till the end of the night (d. christoph hochhäusler, w. florian plumeyer)

This feels like a slightly jerry-built film: a gay cop in a relationship with a trans man who wants to convert and together they are sent on a mission by the cop’s boss to infiltrate and break a drugs smuggling ring run by a canny middle aged DJ who operates via a website. Not that much of it convinces and the editing feels stilted (it feels like it should be a 90/100 minute thriller which actually runs at 120 mins), but the treatment of the relationship between the cop and his partner is well told and as cobbled-together genre movies go it could be a lot worse, even it it left me thinking that you could see why Victoria, occupying similar territory, seemed so fresh and invigorating.

no bears (w&d jafar panahi)

Panahi’s sly, funny and ultimately tragic tale achieves everything it sets out to do and more. It is a social comedy; it is a portrayal of life on two frontiers (Iran/Turkey, Turkey/Europe); it is an indictment of international migration policies; it is an indictment of the Iranian government. There are no heroes in this film, least of all the director, played by the director himself, whose desire to do something as simple as make a film helps to provoke the death of his leading actress. Watching the way the audience shifted from perhaps condescending amusement to the brink of tears was a masterly example of the craft of cinematic storytelling.  

sparta (w&d ulrich seidl, w. veronika franz)

Having now seen three of his films, it seems to fair to make the call that Ulrich Seidl is one of the most transgressive directors at work, making movies that others wouldn’t dare to. Sparta is no exception. There are scenes in the film which are as transgressive in modern western society as almost anything you can get away with. To have as your protagonist a pedophile is obviously a bold step, but to then have him wander round naked in the showers as his prey (or are they) frolic in their trunks is to take it one stage further. Having said which, perhaps the most transgressive thing Sparta does is seek to humanise Ewald, the wealthy man-child at the film’s heart. The film shows us Ewald embracing his inner child on the swings, joining a snowball fight, identifying more with the children than the adults, a kind of Wordsworthian monster, before he gets to open his Sparta academy where he grooms one young boy in particular. At the same time, the Sparta he creates is a kind of haven for the boys, a place where they can act out their childish games, play at being gladiators, scream and holler as much as they like. The dark turn we keep expecting the film to take is only ever insinuated at; if it happens it is never disclosed. Perhaps Ewald, caught up in the shadow of his senile Nazi father, is just a harmless fantasist? Or perhaps not. At the same time, it seems relevant that Ewald preys on Romanian children, which could be a metaphor for the way that the rich prey on the weak, or could be a more direct commentary on the expansionist economics of Germany and Austria, a hangover of other expansionist policies who the senile father embodies. Seidl’s film might have been accused of being exploitative, were it not for its disciplined edit and rigorous cinematography. The framing by Wolfgang Thaler is always thought provoking: an interplay of architecture, image and sensation. The edit breaks the dramatic tension as much as ramping it up. The film succeeds in being both deadening and dramatically tense at the same time, a curious and admirable achievement, which might be said to reflect the modern condition. 

godland (w&d hlynur pálmason)

Anyone I know who has ever visited Iceland tells me that it has the most spectacular scenery. Godland’s irresistible cinematography, by Maria von Hausswolff, takes full measure of this, with the landscape featuring as an additional character and inspiring some of the most beautiful moments on film I have ever seen. If the image is to swoon for, this is countermanded by the bleak storyline, which narrates the journey of Lucas, a naive priest, as he travels from Denmark to a remote Icelandic settlement charged with constructing a church before the onset of winter. Lucas’ journey reminded me in some ways of an antipodean rival, Aguirre, with the knowledge that this mission is doomed to end badly. Another film which came to mind was Martel’s Zama, and there is plenty in the dreamy, loopy camerawork to compare to Martel’s epic. The film is split into two parts - Lucas’ journey to the settlement and his stay at the settlement. He is brought back from the dead, only to find that madness stalks his heels, and the presence of the comely daughter of the settlement’s head honcho serves to complicate matters. However, in so many ways the narrative is a secondary aspect of the film’s ambitions, which seem, as the title suggests, to range further, unto a meditation on the possibility of the divine, something which nature possesses to a degree humanity, cut off from nature, can never aspire to. Godland, with its mighty cascades, soaring peaks and virulent volcano feels like it could be classed as a pantheistic film, one where it is nature as much as man who kills (a man swept away by a raving river, a head crushed under rock), where the bones of the dead will be absorbed and cleansed by the soil as it proceeds at its own pace, which has nothing to do with the rushed rhythms of humanity. 

cuaderno ideal / loop (brenda lozano, tr annie mcdermott)

I slightly regretted looking up the author and discovering that far from being the quiet marginal figure that this novel suggests, she is in fact a player in the Mexican literary scene, who was immersed in controversy when AMLO chose her to be cultural attache to Madrid, an offer that was subsequently rescinded. Loop, or to translate its Spanish title more accurately The Ideal Notebook, a pun on a brand which is also the book’s quest, to find or perhaps create an ideal notebook, is a short, discursive text which feels as though it has been cobbled together with bits of string. It transpires during the time that the narrator’s partner, Jonas, has left her to go to Spain to mourn the death of her mother. Whilst he is gone, the narrator pines for him, sees friends, hangs out, cogitates about Proust or Bolaño or Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, among others, and goes on a couple of trips herself. It’s a deliberately lightweight floaty book. The swallow is a recurring image, and like a swallow, Lozano’s writing seems to glide on her thought processes, sometimes darting, at others giving the impression that the text is scarcely moving at all. Lozano’s text belongs to a school of writing, of which Luiselli is perhaps the most celebrated exponent, the novel as literary journal, and in spite of the limitations of this format, Lozano pulls it off with a marginal charm. 

seules les bêtes (w&d dominik moll, w. giles marchand, colin niel)

Moll is  not a particularly prolific director. I saw two of his early films, Lemming and Harry He’s Here to Help, about twenty years ago. Since then he has only made four films, two of which I have seen. The early work had an engaging approach to narrative, mixing up Hitchkockian tension with a surreal twist, which was right up my street. One suspects the starry Monk (2011) was not a great success, which might explain the subsequent slowdown. However, he has kept on going, and in the same week that my co-writer went to see his last film, (The Night of the Twelfth) I caught his penultimate, Seules Les Bêtes. This is a portfolio film, telling elements of the same story from five different points of view, with the tales overlapping and the timeline jumping around. Mostly set in the rural France, it also manages to include a sequence set in the Ivory Coast, marking it out as a film that tackles the smallness of our big world, where chance encounters are ever more likely and capable of disrupting the apparent tranquility of even an isolated community. The very final twist is perhaps a leap too far, but the film on the whole succeeds in managing its disparate elements with real aplomb. The characterisation is straightforward but effective. It’s a film that is driven by (human) all too human instincts of its varied cast, their motives fuelled by desire for love, money or lust, and in this sense its intentions to represent the things we have in common the world over is beautifully realised. Moll remains one of the finest directors around, and it’s great to see that his career would appear to be picking up pace after the mid-term blues.  

patient 1 (charlotte raven)

Raven’s book appeared in my library for two reasons. Firstly because I am old enough to remember when she, alongside Burchill, appeared on the scene as a literary enfant terrible. How strange to think that she was working for Toby Young’s Modern Review. In so many ways this seems to encapsulate all that went horribly awry with Britain in the nineties. Raven and Burchill were brilliant writers who captured a certain zeitgeist, flames that burned for a while. As Raven acknowledges in her memoir, it was a flame which burnt itself out far sooner than it should have done. Toby Young turned out to be an over-privileged dork with a patina of intellectualism which was enough to pull the wool over people’s eyes, (reminiscent of a former prime minister), whose greatest skill was probably appropriating the talent of gifted women for his own greater good. The flair of Raven the journalist had nowhere to go, and as she notes, was coerced into writing lame controversy pieces, which didn’t do her any good. The other point of reference is that one of my closest friends had a close friend himself, called Tom, who I would meet from time to time, and always seemed lovely. Tom was Raven’s husband for many years. A long-suffering husband, as the book makes clear. It was a curious reading experience to vicariously share the history of an acquaintance, and his combustible marriage. There are all these lives out there, in London, which run parallel to our own, with their dramas and their tragedies and their false dawns and happy moments and unhappy endings and we see just the very edge of these lives, like catching a glimpse of a lurid lining inside a coat. This book effectively turned the lining inside out. Whilst primarily a memoir about living with the hereditary Huntington’s disease, I read it as a roman a clef, shedding shards of light on a world I walked beside but never quite knew. 

On the day of writing, there’s an article in the Guardian with the author making the case for assisted dying, stating that her disease is worsening and she is in great psychological and physical pain. In the book, Raven talks a lot about the dire possible outcomes of her having Huntington’s disease, but ends on something of an up, as she gets a place on a treatment test which could lead to a breakthrough. Even though the news that the test has not worked is revealed at the close of the book, we don’t really as readers register the severity of what is soon to hit the writer, in part because she writes so cogently. Today’s article brought it home in tragic fashion. 

the ice storm (d. ang lee, w. rick moody, james schamus)

Ang Lee’s nineties hit is such a curious film. On one level it is a hideous examination of suburban USA, a world where the bad haircuts and fashions match the dubious morals in the time of Nixon. On the other it’s a tender-hearted coming of age tale, peopled by a whole school of future stars, including Maguire, Ricci and Wood. Lee skewers the vacuous suburban world with real dexterity, helped by some great acting from Kline, Joan Allen and Weaver. At one moment, Weaver, on her hilarious waterbed, one of many succinct touches, is seen reading a Philip Roth novel. We have been transported into a ghoulish world of wannabe predatory men who are in real life a bitter disappointment to their women, either as husbands or lovers. Only the children, lead by the gloriously off-beat Maguire., hold out some kind of hope for a better future, once the ice has melted. (Of course we now know that the ice is melting far too fast and the better future is as illusory as ever). It’s intriguing to see how effectively the outsider, Lee, disembowels the North American culture, in a fashion neither Hanecke or Wong Kar Wai, for example, managed. Sadly I didn’t get a chance to see any of his other films in the Cinemateca cycle. A last note - the strangeness of hearing Bowie’s voice at the end in the song that covers the closing credits. For all that Bowie might have ended up spending the last years of his life in New York, he sounds resolutely un-American, faintly out of place, like the man who fell to earth, albeit, the Englishman who fell to earth. 

the skin (curzio malaparte, tr david moore)

Malaparte’s novel is a collection of extraordinary scenes. Set at the conclusion of the Second World War, it contains all the decadence of a dying continent, measured against the brash optimism of the ‘invaders’, the US troops who the narrator, Malaparte himself, has been seconded to as a translator, as they make their way up through Italy from Naples, then Rome, towards the Alps. The novel is composed of 11 chapters, each one effectively a set piece, dealing with one or another aspect of this clash between brave new and decadent old worlds. What we get is a decidedly anti-heroic vision of the war, perhaps appropriate given that it comes from the point of view of the losers, but this anti-heroicism spills over to the US troops as well. There are no heroes in this dystopian landscape, only survivors or the dead. Malaparte comes from a European tradition of scandal and shock. Names like Pasolini or Celine might be placed alongside his. He seeks out the venal in humanity in a bid to touch the base notes of this thing called civilisation, which is so close to barbarianism. Those who fail to recognise the connection between the two states of being are either stupid or hypocrites. Another touch note reading the book was Von Trier’s Europa. In the UK we have been overwhelmed with a glorified and false vision of this war. The Skin is more than a corrective, it’s an enema, extracting the blood and guts of all the grotesque and disgusting detritus of war and placing it on full display. 

a plein temps (w&d eric gravel)

Gravel’s taut film has something of the Uncut Gems about it, as the heroine, Julie, struggles to survive in the big city against the odds. Julie, separated from the father of her two kids, commutes from a long way out from the centre of Paris, where she has a job as senior chambermaid in a five star hotel. In the week we meet her, strikes are paralysing Paris (plus ça change) and her commute becomes the kind of ordeal any big city dweller knows all too well. The situation is complicated by the fact she’s been invited for a job interview for the kind of job she used to do, before the separation, but in order to attend the interview she has to bunk off work. What with arriving late and having to deal with a Scottish singer who has done a ‘Bobby Sands’, (a touch of black humour which I and one other in the cinema laughed out loud at), and then being invited back for a second interview, Julie finds herself skating on thin ice at work, at a time her ex is failing to pay his share of the bills and her bank account is close to zero. Will Julie make it to the end of the week, or will she throw herself under a train? The tension is ever-present, as Julie flags down lifts to get home and is threatened with being reported to social services. At times the script feels almost sadistic, as though it has been sent to the obstacle lab, but the film painfully succeeds in documenting the first world stress of survival in the urban jungle, even if the ending seems a bit cakeist, as her possible salvation involves plunging right back into the hideous capitalist machine which has brought her to such a pass in the first place. 

utama (w&d alejandro loayza grisi)

Grisi’s film feels like a postcard from the front lines. The front lines of that other global conflict, the planet versus humanity. Set in the Andean highlands of Bolivia, the story is simple. An old couple are reluctant to leave the land they have lived on all their lives, even though it hasn’t rained for a year and the drought is causing their neighbours to leave. Their grandson comes to visit them from the town, trying to convince them to abandon their home and return with him to the city, but the veterano Viriginio is stubborn and suspicious and generational conflict ensues. The film is beautifully shot by Barbara Alvarez and the landscape becomes the fourth protagonist and primary antagonist. The simplicity of the story feels as though it coalesces with the ruggedly beautiful landscape and the urgency of the film’s thematic. There’s no space for embroidery when it comes to the seismic issue of climate change. Nevertheless, the intergenerational conflict delivers drops of humour which provide humanity to this stark tale. It’s also notable how effective Utama’s storytelling is in comparison to that of the director’s father’s feature, Averno. Where Averno was over-ambitious, Utama feels as though it has been, wisely, pared back to the bone.