43 missing: a detective emilia cruz novel (carmen amato)

Ayotzinapa is a name that anyone with any Latino political awareness will know. It refers to an event which took place in Iguala, Guerrero, in 2014, when 43 students were kidnapped and murdered. It is an event which came to encapsulate the arbitrary cruelty of the silent Mexican war which has lead to possibly hundreds of thousands being killed or disappeared. The very number, 43, has acquired an emotive power.

I am not sure how I came to Amato’s book. It is, as the subheading says, part of a series of detective novels which focus on Emilia Cruz, a policewoman in Acapulco. Presumably the fact that Cruz is from the state of Guerrero explains why Amato relocates the action to the neighbouring state of Michoacan. Cruz is assigned to the task force of five trusted police who are allocated to a commission whose intentions is to draw a line under the numerous unsuccessful investigations into the deaths of 43 students in the town of Lindavista. They are not expected to solve the crime or even locate the site of the students bodies, but Emilia’s resourcefulness leads her to achieve this, tying the story in to other non-fictional elements of Mexico’s recent history, notably the escape of El Chapo from a high security prison.

The novel uses Ayotzinapa as a backdrop for this chapter in Emilia’s life. Whilst offering insights into the original crime, one can’t help wondering what people make of it in Mexico. In a similar way to the furore over Emilia Perez, which I saw this evening, it feels as though art is in danger of cashing in on a recent tragedy. Or perhaps it is seen as a way of bringing the case to a wider public? In many ways this speaks of the issues surrounding the writing of crime fiction, perhaps above all in Mexico, where the actuality is so much more arresting than fiction. Before she is kidnapped in Emilia Perez, the Zoe Saldaña character stands next to a newsstand. In Mexico, these newsstands are covered with periodicals describing in gory detail the latest violent killing. Fiction struggles to compete. 43 Missing is a fast-paced read with a plucky heroine, but it doesn’t have much to do with Ayotzinapa, the crime its title refers to. 

bonnie and clyde (d. arthur penn, w. david newman, robert benton, robert towne)

1. Acting. Dunaway and Beatty offer one of those rare masterclasses in how to elevate a role through the use of innate charisma onto an epic level. In some ways Penn’s movie is reminiscent of The Getaway, with McQueen and MacGraw, where the sexual tension between the two leads offers the story an extra dimension. Only in this film, the brave choice is made to explore Clyde Barrow’s impotence and push this as far as they can, showing how their love affair flowered in spite of this. It feels like a very modern choice, foregrounding the relationship problem, which helps both actors give such nuanced performances.

2. History. The story of Bonnie and Clyde takes place against the backdrop of the recession. The first bank they plan to rob is actually bankrupt, there’s nothing there. The film carefully locates the story within this social milieu. It’s nothing extraordinary but at the same time it feels different. Bonnie and Clyde and the film itself become part of the counter-culture. Nowhere more so than in a scene that might have come out of a Midwest Vineland, when they arrive, bloodied and wounded, at a small lakeside community of people who appear to have been made destitute, but who offer the mythical criminals what little they have, recognising and confirming them as folk heroes. This chapter of the American dream tends to be glossed over, the Mice and Men moment, by the narrative of post-war prosperity, but the US has always had an underclass, looking for champions, and the film engages with its characters’ stories on a mythic level.

3. Myth. Nowadays, Hollywood myths are constructed around comic book characters. Big budget films run shy of humans. The division between the real and the idealised imaginary has rarely been greater and every new offering from the popcorn stable reinforces it. The sixties and early seventies, for some reason, bucked this trend. It is not fanciful to think that the drift towards an ahuman politics, a turbo-charged mechanistic vision of capitalist nirvana, embodied by the current US president and the by the country’s role within the world, has been facilitated by this abstention on the imaginary scale by the country’s most powerful myth makers. 

nosferatu (w&d robert eggers, w henrik galeen, bram stoker)

The remake is an interesting directorial choice. Nolan did it with Insomnia. Guadagnino with Suspiria. Van Sant with Psycho. Herzog also tackled Nosferatu. It implies a labour of love, coming from a privileged place: you are an established director who can pick and choose which projects you want to make. Unsurprisingly, Eggers seems more interested in the aesthetics than the acting or the dialogue. He delights in the possibilities of CGI, the construction of this medieval world. There is, perhaps, an analogy to be made between the arrival of the plague and recent global events. However, the insertion of dialogue into the gothic mix seems to derail the mystery and the terror. Every time the actors open their mouths and emit sounds, the movie feels as though it changes register. Although when I commented on this to non-English speakers here in Montevideo, no-one seemed to agree. Perhaps I would have entered more thoroughly into Eggers’ reimagined world if I had understood less, if it had been done in, say, Serbo-Croat. 

tésis (w&d alejandro amenábar, w. mateo gil)

Tésis is a film which has acquired the notoriety it clearly sought. A great, if underdeveloped premise, has Angela, a female film student writing a thesis about violence in cinema, leading her to search for illicit, unwatchable material. So far so engaging. Thereafter, perhaps too soon, she discovers that the source of the worst of this material lurks within the university where she studies. The film then becomes an investigative cat-and-mouse game: will the killer get to her before she can discover and reveal him? There is quite a lot of random pursuits and false leads, although some of the plot twists are entirely predictable. Curiously for a film that would appear to be suggesting a critique of Hollywood storytelling, with the villain of the piece saying in one of the film’s most interesting scenes that the Spanish film industry needs to ape the North Americans and give the public what they want, the film then seems to take on his advice. Instead of taking us to the heart of the problem (and perhaps discovering why Angela is so interested in this subject), it embarks on the kind of roundabout story beats which would not be out of place in the concluding episodes of a supposedly gripping Netflix series. There are moments where the darkness the film purports to reveal shine through, as in the closing hospital sequences where patients gaze like drug addicts at the titillating violence on their TV screens, but these moments are interspersed with the generic jokey tone of the Scream franchise.

conclave (d. edward berger, w. peter straughan, robert harris)

Back in Montevideo, and of course going to the cinema you run into someone you know. Not to mention the folks in the cafe. The difference with impersonal London is stark. Anyhow, this person, a critic of sorts, called out to me after the film, asking me what I thought. He told me he thought it was ‘todo muy correcto’ but he was clearly underwhelmed. Which perhaps surprised me, as Conclave is the kind of high-end ‘quality’ film-making which crosses international boundaries and presumably has a universal appeal. The very content of the film, a bringing together of Cardinals from all over the world, plays to this. I’d enjoyed it more than I expected, and Fiennes does a good job as the protagonist of a resolutely unglamorous film, or rather, the glamour comes from locations and artwork, rather than the actors. It’s not an easy premise and Berger employs a great deal of oficio to make a constantly watchable movie out of a collection of old men sitting around and repeatedly having to write a name on a piece of paper. So on the one hand this is a great example of classical filmmaking, the kind of film that perhaps they don’t make anymore, and on the other, there’s something so polished about it that it’s in danger of feeling like an expensive car in a Belgravia shopwindow. 

the shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history and us (christophe bonneuil + jean-baptiste fressoz, tr. david fernbach)

Not being au fait with current trends in intellectual thought, I don’t know where this obron of Bonneuiland and Fressoz sits in the firmament. What I can say is that it is a comprehensive and disarming read, which  brings together a collection of thought and references regarding the Anthropocene in a manner that makes one think, as one reads, that this book ought to be compulsory reading for anyone over the age of six months. Not that it will be, of course, as people are soon going to stop reading and process information through visual memes, which is part of the problem. It’s hard to read this book and think there is any coming back from the brink, be that the brink of extinction or radical social change. Hopefully the latter. However, the truly dispiriting element of the book is the way it shows how every step taken towards the present situation has been contested and could have been altered. My only question is whether the book’s conclusions/ implications don’t lead towards humanity moving into post-political era; which suits some of the current usual suspects down to the ground. Some might argue that such a thing does not exist, others might say we are already on the brink. 

the monkey wrench gang (edward abbey)

I have just finished reading Christophe Bonneuiland and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene, which examines the idea of the Anthropocene and the relationship between human action and the planet. In the final chapter the authors mention a few novels which have reflected upon this idea. They don’t mention the Monkey Wrench Gang, but they should. The novel relates the actions of four characters who set about to sabotage the mining and forestry industries, as well as blowing up some bridges, in Abbey’s beloved Deep South of the US. This is the land the author dedicated a valedictory account to in Desert Solitaire, tracing the course of the Colorado river in canyons which would soon be flooded by the arrival of a dam.

In contrast to Desert Solitaire, this is a novel and a more rambunctious read, as the four eco-warriors plot and carry out their missions and then seek to evade capture from the forces of law and order. At times the narrative runs the risk of feeling predictable, and lacks some of the more poetic elements of Desert Solitaire. Nevertheless, it’s a forceful stricture against human exploitation of the wild spaces and a significant addition to the canon of works which have sought to place in evidence the idea of another way of interacting with the planet.

the brutalist (w&d. brady corbet, w. mona fastvold)

 In a party of five, The Brutalist had an approval rating of 3.5. The way in which the issue of the holocaust was addressed with subtlety and discretion was praised. The reveal of Guy Pearce’s repressed sexuality was deemed by most a convincing device. The acting was in general admired. I found myself as the lone dissenter, feeling as though the film failed to live up to its ambitions, denoted in part by its running time, in part by its thematic. It felt as though there were too many breathy scenes in closed rooms, and lacked the bravura panache of Childhood of a Leader. But, as noted, I was in a strong minority, and it would appear that the director’s vaulting ambition has been well received. One aspect of being in London is that I find myself seeing far more of the buzzy films when they come out, rather than a few years later. The industry generates a sense of expectation, clearly required for marketing purposes, but perhaps unhelpful for a more considered take on the latest must-see. Either in terms of admiration or deception.

Nb. One of the things that strikes me, thinking about the film a few weeks later, is that the title would imply a reflection on the idea of brutalism as an architectural genre. Whereas what Lazlo seems to be designing is something closer to a neo-classical temple. In the brief scene where his future employer shows images of his earlier Bauhaus-y work, we get a glimpse of this ‘brutalist’ architecture, but this line of Lazlo’s work doesn’t feel as though it is explored in any great detail thereafter. Perhaps he will later gain acclaim as a brutalist, or perhaps the point is that with success he rejects this style. Whichever option he has taken is never interrogated, and the architect’s intellectual framework, so redolent in the title, seems to be swallowed up by the examination of his emotional framework.

a complete unknown (w&d. james mangold, w. jay cocks)

Wasn’t it at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, that someone shouted Judas? Hadn’t Dylan already gone electric before he came back to Newport in 1967?

One asks these questions because the act of watching a biopic is one of constant interrogation of the veracity of the purported facts being conveyed. One gets the impression that Mangold and his writer, Jay Cocks, have culled every available source of documented image to lend their film authenticity, but of course, no one truly knows what was said in heated conversations with Joan Baez or Suze Rotolo. And no-one really knows what that early Dylan was thinking or feeling. It’s a lifetime ago and the memories are shrouded in myth and rumour. As Pinter noted, memory is an unreliable companion. So what the biopic generates is more questions than answers, and the more it purports to approximate to the truth of what occurred, the more it probably errs.

All the same, Chalamet does a decent job of imitating Dylan. There was a quote the other day from the man himself about not understanding from whence his lyrics came, as though he was indeed Keats’ nightingale, the song leading the singer, a baffling blessing of genius. This bafflement never surfaces in the film. Dylan remains an enigmatic seer, in tune with his genius, plugged into a higher plane, one which inevitably leads to conflict on the human plane, above all when it comes to the issue of romance, the structural hook on which the film is vaguely hung. That coruscating strangeness is never broached, we never feel as though we begin to explore Dylan as poet, rather than cultural figure mired in the perils of fame and the public eye. This angle is the one the film pursues, an and it does so efficiently, without ever taking the viewer into the more baffling corners of the singer’s brain.

soundtrack to a coup d'état (w&d johan grimonprez, w. daan milius)

Soundtrack is a tour de force of editing. Editing to music is an art, and Grimonperez and his editor, Rik Chaubet, weave the jazz notes of the score into the found footage with aplomb. In truth, the jazz link in what is essentially a film about Patrice Lumumba and the Congo is slightly tenuous, anchored on the one visit Louis Armstrong paid to the country shortly before Lumumba’s murder. But this is also a film about connections: linking Lumumba to Castro to Malcolm X to Thelonious Monk, who briefly mentions how he went to check out the activist. What were the connections between the jazz greats and politics? The clips of Dizzy Gillespie’s satirical presidential bid are marvellous, but the deeper resonance of the musicians’ political consciousness is mandated mostly by the sound of their music. Clearly Nina Simone’s lyrics are charged with a political anger, but this becomes the backdrop, or soundtrack, to the tale of Lumumba. There is a verve and a jazz feel to the film, it’s a jazz edit, and this bowls the viewer along through the film’s two hours plus. It might also be noted that the only actually filmed footage for Soundtrack to a Coup, rather than found footage, would appear to be of Koli Jean Bofane, both reading from Congo Inc, and narrating a harrowing story from his childhood.