Sunday, 29 December 2024

our share of the night (mariana enriquez, tr. megan mcdowell)

I tend to steer clear of writing here about anything with which I have a personal connection. I wouldn’t say Mariana Enriquez and I are great mates, but we did sit and have a coffee together a few weeks back and there’s the small issue of spending years adapting a short story of hers for the screen, which might become a thing one day, and might not. I actually began reading Our Share of the Night whilst waiting outside the Solis to go to a talk of hers. All of which means to say that I am steeped in mundo Enriquez, one way or another, and cannot claim my normal objectivity, if such a thing exists. I also seem to remember her saying that the novel was not that well received when it was published in the UK. It has taken me over a month to get through it. It’s a weighty text with grand ambitions, which sometimes feels as though it’s going around the houses, of Buenos Aires, La Plata or London. However, going round the houses is also one of its strengths. This is a book that deals with the occult, that deals with spaces or houses that can only be accessed with occult knowledge, and the terrifying things that happen therein. There are moments when Enriquez makes clear her literary and poetic antecedents: she is writing in a tradition of investigation of the world which might exist on the other side of our consciousness. One where the immortals wield a scabrous power, one that the rich and powerful would happily kill to access. 


Friday, 27 December 2024

el jockey (w&d luis ortega, w. fabian casas, rodolfo palacios)

El Jockey, an easily translatable title, is perhaps a marmite film. Stylish, driven as much by its art design as any real sense of narrative, Ortega constructs his movie out of striking images and Roy Andersson-esque sequences. A roomful of female jockeys cavort. A broken figure is swallowed up by a military band. A racehorse races against a Dodge driven by a gaucho. And so ond so forth There is much artistry on display and the film’s opening sequences are arresting, but as it becomes clear that the narrative is essentially a paint-by-numbers job, its charm perhaps begins to wear off. Or perhaps not. Andersson is just one reference here, but just this year I have seen films by Cocteau and Parajanov, where the visual stimuli is prioritised over narrative, or perhaps it might be truer to say that narrative has been employed as a means of transmitting image. Ortega’s film with its use of colour and cliche might be said to belong to this tradition: a feast for the eyes which uses arbitrary narrative connections to bind these images together. At times it feels like advertising: albeit advertising which promotes nothing so much as the director’s personal flair. 

Wednesday, 25 December 2024

ann veronica (h g wells)

Is Ann Veronica an early example of mansplaining? Or is it a heartfelt intent by a male author to articulate the female viewpoint? H G Wells’ novel seeks to capture the thinking of a young Edwardian woman, in an England emerging from Victoriana into a bustling new London. For anyone who has ever gone to London as an ingenue and wrestled with that beast, there are elements of the story that still ring true. It was never easy to dive into the maelstrom and come out swimming. Ann Veronica gets caught up in the Suffragette movement, goes to prison, comes out unscathed. She has an obstinate courage which fuels her journey, although it never feels as though anything too terrible will happen. As a snapshot of supposedly progressive male thinking it is a fascinating lost text; albeit one that makes you think you ought to be reading more Woolf. 

Saturday, 21 December 2024

la chimera (w&d alice rohrwacher, w. carmela covino, marco pettenello)

There has been a lot of hype around La Chimera, which can be a recipe for disappointment. It is a strange, indulgent film, with the central motif being that the protagonist, Arthur, played with a glorious annoyance by Josh O’Connor, is seeking a thread that will reconnect him with his lost lover, even though she is dead. That motif sometimes seemed to stand for the film itself, as it seeks to find a path through the maze of its multiple tones and references. At once winsome, comic and faux-thriller. A film that interrogates our relationship with the past, whilst never wanting to take that interrogation too seriously: more Fellini than Antonioni. Fellini feels like a touchstone for a film with an offbeat humour and a wealth of extravagant but essentially loveable characters. The director’s sister has a cameo role as Spartaco, a dealer in stolen antiquities, and the film isn’t afraid to venture towards the far-fetched, as Arthur’s motley band storms her ship. Yet, somehow or other, all this hangs together. Arthur’s irascible journey as the unexplained gringo with his merry band of brothers becomes a sentimental journey of the Sterne-ian kind, one where emotion and ridicule go hand in hand to create a strange alchemy, aligned with ley lines and divination and the cruel workings of fate. 

Wednesday, 18 December 2024

the rider (w&d chloé zhao)

I watched Zhao’s second film during lockdown on a small screen. At which point she might have been the most feted up-and-coming director on the planet, fresh from Oscar success and the Marvel call-up. Which, watching The Rider again, seems such a confusing career step, for someone whose art appears to be baked into the nuanced, anti-climactic possibilities of cinema. The Rider is a film where almost everything has already happened. Brady, the protagonist, has fallen off his horse and damaged his skull. Lane, his friend, has fallen off his horse and become irreversibly damaged. This is a film about coming to terms with trauma, not seeking it. As such it is obviously a wonderful corrective to the idea of the western as a proving ground for a man’s machismo. These men have proved and lost and now they have to face up to living in a world where all their aspirational values are worthless, or even suicidal. Zhao’s slow burning take on Brady’s crisis is filmed with such assurance that it makes up for the lack of action. There is an ingrained tension in the idea that he will seek to get back on the horse, but even this tension is underplayed to an extent, the filmmaker emphasising the aesthetic as much as the the dramatic elements. This is the golden hour sunset of the western and all the baggy messed-up dreams it carries with it. 

Monday, 16 December 2024

meek’s cutoff (d. kelly reichardt, w. jonathan raymond)

Reichardt’s western is a beautiful, immersive take on what it might have been like to be a pioneer on the great trek west. It’s a film of elegant long takes, punctuated by moments of classic western action. The appearance of the Indian, the stand-off, the runaway cart. A party of pioneers finds themselves lead by Meek, a cowboy cowboy, who talks the talk but doesn’t appear to walk the walk, leading them into barren hills as their water reserves diminish. Under the parasol of the question: will they survive or not, the film stumbles forward in their company, with every obstacle that holds up their progress hardwired into the viewing process. An axle breaks and the audience really gets the significance. A steep hill isn’t just scenic, it’s potentially fatal. It’s a masterly treatment of the lost art of the Western, one which unsurprisingly forefronts gender as Michelle Williams emerges as a counterweight to Bruce Greenwood’s macho Meek. However, Reichardt’s treatment of gender is in many ways just another element in the authenticity of her tale, one which insists on a more nuanced take on the historical actualities of the myth. 

Thursday, 12 December 2024

the napoleon of notting hill (g k chesterton)

The Edwardian decade is a ghost decade. That lost era between Victorianism and modernism. Between a kind of European peace and the wars that were latent. It’s also a curiously empty decade, from a literary perspective. The modernists had yet to get properly going, and the great Victorians were gone or going.


Chesterton’s comic novel might warrant a proper Barthesian exegesis. Here is a novel which doesn’t seem to want to make much of an effort to be a novel. There’s not a single female character in the book, so far as I could glean. There’s a refusal to take anything seriously. It’s a jaundiced critique of empire and nationalism, but one that sees it all as an absurd game, whilst the ramifications were soon to lead to global conflict and the rapacious aspects of Empire were just beginning to be confronted. Set in 1984, supposedly, a mad king awards London boroughs the status of medieval cantons, complete with heraldry and uniforms. When three of them gang up to attack Notting Hill, its leader, Adam Wayne, fights back. The war happens after decades of peace, and is almost viewed as an aesthetic gesture, in keeping with the heraldry and colours. The fact that a decade later, the citizens of Notting Hill, Hammersmith, etc, would find themselves caught up in a war that was, perhaps, equally senseless, is one of the disturbing aspects of Chesterton’s satire. The aestheticisation of war, the insistent irreverence and the name Adam Wayne feel like they could be something out of the Marvel universe. Both representative, perhaps, of societies unprepared for the shit that will soon be hitting the fan.  

Monday, 9 December 2024

the last englishmen: love, war, and the end of empire (deborah baker)

Baker’s tome seeks to encompass a multitude of historical nodal points, which over and underlap. The fall of the Raj, Gandhi and Nehru, the poets Spender and Auden, their brothers, their brothers’ lovers, the conquest of Everest, the impact of the second world war on geo-political history. Perhaps inevitably there are moments when it feels as though a certain shorthand is being employed by the writer. The book is lengthy, but could easily have been ten times as long if it were to fully investigate every strand it takes on. Nevertheless, there is much to be gleaned here. The way in which Auden and Spender’s brothers were part of teams that set out, unsuccessfully to conquer Everest as part of a colonial project, and how both came to realise the vanity, even stupidity of this, in spite of their personal ambitions. Also the way that the scientific work they did in the Himalayas and Karakorams would contribute indirectly to the war effort. In the process, Baker analyses the turbulent decline of the British empire in India, held together by an outdated ideology of British exceptionalism. As such, the book dovetails neatly with Baker’s husband, Amitav Ghosh’s account of the origins of the British empire in India, Smoke and Ashes. 

Saturday, 7 December 2024

kobieta z… (woman of…) (w&d małgorzata szumowska, michał englert)

Kobieta Z taps into the wave of trans films that reflect the post-Foucaultian changes in global society, or at least western global society. Aniela Wesoly starts the film as Andrzej and the film follows the journey of their transformation over the course of forty years. Boldly, the film resists making Aniela an attractive woman, pushing the journey of transformation into middle age. Andrzej is a dreamy young man, confident in his sexuality, making the conversion all the more impactful. Deep down they feel themselves to be a woman in a man’s body and they remain true to this belief, no matter what it costs them. Which is almost everything: their social status, their livelihood, their loving marriage, their looks. There is an upside to all this at the end, when their sacrifices appear to be rewarded with another kind of happiness. But the journey is long and bleak and follows the journey of their country from tightly buttoned communism to something far more liberal. The edit style is pacy and sinuous. Scenes are rarely given time to settle, and when they do, the film pulls out of them as soon as possible. This curtails the possible melodrama which Aniela’s story is liable to, as family and friends react to their transformation. What the filmmakers seem to aim for is an epic vision of Aniela’s struggle, one where we too will come up against the relentless antagonism of the forces ranged against them. 

Thursday, 5 December 2024

white noise (don delillo)

Once upon a time I used to read DeLillo. And then the reading stopped. Returning to the writer, twenty years later, is a curious experience. White Noise feels by parts frustrating, by parts brilliant. It has the feel of a sophomore work, full of tricks and conceits and authorial presence. Then I learn it was his eighth novel. The conceit of the narrator being a professor of Hitler studies at a remote US university, one who doesn’t speak German, feels like a brilliant idea, but doesn’t really go anywhere. The conceit of the narrator’s world being threatened by a toxic cloud, which takes up the central portion of the book, likewise seems a brilliant, Camusian idea, but again, it doesn’t really go anywhere. This is a novel bubbling with tricks and ideas, but one which delivers no coups de grace. Perhaps it’s in the vein of the nouveau roman, almost Barthesian, but there’s something showy about the whole contraption, made of bells and whistles that articulate the author’s intellectual chutzpah but fall short of ever really saying anything. 

Tuesday, 3 December 2024

la bella estate (w&d laura luchetti)

The Pretty Summer might be an English variant on this title, which would seem appropriate, as this is a pretty film with pretty people enjoying summer. And some winter. A slightly episodic drama which takes place from the summer of 1938 to 1939, it follows the coming of age of Gianna, a pretty young woman who has recently come with her brother to Turin from the countryside. She falls under the sway of artist’s pretty muse, Amelia, who leads her towards a life of moderate decadence. The shadow of what is to come hovers at the back of the film - there can be few better years in which to set a period film, with the sense of doomed youth that it portends. No matter how pretty you are, if it’s Italy 1938, the writing is on the wall.