the hills of california (w. butterworth, d. mendes)

My brother said, do you want to go to the theatre, and I said why not. When in London, sometimes it feels like there’s no time to go to theatre: it takes up a whole evening and there are people to see and places to haunt. But as a night out with el hermano, it seemed ideal. And what better than that doyen of British theatre, Jez Butterworth’s latest.

I read nothing about the play beforehand. My expectations, as ever, were not high. The set had a polished, conservative feel. A meticulously rendered front room of a rundown Blackpool hotel. Emblematic, perhaps, but doggedly naturalistic. It declared: “You have arrived in a British theatre, do not expect to witness anything radical.” The audience didn’t look as though they had any desire to witness anything radical, so they were not going to be disappointed. We were up in the gods. I had actually checked out these tickets on-line earlier, and they cost around £70. My bother, as is his wont, had an app, so we got them for £15. The theatre was full. The show is a success.

What unfolded over the course of the next three hours was indeed an exemplary rendition of British theatre. The play is beautifully written, directed and acted. It has humour and pathos, The Andrews Sisters and the Rolling Stones. It is seemingly written for Butterworth’s wife, Laura Donnelly, who gives a grandstanding performance in a female-lead play. There’s a sniff of Chekhov, a faint hint of Pinter in the set-up, a dollop of Osbourne and a whole backlog of British (and Irish) playwriting. It’s one of those things that people in the arts, both here and abroad, will note that we ‘do well’. There’s next to no politics, nothing formally challenging, not even all that much emotion. But it all works like a cuckoo clock. 

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Nb - To be present in the Harold Pinter theatre, formerly known as the Comedy Theatre, is an event in itself. The Victorians had money and they had a grand, claustrophobic vision for how to spend it. The theatre is as intimate a cave, a cave with ledges and crannies and a religious focus on the event of the stage. The social complexity of the Victorian world is still functioning here, with the gods and the stalls, the balcony and the boxes. Even if your seat is half way to Piccadilly Circus, you will still get enough of an immersive view to feel like you are part of this great theatre machine, which is part of this splendiferous empire, a place of plush velvet and ornate ceilings. Just to be there is to belong to the victors. The quality of the show is entirely incidental. 

civil war (w&d alex garland)

Many years ago, in the throes of marital breakdown, I took a very cheap holiday on a Greek island and wrote a screenplay called Truck. It wasn’t a Leonard Cohen type of Greek island. The best friends I made were a hairdresser and her mum from the Midlands, who sipped retsina with me a couple of times. It felt like the end of the world, the death of civilisation. I have no doubt that it helped enormously in the writing of Truck, a film about the end of civilisation which would never be made in a world which has, so far, steadfastly refused to end.

I imagine that if Garland  went to an Island to write Civil War, his budget would have been rather more generous than mine was and his stay more luxurious. Like Truck, Civil War is a road movie, set against the backdrop of society in meltdown. Garland’s dystopian vision seems as valid today as it would have been back in the Nixon times of Hunter S, and in a way Garland might be the closest we’ve got to a sanitised gonzo scribe. The film revolves around a group of photo-journalists who will document the conflict, and it has as much to do with war journalism, the Tim Hetheringtons of this world, as it has to do with politics. The excellent Kirsten Dunst is called Lee, a subtle reference which the film unsubtly underlines early on. Dunst gives a great, vulnerable performance, adding emotional depth to the shock fireworks. War journalists are a curious, seemingly apolitical breed, servants to ‘the story’ and their neutral role reflects Garland’s neutral take on the politics which are always implicit rather than explicit, in spite of the potential topicality. The journalists’ importance, (as the IDF are well aware in Gaza, where they have not been allowed in), is paramount. They are the witnesses, the ones who lend the tree falling in the forest its redeemable value. Wars without journalists are nothing more than killing zones.

Civil War is a very well made film with a taught script and enough jump scares and shocks to keep the popcorn audience happy. At the same time it feels like a far cry from that breed of seventies political US filmmaking (All The President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, Missing, even The Conversation), which somehow managed to feel so edgy and unsettling. The gonzo stalks the stage, but his/her madness is restricted to serviceable and effective story beats. This is probably not in any way down to Garland, as maverick a mainstream filmmaker as we have right now : it’s just the law of the regulated (free) market. 

back to black (d. sam taylor-johnson, w. matt greenhalgh)

Back in the day Mr B & I went to visit the woman formerly known as Sam Taylor-Wood in her studio space in Shoreditch. Unlike many of her fellow YBAs, she came across as someone at ease with herself and her success. She was happy to speak openly about the movement and her role in it. Her works possessed a somewhat showy aspect, (ie Beckham sleeping), but she was a well established artist and seemed at peace with herself. There was none of the edginess of Emin, the lunacy of Lucas or the paranoia of Hirst.

This lack of edge permeates Back to Black, her biopic about Amy Winehouse. It’s a soft soap version of a nightmarish tale. Addiction, betrayal, family drama: This might have been the stuff of Racine, Shakespeare, Kurosawa, Reygadas. Instead there’s something discrete, even tame about the telling of the crack-smoking, disturbed genius. Presumably this approach is necessary in order to construct a tale fit for mass consumption, but it doesn’t feel as though it does justice to the genesis and evolution of a voice which succeeded in shaping the consciousness of a generation. How many singers have become globally ubiquitous as a result of the sheer talent they possess to manipulate the art of song?

In a sense Taylor-Johnson’s journey feels like a typical case of someone becoming consumed by the establishment. The YBA’s mostly came from what might be called the outside. The wealthier they got, the more they became insiders. Taylor-Johnson, similarly to McQueen, took the bold decision to go into filmmaking where she appears to have become subsumed by the conservatism of the British film industry. In the process, in Back to Black, she has essentially beatified Winehouse, who is engrained into the cultural hierachy in death in a way she was never able to be in life. Perhaps this is the fate of all the great jazz stars. (In the film Winehouse’s grandmother warns her of following in Parker’s footsteps, and Billie Holliday is another touchstone.) Or perhaps it is that this more sanitised version of Winehouse meets the expectations of financiers and public, an image the director has been happy to comply with. 

fantastic machine (d. axel danielson, maximilien van aertryck)

Fantastic Machine is a documentary about the image and its evolution from pinhole camera to viral digital media. Given the broadness of the remit, it is perhaps unsurprising that the film doesn’t have too much of a central thesis, beyond the wonder and nightmare of the audiovisual arts. Perhaps the most telling moment comes when the then president of Ireland introduces the first screening of television in the country, likening the potential impact of this new technology to the power of a nuclear weapon. This man from another generation, speaking in severe black and white, comes across as a seer. The film touches on the way in which the image is something the medium has always manipulated even whilst purporting to be completely objective. This is represented through a neat edit sequence where the photographers are seen on the other side of a tragic, award-winning photograph. Fantastic Machine is full of these shiny moments, and is relentlessly entertaining, which sometimes seems at odds with the suggestion it is defrocking the superficiality of the image. It would have been lovely to have had something of Barthes, Virilio or even Baudrillard referenced in order to substantiate some of the ideas which are floated. Nevertheless, the film has a cracking and effective edit, and there are enough nuggets in there to keep anyone happy for an hour and a half. 

the king of warsaw (szczepan twardoch, tr. sean gasper bye)

There is a large shadow which hangs over Twardoch’s novel, set in Warsaw in 1937. That shadow is, por supuesto, the imminence of war, the arrival of the Nazis, the construction of the ghetto and the holocaust. The protagonist of the novel, Jakub Szapiro, is Jewish, as are his family, his neighbourhood, his friends and partners and criminal associates. He doesn’t know, although the reader does, that this whole world is on the point of implosion, and all the petty disputes and conflicts which he is caught up in, with his enemies, partners, wife, family and lovers, will soon be rendered obsolete. This shadow creates its own dramatic tension, which the narrative emphasises by including flash-forwards to Jakub living a sad lonely life in Tel Aviv, decades later. The novel itself is something of a rip-roaring read, full of violence, sex, criminals and betrayal and feels ripe for the Netflix adaptation that subsequently occurred. There is a subsidiary layer which has to do with the history of Poland itself. Jakub’s contacts go to the very top, and his dealings with the far right and its political machinations has echoes of Poland’s recent history. 

manchurian candidate (w&d john frankenheimer, w. richard condon, george axelrod)

It had been a while since I visited my home from home. I had avoided the festival which took place during turismo altogether. I didn’t have the energy. I was travelling, I was rehearsing, I was too busy and the truth is that Cinemateca isn’t the same in the festival . Of course the festival has its charms, but I prefer Cinemateca without the hype. A screening of The Manchurian Candidate, the Monday after the festival, the night before I left for London, was ideal. Cinemateca was back to being half full, with familiar faces, the cinema tragics, como yo.

The Manchurian Candidate is a funny old film. Paranoia, war, humour and some crackerjack neo-HItchcockian dialogue between an oddly sympathetic, low status, Sinatra and a criminally underused Vivian Leigh, oozing screen charisma, even if her relationship with Sinatra’s Major Marco is completely superfluous to the plot. A film that came at the start of the sixties and predicted everything, from Kennedy to Trump, yet doesn’t seem to want to take itself nearly as seriously as those paranoid thrillers of the seventies, when the true extent of Frankenheimer’s Cassandran powers were revealed.

And now am sitting in Carrasco airport, looking out over the runway, where military planes share the space with a handful of passenger jets, and think about how in ’62, when the Manchurian Candidate was made, this view would have seemed equally mundane, with little intimation of the events which the film foreshadowed. Events which would destroy this tranquility and devastate whole generations. 

my name is adam: children of the ghetto volume 1 (elias khoury, tr humphrey davies)

How should we read this book? It’s several years since I read Khoury. Yalo and White Masks both looked at the Lebanese wars which ravaged Beirut during my youth. Here, he turns his attentions to Palestine and the Nakba. There are two narrators: Khoury himself, who in a preface tells us that what we are about to read are the notebooks of Adam Danoun, an Arab-Israeli who he knew in New York, who had protested against the fictions in his novel Yalo. So doing, the author validates the scrappy, discursive nature of the novel, which includes stories within stories, endless asides, and a long opening sequence about medieval Arab poetry. However, there is artifice at work here. Because the story of the Nakba cannot be conveyed in clean lines. Due to the way that history has sought to crush the Palestine soul and spirit, stealing its land and its right to speak, the events of 1948 are inevitably shrouded in speculation and myth, an oral tradition, as hazy and open to distortion as the stories of the early Arab poets. Khoury’s self-avowed unreliable narrator helps to lead us, tiptoeing through the story of his birth in the ghetto of Lydda, now renamed as Lod, and the terrible events of those days when the town was annexed by the IDF. Even the idea of a ghetto is one that has been imported by the Israelis from Europe and imposed upon a Palestine population whose lands and homes were being seized. Finally, Adam meets up in New York with a fellow Palestinian, fifteen years older than him, who experienced the gruesome war crimes, the burial squadrons, the hunger. All those things which are being repeated once more in the charnel house of Gaza.

If there was anyone I should like to talk to regarding Gaza, whose perspective I would value, it would be Khoury. The messiness of this novel feels like an honest reflection of the world it has taken upon itself to depict or reveal. Beneath the hatred, Khoury locates the common ground. He references other Palestine writers, but also Israeli writers, including Oz. The value of literature as a way of understanding what seems beyond the scope of understanding is fundamental to his work. The lengthy sequence on Waddah and the other Arab poets only serves to reaffirm this: from where will we gain our understanding of the medieval mind, if not from the words they left behind.  

What interests me about this novel isn’t its admission of the crime, important though that is, but its ability to trace the outline of the mute Palestinian, who was to become one of the staples of Israeli literature, and to infer the underlying meaning of the founding of the Zionist state, which is that for the Jews to become a people like other peoples – “other peoples” here meaning European peoples – they had first to invent their own Jews.

“Listen, guys,” said Ma’moun. “These people know nothing. They think they’re in Europe. They’ve come and they’ve brought the ghetto with them so they can put us in it.”

“No! I bear no grudge against the Jews. They too die and as soon as they die become dead people just like us and cease to be Jews. We stop being us and they stop being them, so why the killing? I swear I don’t get it. I don’t have a grudge against anybody, but why?

The eaten-away face of the young girl became imprinted on my heart and has remained with me throughout my life. This is what people are. People are cadavers. Even children who look like angels are cadavers.

the annual banquet of the gravediggers’ guild (enard, tr. frank wynne)

A change of tone for Enard, a writer who wears his influences on his sleeve. The Annual Banquet shifts away from the Mediterranean and the Orient into the deep French heartland, the Norman countryside near the Atlantic, the land of Rabelais and Villon. An anthropologist goes to study the locals and finds himself gradually seduced by their down-to-earth ways. The anthropologist, David Macon, starts and ends as narrator, but in between becomes a marginal figure as Enard uses both the landscape and the Buddhist notion of resurrection to probe the history of the region, from the time of the English invasions to the revolutionary era to the Second World War, with a brief cameo from Bonaparte himself. If this is a typically erudite approach to the art of writing a novel, then the generally gentle affectionate tone is not nearly so customary. The novel is like going for a four seasons walk through this countryside, where some days are sun-dappled, others icy, others morose, but beyond the restless presence of death itself, or ‘the great wheel’ as the novel puts it, there is always the prospect of a heart-warming vegetable soup to be had at the end of the day. The Buddhist framework is an elegant device, and the gravediggers at the heart of the book are suitably Rabelaisian. If anything the novel leaves the reader, accustomed to Enard’s more hard-edged work, with the sensation that the writer might be slipping into a mellifluous late middle age, which he is entitled to, but I can’t help suspecting this is a detour on the Enard road, rather than an endpoint. 

strandings: confessions of a whale scavenger (peter riley)

What do you do when you’ve been obsessed with whales all your life, to such an extent that you’ve become an expert on Moby Dick? Of course, you write a book about it, non-fiction, trying to make sense of your psychological deviance and looking for a way to incorporate this into the history of a country which has engaged on a course of deviant psychological damage. A country which has become a beached whale, just as you are a beached whale, just as a beached whale is a beached whale. It’s a somewhat tenuous theory, but Riley milks it for all it’s worth and the book includes revelatory moments. Above all in the way it traces the evolution of a beached whale society, the scavengers and fetishists who feel the pull of the whales, just as the whales themselves feel the pull of the tides which erroneously cause them to commit an auto-de-fe by choosing land over water. These characters represent an alternative Britain, none more so than the mythical ‘Big Blue’ to whom a truly wondrous chapter is dedicated, a character so Dickensian he feels he really ought to be fictional. These oddballs, some using the whale as a metaphor for the possibilities of Brexit, as opposed to the author’s use of the metaphor as the catastrophe of Brexit, construct a fascinating map of the island’s coastal regions, the point of elision between the values of the nation state and the values of the deep. At times it feels as though Riley slightly overplays his hand as he seeks to impose his map of the whale territory on the map of the country, but this is nevertheless a book that conjures out of its unlikely thesis an engaging, off-centre read. 

nostalgia (mircea cărtărescu, tr. julian semilian)

Cărtărescu’s fame has spiralled in recent years. The Twiterati are in a state of extreme excitement whenever his name crops up. Nostalgia is my first dive into his writing, and it’s clear that the author possesses what they always called back in my Writer’s Room days “a voice”. Nostalgia consists of five stories which are at most obliquely connected. The first deals with a Russian roulette player, who defies the odds. The last with an architect who creates the music of the spheres. Both these stories are breathlessly brilliant, in the way the writer’s imagination appears to stretch the boundaries, pushing the stories beyond any anticipated limits, in the process questioning the laws of probability and physics, respectively. These stories bookend three more which inhabit the middle of the book, and which this reader found heavier going. The intricacies of the writer’s mind at times seemed to overwhelm the scope of the story he was relating, or at least that was how it felt. The stories become ornately baroque and the quixotic Bucharest they occur in sometimes gets lost in the whorls and arpegios of the text. Or perhaps it was just the wrong week to be reading it. 

zone of interest (w&d jonathan glazer)

We watched this film in Montevideo at the exact same time it was being garlanded on the west coast of the United States. When I got home I watched Glazer’s honourable speech, the only one with the courage to mention Gaza, something that watching his film at this moment in history inevitably calls to mind.

There have been so many films that have used the Holocaust as a dramatic trope. Some with more justification than others. The issue with the events is how to present them. To seek to show or communicate the reality of a reality that will always be beyond representation. As such the Holocaust represents an artistic and philosophical conundrum and one that is particular to cinema, that most ‘realistic’ of the arts. Glazer is more aware than many of the fact. His film deliberately veers beyond realism from the very opening shot of blackness, which is held for long enough to make the audience question if all is right in the cinema, the world. Another sequence involves a flower dissolving, a la Jarman, to a red screen, which is again held. There are white out moments too. At other points a girl is seen in infra-red, leaving fruit to be discovered - a storyline which only became clear after the film had finished.

However, the majority of the film occurs in naturalistic colour, as the Hoss family go about the daily lives in the shadow of atrocity. All of which brings to the fore one of the key problematics of Glazer’s film. Rather than pondering the realism of what is seen, we end up pondering the aesthetics. The shots of flowers are beautiful. Is there room for beauty in the world he depicts? Is it appropriate? The issue isn’t a moral one: it’s that the question itself leads towards a contemplation of aesthetics rather than the subject matter which the film is dancing around. A similar thing occurs with the award winning sound mix, which seeks to represent the off-stage atrocities. In the end, it felt to this viewer as though this tool was used to hammer home the film’s point. Zone of Interest seeks to be a subtle film, but it utilises cinematic recourses which are profoundly unsubtle. It’s a film about the holocaust which ends up as a film about cinema and its limits. Every visual or auditory nuance seems to throw into question the project as a whole.

Having said all of this, and having returned to see Glazer’s brief discourse, it needs to be acknowledged that the filmmaker is only raising these questions because he is pushing the limits of the medium, in all sorts of ways, some of them the he could never have anticipated as he was making the film. Just as the bricks and mortar of the concentration camp overshadow the Hoss’s home, so the barbarity of the unbridled attack on Gaza’s civilians will always be destined to overshadow the walls of Glazer’s Zone of Interest. 

cuckoo land (tom burgis)

Tom Burgis tells us things we already know, but he does it with great verve, removing the mask of his prey, the lawyer/ philanthropist/ financier, Mohamed Amersi. Burgis connects the dots between Amersi’s donations to the Conservative Party and his close association with then chairman, Ben Elliot, who also happens to run Quintessentially, the horribly titled service provider to the rich and famous. (As well as being Camila’s nephew.) I’d quite like Burgis to do a book about Ben Eliot, a figure who has managed to turn Britain’s creepy reputation for class excellence into a global brand, when about all we have to left to sell, having butchered all our industries, is a commodified version of our class hierarchy. There aren’t any great revelations in the book, but the way Burgis stands up to his subject’s legal bullying is impressive and the sly verbatim accounts of the conversations he had with Amersi reveal the crude power-plays that underpin his subject’s craven grab for power and money. Sic transit gloria mundi.