, vast crevasses might open up, but one suspects not. 

the manuscript found in saragossa (jan potocki, tr. ian maclean)

This is one of those books which when you encounter a fellow reader of it, there will be an exchange of knowing nods based on the notion that you have both participated in a unique literary experience. There are other books which have something in common with Potocki’s text, (The Decameron, Quixote, 1001 Nights), but they will be few and far between.

Saragossa is an accumulation of stories, banked up on top of each other. Ostensibly the tale of a Walloon officer who finds himself stranded in a Spanish mountain range, it spirals out like a cobweb as every character he meets has their story to tell. These in turn contains stories within stories. Structurally, the book is a rubik’s cube, with characters from one strand popping up in another strand and the narrative becoming so dense that even the characters themselves start to complain about the impossibility of following everything.

However, just as radical as the book’s structure is its content. The characters the protagonist, Alphonse van Worden, meets, are as multicultural a collection as anything one might hope to meet in contemporary Spain. Some of the mountain bandits are Muslims, who have hidden out for centuries, since the Moors were defeated in the fifteenth century. Others are Jewish. Others still are visitors from the New World, returning from Latin America. The scope of the novel stretches from North Africa to Mexico. The breadth of the its religious scope is equally broad, with the novel describing Islamic, Jewish, Christian and Gnostic thought. Somewhere in the heart of the caves that stretch into the mountains are secrets which the writer might know but will never dare to utter. As such, The Manuscript Found in Saragossa might be the broadest church book ever written: I can think of no other text that engages with such a cultural multitude.

This itself feels astonishing, as is the whole book. The masterly aspect of the writing comes from the way it flirts with tedium, as we embark on yet another narrative, but somehow succeeds in converting every strand into something unique and engaging. It is, without doubt, one of the more remarkable novels I have ever had the privilege of reading. 

outside (d. olha zhurba)

The Trieste Film Festival is dedicated in large part to Ukrainian filmmakers and stories this year. This makes sense. Trieste is on the Adriatic, right next to Slovenia and Croatia, a city that pivots between East and West. The war is geographically closer here, and it is a festival that posits itself, perhaps, as the westernmost point of east Europe.

I caught two films during my brief stay. Home Games is a fairly traditional documentary about a female Ukrainian footballer and her struggles to bring up her two younger siblings, the other side of the beautiful game.

Outside felt more unusual. Great docs sometimes emerge out of chance and persistence. Capturing the Friedman’s being one example. In this case, the director, Olha Zhurba, started filming the thirteen year old Roma, who had fled from his orphanage to join the Maidan protest camp, and was subsequently kicked out. Roma is a chirpy natural in front of the camera.  Over the years, Zhurba returns to catch up with him, finding him wherever he might be, sometimes in Kiev, sometimes in his rural hometown. Roma’s life has not run smoothly. He becomes an addict, and then gets into serious trouble in his hometown when he is accused of stealing. The film knits moments from Roma’s life together, skipping backwards and forwards in time, gradually building up a portrait of his tough life. It’s a slow burn, but carries a growing power as the film unfolds, a story from the edge of the European dream.

Both of these films were shot before the war. Underpinning the watching of them is the great uncertainty about what might have become of these characters now. It also brings into question the whole functioning of the documentary industry. I type this sitting in the lobby of the Savoie hotel, with industry people from across Europe networking over white wine. Ideas are being pitched and deals, perhaps, are being made. The tension between the art and the industry in the context of war is palpable.