the navigator (d. donald crisp, buster keaton, w. clyde bruckman, joseph a. mitchell, jean c. havez)

I had a friend at school who adored Keaton. That noble clown face, that relentless desire to find the next laugh. The clown who ended up becoming a muse to Samuel Beckett. In truth, clowns are always sadder and wiser than they pretend to be. To choose laughter is a philosophical standpoint. Keaton’s sad face always reminds us that no matter how funny the gag, there will be things in this world that will never be funny. It’s a shame that in amongst the beautiful underwater sequence, worthy of Méliès, and the disarming storm sequence, we also get prima facie post-colonial cannibals rocking up, but this was a different time. Keaton’s humour, like Chaplin’s is a critique of social structures and by implication a vindication of the little man, the underclass, the ones that are never going to become superheroes or millionaires. As such, it spoke to people in the western world who still knew what poverty meant, and reacted to someone who stood up for them.  I can imagine my grandfather, 19 years old, watching The Navigator and finding its societal critique hilarious, an escape from the poverty of his Ipswich youth. 

my weil (lars iyer)

Iyer’s novel is at once maddening and brilliant. It’s a sprawling anti-novel, deliberately resisting plot (although not completely successfully); constantly questioning its own existence, either through the author’s wilful detours or through his characters’ refusal to engage with their apparent narrative journeys. A group of PhD students in Manchester, questioning everything, rebels without a cause, trying to find a way through the jungle of sorrow that is today’s digital modernity. There is gold in them there hills, and Iyer’s text is a feast of thought and philosophy, crammed into the rainy streets of Manchester, where they flaneur around, getting on each others nerves, making each other laugh, getting wasted, playing badminton, even helping each other out. They are a community and we engage with them in a fashion that is, perhaps, disconcertingly orthodox.

I have never read Normal People, worried that it would be like the one episode I caught of the TV series on the plane in January. A kind of pseudo-intellectual bonkfest, masquerading as highbrow. To repeat, I’ve never read the novel, so have no idea whether the episode I saw is anything other than the inevitable betrayal of complex ideas in order to garner ratings. What I can say is I imagine My Weil is the alt-Normal People. A novel that revels in its (pseudo-) intellectualism to such a degree that it wilfully seeks to alienate its readers, to make them want to revolt at the author’s relentless demonstration of his particular brilliance. A novel that, it might even be said, doesn’t want itself to be read. So, of course, I loved it. 

historias del kronen (w&d montxo armendáriz, w. josé ángel mañas)

Kronen is a Madrid bar, and this film is an adaptation of Mañas’ novel of that name. It centres on a group of hedonist friends who meet there in the 90s, get wasted on beer, coke and 24 hour partying. There’s more than a hint of Brett Easton Ellis about all this, and the lead, Carlos, played by the striking Juan Diego Botto, is something of an American Psycho, a party boy who makes a merit out of his lack of morals or values. He’s beautiful, girls love him, he has his posse, but he’s also an out and out arsehole. Over the course of a Madrid summer he succeeds in pissing everyone off, capping it off with the manslaughter of one of his friends.

In truth this is more of a mood piece than a narrative piece. The film dwells on the hedonism of a generation liberated from the yoke of Franquismo their parents laboured under. (Although Bardem’s Calle Mayor perhaps shows a lifestyle not so dissimilar from 40 years earlier, just as Jonás Trueba’s La Virgen de Agosto also dwells on the idle pleasures of a Madrid summer.) Armendáriz delights in getting sweaty with his sexy young stars as they nightcrawl through the city. As the film ambles towards its predictable denouement, it starts to lose its shape. (On the evidence of this and 27 Hours, endings are not Armendáriz’s forte). Nevertheless, it offers a depiction of a new, apolitical generation, lost on the dance floor, with nothing left to fight for or care about. 

27 horas (w&d montxo armendáriz w. elías querejeta)

San Sebastian today has an affluent feel. Famed for its gastronomy and its cultural life. A tourist hotspot, an exclusive European enclave. Armendáriz’s film opens with a tracking shot, presumably filmed from a helicopter, of the bay of San Sebastian, with its beaches and waterfront, homing in on a clock which gives the time as 7am. It’s the start of a tragic 27 hours in the life of the film’s protagonist, Jan, a charismatic student junkie. Only this isn’t now, it’s back before the euro existed, when San Sebastian was still a fishing town, suffering from economic decline. The film tells the story of Jon and Maite, a pair of doomed Burroughsian lovers. Maite is played by Maribel Verdú, who would later figure as the object of the lust of Bernal and Luna in Y Tu Mama También, and a young Antonio Banderas also has a cameo, suggesting that Armendáriz was a great talent spotter. Their lowkey junkie lifestyle is juxtaposed with life in the city, where unemployment is high, riots are commonplace, and the only possibilities are to work in the fishing industry.

The film depicts this industry with a documentary flourish, getting in on the quayside and the fish market. The way that daily life in the city is captured, the bars and the dark, damp streets, is convincing. European naturalism blending with heightened Spanish drama. Cinema’s capacity to reveal the world as it is, the moment the camera runs, is one of its core strengths, something that doesn’t require a vast budget. The contrast between San Sebastián then and today is astonishing. Spain as it emerged from Franquismo was a far cry from the turbo-charged euro economy it possesses, or aspires to possess, today. Maite’s apartment overlooks the sea, and one imagines that today it would be worth a small fortune; likewise a meal in the restaurant that Jon’s parents run in a medieval quarter of the city would probably now be enough for a month’s worth of Jon’s fix. In which case it might be argued that things are better now than they were then, although it hasn’t stopped the youth from feeling disenfranchised and resorting to drugs to help them get through their days and nights.

27 Horas makes a great companion piece to Saura’s Deprisa, Deprisa. Also worth noting the brilliance of the table-football scene, where Jon plays against Banderas’ Rafa, his dealer and love rival for Maite. The table-football match is imbued with the drama of a penalty shoot-out and the skill of the players as they manipulate the stick-men is perfectly realised. It elevates this simple bar game into something epic, laced with an absurd humour. The young Banderas is great and you can see the seeds of his stardom being planted.

Finally: not a word of Euskari is spoken, so far as I could discern. The politics is implicit in the presence of the police and the riots at the edge of the story, but the film focuses on the issue of the disaffection of youth, rather than the wider causes of this disaffection. Having said which the scene where Yan is driven out into the middle of a riot is brilliantly filmed. 

the terrorist. (w&d edward yang, w. hsiao-yeh)

I only managed to catch one film in the Cinemateca Yang season. The Terrorist, which I dimly remembered having seen on MUBI once upon a time, is a beautifully layered work. A novelist leaves her husband (in order to write?) for a former lover. The husband starts to construct links between the novel she publishes and real life. It leads him to a seedy underground world, where a photographer, an extortionist pimp and his female accomplice operate. She is the bait which allows them to steal from rich men. Where do the lines between the fictional and the real cross, all of which is occurring within the context of the fictional, which the film is? And who are the terrorist, to whom the accomplice is connected, as the photographer discovers. The levels of story within story are almost Borgesian. It’s the kind of astute, literate, playful film that Anglo-Saxon culture tends to shy away from, unless there’s some kind of sentimental kernel, something which Yang decidedly resists. 

maria, maria (marytza k rubio)

Rubio’s collection of short stories dabbles with the dark side. One particularly engrossing tale, Tijuca, deals with a woman taking her decapitated lover’s head and burying it in the jungle, according to his instructions. There’s a gothic beauty to this and other tales, many of which seem to emerge from the twisted soil of Calexico. Because these are tales from a lost land, the Mexican North America, a Chicano vision which folds the Yankee psyche into the stranger pulse from across the border, stretching down from the isthmus to the jungles of the Amazon. There was a time when the southern states of the USA belonged to a different consciousness, and in Rubio’s stories we get a glimpse of what that might have been. 

maria (d.larrain, w stephen knight)

Pablo, we’ve got another one for you. 

Si? Cuéntame.

Woman, beautiful, emblematic, tragic death…

Me gusta.

Some great scenes - JFK, Onassis -

Lindo.

Angelina is on board, so it’s A-List -

Fenomenal.

You get to do lots of fancy tracking shots -

Impecable

Tasteful but popular, highbrow but multiplex -

Bueno, un poco Friedman, pero eso es Hollywood, after all -

Big global narrative but essentially apolitical -

Entiendo.

You’re the go-to man for the tragic Clytemnestra narrative -

Por supuesto.

What do you say?

¿Por que no?

Having said all of which I enjoyed Callas, with its slightly offbeat narrative structure and dialogue beats, with its highlighting of the secondary characters, with its predictability. Like Onassis, I have no real interest in opera, like Onassis I could drive a boat through the gaps in the timeline and the sketchiness of the supposed biographical elements; like her amiable servants, I am happy to look the other way and not see what one imagines were the less regal aspects of her behaviour. Jolie holds the whole thing together with a mannered aplomb, and although it never hits the highest dramatic notes, it’s an intelligent, understated take on a sprawling story. 

the big goodbye (sam wasson)

Wasson’s book narrates the story of Chinatown, the film. How it came to be conceived, developed, made, distributed. It focuses on four key figures: Bob Towne, screenwriter, Robert Evans, producer, Polanski, director and Nicholson. In a sense the book is a tragedy, a paean to a world that might have been but never was, due to the obvious flaws of these four key players, but also because of the changing face of Hollywood and, by implication, the drift within the USA towards a more stupid vision of what it aspired to be as a nation/ culture. More commerce, less art. The balance between these two poles of a film’s production has always been a delicate one, film being an industry as well as an artform. Wasson describes how Chinatown’s success as a model of a certain kind of Hollywood filmmaking was the result of Evans’ indulgence and patronage, a production model which, even as the film was being released, was already in the process of being disassembled. For those interested in this complex equation, Wasson’s book is a masterly guide. The book doesn’t shy away from the Polanski issue, laying bare his crimes. However, it does look to contextualise this within the framework of the director’s life, noting the tragedies which befell him from birth, his mother killed in a concentration camp and the later murder of Sharon Tate and his unborn child. All the characters, save perhaps Nicholson, emerge ultimately as monsters of one kind or another, the product and victims of a kind of high Roman empire Hollywood epoch, where excess and wealth were celebrated, but whose fruits were a succession of films engaging with the artform in a manner that has never been equalled. Nicholson is described as a Falstaffian character within this network, at once vain, generous and brilliant. 

ukamau (w&d jorge sanjinés, w. óscar soria)

Sanjinés is not a well known name in Anglo- Saxon circles. Yet he has been one of the most consistently interesting filmmakers from this side of the world for decades, exerting a strong social conscious in his films. Ukamau, which translated from the Aymara, means something along the lines of ‘That’s how it is’, is one of his earliest films. Andrés Mayta leaves behind his wife, Sabina, when he goes to market. Whilst he is away, Ramos rapes and murders her. Andrés wants revenge, but knows the police won’t be interested and the indigenous social code forbids acts of violent retribution. The film, whilst showing the world of the Aymara on the Isla de Sol in lake Titicaca, slowly plays out to the moment when Andrés Mayta finally takes revenge, far from his own territory. The subtext of the tale is clearly about the abuse of the indigenous peoples by the colonial arrivalists. Whilst there is nothing too subtle about this, the depiction of Andrés Mayta’s moral dilemma is artfully described, and the insight into the world of the Aymara is beautifully shown. It was reminiscent of Rossellini or Paulo Rocha, as well as, (observed by Sñr Amato), Mark Jenkins’ Bait.