chronique d’un eté (d. edgar morin, jean rouch)

At the start of the film, the filmmakers declare their objective is to document the city of Paris over the course of summer, 1960. This is clearly an unviable objective and the filmmakers make clear that they are conscious of the limits of their project. Things open with a straightforward device, as two young women stop people in the street and ask them, bluntly, if they are happy, with predictably humorous results. It’s vox pop, ahead of its time, which allows the film to engage with a variety of people from differing backgrounds, but it’s a limited strategy. Then the methodology shifts as we move into a series of interviews with seemingly random characters: a worker in a Renault factory, an Ivory Coast immigrant, Marceline, one of the young women doing the interviews. Gradually the film starts to piece these seemingly random elements together. They meet, they interact, they discuss the events of the day, including the post-imperialist wars in Algiers and the Congo. They even go on holiday, to Saint Tropez, a paradoxically essential element of the Parisian summer. Along the way there are surprises and moments of raw emotion. Some of the characters open up, others are more guarded. The joys and futilities of living in the French capital are laid bare. The film closes with a sequence where the participants are shown the film in preview, a device which allows for more surprises and a further layer of commentary on the viability of the project in itself.

What do we get out of all this as viewers? Well, on the one hand, we do indeed get an idea of what Paris was like over the course of the summer of 1960. We get to see what it looked like, and what the concerns and hopes and fears of its citizens were. We also get an investigation into the limits of a certain observational fly-on-the-wall filmmaking style, what it reveals and what it hides. Where the traps might lie. But more than all of this, we also get a sometimes marvellous study of humanity, the simplicity of humanity, its everyday charm and its everyday despair, a life clothed in the secrets that every soul carries around with them. 

diego garcia (natasha soobramanien & luke williams)

As the title suggests, the novel’s focus is on the eponymous archipelago that was ceded by the British to the USA as a military base, meaning the Chagos islanders who lived there were forcibly deported, destined to roam the world as they sought to make the case for being permitted to return to their islands. One of the co-authors, Natasha Soobramanien, is of Mauritian descent, which helps to explain her interest in the islanders’ fate, as their first port of call after being deported was Mauritius, where a strong community of Chagos islanders remains. Others have moved to the UK, specifically Crawley,  a consequence of the stateless islanders arriving at Gatwick when they first came to Britain. A select cohort of the islanders have been granted UK citizenship, but others haven’t and their fate, as is the fate of so many stateless individuals, is to roam the world in limbo. One of these, called Diego, is a character in the novel, albeit a peripheral figure, as the novel on the whole revolves around the relationship between Damaris and Oliver, which appear to be nommes des plumes for the writers themselves. This auto-fiction is the dominant strand of the book, as it traces the relationship between the two writers, who are also writing this novel we are reading together. The novel thus becomes a somewhat solipsistic project, albeit very Fitzcarraldo. It comes as no great surprise to discover that Soobramanien is an alumni of the UEA Creative Writing MA, which in turn has been so influenced by the work of Sebald. Whilst the novel incorporates segments which are memoirs of other characters, figures in the story of Diego Garcia, there is perhaps a sense that it is slightly less radical than it purports to be and the interweaving of the novelists’ stories with that of the Chagos islanders has moments which feel somewhat tenuous. 

aguas del pastaza / juunt pastaza entsari. (d. inês t. alves)

Aguas del Pastaza (The Waters of the Pastaza) is a beguiling little film. Running at a shade over an hour, it documents the lives of a small tribe of children who live, learn and play on the banks of the river Pastaza, deep in the Amazon rainforest, somewhere on the border of Peru and Ecuador. Throughout almost the whole film, there are no adults present, just the kids. Alves shows them with an affectionate, observational eye. There is no intent to interview them or speak to anyone who might be shaping the way their minds work, in part, one suspects, because it is clear their minds and bodies are shaped more than anything by the world around them, in which they live in a state of seemingly Wordsworthian joy. They climb tees, forage for fruit, hunt for shrimps by night, play football in the teeming rain, paddle down the river in their pirogues, go fishing, cook etcetera. As such this is no more and no less than a vivid fly-on-the-wall portrayal of what life is like for these children, a life that they clearly relish.

As it happens I watched the film with Sñr Amato and his friend, Juanma, who explained that this way of life was one his mother had lived in the Paraguayan selva, not so very long ago. Juanma is a very urbane figure so I had no idea of his rural background. He said that Alves’ film transported him back both to stories his mother told him and his own experiences when he went to stay with family in the jungle, and the sense of wondrous liberty of existing in this environment, an element of the continent’s consciousness that is constantly under threat, (a threat that is latent but never declared in the film). Rather, what we get to see is everything we have already lost and everything that clings on regardless in the face of supposed ‘progress’. 

youth of the beast /yaju no seishun (d. seijun suzuki w. ichirô ikeda, tadaaki yamazaki, haruhiko ôyabu)

Suzuki’s B-movie was a random pick, one of the joys of living close to your local arts cinema, as they are known. Great title aside, the film is resolutely action driven, with the hard-nosed hero, Jôji, wreaking havoc in the Japanese underworld. I have to confess that there were numerous moments where I lost the plot as it stitched together the rivalries of the Yakuza bands. The gaudy tone and colour feel like the antithesis of those movies loved by the arthouse crowd, the stately oeuvres of Ozu and Mizoguchi. This is unredacted action, and one can imagine a youthful Tarantino adoring the vibrant if senseless tones. Kill Bill is just a few steps away from Youth of the Beast, and then the family line leads to the banalities of those movies which feature on the lists of films that have somehow grossed over a billion dollars. Indeed, Suzuki’s tone feels that it owes as much to the American occupation as it does to anything which might be defined as ‘Japanese’. 

full metal jacket (w&d kubrick, w. michael herr, gustav hasford)

I spent much of the film thinking about Docklands. What it was and what it became. How does the barely-remembered Vietnam war map onto the barely remembered Docklands  (before it became the current megalopolis Docklands). For those who don’t know: Kubrick, who didn’t like leaving Britain, reconstructed Vietnam in the ruins of the part of London known as Docklands, once the maritime hub of the capital, which as Britain declined as a trading nation, was an area that had fallen into disuse. The same Docklands would soon become the site for the development of a new financial and commercial zone, Canary Wharf.

Is there a link between Kubrick’s retrospective vision and the neo-liberal explosion that was constructed on the charred relics of his fictional Vietnam? Does the defeat of the USA reverberate with the unleashing of capital that was to follow, an unleashing that has transformed the landscape on the other side of the Thames? I remember, living in Blackheath, watching from the window of the bedsit I was living in at the time, as Canary Wharf tower was being built, going up floor by floor, like some unlikely and unwanted donation from a New York billionaire. I can date that to 1990, because I watched Mandela being released from prison on a TV in that same bedsit. 32 years ago now. Kubrick’s film is set around the Tet Offensive, in 1968, only 22 years earlier. He filmed in 1985-86, only a few years before the area’s transformation. He was closer to the Vietnam war then than we are now to the birth of turbo-capitalism, which rose from the ashes of the USA’s defeat, rising on the land where he realised his fictional recreation of that defeat.

Weirdly, it’s hard not to mourn for that cinematic vision of the Vietnam war, a cinematic vision which produced material as rich as anything US cinema has produced since. Watching the likes of Barbie and Oppenheimer, popcorn movies, one step removed from the Marvel franchise, it’s hard not to yearn for the generation whose horizons were broadened by defeat, by the tarnishing of the dream. Full Metal Jacket feels more schematic than Apocalypse or Deer Hunter, but it is still a rigid, sceptical examination of history, one which permits the construction of anti-heroes, rather than heroes, of doubt rather than affirmation. What came in the wake of this doubt was the bombast of Dockands, a requirement to shroud weakness in steel, to obliviate it from our narratives. The only time that narrative was punctured, in 2001, it was met with the force of a militarised blowback which, in theory, would insure against another Vietnam, although in practice, the empire was still just as wobbly. only this time, no-one got to make films about it. There are no wastelands in our modern techno-cities to re-enact the catastrophes of Fallujah, or Kandahar. And where the will might exist, the interest has waned. What turbo-capitalism has done so effectively is to out-source trauma, even failure. It happens in another dimension, not ours. And should anyone start to question that narrative, the counter-narratives of Trump or Brexit or Milei or Bolsonaro are wheeled out, to say: you too could live in that shiny steel tower. You may live in the ashes and debris of a bombed-out society, which was once harmonious, but don’t despair. If you kill your inner gook, you too can construct a temple in the sky, draw the blinds, press play, and lose yourself in the virtual reality of other people’s wars. 

thérèse raquin (zola)

Thérèse Raquin is a kind of blockbuster novel, possessing many of the hallmarks of contemporary crime/horror. There is only one real moment of dramatic action in its thirty something chapters, which is sufficient to drive the motor of the book’s narrative. This moment is a gruesome murder, conducted by Laurent, Thérèse’s lover. Zola describes the murder and its subsequent effect on the couple in lurid detail. It’s the extreme psychological examination of the event which raises if above being a mere potboiler. Its sister novel is surely Crime and Punishment, both novels examining, through the incidence of a murder, the structure of late nineteenth century social society. Perhaps it could even be said to have something in common with a contemporary novel such as Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais. Crime as a surgical tool, with all the mystery removed, unlike say, the work of Conan Doyle, designed to strip bare the bride of social mores. Perhaps when the murder mystery started to become a genre, it signified a moment when the social divisions that so often underpin criminality were being swept under the carpet. Zola roots the actions of the protagonists in their hopeless social environment, a space where dreams have no currency and just knuckling down and surviving is all there is to aim for. Curiously, when Thérèse starts to go off the rails in the latter stages of the book, she goes and hangs out with those Parisian bohemians who would later become so fetishised within popular culture, as a kind of ersatz role model for the modern hipster. But she rejects this, suppurated with an unatoneable guilt. The existential weight of karma eventually does for the couple, suggesting a religious dimension at work, over and above everything else.

almamula (w&d juan sebastián torales)

Almamula is a coming of age tale with echoes of Martel’s La Cienega and, perhaps, La Niña Santa. Set in the backwoods of Santiago del Estero, it follows the travails of Nino, a pubescent boy who is not only discovering that he is gay, but also that he has a crush on Jesus. Nino is beaten up at the opening of the film, so his mother takes him and his winsome older sister to the home of their estranged father, out in the country. This is a profoundly religious environment, and Nino is scheduled to receive his confirmation whilst there, something which is threatened by the confession of his unorthodox crush to the local priest. The film is beautifully shot by Ezequiel Salinas, optimising the phantasmagoric elements of the rural surroundings and the local forest where the mythical titular beast, the Almamula, is said to lurk, threatening to punish children who give in to their wicked desires. As well as his crush on Christ, Nino also becomes fascinated by the Almamula, who he thinks he sees on various occasions. The film starts to ruminate somewhat, as the leisurely rhythms of the lazy countryside take over, nevertheless this is an assured directorial debut which conjures a convincing sense of place and mood, even if the sense of danger or threat seems at times slightly undercooked. 

avec amour et acharnement (w&d claire denis, w. christine angot)

You have to hand it to Denis. She doesn’t let up. Her latest feels like a vehicle for Binoche & Lindon, as the twin superstars of French cinema strut their tortured stuff. There are two ways of looking at Love and Fury: as self-indulgent Gallic melodrama; or, stripped to the bone, raw emotional heroin. Several scenes feel like they’ve been captured ‘in the moment’, as the two leads go head to head. The mood of the film is one of being constantly on the edge of something terrible about to happen, reflecting the reality of sharing a failing relationship, one which Jean (Lindon) and Sara (Binoche), for all the love their characters have for each other, are trapped in. It all starts to go tits up when François, Binoche’s ex-husband, reappears. His role is perhaps the weakest in the film, as he comes across as the equivalent of a male bunny boiler, evidently narcissistic bad news. That Sara, Binoche’s character, should be so readily infatuated with him seems, to this Anglo-Saxon temperament, implausible. If one were watching this in the guise of a psychologist, one might infer that Sara is using François to get out of her relationship to Jean, even if she would never admit it. In the end, both Sara and Jean seem to be more in love with the notion of romantic drama, relishing the big scenes, than getting on with their lives. The postscript , which perhaps has echoes of that alt-melodramatist, Reygadas, shows Jean happily reunited with his estranged son, one of the various under-developed strands in the film. (Why was Jean in prison; how does Sara’s instability affect her job as a radio presenter.) However, these details aren’t really the point. The structure of Avec Amour et Acharnement is gerrybuilt as a platform to allow the leads to do their thing, and if that’s your thing, you’ll roll with the film. And if it’s not, you won’t. 

zero zero zero (roberto saviano, tr. virginia jewiss)

Zero Zero Zero is an all-embracing account of the cocaine industry as well as being a sort of tragic bildungsroman. The book’s origins are intertwined with the author’s destiny. Having found himself committed to a life of 24h security patrols and restricted freedoms following his first book, Gomorrah, which took on the mafia, Saviano now writes from with a reinforced bubble. His book is in part a quest to understand why this bubble exists, why his life has become this closed, hermetic existence. (In the ‘Thanks’ section, there’s a nod to Salman Rushdie, “who taught me how to be free even when surrounded by seven armed bodyguards”. As the author’s life has become a kind of huis clos, he has less qualms about seeking and exposing the facts behind an industry which he claims makes the world go round. This makes for a rangey read, flitting from Mexico to Italy to Africa to Spain and a hundred other points on the compass which are touched by the narcotics industry, which is essentially the whole world. At times, the writing gets so caught up in the detail that it is hard to follow, but as this is a book which people will come to via the author’s fame, something he is aware of, it represents an invaluable guide to the world’s shadow economy, the one that doesn’t figure on the books, nor will be discussed in summit meetings of the G7, but whose vast mark-ups ensure it is perhaps the most lucrative business in town and undoubtably one of the largest too. Through it all Saviano’s voice emerges as a kind of Cassandra, singing a song he knows no-one wants to listen to, but if he doesn’t sing - who will

Nb - One of the more powerful angles of the book is the way in which Saviano’s own semi-incarceration clearly feeds into his understanding of how people operate in prison or facing the risk of prison. With his own life in constant jeopardy, he can emote more readily than many commentators or writers to the impulses of people living on the edge. One of the most telling chapters in the book is the one where he talks to a drugs mule, explaining the training and execution of this painful process. Of course, the drugs mule is very far down the pecking order, effectively just another victim of the industry, as is, in his own way, the author himself. 

la nuit du 12 (w&d dominik moll, w. pauline guéna, gilles marchand)

Moll’s film, the second of his I have seen this year at Cinemateca, opens with an act of psychopathic brutality. For a while it feels as though the film is staggering in the wake of this action. Where can it go from here? Particularly as it is clear Moll doesn’t want to do anything gratuitous. He wants to pay homage to the victim, re-vindicating the murder mystery as a means to explore the psychic damage that is inflicted by a violent action. As such, the figure of the police chief, Yohan Ives, emerges as the protagonist. Yohan is part of a male-dominated world that has no option but to treat violent crimes as part and parcel of their daily lives, something which contributes to an inevitably sardonic, macho culture. Yohan, played with a delicate subtlety by Bastien Bouillon, has natural leadership qualities, but he is also a gentle soul. HIs failure to resolve the crime nags away at him, representing not only everything that is flawed about the job, but also a world ridden with gender wars and violence. Moll handles the material with restraint and tact. It feels, to an extent, as though this perhaps restricts his filmmaker’s flair, but it permits him to succeed in converting a story which perhaps shouldn’t work, shifting the focus of the crime from the victim to the policeman, but in the end sort of does. The film traces Yohan’s journey towards a reconciliation with the flawed world he inhabits, even if it is a world without mercy or justice.