yo la tengo @ museo de carnaval

There’s a healthy crowd in at the Museo de Carneval which is keen, buzzy, eager to breathe the rarified air of the Yankee muses. It feels like the kind of occasion that might have been banned under Cromwell and might not be encouraged by other authoritarian regimes. Fittingly, perhaps, when I get home I learn that Mudami has won the NY mayoral race. Yo La Tengo seem to represent the good profile of North America. Free thinking musos who don’t look like they’d ever wear designer clothes.

I saw Yo La Tengo at Somerset House about 25 years ago, when I was another person living another life. Ira Kaplan makes much play of the fact that many of their songs were written before much of the audience was born. It suggests a deserved pride in their longevity. Perhaps I have been reborn in the interim. I don’t know what got me into them. Their Hispanic name is a red herring: they’re from New Jersey and as evidenced by the brief comments, they’re not Spanish speakers. (Wikipedia offers the origin story of the band’s name.) They look pretty much the same now as they did back then. They also seem to take the same enjoyment out of playing. Their set is subtly constructed, ranging from feedback heavy rocking out to delicate ballads. The range is as impressive as the way the audience’s sensory journey is curated. They restore the faith on many levels, not least when they invite Eduardo, a young local guitarist on stage to play a song with them.

The set ends with a cover of I Do Believe by the Velvets. The song, sung a cappella, is moving. It offers a flavour of what it might have been like to watch the Velvets, veering from the melodic to the deranged. Fellow emissaries of the right kind of North American freedom.

persuasion (austen)

I turned to Austen’s late novel in a bid to go back to a classic after wading through too many contemporary novels that seemed to be saying less than they pretended to. Austen has a sanctified status in the UK. A pioneer of the female novel, a subtle investigator of the human heart. Not to mention a fertile source of eminently commercial period drama.

The novel sets out a clear and predictable obstacle for Anne, its protagonist. Eight years after declining the proposal of her suitor, Wentworth, on the advice of friends and family, she finds herself still in love with him. When he returns to her circle after years abroad with the navy, Anne is convinced Wentworth has moved on, as well as harbouring resentment against her for having refused him. At the age of 27, she feels her best days are behind her, and has to come to terms with disappointment in love and life. Part of the problem with the novel is that Anne is so damned nice, whist the rest of her family are monsters. Austen mines this for both humour and moral judgement. Her father and two sisters are vain and selfish. Next to them, any normal individual would look good, but Anne is positively saintly. Beyond her lack of confidence, she never does anything wrong. There comes a point in the novel when we long for Anne to screw up in some way, but this never happens.

Which reflects the fact that, from the moment the novel moves with Anne to Bath, not a lot seems to occur at all. There’s a long chapter of exposition on the part of Anne’s friend to tie up a subplot regarding her cousin who seems intent on marrying her; a few set-piece moments where Anne and Wentworth cross before the final resolution of their story. But it all feels disarmingly pedestrian. The penultimate chapter contains Anne’s meditation on the difference between the sexes, which one imagines marries to Austen’s view, along with her wry observation that you can’t trust novels on the subject as the medium has been dominated by men. A delightfully arch observation, but this alone is insufficient to lend the novel any real sense of depth. It’s a strange experience to read a novel that has been so lauded, adapted and fetishised within British culture, only to find oneself reaching out for a branch of significance as one drifts away on its mellifluous tide. 

pasolini (w&d abel ferrara, w. nicola tranquillino, maurizio braucci)

Ferrara’s biopic offers Dafoe one of his finest roles. This is clutch material for the director, and the film feels assured, confident, but surprisingly safe. It opens by presenting scenes from 120 Days, suggesting it will investigate the darkness or hell that Pasolini will speak of in an intriguing interview. But the film is almost too well shot and acted. Everything feels pitch perfect. Ferrara’s rough edges have been smoothed out, there are no moments that either shock or disgust. Having said which, the film, set over the course of the day of Pasolini’s death, is educative, an effective introduction to the life of the Italian poet-cineaste. 

sullivan's travels (w&d preston sturges)

A film about filmmaking. A film about filmmaking when the world is at war. What is the lodestar the filmmaker should follow? A dissertation on the state of the nation? Or escapist entertainment?

Sullivan is a successful Hollywood director who makes crowd-pleasing comedies. But his social conscience is nagging him. He wants to learn how the other half live. So he sets off to roam the country as a tramp, albeit in the company of the charming Veronica Lake. His journey is meticulously plotted, moving from broad comedy towards a suggestion of social realism, with a  twist at the end which would make any script doctor happy. At one point, at his lowest ebb, Sullivan is a prisoner who attends a prison cinema screening in a church. The screening is of a Disney cartoon, which everyone in the audience finds riotously funny. This scene, smartly meta, offers a précis of the film’s premise. Sullivan laughs and realises that cinema as entertainment possesses a healing value which social realism, he believes, never will.

There’s a couple of points about this scene: firstly it takes place in a black southern baptist church. According to Wiki, Walter White, the Secretary of the NAACP, wrote to Sturges: “I want to thank you for the church sequence in Sullivan's Travels.  I was in Hollywood recently and am to return there soon for conferences with production heads, writers, directors, and actors and actresses in an effort to induce broader and more decent picturization of the Negro instead of limiting him to menial or comic roles. The sequence in Sullivan's Travels is a step in that direction… “ So one way the film impacted was counter to the film’s eventual thesis. The other point is that Sturges originally wanted to use Chaplin instead of Disney, but couldn’t get the rights. Of course, Chaplin spent his life negotiating the same balance between entertainment and social realism, and perhaps his films triumphed as a result of their amalgamation of the two: stories about tramps that made people laugh.

Because some of the most telling scenes in Sullivan’s Travels are when Sullivan and Lake visit the marginal, impoverished world of down-and-outs, giving them some kind of representation. We’re only a few steps away from Rossellini’s neo-realism. Film always has to tread a line between entertainment and politics, laughter and the cruel realities the artform emerges from. Sullivan’s Travels does as good a job as anything you’ll see at exploring these contradictions, even if the stated resolution doesn’t exactly reflect the reasons for the film’s effectiveness. 

dengue boy (michel nieva, tr. rahul bery)

Dengue Boy belongs to that fin-de-siècle genre, the video game novel. I don’t get to read that many of them, but it reminded me of Pelevin, and I imagine William Gibson, (who I’ve never read). The virtual reality novel, where characters plug into worlds within worlds. Neva makes an explicit reference to Borges towards the end of the book, (The Aleph), suggesting a larger genealogy to the genre, and perhaps it might also be said to reference back to Huxley, Swift, More, etcetera. The invention of imaginary parallel worlds has always been the stuff of fiction. The technological gizmos of high capitalism only serve to garnish another layer of accessibility to these worlds.

Neva’s dystopian text is set in a futuristic climate-warmed hothouse world where concepts like cold are a thing of the past, only existing in expensive reproductions for obscenely wealthy tourists who travel to an ice-free Antarctica for a taste of something they have heard of in folk tales. The world is afflicted by giant mutant mosquitos which are capable of laying waste to everything in their path, spreading disease, death and destruction in their wake. These diseases are then monetised, as the bio-industry produces profitable vaccines to counter them. The reference to Covid 19 is implicit. In amongst the catastrophe porn, Neva invents a new sub-genre of mosquito splatter-gore. That the novel is Argentine is perhaps surprising, with its playful reimagining of Argentine geography post the rise in seal-levels which has liquidated Buenos Aires and the coast. Above and beyond the politics, the mash-up of ideas and excess seems to echo the trajectory of contemporary Argentina and its current Dengue Boy president. 

magnolia (w&d pt anderson)

Cine Universitario has a healthy, youthful turnout on a Friday night. I guess I’m the oldest member of the audience. They seem to drink it all in, PTA’s grandiose, operatic epic, which swoons through the course of a single night. There’s more than one reference to opera in the film - Stanley even sings opera at one point. The whole film is underscored to an extreme degree, as though the director is suggesting he is not so much writing a film as composing one. I read a Wikipedia quote of Anderson’s saying that looking back on the film he would have cut twenty minutes, which isn’t such a ridiculous suggestion but also seems irrelevant. The movie could be an hour shorter or twelve hours longer. Certainly some storylines could have been teased out more - Donny’s and Phil’s to name but two. But this isn’t so much the film of an LA night as the symphony: the characters are instruments who have their solos, but are part of a wider whole, one that can mess with the logic of time; (whilst Claudia cleans her apartment waiting to open up for the cop, half a dozen storylines are running ahead, but it doesn’t matter, within the geometry of action, all that matters is that she will open the door); with the logic of chance, as the bookending narrator declares, laying cards on the table; all of this without in any way jeopardising the coherence of the music of the film. Anderson even does this with the score, willing to lay music over music, music over dialogue, noise on noise, the parts constantly subsumed to the whole. It is indeed operatic, exhausting, but also moving, portentously moving, perhaps, Yankee style, but moving nonetheless. And as the credits rolled and the final Mann song played, the youthful audience, as though in an opera house, burst into spontaneous applause. 

jumping jack flash (kieron pim)

This is a biography of David Litvinoff, a figure from sixties London who moved between the worlds of rock and roll, crime and cinema. He moved in the same circles as the Kray Brothers and the Stones, to name but two of his extensive web of connections. He was a friend of Donald Cammell and, the book asserts, the hidden animus of Performance. Events in that film directly echo incidents within Litvinoff’s own life. His face was slashed at one point in Earl’s Court as a punishment/ warning from the Kray twins for betraying them. All of which is fascinating, and Pim’s account of the interweaving of the criminal world and the rock world is comprehensive. However, there comes a point when the reader starts to realise that Litvinoff, whilst a larger-than-life personality, might not be quita as interesting as he or the book believe. Pim threads his personal fascination with LItvinoff and their shared Jewish heritage through the book. He travels to Australia, hangs out with Eric Clapton and minor aristocracy, as he seeks to get to the nub of his subject’s mystery. The B-narrative is why the author is so fascinated with Litvinoff, and there were moments in the second half of the book when this reader wishes that the author had gone further into exploring his own personal obsession. 

the mastermind (w&d kelly reichardt)

This is going to be a shaggy dog story, I thought to myself, as the fetching titles unwound. A nod to those seventies crime caper movies, all fixed camera long shots, revealing details that might or might not be crucial for the story, demanding the viewer’s attention. The eminently likeable Josh O’Connor planning a heist, with more and more obstacles thrown up, just as the script gurus would have recommended. No point making a heist movie without speed bumps. As things continue to unravel for O’Connor, who carries on being likeable, O’Connor can’t help being likeable even if he’s robbing old ladies, the movie seems to have two possible directions: a happy ending as he succeeds in somehow reconciling with his family or a tragic denouement where he ends up estranged from them forever. Reichardt subverts this dialectic by coming up with a third outcome, what I would term the Bergman-ending, when you just drop out of the story altogether before engaging with that irascible third act. This could also be termed the Shaggy-Dog-Story ending, which I don’t recall the script doctors ever promoting, but has its advantages. Reichardt has frequently sought a way to ovoid the straitjacket of narrative conventions. In The Mastermind, with its portentous title, perhaps there is a sly critique of this idea of perfection, the notion of the perfect crime/ the perfect script/ the perfect film. 

armand v (dag solstad, tr steven t. murray)

Solstad’s novel has the beguiling premise of being an assemblage of footnotes towards the novel he might have written. Might have written in so far as - there might be a novel which exits but will never be read to which these footnotes belong, or the novel might just have existed in his imagination (in which case could it be said to exist or not?). This playful premise would seem to open the door for non-linearity, deviations, Mornington Crescent. Which it does, to an extent, even if a surprisingly coherent narrative emerges of a man who studied the sciences, then got married, had a child, became a diplomat, separated, married again (this is less clear), had a son who as a young man chose to join the army, against type and his father’s wishes,  and then suffered an accident meaning the father has to take care of the son in spite of their distanced relationship. As this storyline suggests, there is a determined narrative running through the novel, even if it is only told partially, with gaps. The novel also cleaves to that other shibboleth, character, with Armand, the diplomat, emerging as a strong, complex protagonist. All of which left this reader hankering after more disconnect than the novel provides, perhaps. It’s a staccato read, as some sequences of footnotes arrive in a rush and other footnotes are extended over several pages, including a brilliant account of Armand perceiving the head of a US ambassador as a pig’s head, in the gents of a gilded London venue. This is worth the price of entrance alone, albeit there is the lingering sense that Solstad is sketching out an idea which might have produced a more radical book than it does. 

manas (w&d. marianna brennand, w. carolina benevides, camila agustini)

Manas tells the story of a Tielle, a 13 year old girl growing up in the Amzonian state of Para. She lives in a house which can only be accessed by river, with her mum, her sister, two brothers and her dad. Her older sister ran away to Rio several years ago. The reason for her flight soon becomes obvious: Tielle’s dad is a child abuser who tells his pregnant wife he wants Tielle to sleep in his bed, having cut the cord of her hammock. Tielle is fast forwarded towards adulthood with dramatically predictable results. Manas is well filmed and acted and the script rolls along effectively. Its exotic location is part of the film’s appeal, which given this is a film about child abuse might seem paradoxical. It’s notable to see the names of the Dardennes brothers in the credits, along with Salles. There are clear echoes of the Dardennes’ themes and aesthetic (roving hand-held camera) but despite Jamilli Correa’s compelling performance, there’s a formulaic element to events which undercuts the urgency of the message. 

the children (carolina sanin, tr nick caistor)

In keeping with the style mentioned with regard to the last Colombian novel read, The Children employs a discourse which meanders as much as it flows, and is peppered with detours and dead ends. The story of Laura, a woman from Bogota who has a private rental income but nevertheless, to keep herself busy, works as an occasional cleaning woman. One day a boy appears outside her house and her life changes, as she first sends him to social services after taking him in, then seeks to locate him within the bureaucratic maze of the social services, then finds him, starts to take him out and about and ends up adopting him. However, the statement of the bald facts does no justice to the circuitous nature of the novel, which adopts a disinterested observational tone, as though the writer is a scientist looking at strange amoeba as they misshape and reform under the gaze of her microscope. 

the silence (w&d bergman)

The third in a Bergman trilogy.

Spanish dwarf troupe - tick

Kid out of tin drum - tick

Psychological warfare - tick

Adorable elderly hotel worker - tick

Language games - tick

Playfulness - tick

Female sexuality - tick

Imposing female characters - tick

Mystery - tick

Plot clarity - cross

Narrative ‘development’ - cross

The last two are perhaps the most intriguing. This is a film that takes place over the course of little more than twenty four hours. (The three Bergman films I have seen this week have a carefully composed and restricted timeframe). The film starts and ends on a train, but at no point do we know where the boy and his mother are going. ‘Home’ apparently, but what home is or means is never clear. The boy’s father is alive but we don’t know if he’s going to be there. We don’t know why they, and the woman’s dying translator sister, left home in the first place. We know the women want things - not to die, to connect physically with someone - but we don’t know why one is at death’s door and the other is picking up a stray man whose language she can’t speak. A tank dawdles down a nighttime street and we don’t know whether it belongs to the good guys or the bad guys. There’s a transcendent absence of clarity. And yet this film is one of the most remarkable, engaging films you will ever see. It’s a dream state, a child’s eye view, a lacuna, a pause in the earth’s turning. Which is also what going to the cinema is.

Things I love about Bergman: you never quite know what to expect with his films. In spite of his reputation there is no model. Each film has an idiosyncratic flavour. All those years ago, when the Electric was still a fleapit, I was taken to watch a double bill. Time of the Wolf and Le Mepris. I didn’t value Bergman then. Godard seemed more sexy. I was wrong about that, probably, and it took many years for me to start to separate the films from the myth about the films. Claro, they contain darkness, they contain their stuff of the human spirit, but they also contain such light, such perfect shading, such nuance. 

winter light (w&d bergman)

What might peak “Bergman” look like? The name is placed in inverted commas under the assumption that the idea of the auteur supersedes the reality. “Bergman” is bleak, despairing, nordic, snowy. Not all Bergman films share these qualities. Some are more “Bergman” than others. Winter Light is in this sense quintessentially “Bergman”. It opens with a ten to fifteen minute sequence of a church service, unadorned, save for the way the camera picks out the few faces in the congregation, who we assume might be characters we will later follow. Some are, some are not. Not to give too much away, what follows is despair, random suicide, emotional violence, snow, cold, and some kind of doomed human resilience. It is, perhaps, peak “Bergman”, as austere as one could hope for, a few hours stripped back to a kind of desperate pointlessness, religion that fails to console, lives that are endured rather than enjoyed. I have to confess to enjoying it, noting that the scene where the priest tells his would-be paramour how much he hates her, and she reciprocates, is a scene where the bleakness spills over into a kind of warped, gothic humour, completely undercut by what immediately follows. 

through a glass darkly (w&d bergman)

Bergman’s film goes through all the gears, from the mundane to the extraordinary. A chamber piece, four characters on an idyllic Swedish island, it gives little sign of the coming storm in the opening act. A novelist father returns from time in Switzerland to visit his two children, Minus, (17) and Karin who is married to Max von Sydow’s down-to-earth Martin. There are petty family resentments, and they entertain him with a twee medieval drama about seductive death as a maiden. However, gradually deeper tensions begin to emerge, on the part of both children. Karin is sick, with an incurable illness, but she is also going mad. She hears things in a deserted room. She’s convinced god is there. She rejects her husband sexually, but in the room on her own she seems to be possessed of a sexualised psychosis. When the father leaves, this erupts in to a full-blown psychotic episode. Scratch the surface, and under the veneer of civilised society there lurk uncontrollable forces, waiting to take over your sanity. Strangely, the room where Karin goes to see her abusive god reminded me of Mariana Enriquez’s haunted houses, with rooms where the spirits hide. What seems so extraordinary here is the way Bergman constructs a completely convincing and attractive normality, only to render it asunder in the final act. Harriet Andersson gives an astonishing performance: another aspect of Bergman’s talent was his ability to push actors to completely credible extremes. There are other elements which are faultless: the sound design is brilliant, and the use of a static camera acting as witness whilst a character enters then leaves the room, (which Haneke later adopted), affords a tension-building voyeuristic element, long before surveillance cameras had become a thing/ trope.  

bone ash sky (katerina cosgrove)

The shadow of Palestine hangs over Cosgrove’s novel. It connects two massacres, the Armenian genocide and the Sabra and Shatila killings in Lebanon in 1982. The novel traces the forced flight of a family from Ottoman Armenia in 1916, following three generations who eventually make Beirut their home. The key narrative hook is told from the POV of Anoush, the third generation, whose grandparents were Armenian and whose father was a falangist allied to the Israeli invaders who participated in the 1982 massacre. There might be said to be a twin thesis to the book. On the one hand, with echoes of Elias Khoury, there is the logic of generational angst meaning that violence is hard-wired into people’s DNA, and history will continue to throw up more and more instances of inhuman brutality. On the other hand, the novel reaches for an optimistic, multi-faith final act, as Anoush succeeds in transcending religious difference in a cosmopolitan city which has, for now, achieved the same thing. The events of the past two years, (and I write these words on the 7th of October), would sadly seem to lend more credence to Cosgrove’s first thesis. 

szyfry (d. wojciech j. has, w. andrzej kijowski)

The Code, which would be its English title, is constructed around the visit of Tadeusz back to Krakow to find out what happened to his son, who disappeared in the Second World War, presumed dead. The film oscillates between long dialogue scenes and visually poetic flashback scenes from the war. Tadeusz finds himself embroiled in family problems with his other son, Maciek. Whilst the narrative at times felt confusing, it’s intriguing to see another Polish director seeking to come to terms with the legacy of the Second World War and the holocaust. Has approaches this in a manner which feels tangential: it’s part of Tadeusz’ story, without being in any way central to it. It feels more like, as he seeks to unearth the truth, other truths emerge. One curious aspect of the film is the way in which Tadeusz, who has lived in England for many years, seems free to come and go as he pleases. The iron curtain appears to be wide open. 

i’m alright jack (w&d. john boulting, w. alan hackney, frank harvey)

This film screened as part of a Sellers season in Cinemateca. It’s the only one I caught. The context is given perhaps because it seems such a curious film to watch on the big screen in Montevideo. The audience laughed along with Sellers. There was one particularly loquacious fellow who reacted effusively all the way through. Watching it now is a bittersweet experience. It should be remembered that this seemingly gentle satire came out at the same time as the Angry Young Men were doing their thing, and Kitchen Sink drama was on the rise. The cosy caricatures of I’m Alright Jack were already being eroded. Curious, too, that these stereotypes include the Trade Union leader, holding industry to ransom with strikes and pickets. This was a story which would continue for decades. In my youth, the Trade Union leaders were household names (Len Murray, Scargill, Hugh Scanlon) and seemed to wield a power which has faded, just as perhaps British industry has faded. The irony that Boulting presents in his movie is that despite their class differences, all the characters fall under the umbrella of a cosy British familiarity. The capacity to bond over a cup of tea or a drink is always there. (Irene Handl really steals the show here.) There is an idea of a unified Britain that will bind us all together, no matter what. And, given the film was made little more than a decade after the end of the second  world war, that’s perhaps not so surprising. Whether the same could be said of Britain today seems doubtful. As an Englishman I would not want to share common ground with the more bigoted sectors of society who the new right seeks to recruit and promote. But it might be that the Boulting view of Britain was always rosy-hued. A truer version would be revealed in the filmmaking of Loach and Clarke, the writing of Osbourne, Wesker, Pinter and Shelagh Delaney. Although it might be said that within the work of Loach, there lurks a lingering hankering for the Britain depicted in I’m Alright Jack, one of confident workers forever quarrelling with cunning bosses, with some kind of compromise inevitably reached by the end.

volveréis (w&d jonás trueba, w. itsaso arana y vito sanz)

Trueba’s film La virgen de agosto was a sleeper hit in the Hispanic universe. Its tone was laconic, neo-romantic and far more hippy than anything by Madrid’s most famous filmmaker. It was also a love letter to Madrid, his native city, as is Volveréis (You’ll Be Back). The lead characters are Madrileño bohos, a filmmaker and an actor who have decided to end their fifteen year personal relationship, without rancour. They might work together in the future or they might not. Or indeed, they might be working together now, as Alex crops up in the film Ale has directed and is now editing. Or is that actually the film we are now watching? The meta-element of Volveréis is not shied away from. At the same time this is a film about love, about splitting up, about subsisting as artists in the capital. The only other filmmaker I know who lived in Madrid had to move out because rents were unaffordable, which is something the couple realise as they go looking for two new places to live. (One each.) The Maguffin is a party which they plan to hold to celebrate their separation, taking their inspiration from Ale’s father (played by Trueba’s actual father),  who gives his daughter Kierkegaard to read. As the film progress the storyline becomes less and less linear. It’s not clear if scenes are happening in the future after they have split up, or after they have decided not to split up, or in the present as they continue to debate the idea of splitting up. Or indeed whether the scenes are occurring within the matrix of Ale’s film itself, which might or might not be the film we are watching. The edit becomes more jagged and the film teeters somewhere between genius and tedium. The lead actors, Itsaso Arana and Vito Sanz are given screenwriting credits, and it’s hard to tell how far the film’s confusion is a result of precision or chaos in the process of its creation. It would be intriguing to see a script and find out how much of the second half of the film was finalised in the edit. There’s something both gratingly bourgeois about all this and yet radically, formally exciting. 

one battle after another (w&d pt anderson)

Thomas Pynchon. Vineland. Let’s start there. Let’s start with what was happening in the late sixties, the seventies, the eighties. Watergate. Kent State. Iran Contra. Etcetera. Pynchon is a dividing line. A lot of literary types are not that keen. His writing skirts around the shibboleths of standard lit crit. You can’t really teach someone to write like Pynchon. There’s not much  point analysing character or narrative development in his novels. They’re skittish, maverick, and exude a kind of brilliance which is hard to pin down, which might not move you to tears but will have you going - did I really just read that? It’s been a long time since I read Vineland and, guess what, I’ve been thinking about it a lot as we enter this phase of high-USA-fascism. It was all there, in Vineland, I recall, albeit rendered playfully, tucked away in a corner of California, private battles between the state and those who seek to live at the edge of that state. (Many of whom might be rednecks, or would-be Unabombers, but also including those who seek a kinder version of society than late capitalism permits.) Clearly I wasn’t the only one. PTA is a fan, he’s adapted Pynchon before, you can see something of Pynchon in the grandiose, meandering narratives of Boogie Nights and Magnolia.

So the association does not feel casual. One of the talents of an artist is to be on the pulse of where society/ humanity is headed. (“The unacknowledged legislators”.) I am not sure when PTA would have started adapting Vineland, but one imagines it was in the days of the Migra, rather than ICE. Before the full Pynchonesque civil war truly blew up last year. He, like Pynchon, must have sensed what was out there. The sociopathic values given flesh in Sean Penn’s brilliant performance as Lockjaw, the desperation of DiCaprio’s Bob, a desperation that so many who might have coasted through the Obama and the Biden years must be feeling now. (Including PTA himself?). Whilst paying homage to the radicals of yesteryear, the Weathermen and the Panthers, the film locates the punctum of the present conflict in the war on immigration, and specifically Latinos. The Latinos who have occupied California and the southern USA since before the Anglos, (albeit they were colonisers too), against whom the forces of WASP USA are now turning their guns. Benicio del Toro makes amends for his part in Sicario with a beautiful turn as a laconic radical, protecting his people from the state’s grasp. This is where the war is being waged within the USA’s borders, even if other wars are being waged on behalf of this would-be turbo capitalism in other territories in other, more horrific ways.

There’s a moment in the film where Bob is watching The Battle of Algiers. In theory it’s a very knowing, on-the-nose reference, except for the fact that the vast majority of Anderson’s public will never have heard of the film, just as they will never have heard of Pynchon. Hollywood and PTA could not produce a film like The Battle of Algiers. There’s a need for humour, glamour, car chases. PTA supplies this need. It’s a relentlessly enjoyable watch and in this way it gets past the unacknowledged financial censors. It could, were one a radical radical, be accused of extracting humour and profit from the culture war it depicts. But PTA’s sympathies are never in doubt. He knows which side he wants his bread buttered. And he recognises, in a finale which in many ways is the least Pynchonesque moment in the whole film, that there are battles to come, just as the battles being waged are a product of those that were fought (and lost?) before, in the time that Pynchon wrote Vineland. We are on the verge of times that we had hoped we could avoid, but history tells us will always return. My generation, the same as PTA’s and DiCaprio’s and Penn’s, will not be on the front line. It will be a younger generation which will have to choose which side they are on, and who will have to fight to defend their beliefs. 

the battle of algiers (w&d. gillo pontecorvo, w. franco solinas)

Doubt there is very much I could say that hasn’t been said before about this remarkable film, which seems to offer a template for political filmmaking, with percussive edit, sound and music, interweaving dramatic scenes within a historical context, that has never been adopted. Rather, political filmmaking tends to be relegated to talky TV shows where the screenwriter’s dialogue skills are put to the test, and the cinematic aesthetics remain secondary. The power of TBoA comes from the mesmeric use of sound and camera, as the viewer is taken into the radical heart of the casbah. The colonial forces, echoing events today in Palestine, seek to control the local population, but no matter how much they think they’re winning, they’re not. Wanton bombings, carefully controlled gates into and out of the ghetto: this all feels far too familiar. The need for colonial forces to regulate societies they occupy will always be confronted by an enemy for whom the collective patria has more value than an individual fate. 

midnight run (d. martin brest, w. george gallo)

Cinemateca has devoted much of its programming to US cinema this year. Here is another minor Hollywood classic. A film which is entirely constructed around character sees De Niro give one of his finest performances as a disenchanted bounty hunter, and Grodin almost upstage him as the crooked accountant De Niro has to take from NY to LA in order to collect his reward. Grodin’s performance is a thing of quiet beauty. Whereas in most buddy movies, there’s a testosterone rivalry, Grodin exudes a world-weary anti-masculinity. He is, we are told, a good guy, who stole from the mob to give to charity. This marks him out as a maverick, but his performance goes further than this, as though his character is almost actively working against the genre he’s found himself in. He thinks before he speaks. He’s quiet spoken, insistent, even whiny. He has a confidence which has nothing to do with his physical strength. He could be a character out of a Wenders’ movie. The contrast with De Niro’s typical wisecracking boludo is beautiful, and as a result the movie is far more than the sum of its action and comedic parts. There’s a sensitivity which helps it to transcend the genre, to speak about the problems of masculinity and what friendship really means.

As an aside, Brest’s career is an anomaly. He only directed seven features, including this one and the hits Beverly Hills Cop, Meet Joe Black and Scent of a Woman. Those films were made over the course of over twenty years, meaning he was far from prolific. His career appears to have died with Gigli, a Lopez-Affleck flop. Watching Midnight Run it seems surprising he only made three more movies, but perhaps this also speaks to the qualities of Gallo’s ingenious script.

the devil of the provinces (juan cárdenas, tr. lizzie davis)

There is a certain style of Latin American novel which Cárdenas’ book maps onto. An elliptical narrative with a semi-alienated protagonist. A sense of quest, to discover something which the reader realises by the midpoint of the book will never be found. A distancing device, perhaps, hinting at a post-political vacio. In this case the protagonist, a biologist, returns to a small Colombian town after fifteen years abroad. He hooks up with old friends and an ex and his former dealer. He has a job in a girls’ school which is mysterious and possibly nefarious.  His brother was a gay politician who was murdered. The novel also incorporates observations on biology, palm weevils and avocados. There’s no shortage of thought-provoking material, but as noted everything is processed through the deadpan attitude of the biologist, for whom nothing seems to matter an enormous amount. 

set my heart on fire (w. izumi suzuki, tr helen o’horan)

The protagonist of the novel goes by the same name as the author. Izumi is a model who hangs out with rock stars and makes no bones about the fact she likes getting laid. Then, half way through the book, she meets the darkly controlling Jun, a jazz guitarist. Jun is a manipulative controlling personality. Izumi is a drifter, a wil-o-the-wisp, who gets caught in his slipstream. He is abusive and ends up going insane. The first half of the novel feels as though it takes place in a limited timeframe: the second half unfolds rapidly over the course of a decade. Izumi’s descent, tied to Jun’s lunacy, is vertiginous.

It’s not hard to see why Izumi Suzuki’s writing struck a chord in the Japanese psyche. She writes with a candour that pierces the codified society. Sex, violence, drugs: nothing is held back. It’s particularly surprising to see Izumi’s wilful licentiousness and the detail the author provides, without ever seeming salacious. This is how this young woman, representative of a certain zeitgeist, lives. Japan’s social codes have perhaps always concealed a more sexualised undercurrent, the world of geishas and arrangements. Suzuki smashes through any kind of hypocrisy, offering a convincing vision of an alternative slacker society. 

los divinos (laura restrepo, tr. carolina de robertis)

It’s 17 years since I read Delirium by Restrepo, although it feels like yesterday. Our relationship to the books we read is atemporal. They function on a different plane. It’s nearly forty years since I first read Foucault, but my relationship with him hasn’t aged in the slightest. Almost everyone I knew from that era has gone, save family. But he sticks around, with his bald head and his laconic questions. Restrepo’s Delirium has always stuck in my mind as a window into Colombian culture. It’s a country I have never visited, but it forms part of the Latino universe and I have come across many Colombians in Montevideo. Post civil war, post the era of the edge-lords, Colombia might have appeared to settle down. Los Divinos offers a sclerotic take on the social divides which exist in the country, and indeed across the Latino world, where those who belong to or associate with the wealthy elite act as though they only have a passing relationship with the law. Los Divinos - the divine ones - are five over-privileged friends who are due a dose of hubris. Narrated by one of them, with not so much as a single sympathetic character, the novel has a harsh, acerbic flavour. We don’t want any of these characters to emerge unscathed and perhaps for this reason it’s a less engaging read than Delirium.

 

the trial (d. orson welles)

Welles’ version is both expressionist and baroque. Expressionist in the way it uses its Zagreb locations, its off-beam photography, its heightened acting by a stellar cast. This is in keeping with a perceived conception of how Kafka’s world might have looked (not so far removed from Soderbergh’s version of The Castle). Welles does it in style and there are many moments where the set eclipses the action. In the days before CGI, the scenes of mass typists have a demented glory, and the gargoyles and brickwork of the high nineteenth century architecture speak of the Hapsburg world Kafka was born into. Baroque, because of the mannered use of text and ponderous nature of the edit. There are no short cuts on show here, no matter how much Welles’ script has edited down the novel. Scenes play out with a papal solemnity. Welles himself, as the advocate, feels like he might be a cardinal. Women are demented and lascivious. Men are doomed to a warped, frustrated middle age. Antony Perkins strides around through all this like a lost high jumper being asked to take part in a marathon. His demise at the end, as Welles tinkers with the novel, comes as a kindly release. The spirit of Welles hangs over the film just as much as the spirit of Kafka, a monomaniacal presence which challenges the viewer to stick with his vision as the dialogue unfurls at its stately pace and the illogical narrative keeps going round in circles. 

this is not propaganda - adventures in the war against reality (peter pomerantsev)

Pomerantsev’s book is an investigation into the world which shaped the world we live in. Even though it was published less than a decade ago, it already feels as though history is running away from those pre-pandemic times when the reality of what was about to confront us was something that people were warning about, rather than living through. Pomerantsev investigates on a global basis the evolution of the post-truth world, fuelled by social media and its bot farms, by individuals like Nix for whom ethics are an offshoot of capitalism, entirely beholden to the idea of profit. In the process of which are facilitated sense-deranging attacks on reality, allowing the wanton killing of women and children, the elderly and the innocent, to be reframed as actions taken in self-defence, and promoted as such to the point that anyone who questions this logic is in danger of being excommunicated. This is the world Pomerantsev saw coming, and now it has arrived. The dangerous edges of democracy, a system beholden to the manipulation of the masses, are laid bare. The author of the book outlines his personal journey from Soviet Ukraine to the UK. His family fled from a repressive totalitarian regime towards the hope of something called ‘the west’. But the west is not an ethical construction. It is a market driven society. And now the fusion of vast wealth which the technocrats of the internet have succeeded in generating and seek to preserve, with the autocratic ambitions of wealthy men and women driven by nothing more than personal ambition, threatens to decimate the planet with an uncontrollable ferocity. Anything that stands in the way of this behemoth will be levelled. Pomerantsev sees the writing on the wall and traces the way that this is a global epidemic. But there’s a sense that his concerns have been overtaken by the actuality of the present. 

miller’s crossing (w&d the coen brothers)

Did we know, way back when, that we were witnessing the birth of a dynasty? In a world where so many filmmakers come and go, have their moment of glory and then are moved on, to TV or being a gun for hire, or obscurity, the Coen Brothers have stood out over the course of thirty years as a team that gets films made and occasionally strike gold. Miller’s Crossing, their third feature, is an assured piece of filmmaking. The Coen Brothers thrive on big casting, a heightened sense of reality and some tastefully excessive violence. It’s noticeable how Gabriel Byrne keeps bouncing back from repeated beatings, as though he was made of rubber. Then again, this feels like part of the Coen bros schtick - rubbery faces which contort, distort and then come back into some kind of regular shape, a rubbery plot that wobbles around but gets there in the end. It’s a kind of playmobile filmmaking; straining the boundaries of emotional plausibility whilst the actors charm pants off the viewers. So good to see Albert Finney in there doing his thing, one of that great generation of British/ Irish film actors that stalked the movie world and exuded charisma. (On which note and completely tangentially, RIP Terrence Stamp.)

the last seduction (d. john dahl, w. steve barancik)

Dahl’s film feels like it belongs to another era. The narrative dénouement is hinged on a deliberately provoked rape. Whilst Bridget, the femme fatale, is the agent of this rape and is using Mike’s action to her own advantage, one can’t see a film treating the dramatic action of rape in this manner now. Likewise, whilst we live in the era of the sassy female lead, it feels unlikely that a female protagonist’s strengths would be pinned on her sexuality and powers of seduction, as the title suggests. Which is not to say that seduction has ceased to exist, or that women, and men, are still likely to use their sexual attractiveness as a means to get ahead in the world. Just that this is no longer material around which a narrative might be structured. As Bridget, the femme fatale, Linda Fiorentino gives a barnstorming performance, loving the limelight and unafraid to hog it, delivering Barancik’s one-liners with a deep-fanged venom. Small town boy Mike (Peter Berg) doesn’t know what he’s got himself into. Bridget’s ingenuity is tied to the cynicism that goes with knowing how easily men can be manipulated by a stockinged leg. She knows how the world works, even when the world doesn’t want to be seen to work that way. She also knows that whether or not she triumphs in the end it can only be a pyrrhic victory: age will defeat her finally no matter what, and she needs to make the most of the time she has before that oldest enemy of all catches up with her.  

the funeral (d. abel ferrara w. nicholas st john)

Ferrara's The Funeral feels like a riposte to Coppola's Godfather. Socialist mafia battles with capital. Socialist mafia goes anti-catholic in speakeasies and whorehouses. But mafia is mafia and no matter your politics or your licentiousness, family is going to family and the villains are going to do the dirty. In truth, at a hundred minutes, it feels as though Ferrara needed at least twice the running time to tease out all the angles his story opens up. Three brothers all have their stories to be told, the narrative has to skip backwards and forwards in time, and the female characters, played by Sciorra, Rosselini and Mol are given greater protagonism than any, apart from Keaton, in Coppola's version. This is all great, and  Gallo shows what a star he might have been, but ultimately the film is always chasing the narrative's tail. Nevertheless, it's an absorbing piece of filmmaking, a worthy and undervalued addendum to the Italo-American lexicon of mafia movie making.

7 días de enero (w&d juan antonio bardem, w. gregorio morán)

Madrid, January 1977. Shortly following the death of Franco, Spain stands at a crossroads between continued autocracy (military dictatorship) and democracy. In the era when democracy meant something. Bardem’s film looks at events in the city that took place over the course of a week, when the military killed protesting students and committed a massacre of trade union activists and lawyers in Calle Atocha. Who will prevail? We know the answer to this question now. Democracy returned to Spain, and the events of the film played a part in that process. It seems astonishing that for nearly forty years, Spain was under the rule of Franco. The film is at its strongest when it shows the far right as they come together in antiseptic social surroundings or at masculine military gatherings which terminate with ‘patriotic’ singing. At other moments the film feels overlong and lacking the focus of the other film of Bardem I watched not so long ago. It feels as though the filmmaker is seeking to cram in as much information as he can. However, the importance of the film on a political level transcends its aesthetic limitations. At a time when the USA seems to be encouraging its own neo-fascist secret police to do whatever they want, it’s important to be reminded why the extreme right is so dangerous. Because it believes it has an entitlement to take the law into its own hands. One suspects the likes of Vance would have got on very well in Franco’s Spain. 

caught stealing (d. darren aronofsky, w. charlie huston)

Aronofsky has always been a visceral director, the one constant on his complex, bumpy filmmaking ride. He’s made several movies which are in their way seminal. Pi was a masterclass in low-budget first film making. Requiem for a Dream genuinely pushed at boundaries of taste and cruelty in a way few US movies ever do. Mother! Was one of those authorial ventures (like The Fountain) that few filmmakers are ever given budget to go for, and Black Swan has emerged as a low-key classic and regular touchstone for alt-pysch drama, referenced mucho in industry script development labs. Caught Stealing doesn’t lack for the director’s visceral verve. The recreating of nineties NY, pre-Guiliani, with plenty of CGI images of the twin towers laced in, adds to the vibe. Sadly, around the point where Zoe Kravitz is killed off, the narrative begins to flag. The last half or so is a case of going through the motions, kicking and screaming. Caught Stealing feels like an assemblage, with some lovely cameos (Bad Bunny! Doctor Who!) and plenty of colour, but it can’t quite leap through the hoops of a third act whose denouement feels as though it might have been generated by AI. 

the fraud (zadie smith)

Hard to know how to place The Fraud. It’s a novel about London, about Victorian England, about being a writer, about slavery, about being black in a white world. It’s also about being a Scottish spinster who has a kinky relationship with her cousin and is in a menage a trois with the cousin’s wife. That’s before we get to the narrative spine of the novel, which is the recounting of the factual scandal of the Tichbourne Claimant which shook up Victorian Britain. There’s a lot going as the novel jumps around 40 years of history, looking to land punches left, right and centre. Sometimes they land, but at other times it feels as though the novel’s most urgent themes run the risk of getting lost in the wood of highbrow entertainment, as Smith wrestles with a sickening heritage whilst keeping the reader amused. 

land of the snowmen (norman lock)

Land of the Snowmen is said to be written by George Belden, who participated on Scott’s disastrous 1905 mission to Antarctica. Belden and his fellow explorers go quietly mad in the icy wastes. They have visions and are visited by ghosts. Belden documents all this with a wry, tragic charm. It’s not going to end well. However, despite being attributed to Belden, the book is clearly a capricious work of fiction. Belden is an invention and the whole account is a work of the imagination of the writer Norman Lock, attributed as editor. This is a winsome project, steeped in the myths of the explorers, albeit a wispy, snowy thing. 

seconds (d. john frankenheimer, w. lewis john carlino, david ely)

Seconds has a bravura opening sequence. A distorted face in close up. Approximating the surreal. It triggers a lengthy sequence, the likes of which the algorithms would surely nix nowadays, as a suburban banker comes home to receive a call from a dead friend. This will eventually lead to the man’s death and subsequent reincarnation, as Rock Hudson, a socialite painter. It’s an out-there premise for an out-there movie. There are several scenes which could be straight out of The Substance. But Frankenheimer uses extended narrative beats to go further. A Bacchanalian Californian wine-pressing festival. A party that is reminiscent of Antonioni’s La Notte. There’s a Fellini-esque air to much of the action, underpinning the supernatural premise. Although it’s deliberately slow-paced, the director luxuriating in the extended sequences, there’s a relentless sense of madness which seems to inhabit Hudson, whose  woodenness makes the weirdness all the stranger, all the more off-beat. It’s far from a perfect film but it’s fascinating to see in this and Mickey One the kind of psychological complexity these sixties-era USA directors were reaching for, a complexity which got left by the wayside when Lucas and the marketing boys came to town.

mickey one (d. arthur penn, w. alan surgal)

Penn’s maverick film is all Beatty, jazz score, close-ups. Giant faces loom up out of the screen in black and white, like mountain ranges. The film uses dissolves, fast edits, foregoing regular dramatic scenes for something with shaper edges. The audience is asked to play catch-up as it tries to keep up with the story of Beatty’s paranoia, a comedian who’s got on the wrong side of the mob. It’s filmmaking which is dazzling and exerts a modernism not just stylistically but also in the way it presents its leading man, a lothario who’s gone off the rails, stepbrother to James Caan’s Sonny. Beatty is all wired tension, constantly on the brink of overacting, just as everything in this remarkable film is in danger of going over the brink. Like the weird Yves Tinguely sculpture whose destruction is given an entire sequence with no narrative significance, it’s a machine with so many bells and whistles that you lose count of them all. And yet in this excess, in the intricacies of the edit, the jazz score, featuring Stan Getz, in the machinations of the plot, there lurks a film which feels unique, a high point in the transition from stylised black and white to the lurid colour schemes of the seventies. 

dr strangelove (w&d. kubrick, w. terry southern, peter george)

My mum and dad went to see this film on one of their first dates at the Kilburn Classic Cinema. The bomb didn’t get them, although the fear was very real back then. I suspect they came out laughing at Peter Sellers, rather than being gripped by paranoia. Not something my dad suffered from excessively. Sellers’ Group Captain Lionel Mandrake is a delicious comic construction, every inflexion spot on, eyebrows raised at the perfect moment as he grapples with Sterling Hayden’s unhinged General Ripper. In truth, the film is highly theatrical, switching between three locations, the airforce base, the war room and the plane that will drop the bomb. It feels more like comic strip agit-prop than a serious critique of nuclear policy, (see The War Game), glued together with some beautiful shots of B52 bombers flying over Siberia. It’s a long way from Kubrick’s later heavyweight filmmaking, but the combination of humour and fear is always engaging. 

reminiscences of a journey to lithuania (d.jonas mekas)

Mr Amato urged me to accompany him to watch a film by Mekas, a name I have often come across without ever sitting down to watch a film of his. The film takes places in three sections. Mekas in New York, post war, seeking to come to terms with exile. Mekas’ return voyage in 1971 to Lithuania. And, as a coda, a short section on the visit to Vienna which followed the Lithuania trip.

The filmmaking style is informal, homemade. Mekas went everywhere with his camera and filmed everything. His elderly mother, a trip to the Catskills, the dance after the meeting of the collectivist farm. In many ways it seems prophetic of the current era, where everyone documents everything, and lives are captured and mapped out as they are lived. Or at least, a curated version of a life. The images are grainy, beautiful, jagged. It is an assemblage, an act of editing, pulling together the loose strings of the journey to form a tapestry. It is also a cine pobre, stepsister to the Poor Theatre or Arte Povera. Mekas reveals you don’t need a team and lights and gaffers to be a filmmaker, and as such the film reveals how cinema is capable of becoming an egalitarian art form. The other side of that coin is one no-one foresaw in 1972: everyone in the whole wide world is a filmmaker now. What Mekas reveals in the film is the need to both edit and curate. Images acquire another kind of weight/ humour/ magic, when juxtaposed with other images. There’s a difference between a visual information soup and a visual poem. 

faraway the southern sky (joseph andras, tr. simon leser)

Curiously, Faraway the Southern Sky is billed as a novel. It tells the tale of a narrator who is researching the years that Ho Chi Minh, who at that stage went by various alias’, spent in Paris. The novel recounts the narrator’s wandering through Paris as he seeks out the sites where Ho lived, and digs into the archives to find documentation of his time in the French capital, from 1918 to 1924. It is full of observations from the time of the author’s writing, about the gilets jaunes, about the changes to the geo-dynamics of Paris since Ho’s day. It doesn’t feel like a novel. It feels like the account of a flaneur with an interest in Marxism, the colonial struggle and the workings of power. It is a slight book, but anchored around the search for Ho Chi Minh, it is captivating. The level of espionage and state security around Ho, at that point no more than a dreamer, an anti-colonial wannabe, is striking. The police state was not invented by the Nazis or the Chinese or Trump. It has been around forever. Ho comes across as an elusive, idealistic soul, almost a flaneur in his own right. 

mulholland drive (w&d lynch)

Amidst all the playfulness and Lynchian tropes, there’s a classic hard-boiled LA detective story at play. LA is a city defined in no small degree by the idea of the detective, from Chandler to Elroy to Altman to Houston to Polanski to (even) Pynchon. The list could go on. The subtext of is that, in a city of power and image, there are secrets, things hidden behind the arras. In Mulholland Drive, Lynch gleefully joins the party. His heroine sets out to uncover a mystery and in the process she finds herself drawn into peril. As ever with Lynch it’s not quite that simple: the heroine has an alter-ego who might or might not be her in another dimension. Is she the author of the killing she is trying to solve? The questions add a piquancy to the story, steering it away from the formulaic. But the narrative drive of the mystery propels the movie through the directorial detours and flights of fancy. Lynch also reveals another LA, the Latino city that lies beneath the WASP creation. A different kind of tragic past which takes the viewer to places where Anglo Hollywood normally fears to tread.

a weekend in new york (benjamin markovits)

Almost a decade ago I read You Don’t Have to Live Like This by Markovits, which I remember as a wistfully astute dissection of Obama era USA. Ten years on any US idealism that might have existed has been subsumed by the geriatric administrations of Biden and Trump. A Weekend in New York sees the writer focusing on a family weekend in up market New York, as a B-List tennis player competes at the US Open and his intellectual powerhouse family come to watch. The book, as the title would suggest, is set over a single weekend, before the tennis player’s opening match on the Monday. Markovits takes us in painstaking detail through the hours, switching his attention from one family member to the next. The family bickers and their vulnerabilities are put on show. Markovits isn’t interested in conclusions, there is no real narrative (we never learn the result of the tennis match), rather his is a snapshot of a world, perhaps Knausgaard-esque (not having read the big K) or Woolfian. It’s faintly addictive, perhaps like watching a tennis match, as the reader’s head turns from side to side, but these are not easy characters to engage with, with their lightly-taken sense of privilege, their views of Central Park and expensive brunches. These people are on the fringes of the rulers of the western world, nabobs in an imperial system, but the writer seems to shy away from casting any kind of judgement, as if he were another family member, unwilling to rock the boat. The most intriguing strand in the book is the one around the elder bother, Nathan, who is investigating the legal framework for the state’s right to unilaterally assassinate via drone strike. It feels as though, in this era of para-legal playstation killing, Markovits is touching a nerve that is both fascinating and urgent, but he pulls his punches, and the novel leaves us little the wiser with regard to the issue or the state of the nation under discusion. 

Ps - publishing this at the time of the US Open happening, it does feel as though Markovits might have delved more into the world of tennis, the hook upon which the novel is hung. The excesses of the tennis circuit, the unbridled arrogance of globalisation, the egos… it all feels as though it would be ripe for the author’s analytical intelligence. 

güeros. (w&d. alonso ruizpalacios, w. gibrán portela, alan page)

In some corner somewhere I had been advised that Güeros was one of the top films of the 21st c so I went on an expedition to the underbelly of cinema, the Sala Chaplin, which is a story in itself, and caught it, running into Felix, both of us noting that the Cinemateca was un poco flojo in its programación this week. If this is an anecdotal, cotidiano entrance to this review, then that feels just right. Güeros is more or less a 24 hour trip through a day in the life of Mexico City (DF), from the badlands to the occupied university to a posh restaurant to the out of town high rise estate. And much more beside. Ruizpalacios endows the film with a visual poetic which means a cabbage can have as much weight as a brick. There’s the best of the  film school aesthetic at work, a joy in detail and the close-up, all lovingly framed in black and white. The narrative feels like it owes a debt to Los Detectives Salvajes, as Tomás, his older brother, Sombra, their friend Santos and finally the charismatic student leader, Ana, go on a mission to find a lost singer with a stylised name, a man who made Dylan cry. The story goes round bends and down dales (with the use of a beaten up car fundamental in the sprawl of DF) and the film retains a lyrical, affectionate feel. There are some very simple get-outs - ie at once point to escape from danger the crew just run away and get in a car and drive off, which reminds us screenwriters that sometimes you don’t need to overthink the narrative: if the film has engaging characters, visual flair and the sense of an ending, you can cut the odd corner. Ruizpalacios, I note, went on to make the arthouse hit, The Kitchen, co-written by none other than Arnold Wesker, so he’s a shrewd customer, and a great addition to the amazing Mexican canon of the 21st century. 

accattone (w&d pier paolo pasolini, w. sergio citti)

A second Pasolini film in a few weeks is a direct contrast to Theorem. Where that felt like a calculated, ordered and indeed theoretical piece of filmmaking, Accattone, made only seven years previously, has a chaotic, rambling feel, reflecting the life of the eponymous protagonist. Accattone is a pimp, and not a very successful one. He comes from a culture where it’s considered undignified to do a day’s honest work. His gang hang out drinking on the outskirts of Rome, in streets where the after effects of the war are still all-apparent. Accattone is both charismatic and unsympathetic, an existential proletarian anti-hero. Pasolini paints an unsentimental portrait of Roman low life which is perhaps stepfather to Coppola’s Godfather. Italian machismo in full flight, with women as second class citizens and a life of crime the only honorable profession. It’s a raggedly brilliant tale, part of a European cinema which, like Varda’s film, was seeking to create characters with greater psychological depth. 

cleo from 5 to 7 (w&d agnès varda)

This film, a little like the Haneke film I recently watched in London, is perhaps another of my Ur-texts. (As might be Performance, so this is a year for the father/mother texts). I would guess I had only seen Cleo once before, but the simplicity and urgency of the filmmaking left its mark. To tell the story of a woman, a character, in 90 minutes, which are more or less 90 minutes of her life, a way of sticking to the unities of time, place and action, is to create a lightning flash of a film, to stop and capture time. Varda’s Cleo has no great profound storyline to pursue. She’s scared she’s got a fatal illness, but we the audience are never sure whether this might be real or part of the drama she creates, part of her beauty and appeal. Aside from this she drifts around Paris, meeting friends and lovers. It’s inconsequential, but that’s part of its charm. Where film narratives seem so dependent on dramatic tropes, Varda resists, letting the star and the camera and the city guide us through the timeline. Indeed, in many ways the film, with the brilliant cinematography of Paul Bonis, Alain Levent and Jean Rabier, is a love letter to Paris, a Paris which still feels like it might be the city of the flaneur, a set on which its inhabitants play out their roles, blessed to be framed against the backdrop the designer has given them. 

the deserter (enard, tr. charlotte mandell)

I read a long essay on this book after finishing it, detailing the way Enard has been a defender of the idea of Europe, a Europe that stretches from Galway to Beirut, a Europe to which the Maghreb countries also belong. It’s a particular vision, which permits him to incorporate the Arab intellectual world, thereby paying homage to these cultures, so formative in the shaping of Europe, so constantly misrepresented as the colonial vision of Western Europe focused on mercantile expansion came to dominate. This is the fourth book of Enard’s I have read and I recognise, as the essay writer observed, that part of the fascination of his texts is precisely this investigation into what it means to call something European, above and beyond the economic or even socio-political perspectives.

The Deserter, as the writer of the essay observed, perhaps offers a more pessimistic vision than his previous books. It dovetails two narratives. Firstly, that of a deserter in an unnamed war, fleeing for his life. He connects with a traumatised woman, also fleeing, and her donkey. The prose and the story are stark, elemental. Enard makes much play of the sensory elements of their experiences. It might be described as a bleakly poetic text, albeit one which contains, perhaps, a hint of optimism, at the last. The deserter’s tale is interwoven with the account of the life of an East German mathematician, who survived Buchenwald, and who bought into the flawed aspirations of the DDR. His story is narrated by his daughter, and the kernel of her account is set on a boat near Berlin on the fateful date of 11/09/01, that foreboding hinge of two centuries. One steeped in atrocities and idealism, the other in a world without values. The daughter, now 71, is writing her account looking back at events from 2022, just as the war in Ukraine is igniting. These references suggest a fearfulness in Enard’s writing which hasn’t been seen before. As he looks into the future he sees more of the same: a vision out of a Sarah Kane play, an unravelling of all that has been stitched together to create that thing we call European civilisation. A process which has been in the process of beginning, of course, for centuries, in the concentration camps and the gulags, and the colonial misadventures.

The Deserter is a strange, slightly unsatisfactory novel, which feels as though it’s reaching for something that the writer cannot quite grasp. But an unsatisfactory Enard novel still makes for an absorbing, provocative read. He is a writer who uses the novel as a means to flex our thought processes, to make us question, if we see ourselves as European, what the hell that means, or if we don’t, who the hell those people might really be. Because, filtered through his imagination, they sure as hell are not the people they think they are.

Have looked up the essay - the essayist is Nicholas Dames and it can be found here.