mrs dalloway (virginia woolf)

The other day we walked through Bloomsbury and saw a sign for a Dalloway court, or some other confection made up to honour Woolf’s protagonist. Even though Mrs Dalloway doesn’t live in Bloomsbury, she lives in Westminster, and she never goes there. This seems to reflect the way that Dalloway (and perhaps Woolf herself) have become signifiers which might not have that much to do with their original essence. It’s not clear to what extent the author even likes her protagonist, a woman who has chosen an easy metropolitan life above any bohemian  instinct she might once have had. Who has rejected the more dangerous Peter Walsh and married Richard, a minor member of parliament, someone who couldn’t be more establishment if he tried. The Prime Minister comes to her party. She’s a far cry from the ideal of Bloomsbury independence and self-publishing. The emotional heartbeat of the book, surely influenced by Joyce, is the tragic returning soldier and his Italian wife. The soldier suffers from shellshock, or PTSD in today’s terms, and his delirium is at odds with the addled comfort of Dalloway’s life. When news of his death infiltrates her party, she feels resentment. A resentment at the realities of politics and history intervening on her idyllic set-up. Which in reality is far from idyllic, as she has lost touch with Walsh and her friend Sara Seyton, the two real conduits for any kind of emotional or artistic life she might have lead. Dalloway has been mirrored onto Woolf, but she feels like a vacuous copy. The sort of lady who lunches that would now be found in Notting Hill and environs rather than Westminster.

This mirrors the way that Woolf has been appropriated as an exemplar of a certain kind of studied, pseudo-aristo, pseudo-bohemian Englishwoman. An image that lurks at the edges of brands like Marks and Spencers and Laura Ashley. She has been appropriated by the marketeers of this type of ghoulish loveliness, to be consumed by the Mrs Dalloways of her day. Walsh, whose underwhelming career has played out in India, as part of the great colonial project, feels an extreme ambivalence about this England to which he has just returned. “Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage!"

At the same time, Woolf’s prose contains the lyricism of poetry. The most vivid moments are reserved for Septimus, the shellshocked soldier, and it’s via his shellshocked voice that the writer achieves an Eliot-esque song: “Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.”

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“It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

sentimental value (w&d joachim trier, w. eskil vogt)

We watched the film at the Ritzy, a cinema which used to be one of my many London homes, but one I hadn’t visited for almost a decade. Given this the title seemed more than  appropriate. The film itself made me think of Trueba’s Volveréis. A film within a film, the overbearing shadow of a father. The ghost of Bergman, perhaps. As well as the observation that this kind of measured, serious cinema-making, which to an extent wears its heart on its sleeve, is the preserve of a European mindset, one which, like the house within the film which is a kind of church for the protagonists, feels almost out of time, in need a makeover. The most curious scene within the house (revealed within the shot not to be the actual house but a re-creation on a sound stage) is the final image, where it has undergone an IKEA makeover. The more ramshackle charm of the absent mother’s house is turned into something sleek, clean lines, graphic design. For some this new version of the house will be an upgrade. For others, it will be a reduction to a norm. What exactly this says about the film Gustav is finally making with his daughter, or the film Trier himself is making, is hard to tell. An ironic commentary? Or a declaration of faith in the existence of a new future, where this type of film will continue to be made, and these kinds of filmmakers will continue to be financed? It also provoked the thought that Trier’s cinema might have become so fashionable and lauded precisely because it is the kind of cinema that the Anglo-Saxon world recognises it is incapable of producing. His films are rare, exotic gems from a distant stratosphere. 

the book of blam (aleksandar tišma tr michael henry heim)

The Book of Blam was Tisma’s first novel in a trilogy. In some ways, having already read Kapo, it feels as though the author must have been building up towards the extremes of the later novel. The Book of Blam, set in Novi Sad, is a circuitous read, stitching together diverse fragments taken from the life of the book’s protagonist, Blam, tracing his ancestry, his lost love life, his failures, his escape from the pogrom, but also the fate of his family and friends, almost all of whom died during the war. As stated, this feels like a less traumatic entry point into Tišma’s writing, which, given the cruelties the book relates, seems astonishing. Tišma’s even handedness in describing events in Novi Sad during the war is extraordinary. 

l’histoire de souleymane (w&d boris lojkine, w. delphine agut)

The second screen at the Ipswich Film Theatre is small enough to make one miss Cinemateca and question whether it’s worth spending ten quid to watch something you could project larger on your wall. However, the cinema is also half-full on a bitterly cold night, and this engenders the sense of a communal experience which reminds one why it is still worth it. Lojkine’s film is a classic piece of neo-realism, following a day and a half in the life of Souleymane, an illegal immigrant from Guinea, trying to get by in Paris. The line between documentary and fiction feels suitably fine, and the film feels credible, even when the narrative takes advantage of every possible twist to make his day as bad as possible. If this smacks of script development, the film wraps up with a brilliant scene where Souleymane states his case for asylum to a sceptical if sympathetic female official. The scene is a long dialogue scene, but we as the audience are right inside Souleymane’s experience, and look on with the same pained hopelessness as the interviewer. This is the brass tacks of the world, the place where life-changing decisions are made, where the pitch has to be more than perfect, it has to be authentic. The scene is theatrical, urgent and compelling. For a small moment in our privileged world we get to live, from one side of the fence or another, the arbitrary cruelty of our geo-political system. 

martyr (kaveh akbar)

Akbar’s novel is a tremulous US-Iranian tome, featuring a maudlin poet and a cunning plot twist. It’s a novel that meanders, drifting between scenes from Indiana, Iran and New York. It might be described as a coming-of-age tale, even if Cyrus, the protagonist, is nearly thirty. But he’s a loser, baby, and this is the story of his coming to terms with being an immigrant and a slacker, as he seeks out the secrets of his family history, supposedly left behind in the unknown lands of the orient which he has never visited. The novel is punctuated by Cyrus/Akbar’s poems, and held together by a thread that pretends to deal with Martyrdom, as the title suggests, even if Cyrus’s declarations in favour of martyrdom lack credibility, and feel as though they come from the US side of his nature, rather than the Iranian. He’s too comfortable in his uncomfortable skin for us ever to really believe that he would do anything more extreme than catch a plane to New York. One remains with the lingering query of how different his journey and the novel might have been had he taken a plane to Tehran instead. 

bass instinct (two fingas)

Bass Instinct is set in nineties London. Its protagonist is a cycle courier stroke DJ stroke Ladies Man. Much of the book is couched in the terms of a black macho identity, where women are little more than bodies and the music and the weed is all that makes life worth living. As much as a novel, this feels like a document of a time and a place, that esoteric world of clubs and high rises, of men and women doing humdrum jobs by day before transforming into romantic superstars when they head out into the glory of the city’s nightlife. This encapsulates the bittersweet glamour of living in one of the world’s great cities, where your mere allegiance to that tribe appears to endow you with magical powers, in spite of having little to back up that endorphic sensation.

 

patria (homeland) (fernando aramburu, tr alfred macadam)

Patria is a phenomenon as much as a novel, the fate of books that get adapted into blockbuster TV series’. The doorstopper book relates the Basque independence conflict through the fate of two families, whose friendship is destroyed by politics and ideology. It’s a saga, which reveals the way in which ETA split the Basque world in two  and the novel reflects this, skipping backwards and forwards in time in clipped, syncopated chapters.

 

yek tasadef sadeh/ it was just an accident (d. jafar panahi)

It Was Just an Accident opens with all the hallmarks of Iranian cinema: neorealism, long scenes in cars, an opaque layer of mystery. It also won the Palme D’Or, an instant source of scepticism. However, I would suggest its roots are more tied to that rare genre, the camper van drama, which includes Little Miss Sunshine and the Sorin’s Historias Minimas. In Panahi’s tale, the minivan contains five clearly defined characters and a kidnapped torturer. Unless the kidnapper, driver and owner of the van, Vahid, has made a mistake and kidnapped an innocent man. This becomes a twisted road movie, which is also a meditation on state abuse and revenge. Panahi’s narrative has a straightforward, traditional brilliance: we need to know if the kidnapped man is indeed the torturer, and if he is what actions his victims will take. It deserves all the garlands and prizes it has received. Cineastes don’t need to spend big bucks to construct a film which is gripping and thought-provoking. The irony is that this film is reflective of issues in so many countries: the next night we went to see a documentary about the Uruguayan dictatorship, and Panahi’s story speaks eloquently to that time: the cruelty and damage inflicted by state terrorism on defenceless people who might, one day, seek retribution.

three days of the condor (d. sydney pollack, w. james grady, lorenzo semple jr, david rayfiel)

At the time of writing, the USA is on the verge of attacking Venezuela. Since Pollack’s film was released, the USA has invaded Iraq, and intervened in Libya.

Redford is a CIA desk jockey whose job is to analyse literature for clues of global turbulence. He stumbles across a text linking Iraq, Libya and Venezuela without at first joining the dots. But his discovery triggers the summary execution of his colleagues. Someone desperately needs to make sure that what Redford has discovered doesn’t get out. The narrative plot points might be tenuous, but the underlying thesis is as valid as ever. At the end of the film Redford confronts the head of the maverick CIA within a CIA - and realises it’s all about the oil. Same as it ever was.

Besides its ongoing geopolitical resonance, Three Days of the Condor remains a terrific thriller, blessed by extravagantly good Hollywood performances from Redford, Dunaway and Von Sydow. Pollack’s camera roams New York, with a protagonical role for the World Trade Centre, where the CIA office is based. Dunaway and Redford somehow manage to convince in their star-crossed one-night stand. This is a Hollywood thriller par excellence, which also happens to be an endlessly relevant treatise on the political systems of the past 50 years.

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As I post this, as ever weeks after watching the film, the USA has just bombed Venezuela.