perdita durango (w&d álex de la Iglesia, w. jorge guerricaechevarría, david trueba, barry gifford)

Emerging from de la Iglesia’s bombastic movie, I was told that it went down a storm in Mexico when it came out, back in the twentieth century. It would be worth analysing why that would be, given that the Mexican lead, Romeo, played by an over-the-top Javier Bardem (is it cosplaying when a Spaniard plays a Mexican bandido as a psychotic?) fits a stereotype of the kind of deranged, amoral killer which US governments warn are exactly the type of people they need to keep out. Much of the action takes place on or near the border itself, which Flavio Martínez Labiano’s flamboyant camera work depicts with swooping helicopter shots, pre-drone. As Romeo and Rosie Perez’ Perdita criss-cross across this border, wreaking havoc, they tread a fine line between charismatic anti-heroes and sadistic monsters. I guess if one identifies as an anti-hero, something which the us-and-them of the border encourages, then it’s not that hard a leap to identify with Perdita and Romeo. It’s an interesting contrast with other border fictions. In McCarthy, the gringos are the good guys, crossing into a biblical world whose protean mores they grapple with. In Villeneuve’s lurid Sicario, the Mexicans are just as amoral and sadistic as Romeo and Perdita, but with none of the charm. So in a sense, de la Iglesia’s operatic tale can be seen as a vindication of those who are usually vilified, and their arbitrary vengeful abuse of two young kids is a turning of the tables. On the other hand, a film which glorifies a rapist, (or rapists, because Rosie also gets in on the act), is perhaps harder to like in this day and age, even if this might be termed a film which clearly comes from another era and the kids seem to get off on it.

In many ways Perdita Durango feels like one of those macho films with a female lead that got given budgets back in the day. Perdita is second cousin to Betty Blue or Thelma and Louise or La Femme Nikita, even Run Lola Run, eponymous avatars of a kind of kick-ass femininity which still feels a long way from feminism. 

the getaway. (d. peckinpah, w. walter hill, jim thompson)

Peckinpah’s film feels like the sort of film they don’t make anymore. A serious movie, even though it’s all car chases and shoot-outs. Counter-cultural antiheroes. A complex relationship. Gender wars. Effortless charisma which the lead actors actually have to make an effort to ruffle.

McQueen and MacGraw exude a kind of Iconic cool which can only exist because the narrative and direction construct the parameters within which this iconic cool is allowed to flourish. One thinks of Tarantino’s use of Pitt, in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and everything about that feels contrived or tongue-in-cheek. Perhaps Travolta and Jackson came closer to the real thing in Pulp Fiction, but there’s a sense that these kind of iconic figures don’t really fit into contemporary narratives. Certainly, the gender politics feel as though they belong to another era, no matter how much the film seeks to emphasise that MacGraw is just as tough as McQueen. Perhaps surprisingly in a film with this title, she is the one who does the majority of the driving. She kills bad guys too, and they are a team, even if she’s also the one who fucks up at one point, putting everything at risk. The fact that she has traded her body for McQueen’s Doc’s release is part of the unstable gender politics, but if we believe that fifty years later we have gone beyond that kind of deal, surely we are living in a fantasy world. The female body remains a token of exchange amongst powerful men, even if it’s now less acceptable to recognise this in the movies. The other day someone told me that so many of the movies that they are watching have a gay protagonist, either male or female, and this might be a way to circumvent uncomfortable truths.

However, there is perhaps another reason that the film, and it’s nerveless cool, feels so alien to today’s culture. McQueen’s Doc is a felon, a representative of the anti-establishment, and his crooked antagonists belong to the establishment. The film occurs in the hangover shadow of the Vietnam War, when faith in the system was at a low point in the USA. The counter-culture, for want of a better phrase, was seeking, in the company of Pynchon, Coppola, Mapplethorpe, Patti Smith et al, another set of ethical paradigms to live by. In the intervening years, that counter-culture has been crushed, or at least co-opted, absorbed into the mainstream. It’s not so much that stepping outside the system is impossible, it’s that the moment someone goes there, their posture or pose is welcomed and monetised. So, like Pitt in Tarantino’s film, what’s left is a shell (or simulacrum) of the anti-establishment pose. By contrast McQueen and MacGraw inhabit a dirty hinterland, and are literally consigned to the rubbish dump; the only place their anti-systemic heroism can survive is across the border, in Mexico. 

the secret life of trees (zambra, tr mcdowell)

This short novel has been much praised, and as such this reader came to it with high expectations. Zambra’s book is so slight it’s almost, but not quite, transparent. Set over a night when the protagonist’s partner fails to return home, it adopts a structure which allows it to drift and muse, shifting the point of view to that of the protagonist’s young stepdaughter, imagining her take on these events years down the line. In some ways the novel seems in keeping with the likes of Chejfec, a nouveau roman, albeit one with a soft, tragic centre. It would clearly appear to be riffing off the fate of the disappeared, a Latin American  phenomenon, one of the many crimes of the dictatorships. (Although one notes with a shiver the way far-right Anglo-Saxon groups in their vile T-shirts have adopted Pinochet.) Yet the allusion to the disappeared is so understated that one wonders if readers from other parts of the world would even pick up on it. Intriguingly I read an interview with another Chilean novelist, Labatut, saying he resented being compared to most of his contemporaries, and I found myself wondering if Zambra would be one of those. Perhaps The Secret Life of Trees is indeed a work of minor genius, in which case something was going over my head as I read it; in other ways it feels too slight and wispy to even stand on its own two feet: a gust of wind would be all that it takes to blow it over.

roter himmel (w&d christian petzold)

Roter Himmel could be translated as Red Sky. (Rather than the approved English title, which is the clumsy “Afire”.) The sky is red because there are forest fires on the Baltic coast of Germany where Leon has gone with his friend, Felix, to spend a few days working on his novel at the rundown country home Felix has inherited from his late father. Felix is ostensibly there to work on his proposal for an art diploma, but the lure of the coast and the sea and a few days holiday soon wins out, whilst Leon grumpily insists on trying to write.

Leon’s hapless mission is rendered even more unviable by the presence of the alluring Nadja, who Felix’s mother has, unbeknownst to him, allowed to stay in the main bedroom. Nadja is having vigorous sex with the local lifeguard, Devid, which can be heard through the thin walls and keeps Leon awake at night, so that he ends up sleeping outside with the mosquitos. The set-up suggests a holiday rom-com, albeit one which is disconcerted by the presence of the forest fires which glow on the nightly horizon, and the buzzing helicopters which dump water on the fire and echo the buzzing of the mosquitos. Leon is smitten by Nadja, but is too much of a self-obsessed oaf to do anything about it, even when he realises she might be interested in him. In the classic comedy situation, they would end up together, and this seems even more likely when Felix and Devid decide to embark on an unexpected fling.

I have been on a slight Petzold tip of late, watching both Undine and Phoenix on Mubi. Paula Beer appears to have replaced Nina Hoss as his muse, but the tone of the films remains the same: a sense of intellectual playfulness, anchored by a literary leitmotif - in this case a poem of Heine’s - married to a dispassionate take on the vicissitudes of love and human frailty. Roter Himmel and Undine, unburdened by the presence of too much history, offer unlikely character studies, with Leon in particular seeming like an almost Shakespearian anti-hero, an unwieldy Hamlet who will have to come to terms with his own flaws in order to overcome them and write the novel he needs to, rather than the one he doesn’t. The eco-message which lurks at the edges feels more like a footnote than a central axis of the film, constructing the possibility of tragedy in a world where affluence has rendered everything almost too comfortable (down to the Birkenstock Bostons which Leon sports). Where Barbara, Transit and Phoenix (which I have yet to watch) seek to wrestle with the implications of history on the German psyche, his later films appear to be addressing a more elemental agenda, where fire and water become protagonists. The resulting films have the feel of a short story by a nineteenth century master like Chekhov or Kleist, situating an ordinary soul, shaped and limited by the frailties of their society, in a situation where only tragedy or magic can give true meaning to their lives. 

regeneration (pat barker)

Pat Barker’s book, the first part of a trilogy, was nominated for the Booker Prize a long time ago. (The third part of the trilogy won in 95.) It feels, in so many ways, like a paradigmatic work of British fiction. Firstly for its subject matter, and secondly because of the novelist’s stylistic choices.

The content involves the rehabilitation of soldiers suffering from PTSD in WW1. Rivers, a fictionalised version of a real person, is one of the medics at the remote Scottish hospital where patients are treated, humanely, as they recover. The kicker is that, if they recover, they can then be sent back to fight in France. Something one of the patients, Siegfried Sassoon, who has written a letter in protest at the ongoing carnage, decides he wants to do, if he is deemed to have recovered. Rivers is is chief medical officer, aware of the Sassoon paradox of both objecting to the war and seeking to continue to wage it, and he himself wrestles with his conscience as he realises he is only curing young men in order to send them to their deaths. Along the way other figures who my generation grew up with, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves, make cameo appearances. The First World War poets were our British poetes maudits, weaving from the mud, blood and death of the trenches beautiful flowers of verse which would echo through the generations. These were romantic icons long before rock and roll made its claim on the youthful psyche, and I remember myself declaiming Owen’s poem, An Anthem to Doomed Youth, on a stage at prep school back in the seventies. Choosing to fictionalise the reality of this moment in history, using factual testimonies and the poems themselves, Barker must have known she was digging up literary gold, and so it proved to be.

The form of the novel is, by and large, utilitarian. Much of it is constructed from pages of dialogue, as soldiers and medics discuss their predicament. The author refrains from anything that might be considered flowery, although the occasional passage where her imagination appears to have been given freer reign. such as when a soldier goes awol in a wood and encounters a menagerie of dead animals, are the ones that stand out. Maybe this means less is more, but at the same time the novel’s insistence on a rational engagement with the irrationality of PTSD feels, at times, almost surgical. It made me think of the course I did at Faber, where flights of fancy were seen as vaguely bad taste. There’s something almost brutally British about all this, and whilst the authorial efficiency is undeniable, the resistance to any sense of flair feels like it would have been given full approval by the generals of the war office as they sent the young men out to do their duty.

les cousins (w&d chabrol)

Chabrol’s second film is a slightly stagey piece, set in Paris, as opposed to his first, rural offering. In a sense though, the character of Charles, played by Gérard Blain, is almost an extension of Serge, played by the same actor in the director’s eponymous first film. Charles is the cousin from the sticks who comes to stay with Paul (played by Jean-Claude Brialy, who is also the co-protagonist in Le Beau Serge), his worldly cousin. Both are studying law, but where Paul is a hedonist socialite, Charles immerses himself in his work,  all the more so when rejected by Florence, who appears to choose Paul over him. The narrative is somewhat stilted and melodramatic; what is of more interest is the way the director seeks to explore these tensions between a version of an older, conservative, rural France, and a younger more liberated strain which prefigures the arrival of the sixties. There are moments when Les Cousins has the feel of an Antonioni or Fellini film, notably when an Italian aristocrat gets embarrassingly drunk at one of Paul’s decadent parties. In these moments, as in the slightly anti-climactic tragic ending, it feels as though the fabric of this new French post-war society is being stretched towards some kind of breaking point, although this might also just represent the habitual tension between the capital, with its celebrated decadence, and the rest of the country. Chabrol is never as formally innovative as Godard, nor as radical in his vision of humanity os Truffaut, rather it would appear his cinema is occupying another space, that of the self-examination of contemporary mores and morals. 

the catalogue of shipwrecked books (edward wilson-lee)

Wilson-Lee’s book succeeds in incorporating a ranch of fascinating material. It recounts the life of Hernando Colón, Colombus’ second and youngest son, who, having travelled with his father to the newly discovered Americas in 1502, subsequently set about creating the biggest, most diverse library in the western world. Hernando did this at a time when printing was in the process of growing exponentially. His mission, according to Wilson-Lee, was positively Borgesian. It was to construct a repository of the world’s knowledge, not just from within christendom, but from every corner of the globe. The inference here is that Hernando’s knowledge of his father’s journeys, as well as his personal experiences of the Americas, meant that he was able to conceive the importance of embracing the multiple cultures of the expanding world which was only just starting to become known. (A fascinating side-note to Hernando’s library was his garden, created on the banks of the Ebro in Sevilla, where he cultivated many plants from the Americas, among other sources.) As such, Hernando represents one of Europe’s first globalised minds, as well as constructing a knowledge-base which prefigured the arrival, centuries later, of the World Wide Web.

The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books exudes scholarship, as the author investigates and imagines the contents of the library, much of which has since been lost. However, as much as anything else, this is an intriguing study of a man at the centre of a world perched on the brink of a radical transformation, one whose effects were being processed by European societies struggling to come to terms with the forces unleashed at the close of the fifteenth century. Hernando’s quixotic response, one that sought to consolidate and protect not just the world’s extant printed knowledge, but the very idea of knowledge itself, comes across as a heroic and progressive reaction. The significance of ‘the book’ as a pillar of society, is one that has been constantly threatened. Not for nothing is the image of book-burning associated with an idea of bringing down the classical conception of a knowledge based society, to replace it with one of superstition and conspiracy. 

cold enough for snow (jessica au)

Au’s brief tome, a novella, is another text which would appear to flirt with the genre of auto-fiction (although who is to know?) as the Australian narrator goes on a trip to Japan with her mother, who was raised in Hong Kong. In the course of the trip, the narrator indulges in a few recollections, (of kayaking on a lake, of a childhood visit to Hong Kong), and some meditations on the nature of family. With her mother, she visits museums and takes trains across the country, before their paths separate and the narrator goes on a solo walk in a more rural zone. If all of this sounds somewhat mundane, that’s because it is, unashamedly so. Au’s text doesn’t have quite the same laconic tone as the like of Chejfec or Toussaint, whose work explores a similar aesthetic of the quotidian, rather it trades on a shaggy-dog suspense, as the reader suspects that something more dramatic is bound to happen sooner or later, even though it never does. There is a moment of potential tension in the closing pages which is soon punctured, leaving the reader with the not unpleasant sensation of a leisurely stroll through a partial Japan, via Hong Kong and a volcanic lake. 

mato seco em chamas (w&d adirley queirós, joana pimenta)

Mato Seco em Chamas, translated in English into Dry Ground Burning, is a curious blend of Ghetto Mad Max, muscular feminist filmmaking and documentary footage. Three women succeed in stealing petrol from an underground pipe, which they sell at a discount to the motoboys in their marginal barrio, situated in the hinterland on the edge of Brasilia. Two of the women, Chatara and Lea, are sisters, with Lea recently released from prison. A third, Andreia, is setting up her own political party, PPP, which could be understood as the Prisoner’s Party for the People. The trio defend their territory as the police move in, before Lea is rearrested. The filmmakers smartly employ some barnstorming biker imagery, as the motoboys procession through the barrio, and at another point when Andreia leads them, as though at the head of a great cavalry movement. These moments, and the shots of the oil well, have a romantic cinematic power, summoning up the ghosts of Brando in The Wild Ones or Dean in Giant. The images feel as though they are being skilfully welded onto the unwieldy mechanism that is the film overall.

Because, Mato Seco em Chamas is clearly far more than just a dystopian drama. It’s also clearly rooted in the everyday turmoil of Brazilian society. There is footage from a Bolsonaro rally, as well as several sequences in the favela where the women are based which have a vivid fly-on-the-wall feel. A female singer performs to a favela crowd; Andreia sings in a Pentecostal church. The line between fiction and fact is blurred, even more when the film suggests that its protagonists aren’t actually actors, but real people who have been drafted into this fiction, and the apparent reveal that Lea has gone to prison a second time actually means that the actress who is playing Lea has gone back to prison.

The resultant film is percussive, punctuated with music from the barrio, treading a fine line between the real and the imagined; showing us a favela world which is lived like a Mad Max movie, and who are we to know how true or not this is. A sequence towards the end seems to suggest that the petrol which the women trade is actually a cipher for narcotics, but even this remains unclear. At two and a half hours long, this is a challenging, radical film which feels as though it has emerged from some kind of parallel cinematic sphere, one which knows and uses the tropes of cinema, but isn’t all that interested in them: instead it seeks to capture something of the reality of the Wild West of Brazil’s edge-lands. 

french connection (w&d william friedkin, w. ernest tidyman, robin moore)

French Connection is a film that can’t stay still. Everyone is constantly on the move. In cars, in trains, in a boat, but more often than not, on foot.  Freidkin has a similar restless energy to early Godard. It feels as though he wants to devour every corner of the city and in many ways the film ends up being, as much as anything else, a portrait of New York. This is cinema as flaneur. The film moves from high end hotel district to Harlem to the riverside, and it crossed my mind whilst watching it to wonder how those cities I know well, London and Montevideo, might have looked had the film been set there. This capturing of the city helps to reaffirm the director’s desire to shoot the film with the realistic feel of a documentary, (there’s also a hint of Cassettes’ roaming NY camera), transporting the slightly generic thriller material into something harder-edged, straight off the streets. At times this makes for a film that has the feel of a whisky hangover: life is washed out, desperately needing sleep or the blackest of black coffee, struggling to stay alert, numbed by the inevitability of the next chase, the next frenetic declaration which will reassure the detectives, Gene Hackman, even you, the viewer, that we are not hovering at the edge of coma; we remain riotously alive. 

the third part of the night (w&d andrzej zuławski, w. mirosław zuławski)

Żuławski’s first film is a bewildering but brilliant mash-up. Set in wartime Poland, it combines the quest for a cure for typhus, which involves putting infected fleas in matchboxes to bite the skin of volunteers, with the Gestapo hunt for Michal, the charismatic lead. Żuławski’s camera darts around like a cat on a hot tin roof whilst the plot moves forward like one of the film’s jumping fleas, frequently hiding in remote corners before leaping into the light. Zuławski narrative uses leaps in time to wilfully disorientate and confuse the viewer. Michal’s wife and child are murdered by the invaders at the start of the film, and Michal’s dead son haunts him as he helps a woman who looks just like his dead wife give birth. The idea of the double permeates the film, lending it an existential flavour to go with the bio-thriller elements. It’s a film that feels at once modern and baffling, the work of a mad scientist, a visionary or an idiot. But what can also be said, without doubt, is that it’s a film that’s aggressively original. The same could of course be said for much of Polish cinema that emerged out of the communist era: a cinema perhaps compelled by censorship to say things in cryptic tongues, to hide meaning in suitcases or coffins, to use the camera to disorientate as much as it clarifies, throwing the dogs off the scent, allowing its secret messages to slip through the net.