priscilla (w&d sofia coppola, w. priscilla presley, sandra harmon)

Glass Half Full

Coppola looks at the other side of fame, stripping away Presley’s aura as she presents events from his young bride’s POV. Jacob Elordi’s Elvis is an anti-Elvis, all boyish moodiness and very little charisma. It’s a pared back performance which carefully deconstructs the myth, with Priscilla given centre stage. Her evolution from child bride to emancipated woman is convincingly rendered and one senses the director’s own journey from being a cog in the Coppola machine to becoming her own woman and director shadowing the film’s narrative.

Glass Half Empty

Coppola’s uneasy film, which seems to have been deliberately stripped of emotion in a flat, monotone edit, never really comes to the boil. Seeking to tell the abusive story of Elvis’ child bride, railroaded into a claustrophobic world which is controlled by Elvis, his father, and the absent Colonel Parker, the film never engages fully with the conflict or abuse inherent to her situation. The film suffers from moments of arch cliché, such as the sequence where Priscilla and Elvis take a hackneyed LSD trip, scored by suitably ‘Indian’ music, or the predictable closing scenes. In the end, for all its endeavour, Priscilla falls into the biopic trap of trying to tell too much in too short a span of time, something which the director attempts to paper over with various lukewarm montage sequences. The desire to show Elvis as a proto-monster but also a loveable poet leads to a muddy, vacillating narrative which feels as though it can never quite make up its mind. 

Iko shashvi mgalobeli / there was once a singing blackbird (w&d otar iosseliani,, w. sh. kakichashvili, dimitri eristavi)

Iosseliani’s second feature is a narrative-light account of a day in the life of a percussionist in Tbilisi. Gia is a freewheeling, happy-go-lucky percussionist in the orchestra. Something of a lothario, with an eye for the ladies and a galaxy of friends and acquaintances, his day is crammed to the gills with rehearsals, meetings, family and generally living his best life. He sometimes complains that he never has time for anything, but this is clearly down to the fact that he’s too busy running around being a lad about town. Played with a charming verve by Gela Kandelaki, Gia is a stepbrother to Agnes Varda’s Cleo or Keitel in Scorsese’s Who's That Knocking at My Door. What seems doubly remarkable about Iosseliani’s film is that despite the fact it is filmed behind ‘the iron curtain’ in the demonised USSR, Gia feels like a typical product of the late sixties, a figure endowed with so much personal freedom that it consumes him absolutely. There’s a lovely narrative strand where two visitors from Russia arrive at his home; he tells them to hang out until he gets back later, but in the social blizzard of his day he forgets all about them. Marine, played by the luminous Marina Kartsivadze, makes a cameo appearance and the film revolves around Gia’s capacity to time his entrance to play the kettle drums to the second, infuriating the conductor by only arriving in the nick of time. The film manages to remain compelling despite it being entirely episodic, with almost no attention paid to narrative: this is an immersive day in the life of a Tiblisi social butterfly and its 90 minutes are as thoroughly instructive and entertaining as the life of its protagonist, the singing blackbird of the title.

giorgobistve / falling leaves (w&d otar iosseliani, w. amiran chichinadze)

I don’t think I have ever heard Otar Iosseliani, who died last month, being referenced in the British film world. Cinemateca is honouring him with a retrospective. This early film of his, shot in his native Georgia, is an engaging coming of age tale. It focuses on Nico, a young man who gets a job in a winery as a quality control inspector. The naive Nico, engagingly played by Ramaz Giorgobiani, soon learns that his job is meaningless: the quality of the wine is of secondary importance to the need to hit quotas. When he goes against the majority to declare that the wine in Barrel 49 is not good enough, (It’s like vinegar, another worker says), he is mocked. Nico is smitten by Marine, a neighbour, another who doesn’t take him seriously. When a local bully punches him in the eye for having the temerity to visit her, Nico suddenly turns. At work he takes it on himself to put Barrel 49 out of action and snubs Marine’s attempts to apologise. 

Giorgobiani’s likeable performance holds the film together. But it’s clear that the director’s aim is to capture a portrait of his society. The film opens with on extended rural sequence, showing the vines being picked and turned into wine. Iosseliani then takes us into the homes, cafes and bars of the city. The camera darts around, capturing details, and the aesthetic feels akin to the French Nouvelle Vague or early Bertolucci. As such, the film builds up a compelling portrait of life in Soviet Georgia, which doesn’t seem so very different to life in any other part of Europe. Indeed, what is striking are the similarities, in terms of architecture, anxiety and ambition. Also notable is the representation of the female characters, Marine and her friend Lali, whose self-possession and confidence are in striking contrast to the naive Nico. 

baudolino (umberto eco, tr. william weaver)

Eco is a curious writer. One whose work as a semiotician attracted a whole generation of philosophy students and the admiration of many of Europe’s most prestigious intellectuals, but also one whose fame is based on a rip roaring medieval detective story. It’s many years since I read Name of the Rose, and in spite of labouring somewhat through Baudolino, I hope to return to it one of these days. Baudolino, tells the tale of the eponymous protagonist, who is adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, gets involved in all kinds of scrapes and battles with the emperor, before setting off on a hapless mission to find the kingdom of Prester John, the lost Christian prophet who reportedly ended up in the Indies. The novel is divided into two parts, written through forty chapters. The first deals largely with the Middle Ages politics of central and Eastern Europe. The second, a section that is more magical allegory, deals with Baudolino’s mission to the East in search of the lost prophet, and includes centaurs and cyclops other mythical creatures. There’s the sense of a writer straining to locate the precise register to tell what might have been a fascinating story, had that register been nailed down. Eco’s interest in pre-Renaissance Europe, aka the dark ages, is attractive. What were the people of that warlike continent like? Why is their history less well known than that of the Roman Empire? To what extent were the innumerable international conflicts a reflection of what we would now describe as globalisation? Where did our received idea of Europe end and the myths begin? These and other questions are latent in the text, but it never feels as though the writer quite gets to grips with them. As such, Baudolino is a lengthy curiosity, which lacks the narrative coherence of Name of the Rose. 

heaven can wait (d. ernst lubitsch, w. samson raphaelson, leslie bush-fekete)

I remember watching Ninotchka as well as To Be Or Not to Be, back in the mists of distant time. So I had a memory of Lubitsch as a subversive figure within the Hollywood cannon, someone with a measured European sophistication. In that regard, Heaven Can Wait felt like an anti-climax, with its conservative discourse on what makes for an ethical man. The apparent moral being that it’s ok to be a bit of a roguish philanderer, so long as you settle down sooner or later and marry a good woman. Don Ameche’s Van Cleve never seems wicked enough to be permitted entry to hell, which is what the initial set-up suggests.

Perhaps more interesting is the comparison between Heaven Can Wait and It’s A Wonderful Life, both films made in the shadow of war, which analyse the ethical question of what represents a well-lived and honorable life. At a time when death was riding pillion all over the world, this was clearly a pertinent issue, although both films neatly sidestep any political grandstanding. Both are helmed by European-born directors who would have been well versed in the Faust story, and both films adopt an upbeat, anti-Faustian position, where the everyday North American actions are given greater weight than vaulting European ambition. Faust goes to hell, whereas Van Cleve is promised heaven. This upbeat celebration of North American banality made sense in the forties, when the USA had ridden to Europe’s rescue and the tricky question of the country’s origins could still be ignored under the rubric of civilisation versus ‘the savages’. Films couldn’t be made without the technology of this civilisation, and film is what rescued both directors from the hell that Europe had recently become. All of which might help to explain the slightly soft-soap tone of Lubitsch’s popular film. 

forgotten manuscript/ ultimas noticias de la escritura (w. sergio chejfec, tr. jeffery lawrence)

Chejfec’s fiction has a dry charm and this non-fiction essay about the nature of writing in the pre and post digital age employs a similar tone. Broken up into 27 sections, the writer analyses the meaning of writing itself. Does a note in the margin of a book then become part of that book? Does reading a book on a screen alter the reader’s reception of said book to reading it on the page? How does the material consumption of a text affect interpretation? The book (which I read as a digital copy) poses all these and many more Barthesian questions, whilst permitting itself regular nods in the direction of the paterfamilias of Argentine literature, Borges. 

trenque lauquen (w&d citarella, w. laura paredes)

There’s a monster in Trenque, which the protagonist, Laura wants to see. She’s told she can’t see it, but she can listen to it. She strains at the door to hear, and what she hears, along with us, is the sound of the monster breathing. Which seems wholly appropriate for a film which relishes its capacity to breathe. Rather than being measured in minutes or story beats, it might be measure in breaths, the breaths the characters take as they try to work out what’s happening, and we take alongside them.

Trenque Lauquen has garnered critical plaudits and global recognition for Citarella. Its genesis as part of the Pampero stable is evident, with Llinas credited as a collaborator. At nearly five hours long, it is in the vein of Historias Minimas and La Flor, films where the director worked as a producer. All of which goes some way to explain the surefooted way her magnum opus handles the challenge of filling so much screen time so artfully. It’s almost as though a parallel version of cinema has been quietly evolving in the province of Buenos Aires, one which has no fear of taxing the audience’s attention span, something which is such a concern in other parts of the world. Because Trenque isn’t just long, it also revels in its longeurs, even down to the modes of dialogue, where the Pinteresque pause is employed to full and touching effect.

The film is divided into twelve parts, each of which has its own distinctive flavour, sometimes, as in Spregelburd’s part, defined by the acting, and sometimes defined by the mood. In her talk following the screening of Ostende, a film she said was shaped as a mash-up between Rohmer and Hitchcock, the director said that Trenque is a conversation with at least eight directors. Hitchcock might be there again, along with Antonioni, using the trope of the lady who vanishes, and the end felt as though it might be a nod to Varda’s Vagabonde. The multiplicity of influences and tones, another thing that more conventional filmmaking tends to be wary of, actually helps to define the aesthetic of Trenque Lauquen: it is many things at once, always predicated on a mystery. The mystery of the poetess, the mystery of the creature, the mystery of the missing protagonist. These hooks are enough to constantly engage the audience, and maintain the film’s rhythm: we’re not that bothered how long it takes, in fact, the drawn out nature of the quest if anything adds to our enjoyment. This is cinema operating like a sprawling novel, where the detours and distractions are part of the pleasure. 

las poetas visitan a juana bignozzi (dir. laura citarella, mercedes halfon)

The Poetesses visit Juana Bignozzi, to translate the title into English, is a lovingly crafted documentary co-helmed by Citarella with Halfon, a writer, poetess and critic. Halfon has been entrusted with the papers of the titular poetess, a formidable woman and a wonderful poet. The film offers a loving introduction to Bignozzi’s work, but more than this, it is also delightfully self-referential, asking the question of to what extent a film can ever truly represent a subject like poetry, or a poet(ess). The tension between directors is noted, with Citarella more preoccupied with these questions, whilst Halfon is engaged in the more prosaic task of paying homage to Bignozzi. There are two main areas where their approaches coincide. Firstly, with the more Bolañoesque elements of Bignozzi’s story: she spent thirty years living abroad, and the contents of this time in her life remain mysterious. She was married, but travelled extensively; in the dense forest of photographic memories left behind, many of the figures who appear are unknown and appear untraceable. There’s something of The Savage Detectives about all of this, as well as the spy narratives which Citarella loves: a fortuitous touch is the way that in a doc filmed about Bignozzi when she was still alive, there’s a sign which says in Spanish - From Russia with Love - outside the block of flats she lived in. Secondly, their approaches coincide in ultimately letting the poetry do the talking, (even if the director has to ask the question: which version of the reading is the best one to use? Is it better (more truthful) to get actors to read or not?). The final section of the film is given over entirely to the poems, although even here there’s a dialectic between sound and image, with the poems being presented both through being read and via the text itself appearing on screen. 

ostende (w&d laura citarella)

Ostende is a masterclass in how to make your debut. The film is predicated on the quiet charm of its protagonist, Laura Paredes. Staying at the eponymous off-season balneario, she observes what she believes is a conspiracy evolving between three of the other guests, an older man and two younger women. This gives the film a Hitchcockian guile, a hook to anchor the film’s quiet observations and gentle humour. As is so often the case with the films from the Pampero stable, there are elements of the shaggy dog story to the narrative. The journey is more important than the destination, even if this is to a certain extent belied by the film’s final sequence. The story Paredes constructs in her head about her fellow guests is echoed by a story for a film that one of the hotel staff tells her, a tale that promises darkness, violence and mystery, but is no more than a first act. The presence of a John Le Carré book which Paredes is reading reinforces the idea that the audience is watching a spy movie, searching for clues along with the protagonist. But the film also makes it clear that in this sense the cinematic thriller is a game, played between audience and director. The director’s role is to keep the audience guessing, which is also a way of keeping them awake and alive, as we try to decipher what the hell this all means.

There’s probably a more complex essay to be written about how this tallies with a Rioplatense consciousness, with its echoes of the oeuvres of Borges, Saer, Cortazar, Onetti among others. The ludic power of art. Maybe one day I, or another me, will get round to writing it. Meanwhile it was fascinating in the post-show talk to hear how the director was prepared to return and film another scene even after the film had premiered at BAFICI. The dexterity of the Pampero aesthetic is matched by the flexibility of their shooting methods. Ostende possesses a freshness predicated on its constant willingness to surprise, even if that surprise is a five minute sequence where someone narrates a film which will never get made. There’s the constant sense that you, along with the protagonist, have no real idea what is going to happen next, and that just makes you all the more anxious to find out, even if the subsequent discovery proves anti-climactic. Cinema becomes a maze full of dead ends and wrong turns, but there’s something fundamentally active and pleasurable contained within the frustrating process of navigating this labyrinth. 

napoleon (d. ridley scott, w. david scarpa)

It’s not hard to imagine a film where a young lad, growing up in the north, sits in his history class, listening to the teacher talk about the megalomaniac traits of Napoleon Bonaparte, a man whose name, for generations, was synonymous with an idea of military prowess as well as being an existential threat to the British way of life. The man who apparently belittled Britain as a nation of shopkeepers. And this lad, rather than complying with his teacher’s derisory, arrogant attitude towards the Emperor, that curious arrogance beloved of history teachers, those who analyse the world rather than shape it, actually feels inspired by the short Corsican’s story. He thinks: one day, I too will be a kind of Napoleon. And as the lad grew, and took his place in the world, he did, indeed, become a kind of Napoleon. A general capable of summoning armies, making them march to his beat, creating a legacy which would give him the power to indulge his most outlandish whims and convert them into spectacles which cost more than anyone in the north in the fifties could ever have imagined. He was, and is, his own brand of Napoleon, and now, with the light of evening beckoning, it was time to finally pay homage to that figure that had inspired him in the classroom all those years ago, a man whose name could be uttered in the same breath as Alexander the Great, a ruthless imposer of order, a doomed lover, a tyrant to some and a hero to others.

And had this film been made, by Lynn Ramsey or the late Terrence Davis, for example, the only British directors who spring to mind who might have conceived and convinced others of their vision, then it would possibly have been a far more insightful film about power and ambition than the one the lad ended up making. 

minor detail (adania shibli; tr. elisabeth jaquette)

Man not the tank shall prevail

Next, I pick up the map showing the country until 1948, but I snap it shut as horror rushes over me. Palestinian villages which on the Israeli map appear to have been swallowed by a Yellow Sea, appear on this one by the dozen, their names practically leaping off the page.

It’s been a long time since I’ve passed through here, and wherever I look, all the changes constantly reassert the absence of anything Palestinian: the names of cities and villages on road signs, billboards written in Hebrew, new buildings, even vast fields abutting the horizon on my left and right.

Perhaps it has always been the way that the workings of the wider world, which have no obvious material impact upon our personal lives, nevertheless impact on other, more atavistic levels. When I was a child, the ghost idea of Boney, (Napoleon Bonaparte), still existed in the folk memory of the British isles, and one can imagine generations of British children being touched by the residual fear of a figure who died in the early nineteenth century. Wars have an effect which go far beyond the waging of them; the effects percolate through into the future. In my lifetime this has been true of Vietnam, Iraq, the Malvinas, Rwanda, Afghanistan, to name but a few.

The past months have added another war to that list. A war which feels like the apogee of the unjust twenty first century war. All war is perhaps a perverse blend of courage and cowardice, and the objective of those who wage war is to minimise the amount of courage required, as courage comes with a cost. Twenty first century warfare has evolved into an object lesson in cowardice. Dropping bombs from the sky to kill civilians requires no courage. Anymore than leaving cholera infested blankets on trees. When the armoury of the media is employed to reinforce this cowardice, the effect is doubly obscene. Children stagger across the eleven inches of your laptop screen, wailing in terror, blood-soaked, and this is pronounced as some kind of act of courageous military valour. When, in your bones, you know you are witnessing actions which are crimes against humanity.

All of this has a terrible relevance to Adania Shibli’s slender, compelling novel which uses fiction to investigate the theft of Palestinian land and the reality of Palestinian oppression within the apartheid state which Israel has since become. The novel opens with an account of the events leading up to the criminal rape and murder of a girl by soldiers who are participating in the establishment of Israel’s southern border. The prose is relentlessly material: language as an unvarnished testament. The skill in the writing is the way in which the authorial voice is reduced to the bare minimum. The story is presented from the point of view of an officer, commanding his troops, and there are moments where the reader almost (but never quite) comes to sympathise with the officer, who seems to be a force for the maintenance of civilised mores within war, until he isn’t anymore. The soldier is in great pain following an insect bite and this pain ultimately destroys his moral compass, and he becomes as much of a criminal as the soldiers he is trying to keep in line.

The second part of the novel is told from the point of view of a female writer, an avatar for the author, who is investigating the crime committed by the soldier all those years ago. History filters through and repeats itself. Once again, the story is told using pragmatic prose, which describes the fearful and absurd constructions placed upon an ordinary Palestinian citizen within their own country by the Israeli state. The narrator decides to research the crime, a process which involves entering the Israeli side of the country, with all the fearful paranoia that this engenders for a Palestinian. Simple things like hiring a car and driving that car down a road become fraught with risk. Terror stalks her heels, a terror that was initiated in the construction of the Israeli state and the theft of Palestinian land, and a terror that is all too understandable today, because it is underpinned by an apparent right to kill Palestinian citizens with impunity.

In her trip, the narrator notes how the geography of the land has been rewritten over the course of the last fifty years. Towns and villages which existed for centuries have been erased. The current events in Gaza appear to be an extension of this colonial practice. Reading Shibli’s novel reinforces a sense of impotence in the face of injustice. The only thing we can do is bear witness, as writers and as readers. The scales of history will have the ultimate word on whether the occupiers’ cowardly war will be one which succeeds in its aims or ultimately, as is the case with so many cowardly wars, leads only towards a Pyrrhic victory. What is undoubtable is that the end of the war will not come with the cessation of violence, because, as Shibli’s novel so eloquently shows, the violence committed by one generation lives on to haunt those that follow. 

stavisky (d. alain resnais, w. jorge semprún)

Resnais had a curious career. From the avant-garde to this somewhat run of the mill version of what might have been a remarkable tale. You can understand the attraction of the story, one that he perhaps learnt about as a kid. Stavisky was a maverick Ukrainian born near Kiev who immigrated to France and built himself up as an impresario. He dabbled in the entertainment business as well as the bond market, where he made fraudulent profits which lead to his eventual demise in spite of having bribed a fair quantity of politicians. It’s a jazz age story set in Paris and Biarritz with an expensive costume budget and music by Sondheim, but besides these technical elements and Belmondo’s grandstanding, this feels like a film which is searching for its raison d’être. The narrative, told in part via flashback, has a heavy handed feel, and the film starts to sag under the weight of the menagerie of French character actors who traipse across the screen. It’s a long way from the formal playfulness of the director’s early work. 

killers of the flower moon (w&d martin scorsese, w. eric roth, david grann)

There’s a certain irony in Scorsese, an alpha male filmmaker, whose films so often revolve around the activities of other alpha males, making a film in his dotage which is predicated upon the strength of a woman. Lily Gladstone’s performance as Mollie brings a subtle charge to proceedings which all the grandstanding of De Niro and DiCaprio cannot compete with. She inveighs the film with a sense of that which goes beyond dialogue, the power of a look, the throwaway line. Where De Niro and DiCaprio are all surface - the latter surface emotion, surface stupidity, the former surface cunning, a typical late De Niro genial monster, Gladstone seems to be all depth, as though she has no need to speak in order to convey thought. It’s a compelling performance, which ties in with De Niro’s early observation to his nephew that the Osage say that the white person’s speech is like the chirp of a blackbird, and they will use silence to counter this, examining the weakness of their white interlocutor.

Around the midpoint of the film, Mollie gets sick. She drops out of the narrative to a certain extent, and the film shifts to more familiar Scorsese tropes of the family and its corrupting influence. It descends into a meta drama about the relationship between DiCaprio’s Ernest and his uncle, William Hale, played by De Niro. Their interaction feels predictable and follows a vein that runs through Scorsese’s work of the seductive but malevolent power of the family. There is a fearsome attempt to depict DiCaprio’s Ernest in a not altogether unsympathetic light, in spite of the fact that he is responsible for the killing of two of his wife’s sisters, amongst other crimes. This feels a lot like the exec producer actor interfering with narrative logic.

Having said which, the first half of Killers of the Flower Moon, until Mollie becomes bedridden, is almost vintage Scorsese.  At his best, he is a master of making big issues fit the screen, as though they have been waiting for him to boil them down into 120 minutes. The intercutting of archive footage, the grand set pieces, the swooping camera, the rhythmic edit, the sense of the narrative being driven through the use of music and edit, the ellipsing of time, all these are present in the opening hour. Then, like a marathon runner spotting the tape and slowing down, the second half of the film, robbed of Gladstone’s ludic energy, seems to run out of gas. (Or oil.)