doe-eyed critic

nine muses (w&d john akomfrah)

2012-01-27T03:21:00.000-08:00

Figures in fierce coats stand braced against the cold. These are the immigrants. The ones who came to this country, left the sun behind, and now have to contend with the snow and the ice, find a place in a new world, join the madness.

There's some riveting camerawork, as these figures face lakes, open roads, the North. This is a portrait of Britain, seen from the skewed angle of the...

Hang on, I thought, about 45 minutes in. That's not Scotland! That's not Loch Maree! All those 4x4s aren't in Britain. Those traffic signs look kind of... American? Indeed, as my learned colleague observed later. It's all part of the metaphor. The immigrant confronting the barren cold... I'd got this. I just thought the barren cold was British. Which is what all the beautifully selected archive footage implies. I mean, this is a film about the experience of being an immigrant in Britain, isn't it?

So the subtlety of the use of Alaska as a metaphor went over my head. It seemed to me that the filmmakers had received a hefty grant and made the most of it. By going to Alaska. This is a point that Nine Muses makes somewhat relentlessly, as the Alaskan footage recurs and recurs and recurs and recurs. It's cold out there. You need a good coat.

This footage is punctuated by the above mentioned archive footage and series of increasingly ponderous readings taken from the "Naxos Classical Archive". After the initial Paradise Lost quotation which seems appropriate, we then get Dante, Hamlet, Richard 2, Beckett and Joyce. All of which succeeds in elevating this film into a work of massive pretentiousness, which, were it to have been done by a German featuring Goethe, Kant et al would probably have been laughed out of court.

There is something refreshing about the director's take and presentation of the immigrant process. Buried deep within Nine Muses, under the snowdrifts, it feels as though there might have been a bold and compelling film. But in the end there's an Alaskan wooliness to the whole endeavour which holes it below the waterline.

weekend (w&d andrew haigh)

2012-01-22T09:00:00.000-08:00

It might be that the will is flagging, as I saw Haigh's surprisingly successful movie before 2011 had drawn to a close. The film itself has a clear agenda: to tell its gay narrative with as much vigour as any straight narrative, not to pull its punches, not to be in any way embarrassed about what it's doing. It's a gay Before Sunrise and just as wordy as Linklater's film. The two lead characters are convincing, their relationship, doomed to be nipped in the bud, is, in its way, quietly affecting.

Which perhaps explains the film's success. In truth, despite all the noises recently about the rude health of the British film industry, it seems to me that even at our most maverick we still seem to be producing films which are parochial. Little stories that search out their niche in the market. In that sense we're not that far removed from the fledgling film business of the country I'm returning to shortly, in spite of the money, energy and kudos lavished on the film industry here. Weekend isn't that far removed from Archipelago or Tyrannosaur or much else in terms of the scale of its ambition. Of course, so much of that ambition is re-routed to Hollywood, where people go if they want to get paid well. Thinking on the films of Anderson, Roeg or even someone like Lean, they seem to come from a different, less risk-averse time. As ever, this says more about the industry and the financiers (and hence, obliquely, the intellectual optimism of the country) than it probably does about the filmmakers themselves. There probably are plenty of filmmakers with a grander vision, but there's not much chance of the films they want to make being produced here.

the artist (w&d michel hazanavicius)

2012-01-12T10:15:00.000-08:00

Leaving the cinema there was some debate over whether thisis a reactionary film or not. In difficult times, the public takes succour inescapism. A film about silent cinema becomes an unlikely success as we look foranything to take our mind off recession and the collapse of Western capitalism.Into the breach steps a tale from a time when stars were stars and cinema wassimpler.

I could buy this argument, but I’d like to offer thecounterpoint. Hazanavicius’s film instead compels us to revisit a brief, goldentime when the filmmaker’s message wasn’t sullied by language. When the imagewas paramount. It could almost be seen as a tribute to Derrida. We revisit aless forensic, cynical age, when delight in the image was still permitted toflourish and watching cinema was akin to stepping on the Moon. In this regardit would appear to have something in common with Scorsese’s Hugo, albeit TheArtist us a more satisfying, witty film than the old master’s.

So I’m not convinced that The Artist, no matter howenjoyable, is all that escapist. It’s more of a paean to those things we havelost than an invitation to bask in the delights of what we have. Perhaps that’swhy it’s weirdly moving. Valentine is a man out of time, losing touch with theworld that is to come. A feeling that all of us are constantly condemned torepeat in this hyper-technological age, forever one step behind whatever isjust about to emerge and turn the world around again.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to have liveda normal life before the invention of the printing press. If you didn’t speakLatin or live in a monastery. Were minds less rich for the lack of information?Did the intellect not sing its own song still in whatever form it took? Theartist reminds us that for all our so-called sophistication, we’re stillsusceptible to those things which have shaped human perception since beforetime began. Things such as the other and the heart. And dogs.

dreams of a life (d. carol morley)

2011-12-29T09:09:00.000-08:00

This is a Christmas film. A woman has finished packing somepresents. She sits down to watch the TV. She dies. The TV stays on. Three yearslater, her remains are discovered. The presents are still there.

Or maybe it’s an anti-Christmas film. The real miracle ofthe movie is that, in spite of its premise, (and this is a documentary, tellinga true story), it somehow manages to be in some way not depressing. Theweirdness of Dreams of a Life is that we learn that far from being unloved, a victimof our heartless society, Joyce Vincent, the woman in question, was held indeep affection by the people whose lives she had passed through. If this is amystery movie, it’s one that leaves its puzzle unresolved. The causes of herdeath, both physical and psychological, remain speculative.

In a way, Dreams of a Life is the biography of the London Ihave lived in these past 25 years. The modern city is a peripatetic land, fullof magic doors and ratholes. You never quite know which one you’re going topass through next. Vincent, we are told, enjoyed the city. It brought herwithin touching distance of realising her dream of being a singer. It broughther relationships with people from a variety of races, cultures and differentclasses. It allowed to be invisible when she wanted, but also to participate inthe things which constitute city life: the events, the bars, the streets.Someone describes Vincent as a chameleon. All true city-dwellers arechameleons, capable of switching from one ambience to another; their personalitiesas much a negative of the world they live in as a positive of themselves.

The director took the bold move of casting an actress torecreate scenes from Vincent’s life. The actress sings and walks and is givenone line. At first I thought that this was a mistake, that the audience’smental picture of the film’s subject would be distorted by the actress ZaweAshton’s features, but in the end it worked. Another aspect of Vincent’s lifeis that she grew up in the pre-digital era. Ours will be the last generationwhose memories are captured within minds, not on hard drives. There are fewphotos of Vincent: she remains a blank slate upon which we can draw our ownpicture. Ashton remains an approximation of the woman who vanished; her mysteryall the stronger for the lack of documentary material to reflect the accountsof her given by friends and lovers.

It seems likely that we have all of us who have lived inthis city over the past twenty years known our own version of Joyce Vincent.Perhaps for some she is what we became: someone who vanished from their lives,who mattered for a while and then moved on. This is where Morley’s sympatheticapproach reveals another truth, less tragic, more mundane. The city is a placealmost designed for transience. The people Morley tracked down to tell us aboutJoyce come across as good-hearted and caring. It’s not such a bad society weinhabit, even if it has cracks. And whilst this is but a partial story of itssubject’s life, with the crueller aspects under-explored, the film stillsucceeds in being somehow celebratory. All the lonely people are perhaps notquite as lonely as they seem. The closing image need not be the one by whichthey are remembered. Morley seems to restore Joyce Vincent’s self-respect, counteractingthe obvious, tragic figure of the newspaper headlines. As such, Dreams of aLife pulls off the odd trick of being both affirmation and condemnation of ourculture at the same time. By choosing to tell the unheralded story of one ofthe city’s unknown warriors it succeeds in being one of the most tellingdocumentaries about London I have ever seen .

las acacias (d. pablo giorgelli; w. giorgelli & salvador roselli)

2011-12-09T07:34:00.001-08:00

Las Acacias is in an almost perfect work of art. Within theconfines it sets out for itself it seems flawless. The only problem is thelimitations it places on its ambition.

The film is a road movie and anyone who’s ever been on along bus journey, in South America or elsewhere, will quickly find themselvesidentifying with its languorous pace. Ruben, an Argentine truck driver, istaking Jacinta, a Paraguayan mother and her cute baby, Anahi from the border toBuenos Aires. Ruben is crotchety and lonely. He hasn’t seen his only son inmany years. Gradually, as they make their way South, the mother and hercharismatic baby melt his heart. Nothing remotely unpredictable happens. Themovie resists any temptation to melodrama. On a couple of occasions there’s ahint that something bad might happen to Anahi, who gives one of the finest babyperformances you’ll ever see. These moments throw out occasional flickers ofdramatic tension, but the narrative quickly steers away from danger, gets backin the truck, and keeps on moving.

Everything is meticulously observed. Las Acacias is beautifullyacted, understated and filmed with no little skill. Only in its very closingsequence does the thinness of the material really protrude, as the film aimsfor an unnecessarily upbeat ending. The movie has received considerable praiseand featured on the lists of several of Sight and Sounds critics’ best films ofthe year.

However, it might perhaps be reasonable to ask whether beingextremely skilful in the use of such a limited palette is really furthering thecause of Latin American filmmaking. For example: Jacinta is an economicmigrant, presumably subject to some kind of stress which is making her take onthis journey across the continent with her infant child. But the issues ofParaguayan society remain firmly ensconced in the back story. When she’s askedabout Anahi’s father, she says the child doesn’t have one. Where do Ruben andJacinta’s stories sit within the wider political framework of the continent?(And who, barring cinephiles is going to want to know?) In the end Las Acacias,in spite of its apparent down-to-earthness, almost has the feel of a FabergeEgg. Beautifully crafted but of marginal artistic or social relevance.

haunted child (w. joe penhall, d. jeremy herrin)

2011-12-07T02:34:00.001-08:00

Somewhere in this production is a really fine play trying toget out. I saw it in the preview week, with the actors still clearly findingtheir feet. No doubt they will get there. The key issue regarding its successrelates to how this carefully calibrated tale is directed: exactly what is thecorrect pitch for what is essentially a two-hander about marriage and mentalillness, with the title something of a red herring.

The play’s premise, established in the opening scene, isthat Douglas has walked out on his family and his wife. Julie and their son,Thomas, have no idea where he is or when he’s coming back. In contrast to theset design’s rigorous (and predictable) naturalism, the play retains an almostabsurdist opaqueness. We’re never told exactly how long Douglas has beenmissing. When he does re-appear, the details of his time away are revealedgradually, piece by piece. Is the marginal world he claims to have joined real?Or is it just an invention of his troubled (haunted) mind?

Penhall’s most famous play, Blue/Orange dealt astutely withmental illness. As Haunted Child unfolds, the degree of Douglas’s un-hingednessbecomes ever clearer. The writing handles this beautifully; the layers arepeeled away over the course of a couple of days. Douglas hovers on the brink ofnormality, the normality of marriage and fatherhood. In a Europe where despairseems to be nagging at the heels of whole swathes of society, having a goodjob and a nice home is no longer sufficient to ward off the demons, andPenhall’s portrayal of Douglas feels frighteningly prescient.

It’s the exploration of this tension within Douglas, betweenthe lure of a kind of asocial madness and the comforts of societal norms, whichshould elevate the play beyond being merely an enjoyable, entertaining piece ofstorytelling. However, at times it feels as though the direction is workingagainst the play’s subtler instincts. Whilst there’s a great deal of humour inthe text, it felt as though there was a tendency to overplay the laughs,thereby dissipating the play’s tension and undercutting its power. Like hisson, the audience needs to be genuinely spooked by the transformation in thisstrange, sad man. He’s Banquo’s ghost writ large, the spectre in ournever-ending festival of consumer delights, the man who would renounce theworld and all its ersatz, earthly pleasures.

all the king’s horses [michèle bernstein]

2011-12-04T10:17:00.001-08:00

Who were we? What were we doing? Stumbling round the citylike flat-footed dancers. Drinking and driving. Ducking and diving. Were weever young? Did we ever feel young? What does it mean to be young? Is there acurse? Is it contagious? What was the plan? What wasn’t theplan? Did the city belong to us or did we belong to the city? Was any of itreal? Did it even happen?

Somewhere in another universe people knew that they were cursed with more than just knowingness; they were cursed with the wand of knowingthat they would never have to lift a finger, that the things people fought forand cried about would barely touch them because it was all too easy. So even ifthey did find themselves crying or fighting it wasn’t really real, not in thenaïve way of those who really cry or fight. For whom the moment isall-consuming, a be-all or end-all. They laughed and/ or cried with thedesperation of people who wanted to know what it would really be like to laughor cry, to be hurt, not to have to hurt, to be heartbroken, not the other wayround. The more glamorous it all seemed the more they wanted to curl up in acorner and start again somewhere else, start again as children. Who wouldperhaps retain the shard of naivety you need to love, not just be loved: thatmost disposable, objective of pleasures which bears almost no connection withthe subjective glee of the suffering of the lover, as Barthes might have said,just to let them know what they were missing out on. Of course they couldn’t beborn again, they couldn’t be re-christened, so instead they strolled around thecity in all their shiny but inevitable cynicism, (a cynicism they couldn’thelp, which they hated), doing what they did, and one day, because there was noreason not to, one of them wrote a book about it.

It wasn’t a great book and it wasn’t a terrible book. Itwas, if anything, a curious book, which was greater than it aspired to be butnot as great as it might have been had life not been the way it was. It was akink in the slipstream of literature, one that laughed at itself, just like thewriter found herself laughing at herself, and him, because if you didn’t laughat yourself, and all your wasted talents, what else could you do? You couldn’tcry and you couldn’t fight so all that was left was to laugh. And the book saidnothing really, because the idea that books can say things is one of the greatmyths of literature, which is almost a myth in itself. But it did do one thing.It captured a time and a moment and the way they lived, these strange, happy,unhappy people. Their names were Guy and Michèle and they lived in Paris; butthey also lived in London and New York and sometimes they lived in a paralleluniverse, the one you inhabit, the one whose air you breathe, little knowingthat they’re watching you, envying you, laughing at you, wondering what it’slike to live inside another kind of brain.

the deep blue sea (d terence davies; w. terence rattigan, adapted by davies)

2011-12-02T03:01:00.001-08:00

In an interview with the director, Davies says that Hester,the tragic wife who leaves her husband for the dashing former RAF pilot, is awoman who’s discovered sex late in life and that this then shapes the whole wayshe sees the world. Which kinds of takes us to the nub of why, for all itsworthiness, the film adaptation of Rattigan’s brooding post-war drama doesn’treally convince. After one baroquecamera movement in the opening five minutes, there’s no sex at all and preciouslittle sexual tension. For all the fact that Hiddlestone and Weisz look thepart, there’s something completely unconvincing in the theory that she’s goingto throw her life away for him, and that when she does so he’s going to behavelike such a twat.

This isn’t to knock their acting. It’s their performancesand that of Russell Beale as the wronged husband that keep the film on somekind of an even keel. Rather, there’s something stately, or perhaps turgid, inthe direction and the screenplay, which fails to complement a steamy drama oflate-released passion, albeit passion with a stiff upper lip. Davies’ signaturemoments are the rather beautiful tracking shots of stoic Londoners singing inthe underground during the Blitz, or in the post-war pubs. These add a sense ofstyle to proceedings. But they also feel like they rob the rest of the film ofany energy. During these scenes and the melodramatic, suicide-watch openingshot, the camera is given license to roam. But through the rest of the filmit’s a case of static shots of talking heads as Rattigan’s words are faithfullyreproduced. This is all well and good, but it doesn’t take us any deeper intothe world than the play does. The advantage of cinema over theatre instory-telling terms is that it can reveal detail which theatre cannot. How thelovers co-exist, in bed and out. What the inside of Hester’s mind looks like,as she contemplates suicide. Davies’ version of the play doesn’t engage withany of this.

Instead we are offered a curiously sexless story full ofmelodramatic moments. A few years ago I saw a version of The Winslow Boy atSalisbury. I’d never seen the attraction of Rattigan, but the effortlesslystaged production helped me to understand what all the fuss is about. He’s anauthor who really understands stagecraft, and under the crust of their Englishskins are real people responding to real situations. Based on this, it seems apity that Davies’ film fails to de-fifty-fy or de-Anglicise these tragiccharacters. The other film it brings to mind is Brief Encounter. The world hasmoved on since that film was made, so that now it and its characters’sensibilities have the feel of a museum piece; but this fails to take intoaccount that the reason for its effectiveness is that in their day, Howard and Johnsonwere contemporary figures in a modern world. The truth of the situation theircharacters are living through shines through and the film has become a classic.Davies seems keen to suggest that the emotional truths of Hester’s despair arereal, but his reverential approach to Rattigan’s text sucks the life out of herstory and leaves the audience perhaps impressed, but ultimately unmoved.

hugo (d. martin scorsese, w. john logan, brian selznick)

2011-11-30T08:31:00.001-08:00

The watching of Hugo was not so much about the film, moreabout the event. And I suspect that was true for just about everyone in thecinema. The event being the night of the Royal Film Premiere, something thathas happened every year since 1946.

As Leicester Square is being currently turned into dust, thered carpet was a somewhat obscure affair, which took one round the houses, pastseveral pubs, full of people with pints in their hands wandering what the fusswas about. As well they might. In spite of some well-tooled paparazzi, therewas a shortage of luminaries. Damian Lewis, whose wife is in the film, seemedto be getting more attention than perhaps he’s used to, largely because thenext most famous personages not in the cast were the latest graduates of XFactor. The security was desultory. As I took my place I speculated about howeasy it would have been to have followed in the footsteps of Andrei Bely orConrad’s anti-heroes. Which is perhaps reassuring. Once in the auditorium theentertainment consisted of watching a screen which showed live footage ofnothing happening outside. The comedy was supplied when the hired compere’srehearsal of her lines (something about David Niven) was mistakenly picked up byher live mike, to the audience’s delight. It wasn’t quite up there with GordonBrown’s “bigoted woman” or Reagan’s plan to nuke the USSR, but it helped topass the time. A few buglers took the stage, looking lost. They did somebugling which seemed to make them feel better. The highpoint was when thecinema’s Wurlitzer was used for the national anthem, giving it a kind ofBlackpool-pier variety flavour.

As for the film, Scorsese’s latest… It has to be said thathe uses 3-D more effectively than Herzog and, so I was told, Tim Burton. At itsheart, Hugo is a paean to the art of cinema, with the narrative revolving arounda young boy’s re-discovery of theforgotten George Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley. At the end of the film therewas the strangest use of 3-D I’ve encountered yet as the fictional, cinematicKingsley made a speech in almost exactly the same spot the actualflesh-and-blood Kingsley had made a speech introducing the film earlier. Lifeimitating art imitating…

There’s some lovely use of Méliès’ films, the discreet nodof a veteran director to cinema’s capacity for delight and improvisation. All ofwhich makes this a meritable project for Scorsese’s first use of 3-D. The pityis that the magic is all in the technology: apart from Sacha Baron Cohen’sdroll turn as a vindictive station master, there was a shortage of the sort ofcharm that Jeunet might have brought to it, in his heyday (or even BillyWilder). Everything works, but in a strictly functional manner that’s ultimatelyun-involving: the most memorable moments are provided by Méliès and HaroldLloyd.

Still, the night was not really about the film, it was allabout the occasion. One wondered if its low-key tone was reflective of theBritish indifference to the art of cinema: pitch up, watch something made by aNorth American which stops you thinking for a couple of hours, and then escapeby any means possible. In our case this involved being ushered out through adangerously-packed fire escape, men in black tie shouting into their mobilephones, glamour at a premium. To be thrown out into the Soho night just in timeto catch last orders.

the housekeeper and the professor [yoko ogawa]

2011-11-29T05:03:00.001-08:00

When Christopher Nolan’s film Memento appeared, it containeda device which seemed breathtaking in its simplicity and full of anunquantifiable dramatic potential. The device is that of a man whose memory isreduced to a very brief span of just a few minutes. He writes notes which heuses to remind himself of the things he will need to try and remember when he“wakes up” again with his memories once again eradicated. The one problem withNolan’s idea (developed with his brother) is that it is so dazzlingly originalthat it cannot really be repeated, as everyone will just say – they already didthat in Memento.

Which leads to the question of how successful that film wasin Japan and whether Ogawa likes the cinema. Because her novel, published longafter Memento was released, employs exactly the same device. Given that this isa novel and its timespan has greater scope that that of a movie, the mathsProfessor who suffers from the disease has an 80 minute memory span, allowinghim to develop quite a profound relationship with his housekeeper, thenarrator, and her son, who is known as Root, because his haircut reminds theProfessor of the sign for Square Root.

In contrast to the Nolan, Ogawa uses the device to develop agentle, sad but affecting tale of the way in which the human instinct towardskindness and affection can succeed in transcending even the annihalatoryprocess of time. In spite of his illness, the Housekeeper succeeds indeveloping a rich relationship with the Professor, which changes both her andher son’s life. The idiot savants of this world know far more than us ordinarymortals will ever be able to forget. Underpinning this is the Professor’sbelief that mathematics, the art of which he studies, precedes and willpostdate humanity. The mathematical laws offer a transcendent vision to thosewho learn to study them. The Professor communicates through maths and as theHousekeeper gets to grips with the science, along with Root, their relationshipflourishes.

So, now it can be said, if anyone were to use this narrativedevice again: you can’t use it because Nolan and Ogawa have already used it. Itis perhaps worth noting the way in which two separate cultures have chosen touse the same trick. Ogawa’s version is less viscerally dramatic, perhaps, butin her hands it shows the way in which the ability of humans to connect cantranscend even the most extreme of obstacles. Whereas Nolan’s use of the devicewas rather more nihilistic.

the beach beneath the street [mckenize wark]

2011-11-21T08:00:00.001-08:00

McKenzie Wark’s book narrates the history, theory andpractice of the Situationists, an apparently marginal movement in twentiethcentury cultural history. It couldn’t be much more timely. The likes of PaulMason have recently been labelling the nascent “Occupy” movement as a kind ofSituationist protest. Highly visible, non-confrontational, this movementconverts town centres into a kind of playground/ camping site. In keeping with thereclaim the streets movement, it’s aim is both to reappropriate public spaceand to flag up the potential for alternative modes of living within the heartof the capitalist domain.

Exploring alternative methods of living is all part of theSituationist project. Attempting to find cracks in the system which would allowpeople to engage with their humanity and creativity in a post-capitalist, evenpost-Marxist fashion. In a strange way, from Wark’s account of Debord, Jorn etal’s thinking, in some ways modern capitalism seems to have embraced someaspects of the project. In an Apple-shaped world, we are all potentialfilmmakers, writers, musicians creatives. I-men and i-women are expected toincorporate these qualities into their everyday existence. It’s almost a crimenot to. On the other hand, capitalism’s dependence on individualism means thatthis activity tends to occur in a fractured, isolated context. Society as awhole still prioritises the individual’s economic production as the index oftheir worth. The situationist dream of a restructured society, liberated fromthe tyranny of wage labour, seems as far away as ever.

Wark’s prescient book steers the reader through this evolvingand frequently complex history, ranging from the theory of Debord to theseemingly dilettante antics of the likes of Isou in the fifties. There’s somethingabout Situationism which appears on some levels to be Romantic andinsubstantial. In part this is because it’s a movement that never proselytised,content to remain a club one was invited to join (or was thrown out of) ratherthan a party seeking members. Wark does a strong job of rectifying this,examining the texts and the more rigorous philosophical writings of themovement’s key members. This is a detailed introductory handbook to a way ofthinking that might just be on the point of coming into its own, fifty yearsafter its heyday. It also makes one wonder who are the contemporaryintellectual architects of the current political movement, labouring away inobscurity, their work filtering through into the mainstream, their names as yetunheralded.

contagion (d. steven soderbergh, w. scott z burns)

2011-11-19T08:34:00.001-08:00

The classic modern text dealing with issues of pestilence is Camus' The Plague. Contagion is basically The Plague reworked and distilled, on a global scale. Just not as good. It feels like something everyone - writer, stars, director - has done for the cash. Indicative of another plague which has always haunted society: the plague of mediocrity.

Soderbergh usually creates films which have some element of surprise. He might be the closest Hollywood mainstream gets to having a maverick, with his unusual career pattern and portmanteau projects. But in learning to play the Hollywood game, he has taken on the Coppola, Scorcese tactic of Quid Pro Quo: I'll do something for you if you do something for me. Contagion seems like one of the ones he's done for them, to put some credit in his fantasy box.

It's a pity because the ingredients are there for a compelling drama. The bio-political state is an under-reported one, as someone must have said. The politics of contagion are there to be explored and are backed up by that great movie trope, the Doomsday scenario. Initially, the film nimbly traces the disease's exponential kill pattern, moving from Hong Kong to the US to Switzerland. The script seems to be positing a globalised movie, Camus's wartime town morphing into the whole of the 21st C planet.

Then it runs out of steam and gets stuck in the US. A succession of bizarre cameos, not least from Jude Law, fail to interconnect with one another. We get the decline and fall of Western Civilisation in the space of about 20 minutes, followed by its sudden recovery (to the refrain of a U2 track; this time the world reincarnates with a whimper). As though the film's ambition outstrips its capacity. The globalised vision is shrunk to a few streets in San Francisco and the Midwest. Perhaps there's another subtler allegory here? The globalised dream, the world as cyber-village, destined to collapse in on itself under the weight of the sheer detail it cannot bear. In the end there's no room in Soderbergh's movie for Asia, Africa, Latin America or even Europe. In another misconceived cameo (in a misconceived film), Marion Cottilard spends the whole of the epidemic holed up in a village in rural China after being kidnapped. When she's freed, after a dodgy deal, she chooses to run back to the village. Better to live in humane seclusion than our bastardised techno-commercial world, slaves to the bio-capitalists.

Contagion is ripe for Zizekian interpretation. However, this has nothing to do with its quality and all to do with the territory it has tried and failed to assimilate. In an echo of Camus' great novel, the film attempts to link the vagaries of fate with the exigencies of morality, investigating whether the two are connected: is the good man/ woman more like to survive than the morally neutral? Unlike Camus' book, having set up this territory, the film seems to duck all the issues it has raised, and everyone, apart from Winslett's saintly health officer, survives, be they good, bad or somewhere in the middle. (This being a film made for North Americans about North Americans, they are on the whole unfailingly and tediously 'good'.)

Incidentally, since seeing the movie on Wednesday night, I've picked up a cynical, malevolent toothache. Let's hope this isn't the harbinger for a global outbreak. I can't really face the prospect of Contagion 2: The Killer Toothache.

muriel (d alain resnais, w jean cayrol)

2011-11-17T04:06:00.001-08:00

Somewhere in my head Muriel had acquired iconic status. I'm not quite sure why. There's a book of Truffaut's reviews I was given at the age of 17 which probably talked about it. (It's boxed up somewhere so I cannot check.) Maybe it's just the simplicity of the title. Maybe it's Resnais himself, the mysterious maestro of detached emotion who ended up being a devotee of Ayckbourn. A grand survivor from the heyday of Nouvelle Vague, still doing his idiosyncratic thing. You wonder if they still talk to one another, the survivors, him and Godard and Varda and a few others. Do they head to Cineworld to check out the latest Soderburgh and then have a few pints afterwards in a quiet bar, where maybe someone half-recognises them and comes over in a drunken haze, mistaking one for Truffaut or the other for Giscard D'Estaing?

I kind of hope so. Maybe, if they do, they spend the odd twenty minutes trying to work out what Muriel is really all about. I've rarely seen a film edited in a more unusual fashion. The first 45 minutes is given over entirely to a slightly stagey evening meeting between four people, including the worldly-wise Helene, played by Delphine Seyrig. Then the movie rattles through a whole dollop of plot with a string of three- second edits, which seemingly move everything forward to a new starting point. Which is the cue for the next wordy scene, before another fast forward. As though Resnais had discovered the art of the music video twenty years earlier, dispensed with the music and slotted these sequences into what at times does indeed feel like an Ayckbourn play.

The film's most arresting moment comes when it includes a five minute documentary-style passage, seemingly out of keeping with the remainder of its aesthetic, about the Algerian war. In fact this war haunts the film, with one character still affected by the abuses he witnessed there, and another falsely claiming to have served there. These strong, political themes are mixed with dry humour and melodrama. The whole concoction makes for a film which is frequently baffling and constantly wrong-foots the viewer. We never quite know what type of movie we're watching. It challenges our patience; which is not such a bad thing, but in a somewhat peculiar twist it does so through it's banality. Perhaps in the end it's what you would get if you were to blend Sartre's seaside tale, Nausea, with a dash of Ayckbourn and a soupcon of Battle of Algiers. One awaits the remake.

days of eclipse (d. aleksandr sokurov; w. pyotr kadochnikov, yuri arabov)

2011-11-15T04:52:00.001-08:00

Has a film ever had a better opening? The camera falls toearth. Yuri Khanin’s astonishing score plays out over images of the Turkmenicommunity. Faces stare out at us. We listen and we watch.

Which is the fundamental praxis of receiving cinema.Listening and watching. Only, usually, there is so much information to beprocessed that we almost forget this is what we’re doing. Sokurov follows inthe footsteps of Tarkovsky, who sought to make his art of cinema into anexperience to rival that of the great masters; which is also to say to rival orequate to a religious experience. Perhaps the key to this experience is tobecome aware of our existence through the act or art of engagement. Thisdemands something most of our cinema rejects: self-consciousness as a part ofthe process; rather than the eradication of the self (also known as escapism)so much of cinema has sought to bring about.

Days of Eclipse lasts for over two hours but it reached apoint where as far as I was concerned it might have lasted for six. The filmdepicts a Russian doctor who is living in Turkmenistan at the fag end of theSoviet empire. He is young, good looking and listless. The world is draped inthe torpor of heat. It’s as though it’s under glass. A friend of his dies and there’sno explanation of why. Another friend of his has a weird, animalistic staingrowing out of his wall. The doctor crosses a road and gets involved in afight. He’s told his work is potentially seditious, so he decides to burn it,but then, the papers already alight, he has second thoughts and puts the fireout. Strange beasts crop up in his life: lizards, snakes, lobsters. Finally heescorts his friend as he leaves, heading for the sea.

What does it all mean? There are undoubtedly narratives atwork here, about the demise of an Empire, about the search for significance ina world where the quest for Utopia has stalled and ground to a halt. However,perhaps as an aspect of these themes, or perhaps as part of the director’s owninvestigations into the real nature of and potential of cinema, the film alsocomes across as a dialogue between viewer and screen: an exploration of how theact of viewing oscillates between the passive and the active. Sometimes Sokurov’simages and use of sound overwhelm us, demanding nothing but reception. But atothers the film asks its audience to make an effort, to engage, to find thehumour and the pathos without these things being spelled out.

Sokurov has achieved belated fame beyond his country’sborders. I recently saw his feted Russian Ark on DVD. Where that seemed showy,slightly ponderous, with occasional flashes of brilliance, this earlier workfelt swathed in a viscous genius, which seeped through the colour distortedprint, frame after frame.

the moon and sledgehammer (d phillip trevelyan)

2011-11-10T06:56:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time in a land far, far away, called England, there lived a teller of tall tales, who took tea with kangaroos and got tired on his way to the moon. His name was Mister Page and he lived in a nook in the woods with his four children who were all grown up. Together they drove steam engines and played the organ and cast spells in the coals of the fire. They climbed trees and drizzled oil all over the world. They were the inheritors of Falstaff and the progenitors of Rooster Byron. The world belonged to them and they had all the time in the world to make it theirs. It was nature and machine and human rolled into one. The steam engines played with the doves and the bugs. They made telescopes and submarines and televisions that killed you if you got too close. Before televisions existed. They'd been to the moon and seen the volcanos. Sometimes they didn't like living there, because sometimes we don't, but most of the time they were as happy as Larry.

And if you think this is could be one of Mister Page's tall tales, think again and get hold of a copy of Trevelyan's film. The old man, the filmmaker who captured this gentle madness, a madness lost in time but one which will always exist so long as we have groves and nooks within this land, seemed sad at the passing of time. He sat on the stage at Rough Trade records in the most advanced corner of London's hipsterdom and answered questions about his film with what the Hispanics would call nostalgia, as he talked about the Alice-in-Wonderland world he'd stumbled upon back in 1971. With the aim not of exposing or poking fun at its inhabitants, but paying homage to them by capturing their rhythms and their quirks. His film is a mellifluous amble through their lives. It represents one of the great documents of a rural culture (or counter-culture) which has persevered in this country in spite of everything the 19th and 20th centuries had to throw at it. As well as an example of why documentaries work best when they find their own way; when their narratives and pacing reflect the worlds they're observing, rather than the demands of a market.

ides of march (d. gerorge clooney, w. clooney, grant heslov, beau willimon)

2011-11-06T02:41:00.000-08:00

It's that time of year in the twentieth century's greatest empirical force, when the farrago of selecting the next leader gets under way in earnest. It is, as Cheney might have said, a duck shoot. Candidates line themselves up waiting to be shot down; if they somehow survive, who knows, the title of the most powerful man on the planet could be waiting for them. At the moment, a man called Herman Cain is the surprise leader in the Republican polls, but already his campaign has started to falter amid innuendo and rumour. Who knows: in ten years time he could be a household name (given his political & economic strategy one is inclined to hope not) or he could be mired in obscurity, the answer to a pub quiz question.

It's this curious selection process that the Ides of March focuses on, looking at the course of rival Democratic campaigns as they reach Wintery Ohio, with the knockout blow waiting to be dealt. Who will be the last duck standing: the charismatic but morally compromised Clooney or his anodyne rival whose name is Pullman but who isn't played by Bill Pullman. (Perhaps some kind of in-joke?) This is the backdrop for the story of Stephen Meyers, played by Ryan Gosling, a naif, ambitious, would-be political strategist-guru, who is about to learn the real dirty realities of politics.

Gosling's journey is at the heart of the film and it's his performance that redeems a sometimes verbose script (adapted from Willimon's play). The opening scenes are self-consciously laden with "great" dialogue: ie the kind of dialogue where you can almost see the written words on the page. It's heavy handed and not helped by the uninspiring cinematography. Gosling sleeps with an intern who's in all kinds of trouble before she kills herself. For a moment, as he resorts to speaking on public payphones and the camerawork becomes edgier, it feels as though we're about to enter political thriller territory. But gradually Gosling begins to flex his acting muscles and the latter half of the film is all about his journey towards political anti-karma. Tellingly, it's Gosling's silence which is the most effective thing about the film; the morally compromised outsider, like Iago, who says more saying nothing than he would if he spoke. In contrast to the falseness of the words that the campaigns are made of. Gosling ditches any idealism he might have had, accepts the compromise and joins the bandwagon, which would appear to be rolling all the way to the White House.

There's something rather clunky about Ides of March. It's like a slightly undercooked Three Days of the Condor without the thrills. The polish and the resources and the cleverness have such a sheen that they can't help but feel tawdry. It would be nice to think that this is all part of a bid to authentically capture the vaudeville aspects of the campaign trail, but one suspects that in actuality it's all part of the film's own bid to pick up votes at Oscar time and in the multiplexes. Which is reasonable: that's what Hollywood films are designed to do. It's just that, given the scope of the film's political critique, it feels as though a little bit more cinematic ambition might have been warranted. What redeems Ides of March is Gosling's performance, his increasingly blank face as the film progresses encapsulating the glassy hollowness of all he is caught up in.

the she-devil in the mirror [horacio castellanos moya]

2011-11-04T03:56:00.000-07:00

Moya's book is a jaunty read, told from the perspective of a young woman immersed in the baroque world of El Salvadorean high society. When a friend of hers is murdered she takes it upon herself to try and discover the real killer, having no confidence in the police chief. The fact that her friend was involved in a series of vapid affairs with a selection of San Salvador's movers and shakers means that the list of potential killers is a long one. It also means that the more Laura, the narrator, mouths off about it, the more danger she places herself in. The fact that she is too blasé and privileged to realise this adds to the sense of impending doom.

The book consists of several breathy chapters, each of them a monologue by Laura to her supposed friend. One can't help suspecting that a great deal of nuance is lost in translation, as she intersperses her theories with observations about society: the malls she meets her friend in; the church; the press, etc. There's nothing sympathetic about Laura and it's clear we're not supposed to like her much. Rather the author is setting out to skewer an elite, to hoist them on their own petard. The book, published in 2000, looks at the way El Salvador, even post-dictatorship, continues to be run by a wealthy, corrupt section of society. There's a quote from Bolano on the front cover of my edition saying Mora is the only writer of his generation who "knows how to narrate the horror, the secret Vietnam that Latin America was for a long time." I'm not sure She-Devil in the Mirror quite lives up to that billing, maybe his other books do, but nevertheless it's an enjoyable, satirical, eminently readable take on a country which had a long way to go before recovering from the crimes of the late twentieth century.

diary of a bad year [j m coetzee]

2011-10-29T12:26:00.000-07:00

This is an unusual, fractured narrative. There are twonarrators and three writers on almost every page. An ageing writer has beencommissioned to write a book of “opinions” about the modern world. Each pagecontains his apercus on the state of the modern world. His thoughts range fromterrorism to globalisation to Blair to Pinter; the nature of love and sex inthe modern world, and much more besides. The material is profound but dry.Counterpointed against this is the sub-narrative, as he meets and employs ashapely Filipino woman who acts as his secretary. She in turn is in arelationship with a financial whiz kid, who sees her relationship with thewriter as a possible means to rip him off, by using the writer’s dormant buthealthy bank account to his own advantage. She is given a voice at the bottomof the page to narrate the consequent fate of her relationship, outlining theway in which the writer has influenced her own life.

This makes for a somewhat structural novel, something thewriter’s opinions later address, as he writes about the way in which writersbecome more formalistic as they get older; their texts tending towards thetheoretical, becoming more and more disconnected from the human angle. It readsat times like a cri de coeur by Coetzee himself, railing against his own fateas both a man and an author. Of course, this is just one of the book’sconceits: with no knowledge of the man, this assumption could be entirelyfalse. Even if it is, there are still times when the book feels like an intellectualexercise. In large part this is because the two (literally) sub-narrativesremains somewhat fragile. The net effect is a book that’s somewhat sketchedout. Which might be the writer’s commentary on the nature of reading in thedigital age. When the writer’s opinions really bite is when he comments on theenduring power of the classics, in particular the works of Tolstoy andDosteyevski. His writing about them appears to contain a lament for thediminishing power of the novel, with the novelist no longer capable ofembracing and containing the great themes within the confines of their pages.We’re now reduced to fragmentary narratives which are so self-aware that theycan no longer aspire to any kind of universality. It makes for a curious,fascinating, if unsatisfactory reading experience; and perhaps that’s the wholepoint.

the future (w&d miranda july)

2011-10-24T02:23:00.000-07:00

My response to this film was largely shaped by the polar reactions of two people I don't know. The first was an engaging man who we ran into outside the Coach and Horses in Soho. He looked a bit like Peter Jackson and evinced an almost pathological hatred of Miranda July and anything she touched. This was after having a measured conversation about Australia. The extent of the hatred was so pronounced that one couldn't help wondering if there were things about Ms July one just wasn't aware of. (She eats horses? She secretly voted Bush seven times? etc etc) I too found myself questioning everything about her: her aesthetics, her philosophy, her overall (faux?) kookiness. This was before the film. In the screening itself I was seated next to a young woman on my right who laughed so much at every little thing Ms July did, to the point of slapping her thigh in delight, that I found myself wondering if there wasn't something hysterically funny taking place on the screen which I was just plain missing. When the woman later started sobbing and wailing, distributing orgasmic gobs of grief as the narrative turned bleaker, it struck me that I was still some way from fully getting a handle on the whole Miranda July concept.

What is clear is that the filmmaker polarises opinion. Her first film, as far as I can recall, was a quirky, kookie, idiosyncratic offering. The Future is all of those things, but it is also bleak and perhaps personal. This is one of July's greatest conceits: like Allen or Amis, she's right there in her narratives. Is this story about a seemingly functional couple on the cusp of entering the end of the beginning of their love affair really about her? How can we separate July the character from July the filmmaker? Has she had dealings with men who wear chains?

As you can see, I emerge little the wiser. If anything I'd have to say I'm baffled by the July phenomenon. I'm still not sure if I enjoyed The Future, with its slightly annoying title, or of I hated it. I'm still not sure if it's funny or sad. Maybe the title's not actually annoying, it's really charming? Maybe this is a Borgesian twist on Los Angeles living? Maybe it's just gleefully self-indulgent nonsense? I can't make my mind up. Sometimes it's better that way.

dark horse (w&d todd solondz)

2011-10-19T02:48:00.000-07:00

The arch offender is back. Solondz's Happiness is lodged somewhere in the spinal cortex of everyone who saw it; the film that artfully offended everyone. It was peculiarly effective and enormously successful. Perhaps, above and beyond the qualities which carved a path for a whole generation of "gross out" Hollywood comedy, because of the way in which it took characters who are usually too marginalised to be allocated screentime and explored their secret desires.

Dark Horse starts in this vein. The opening shot is masterful: a bizarre, tribal, urban wedding dance being enacted by a host of taffetaed and tuxed up celebrants, which pans around the room until it reveals two characters sitting on their own, resolutely refusing to join in. One of them leans into the other and says he doesn't like dancing. We instantly know that these will be our Solondzian anti-heroes.

The opening scene is slightly odd in so far as it's clear that it cost quite a bit to film, something which the rest of the film doesn't appear to have done. As though much of the budget was blown on this scene, which sets out a marker the film struggles to live up to. Thereafter things settle down as we follow Abe, the ugly duckling son of Mia Farrow and Christopher Walken (that's quite some lineage). Abe goes about fulfilling his destiny of being a complete and total loser. In the course of which he attempts with mediocre success to woo the attractive but maniacally depressed Miranda, the woman he met at the wedding; argues with his father; and has strange visions involving his father's secretary. Much of this is quietly amusing, but seems to lack the edge of Solondz's earlier work. Abe is a sympathetic figure, perhaps a bit too sympathetic, and as his journey meanders towards its desultory end, the film also seems to run out of steam.

It feels as though there's something slightly under-developed about Dark Horse. The writer has identified his characters but failed to really nail them. The anti-heroes are out there, but the weirder parts of their minds remain untouched. Perhaps Solondz is attempting to create more of a whimsical, affectionate fable. However, he'll always be stalked by the wild horse which was Happiness. His characters will always prowl in the shadow of that film's characters. It's as though he's created a rod for his own back and there's no escaping its ferocity; so anything he does which doesn't match up to it seems pale, rather than dark, in comparison.

the tattoed soldier [hector tobar]

2011-10-14T01:52:00.000-07:00

Walk into the heart of downtown Los Angeles, away from Beverly Hills or West Hollywood or Santa Monica and you find yourself immersed in a Hispanic city. Which is what Los Angeles was to begin with. There's an argument to be made for it being the Northernmost output of Latin America. In a Youtube interview to Dutch TV, Tobar makes the point that the city is the meeting point for Hispanic, Anglo and Oriental culture, perched on the Pacific, looking West. Los Angeles' geographical situation helps in every way to make it the dream factory that it has become. But it's almost as though the city's dreaming has succeeded in eradicating its daily realities. No one want to know about the Hispanic city which still occupies its centre, just like no one wants to know that Los Angeles still has a centre. It doesn't fit with the idea of a liminal, dreaming city.

Tobar is a native Los Angelino, descended from Guatemalan immigrants. His novel puts the city back on the map. It's set in the world of Latino immigrants and a multi-racial underclass. The story follows a mission of revenge by Antonio, a political exile, who discovers his wife's army-sponsored killer playing chess in Macarthur Park. The book is set against the backdrop of the Rodney King riots, which Tobar covered as a journalist. The riots provide the cover for Antonio to exact the revenge history demands. The novel is as much about Guatemala as it is about the US, but like any great city, LA contains the narratives of all those countries whose citizens its walls have provided some kind of shelter to.

The narrative is brisk, engaging and discursive. It's written with a smattering of Spanish and Spanglish. It walks the streets with its desperate characters, but the only time it gets near to Beverly Hills is when Antonio's Mexican friend shacks up with a housekeeper. People don't drive their own cars, they take buses. There's a reality lived by millions of Angelinos which the dream factory only touches on when it needs criminals or undesirables to populate its narratives. Tobar's novel brings this reality to life. It's a book which should be read by anyone who's ever visited LA, ever seen a film set in LA. It's all very well living in dreams, but sometimes, you have to return to the dirty business of reality.

midnight in paris (w&d woody allen)

2011-10-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

Everything about Allen's career over the course of the last few years has put me off. I haven't seen much, but I was unlucky enough to catch Match Point. It's felt as though this is a sad, slightly undignified twilight, the one time genius peddling his wares where he can and, from the evidence of Match Point, creating picture postcard movies with Harlem Globetrotter casts and dodgy accents which possessed neither the wit nor the depth of his earlier works.

Midnight in Paris doesn't begin auspiciously. A long sequence plays out with documentary style footage of the city. A group of not-particularly-likeable North Americans are staying in a rich person's hotel and seeing the sights. Then, like a ray of light, Owen Wilson, the would-be novelist, is given a line which is vituperatively funny and gratuitously rude about the Tea Party. Politics infiltrating the late, bland Woody Allen? It's a promising sign. Soon afterwards, the narrative conceit kicks in, the handbrake is off, and the film turns into a delirious late-Allen masterclass.

The conceit is a simple one. Which is that Wilson discovers that if he waits on the right corner at midnight, he'll be whisked back in time to the twenties. Where he gets to hang out with all the greats. Allen has already mined this vein with Zelig, but here he incorporates it into a subtler, sadder narrative. Wilson's character, Gil, dreams of living in this epoch, when the US met Europe, when art still seemed to have a value greater than mere commercialism. And all of a sudden his dreams come true.

The conceit allows Allen to get his funny bone back. The innately comic scenario of Gil knowing things about Scott, Ernest, Zelda, Pablo, Bunuel and their ilk is mined for all it's worth. Wilson deadpans like a better-looking, younger Allen. Part of Allen's problem is that his films have never seemed complete without his presence, and the leading man all too often offers a version of Allen-lite. But Wilson has enough goofiness and character to pull the role off.

A lot of the lines are classic Allen and the ambition of the narrative is a throwback to his halcyon days, taking a real risk which pays off. There's another level to Midnight in Paris which is more subversive still, speaking to the audience not so much about the past as the present. Back in the real world, whilst Gil dreams of living in Paris, his wife wants to move to Malibu. Her parents are rich and sour. They go and see US movies which they can't remember the next day and the main attraction of Paris is its capacity for supplying antiques to furnish their homes they can't find in the US. Gil, intoxicated by the city, is pitched in direct conflict with his new family, and the consequences ring true.

Meanwhile, the film playfully reveals to Gil that you can't live your life stuck in nostalgia. The sharp script allows itself to follow through the logic of its conceit, revealing that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, even when you've magically been transported there. The thwarted love affair between Wilson and Cotillard has echoes of Allen's great romances: love is a zero-sum game, where everyone's liable to end up being a loser.

You won't see another movie like Midnight in Paris, certainly not in the English language, because very few writer-directors are given the budget to indulge their whims and intellectual games in the way that Allen is given license to. He's written a script which is entertaining, effortlessly funny, wistful and subversive. Then he's filmed it with real vigour. Those who came to bury him, not to praise him, myself included, have egg on their faces.

tyrannosaur (w&d paddy considine)

2011-10-09T06:44:00.000-07:00

There's a general rule of thumb which has been by and large honoured in this blog never to write about things which include or are created by friends of mine. There's a twin reason for this: the critic's perspective can be compromised when personal feelings are involved, and even if that's not necessarily true, there's also the risk of pissing people off. I don't know anyone who worked on Considine's film, but given the limited scale of the British film industry and the amount of players who have their fingers in this pie, you cannot help thinking that it might be impolitic to say what you really think about it. But anyway...

The acting is good, albeit good in that "grand acting" fashion which kind of declares as it goes though customs: 'actors at work'. Everything's slightly mannered; the quest for "truth" in the moment is so worn on the sleeve that there are times when the sleeve is all you can make out. But this is a film made by an actor which is all about the acting, and the actors deliver what's expected of them. Olivia Colman in particular succeeds in convincing in spite of the fact that her character is placed in a dramatic situation that's so wafer thin she's coaxing something out of a near empty tank.

Without wanting to give too much away, she's in an abusive marriage with a character whose name barely registers, played by Eddie Marsan. We know Marsan is not a nice man because he pisses on his wife when she's asleep. Not the most subtle of character notes. But one of the few we're given. Marsan is a borderline psychotic who practices his boxing skills on his wife, played by Colman. He's a really nasty man. Really nasty. Malevolent. A rapist. Who drives a red sports car. Who uses the word "wank". Who lives in a house with extremely bland furniture. He's, let's repeat this in case you, the audience, have missed it, a nasty piece of work.

At which point, you, the audience, might be inclined to ask some questions. Such as - why is Marsan so horrible? Why does his wife, Hannah, not go to someone for help? Why does no one take any notice of Hannah's repeated facial injuries (and has this just started or has it been going on since their marriage started)? If Marsan resembles any filmic character I can think of it's De Niro's in Cape Fear. Where Scorcese was deliberately playing with the idea of a B-Movie villain. But Marsan's character is not a B-Movie villain. Considine's film is in the tradition of British social realism. We're supposed to believe in these characters, this world, this desperate, caricatured grimness. When in fact all we're given are the tropes, the symbols, which, I would suggest, are themselves exploited in the name of 'art'. There's an argument that it's irresponsible to appropriate dramatic symbols (in this instance that of the abused wife, and the sheer quantity of stage make-up Colman has to bear almost becomes clownish) without making some attempt to address the actual origins of these dramatic symbols: ie Marsan's psychosis. It's using the semiotics of real suffering for dramatic ends; because there's nothing real about any of this. And with its emphasis on the 'authenticity' of the acting, the film is almost screaming at the audience that this is 'real'.

So there it is. Another British movie about how grim life is on the supposed hard edge of our society. So far as I'm concerned it wouldn't matter if every movie made in the UK dealt with his theme, if only it were done with a sense of truth and love. Gary Oldman is thanked in the credits. So many films have been made in the shadow of Nil By Mouth, and all of them, this film included, merely come across as pale imitations.

the palm wine drunkard [amos tutuola]

2011-10-07T07:36:00.000-07:00

I had already come across Tutuola without realising it. In this book he refers to another book, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which he had, at the time of writing this book, not yet written. This is indicative of the way in which Tutuola's writing seems to take place in the fifth dimension, beyond the petty confines of time. (Which has implications for the idea of narrative.) In 1995, during a peripatetic phase of my career, I was given the job of looking after a group of Nigerian actors who were in London at the behest of the Royal Court, to perform a version of Tutuola's later novel. When I arrived to collect the company to drive them back to Heathrow, it turned out that almost half of them had absconded, vanished into another bush of ghosts. Which might suggest I had failed in my duties; at the same time I learnt more about being African from those weeks with the Nigerians than from any other source.

Tutuola's first novel is like a spotlight being shined on a way of using the language we never knew existed. Straightaway we are propelled into a land where Fear is both an emotion and a character, alongside Heaven and God. You will meet them along the way. The narrator's ostensible journey is to find his tapster who's vanished, gone to the land of the Deads. As a result his life, which up until that point had consisted of drinking palm wine and having parties, is rudely interrupted. The key point, perhaps, is that this is his life: just as in our world we might go to the office or till the fields, his life is to get up and drink. However, the disappearance of his tapster means he has to go on the road to find him.

This notion of a search, the original picaresque narrative, is repeatedly encountered in African literature. On the road you will see things that appear to be beyond belief. The story is bounded only by the imagination of the narrator, and Tutuola has no shortage of imagination. At the same time, as a Western reader, the lack of all those narrative elements we have come to expect in a novel make for a sometimes painstaking read. As though we are not yet ready to enter a realm of pure imagination, where the novel is made poetry and the reader has to engage with the previously unimagined on almost every page. Where is this going? What do we learn? We learn that there are things under the sun and moon (and witnessed by Sun or Moon) which we had never imagined. Which, because they have been imagined, possess the possibility of being real.

If I was to curate a literature course, this would be one of the first books I would put on the reading list. I would hazard a guess that Tutuola is writing under the influence of an oral storytelling tradition. A world where the story has no beginning or end, it is a restless continuation, which the audience can drop in or out of at any moment. Stories lurk within stories and every new stop along the road is a field of play, a space for the storyteller to dazzle you with the unfeasible; to bring the unimaginable to life. Our culture, trapped in the teleological narrative, is consumed by beginnings, endings and middles. Does life really work this way? Or do we shape the narratives of our lives to fit this model? Surely it's truer in some ways to see the world as a constant space of non-learning, a constant encounter with the remarkable, lurking around the corner, Superwomen and giants, famines and plenty. Tutuola's text often feels as though it lacks all direction, as though it's in danger of suffocating beneath the weight of its invention, but then you keep going, you round a corner, you discover something new...

drive (d nicolas refn, w hossein amini)

2011-10-03T10:22:00.000-07:00

It's been almost a week since I saw Drive and the predominant memory is not the violence or Gosling's assured performance or the beautifully rendered love story or even the eurotrash score. It's the shocking pink font used for the titles and credits.

This pinkness lends a neon brashness to proceedings from the start. It has the feel of a directorial flourish. As though to suggest that nothing we see needs to be taken too seriously. It also has the feeling of a foreigner's take on LA: bright party colours and recklessness. There's a moment in the film when Albert Brooks' gangster says that he used to be in the film business years ago. He describes the films he made, films which sound suitably commercial for a gangster boss, and at the end he says: they used to call them European. It feels as though Refn's Drive is fulfilling that same brief: a Hollywood notion of what a European film might be, in their dreams. (Not the Europeans).

Refn, with his flair for mood and violence, feels like the kind of European who'd fit in well in Hollywood. Which isn't an insult. If Drive is essentially 'noir' it's easy to forget now that that style, later re-appropriated by the Europeans, was developed in the US by exiles, the likes of Fritz Lang, Wilder, Siodmak etc. The city is reduced to a grid wherein human passions are worked out with all their dramatic implications. LA, with its lack of recognisable landmarks, is the perfect laboratory. Gosling spends his time driving through anonymous streets. There's no hint of where he comes from. He's a perfectly alienated twenty first century being. The first thing that appears to give any meaning to his life is the appearance in it of the gamine Irene, another apparent drifter.

On many levels therefore, Drive might be seen as a cynical movie. The throwaway violence, the rootlessness, the pink font: it's as though the hyper-smart Refn is both showing off with his technical acumen and also suggesting that this is basically a Hollywood B-movie and we shouldn't take it too seriously. (I'd even include the way he directs Gosling in this, for all the plaudits the pair have received: to my mind it's almost a tongue-in-cheek performance, an homage rather than something rooted in any genuine feeling.) However, there's one aspect of the film which transcends everything else. Which is the love affair: not so much in that it happens, as it's a necessary plot requirement, but in the way in which it is portrayed. It's not often that you'll see a director pinpoint the mechanics of love as beautifully as Refn does in Drive. All of a sudden, his taciturn style pays dividends. Mulligan and Gosling barely speak to one another. Yet it's evident that each has transformed the other's life utterly. It's all in the not-said, even the not-done. There's one moment where she places her hand on his, and this tells you all you need to know.

So, underneath the cynicism, there lurks a romantic sensibility. I got the feeling throughout the film that Refn's directing was like watching a sportsman playing at half-pace. In his depiction of the love affair, it suddenly feels like he's moving up through the gears. The rest is functional and assured. You can't help wondering what kind of film Refn will make when he's really going for it; as well as wondering if he's so good at playing the system that he'll never really have to stretch himself.

tinker tailor soldier spy (d tomas alfredson, w. bridget o'connor, peter straughan, le carré)

2011-09-28T08:10:00.000-07:00

According to someone who works for the producers of this film, it had a lot of trouble getting financing. Which seems surprising. Because if this isn't a gold plated UK film concept then what is? It looks and feels like high quality Oscar bait. Which is both its strength and its weakness.

From an early shot of jet planes swooping over Budapest, pulling back to reveal schoolchildren in a bell tower cheering, it's clear that the director intends to pull out all the stops in order to beef up le Carré's famous text. It takes the folk-memory of a grey seventies London and makes it hyper-grey. The frames drip with what one assumes to be a meticulously graded lack of colour. With its Alpha role call of British male stars, the film comes at the viewer relentlessly, bludgeoning him or her into accepting that, yes, this is film-making at the top of its game.

Alfredson's breakthrough film was also set in the seventies, not that many noticed. HIs measured Scandanavian technique should be perfect for the convoluted, repressed world of British spies. And yet, in spite of its reasonable pacing and careful use of flashback, there's something slightly pedestrian about Tinker Tailor. One could say: that's the whole point, but le Carré's narrative seems to suggest it isn't. Where the British act as though they are insouciant functionaries, seeking to out-functionary their Soviet opponents, the reality is that their Christmas parties are a hotbed of seething passions and intimate tensions. When Firth's Bill Haydon tells Oldman's Smiley at the end that his seduction of Smiley's wife was "nothing personal", you can't help feeling that this could be yet another lie, another false move in the chess game these players have chosen to get caught up in.

All of which hints at the film's major weakness: we don't really know who these people are. With the exception of Smiley's passion for Anne and Ricki Tarr's tempestuous love affair, we learn nothing about their secret motivations and desires. So, when the house of cards comes down, and the denizens of the circus meet their fate, it's hard to care. (Idly I wonder what someone like Welles, with his flair for fleshing out minor characters, might have made of le Carré's book.)

Given this, and given the way in which Alfredson so brilliantly made us care about his vampires in Let The Right One In, one suspects he has been hamstrung by an efficient but prosaic script. Sensibly it puts much of the dramatic tension on Cumerbatch's shoulders as Guillam, but the brief scene where he appears to be cutting his ties with his lover offers a glimpse into the real deceptions and betrayals at work, underneath the more obvious games. The moment Strong's well acted Jim Prideaux catches Firth's eye at the Christmas party offers another hint.

Indeed, the Christmas party scenes, albeit filmed in a studiously observational style, are when the film really seems to come alive. The spooks playing their complex games are suddenly made human. The seventies setting rings entirely true; the shadow of the war fomenting both camaraderie and gloom, with the West far less better off in comparison to the East than it so earnestly believed. In these scenes those of us who were still in our childhood back in those days might catch a glimpse of the country we grew up in, one which is now unmourned and by and large forgotten. For all its slightly strident quality, it's hard not to wish that Tinker Tailor hadn't done more to take us into this world (a la Lives of Others), to make us understand the battles that had been fought that underpinned the battles which these men continued to fight through the Cold War, battles of both a political but also a personal nature.

post mortem (w&d pablo larraín)

2011-09-26T03:34:00.000-07:00

For some of us, and clearly from its undistinguished London screening, we are few, Post Mortem was one of the most eagerly anticipated film releases of the year. A film that warranted red carpets, gala screenings, celebrities telling you how much they loved it. Instead, Larraín's film was playing on the ICA's tiny second screen, in a grainy projection that did it no favours. Before the film started the audience were informed that there was a problem with the tape. They played five minutes of Silvio Rodriguez, which was at least appropriate, before fixing it. The whole thing was something of a verguenza, and one wonders how the film's marketing people, sitting on the work of one of the cinema's most exciting directors, have let this happen.

The pivotal scene in Post Mortem occurs two thirds of the way through the film. Its lead character, Mario Cornejo, (in some ways a prefiguration of Alfredo Castro's character in Tony Manero), is seconded into participating in the autopsy of Salvador Allende. This is the story of a little man caught in history's headlights. The scene itself is swathed in the blackest of humour, with Mario struggling to use an unfamiliar typewriter as his boss dictates his notes. In the film's credits, there's a thanks to Mario Cornejo himself. Larraín has taken this real, unknown man who found himself on the stage of history and fictionalised him, imagining how he got there and, more importantly, the impact his being there had on his already vulnerable psyche.

As a result the film neatly splits into two sections, pre-coup and post-coup. Mario is an apolitical figure. There's clearly turmoil in the streets, but he's more interested in his neighbour, a dancer in a seedy cabaret, who lives with her politically active family. Mario patrols the streets of Santiago in his red bubble car. It's a sullen city, pregnant with disaster, but Mario seems oblivious. Then the coup happens and the film shifts register. It embraces a kind of deadpan baroque, as bodies mount up at the morgue where Mario works, and he and his colleagues struggle to stay sane in the face of horror; not a slasher horror (though it's fascinating the way in which a scene such as the one where Mario drags a gurney stacked with bodies behind him feels like it could have come out of a horror film), but a real, historically documented horror.

As such, the filmmmaker is attempting to do something supremely ambitious: to convey to a modern day audience what those days were like. To recreate history. Not in a documentary fashion, but in a sensory fashion. We start to feel the sense of nihilism that arrived with the coup (and the aftermath of which Tony Manero explores in more depth). Whilst it's a bleak space, its also a strangely comic one; there are no rules, death is flat, matter-of-fact, on the edge of being farcical. Dead people are shot and they are neither more dead nor less so. Mario walks through this landscape like Buster Keaton, po-faced and desensitised. The ending, when it comes, is brutal and revelatory, savagely violent without even a hint of blood being spilt; a ghoulish work of performance art.

Chile remains a society where political divisions between left and right are heartfelt and integrated into the day-to-day. Larraín belongs to one of Chile's most political families: his uncle is part of the right-wing government which has been subject to violent recent student protests that lasted for months. To make a film about the most significant moment in its recent history is therefore a bold step in the first place. To do it in a way which is both oblique and horrifyingly direct is yet more of an achievement. As the immediate influence of the dictatorships recedes in Latin America, its artists begin the process of trying to make sense of the legacy they've inherited. The closing scene of Post Mortem summons up a society that is on the point of shutting itself up for the next thirty years. It's a devastating ending for a film which pulls off the trick of recounting an unlikely narrative about issues of enormous weight within its society whilst developing its own dry, idiosyncratic aesthetic.

monsieur pain [roberto bolaño]

2011-09-16T03:39:00.000-07:00

Bolaño's literary history means that he's going to spend a long time dying. Having written extensively for twenty years before he was first published, there's a substantial back catalogue to be worked through. The reason he had to wait so long for success was more to do with the fact he was a maverick than anything else, scrabbling around on the margins. All of which means that, in death, he's more prolific than most living writers. This book is one that helped to get him recognised, and is the subject of one of his more famous stories in Last Evenings on Earth. As such it almost as interesting for its role within the Bolaño myth as it is for its literary qualities.

Monsieur Pain is a slight if beguiling book, set in Paris before the second world war, when the eponymous hero, a mesmerist, is drafted in to consult on the case of a man who is dying, apparently, of hiccoughs. However, a rival party doesn't want the man, Snr Vallejo, cured, paying Monsieur Pain a sizeable bribe in order to get him not to take the case. That's about it with regard to the narrative. The pearls are to be found in the writer's love of arcane detail. He meets a pair of twins who design ghoulish scenes in fishtanks, (a kind of cross between Mr Hirst and the Chapman Brothers?); Pain is plagued by random characters who pursue him across Paris. His former best friend has become a fascist luminary in the Spanish Civil War. There is an air of Poeian menace (the book includes a quotation from Poe at the front).

Monsieur Pain is neither a great book nor a terrible one. At times it feels like an exercise in style, at others it includes writing that is bona fide Bolaño. As ever, a little research brings intriguing results. Bolaño was always a fervent advocate of neglected Latin American poets. It turns out that Vallejo is not a fictional but a real figure, who died in Paris in 1938. One whose work is held up to be among the most eccentrically brilliant in the Spanish language. Vallejo's qualities don't really come through in the book: he is a man who cannot speak and is dying of hiccoughs. However, it might not be too spurious to suggest that Bolaño sees something of himself in the figure of the Peruvian, a Latin American poet dying in exile. Which would make Monsieur Pain something of a prophetic text, as though the writer sensed a tragic destiny underpinning his development, something that tallies with his instinct to auto-mythologise, blending fact and fiction, as though his life was a book he was constantly writing, fragments of which would be captured on paper and described as his novels.

Given this, the following lines from a Vallejo poem (Black Stone on top of a White Stone) would appear to have their part to play in the story and Bolaño's reasons for writing this book:

I shall die in Paris, in a rainstorm,
On a day I already remember.
I shall die in Paris-- it does not bother me--
Doubtless on a Thursday, like today, in autumn.

the golden dragon (w roland schimmelpfennig, d ramin gray)

2011-09-14T01:41:00.000-07:00

I had a spare hour to kill in Debden in early Summer and found myself picking up a copy of Schimmelpfennig's The Woman Before. It was sunny and I sat on the front porch as people out of an Andrea Arnold movie walked past talking loudly. In theory I was working but in practice I was just reading again. The play was a lazy read, but it didn't do much for me. It felt like there was something that wasn't coming across off the page. It felt a little shallow. It felt like maybe I was missing something, or maybe there was nothing to miss and I was just being tricked into thinking I was maybe missing something.

That's the context for going to see The Golden Dragon. After which I suspect that it was me who was missing something. Because The Golden Dragon is a beautifully written play about globalisation, teeth, society, asian food, and a whole host of other things. Its narrative somehow distils seemingly random stories about ants and crickets; a boy's toothache and a girl's sexual abuse; a couple's distress at having a baby and two air stewardesses getting over an 18 hour flight; blending these stories into an arcane, unlikely, culinary triumph.

The play is punctuated by the naming of oriental dishes and the listing of their parts. Perhaps this is what appeals to Schimmelpfennig about this cuisine: the way in which it takes seemingly un-cooperative ingredients and uses them to create dishes which everyone, all over the known world, wants to eat.

However, without going into the subtler and indeed more tragic themes which the writer addresses in The Golden Dragon, I'm going to offer an excuse for my slightly dismissive reading of his earlier play in Debden on a sunny day in what felt like an Andrea Arnold film. (Except that the film being made was actually about a woman falling in love with a serial killer on death row.) Which is that Schimmelpfennig's work requires something which is not that common in British theatre. It requires an understanding that a theatre is not a television, or even a cinema. And it also requires direction. All too often our attitude towards a difficult text is to attempt to make it simpler, more digestible. Rather than embracing the complexity and seeing it as a challenge. It's a director's job to take something which seems hard or even impossible to convey to the audience on the page and realise the author's intention on the stage. Gray's staging of The Golden Dragon, jumping from room to room, scenario to scenario, on what is essentially an empty stage, might be termed Brechtian or Brookian. Whatever the label, Schimmelpfennig's text demands more than slavish re-presentation, it demands direction, something which has clearly been supplied. The actors and designers have responded with imagination, vigour and wit. The show embraces the writer's seemingly arcane conceits and brings them to life. In the process the audience at the Arcola is reminded of what theatre is/ can be - a process which engages with our imaginations, which wakes the dormant child within us, which takes us by surprise.

Of course, in order to do this, you also need writers who are capable of creating texts which allow directors room to really do their job. Something which, (as noted by Simon Stephens in his German lecture earlier this year), British theatre isn't all that comfortable with. The Golden Dragon offers a glimpse of another theatre which flourishes on other shores but withers here. Schimmelpfennig's play is a playful (profound) delight, but the production as a whole is a vivid reminder of what theatre can achieve when it puts its mind to cooking up a feast.

days of heaven (w&d terrence malick)

2011-09-13T06:13:00.001-07:00

Just because a film is pretty to look at doesn't make it a masterpiece. It needs a bit more than sweeping vistas and chiselled jaws. Fortunately Malick's now seminal film is more than just a pretty face.

All the Malick tropes are here in action. The voiceover, the imminence of death, the poeticism of the everyday. This was just his second film and it was as though he emerged fully formed, a filmmaking monster who acted with complete assurance whilst everyone else was scrabbling around learning the rules. The real danger which Days of Heaven faces as a work of art is that it is too perfect. Something the filmmaker appeared aware of, deliberately throwing away his ending as though to throw the audience off track. It comes as no surprise that he followed the young girl Linda down the railway line at the end of the movie, heading off into the unknown, not to make another film for over a decade.

It's Linda who narrates. Her deadpan tone and offbeat perception keeps the film grounded in the face of the epic menage a trois love story that drives the narrative. The child's eye sees things in a different light; it has more in common with the philosopher than the adults, caught up in their emotional ties. The things that Malick really seems to delight in are the offcuts, the shards, the scraps of life around the edges. A tap dancer; a locust; the shape of the wind.As a result the most affecting aspect of the film's narrative has nothing to do with the drama of its central characters. It's the way in which it somehow captures the impermanence of the life these people lived and the value which this impermanance bestowed on the ordinary, small aspects of being human.

Days of Heaven is, in its way, a Western. If a Western is a movie that captures what it meant to live at the edge of the known world. The precariousness, the sense that you could fall off at any moment. Meaning you had to savour what there was to be savoured; something Malick's vision and Almendros' cinematography do with a vengeance.

harbor [lorraine adams]

2011-09-11T03:08:00.000-07:00

The physical harbor referred to in the title is near Boston. It's where the Algerians, many of whom come from the same small seaside town, Arzew, arrive after they jump off the tankers they have stowed away on into the icy Atlantic and swim the last leg of their journey to the relative safety of the USA. The Algerians are fleeing from the brutal and under-reported conflict that has ravaged their country. The book follows the journey of Aziz, a former soldier, from the tanker up to his arrest on charges of terrorism.

The last word signals the secondary, ghost narrative of the book. Who are the bogeyman figures who populate our media and our consciousness? What does the shape of the "evil which threatens our civilisation" as Blair, Bush and Amis might say, take? In Harbor, Adams sets out to demystify what will come to be known as a terrorist cell.

The book is apparently based on testimonies that Adams curated during her time working as an investigative journalist. Her style is clipped, with fast edits between short chapters. The influence of Elroy appears to be significant, as she hops, skips and jumps through the years of the Algerians' illegal stay, constantly moving the narrative along. The effect is sometimes opaque: the reader can feel as lost as the novel's characters as they head into a new continent without much of a clue. Logical, "transparent" readings of their lives, the book seems to be suggesting, are impossible to construct. They inhabit an almost invisible hinterland of petty crime, credit card theft, black labour, nightclubs, religion, alcohol and ultimately, at the edge of the spectrum, fundamentalism. Bit-by-bit, the narrative accrues, and our understanding of Aziz grows, shaped in large part by the terrifying events he experienced in Algeria and from which he will always be fleeing.

There's an acerbic, journalistic flintiness to Adams' prose. Like Elroy, she doesn't want her style or even our natural tendency to sympathise for a hero, to get in the way of the account she's giving. This makes for a compelling, ultimately tragic novel. What is revealed is that it is not so much the perceived threat that is a danger to our society, but our ignorance with regard to what this perceived threat really consists of.

curfewed night [basharat peer]

2011-09-09T15:44:00.000-07:00

For all the fiction that I read, and it seems sometimes unlimited in its requirement for consumption, I'm a fictional gas guzzler, I can't help thinking that you sometimes learn more about narrative from reading non-fiction. I don't care what my post-post-moderns say, there's no such thing as a text without a story, or at least the implication of a story. I dimly remember Nietzsche saying something about how even his laundry lists or his shopping lists were part of an oeuvre (or was it someone saying that of him? It's all so long ago now, all that); and now, in an age when they can deduce or plan your life history from your supermarket receipts, isn't this even more evident? Likewise, the manual for assembling the thing-you-don't-quite-know-what-it's-supposed-to-be from Ikea, if you are unfortunate enough to live in a world with Ikeas, contains a story: the parts that should become a whole, the dream that is within your grasp, waiting to be realised. Not to mention, when it comes to it, all the literary detritus of our lives, the unloved emails; text messages; tweets and sundry which contain the gory details of the lives we lead.

So clearly a non-fiction book will also contain its narrative. In a work of fiction, that narrative is worn on the sleeve. (Even if the writer seeks to avoid wearing it on their sleeve). In a work of non-fiction, the apparent demands of beginning, middle, end; development; deconstruction; wholeness; the angst of perfection; these all seem apparently more remote. The objective is to account or theorise, and accounts and theories can take any shape or size. However, having read of late a few works of non-fiction, the importance of narrative to the book's success in meeting its objectives seems patent; and the the failure of the author to manage the demands of narrative remind the reader strongly of both the necessity and the glory of a consciously managed narrative.

Peer's book treads similar territory to Waheed's Collaborator, detailing the conflict in Kashmir from the perspective of a young man who has had to live though it. Similarly to Waheed, Peer's book opens with an evocative description of Kashmiri village life in the days before the conflict really took wing. However, Peer is a journalist, and his account is non-fictional. It is a loose, anecdotal ramble though his life and relationship with the land he came from. Peer left Kashmir to go to university in Delhi. He eventually gives up the job so he can return to Kashmir in the second part of the book and research the stories which will go into the writing of Curfewed Night. The author talks of the need to capture and document a conflict that the world has ignored. He skips from chapter to chapter, moving from town to village, trying to catch up the ghosts of his past and find out what has happened to them, revealing at the same time the way in which Kashmir has been altered and damaged over the course of the last twenty years.

However, this is a hotch-potch voyage. Peer doesn't seem to have a clear idea of what he's trying to say. Perhaps because, in spite of his protestations, he seems to have adapted to mainstream Indian culture so successfully, where so many of those he grew up with haven't. The book feels as though it might be fuelled by survivor's guilt; a kind of therapeutic journey which the author lacks the perspective to really describe. What exactly Peer's story is remains nebulous; and so, therefore, does his account of the Kashmiri conflict. Where anger suffused Waheed's book, Peer's seems predicated by a failed search to locate that anger. Had he been more conscious of this, this might have lent his narrative a clearer shape. Or something else might have informed it. As it stands, Curfewed Night does its job; but it seems to me the author's literary duty remains unfulfilled; in the margins of this book there lies another, waiting to be told, the one that squares the exile's life with the struggle he cannot help but leave behind.

kill list (d ben wheatley, w. wheatley & amy jump)

2011-09-09T07:28:00.000-07:00

Kill List has received a fair amount of hype for a low budget brit-flick. There have been suggestions that this is the film to rescue UK cinema from its creative mediocrity. At one point, when our two heroes visit their employers looking to get out of their ill-fated contract, they ask what the job is really about. Someone tells them, that it's about "reconstruction". The word is carefully chosen, and would appear to suggest an echo of the British missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jay and Gal were together in Iraq. Is this film a veiled political critique? What is its real agenda?

The film opens strongly. Jay is trying to adjust to life in suburbia with his wife and child. His best mate, Gal (a homage to Sexy Beast?) comes round for supper with his new girlfriend, the disarming Fiona. Wheatley's camera does a good job of capturing the dynamics of a long, boozy night. The evening is allowed to play itself out, with Jay losing his cool and then coming round, Gal comforting Jay's kid and wife and Fiona unphased by anything she sees. By the end of the night we know these characters inside out. We understand the off-beat but believable dynamics of their relationships. The film's restless editing style and floating camera keep the pace moving and lend the film a slightly documentary feel. (The scene reminded me a little of the opening to Trapero's Born and Bred.)

This doesn't feel like a film whose title is Kill List: it feels more subtle, more intricate and more ambitious. But this is the high water mark of the movie. The next stage moves towards more standard UK fare as Jay and Gal take on a new job. They're hitmen and they've been given a list of people: a priest, a librarian, an MP. The film mutates into McDonagh's In Bruges. Gal and Jay enjoy some lively repartee as they go about their violent and increasingly unhinged business. It's all a bit strange and slightly creepy, but with Jay's family out of the picture the dramatic tension diminishes. Then comes the last of the three movies within a movie. The denouement suddenly goes all Wicker Man. There's a lot of running around in tunnels. The people who've hired our heroes turn out to be leaders of a cult. Who do exactly what you'd expect from cult leaders: they make their followers wear funny art-designed straw masks and walk around in the nude in the middle of the night, as well as carrying out random executions for their and our entertainment. It's not going to end well for Jay, and whilst the filmmakers might have thought that the final reveal would be a shock, it feels about as surprising as the fact that Tony Blair turns out to be Murdoch's child's godfather.

In a way, Kill List seems to contain the good, the bad and the ugly of British cinema. Like so much of the cinema we make, it ultimately feels as though it's aspiring to cult status, rather than trying to tell a truthful story. This inevitably means that the film starts to feel like a video game, which is exactly what happens in the last 15 minutes. Somewhere along the line it seems as though someone lost their nerve. Perhaps the filmmakers, perhaps the financiers. The opening of Kill List suggests a film that might have the capacity to be genuinely unsettling. But it can't sustain this. Instead, it ends up trying too hard and resorting to too many clichés. There is considerable skill in the editing, the sound design, and the dialogue (some of which is credited to the actors themselves). It may even be that Kill List garners the cult following it so desperately seeks. But in the end it feels like it's seeking points for effort and ticking boxes. There may be a filmmaker of real vision at work there somewhere, but this isn't the film that proves his case.

truth and reconciliation (w&d debbie tucker green)

2011-09-07T14:22:00.000-07:00

The upstairs space in the Court has been transformed into a large theatre in the round. The chairs are wooden and plain. Several have signs on them advising they are delegated for family members. On stage are more chairs, lots of them, some laid out in neat rows, others scattered randomly. The show starts when a South African family walk on stage, a mother, her mother, and her two children. The mother refuses to sit down. The rest of the family tell her to, but she refuses. A Zimbabwean couple join them on stage. They are bickering. We don't really understand why. A Rwandan family appears. They too are arguing. Later, two men and two women from both Bosnia and Northern Ireland will appear. All these actors are participating in a process of truth and reconciliation.

Gradually the situations of the individual groups become clearer. But the process remains opaque. On occasions it's hard to tell who's done what to whom. Everything is messy and complicated. Every aspect of the process assumes a significance. Who sits where. Who talks to whom. Who looks at whom. These are not situations that require any ramping up of the dramatic stakes. The drama, conflict, call it will you will, is there, tangible in every instant of the play's brief 65 minutes. The writing doesn't try and capture the full horror of what has gone before in these countries, although it offers hints. It doesn't pretend to be all-encompassing. And is all the stronger for it. This is about the aftermath of conflict. The awkward, fiddly, painful process of trying to find the words with which to speak to the enemy.

Green's language is as precise as her staging. Sometimes the dialogue is machine-gun; sometimes hesitant. Every word has a weight. The characters try to resist becoming photofit images of victims. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. A Rwandan widow betrays herself through her breathing; the South African mother continues to refuse to sit down. At the end the ghosts come out to play.

This is neither a "well worked play" nor an experimental piece. It is simply hypnotic writing which offers the viewer an insight into how history works. Debbie Tucker Green captures the speech patterns of five nations; she also captures the speech patterns of grief, anger and obstinacy. At a time when plays which try to look at the "big picture" seem to be back in vogue, her precision makes every moment seem to count tenfold, packing more into an hour than most do in three. Kudos as well to the Court for letting her direct her own work: writing this good needs a director who understands the value of every word.

attenburg (w&d athina rachel tsangari)

2011-09-05T12:43:00.001-07:00

Until about a year ago references to Greecewould conjure up images of beaches, sunsets and ruins. It's a long time sinceByron went to fight for its freedom. Of course it has been touched by various wars, had its coup d'etats, military rule and revolutions, but by andlarge Greece has been synonymous with ageless beauty, olives and the good life.For now, however, that image has been displaced. Greece is now afront line on the global economic battleground. Middle class people riot andsleep in the streets. Politicians and financiers regularly speculate about itsdemise. Economic journalists head there to reveal the shape of a dystopianEuropean future.

In retrospect, Dogtooth, Lanthimos' brilliant movie,seems to have been giving out warning signs. Within a walled garden, all wasnot what it seemed. Something was going horribly wrong in the Greek state and the chickens were coming home to roost. Tsangari, who has spent agood deal of time in the States, is credited as associate producer on Dogtooth.Attenberg is being marketed in Dogtooth's slipstream and it too bucks againstthe previous bucolic images of the country.

The film is set in a coastal resort, but it's acoastal resort in Winter. As Morrissey observed, coastal resorts in Winter canbe depressing. Even more so when your father is dying of cancer, as is the casewith the film's virginal heroine, Marina, played by the impressive ArianeLabed, who somewhat curiously happens to be French, not that you'd notice. Marinahas issues. She’s 23 and she’s never had sex. She practices kissing with heron-off friend, Bella. She imagines her father naked. Together they watch DavidAttenborough shows (hence the film’s curious title) and sometimes act out asgorillas. When she finally goes to bed with a man, she talks so much it putshim off. This makes for one of the funniest sex scenes ever filmed. It’s almostas though Marina is inhabiting the flip side of the Greek Summer idyll. Herfather is an architect who would appear to have helped develop the resort. Butthe view from the apartments is always grey and unwelcoming.

There’s a hint of the dysfunctional US indie dramahere, with a strong female twist. Death is coming and Marina is going to haveto cope with her grief. However, in contrast to a North American sensibility,there’s no bittersweet pay-off. Once her father’s ashes have been scattered,the film switches to a long static shot, of little apparent relevance, in whatlooks like a cement factory. There’s a feeling that the ending is less movingthan we would want it to be; but that is also exactly right. In an echo ofDogtooth’s harsh edges, Tsangari flirts with the themes of sentimentality butthen resists them, reluctant to give the audience what it wants.

Which is not to say that the film is not warm andsensitively told. Perhaps the one adjective it resists from that compendium ofadjectives which describe films which deal with death and sex, is “human”. Onegets the impression that Tsangari would prefer the adjective “animal”. Not in anasty sense, but in the sense that our assumed notions of evolution andprogress aren’t quite as valid as we like to think. We manage to make thesimple things in life, like sex and dying, incredibly complicated. Which meansthat the supposed virtues of ‘civilization’ are not as impressive as itsmarketing.

There are occasional longeurs in Tsangari’s film. Butits so full of unlikely and brilliant moments that they don’t matter. Whetherthe Greek new wave is showing us the future of the European dream or not isopen to debate. But it is producing some remarkable cinema.

the faber book of new south american cinema (demetriou matheou)

2011-09-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

The first half of Matheou's book has more of the feel of a publisher's vision than the writer's. Matheou is a film critic who's clearly good buddies with Walter Salles. Salles is connected, for reasons the book explains, with a host of Brazilian film-makers. Therefore, Matheou has had privileged access to them. An access which takes the form of a series of interviews, which are brought together in this collection. In a 400 page book, the first 220 are dedicated to Brazil, and most of this is taken up with these interviews which offer a somewhat uncritical perspective on the Brazilian new wave which has evolved over the course of the past twenty years, known as the 'retomada'.

Whilst this offers a host of fascinating insights, the emphasis on the filmmakers' personal accounts of their achievements means this is no Raging Bulls, Easy Riders. Rather, it feels like a sanitised account. The conflict between Lund and Meirelles over the authorship of City of God is alluded to, but only to such an extent that one is lead to suspect there might be a more intriguing story there that hasn't been told. Matheou is reverential in his approach to Salles' work, and those (including many South Americans I know) who feel the Motorcycle Diaries was something of a lightweight, sentimental treatment of the Guevara myth, later surprisingly eclipsed by the Hollywood doyen, Soderbergh, might be disappointed by the author's refusal to even suggest that it was anything other than a masterpiece. The writing doesn't address the issue of how Brazilian cinema is dominated by the perspective of a relatively affluent class. Again, reading between the lines, one of the most intriguing strands is the way in which Salles, Meirelles & co are seeking to overcome their own ignorance through the process of their filmmaking; leading them to explore aspects of the country which remained hidden below the surface of their somewhat sheltered lives. The overall impression of the Brazilian half of the book is of a somewhat cosy relationship between the critic and his subjects, which leads to some fascinating insights, but a sometimes frustratingly worthy account of Brazilian cinema.

What seems apparent is that the writer is less well connected when it comes to the other countries he chooses to focus on, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Peru. This takes up the second half of the book. Matheou writes in less detail about the cinema of these countries and one gets the feeling that he has had to work harder to gain his insights. This communicates itself through his writing. The book becomes less of a showcase for the director's voices and more of a genuine investigation of the causes and subsequent themes of the respective national cinemas. Perhaps it also helps that most of the filmmakers from these countries on the whole come from a younger generation than the Brazilians, with a more restless approach to their work. The device of using interviews continues, but given that the films the directors are discussing are by and large less well known, Demetriou works hard to fill in the gaps for his audience and in so doing provides a strong resume of Southern Cone and Peruvian cinema over the course of the past decade.

In addition, he's particularly good on the issue of funding, marketing and distribution of films. Again, the contrast between Brazil's more established industry and the evolving industries in the other countries is fascinating. There's no doubt that any European filmmaker ought to be inspired by the tales of the likes of Trapero, Martel, Alonso, Scherson, Larrain etc, as they recount the way in which they overcame the financial obstacles to get their films made.

Matheou's book is a useful if frustrating guide to Latin American Cinema. He's seen the films and he brings a whole host of names to the reader's attention, even if his remit feels less ambitious than it might have been.

the skin i live in (w&d pedro almodóvar)

2011-09-03T03:52:00.000-07:00

The credits of a film are a sure fire way to assess its production values, as well as to gain some kind of an inkling of the director's attention to detail. The credits for Almodóvar's latest last about a quarter of an hour, suggesting no expense was spared. Towards the very end, after the caterers and the music and the acknowledgments and the artwork and Gaultier and so on, there comes a list of the books featured in the film. This list consists of half a dozen or so books. I'd been trying to spot their titles during the film but the shots were always too quick or opaque. So here they were. Included in the list were Alice Munro and, at the top, Dawkins' The Selfish Gene. I've read neither but I appreciate that the director probably has. The books aren't quoted from, so I presume they don't need to be listed in the credits, but they are. This is both attention to detail and a director mapping out the wider cultural context within which the film has been made.

That attention to detail is apparent in every aspect of the film. From the casting (Banderas surprisingly watchable) to the art design (Ledgard's home-operating theatre feels just medical enough to be convincing and sufficiently beautiful to adorn rather than blemish the film). As well as the script. In the Anglo-Saxon world there's a lot of talk about the rules of scriptwriting, the do's and the don'ts. Almodóvar drives a train through all of it. The film evolves into an hour-long flashback. A flashback which is repeated and dissected. Cut up in much the same way Banderas' plastic surgeon restructures bodies. It spins a two hour supertanker narrative out of the most absurd of stories, a narrative which has its own logic and obeys its own rules, coming to a grinding halt not with a bang but a whisper.

This is intelligent movie-making on a grand, theatrical scale, the sort of thing Hollywood used to do, once upon a time, but struggles to get away with today. When you boil down the ingredients what's left at the bottom of the petri dish are absurd, even vulgar notions that should make for a preposterous fiasco. (Gender/ mothers/ men dressed as tigers etc.) But the old masters know what they're doing. Film is a kind of sleight-of-hand. Images are slotted together to build up a universe. Stirred with music and editing. The opening fifteen minutes or so of La Piel Que Habito somehow makes you believe that Banderas is a plastic surgeon who has concocted a hyper-resistant human skin out of pigflesh. And is now using these bizarre skills to go about the Frankenstein process of re-animating his dead wife. Step outside the world which is being conjured for no more than a moment and you'd find yourself shouting: It's balderdash!, or other appropriate expressions. But the skill of the film-making keeps you hooked.

When Almodóvar is on top of his game it's a bit like reading a novel by Huysmans or Blaise Cendras or Edgar Allen Poe. He seduces you into entering a parallel world which seems to occupy its own reality, a reality that you, the audience, can participate in. The novelist has the advantage that he or she does not have to make you see the world they have concocted. The filmmaker truly has to become a conjurer, brainwashing the audience into accepting everything that's put before their eyes. This doesn't have to mean that the brain ceases to work: in the most skilful application of the craft a filmmaker provokes a kind of conscious brainwashing. It's a fine art, and in La Piel Que Habito, the maestro pulls it off.

kind hearts and coronets (w&d robert hamer)

2011-08-28T06:02:00.000-07:00

I went to see this with my sister. She said she couldn't remember the last time she'd seen it. Then, upon leaving the cinema, she commented that she wasn't sure she'd actually ever seen it in its entirety. Kind Hearts is one of those films which my generation by and large feels as though it has seen, even if it hasn't. It occupies its own, obscure place in the national psyche. In its way, it is as British as Loach or Hancock. The audience at the NFT revelled in the screening; it isn't every time you go there that an audience seems to bask so contentedly in the shade of its screen. There is a peculiar moment, however, towards the end of the film, when Price and Greenwood, both making acting look effortless, have an exchange which included that phrase 'ten little niggers'. For a split second, the glow was punctured, the gap between the eras rent asunder. On one level Kind Hearts encapsulates a kind of ageless quality of Britishness. On another, it belongs to another era altogether.

What is this ageless quality? It is distilled in the performances of the film's leading actors. The first is that of Dennis Price, the would-be Baronet and serial killer. Price invests the part with an insouciance which is almost Gallic. He is descended from the ranks of Sidney Carlton, Oscar Wilde and Hamlet. The absurdity of existence always flirting with its actuality. However, unlike the French, the Bristish never succumb to or indulge that absurdity. Rather it is incorporated. Into our customs, our sexuality and our disdain for the serious. So many of the greatest British characters succeed in capturing this disdain, upto and including Bond. The rules are paid lip-service, and then broken. Greenwood, that most under-rated of actresses, enters into this game with gusto. It justifies both her affair and her complete lack of scruples at the end. In contrast to these two, there is the famouly Titanic performance of Guiness, playing eight different characters. There is something heroically ridiculous about Guiness' performance, a bit like our empire and our delusions of grandeur. That Price should exercise that other aspect of Britishness to bring down the Guiness set seems entirely appropriate. As though our devilish good nature is triumphing over our pompous banality.

These traits persist in our psyche today. If I was being mischevious I might call it the battle between Pinter annd Hare. Hamer pinpoints this conflict with glee. In addition to this, there is a faultlessness about the film's tempo and execution which lends it the quality of a classic. As with any work of art, it is of its time, a time that has long since elapsed. But Kind Hearts manages to transcend its time and remain one of the most British, and beautifully British, films ever made.

project nim (d james marsh)

2011-08-21T10:50:00.000-07:00

If the first rule of film-making is to select a story that is captivating, the director Marsh has clearly mastered it. Project Nim recounts the history of a chimpanzee raised by humans as part of an experiment to establish the chimp's capacity for language. It has heroes - Nim himself and his defenders, as well as a clear villain, in the shape of the unlikely Lothario who ran the program and seemed to give up on Nim as soon as the going got tough, sending him to live in a hellish cage and then onto a medical research program which used chimps as quasi-human guinea pigs.

Following on from Man on Wire, Marsh has unearthed a remarkable story which more than deserves the telling, a kind of real-life Battle of the Apes. Nim's anthropomorphic qualities are astonishing, with several of the people who knew him commenting on his ability to read the mood of a room and its occupants, as well as his instinct towards a masculine domination of his territory that appeared to function across the species barrier. Several women talk about Nim in near doting terms: he was more than a chimp, he was a friend, and one that was betrayed by the human race.

However, in contrast to Man on Wire, Project Nim feels like a slightly more serviceable documentary, which does the job without a great deal of magic. There's a lot of talking heads, as the film unearths Nim's former associates, who appear in the chronological order in which they appeared in his life, departing with the aid of a slightly mannered camera move which slowly draws away from the interviewee before the story moves onto the next one. There is a good deal of archive footage and some fairly lacklustre recreations, but it feels a little bit like Marsh is coasting at times. Both the poetic and scientific aspects of Nim's ability for communication felt as though they needed to be explored in greater depth. Locked within Nim's story there appears to be a profound commentary on the limits of being human, both in terms of our capacity to empathise (with hints here of Rilke) and our obsession with notions of progress, a progress which only succeeds in removing us further from our origins. But Project Nim seems reluctant to grapple with the full implications of the fascinating story it tells.

the reluctant fundamentalist [moshin hamid]

2011-08-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

Hamid's book is the kind of text you can read in a single sitting. I read it in two. The narrative is compelling, the style flows easily, and the book's remit appears to be bold and topical. I came across it via an article discussing why there's been no truly successful novel about the fall of the twin towers. One of the article's conclusions was that the event itself was experienced so profoundly by the world's public that fiction finds it hard to live up to the real thing. Hamid's novel, as the title suggests, at least offers a fresh perspective on the theme by adopting a narrator who's Pakistani, living in Lahore, talking to an American spook. The implication is that the narrator is the reluctant fundamentalist of the title and that his personal experience of 9/11 contributed to his radical politics.

The book follows the narrator's fortunes working for a Morgan Stanley/ McKinsey style organisation called Underwood Samson. His job is to value companies, presumably facilitating asset stripping or hostile takeover. He has secured his post in spite of his third world pedigree, and in order to ensure this does not handicap him he works harder than his peers and looks set for a golden future. The novel's description of the conflicts felt by the narrator as he seeks to realise the Western dream of affluence and power is acute. No matter how hard he tries he will always be an outsider. When he watches the towers go down from a Philippines hotel he cheers in spite of himself. Later on a trip to Valparaiso in Chile he crumbles, unable to participate in the deconstruction of a venerable publishing company. He quits and returns to Lahore.

As the novel restlessly trespasses over four continents in the course of its 200 pages it feels for a moment as if Hamid is the writer who will be capable of relating the East/ West; North/ South; Third/First world divide. His premise is perfect and his observations are meticulous. However, sad to say, the book kind of fizzles out. Firstly, the narrator's transformation into a cult political teacher in Pakistan (the fundamentalist of the title) is dealt with in the space of a few paragraphs, so cursory that they fail to investigate this essential stage in his development in any depth. Secondly, the conceit around which the tale is spun of the narrator talking to a US spook in a Lahore marketplace goes nowhere.

All of which leaves the reader with the impression that they've only really read half a novel. A strong, promising half a novel, but also, ultimately, a lazy one. Underneath the book's supposed examination of what might lead a man to become a fundamentalist (or even a terrorist), one cannot help thinking that this ends up being another contribution to the Orientalism debate. Hamid's book with its ferociously simple prose style and lack of any considered denouement seems tailor made for consumption by a 'Western' audience. There's no real subversion in the narrator's destiny; he doesn't shock or upset or alienate us. If there have to be "fundamentalists" in this world, (and the shortcuts the book takes as it addresses the narrator's transformation don't leave us much the wiser as to what this word really means), 'we' would probably want them to be just like him.

tibet, tibet [patrick french]

2011-07-30T04:26:00.000-07:00

As the title suggests, this book is of primary interest to Tibetophiles. Those intrigued by a mysterious land which sits in the sky and seems to effortlessly generate myths. French addresses this issue from the off, referring to the line from an obscure and second rate British poet called Henry Newbolt, who, in 1904, wrote a poem which coined the phrase: "the mind's Tibet". Writing as someone who's had a fascination with Tibet all his life, he explores the way in which the myths the country generates contribute to our failure to understand the current political realities of Tibet.

The book is framed around a journey which French took at the start of the twenty first century into Tibet. With a raft of contacts and a grasp of the necessary languages, he succeeds in travelling alone through the country, escaping the usual attentions of the Chinese state guides. In his travels he meets peasant horsemen, former political leaders, prostitutes, lorry drivers, state apparatchiks and the Dalai Lama. The book is full of French's encyclopaedic knowledge of Tibet history, myths and customs, but it comes alive when he meets real people who are searching for a way to live under the cement umbrella of Chinese rule. In so doing he obtains an accurate picture of events which lead up to the Chinese invasion and the brutal repression which followed it through the sixties and seventies, a repression intricately connected with China's own history.

The book skirts over much of this history, as well as British and US involvement in the country. What French's book ends up presenting is a paradox. On the one hand there's a Tibet whose history and people have been systematically attacked by the Chinese over the course of the last fifty years. On the other is a country which remains indelibly Tibetan; a place which the march of history might scratch but will, it seems, never be able to break. Although given this book was published almost a decade ago, perhaps this is an optimistic point of view.

bal (w,&d. kaplanoglu; w. köksal)

2011-07-23T11:06:00.000-07:00

Bal, which translates as Honey, won a significant prize at the last Berlin film festival. It was interesting to note the amount of Germans who worked on this film, presumably in part due to the German finance deals which got it made. The film itself tells the relatively straightforward story of a young, unconfident boy, Yusuf, whose father one day vanishes when off on a long trip in search of honey. There's an ecological aspect to his fate: the reason he's been forced to search further afield is that the bees are vanishing from his usual stamping grounds. The suspense element is generated by the question of whether Yusuf's dad is going to come back or not, something the opening sequence rather gives away.

Bal is beautifully observed and filmed; Yusuf's rural world is at the very margins of Europe, a place where mobile phones and the internet have yet to make an appearance. It's a rural community, but one which does not seem to be particularly poor: the family are seen to be eating well and live in a spacious house on the edge of their village. The reasons for Yusuf's reticence at school, where he aspires but fails to be one of the better readers, overcome by a stutter whenever the moment comes, are never really explored: he's just the way he is. At one point, when looking for his father, he's taken by his mother to a fair, where people have arrived in their cars to dance and trade: for a second the audience is given a glimpse of the wider world to which Yusuf is connected, with traditions and commercial possibilities his parents' straightforward life never normally touches.

The advantages of their life seem obvious: their home would make for a hippy dream house, tucking away in steep wooded hills. The disadvantages are, however, also clear: if something happens to you and you're a long way from home, no-one's going to come and help. Whether there's a more subtle commentary on Turkish life at work I couldn't really tell. Bal may be a beautiful film, but it's also so inoffensive it makes you wonder what the filmmakers, financiers et al were trying to achieve.

tree of life (w&d malick)

2011-07-16T10:54:00.000-07:00

Seated in the most comfortable cinema seat I've ever encountered, something so lush and leathery its comfort was as much of a distraction as a comfort, I had a Borgesian thought. Which is that cinema is aspiring to attain the perfection of the trailer. Wherein every moment is lush, pregnant with the incipient meaning of the film it represents, condensed with signifiers. And that cinema is in danger of aspiring to create cinema not as narrative, but as trailer. Ultimately films will all be trailers for a film which will never be made. Each moment in its 2 hours plus running time a signifier for a narrative it might one day have told, if films ran to days or weeks.

It's not entirely by chance that this thought should have occurred whilst watching Malick's oeuvre about the growing pains of a teenage boy in the American fifties. Lets be honest: the narrative here is entirely secondary to the sensory experience. Which is why it gets away with some Gaspar Noe style images of volcanos and what I took to be eggs being fertilised and even some ropey dinosaur CGI. The kid and his brother's story is told in images, with the usual bathetic Malickian voiceover, once again pregnant with suppressed meaning (in the same way as the voiceover in a trailer). And there were moments as I sat in that uber-comfortable seat when the whole thing hovered on the point of working; when I almost brought myself to invest in this child's life and fate, in Malick's restless pursuit of a utopic domestic harmony.

Then he goes and has them wandering around the south of Chile like something out of those old British Airways adverts, the whole family and all their non-friends, dressed in white. And the film felt oncemore like an advertisement for itself. Which might be the dasein as opposed to the opposite of dasein or it might be something else, but in the end felt oddly de-sensitised, Riefenstahlian, like the product of a society which has allowed technology to separate story from feeling, which is in danger of retreating into pure image.

But maybe that was just the seat's fault. I have a feeling I'll enjoy The Tree of Life more the next time I see it. See the unceasing roving of the camera as questing rather than the indication of a neurosis; see the acting as brechtian rather than wooden. There was some discussion of Malick versus Kubrick in the pub afterwards. I'd say the film which eclipses Malick's as an exploration of the perils and joys of childhood is actually Erdem's Times and Winds. But perhaps discussion of its merits is irrelevant, because Tree of Life is just a trailer for a film which has yet to be released.

allah is not obliged [ahmadou kourouma]

2011-07-15T03:42:00.000-07:00

Child soldiers and depravity. The paradox of the image of the beguiling kid toting a machine gun or in the words of Birahima, the book's narrator, a 'kalash', is one that forms part of the iconography of post-colonial Africa. Birahima is one of them, and Kourouma's novel gives the image a voice.

It's a voice, steeped in slang, which is sparky, wilful and provocative. Never depressed or even world-weary, Birahima cheerfully recounts the things he's seen. In a world of never-ending savagery, the only perspective to take is one of grim irony, and, where necessary, avoidance. As Birahima wanders West Africa, from Liberia to the Ivory Coast to Sierra Leone, he confronts death on a regular basis. To offer some kind of testament to the child soldiers whose lives have been dispensed with so lightly, he offers up a sequence of 'funeral orations'. In a few paragraphs he outlines how they came to end up dying in the manner they did. But there are moments where he's clear about where to draw the line: what the reader gets is not the full horror, for there are many things that Birahima knows but refuses to disclose. What we do learn is bad enough, even if it's leavened by his Birahima's relentless optimism.

To what extent the book really captures the thoughts of a child soldier is hard to tell. Kourouma's book is also an acerbic attack on the warlords and corrupt politicians who squabble over the lands and the riches of West Africa. Doe, Taylor, Abache, among others, all make appearances, and chapter five is given over to a potted history of events in Kourouma's home country of Sierra Leone. it makes for a scathing introduction to the venal mess created in that part of the world, a writer's counterblast to the machinations of people with power. The book's narrative is episodic, as Birahima wanders around the killing fields in the company of the grigriman, Yacouba, moving from the band of one warlord to another as he searches for his aunt. It may be that it's impossible to convey the reality of the child's mind, and at times the book's central character becomes secondary to the writer's desire to let the reader know about the politics; but somehow the connections stack up and Allah is Not Obliged, in spite of or because of its haphazard narrative, is a powerful reminder of the way in which literature or art alone can offer a voice to the voiceless; can counterpoint the brutal realities of politics with the actuality of what it means to live beneath the yoke of politics.

a separation (w&d asghar farhadi)

2011-07-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

My friend Mr Westaway does a great impersonation of Hitchcock talking about the banality of the kitchen sink drama. I could not do it justice in the flesh, let alone in print, but suffice to say that the old master wasn't enamoured of the genre, if that's what it is. From my point of view, UK culture is still overly rooted in a movement that could be said to have emerged from the Court in the fifties, and has persisted in the work of Loach, Andrea Arnold and countless TV dramas which seek to strip back the veil of artifice and expose the 'reality' of contemporary life.

Part of the reason for being resistant to a movement that finds its ultimate expression in the melodrama of the soap opera, is that the film and television industries are mediated by the middle classes, or even upper middle classes, in the UK. No matter how 'real' a kitchen sink drama seeks to be, it will be facilitated by the same people who are facilitating the likes of Cranford, Lark Rise to Candleford and the latest Jane Austen adaptation. The kitchen sinks on show are more likely to come from Habitat than Wickes.

However, that shouldn't be a reason for dismissing the genre out of hand. The small domestic dramas, as Austen was aware, offer an insight into a society's daily lives that grander or more poetic drama cannot. And cinema is an ideal medium for the kitchen sink drama, which is relatively cheap to film and, if done well, depends on the effectiveness of the acting as much as anything else. Which brings us to A Separation, a film where a key aspect of the plot hinges on whether the central character hears what the home help said to his daughter's tutor whilst they were literally standing beside the kitchen sink.

As the title suggests, this is a domestic drama about ordinary people struggling to get by. The premise of the film is that, without any real antagonism, Simin and Nader are splitting up. Their daughter doesn't want them to, but Nader feels he has to look after his Alzheimers afflicted father and this means the family cannot move as Simin wants. As a consequence, Nader has to hire someone to look after his father whilst he's at work. Simin finds someone, a religious woman from a poor background, who happens to be pregnant, not that you can tell. One day Nader comes home and finds his father on the floor with the woman absent. When she gets back he dismisses her, pushing her out of his flat. She loses the baby, and before Nader knows it he's up for murder.

These are the bare bones of a beautifully observed story, which hinges on a moment the viewer's already seen and hence is in a position to make their own judgement. It's very clever storytelling, mostly set within what appears to be a relatively middle class apartment. As the full consequences of Nader's actions begin to be felt, the viewer learns what it means to live in this society, one stifled by poverty and religion, as well as its curious, seemingly ad hoc legal system. However, more than just offering a vivid picture of contemporary Tehran, Farhadi also unswervingly charts the lines that exist in so many cultures between third and second worlds, and the intense pressure ordinary people all over the world feel exerted on them as they try to get by within these faultlines. Simin and Nader have a seemingly pleasant flat, she drives a decent car, their daughter goes to a good school, but all the same its as though society has restricted their potential for happiness, something latent in their situation from the beginning of the film.

Farhadi's film has been seen as a move away from the more cerebral cinematic essays of the Iranian tradition. In contrast to Kastiorami's work its narrative is straightforward. Yet the film is constructed with such delicacy, both in its screenwriting and its acting, that it never feels as though it's in danger of slipping into melodrama. A Separation is an understated and affecting film which appears to get to the heart of what it's like to live in contemporary Iran: it is as a result of its reluctance to shock or sensationalise that the film remains so watchable. I'm not suggesting Hitchcock would have liked it, but A Separation undoubtedly goes some way towards helping to redeem the kitchen sink drama, in part because it is not afraid to show the reality of a middle class kitchen sink; not just the working class ones.

lunar caustic [malcolm lowry]

2011-07-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I decided to join Twitter. Fittingly for the purposes of this review the decision was taken within the middle of a sleepless night. I came across a quotation from someone called Malcolm Lowry and using small childlike steps of the ingenue, I 'favourited' it. This is the quotation:

When they smashed into the hurricane the jaguars moaned in terror like frightened children.

A few days later I discovered that Malcolm Lowry was 'following' me.

This was both somehow flattering, but also disconcerting. Because, to the best of my knowledge, Malcolm Lowry has been dead since before I was born. I decided to 'follow' Mr Lowry, and it seems he is alive and well and tweeting. Which can only be a good thing.

Because Lowry must be one of the most under-appreciated British writers of the twentieth century. There's a tendency to gloss over his existence. You can sort of see why. He never, to the best of my knowledge, wrote about stately homes. Or even class. There's a quasi-autobiographical streak to his writing which (until Amis fils came along) was considered a bit bad taste, or French. He writes about life at the global margins and never puts in any neatly intellectual perspective as a sop to his British audience. Lunar Caustic, a novella which describes life in a New York mental hospital, feels like the work of someone who's got down and dirty with the margins of society. I found myself thinking about the endlessly venerated Orwell, whose work seems twee and contrived in comparison (like the sweet cottage he lived in at the top of Portobello Road). Lowry, it seems, listened to the stories of a marginal world, wrote them down, and then found out his country didn't want to hear them.

Lunar Caustic is a brisk, brilliant 90 pages long. It's an observational, slyly humorous account of a British drunk, suffering from hallucinations, who somehow finds himself assigned to this New York madhouse, which overlooks the river. It's probably now prime real estate, but the book conjures up a New York where poverty is still a keynote in the city, a city which belongs to sailors and madmen as much as bankers and artists. The book's protagonist casts his jaundiced eye over a world he's found himself briefly trapped in, observing the human instinct for storytelling and the way in which (pace Foucault) definitions of madness have always had a socio-economic basis. The book's failing is that it is too short; we want to know more about Plantagenet, his drinking, his piano playing and his ex. Nevertheless the prose is always fluent; Lowry's anti-heroic voice singing out from this hidden corner of the world.

In an earlier life, Plantagenet has been a sailor. One of his journeys involved, (with a neat symmetry from my reading point of view), transporting wild animals through a typhoon off the Bay of Bengal. At which point the writer informs us, and I think it bears repeating:

When they smashed into the hurricane the jaguars moaned in terror like frightened children.

the hungry tide [amitav ghosh]

2011-07-01T06:41:00.000-07:00

This is one of those books that arrived at a time of need. When you don't really know what you're doing yourself and you can't understand why things are happening as they are and you can't think about reading anything but then you do and the voice of the author anchors you. This is the world. Not the things that happen. But the things that are written. Which exist like a permanent rainbow overhead, a pot of gold which is constantly within reach.

In the end, oddly, Ghosh's book left me feeling disappointed. But in the beginning, it was a revelation. To say this reveals that reading this writer is to embark on a journey. Fittingly, the book's two principle characters, Piya, the US cetologist and Kanai, an Indian translator, meet on a train as they are about to begin a journey to the Sundarbans, a series of mangrove swamp islands in the Bay of Benghal, not all that far from Calcutta. Piya is hoping to study river dolphins; Kanai is returning to visit his aunt, whose late husband's notebook has been discovered and bequeathed to Kanai, for reasons he doesn't entirely understand.

Immediately the reader is thrown into rich novelistic territory. What will Kanai discover in the journal? Will Piya find the dolphins and what will happen if she does? How are these two seemingly disconnected persons due to become connected? Ghosh's book is so well formed, it's foundations laid with the cunning and art of a mason, that it's an immediate delight to feel oneself, as a reader, caught up in his tide, rolling down the river with his effortless narrative. In addition to all this, the book feels as though it's hard-wired into the land he's talking about: the people's myths; the presence of nature, above all in the shape of the mercurial, murderous tigers; the influence of the British; and finally, the force of the weather, which shapes the land as well as the stories of those who inhabit this land. Including all the characters we will meet. At one point, the narrative even finds a way to inform the reader of how the birth of the continent, so far away and yet so present, the island that was India colliding with Asia, forming the Himalayas and its rivers, helped to shape this land, and its people.

At times this is bravura writing, the novelist providing the perspective for his characters' stories (and our own) which day-to-day life has no time for. Ghosh achieves this without imposing his voice upon this audience: the information he conveys resides within the dreams, folklore and learning of the people he writes about. You come out of the book feeling as though you too have visited the Sundarbans and walked in the shadow of the tiger. The moment Fokir, the local fisherman, explains to Piya, distraught at the killing of a tiger, why the tiger has allowed itself to be killed, is a remarkable one, the inherited knowledge of the land trumping everything our liberal Western sensibilities have taught us (with our inherited knowledge) to feel.

Perhaps strangely, it felt to me as though the book's denouement was its least convincing aspect. As though the mechanics of the story are in danger of taking hold. There are moments in this book when you can see the gears moving. Perhaps because he had done such a job of luring me into his trap, it's closing felt like an anti-climax. Nevertheless, the job had been done. I had been taken out of my world, a world without sense, and escorted through another one. The act of separation helping to lend perspective to my own. Reading being the opposite of escapism; instead a space for contemplation, the novelist's acute presentation of the parameters of his described world allowing one to spy the parameters of one's own.

the blind owl [sadeq hedayat]

2011-06-20T02:10:00.000-07:00

I discovered this book in the Calder bookshop across the road from The Young Vic. The blurb referred to the writer as the Iranian Kafka. He's not. He's something else altogether.

The Blind Owl is a short, very dense text, of just over a hundred pages. It's narrated by a lunatic, a lunatic possessed by a cold thread of reason. The first forty pages of the book contain some of the most brilliant, hallucinatory writing I've ever come across. The last sixty aren't bad either. Hedayat employs horror, humour, repetition and acute powers of description to describe one man's madness as told by himself. You could say it emerges from a style of writing pioneered by Dostoyevski, specifically in works such as The Double, (so much in twentieth century literature seems to come from Dosteyevski) or, as mentioned in the forward, the French poets maudits, with their delirious introspection. From an Anglo-Saxon point of view, it feels like it might be the direct heir to Coleridge's Kubla Khan: this is what it's really like inside the pleasuredome, in a land where time drips off the walls and every bead of sweat contains a world refracted within.

What marks out Hedayat's text in particular is the remarkable use of repetition. Which serves as both a source of stability in a world where events seem to obey no temporal logic and also the source of a kind of comic damnation. It's all going to come around again, it's never going to change. Trapped as we are in the same old patterns (script after script; flaw after flaw; fight and flight, etc) the simplicity of Hedayat's device works to remind us that the narrator, for all his opium habits and exotic strangeness, is one of us, human, obedient to the inescapability of fate.

point blank (d fred cavayé, w cavayé & lemans)

2011-06-18T02:05:00.000-07:00

Someone somewhere must have known when allocating the English Language title of this film that it was thereby alluding to another film made in the late 60s by John Boorman. Perhaps it was a marketing exec, reasoning that this might drag in punters through association, subliminal or otherwise. If that is the case, one can only say, as ever, don't listen to the marketing men. Next they'll be calling any old remake 'The Italian Job', perpetrating the spurious notion that it's on a par with the original, etc etc.

It's a curious aspect of French cinematic culture that they love a corny old policier. It's a fierce strand that has run through the country's cinema over the course of fifty years, perhaps more. Godard played around with it, and before that Becker and Melville created their classics. Much of Chabrol's work is crime drama, and in recent years there's been the likes of Mesrine, various Audiard movies, Tavernier movies... The list goes on. Much of this is self-consciously inspired by or in reaction to US culture. It's almost as though there's a perceived need to provide a counterweight to the notion that the French are a bunch of arty, philosophical types, who make noodly films and refuse to invade Iraq.

Cavayé's film belongs to this tradition. Unfortunately, when the French ape the US, like almost all apeing of other cultures, it doesn't do anyone any favours. Cavayé appears in Point Blank to be attempting to make a rollicking, action adventure movie with twists and turns galore, a kind of on-speed version of 24, only with a mature 'adult' relationship at its core. The consequences are not hard to guess. This is like a steak-frites cooked by Macdonalds, with neither the horrific trashiness of the latter (something which at his best, Tarantino pulled off) or the quality control of the former.

Of course, the French crime dramas which work are those which are unafraid to drop in a dash of philosophy/ introspection. Le Samourai is a small masterpiece; The Prophet is perhaps a little self-consciously brilliant, but has its particular brand of brilliance none-the-less. The French can do crime drama; they just need to keep to their own titles and inject it with a French sensibility (whatever that means) rather than a heavy dose of ketchup.

the tenant & the motive [cercas]

2011-06-12T15:39:00.000-07:00

These are two novellas by Javier Cercas, brought together in one volume. They are primarily of interest in the way they show how far a writer is capable of profiting (in every sense) from the process of re-invention. The Tenant's setting, an American university campus, has something in common with The Speed of Light, but this aside Cercas' later work seems almost unrecognisable. In these early texts we get an idea of the writer's capacity for attention to detail encased in a relaxed prose style and a certain structural playfulness, (both stories containing a circular dimension), but its all done in a limited, slightly arch fashion: the novellas feel like exercises in writing, rather than the raw-blooded thing itself.

I have a feeling that in one of the later works that I've read, the author refers to these earlier texts, slightly dismissively. This is an aside, but in my early years in the capital, I went to a gathering at The Poetry Society, which was then in Earls Court, to listen to a clack of poets talk about their "juvenilia". It might be a false memory, but I have a feeling Motion was there, wearing a green suit, along with perhaps, Morrison and others. They read some of their youthful poetry and then dissected its awfulness; attempting to pinpoint the moment at which they acquired maturity as writers. I remember the evening feeling bizarrely self-congratulatory, and realised that anything I had written upto that point could only be seen by them as 'immature'. In a sense I suppose they were a pale equivalent of the figures in Cercas' friend Bolano's opening to The Savage Detectives. Whether time will recognise the distinctions being made by these poets between their immature work and their mature work will only be revealed in their remembering. Maybe I was just kicking against the pricks, as a would-be angry young man, frustrated by the green suits.

Because Cercas' experience shows that there is such a thing as development and there's no doubt that in the twelve years between the publication of these novellas and the publication of Soldiers of Salamis, he evolved, or rather, discovered another method of writing which was more appropriate for his skills. Having said that, there is then the danger that he will typecast himself as the clever writer who made texts out of historical faction. I'd like to think that there's no such thing as juvenalia (even if there is) nor is there such a thing as mastering the beast. The process is one of ongoing change, peaks, troughs. Keep trying, as Beckett put it, although he said it rather more eloquently.

beginners (w&d mike mills) & ballast (w&d lance hammer)

2011-06-10T02:13:00.000-07:00

My week has been bookended by Brixtonians taking me to the movies. It began with Ballast, Hammer's seemingly low-budget, cinema verite investigation of low-rent lives in the modern Deep South, and concluded, (if the week is deemed a short one) with Mills' LA tale of loss and love. The contrast between the two films seems beguiling; both made by would-be indie US filmmakers, one seemingly outside the system (even though he has made his money out of doing artwork on the Batman franchise), the other seemingly within the system (even though his first film was an 'indie' hit.) The likelihood is that Mills and Hammer come from similar places and perhaps their movies have more in common than at first appears.

Ballast might well be termed moody. It's a sparse telling of the tale of a disfunctional family. The film opens when Lawrence, a lugubrious, large-boned black man, shoots himself after the suicide of his twin brother. Thereafter, he recovers, and his brother's son, James, enters his life. James' mother and father weren't talking and James has grown up thinking the worse of his absentee father, feelings he transfers to his uncle, whom he initially confronts with the gun he's stolen from Lawrence, the same gun Lawrence used to shoot himself. As the film unwinds, James, Lawrence and James's mother, Marlee, work out a way of living together. The piece is shrewdly edited, with the pieces of the puzzle slowly coming together as the audience comes to terms with the connections. It's also well shot by Lol Crawley, who lends an overcast pallor to proceedings. Under the influence of the Dardennes brothers, the film wears its earnestness on its sleeve. Still, it's not your standard US fare, and the film's real strength is its storytelling, as it weaves its story out of very little material into something that succeeds in holding the audience's attention. The intention seems to be to convey something approximating normality and make it watchable: to deliver the opposite of the Hollywood dream.

Beginners, on the other hand, is set in a lush-looking LA, with two fetching leading actors, whose lives seem by and large quite far removed from the normal. Oliver is mourning the loss of his father, who after the death of his wife came out and acquired a new life with a sparky Latino boyfriend. He then meets Anna, who occupies one of those infuriating non-parts: a French actress who lives between LA and NY, never seems to do anything, and has some problems with her dad, who phones her up and tells her he wants to kill himself. They run around LA and fall in and out of love and back again. It's all fairly vacuous, and once again would seem to have a strong European influence. This is post-Soderbergh, post-Godard, with McGregor and Laurent as Belmondo and Seberg. As with most imitations, its pallid. The film uses the image of its stars to convey its message: Ewan looks unhappy, therefore he must be; Melanie looks tortured, therefore she must be. There's nothing really going on, and once the love affair has been established, it has nowhere to go except to wait for Ewan's gay dad to pop his clogs, which of course he does, towards the end. Disappointingly for a director who has made his name making independent cinema, there doesn't seem to be any real ambition beyond presenting images for the eyes which seem to be alluring. There are plenty of them, and so there should be, but if you ever wanted proof that film has to be about more than just pretty pictures, Beginners will do it for you, largely because it seems to be trying so hard to convince its audience that it possesses a profundity it clearly doesn't actually own.

However, in keeping with Ballast, Beginners has made a virtue of its editing and its cinematography, as well as throwing in some cute animation for good measure. Clearly, Beginners can indulge all of this because that's all it aspires to be: well produced. Ballast on the other hand is trying to describe the reality of living in the US in a more 'authentic' way. It attempts to demystify the film process: longer takes, little fancy lighting (one scene which is over-lit, when Lawrence makes a pass at Marlee at the kitchen window, stands out like a sore thumb) and a concerted effort not to use the machinations of cinema to glamourise the images the film is capturing. Of course, it can't quite succeed: the opening shot, for example, of James sending a flock of birds into the sky has a dirty beauty Andrea Arnold would have been proud of.

The trouble with Hammer's approach is that only the cinema tragics went to see his film (which in spite of its low-budget vibe still cost $700 000 according to IMDB). The stars should guarantee Mills' effort some kind of audience, even if in commercial terms the issues of being gay and death might seem 'risky'. There doesn't seem to be much space in Anglo-Saxon culture for a cinema which seeks to use the medium as an agency of investigation or reflection of its society. Ballast makes a worthy effort, but Beginners shows up the shallowness of an industry which doesn't seem to know what it's there for, on anything other than a commercial basis.

Which is hardly a radical conclusion and suggests the whole premise of this joint review has revealed very little except for if you have a spare hour and a half and need to make the choice between the two films, choose Ballast. It's less fluffy, but it's got more body.

le quattro volte (w&d michelangelo frammartino)

2011-06-03T15:34:00.000-07:00

It's a wonderful thing that cinema can do when you come to something in ignorance and leave in awe. Of course it cannot happen all the time, or else we'd never do anything else: it would be the best drug ever invented. (In a way perhaps the moving image, is just that). But when it does there are few things better than sitting in the black box and watching another vision of the world take shape before your very eyes.

Le Quattro Volte, and I almost say this between clenched teeth, is a small miracle of a film. Between clenched teeth because in some ways it might have been made to have been discussed and marvelled at over middle class dinner tables, and in singing its praises I might be seen as a middle class diner, or dining table. It is set in a picturesque village in rural Southern Italy (one of the few thoughts which disrupted my enjoyment of the film was the notion that, as in parts of France or Spain, it would not seem unlikely that swathes of the village might have been or will be bought up by those dining Brits), and it has nothing very threatening about it at all, excepting the odd goat. This is not a film that's presaging or even casting much of a nod at societal upheaval or global catastrophe. If you wanted to you could accuse it of being twee. However, no matter how twee it might be (and shots of a kid goat, stumbling lost through a wood, might be deemed very twee indeed), it is also brilliantly made.

I'm not sure exactly what the four in the title refers to as the film consists of three stories. One recounts the last days of a taciturn, gnarled goatherd. The second recounts the first days of a kid goat. The last recounts the last rites of a tree. All three are ingeniously connected, one story leading into another. All deal with the most profound of issues: birth, death, and what it means to live, as either animal, vegetable or human. Yet the film brings the lightest of touches to all this profundity. There's a barrel load of wit in the way it uses the camera as spy, or voyeur, on the three stories. Not least in a bravura sequence which precedes the goatherd's death, and manages to integrate Roman legionnaires, the passion of Christ, a demented dog and a flock of wayward goats. In the course of which it obliquely touches on the peculiar but vital life of the village itself.

The villagers remain bit part players in this sly documentary. (Is this a drama or a documentary? Both, or neither? This genre bending is another of its achievements.) When a villager turns, conscious of the camera, then tries to get out of the way, the deceit of the camera's anonymity is deliberately ruptured. At the same time, the host of cavorting villagers can be compared to a group of young cavorting goats, who likewise have their games and social structures, which the camera observes. There is a bizarre humanity latent in these goats, who will be born and get lost and ruminate and eventually die, just like we do. The interweaving of human and animal stories does more than any nature documentary ever could to illustrate how we are all mere creatures, with our curious practices, doing our best to get by under the big sky.

If Quattro Volte reminded me of anything it was perhaps some of Calvino's fables. The film shares his wry, ahistorical observation of rural existence and customs perpetrated since the time of the Romans and before. Things that go beyond language (this is a film without dialogue). If there's been any better exploration of what nature means and the way in which we, as humans, are part of it, no more nor less than a goat or a tree, I have yet to see it. Frammartino's film seems to have appeared out of nowhere like a natural phenomenon itself, laden with a wry wisdom and a pantheistic intelligence.

the diving pool [yoko ogawa]

2011-06-01T08:35:00.000-07:00

The Diving Pool is the second of Ogawa's books I've read in quick succession. This is a collection of three novelas. All three are told from the point of view of a female voice, each one on the point of alienation from her society. In The Diving Pool, a young woman lives with her religious parents who act as foster parents to a bunch of children; inspiring in the narrator complex passions of both lust and a muted sadism as she guiltlessly terrorises her younger foster sister. In Pregnancy Diary, the narrator is herself subjected to her pregnant sister's self-indulgent whims; in the final part a woman who is putting off moving to Sweden to join her husband who has a job there finds herself drawn into the menacing world of a nearly limbless caretaker.

There is more to Ogawa's writing than their featherweight narratives. She is what they might call a consummate stylist. There's that pleasure to be gleaned from reading her work of knowing that every sentence has been worked on, but not in an abrasive, ponderous manner. Rather they have been honed and polished, the rough wooden edges of words rendered now as smooth, yet unexpected, as a mirror. Ogawa succeeds in making the physical tangible: food has a curious presence in her prose, it's something alluring but also potentially revolting. Nature is Herzogian: as liable to sting as it is to caress. The depiction of the caretaker who has no arms and only one leg would appear to be something out of a horror movie, and the story feels as though it belongs to that genre, but the careful, cruel-comic descriptions of his method of making tea or opening a door gives the piece another dimension: maybe this man in not so much a figure from a horror story, more a self-sufficient hero? Ogawa's naive narrator opens up this space and the story is defined not just by what it tells, but also by what it might become; the writer playing with the reader's expectations in a delicate game of literary charades.

The interesting thing is that it's the featherweight nature of the narrative that allows the writing to get away with this level of suppressed potential: she leaves her audience wanting to know more. And we are happy to be teased like this on this scale; it never reaches the point of becoming grating. What we don't know is as important as what we're told. The unwritten text perfectly complementing the written text.

fire in babylon (d stevan riley)

2011-05-29T08:45:00.000-07:00

The Summer of 1976 was hot. I was ten years old. My family lived in Northwood. I lived there for the three months when I wasn't at boarding school. There was a large garden with a small wooded area at the back. An ample lawn, with flowerbeds on either side. At the bottom of the garden, in front of the house, there was a rosebed. The garden sloped downwards. At certain points in our lives, times when there was a lot of rain, my father would dig channels across the lawn. I presume this was to channel the rainwater away from running down towards the house, but I can't be sure. The sitting room had French windows which opened out onto the garden.

I spent a lot of that Summer playing cricket. I imagine I played mostly with my friend Nick and my oldest sister. The ball would get lost in the flowerbed on a regular basis. The great fear was that it would be hit down the garden and break a window, something which happened at least once. Days were long and hot. In between bouts of playing cricket, we'd go inside and watch it on the television. The old men of England were being terrorised by the West Indians. This is a key part of the film, Fire in Babylon, which tells the story of the rise of the West Indian cricket team in the seventies. The film accentuates to a certain extent the racial overtones of the cricketing conflict between the West Indians and an English team lead by a South African. However, from a child's perspective the issue of race was non-existent. The only thing that was clear was that the West Indians had fiercer bowlers who were too much for the likes of Close and Edrich, men who looked like the most boring of school teachers.

The film made me think about what a peculiar but enrichening slant a following of cricket generates in a youngster. Cricket is a global game, albeit one played by only about ten countries at the highest levels. India, Pakistan, the West Indies: as a youngster I never saw these places in terms of race; merely in terms of cricketing prowess. It's interesting to note that several of the cricketers who feature in this film have expressed reservations about the way in which their comments have been used: the issue of race might have been bubbling under but it was not the priority the film suggests.

All the same, Fire In Babylon looks like belonging to a series of films which seek to elevate sport, placing it within its socio-political context. (The soon to be released Senna will be another). Given the enormous industry that modern sport has become, this seems like both a canny and a justifiable approach. Sport can play a part in the collective consciousness in a way in which art can only look on in jealousy. Art can reclaim its role by seeking to contextualise those moments or feats which are extolled in the day only to be forgotten. Apparently when several of the current West Indian team saw the film, (a team that has reverted to being "calypso cricketers", a tag which Clive Lloyd's team hoped to leave behind forever), they had no idea of the full history of the West Indian team.

Sport is part of the lives of so many of us. On one level it's just commercialised froth; on another its part of the warp and woof of the world we inhabit.

the tunnel [ernesto sabato]

2011-05-21T05:57:00.000-07:00

Snr Sabato died recently. His is a name, like Bioy Cesares or Saer, that seems to live in the shadow of Borges. Consequently it was interesting to note that The Tunnel, originally published in Sur magazine, was championed by Camus and presumably was reasonably well known in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century.

The book has some of the playful internal machinations of a Borges story. It describes an artist's obsessive and ultimately catastrophic love for a woman whom he spies looking at one of his paintings in a way that leads him to believe she alone has grasped its significance, and hence the significance of his art and his self. Intriguingly, it's not the whole picture that Maria is looking at: it's 'a remote scene framed in a tiny window' in a corner of the picture's canvas. What does she see though this window? On the one hand she sees a vista of the sea, but on the other the artist decides she's seeing into his soul. Sabato's text is delightfully cryptic. Maria and the artist begin an affair, one which is plagued by his jealousy, but details remain sketchy and the 'truth' of her position is never revealed.

This deconstructed, playful approach to narrative, taking Kafka or Dostoyevsky's unreliable narrators a stage further, might be seen as pure modernism, in the vein of Borges's mindgames and Calvino's fractured narratives. But there are two aspects to the book which help to shift it onto another, less cerebral plane. Firstly, it is extremely funny. Castel, the book's anti-hero, has a raw, sardonic sense of humour. The author indulges his frequent asides as he muses on the role of the critic, for example, with scathing vindictiveness. His humour reflects his intelligence as an outsider and it's not hard to see how this voice seduced the likes of Camus.

Secondly, the book deals as tellingly with the subject of love and its lunacy as almost anything you could come across. Castel shifts from anxious passion to deluded paranoia. The way in which the book traces the stages of his ferocious and ultimately misguided love for Maria is masterly. It's not hard for love to become a disease rather than a life-force: the lover's unrealised obsession has more to do with themself, the subject, than the other, the object, even when the lover has convinced him or herself that the other is the one calling the shots. Sabato's occasionally incoherent narrative helps to illustrate the perils of the delusions of love, a world where clouds can look like bears, and the temptation (or dramatic need) to interpret information supersedes any rational appraisal of what's actually occuring. This way, Sabato, seems to suggest, madness lies, no matter how brilliant the lover might be (and perhaps the more brilliant they consider themslves, the more dangerous they become.)

With its humour and meditation on love, The Tunnel comes across as a brief, understated masterpiece. Whilst short, Sabato's text acts as a fascinating counterpart to Borges: the work of someone who shares the maestro's intellectual talents, but seeks to locate these within a more tragic, humane literary context.

i am the wind (w fosse, d chereau)

2011-05-03T14:25:00.000-07:00

This review might be subtitled:

Starkness & Stagecraft

Starkness is for Fosse's enigmatic, idiot-savant text. Two unnamed men talk about how terrible the world is, and then go out to sea on a boat. Where they discover the world is not so terrible, but nevertheless suicide has its attractions. This is the second Fosse text I've come across. He is a beguiling writer, if only because you can't quite believe that anyone can get away with dialogue that seems so devoid of subtext. People say exactly what they think. Or do they? It's intriguing to see in this well-acted production that whenever the actors allow a note of humour to enter into their apparently po-faced exchanges, the drama shifts to another, more playful level. It felt as though there were more laughs latent in this piece than the production realised. Tom Brooke, one of the two actors, captured this cheeky ambivalence beautifully. In his mouth every statement became a potential question, and any suggestion of hyperbole or melodrama was undercut by the character's sense of self-awareness. The comparisons with Beckett are there to be made; and like Beckett, Fosse seems to benefit from not being drowned in seriousness.

Drowning being a strong possibility as a result of Chereau's aqueous stagecraft. As you walk in, the large open stage is turned into a puddle. Out of which later will emerge a boat, which could sink at any time. The moment the boat surges out of the deep is arresting, and the swaying, eddying boat which appears complements the meandering dialogue of the piece's middle section. Chereau and his designer's mechanics might have seemed out of keeping with the simplicity of the play, but in the event they work. The play requires a boat on the sea and Chereau delivers this, nothing more nor less. The lights bouncing off the water and water refracting off the theatre walls help lend an ethereal beauty to the space. This is high-tech simplicity, and in its paradoxical way the stagecraft is stunningly effective.

There remains the feeling that this is a brittle piece, one which requires the most delicate of touches to pull off. There are moments when it teetered on the brink of folding in on itself in a miasma of forced poeticism. However, the production skirted the isle of indulgence and came out the other side, into the wide open waters of spectacle and a theatre steeped in the physicality of things.

hotel iris [yoko ogawa]

2011-05-02T04:21:00.000-07:00

Ogawa's short novel is set in a Japanese coastal resort town. Which coast it is set on I don't know, but the notion that all those fictional characters who participate in the novel, and the fictional town itself, might no longer exist, adds piquancy to a slight but finely written story of depravity and delinquency. One of the comments in the blurb, by Hilary Mantel, says - "I admire any writer who dares to work on this uneasy territory". This territory being the sexuality of a seventeen year old girl who enjoys, that being the operative word, a fraught and to-most-people's eyes abusive sexual relationship with a man three times her age.

There's much here that seems to resonate with foreign notions of the Japanese psyche. The use of sex as both a complex outlet for power games and a means to excavate the subject's confused interior landscape. Mari, the protagonist, desires the humiliation that her lover, the Russian translator subjects her to. Here is the pertinence of Mantel's comment. It is the kind of book which it might be said could only be published by a female writer, in this day and age. If a man were to suggest that Mari wanted this 'abusive' relationship, exploring it from her point of view, it is hard to think he would be taken seriously and would in all likelihood be read as exploitative. However, in Ogawa's hands, the story is strangely convincing. Mari is never a victim: she remains a level-headed appraiser of her situation, no matter how dangerous. We are in similar territory to the recent film of Norwegian Wood: just because you're going through something difficult and complex doesn't make for an inevitably tragic narrative. The resilience of youth enables people seeking experience to embrace strangeness; a strangeness which society, (in Hotel Iris denoted by the townspeople and Mari's family), cannot contemplate as anything but alien and reprehensible.

The book's effectiveness is not founded on its more salacious material, but on the way it gets under its protagonist's skin. The whole world is coming alive for Mari, and the translator is but one part of that world. At times the book's town feels reminiscent of Prout's Normandy seaside holiday resort; the seaside, with its unique rhythms, is a great place to grow up, to realise the possibilities of the adult world. Ogawa's prose offers precise descriptions and is unafraid of surreal detail (a plague of fishes, a lunch of multi-coloured soups). Hotel Iris is a book that succeeds in exploring the most provocative of worlds without really being provocative at all. By reducing the salacious to the mundane, she seems to suggest that we shouldn't over-emphasise deviance or sexuality; normality abounds in even the most rarified of situations.

how i ended this summer (w&d aleksei popogrebsky)

2011-04-26T13:20:00.000-07:00

Two men, stuck on an island in the Arctic Ocean off the North Coast of Russia. It's a recipe for trouble, evidently. Especially when we learn early on that there's an 'isotope' on the island. What is an isotope, you might be asking? Well, it's a biggish radioactive device that looks like a half-submerged bomb. It gives off a satisfyingly dramatic racket when a Geiger counter is placed in its vicinity. It can also keep you warm if you find yourself stuck out in the wilds. Dangerously warm.

Popogrebsky's film begins as a lyrical meditation on life in a cold climate, before morphing into a kind of pointless existential psycho-thriller. In post-Soviet Russia the hard-bitten Sergei finds himself foisted with the young studenty type called Pavel, who drifts around the island listening to his Yo La Tengo-style music and getting a hit from the stunning scenery. Things start to go pear shaped when Sergei goes fishing and Pavel receives the message from the radio that Sergei's family have been in 'an accident'. How he reacts to receiving this message determines their fate. In a sense this is The Dumb Waiter with a polar bear thrown in for the video games generation. (Pavel plays a rather neat shoot-em-up video game with a distressed mural of Marx and Lenin in the background.) The narrative becomes reductive, but then there seems to be limited scope for its development. It's not as though Sergei and Pavel are going to become lovers in the Arctic circle, although that might have introduced a more dangerous twist than the way the story actually unfolds.

The unacknowledged character in the film is the landscape itself, which is ably captured by Pavel Kostomarov, the DOP. There are several effective time-lapse sequences and the polar bear moment works well. However, in spite of all the things that work, the whole project feels a little too contrived and a little too abstract. It maintains a certain discipline, never succumbing to melodrama (in the style of Scorcese's latest, for example). But all the same, it feels a bit cold. Maybe if we'd learnt what an isotope actually does, or why this island has been used as a base through so much of Russia's history, we might have cared a bit more about what Pavel and Sergei get up to in their mannish games. But the script adopts the clean slate approach: the island holds no ghosts, just a relentless capacity for driving its inhabitants radioactive ga-ga.

shadow of the silk road [colin thubron]

2011-04-26T05:01:00.001-07:00

Thubron's book is a curious journey. It's been several weeks in the reading. Crossing Asia from China to the Mediterranean. Following one strand of the Silk Road in a ramshackle, Westerly course through 300 plus tightly knit pages, full of dense, frequently poetic prose.

Anyone who's ever embarked on any kind of a journey knows that as well as the discoveries and the sights, there are also the longeurs and those moments where you wonder what the hell you're doing. Whilst Thubron obviously had more of a reason than some for his journey - he was on the way to writing another best-selling book - his account includes plenty of those longeurs and seemingly endless bus journeys.

The journey begins in China and, whilst still in possession of his full energy, this opening is perhaps the most engaging part of the book. Thubron gets to grips with the changing nature of China, retracing steps he's taken before. The fact he knew this land twenty years ago is to the book's benefit: the full extent of China's transformation in that time is ably conveyed. Subsequently, he continues to seek these parallels, looking at the way a place has evolved or declined. However, the route feels so haphazard that, as it unfolds, places bleed into one another. The Stans become something of a blur, and the final stint through Iran and Turkey is a breathless dash for the coast. Again, any traveller knows that there's a slight sense of diminishing returns the nearer you got to the journey's finish: you just want to get there, and the reaching of the end starts to become more important than the encounters along the way, but given that this is an account of the Silk Road itself, it seems as though the writer's weariness is in danger of short-changing the well-trodden path.

In part this is because the reader realises as the writer progresses that there is no real narrative at work here. This is travelling as a mass of observation. Some of it well done, some less so. When Thubron runs into 'ordinary' people, he describes them well. But too often the prose teeters on the brink of a heightened poeticism that runs the risk of seeming repetitive. (I lost count of the number of times he used the word 'faience' and I still have no idea what it means.) But what's going on beneath the surface? Why is the writer even embarking on this trip, unless he's just been commissioned? He seems to have no real stake in the journey, he's just a travelling notebook and pair of eyes. There's no real goal and no real story. Bizarrely, a note at the beginning of the book alerts the reader to the fact that the journey was interrupted for a year in the middle, due to the conflict in Afghanistan. But the book bumps along without reference to this; as though it has never happened. This acknowledged deception only provokes curiosity as to all the other unacknowledged deceptions.

Which is not to criticise the writer for these; the process of documenting a journey has to be a selective one. Just to suggest that his account might have had more purchase and been more satisfying if the writer had let us in behind the veil of his poeticisms a little more. Alluded not just to the journey of history, or silk, but also of the man himself.

la casa muda (d. gustavo hernandez, w. oscar estevez)

2011-04-14T15:29:00.000-07:00

Once again, a Uruguayan film on release in London. A Uruguayan film, no mas, starring Jerry, from Harold Pinter's Betrayal. Looking haggard and decadent and far too old to play Jerry, which Snr Alonso probably is. But his abilities as an actor helped him to overcome this issue on stage. And, let's be honest, his abilities as an actor aren't really tested here. Nor are the abilities of any of the other actors, of which there are approximately two. This film isn't about the acting. It's not about much really, at a slight 74 minutes. So, what you may ask, are it, and Jerry, doing here, in London town?

Casa Muda is a genre piece, made in a country that's making perhaps half a dozen films a year now. Casa Muda, a horror made with three actors, a house, a digital camera and a well-conceived sound design, would be among the cheapest of them. But somehow it's ended up getting a world wide distribution deal and selling itself for the already-in-production Hollywood remake. It's not the scariest horror movie ever made, it's not the goriest, but it might be one of the most intelligent.

The piece contains two key conceits. Firstly that it's filmed in a single take, apart from the significant coda. Whether this is true or not - the man on my right said there were lots of cuts and he found them distracting - doesn't matter too much. This is a selling point, and it's well enough done for it to have worked. The effect of this seemingly endless take is to create a piece of cinema that feels as much like a piece of classical music as a film. Hence the significance of the sound design. It has its longeurs - the opening is veering on the dull - it builds towards a finale, and within its progress it has sudden, violent crescendos. If you go with it, it's kind of hypnotic, and uses cinema in a shrewd, non-linguistic manner. The extended, real-time take heightens all of this and not only works on an aesthetic level, it's also a great selling point.

The second conceit is, to a certain extent, revealed by the title. A more precise translation than the working one of "The Silent House' would have been 'The Dumb House'. You can see why the distributors didn't go for that. However, the point about a dumb house is that it doesn't speak. Yet, this is a house that speaks all the time - it clanks and groans and makes scary noises. The title therefore gives away the twist, which isn't worth disclosing here. On one level its a ridiculous twist, as the Uruguayan paper, La Diaria, observed. On the other, it is a functioning twist. It seems to me the writers of the film were smart enough to know that in order to make something distinctive, they needed to come up with an effective functioning twist and they did so. The twist is more important than the viability of the twist. (Even if Bradshaw in The Guardian appeared beguiled by it.) Judged on the level of a horror film it may not be the greatest twist of all time, but it doesn't have to be. After all, it is just a horror movie. Or at least it will just be marketed as such. And this is key to the film's capacity for success. Which, on it's own terms, a little no-budget film made in the backwoods of San Jose, it has undoubtedly been.

Looking at Casa Muda from a perspective of Uruguayan cinema, I'd say, in spite of the fact it's not my cup of tea, that it marks an advance in an emerging industry. Anyone will tell you that the hardest nut to crack is genre. The way in which the film plays up to its limitations, doesn't try to be anything more than the canny piece of filmmaking it is, seems, again, intelligent. Its very simplicity will allow people to impose readings on it in years to come it doesn't seem to be seeking. It's also an object lesson in how to approach the David and Goliath world of the film business. Until you reach the top, your film is always going to be struggling to compete with the production values of films with bigger budgets and bigger stars. (Bigger than Snr Alonso, you might be saying, but yes, sadly, this too is true.) Given this, you can either become an auteur, and a great deal of developing world cinema is auteur lead, and all the richer for it; or you can take the industry on at its own game using the one tool money cannot buy - your intelligence. Hernandez and Estevez demonstrate plenty of this. Not so much in the quality of their product, more in the quality of their intercession with the industry, an intercession which would seem to have paid off handsomely.

Even if Gustavo only earned about $1000 for his grisly work. Nevertheless, the closing credits perhaps made it all worthwhile, no matter how meagre the fee.

armadillo (d. janus metz pedersen)

2011-04-12T01:18:00.000-07:00

It's interesting to learn that Metz's film has attracted criticism on the basis that it's too aesthetic. This, it has been noted, is a war documentary that looks like a feature film. The cinematography, the use of music and editing, all serve to heighten the viewer's experience. This attention to technical detail also raises the viewer's awareness of the silent hands at work behind the camera. There appears to be something of a paradox here, because, in spite of the fact they, (at the very least the director and Lars Skree, the cinematographer) are present at all times, in the midst of fire-fights and porn-watching sessions, this is not the kind of doc where the filmmakers become characters within their own movie. Metz and Skree try to absent themselves as far as possible and let the soldiers tell their own story.

Something which can't ever, quite, be done. Firstly, some of the conversations between the Helmand based soldiers, where they talk about what they think of the war they're waging, feel staged and even awkward. Secondly, the film includes several 'debriefings' including one key scene where a soldier appears to boast about his clinical execution of four Taliban, killed in a ditch during a firefight the viewer has already witnessed. Did the presence of the cameras, no matter how used the soldiers might be to them, have some kind of an impact? Were Rasmus and the others starting to take on roles within the as-yet uncompleted film? I don't think it's to the film's detriment that it raises questions about what the impact of having a camera trained on you as you go through meltdown in Afghanistan might be, but this issue does skew the notion of capturing 'reality'. Reality with a camera is not the same as reality without one. Not yet, anyhow.

As mentioned, Armadillo has been criticised as being dishonest. However, in some ways this means that when it does capture moments which feel inherently, indubitably 'truthful', these are all the more powerful. Such as when the bug-eyed wounded soldier sits by the side of a ditch, in a state of delayed terror, traces of which still seem present in his demeanour when the company visit him in the medical camp a few days later. Or, tellingly, the attitudes of the Afghans themselves. Their candour seems at odds with that of the Danes: they say it like it is. "You should go home. The Taliban are going to kill you all." Or: "My wife and child are dead." They don't look at the camera, which presumably, from their point of view, is wielded by another of the robocop aliens who have descended on their land and keep requesting them to put their lives on the line and co-operate. Armadillo's capturing of the problematic dynamic between the occupying forces of 'the West' and the locals themselves, often glimpsed as figures fleeing the latest skirmish to affect their village, is as potent as anything the film tells us about Danish army life.

The film's aesthetics do raise issues and imply a contradiction between the filmmakers desire to deliver a portrayal of the truth of war and their intention to create a well-crafted film. All the same, the very act of capturing war is perhaps, for now, an endeavour beyond the reach of filmmakers. At some point, an inherent dishonesty creeps in. It may be that videos filmed by soldiers on their mobile phones in Iraq or Libya etc are a truer account, but these tell only the most fractured of narratives, they confuse as much as they enlighten. The sequence when the Danes are attacked and fight back, provoking the potential human rights abuse, is baffling, as war must be: who's fighting whom? Are we shooting in the right direction? What the fuck is going on?

My take on the way Metz has gone about this is that he has recognised this inherent dishonesty in the bid to capture war on film, and has therefore embraced it. The very last scene shows the tough Rasmus, back in Denmark, in the shower in his home. This scene is clearly and unambiguously staged. As though the filmmakers are acknowledging the artifice behind their art. Whilst stating, as we have seen to be true, that this doesn't mean that the things that we have witnessed did not occur. Nor that a price has been paid which we, the viewer, even after watching the film, still cannot fathom.

piano (jean echenoz)

2011-04-10T13:36:00.000-07:00

The randomness of the reading process leads me via a Guardian recommendation to Echenoz, about whom I knew nothing, and having now read the brief Piano, am none the wiser. This slight book starts promisingly with its Paris-based description of a concert pianist who suffers from stage fright and has to be literally pushed on-stage by his curious, down-to-earth minder. Who are these people? What is their real connection? Why does Max, the pianist, live with his sister and dream every night of a woman he last saw thirty years ago? These and a succession of banal but potentially significant questions suggest that this is going to be an enigmatic, quirky read. The reader, enjoying the depiction of another side of Paris life, suspects that a layer of profundity is about to be revealed, or at the very least, hinted at. Especially when it is made clear that Max is going to die at some point. A treatise on death? A meditation on the life well lived? The critics' remarks on the front and back of the book claim this is so, but if that's the case it went over my head. Rarely has a reading experience felt more like literary wallpaper. Not an unpleasant wallpaper to find oneself perusing for the couple of hours it takes to read the book, quite soothing in fact, but wallpaper nonetheless.

I feel as though I ought to give Echenoz another go, and if all his books are this slight it might be possible to read the complete works in a weekend. It would seem he's a highly respected figure and the good folk on the comments section of the Guardian books page (no sign of Pelevin) seemed most enamoured of him. Which is not, when you think about it, necessarily something that should influence one's judgement. The book did, briefly, make me want to return to Paris at least one more time. But it didn't excite my curiosity about heaven or hell, which in the world according to Echenoz might be considerably closer than Paris. And whilst I'd normally be a sucker for a detour to Iquitos, in this case even I found the detour gratuitous and wondering whether the writer conceived the whole book as an excuse to visit the Amazon city? If so, hats off to him and I hope he got more out of it than this reader got out of Piano.

the kindly ones (jonathan littell)

2011-04-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

The books you don't know where to start with are either the ones about which there is nothing to say, or those where there is too much. And in their too-muchness, leave one floundering. The Kindly Ones exists within the latter category. Since starting it a surprising number of people have approached me to say that they've been told about this book. But I've met no-one who's actually read it.

It manages to pull off the feat of being both an easy read and not-an-easy read. It is easy to read because, in spite of its length, it tells its linear narrative with a fluent, conversational prose style. When Maximilien Aue, the book's narrator, occasionally breaks from his narrative, the recounting of his war, the second world war, as seen from his perspective, in order to pursue a diversion about the nature of linguistics with respect to the Caucusus, or the difference between the Jewish faith and the Nazi faith, this too is easy to follow. The narrator is in no way stupid, he is well-read and cultured, but his imagination knows its limits. It has to because, if he crosses those limits, follows up the time he perceived Hitler as a Rabbi during a speech, for example, it would mean the loss of his job, his livelihood and his life. Littell reveals the imaginative straightjacket of the totalitarian state and this, ironically, facilitates rather than hinders the book's narration.

Then again, it is not an easy read because - Well, because. Because of history. Or more specifically, the history that the book's protagonist, Aue, lives through. He is a senior officer in the SS. He travels the length and breath of the Nazi empire. From Paris to Stalingrad; Berlin to Kiev, Auschwitz to Antibes. He sees things and participates in actions which might be named genocide, or atrocities, or homicide, or evil or any other number of words we use to describe the things that we all know happened during that time. (Still happen?) And the reader sees and participates in these things with him.

This is the great conceit of the book. It is - in part thanks to its fluid prose style, in part because it takes its readers into a world they know much about but also know so little about, in part because it has a clear, historically documented over-arching narrative (The Nazis lose - ) - entertaining. Aue meets characters and we meet them with him, who are, for want of a better word, sympathetic. Even Aue is sympathetic. So we read on through the massacres and genocide and the evil. We are entertained by this story. The fate of the Jews and the gypsies and the mentally ill and all the soldiers who pass through the book might trouble us, but not to such an extent that we can do anything about it. Aue's readers are, it might be said, complicit in his narrative. His terrible narrative.

Which makes for a brilliant piece of novel-writing. I had reservations about the strand within the book, which comes to the fore in the final hundred or so pages, where the writer appears to want to consciously de-sympathise Aue. Who becomes rather more than a passive observer. In the penultimate section, Aue's embracing of a pathological, psychotic madness, it feels as though the author or the narrator has perhaps felt the need to inflict some kind of violence on the reader, to not let the reader get away with the comfortable reading experience so much of the book has been up to then. The Germanic order of Aue's mind gives way to a French delirium, with shades of Sade, Bataille, Genet. But the book and its writer have earned these moments, if they are deemed necessary. Perhaps it is just the exhaustion taking hold. The exhaustion of reader and writer; horror and war.

Just as I didn't know how to begin, I'm not sure how to end. There is much to say, as I have said, about this novel. More than I could begin to say. About the writer's ambitions and the innate critique of what it means to be human that the novel, with its curious title, would seem to present. What is the point of us lamely condemning things without either understanding these things or endeavouring to recognise how we might be guilty of similar complicity within our own way of life? The blurb within the book informs that Littell has worked for humanitarian agencies: in his re-imagining of the horrors of the Eastern front, there are often moments with echoes of our modern societal structures. As calculations are made about how much food a human can subsist on; what are the financial and regulatory costs of preserving or denying life; how these decisions are made within operating frameworks which allow the powerful not to view the weak as humans, but as statistics. There are echoes of Peter Singer; there are references to Kant and Hobbes; there is the acknowledgement that the Nazi infrastructure arose out of a socio-political-philosophical method of viewing the world which lived before Hitler and lives on after he and his Nazis fell.

And at the same time, in the words of Aue, a man without consonants, there are also moments of perverse beauty within what is, in the bravest, most transgressive sense of the thought, a perverse book. Such as the old man in the Caucusus, perhaps descended from angels, who denies the war's dominance by demanding his death, a death which has been foreseen, as are all deaths. Who orders Aue to dig a grave for him; to kill him; to commit the crime so that he might finally receive the death he has waited all his life to inherit.

cave of forgotten dreams (herzog)

2011-03-31T10:44:00.000-07:00

The La's come to mind. There she goes, there she goes again. He's back. Only, Werner is unmistakably masculine, grizzled. An idealist/cynical bear emerging out of the Neolithic underworld, come to charm and provoke and remind us that progress is a modern invention which doesn't mean as much as it thinks it does.

Which is why his latest film, dealing with a recently discovered cave in the Auvergne, decorated with painting up to 32,000 years old, offers fruitful territory for the old irascible. At one point he observes how a horse has been painted with Meyerhold-like legs, suggesting it is really running, and claims it, as he would, as the progenitor of cinema. Werner face to face with his roots, as man, as artist, as cineaste.

In truth, The Cave, in spite of its 3-D fireworks, feels a little Werner-lite. Here's a man who's successfully carved out his own niche, documenting whichever esoteric story takes his fancy, knowing the world will take an interest. Perhaps, in the face of the remarkable, quasi-religious discovery of the cave, Herzog cannot help adopting a reverential gaze. His usual quirkiness is muted; the would be Neolithic flute-player warbling the Star Spangled Banner being one of the few occasions the filmmaker lets his guard down and offers some bona fide Herzog humour. Perhaps it was in recognition of this that he added the curious postscript about the mutant alligators, offering a sly link with his Bad Lieutenant.

It might also be that there's another intriguing cog in Werner's wheel. One of his hallmarks has been the way in which nature, far from being an idyll, is a shadowy, antagonistic force. This idea reappears throughout his work. Given his art is founded to such an extent on technology, perhaps we should not see it as surprising. Cinema is still the most modern of the arts, and in adopting it, Herzog has explored the frontier that exists between what man can achieve and what nature resists. So, when the engaging circus artist turned archeologist tells him how he dreamt of lions for days after he emerged from having spent time in the cave, it's no surprise Werner asks him if he had been scared in his dreams. To which the man replied that he hadn't been. When, at the film's conclusion, we finally see the cavepainters' lions, it's true that they look far from frightening. Their expressions seem mournful or noble, sleek heads on sleek bodies, with no hint of aggression.

It's easy to romanticise these painters and their connection with nature, which appears from their paintings to have been less fraught, more integrated with the wild creatures that surrounded them, than our own. This could be a misreading of the images. The point is that Herzog doesn't seem interested in presenting his more habitual counterpoint. There are no warning from Werner about the negative power of nature in this film. Instead, the filmmaker seems unable to do anything but adopt the most warm-hearted approach towards the painters of the Chauvet cave and the world they depicted. He is seduced and the fear is kept at bay.

route irish (d loach, w laverty)

2011-03-25T03:35:00.000-07:00

So Route Irish is the most dangerous road in the world. Roger? Where better for a commercial black op team to pull a black op? Check. And confirm the intrinsic evilness of the UK-US military industrial enterprise. Which is now being privatised. Check. Iraq is just dust now. Roger. They could sort out Dafur in a matter of weeks. They could rule the world by Christmas. He Has to DO Something about it -
Like what?
Well, he could take up waterboarding.
But that doesn't work.
Yes, but it's dramatically effective?
What?
Here's the scene. Good guy, our man, realises the error of his ways. Goes rogue. Captures bad guy gone rogue. In his 4 Wheel drive. Makes a quip about golf.
Golf?
Then waterboards him. Only it doesn't work.
Nice. Who are you thinking of casting? Pitt? Damon? Chuck Norris?
This is a Ken Loach film.
Oh. Ewan McGregor? Also - will the audience understand all this? I mean, what is Route Irish anyway?
It's the most dangerous road in the world. We'll tell them. We'll make it crystal clear. We'll tell them repeatedly. We'll bomb them with information. This is a counter-intel info war. There will be no let-up. EVERYTHING WILL BE EXPLAINED> SEVERAL TIMES> AND THEN ONCE FOR LUCK>>>
How does it end?
Violently.
Good. What about the Iraqis?
Who?
You know, the Ir-
This is about the war of the industrial-military complex against the whole world! It's more than just the Iraqis! This is about Liverpool!
What?
We'll put in some Iraqis. If we have to.
Dead Iraqis or living Iraqis?
Lots of dead and suffering Iraqis. In grainy 'authentic' footage.
Great. Any, you know - Iraqi - characters?
I told you this is about the military-industrial -
In Liverpool. I know. But isn't Route Irish in -
OK. We'll have an Iraqi.
Good. Otherwise - you know - it won't feel - authentic.
We'll make him a sensitive musician.
Why?
So that the audience root for him.
Great.
Great.
So. How much do you need?
How long is Route Irish?
I don't know. I've never been there.
Don't worry. We're filming in Jordan.
Great. I heard Jordan has great cuisine.
This is a Ken Loach film! It's not about fucking cuisine!
Iraqi cuisine?
OK. OK. He can play some music.
Who.
The Iraqi musician.
Why?
Cultural references.
Great. I love Loach. He's so -
Great?
Real.

seconds out (martin kohan)

2011-03-20T10:24:00.000-07:00

Seconds Out is a playful novel, reminiscent of the work of Cercas, which explores the nature of time, among other things. It's based around the 17 seconds that occurred between Jack Dempsey being knocked down and returning to the ring during a 1923 heavyweight boxing title fight by the Argentine challenger Luis Firpo. Even those with no interest in boxing will be aware that 17 seconds doesn't sound right. Standard procedure, which was not applied in this instance, is a count of ten seconds. Dempsey gets off the hook, returns to the fight and wins. This twist and the way in which the news is reported in Argentina has catastrophic effects. The book has a chapter for each of the 17 seconds, examining the incident from the perspective of Dempsey himself, a photographer and the referee. Extending the investigation of the moment, the book is framed by the device of two Patagonian journalists on a local paper who have to write an article fifty years afterwards on an event from 1923. Verani is writing about the fight whilst Ledesma, his colleague, writes about the simultaneous visit of Strauss' Viennese orchestra and their playing of a Mahler symphony.

Using disparate ingredients, Kohan stitches together a loose tapestry of information, bringing Mahler's biography and early 20th Century Argentine history together. It makes for a strange, breezy read. The presence of a mysterious narrator, who's trying to get to the bottom of a suicide which occurred at the time of the fight and used to be a junior to the two journalists, adds to the sense of a narrative which is always on the point of revealing a great secret. In truth, the revelations which do occur seem somehow underwhelming. There's something of a flawed conjuring trick about the book: it grips the attention with the anticipation of the trick to come; but the trick itself is less impressive than the set-up. However, it may be that that's part of the point. It's an anti-narrative. From the point of view of an Argentine, the wrong man wins and history forsakes the challenger. Argentina becomes a place where the likes of Strauss never visit. The clock runs backwards. Seventeen seconds that changed the perspective of a nation, Kohan might be suggesting.

norwegian wood (d. anh hang trun)

2011-03-17T11:30:00.000-07:00

My erstwhile friend Mr C, at a point in his life where he was internet dating, used to say that there were two things which every woman he met put at a premium. One was lazy Sunday mornings. The other was Murakami. Personally, I resisted getting caught up in the craze for the Japanese writer that seemed to sweep London. It's to the credit of Mr Trun that his film version of the successful book leads me to think my snobbery was, as usual, misplaced.

On one level, there's something scarily melodramatic about the story. Girl's boyfriend kills himself, boyfriend's best friend falls in love with girl, who can't get over her ex. Then someone else falls for best friend who can't get over girl. Who kills herself and thereby cuts Gordian knot. There's an extended anguish scene as Watanabe suffers beside a suddenly even more portentous sea after Naoko's demise which in another film would be teeth-pullingly indulgent. But somehow, Trun gets away with it. Just like he gets away with the slight vaguaries of the script as it attempts to squash the novelist's narrative into cinematic form. There's some intriguing but redundant social protest scenes in the opening act, and the exact purpose of Wanatabe's decadent friend Nagaswa remains unclear. Nevertheless, the film, which is over two hours long, gradually seems to find its groove. Wanatabe's tragic compromise becomes more and more understandable. The tortured architectonics of love, something that has to be endured as much as savoured, slowly make some kind of sense.

The scale of the film allows the director to investigate an idea of romantic love, its longeurs, its wayward course, its sometime futility, in a way that a 'tighter' narrative might struggle to achieve. This is territory which the novel usually deals with more convincingly than cinema, because the novelist has dispensation to let the story wander where it will. Had the screenplay police got hold of this film, they would have squeezed the heart out of it. Young lovers do tend to spend a lot of time wandering around aimlessly, trying to find their way, and Trun's depiction of Wanatabe's puzzling journey captures this acutely.

Well, anyway, it convinced me. Maybe it's down to the lush cinematography and the winsome Japanese actors. Maybe I'm seduced by the exoticism. But to me it feels like, fifteen years after he made Cyclo, Trun's almost lazy style was made for Murakami's romantic tale. To be watched on a Sunday afternoon. After spending the morning being lazy yourself.

the collaborator (mirza waheed)

2011-03-14T14:53:00.000-07:00

I heard someone talking on the radio the other day - world service, now rediscovered as the finest the BBC has to offer - talking about the traditions of Middle Eastern literature. And how it was hard for the West to understand to what extent literature from that region is of necessity a literature of protest. He was editing a collection, which I would buy if I could remember it's name, so it felt like he knew what he was talking about. I think the point was something along the lines of the fact that the mere act of writing fiction within the context of an autocratic regime meant to potentially commit an act of transgression.

Waheed's book comes from the furthest reaches of the Middle East, the land where the Mongols built their palaces and dreamed of going to die. A land famed for its beauty, divided in two, perched in the Himalayas. The land known as Kashmir. This is also a book of protest. It tells the simple story of a young man who grows up in his Kashmiri village with his friends, near the Line of Control, only to find that his friends all leave for Pakistan in order to train to become fighters in the liberation movement, whilst he is left behind. And then how the village is taken over by the Indian army and, in the space of a few months, destroyed. A couple of acts of savage barbarism are enough to force all of the village to flee, save for the young man and his parents. The youth is coerced into working for the Indian army ad dreams of killing Captain Kadian, the man who sends him on his missions to survey the remote killing fields. It is the grimmest of rites of passage as well as a lifting of the veil on the atrocities performed on a regular basis.

When we were there, in 2009, we stayed on a houseboat on Dal Lake. The man who looked after us was one of the saddest men I'd ever met. His name, he said, was Jimmy. He was short, he shivered all the time, when he talked it left you feeling suicidal. Yet it was clear that whatever misfortune had afflicted Jimmy, he was a good man who wanted the best for you, the strangers passing through his world. Jimmy came from a village several miles from Srinigar. He talked a bit about it. He told us how it used to have electricity but now it didn't. He hinted at army brutality and tragedy. If you asked him more, he shook his head and looked away. The trauma he had lived through didn't appear to be something you could 'get over'. Jimmy was scarred for good.

Reading The Collaborator offers more of an insight into the unnamed things that Jimmy's village, in keeping with villages all over Kashmir, have suffered. The book offers what is a fictionalised account of what really happened, as seen through the eyes of a Kashmiri writer. It's not an account that the Indian government would accept or wish to see propagated. At a time when people are rebelling against repressive regimes across the Middle East and beyond, Waheed offers some insight into what they're up against and what it is like to be pushed to the point where you would rather die in the cause of freedom than soldier on under the yoke. Under these circumstances, it becomes the task of the writer to lead the way and speak out. The very act of writing becomes an act of protest.

archipelago (w&d joanna hogg)

2011-03-12T15:53:00.000-08:00

Joanna Hogg is back and she's not taking any prisoners. Archipelago contains perhaps even fewer moments of drama than Unrelated. The takes are even longer. Less things happen. She's pushing you to the limit of your endurance. Single-handedly, Joanna Hogg is creating the new Anglo-Saxon anti-Hollywood, and she's doing it a cinema near you, now!

That last part might be a case of distortion. Nevertheless, the Renoir was doing good business of a Friday evening. There might be a market for the middle-class Ozu homage after all. Or is it just Mike Leigh for the middle classes without the sentimentalism?

Funnily enough, I went to see it with my sister. Archipelago is a film about British families, and, as noted, specifically the more affluent British, the type who can afford to rent a nice house in the Scilly Isles for a fortnight, with comely domestic help thrown in. With her acute observational style, Hogg successfully skewers the gauche British approach to our emotional lives. Edward, about to go away for a year as a volunteer Aids worker in Africa, is not allowed to bring his girlfriend. His sister, Cynthia, is a minor hysteric and their mother is clearly in the throes of breaking up with their father, who never appears. The arguments all happen off-screen. On screen, the most anyone's prepared to do is allude to a problem, never address it. All of which seemed entirely accurate, and, as I say, seated next to my sister, knowing as we do something of this kind of world, it should perhaps have felt a little close to the bone. But I can't really say it did.

Archipelago follows a similar model to Unrelated. A family on holiday, their dynamics explored, with an outsider present acting as a kind of measure of the family's humanity. The shots are also measured, and the cinematography captures a slightly joyless, sub-Tropical beauty of the Autumnal Scilly Islands, presenting a washed-out, colourless palate similar to the range of the family's emotional register. In a way, this is a faultless film, but it's faultless because its parameters are so clearly defined. In one of the more affecting moments of the film, the posh artist friend of the family talks to Edward about finding your course and sticking to it, learning how to be strong in order to be able to do the thing you want to do, in his case art. It's one of the few moments when it feels as though the screenplay is going beyond gently poking fun at its listless characters.

Perhaps he speaks a little of Hogg's own efforts to make the films she wants to make. Which is admirable, and it's hard to criticise someone with a such a unique vision. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that perhaps I should have felt a little more uncomfortable, given the circumstances under which I was viewing the film. Also, that this accomplished director might perhaps gain from veering off-course, rather than sticking to her guns, in her next re-imagining of British cinema.

submarine (w&d richard ayoade)

2011-03-10T07:40:00.000-08:00

The opening shot is of a teenager in his Welsh home, plastered with carefully selected posters and an unsubtle image of a submarine. The teenager's voiceover kicks in. It all seems dangerously familiar. A British coming-of-age comedy drama. The student audience is laughing within seconds. I get that sinking feeling.

Then, within minutes, it goes. Don't judge a book by the cover, the saying goes, and in spite of the fact that from the cover it looks like this is going to be gauche, in spite of the fact it has a cameo by Considine as a wacky neighbour, in spite of the fear that this will be Gavin and Stacey, the movie - in spite of all this, the film confounds the sceptic and something beautiful emerges from this potential mush.

Flair is a rare beast amongst British directors, and flair with a hint of heart is even rarer. With Submarine, Ayoade, however, demonstrates that he's in possession of this rare combination. The film is beautifully shot. The nouvelle vague homage doesn't feel forced. And the teenage protagonists, odd couple Oliver and Jordana, not only convince, they actually have you rooting for them. Because, of course, of their flaws, their horribleness, their awkwardness, their teenage selfishness. At one point, the film captures a conversation between them where they're not speaking. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, think back perhaps to those endless late adolescent hiatuses of love, when neither party can find the words to move on, when all avenues seem blocked, when it seems like this moment will just never end. Well, it resonated with me anyway.

After the show, the DOP, Erik Wilson gave a long talk to the alumni of his ex-film school, where the screening took place. He explained that Ayoade handed him over 120 films to watch for his prep. (He admitted he hadn't watched all of them.) Somehow, Ayoade has pulled off the trick of transforming his influences into something original. Just as each and every one of us has to live our own personal coming-of-age narrative, Submarine succeeds in convincing that Oliver's coming-of-age story is like none that has ever come before. Which is no small feat. Largely because at heart it's so French, this felt like one of the most bracingly intelligent movies to have come out of the UK in a long while, all the more so because it dresses up its intelligence in a sheen of underwhelming teenage angst.

villa [guillermo calderon]

2011-03-08T15:52:00.000-08:00

The upstairs theatre at the Royal Court was more or less full for the reading of the first of Calderon's double bill, the penultimate event in the theatre's Latin American season. Which means about a hundred people witnessed what is likely to be one of the finest piece's of playwriting to be seen in a London theatre this, or any other year.

Three women sit on the stage, scripts in hand, and vote. We don't know what they're voting for. We don't know who they are. We don't have a clue what this is all about. Gradually it becomes apparent that the play, Villa, takes its title from the debate conducted by the women about what kind of memorial should be created to mark the spot within Santiago where Pinochet's torturers conducted some of the most heinous crimes. Each one has her own idea, which she promotes. They vote again. Democracy seems flawed. They can't decide. A spoilt vote has as much value as an 'actual' vote.

On Saturday, at a seminar about Latin America, Calderon stated that for him, theatre had to be prepared to be a reminder of the bad things within society, something which in a supposedly booming post-dictatorship Chile is all the more important. The job of theatre, whether it likes it or not, is to be both the bearer of bad tidings as well as a medium that ensures the past is not forgotten.

Whilst this sounds like a grim remit, what Calderon's own words did not reveal, but his play does, is that the bringing of bad tidings is also an act of seduction. There's no point alienating people if you want them to engage. Villa, somehow, almost mysteriously, succeeds in infiltrating the full horror not only of what has gone before, but of our society's desperate attempts to find a flawed reconciliation with what has gone before, into a text which is funny, charming and has you on the edge of your seat. To such an extent that, in a play which examines the contradictions of using art to commemorate acts of political violence, the viewer doesn't know if they should not feel some latent guilt in the pleasure to be derived from the playwright's brilliance, as the text lays bare the full extent of the Pinochet regime's inhumanity.

This is a diversion, but it seems to me that the really great dramatists are those who understand the curious semiotic of the English word for a work of theatre. We call it a play. When you are lucky enough to come across a writer who really knows what they're doing, the play feels like an act of play, and the theatre feels like a place of play. This is not to say that serious issues are belittled. It means to say that the writer allows his or her audience to re-connect with their capacity to engage with the world on a level removed from the everyday, to re-form it. So that it can be seen anew. Calderon's work has elements of Beckett, Pinter and Pirandello. It re-opens old wounds but does so with a surgeon's precision and brilliance, so much so that it's only when the wound is gaping and the blood is flowing that we, the audience, realise quite what we've got ourselves into. Or what he, the playwright, has got us into.

Calderon himself directed the play and the impeccable work of his three actresses seems like a testament to the director's mastery of his own text. At the end of the play, in amongst all the other questions the play provokes, including whether I should really be typing this on a Mac, and to what extent is architecture fascist, or rather to what extent does modernity tip-toe in the shoes of our fascist past, or, to what extent are the tools we supposedly use to engage with society's ills actually tools which inure us against society's ills or - Well, let's be honest there's so many questions coming out of this play we, the audience are like kids in a sweet shop -

In amongst these questions two more banal ones crossed my mind. What kind of experience will Discurso, Villa's companion piece, which is staged tomorrow, offer? And secondly, why, given their support of this remarkable writer, has the Court not gone further and offered London a full production of the play, rather than just a reading?

animal kingdom (d. david michôd)

2011-02-27T12:42:00.000-08:00

I don't know if this is down to my state of mind at the moment or the film itself. Animal Kingdom's merits as a film are indisputable. The acting is impressive, the story-telling is effective, there's a bleached deadness to the grade and sufficient longeurs in the editing to allow the film to breathe. I was engaged throughout. Yet even as I left the cinema the film had already washed over me and now, less than two days since seeing it, I struggle to recollect any overwhelming feeling in response to it. As I say, I don't know if this is due to the film or my own personal sense of current alienation. Perhaps, being a film that in some ways deals with the notion of alienation, through an impressive central performance from James Frecheville, it hit a nerve that is partially dead.

There's a lot of Scorcese in the background in the tale of a crime family from the Melbourne suburbs. Scorcese gets everywhere these days. You can't move for Scorcese. The slow-motion takes, reminiscent of Mean Streets, were one of the film's weaker tropes. However, early Scorcese works not just because of its vivid technical qualities, but also because of the film-makers ability to present his world, the edges of Little Italy. In a similar way, Michod captures the low-level Anglo-Saxon tropicality of an Australian suburb. Seemingly the antithesis to gloomy , rainy England, in actuality Australia sometimes feels like a Platonic experiment at the creation of a sun-bleached nirvana that has gone weirdly off the rails. And Michod gets to grip with this sense of unease, showing us a society where sociopaths determine social structures and no-one can escape their influence.

As I say, there's much to admire in this film. I have a feeling Michod will make more films and become successful. It will be interesting to see if he stays in his native land or not. The offers will be flooding in. Making a good crime thriller is one of the hardest things to do. The audience doesn't just have to buy into the actions of characters at odds with society; they also have to believe in their world. Animal Kingdom achieves all that. Even if it leaves you as numb as J, it's monosyllabic protagonist, a young man whose future seems doomed both before the film begins and after the credits have rolled.

inside job (d. charles ferguson; w. chad beck, adam bolt)

2011-02-19T04:39:00.000-08:00

1. Whilst the financial crisis of '08, (since it has failed to obtain a less prosaic monicker), was occurring, and indeed it its aftermath, experts and laymen alike would say, and still say, that the world of derivatives and credit swaps and the like was so baffling that its complexity in some way became linked to the notion of a black hole of (toxic) money. The banks and their experts had created a black hole of knowledge, something so devious that it had outrun even the gurus of the financial world. As though that knowledge had in some way morphed into an anti-knowledge, one capable of bringing down the whole house of cards. Inside Job, with the help of a few simple diagrams, comprehensively punctures that myth. It's not that complicated. People knew what they were doing. They are responsible. Not the anti-knowledge.

2. This clarity extends itself to the interviewing style. We never see the interviewer, or interviewers. But we hear their voice. Common sense is a somewhat ephemeral concept which can doubtless be manipulated. But when an interviewer asks a perfectly reasonable question and is rebuffed, the confidence of the interviewer in resisting the rebuff reminds the viewer of its common sense. Does it matter that an expert changes the name of his paper from 'Stability in Iceland' to 'Instability in Iceland'? Not a lot, in the wider scheme of things, but revealing the expert's reaction to the disclosure of this fact helps to reveal the levels of duplicity and intellectual laziness necessary to construct and support a system as catastrophic as the one that was constructed, with the expert's help. If the interviewer were an actor we would be lauding his understated brilliance.

3. The words 'holy cow' in the mouth of a Frenchwoman are surprisingly potent.

4. I watched this in a cinema in Notting Hill. The audience was not, I'd imagine, what could be described as downtrodden. They gasped in amazement at the film's revelations. What happened in 08 in some ways transcends political boundaries. Which is not to say it was not the work and product of right wing thinking, but is to say that the creators of the economic model which lead to '08 were not acting out of an ideological instinct. Unless greed is ideological. What the film shows is the complete lack of any ethical dimension to the actions of those promulgating and profiting from an economic model they themselves instigated. In that sense this class (a tiny elite with appropriate intellectual underpinning) seems to embody a form of fascism, whereby the actions of the individual have become entirely disassociated from the actions of society. The miracle of all this, which perhaps encouraged their sociopathy, is that they are the ones whom society chose to reward or allowed to be rewarded on what can only be described as a disproportionate scale.

5. It is a pity, as well as presumably revealing, that the film didn't succeed in conducting an interview with any single banker working for one of the significant corporate players during the events of '08.

6. Who really matters? Mervyn King appears in one shot in this film. He is not name-checked.

6. The cinematography is impressive. If ever a documentary could get away with sweeping helicopter takes of NY riverfront, this is it. All to often a documentary's aesthetics get in the way of its intentions. In this case, the film cannot afford not to be watched because its aesthetics could be dismissed as being those of a low-budget attention seeker.

7. Final point. It's not my style to bullet point a review, but in some ways Inside Job seems such an important film, that the critic's job with regard to it is not to give an opinion, but to attempt to highlight why it should be seen. Furthermore, it will be ignored and tarred with the accusation of being in some ways ideological. Because merely to document what occurs in certain parts of our world is deemed 'left wing'. [There will be those who say it is left wing to watch Al-Jazeera when today, of all days, shows why it is an imperative if you regard news as being a source of information regarding what's going on in the world.] If Inside Job has an axe to grind it is that the events which lead up to the financial crisis of '08 have been ignored, marginalised or mystified by mainstream media. Which allows politicians to do the same thing. Next time this kind of financial collapse occurs, the outcomes will be even more malignant than in '08. And we still don't have any real idea of the full cost of '08.

our private life (w pedro miguel rozo, d lyndsey turner)

2011-02-17T10:31:00.000-08:00

This afternoon the following quote from Cortazar arrived via twittersphere: "pero quién sabe si todo eso lo decía o solamente lo pensaba". Rozo's play deals, ostentatiously, with the division between thought and word, suggesting that in a more modern environment, people become more adept at concealing their thoughts, something which in older times, in more basic communities, were as exposed as the words that people used. This is an engaging, if not completely original idea. Part of the pleasure of watching this English language production was seeing the way British actors, schooled as they are now in naturalism, dealing with the writer's presentation of their characters' thoughts, which are, essentially asides. Asides are a key component of 16th, 17th, and 18th century theatre. The ascendancy of film has lead towards the domination of naturalism, which has no space for the aside. The spoken thought is now consigned to the margin in British theatre.

Not, however in Latin American theatre, or what little I may have seen of it. Rozo's play, in common with the work of Uruguayan authors such as Calderon, Sanguinetti and Morena, revels in the theatricality of the aside, as the actors establish a complicity with the audience. Some of the play's actors seem to have gained more of a grasp of of it than others. Adrian Schiller, in particular, as the devious but charming psychiatrist and Bolano lookalike, seemed to delight in unveiling his hypocrisy, his performance helping to set the tone once the play had got past a slightly stilted opening section.

The family, that cauldron of secrets and lies, is the perfect domain for this style of combative theatre. Rozo investigates the duplicity of a would-be middle class family with some verve. Again, there were moments when the play struggled to engage with the move beyond naturalism. This is a heightened, perhaps expressionist style of theatre (which pays its dues to the telenovelas Rozo also writes). It requires pace, verve and variation in order to be true to the writing's rhythms rather than the search for emotional truth. (Not for nothing is Berkoff one of the more popular British authors in Latin America.) At times the play really hit its stride, whilst at others it seemed to flag, although it's likely that the timing will improve as the play runs.

If Rozo's play doesn't have the theatricality of La Munequita or Ararat, it's still refreshing to see the production engage with a contrasting theatrical style, a reminder perhaps of the flair of London's Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre rhythms. The space between word and thought is so simple to explore in theatre and offers up vast psychological and dramatic potential, something that can counteract the predictable and marry tragedy with bitter humour. So often I left the best productions I saw in Latin America with the feeling that the theatre there contained something more visceral and adventurous than our more studied methods of creating plays. This may well be a romantic and absurd generalisation, but if it has any basis in fact then there are flashes of these differences to be denoted at the Court's upstairs space in its production of Rozo's acerbic play.

black swan (aronofsky; w. heyman, heinz, mclaughlin)

2011-02-10T06:09:00.001-08:00

I feel more normal today.
Yesterday, walking back solo through Notting Hill, I felt less so.
There may have been many reasons for this, but one of them was Black Swan. Which I had just been to see.
Many years ago, I remember coming out of Venn Street Clapham Picture House having just seen Naked. The only Mike Leigh film that's ever touched a nerve. I felt edgy, watchful. The world that the film had conjured (as much Thewlis' performance as anything else) seemed all around me. In truth it was. I was young. I lived in London. Life seemed transient and precarious.
The circumstances under which one watches a film affect one's reaction to it.
Less than a day later it's easy to look back on Aronofsky's film and laugh at its gaucheness and cliche, and sheer over-the-topness.
Which should not be to forget that I also found myself laughing within the cinema, at Cassel's splendidly seedy manipulator, at the film's exaggerated Apollo/ Dionysis schtik, at a director pushing boundaries with glee.
But the laughter a day later is that of the critics who see the film as at best infantile, at worst, abusive. And it's not hard to see why.
A thick skin and you're insulated against the ridiculous.
Or some feathers, perhaps.
Because this is, in spite of its various absurdities, a visceral film. About things that in the moment seem real but from outside can look ridiculous. Creativity, neurosis, desire.
I don't live in New York and I've never liked ballet. I'm no gamine waif. But somehow, the film, with its remarkable camera work and its shrewd use of music and all the other tricks that it employs, succeeded in bowling me over.
I came out of the cinema and the world, this plush world I walked through, felt borderline repulsive; borderline homicidal.
It's a reaction. I almost used the word over-reaction. But that would be wrong. It was a reaction. To the director's cinematic will.
Art, as this most metaphysical of films (no reason metaphysicm should not also be visceral) relates, is more than the sum of its parts, and should not be afraid of crossing the line unto what might be perceived as ridiculousness.
The ridiculous is out there, and it doesn't do us any harm to touch it every now and again, to lose control, to strive to, or perhaps to actually achieve, the going-beyond the line. Drawn by ourselves or society or god or the universe or physics.
I feel normal now. But for a while last night I didn't. Which is almost entirely to the film's credit.

of gods and men (d. xavier beauvois; w. beauvois & comar)

2011-02-07T16:09:00.000-08:00

The more you like the premise the more likely you are to be disappointed. I think that's the conclusion I came to in discussion with Mr Mahey this week, with particular regard to the work of Dos Santos.

The premise of this film is a bunch of Christian monks (lead by a man called Christian) who live in the Atlas mountains of Algeria at a time when violent Muslim extremism is on the rise. Which made me think of Pamuk, for a start. Particularly in the engaging opening scenes where the monks are seen co-existing with the Muslim village, and Christian has a copy of the Koran on his desk alongside the saying of Francis of Assisi. I thought at this point that Beauvois was about to deliver the film which no-one seems interested or capable of making, one which explored not just the fault lines between Christian and Muslim communities, but the points they have in common. Where better to set this film than in the mountains of North Africa?

Then the villagers dropped out of the story and the Muslims were relegated to terrorists and the brutal army, menacing the monks in vespers with their noisy helicopters. I reassessed, and tried to re-read the film as a study of the devotional life and sense of duty. Christian takes walks by the beautiful lake as he wrestles with his destiny. But the army and the terrorists kept popping up to interrupt the peace. In the end, the film turns into a thriller. Will they survive or not? If so, who will survive? And how? It's the Towering Inferno in extremist Algeria.

A little bit of this and a little bit of that. A recipe for art-house success, without doubt. A superb premise which has gone down out a storm. I loved the premise. And was then disappointed by the film itself.

biutiful (d iñárritu; w iñárritu, armando bo, nicolas giacobone)

2011-02-05T02:19:00.000-08:00

Back in the cinema. Lights dimmed. Big screen. Ten pounds. Three hundred pesos uruguayos. Having experienced cinema within a purely digital form (casi) of late, this was a return to the old routine. There's another conversation to be had about the merits or demerits of how you watch cinema, and what this implies for the cinematic form, but that's a conversation for another day.

One thing Iñárritu has shown no fear of within his career, for better or for worse, is the potential of cinematic narrative. Oddly, I now remember sitting with Ana's niece at one point in 2009 in San Jose, watching a pirated version of the Japanese club scene in Babel and enjoying it for 20 minutes before retiring. There's another club scene in Biutiful, Inarittu likes a bit of bling, and this is also well filmed. In isolation it would make for a compelling sequence. Biutiful has a whole range of isolated sequences which stand out as bravura filmmaking. The opening; the first scene where we meet Marambra; the arrest of the Africans. Among others. Unfortunately for Inarittu, the real art of cinema is not merely the creation of remarkable moments, but how those remarkable moments are then strung together. This is where one wonders if Arriaga's true talent was understanding Inarittu's limitations. A fractured narrative papers over the narrative cracks in a way a linear one cannot. Biutiful is the work of a talented filmmaker, but all the same a filmmaker who doesn't know how to edit.

As a result, in spite of Bardem's remarkable performance, (finally persuading me that he's more than just a craggy face), Biutiful sags in too many places. When the film's central tenet is that the leading character has cancer and will die, it's probably going to be grim. I enjoy a grim film more than your average punter, but even for me this was pushing it. Furthermore, there's something about Inarittu's flair as a filmmaker that seems counter-productive for the material. Although the narrative is grim, the style of the film isn't. There are too many sexy moments. Even the club scene, which should be a kind of descent into the underworld, feels lush and eminently watchable. There's also too many seemingly clever touches which aren't really developed and smack of "Script Development". That Bardem's modern day saint should happen to talk to the dead; that the Chinese sweatshop owner happens to be gay; these details feel like add-ons, the gilding of the lily.

It's tempting to say that Inarittu has cooked his goose as filmmaker, that he peaked with his debut, and its been glamour and downhill ski slopes ever since. I'm not sure that's true. In twenty minute chunks he's about as good as it gets in terms of dynamic, visceral film-making. He just needs to find the right writer to help him string these episodes into a functioning narrative. And learn how to edit.

+++

andes [michael jacobs]

2011-01-30T15:01:00.000-08:00

Sub-titled it's a long way from the top to the bottom.
I don't know why I find it hard to take Jacob's book seriously.
In a sense I think, in spite of the seemingly epic nature of his journey, in fact he's merely flirting with the Andes.
And in a way it's hard not to.
The Andes don't give up their secrets easily.
They belong to mountain people, who've lived there longer than you or I or the Spaniards or the Europeans and will still be living there long after we've all had enough.
On a bus from Oruro, you spot a collection of people, gathered in some kind of congregation. It's a public meeting. They're talking about things from which you're excluded. You're looking on from a bus. You know you're not part of it. The bus passes by in seconds. The meeting keeps going.
You don't belong and that's fine.
Which is what, I would imagine, any book about "The Andes" has to address. The fact of not-belonging. The knowledge of scratching the surface.
The futility of the whole damned project.
Jacobs doesn't do this. He takes a lot of buses, which is an imperative. And he meets and talks to a lot of people. He gets around. But he's skating.
Maybe that's all any travel writing can ever be.
A form of skating.
Maybe, when Jacobs slyly slags off Chatwin, a little more self-awareness might have been in order.
Even if he does speak perfect Spanish.
It won't mean he'll know any Quechua; or Aymarac.
I'm fond of the Andes. I'd like to go back there. I like the air there. It helps you to stop smoking. I like the fact that I don't even have to aspire to belonging. I don't. I'm a gringo. But then so is almost everyone else. Even the ones who live there, the ones who speak a language you can understand, they don't really belong there.
The Andes are like a back street in Delhi. You don't know what's happening on the inside.
You never really will.
And it's probably for the best.
I'm not sure Jacobs communicated that.
If you're looking for a guide book, it's not going to do you any harm.
But it will weigh you down.

+++

noberto apenas tarde (w&d daniel hendler)

2010-11-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

The voice of the critic has been in hibernation in South America. The critic has been to see one other film, New York Stories, a faintly catastrophic mesh of impressions that added up to less than the sum of its parts should have done.

Apart from that, it's been deep immersion in zombies and Pinter. No time for cinema going. And, truth be told, little inspiration to service the habit. However, energy was summoned to go and see Hendler's whimsical Montevidean tale. For the obvious reason that it depicts the city in which I'm currently living, and also because the leading man, Fernando Amaral happened to be participating in a series of Pinter workshops I was giving at the Galpon. Because it's like that here. Fernando is now rehearsing a no-budget play at the same venue, and will be for the next few months. One day you're the lead in a film that's doing the festival circuit round the world, the next you're turning up at 10pm for rehearsal and working gratis. The actor's life is not that different in London, but it's a little different. Fernando is not anticipating a call from Hollywood at any moment.

His performance is remarkably composed. He holds the film together, as the ill-fated Noberto, an incompetent estate agent who decides to take theatre classes, and finds his life transformed, for better or worse. It's a low-fi tale, which succeeds in capturing a slice of the life lead on the theatrical margins of the city. The impressive Roberto Suarez, who plays his charismatic teacher, is himself a charismatic teacher, (and who we ran into in the Girasol later that night after watching the film). The world Hendler presents is only a few heartbeats away from the real; and Noberto's story could well be happening beyond the door I currently inhabit, Paysandu, esquina Roxlo y Tacuarembo.

That's the charm of Noberto. Even if the narrative fails to fully hold up, and the film rather fades away towards the end, (in this reviewer's opinion), it still succeeds in pinpointing a Montevideo which really exists, as well as the bittersweet role of theatre and the arts within the city's psyche. A retreat, but also a dream of another life. Which is perhaps what art always connected to. Not the dream of wealth or kudos: just another life, one that eclipses the humdrum of the day to day. You don't have to be very famous to experience Warhol's sixty seconds of fame. You just have to want to make that leap one day, transcend, fly for a moment, and there's the chance you'll encounter it.

five easy pieces (d. rafelson, w. rafelson & eastman)

2010-08-17T13:35:00.000-07:00

As mentioned I've now made the oceanic leap, but before doing so I was thankfully coerced into seeing Rafelson's small scale masterpiece, Five Easy Pieces. Killing time in Garulhos this morning, I tried to concoct a theory connecting the old world with the new, mapping it onto Nicholson's conflict as he tries to escape the (European) legacy of his family's classical music burden by whooping it up in a new (American) fashion in California's ahistorical playground.

I like the theory, largely because I was working on it having freshly arrived after a sleepless night on the wide American continent. However, in some ways it seems a bit European to pontificate thus, and I might as well listen to the American inside me, (there's an American inside us all, that's their secret, those darned Americans (Norte y Sur)), and merely laud it for its brilliance, its wit, its charm, its ability to be a film which is both recklessly entertaining and worthy of the most outlandish theories; a movie made for adults, not kids, and unashamedly so, from its dialogue to its cinematography to its unerringly acute sense of humour. And for Jack, giving one of those performances that succeeds in reminding us that there is such a thing as genius in acting. Although it requires a director who appreciates it in order to flower.

(Incidentally a brief look at Rafelson's directing career on IMDB makes it clear that his was one of the great lost Hollywood careers. Whether this is do with his own hedonistic failings, or a system that even as he was hitting his stride was running out of space for the kind of films he was capable of making is one of those debatable questions. But rarely does a director put so many feet right as Rafelson does in this strangely moving tale.)

antwerp [bolaño]

2010-08-17T13:12:00.000-07:00

Last year, on my trip to South America, I read Bolaño. However, Antwerp is a very different kind of beast to 2666. The last was his final book, more or less, this was his first, written in 1980.

It's a dense, poetic tract, of little more than 70 pages. There's no more than hints of a narrative in a text made, like a Hanecke movie, from 56 fragments. If it's reminiscent of anyone, it might be Lautreamont, the prince of the depraved, whose great text makes little sense but still manages to sear itself on the reader's retina. It's perhaps another glimpse of the poet Bolaño claimed he wanted to be before he settled into become the novelist he truly was. The claim on the back of the book that Antwerp is "the only novel that doesn't embarrass me", seems disingenuous, and written from a position of strength. It is, as he mentions in his introduction, not the kind of book that gets published these days; the kind of book that in the late 19th century had a vast readership but in this day and age would have precious few. And those that do, would be aficionados. In a way its a book of the damned, one of those texts written by a writer with no ambitions, just the need to thread words together on a string of consciousness.

Nevertheless, I suspect that if you work it harder, if you read it carefully, repeatedly, looking for the links, not on a plane to Montevideo surrounded by the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, the connections it contains will gradually make themselves clearer; the artistry emerging in a fashion he later learnt to make more latent.

this blinding absence of light [tahar ben jelloun]

2010-08-09T08:54:00.000-07:00

This is a book about a soldier who found himself involved in an abortive attempt to assassinate the King of Morocco, and as a result was incarcerated in a space without light, without room to stand up, with a meagre diet, watching his companions die one by one, for almost twenty years.

The soldier is the narrator. As much as the book is about his suffering, it is more about the techniques he developed for survival. Shutting himself from his past, and any notion of hope, he finds himself using mysticism to aid him in his struggle. This takes the form of out of body experiences, allowing him the ability to occasionally spy his corporeal self as it battles against the cruelties faced. However, whilst the body suffers, the mind retains its freedom, in large part through the narrator's refusal to fall into the trap of despair which the authorities have concocted.

As such, it's one of those books which document an experience beyond the true grasp of our understanding. An experience which can only be accessed through grave misfortune, or a sense of religious or spiritual vocation the like of which cannot exist within a day-to-day context, and is therefore never to be met. This is not to say that the book is any sense other-wordly: the ability of the narrator to find his spirituality within the context of death, disease and co-existence with his fellow inmates means that he remains an engaging voice.

One of the most remarkable aspects of Ben Jelloun's book is that it is not a work of non-fiction, but a novel. The author's capacity to enter into the voice of the actual prisoner is uncanny. This is a novel on the very borders of fact; the articulation of a voice from the underworld, which has miraculously surfaced and found its way back into the world.

frontier blues (w&d babak jalali)

2010-08-08T14:43:00.000-07:00

Jalali's film is a deceptively smart piece of filmmaking set in Gorgan, the filmmaker's hometown, on the Iranian-Turkmeni border.

Gorgan a kind of nowhere-ville. The film focuses on three characters. One wants to get married to an Iranian woman he never speaks to (one of only two women in the film, the other being her mother). A second, who later joins the first working in a chicken factory, is inseparable from his donkey, and pines for the mother who left him for his youth to go to Paris. The last, perhaps most adroit of the three, is a Turkmeni minstrel who is taking an Iranian photographer around. His contempt for the photographer is made clear, with the photographer constantly seeking out 'authentic Turkmeni' shots, which have no authenticity at all. On one level this leads to hilarious results, such as the staged wrestling match; on another it generates a poignancy, with the photographer constantly asking the minstrel to take him to a wedding or a funeral, only to be told that these things don't happen anymore. No one dies and no one gets married. At one point a character is asked where he wants a lift to. He replies 'nowhere', and his told to hop in, they'll take him there. Slyly, the film critiques our need to view exotic locations as romantic: with its muted cinematography, Jalali seems to be suggesting there's nothing exotic about his location at all. Instead, the carefully composed shots capture the banality and hopelessness of life in this dead-end town, only it does so with a dry, comedic tone.

Perhaps its because of its refusal to romanticise its locale in any way, (in contrast to Strickland, for example), that Frontier Blues has been slated by many British critics. As far as I'm concerned, that's an indictment of our criticism rather than the film. Frontier Blues is a slow watch, but it's peppered with moments of guile and humour which only a tired soul could fail to enjoy. Furthermore, it manages to achieve a poignancy in its depiction of the dead-end lives of its protagonists. From the shopkeeper trying to sell an oversized jumper to a boy to a man learning English so that he can communicate with people in Baku, the film is riddled with humane detail which helps to bring this obscure part of the world to life. Jalali clearly knows his world, and his portrait of it blends affection with honesty.

bus 174 (w&d josé padilha; co-directed felipe lacerda)

2010-08-08T04:01:00.000-07:00

Subsequent to this film, Padilha moved into drama, making the slightly bombastic Elite Squad. Elite Squad was a success on many levels, and bombast and cinema make for comfortable commercial bedfellows. Nevertheless, Bus 174, a documentary, displays a rather more surgical directorial sensibility, one which skewers some of the more grotesque aspects of Brazilian (and specifically Rio) society with unyielding intent.

The film opens with a panoramic helicopter shot, homing in on the primeval beauty of Rio as it seems to erupt out of the Atlantic ocean, the city named for the month it's river was discovered, a city which more than most succeeds in maintaining an affinity with the land it's made from. Jungle lurks at the city's edges and hides away on hilltops within its boundaries. Almost as though declaring that this is a city which contains environments which cannot be known, forever at odds with the urban ideal of transparency or accessibility. The directorial counterpoint to the gleaming opening shot are the scenes filmed in a prison, which are given the heading - any prison in Rio. This, even more than the favelas, is the manifestation of jungle, contained within the city, a place where men live crammed together, without room to lie down, or suspended above each other in hammocks, with shared possessions hung from ropes. The camera captures faces in negative making them appear dehumanised, vague, their pleas for attention or justice or decency coming through as sound recordings from the underworld. It's a mesmerising passage of footage which brings home the film's contention that there are parts of Brazilian society that suffer from extreme neglect and de-humanisation. When these elements appear within society, it should come as no surprise that conflict comes with them, something Sandro's story eloquently conveys.

These directorial touches help to ensure that Bus 174 pushes the boundaries of the documentary format. As well as the talking heads of those involved in the Bus siege, the directors make the most of what is a documentary goldmine, the hours of TV tape which traced the abortive bus hijacking by Sandro do Nascimento, a renegade figure whose agenda, the film gradually reveals, was more complex than anyone could imagine. Tracing Sandro's journey in conjunction with the progress of the siege itself, the film assembles a portrait of a complex, abused figure, who created his own meta-drama in order to finally, it is suggested, make himself visible within a society that does not want to know about people like him. (As such the film's resonance reaches far beyond Brazil).

Bus 174 is a taut, masterly piece of documentary making. In contrast with Elite Squad, it benefits from having a clear focus on one dramatic situation, which is played out to its tragic, farcical conclusion. It's high-octane fiim-making, which shakes up a format which so often manages to reduce the dramatic into something staid.

white [marie darrieussecq]

2010-08-06T07:25:00.000-07:00

Although I cannot remember the details of Medem's Lovers of the Arctic Circle, I'm sure it had a fair amount in common with White. Even if White is set in the Antarctic, it's still a tale of pre-determined love coming to pass under the influence of snow and ice. Darriussecq's novel is short and filled with intimate detail: the loos which incinerate shit, the effects of the cold on human perception, the depth of the ice and the height of the ice-cap over the Antarctic soil. The two imminent lovers, Edmee and Peter, both make their own way to the ice-station, their back stories elliptically filled in, little hints of fractured histories and suggestions of lost trauma. All of which is overseen by a chorus of ghosts. Whose ghosts remains unclear: whilst details of Scott and Admundsen's missions are frequently referred to, their destiny has no impact of the protagonists, who bide their time on the base waiting for the union which the ghosts know is coming to pass.

White is poetic, romantic, pretentious in the finest of French traditions, and somewhat slight. It discloses what might be termed 'a voice': of the books I have read of late it perhaps has something in common with Pelevin's Omon Ra. It's an exploration of human behaviour under extreme conditions, and succeeds in doing this convincingly, even if the futuristic narrative already feels faintly absurd. As such, with its holophones and voyage to Mars, it might one day belong to that tradition of books which postulate a future which never came to pass.

temptations of the west [pankaj mishra]

2010-08-02T08:13:00.000-07:00

Last Autumn, in Kashmir, we sat and listened to Jimmy, who looked after us on the houseboat, as he talked about the suffering endured by local Kashmiris, and the people of his village in particular. In spite of the vast military presence, and a sense of melancholia that seemed to hang over the (always male) residents of Srinigar we met, the full extent of this suffering remained concealed. There was a sense of the need to move on, to convince the Western tourists that things were improving, that there was nothing to worry about.

Of course, as a visitor, the reality of a society is hard to grasp. This is part of the reason we need journalists, who can delve deeper and reveal what's really going on within a society. To do this, the journalist needs to get out there and talk to people on the ground. Even then, his or her impressions will be nothing more than partial, but at least they can begin to help the layman to understand the things the eyes cannot immediately see.

Mishra's book does just this. As such, it seems like an almost mandatory read for anyone visiting India, Kashmir, Afghanistan or Pakistan. (The sections on Nepal and Tibet are more discursive, and lack the detail of the other chapters.) Mishra is driven by a curiosity to find out about what's going on in his part of the world, but also to trace the way in which a society he thought he knew as a child was more complex than it seemed, and how it has evolved as a result. His writing on the often frightening changes to Indian culture, after speaking to film stars and politicians, visiting Hindu strongholds and Muslim havens, constantly explores the frayed edges of a new India, where tolerance and pacifism are in increasingly short supply. When he writes about the bombastic Bollywood film LOC Kargil, the whole caboodle of religious divide, Hindu nationalism, the mythic role of Kashmir and Bollywood are brought together.

Because so many people visit India, and because the colonial heritage with regard to India and Pakistan is still so great, there tends to be an assumption that we in the UK know something about that part of the world. Mishra's astute observations help to plug the vast gaps in our knowledge, skewering the way in which these societies are struggling to come to terms with modern materialism whilst maintaining a conviction in the importance of the four great religions that dominate South Asia. In the process he helps to show how Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, as well as explaining why the Kashmiri crisis might well be one without end.

In the last two months, things have taken a turn for the worse in Kashmir, and one wonders how the people we met, Jimmy, Shaquil and co are getting on. I wish I'd read Mishra's book before I visited. The tourist's ignorance, marvelling at an exotic beauty, is all very well, but in the end, if we want to be more than mere than just economic, part-time colonialists, there remains some kind of imperative to make the attempt to be conscious of those places we choose to explore when we find ourselves taking time out from our endlessly busy lives.

bluebeard (w&d breillat)

2010-07-31T05:27:00.000-07:00

This morning, in the Guardian, reading the obituary of Cecile Aubry, a little known French actress of the forties who married a Moroccan pasha and devised a TV show called Belle and Sebastian, I learn she "played Bluebeard's seventh wife as a sexy teenager, even performing a silhouetted striptease that left little to the imagination". This suggests that Bluebeard plays a larger role in French popular history than ours. In her film, Breillat employs a framing device of two young girls who find a copy of the fairy tale in a loft, and read it together, and perhaps generations of young girls have done the same in French attics, without the attendant dramatic consequences.

All of which implies that there may be levels to Breillat's interpretation of the fable which I am ignorant of. In her version, Bluebeard's wife is no ingenue, but a clear-headed young woman who knows exactly what she's up to. Breillat would also appear to be playing off her reputation, intimating the possibility of congress between beauty and the beast, something which the film then artfully steers away from. There's nothing in the film to frighten or disturb little girls, on the contrary, it's a highly empowering tale. Perhaps the abrupt conclusion of the secondary story is added to ensure a greater bite to the film. As it is, the most intriguing aspect of the beautifully filmed period narrative revolves around the dynamic of the two sisters, a dynamic which is interrupted by the younger's marriage to Bluebeard.

Having said which, there's still something remarkable about the way in which Breillat succeeds in creating a period drama which retains a naturalistic feel. This is not an artfully conceived world; the lack of CGI or big budgets helps to maintain a down-to-earthness which is completely convincing, and within this context the girls themselves feel modern, in spite of their period setting. This helps to make the film beguiling, and though slight, one can envisage it being viewed as something of a minor masterpiece. Nevertheless, it's hard not to hanker for the confrontational Breillat whose films stripped the veil of our modern day sexual mores; one hopes she's not in too much danger of mellowing.

the informers [juan gabriel vasquez]

2010-07-28T03:43:00.000-07:00

The Informers contains stories within stories. When the narrator writes a book about his father's German Jewish friend, Sara Guterman, who arrived in Colombia fleeing from the Nazis, his father reacts viciously, publishing a damning critique. After a heart by-pass operation, the father changes his tune, before the reconciliation is ended when his father's killed in a car accident. However, it transpires that his father had just come from visiting his old friend, Enrique, whose father he denounced forty years ago as a Nazi, and whose family was destroyed as a consequence.

In effect this is a tale of family intrigue and secrets, with the narrator's journey towards the truth assisting him in his mission to escape the shadow of his overpowering father. The book comes lauded with critical acclaim. It is a well constructed text, but suffers from the author's tendency to overwrite and embellish. Succinctly told it could have come in at 200 pages, but instead comes in at 350, and its whimsical asides diminish the potent father-son narrative. Furthermore, the books ends with a historical footnote, explaining the nature of the Colombian blacklists, upon which the book's mystery and drama is predicated. The need for the footnote seems to some extent to point out the book's failure to sufficiently convey their significance within the text itself. Additionally, whilst much play is made of the mystery surrounding the father's action, it still seems puzzling that his son, for all his fascination with the case, never seeks to investigate the causes of his father's seemingly random act of betrayal.

The Informers feels very much like a first novel, full of intriguing ideas, but lacking a certain clarity. It offers a frustratingly restricted insight into wartime Colombia's history, and the way in which it connects to its more recent, violent history. A book full of loose threads, it never quite seems to get to the bottom of the various mysteries it sets out to investigate.

the spy who came in from the cold [le carré]

2010-07-25T12:29:00.000-07:00

Reading this book is like taking a walk through one's childhood, even if it was published before I was born. For all it's ability in the first half to conjure up the strange world of post-war London, this isn't a great book. The second half becomes surprisingly bureaucratic for what was in its time a vast commercial success, as what turns out to be Leamas' trial is spun out over several chapters. Nevertheless, Le Carre has already succeeded in investing the text with all the mystique of that world which is now all but forgotten. The notion of the Communist threat, and the reality of the Cold War are things that would appear to have evaporated altogether. But for anyone born from the 40s through to the early 70s, this monolithic conflict dominated our fears, and our dreams.

Besides the way it captures the complexities of British attitudes to all this, attitudes determined by the joy of the game, as though a war had something to do with a crossword puzzle, perhaps the most telling aspect of the book is the positive light in which it presents two Communists. Firstly the ingenue, Liz, who the writing carefully depicts as someone who succeeds in seeing through both sides' game in order to discern human truths that lie behind it; and Fiedler, Leamas' interrogator, who becomes an increasingly sympathetic and tragic figure, one of the only ones operating within this world who actually has any real values. (Unless one grants Leamas this accolade, seeing his actions as a kind of heroism, rather than the alternative, the actions of a world-weary cynic.)

Looking at the writing of Zizek, whether we trust him or not, we see him critiquing materialism for its lack of idealism, something which ultimately undercuts our ability to achieve happiness, no matter how great our material comforts. Perhaps its overly speculative to view the supposedly fearsome Fiedler as a sacrificial lamb. Nevertheless, it seems curious that Le Carre, a man like Green concerned with the way the pattern of history shapes the ordinary man's dreams and happiness, should endow this initially fearsome figure with such subversive dignity.

The book is artful, and told at a brisk pace, and perhaps its hard to gauge the true impact its anti-heroic viewpoint might have had on a Britain still reluctant to believe that their noble wars had been replaced with such a tawdry one, where heroism was now, by and large, redundant.

leaving (w&d catherine corsini, w. macé)

2010-07-24T09:37:00.000-07:00

I"m seated in a garden in Ipswich, en famille. By English standards it's a warm day. It could be a scene from Accident, but it could equally be a scene from what Mr C might describe as a middle class French movie, in a derogatory tone. There does indeed seem to be an increasing inclination on the part of French filmmakers to make what might be called 'middle-class' movies, many of them featuring a range of the current remarkable generation of French actresses. Mr C says the only French film he likes is La Haine. Quite apart from the whole new wave phenomenon, I've enjoyed movies over the years by the likes of Rohmer, Mimouni, and probably a host of others whose work could be described, perhaps, as 'middle class'. In a way, given the sometimes predictable, patronising tendency of a middle-class British film industry to try and explore its own agendas through often contrived portrayal of 'working class' life, it seems perhaps more honest to turn the mirror on the class where the film industry emerges from. (Something Cooke noted when he took over the Royal Court, although I'm not sure if his well-intentioned mission to stop rich people delving into the lives of the marginalised/ proletarian in their corner of Sloane Square has quite come off.)

Which is all a roundabout way of saying that the reason Leaving is such a turkey has nothing to do with its socio-politics, and everything to do with its cliched, soft-centred premise and script. That Kirsten Scott Thomas should want to give up her bourgeois sensibilities in order to have fierce sex with Sergei Lopez does not seem altogether unlikely. However, that this will involve her plunging towards an abyss of criminalising impoverishment proves hard to take. With only love to sustain her as she works in a water melon packing factory, with her comically evil husband finding new, devious ways to gain revenge for his cuckolding at the hands of an ignorant ex-con, Scott Thomas sinks towards infamy, a modern day Lady Chatterley.

The film feels like it's been created as a vehicle for Scott Thomas. It's a role which, in theory, any actress would die for, the woman prepared to sacrifice all for love, but the sheer predictability of the template sadly only goes to confirm the prejudices of those who claim 'middle class' French cinema (by which they mean almost all French cinema) is self-indulgent and emotionally vacuous.

inception (w&d nolan)

2010-07-22T02:30:00.001-07:00

It's always interesting to read the critical reaction to films, particularly those that are ostentatiously clever. When that occurs, the tendency of the clever critic appears to be resist the attempts of the clever filmmaker to demonstrate his or her cleverness. The very word 'clever' becomes something of an insult. Hence, in the media I read, and the comments that are appended to that media, the better half is using words like 'pretentious', 'emperor's' 'new' 'clothes', and so on. As though there is some debate over the cinematic merits of the film, and its ambition. Christopher Nolan, you're no Stanley Kubrick, seems to be the jist of things.

So what? That's like telling Tendulkar he's no Bradman. The carpers create a mental logic which accords with a vision of the world they seek to project. Which would no doubt delight Nolan, who if he does anything in this film, demonstrates an ability to explore the concept of phenomenology. There are flaws a plenty in Inception. The snow-dream lacks the poetry it aspires to; the explosions go on for to long; some of the dialogue is unintentionally comical (although there are hints of humour in the film, something one doesn't normally associate with the director, and there may be a tongue in cheek aspect to some of its more grandiose lines); and finally, and perhaps most pertinently, there's a distinct lack of what some would call 'emotional depth.' This is not the Dardennes brothers neither, and it would be true to say the Gondry/ Kaufmann film covered similar terrain with more emotionally verve.

Do these problems matter? Is not every movie susceptible to the accusation that is in some way lacking? Of course they are. Casablanca lacks a good car chase. The Conversation lacks Ingrid Bergman. Performance lacks social realism. And so on. On the other hand, if one looks at Inception in terms of what it does...

There seems to me little doubt it's a film that will become embedded in people's dream of what cinema can achieve. It will provoke an absurd number of PhD theses. It will be talked about over chapatis or cream teas or masitas for years to come. Because what Nolan succeeds in doing is stimulate the mind. He pulls off a seemingly hyper-complex premise. (Incidentally, even if he has apparently been working on the script for a decade (which is not as long as it sounds, in dream time), I suspect he might also have been influenced by the equally bonkers but slightly less comprehensible Primer.) He makes his audience not only think, but enjoy thinking. By which he reminds us of the pleasures of the mind, something we are all to prone too forget.

As The Prestige showed, Nolan knows he's a showman, and it's all trickery. In reality he has less pretension than many seem to want to attribute to him. Like another master-spinner of tall tales, Borges, his work aims to seduce the mind rather than the heart. But his facility for achieving this reminds us, if this is not too pretentious, that the mind is an organ of the body, like the heart, one that craves stimulation and love, without the gift of which we are in danger of festering. Nolan does all that cinema is capable of: he wakes us up, and reminds that even if it's all a dream, we are, indeed, alive, waking dreamers, blessed by our capacity to perceive the world around us.

pedro paramo [juan rulfo]

2010-07-21T05:36:00.000-07:00

[An aside. Someone said the other day that the way to make this website more popular would be to unleash a more sardonic tone of voice (which can occasionally be found here) on a more regular basis. Instinctively, that felt wrong. Occasionally I describe myself as a critic, (the title page does so too), but that's not really the function of this site/ book. A critic implies someone who makes a judgement (I just tried to find its etymology, without success). Whilst a notion of judgement, or evaluation, is implicit in the giving of a reaction to a work of art/ literature, that's of only secondary importance. Especially given that I have no readers to influence. In which case, what is the function of this site? Firstly, it's a record. When I was a child, I kept a black notebook and wrote down the names of the books I read in it. Lots of Huxley, Hesse, Camus and their ilk. I maintained the record into my late 20's and then let it slide. There's something anal about this, of course, but it also seems to me that given the flood of information we are inundated with, is does no harm to have a place to refer to what has been, what has enrichened, or not. Secondly, and more importantly, this is the journal of an enthusiast. There's no space to go into any great detail of the role of art in our society, but if one holds it to have some value, as I suppose I do, then it feels in some way positive to create a space where access to that art can be offered. It's probably fair to say that this seems particularly the case within an introspective culture such as the one I inhabit, (no matter how broad it believes its remit to be). As such, should anyone stumble across this site, far from offering the satisfaction of seeing something knocked down, or criticised, I would hope that it might prompt curiosity for some of the rich worlds of writers, filmmakers and the like who I have been fortunate enough to discover over the course of recent years.]

Including, of late, Juan Rulfo. A name I'd heard talk of, but knew nothing about. Le Clezio's reference to him in the last book I reviewed prompted me to read him. Rulfo, so I've learnt, only published two books. Sontag writes an affectionate introduction, explaining something of his life. As such, he's a maverick, someone who belongs to Vila Matas' compendium of near-silent authors. Paramo is a simple/ complex fable, which operates on a host of different timelines, which whispers various stories, all inter-connected, all leading back to the eponymous anti-hero. It's a breathy, brief book, which feels like it could be re-read a hundred times and still contain secrets the reader hasn't gleaned. As Le Clezio notes, it feels like a tract from another world, with another way of seeing things. Of all the writers I've read of late, it's dreamscape most resembles the work of Couto, another writer whose work seems informed by a tradition with another vision of time, one that's not linear,but fractured, belonging to a world where death is not omnipotent. Where the dead live alongside the living, or perhaps the living live alongside the dead. It's also a story where the density of the narrative seems to belie the sheer number of pages: my version of the book contained 122 pages, and took no more than a couple of hours to read, but the number of threads that are spun from these words seem nearly unquantifiable.

white material (d. claire denis, w denis & marie n'diaye)

2010-07-19T18:10:00.000-07:00

Denis and Huppert. A potentially explosive combination. Which, in this case, smoulders rather than combusts. Like the coffee factory which the troops burn, where Huppert's son dies, where she enacts an Apocalyptian Now moment at the end, felling a strangely Brando-esque lookalike (the underused Michel Subor). It appear that Denis deliberately keeps the lid on this somewhat Conradian tale of the redoubtable coffee plantation owner who believes she belongs to Africa, only to discover that Africa isn't convinced about the relationship.

Huppert is utterly convincing as the bedraggled, faintly elegant neo-colonialist, Maria Val. Because of course, this unnamed country is no longer a colony. It's now a failed state, with echoes of the Congo, or Rwanda. A place where children are the lords of misrule, as they were in another French film, Sauvaire's Johny Mad Dog. However, Denis brings her distinctive vision to bear. When two child soldiers infiltrate Maria's house, they leave dirty footprints in the bath. They nearly kill her son, but no-one seems to think much of it. In Maria's world view, these things are always on the brink of happening, and that's part of the reason she loves it. Her occasional references to France reveal something bordering on contempt for the privileged Europeans. At one moment she mutters in a rare voiceover her opinion that this country is too beautiful for Europeans, as though she believes herself completely assimilated, an African native. In spite of the fact that the leader of the rebels criticises the exploitative foreigners, which include her. Another artful scene shows her showing her hired hands their living quarters. The coffee pickers peer into a darkened shed, full of bunks. Their world remains divorced from the white people's living quarters, no matter how much Maria thinks they're all the same.

Maria's characterisation is rich and strange, part heroic, part idiocy, part condescending, part integrated. Denis seems inclined to let Huppert's acting do the work, using less music than usual, having her roving camera follow her like a spy. Although the film yet again posits an Africa which exists on the edge of anarchy, ruled by boys in dresses and mystic warlords, it draws strength from the complexity of its portrayal of the coffee grower, who doesn't even own the plantation she works on, which is now worthless. Her quixotic faith in the value of the land makes this is a film about belonging and our understanding of what that means. The way in which it is choice as much as a birthright. If White Material initially seems like an unlikely film for Denis, after 35 Rhums, perhaps it might be seen as its obverse. Where the latter dealt with African immigrants in Europe, this one deals with European immigrants in Africa. All of them seeking their identity in a mixed up muddled up shook up world.

the mexican dream [j. m. g. le clezio]

2010-07-19T11:35:00.000-07:00

The subtitle of this book appears somewhat convoluted upon first reading. It's: "Or, The Interrupted Thought of Amerindian Civilisations.' Is this merely a poorly translated phrase, or is it just a piece of literary whimsy? The answer is neither, and by the time the reader reaches the end of this book, its meaning is clear.

Le Clezio's objective is to explore the fate and legacy (or lack of one) of those civilisations of the New World which the Old World cut off just as they were coming into their prime. Far from being a collection of savages, the Aztec and Mayan worlds were sophisticated urban societies, with their own notions of religion; philosophy and physics. In comparison, the barbarians were the Spanish, who melted down golden artefacts and destroyed their beautiful cities. The book documents this tragic meeting of two worlds, introducing the reader to a host of other forgotten cultures who lived on the edges of the Mexican world, including the Chichimeca; the Tarahumara; the Totonac and further North the tribes of North America. The author observes the connections between these doomed worlds, in the way they viewed nature, their span upon the earth, and their gods.

His reading of authors such as Sahagun and De Las Casas, as well as those few Mayan and Aztec texts which survived, allows him to establish a clear portrait of what was an evolving world view, contextualising the famous blood lust of the Aztecs, as well as divining the secret of their innate expectation of destruction, a prophesy which came to be fulfilled. At the same time, he stresses that these societies were still in the process of developing philosophies, philosophies which might, had they been allowed to flower, have evolved to rival or complement the complexity of Buddhism, or materialism. However, as observed, this never happened. The evolving thought processes were interrupted. This world where gods walked with men, and life was not part of a linear vision of time, but a circular one, was all but extinguished over the course of a single generation. And the loss to mankind as a whole, the author suggests, was greater than we shall ever be able to realise.

tetro (d coppola)

2010-07-11T01:49:00.000-07:00

These are the dog days of Summer. As can be gleaned by the amount of cultural activity being undertaken. It feels a bit like an inverted hibernation. Football, travel and the vagaries of life have taken over, as the sun toasts us all on a daily basis.

In between World Cup matches, I took up the offer of a trip to see Coppola's latest, supposedly low budget offering. It's over a fortnight now since I saw it. Although it's not his first, the idea of Coppola doing a low budget film seems something of a contradiction in terms. Clearly he thought so too, because, after managing to keep the lid on the budget in the first half, the second descends into hints of extravagance. Both budgetary and thematically, as the characters suddenly find themselves at a gaudy, not very Patagonian arts festival, where Vincent Gallo's terrible play is hailed as a masterpiece. Suddenly, an intriguing film is thrown off-kilter, as though the director lost patience with having to scrimp: two frugal acts are followed by a splurge of a desert, a would-be low budget knickerbocker glory added to the menu at the last moment.

It's a pity, because the premise and opening acts are engaging. No matter how limited his resources, Coppola still has friends in the right places, and the black and white photography of Buenos Aires is beguiling. The set up of a rich man's son (Gallo) who's run away to the South to escape his father's grip, has sufficient weight to keep the audience engaged. The use of Buenos Aires as a counterpoint to New York is also astute; BA being the other great city of destination for Italians fleeing poverty in the early 20th Century. The Argentine and US cast works together more effectively than has been the case in similar cross-cultural endeavours.

All in all there's enough to make the film work. Until the script founders on the notion that Gallo's scrawls actually hide a demonic literary genius; and then his novel becomes a play; and that play is performed at the ludicrously posh Ushaia literary festival, and Gallo isn't his brother's brother, and it all becomes Oedipal and relentlessly silly. Leading to the implication that, no matter how much he'd like to be, Coppola wasn't born to make low-budget movies. He doesn't possess the discipline, he needs the adrenaline of the potential of catastrophic failure in order to provoke him into producing work which doesn't drown in whimsy.

first as tragedy, then as farce [slavoj zizek]

2010-06-15T00:04:00.001-07:00

It's been a few weeks since I finished Zizek's entertaining book on the plane. Zizek is now part of the zeitgeist, gradually insinuating himself into a mainstream discourse, overlapping the kind of territory occupied by Alain De Botton, Chomsky, Schama, Dawkins and their ilk. Philosophical discourse for the masses.

Which, given his professed Communism, seems appropriate. Even if 'the masses' actually means 'the chattering classes'. One wonders how long before he has his own TV show. On the basis of his book, the sooner the better. He makes his case for the reinvention of Communism, a kind of post-Marxist Communism , succinctly. In the process he uses a host of contemporary references (including demonstrating a penchant for the more portentously tacky side of Hollywood), in a text which ranges from the Haitian slave revolt to Berlusconi, from Obama's Cairo speech on religious tolerance to Starbucks, from Hegel to Foucault. All via Marx himself.

It would be presumptuous of me to try and summarise his arguments, and I suspect they may be amplified in greater detail in other tomes, but as an introduction to his work, First as Tragedy... acts as an inspirational text. Anyone who has an interest in the fate of humankind in the forthcoming century would probably find it worth their while to read. As to what we do with the information, how we disrupt ourselves out of our comfortable mass socio-political hibernation in the Chocolate Factory of World Cups, iPads and modernity's other trappings - that's another issue. Just as the actual likelihood of the return of (genuine) Communism cannot be confirmed by the reading of this book. Nevertheless, Zizek seems to know whether the toast is going to land butter side down or not, and in his confident prose there emerges a kind of optimism for another way. Not the first, nor the second nor the third, but a way out of the mess we all secretly (and increasingly) suspect we've made of things, in the quest to make life 'better'.

the killer inside me (d. winterbottom, w. john curran)

2010-06-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

Winterbottom's career tends to be somewhat hit and miss, in part as a result of the variety of cinematic styles this prolific director has chosen to explore. For my money, the films of his I've enjoyed the most have been those dealing with a specifically British sensibility and humour. However, he's become an adept filmmaker, capable of ratcheting Hollywood A-listers into unlikely material (A Mighty Heart, Code 46) and you always expect to find something of interest in his films, even if you don't like the one in particular.

Consequently, the slightly mundane nature of The Killer Inside Me, in spite of its violence, makes it feel like an atypical Winterbottom movie, more of a Hollywood product. Casey Affleck delivers another phenomenal performance as the psychotic lawman, and the supporting cast do their bit (their value emphasised by the the old school title sequence), but the material, an adaptation of a Jim Thompson novel, feels generic.

Maybe that's why the director's chosen to go overboard with the violence. It feels as though he's a hired hand, looking to stamp his mark on a packaged product. The violence is shocking, in a cinematic way. Less so is the transgressive sex, (somewhat limply re-featured in flashbacks from time to time), which titillates rather than excites or disturbs. As though made knowing that whilst he could get away with upping the violence ante in the States, he would be never be allowed to explore the potentially more intriguing sexual themes in any great detail. Occasionally, in Winterbottom's work, there's hints of Roeg at his darkest, but where Roeg was prepared (or allowed) to explore his themes in all their murky depths, Winterbottom sometimes seems to use these same themes as window dressing.

The ending, pure grand guignol, seems indicative of a script which has backed itself into an absurd corner. The way in which the direction chooses to promote the theatricality seems like another indication of the director himself struggling to make something more quirky from his base materials, but at the end of the day the film seems slightly sluggish, lacking a real sense of place, and choosing to make up for its torpor with the occasional firework.

valhalla rising (w&d nicolas refn, w. roy jacobsen)

2010-05-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

This was not the movie any of us expected, after another Sunday evening excursion. It did admittedly contain an appropriate amount of gore, it did contain a single Viking, a one-eyed Viking called One-Eye. But that's as far as it goes. Refn's poster suggests a canter through some millenial pillaging, but the film is a meditative, psychotropic crawl, exploring an unlikely but perhaps feasible voyage towards death.

One-Eye has been captured by a pagan Scottish tribe, and is their resident, caged Giant Haystacks, defeating all-comers. When he escapes, he hooks up with a bunch of witless would-be Scottish Crusaders. Their boat goes the wrong way, drifting Westwards through a pea-souper to arrive on the shores of Vineland, where all and sundry meet their fate, either at each other's hands or those of the unfriendly natives. The spectre of Aguire overshadows the story, even if Refn's adventurers arrive in the New World five hundred years earlier. In an interview, Refn also mentions Tarkovsky, whose debt is evident in the film's stately, anti-dramatic pacing, albeit a pacing interrupted by moments of crude violence.

The premise, with its Scandanavian twist on history, is engaging. The Vikings did make their way to the place which was later named America, and doubtless more than a few suffered desperate, unheralded fates. It wouldn't be hard to read a kind of anti-history into the narrative. The unspoilt Eden of the Americas remains pure, the barbarity of Western ideology, shaped around religion, snuffed out at birth. In an otherwise patchy dialogue, one of the Crusaders remarks of an arrowhead that it's made of stone, not metal, and takes this as evidence that the natives are savages; but in the end it's the Crusaders savagery which is laid bare.

The looseness of the episodic narrative invites a hermeneutic approach which the film itself probably doesn't quite justify. It's something of a curiosity. In an interview where he also says he'd like to direct Wonderwoman, Refn talks about his film as a drug. You could probably read it as a classic bad trip, inclusive of dodgy 'blood-soaked' imagery. Nevertheless, in spite of the iffy dialogue and its general wooziness, the film got under my skin, its refusal to give the audience what it's expecting suggesting a perverse talent.

(Nb - I have not seen Pusher, but have had it recommended to me, and I can imagine that in more concrete, contemporary surroundings, the filmmaker's hypnotic approach could feel revelatory.)

the bad lieutenant: port of call - new orleans (d. herzog, w. finkelstein)

2010-05-23T08:25:00.000-07:00

There are two hand held shots in this film, one from an alligator's POV, another from an iguana's, which are pure Herzog. The rest might be defined as more Kinski than Herzog, as though Nick Cage is seeking to summon the director's excessive alter ego from the grave. Cage's over-the-top performance possesses similar traits to Kinski's most grandiose work, which was achieved in conjunction (rather than at the behest of) his director. Herzog has a penchant for the atavistic spirit, the freak who not only lives life but seeks to devour it, and Cage is more than happy to comply with the less measured half of the director's brain.

Which all goes to make for an entertaining if ridiculous movie. Had it been directed and played more 'straight' it would have been pure pap. However, under the sway of director and star, it almost becomes a critique of excess, a lost film of Donald Cammell's. Almost, but perhaps not quite. Within the security of the Hollywood system, Herzog's vision becomes cauterised. (Hence the appeal of the two shots he quite specifically claims as his own in the credits.) It feels like the only way it could truly have been a Herzog movie would have been had he been able to make it in the days following the breaking of the New Orleans levees, when the bodies and the slime still owned the streets. The shadow of Katrina, and its critique of the American dream, hovers over the film, but its potency has waned. Instead, Herzog uses images of the blandness of the cityscape, its residual grey, its neo-destitution to frame the decadence of a system that can produce an anti-hero like Cage's Terence McDonagh. The gloopily feel-good ending (as in the case of Rescue Dawn, his last Hollywood film) seems like an admission of defeat. This is not Kinski on a raft full of monkeys, or throwing himself at the surf. The rage is tempered, the system and the filmmaker agreeing an uneasy and not entirely satisfactory peace. The irony is that for all its faults, Ferrara's Bad Lieutenant might have been truer to the original spirit of Herzog's fimmaking than Herzog's own version of the film whose title it shares.

four lions (d morris, w morris, bain & armstrong)

2010-05-21T04:34:00.000-07:00

It's been over a week since I saw the much heralded Four Lions. Which was to be enjoyed. In spite of the fact that the trailers and the sneak previews had already used many of the funniest clips, Morris' provocative humour still packed a punch, and the premise is too perfect for the film not to succeed on some level or another. The notion of making a comedy about a group of suicide bombers, exposing not the fundamentalist but the British roots of their endeavour, is both bold and in a strange way beautiful. The scene where three of the four are in a van driving down to London to do their deed, singing along to the cheesiest of pop hits, Dancing in the Moonlight, captures some kind of ludicrously believable truth. It's in the British psyche to be 'a bit of a nutter'. These are jovial fools, followers of Falstaff as much as Allah, the type of characters who have been celebrated in English literature through the ages.

At the same time, a week later, I'm not sure if the film's conceit quite comes off. The double task of personalising and ridiculing these hapless figures only functions in patches, no matter how hard Riz Ahmed works to pull it off. At times the piece strays into the terrifying realm of 'comedy drama', meaning that it refrains from going for the jugular in the style of Morris' television work. Some of the comedy felt tame, not least in the outtakes that are filtered at the end, and the political messaging has no real clarity. Morris is at his most effective as a Swiftian provocateur, a respecter of no rule, upto and including the injunction that declares we have to care about the characters. In the end, Four Lions might have been more powerful (and more funny) had it followed a Godardian rather than an Ealing Comedy model, although that kind of debate would surely have been anathema in the funding rounds the film would have had to go through.

Nevertheless, I suspect Four Lions shall be looked back on with fondness, in the same way we look back on the likes of Porridge, or Citizen Smith. It's a curious, slightly disjointed film, but one that has the cojones to address and humanise a subject that British culture usually struggles to deal with in anything except the most worthy of ways. It will be interesting to see how it fares abroad.