the teachers’ lounge/ das lehrerzimmer (w&d ilker çatak, w. johannes duncker)

This is the kind of film that the UK, for all its reflected Hollywood glory, doesn’t seem to produce anymore. Taut socially conscious dramas. Perhaps all the energy for making them goes into the more lucrative arena of high-end TV. The film deals with the travails of Carla, a sympathetic teacher of Polish descent in a German school. When she realises that someone is stealing from her, she sets a trap, little realising that the person who will end up caught in the trap is herself. The film explores a variety of issues, from racism to identity politics, to cancel culture. The action never leaves the school: we don’t learn where Carla lives, or what kind of town this is, but this is compensated for by an increasingly claustrophobic vibe which constantly ratchets up the dramatic tension, until the slightly underwhelming finale. Nevertheless, it’s an example of cinema being used to prise open the fault-lines in German society. The heightened tensions amongst the teachers felt redolent of Germany’s angst around the issues of both Russia/ Ukraine and Palestine, cleft sticks where either action or inaction only seem to makes matter worse, and every tiny conflict becomes exacerbated until it has blown up into a full-scale crisis. Who will benefit from this rarified chaos? Clearly not the well-meaning teachers, as the film makes clear. The well-intentioned, naive Carla just keeps making things worse, the more she tries to right the reeling boat. 

close up (w&d abbas kiarostami)

The playful intellectualism of Iranian cinema seems to have echoes in the mind games of Rio Plantense cinema. This is what happens when you yoke cerebral educated filmmakers who don’t have a capitalist imperative to the artform. See also Communist era Poland.  There’s something Borgesian about Close-Up, with its imagined film within a film and its impersonating director. But there’s also a tragic social history there, as the impersonator, Hossain Sabzian, a film lover with no hope of ever making a film, indulges his Walter Mitty life for a while. Sabzian is so disarmingly charming and unassuming, playing himself in the movie, that you cannot help but root for him. The humanism that underpins Kiarostami’s vision is also indicative of Iranian cinema’s progressive agenda, which seems so little in keeping with the country’s official or apparent politics over the course of the last thirty years. In addition, the very fact that Sabzian’s fraud is constructed around the fame of a director speaks of a society that  values cinema in a way that the West does not. Even our most famous directors, the likes of Nolan, Mendes or Macqueen, are unlikely to be recognised in the improbable event they decided to go rogue and travel on public transport. 

the woman in the dunes (d. hiroshi teshigahara, w. kôbô abe, eiko yoshida)

Curry and I went to see this at the NFT all those years ago. No idea why we chose to go, a blind whim, or perhaps he had done his research. It was, in its way, a revelatory viewing experience which shaped our thinking on The Boat People just as much as Cortazar & co. Little did we realise, cinema ingenues that we were back then, that no-one in the UK was either going to be interested or impressed by a film referencing Teshigahara. As ever, it was a trip returning to see a film that has lingered in the memory over the course of twenty years. The near sadistic brilliance hasn’t waned a bit. I couldn’t help thinking about what the cast and crew must have gone through to film in this relentless jungle of sand. An almost Herzogian process. In many ways this is a classic horror movie. Man who is hoodwinked by callous locals, held captive against his will, starved and brought to the edge of sanity through thirst, flees only to get caught in quicksand. And yet, as the title suggests, it is also a warped love story, of the kind that appears to recur so frequently in Japanese culture. 

the man without a past (w&d kaurismaki)

Kaurismaki’s cinema really doesn’t feel as though it ought to work in the 21st century. It feels like the lost child of the silent era. The photography is beautifully crude. The colour palette is unashamedly contrived. The dialogue lacks any obvious subtext. The stories are simple, without any of the derivations or complications so beloved of modern scriptwriting. It feels like the anti-Nolan, if you like, whose bombastic cinema is the apotheosis of what the movies, even ‘serious’ movies have become. And yet, Kaurismaki’s cinema is always an unadorned delight. Simplicity, as his fellow Nordic savant, Fosse, also understands, has a power that all the machinations of the world struggle to compete with. The Man without a Past is yet another example of this, a fable which feels timeless, which nevertheless succeeds in communicating so much about the nature of identity, and its construction, a sly peaen to the IG generation, all of them deadset on creating themselves from scratch. It can be done, but it helps if someone smashes you over the head with a baseball bat first.  

perfect days (w&d wenders, w. takuma takasaki)

Daily life is a repetitive strain syndrome. Sometimes it feels ok, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, just maybe, it feels great. The beauty of Wenders’ film is the way, in telling the story of Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, he captures this so perfectly. Film is generally about dramatic action. Plot points. Development. Whenever these threaten to appear in Perfect Days, Wenders and co-writer Takaski rein them in. What matters about this film, what makes it special, isn’t what happens. It’s what doesn’t happen. Not many filmmakers get to the point where they’re permitted to explore this kind of vibe. I for one am thankful that in this instance, someone has given Wenders money to do just that. I could watch this film a hundred times and never get bored.

Ps I got a counterpoint to this on my first night back in the UK from Mr Curry, who said that the more he thought about the film the more it got on his nerves. In is view, a film about a toilet cleaner  who just happens to have a wealthy background and drives around playing their favourite songs was the kind of project overprivileged males dream up in fancy hotel rooms… and he might have a point…