la habitación de al lado (w&d almodóvar, w. sigrid nunez)

Will Almodovar’s latest break the tradition of late twentieth century auteur cineastes going to the US and making a horlicks of it? Thinking Wong Kar Wai, Haneke, even Herzog. Well, not really. The Room Next Door, to give it its English title, is a curious construction. It sets out its stall early on that it’s about death, with some heavy handed dialogue (lost in translation?) as Tilda Swinton’s sepulchral Martha, clearly named for Martha Gellhorn, tells her long lost friend Ingrid that she has terminal cancer. Thereafter the film becomes a meditation of sorts on what makes for a good death. Martha coerces Ingrid into helping her go through this process, which is curiously bloodless. The most passion in the film comes from their shared ex-lover, played by John Turturro with a bullish charm, as he goes off on one about climate change and neo-liberalism. Worthy enough subjects, to be sure, but they feel shoe-horned into the film. And it’s a film of shoe-horns. There’s a gratuitous burning house scene, there’s a trademark flashback scene, which in another Almodóvar film might have been revelatory, but in this one just feels tacked on, because there was some spare budget?, there’s even a fleeting scene set in Iraq, where Martha the war photographer appears, learns that people like to fuck in wartime, then is banished to become sepulchral Martha once again. (The second film this year about a war photographer named after another famous war photographer.) There’s even a quickfire bowling scene, which might be another homage to Turturro’s role in Liebowski.

There’s the kernel of something intriguing about a late stage director musing on what will come his way shortly, and the homage to Joyce and Houston feels poetically on point, but at the same time the film feels uneven, unsure of itself. New York looks pretty, but the line: ‘Pink snow, at least something good has come out of climate change’, which Martha offers early on feels indicative of a film which isn’t entirely sure of its footing. Fortunately Turturro’s later monologue puts us straight, as he makes it clear that climate change is definitely not a good thing.

the war game (w&d peter watkins)

Playing as part of a radical season in Cinemateca, The War Game is a curious blend of horror and lost Englishness. A mock documentary set in Kent, describing the impact of a nuclear strike on Britain, the film is famous for having been banned by the BBC after being initially commissioned by them. Watkins manages the horror superbly. The film escalates in its brutality, starting with a kind of normality and then moving on to full blown nuclear firestorm, inspired, as made clear by the commentary, by Hiroshima, Nagasaki, but also Dresden and Hamburg. You can readily understand why the BBC got cold feet about screening it, as the images of a devastated Kent and its citizens are genuinely shocking. The horrors of war had rarely been so surgically captured.

At the same time, as an Englishman, there is something nostalgic about viewing a lost Britain, with its clipped accents and eccentric dress sense, and a certain reticence which seems to have been foregone with the coming of Britpop, Brexit and post war prosperity. At one point the documentary mentions ration cards, reminding us that the film was made at a time when every adult would remember what a ration card implied, something subsequent generations would never have to contemplate, or even understand. There is also something in the tone of Watkins’ film, a blend of the extreme with a tight-lipped understatement, which speaks to the qualities which might once have been perceived to represent Britishness, or at least a version of Britishness which this writer might identify with. 

orbital (samantha harvey)

Orbital is a short, Calvino-esque novel set in space. Six astronauts on a space station pass their day passing days, spinning around and around the globe, zooming through timelines and over continents. The novel is more of a meditation than a story. A meditation on what it must be like to possess this perspective, to live weightless, to be pioneers for a new version of humanity. There are several bravura passages, including one which shows humanity’s seconds within the twenty four hour clock of the universe’s existence. The six characters are all given their due, with memories and dreams folded into the view they share of the planet earth. The vast immensity of space, with its strange silences, is a suitable backdrop for a book which navigates a path between sly tedium and great beauty. 

the man with the golden arm (d. otto preminger, w. walter newman, lewis meltzer, nelson algren)

In the olden days you went to Cinemateca half expecting that the projector might break down and the film would struggle to get to the end. Those days have gone, just like the old salas have gone, but this screening was a throwback. Half way through, the film gave up the ghost, and even though valiant efforts were made to resuscitate it, I ended up watching the final hour in a much better print on YouTube.

Given all this, it’s worth noting that the screening was part of a season of alternative films that managed to sneak under the radar. Preminger’s Chicago, full of sleaze balls, femmes fatales, and flop houses, not to mention the junk, is beautifully realised. It feels like something out of Gorky, the lower depths, a place where the crushing  inevitability of poverty is bound to get you in the end. In the midst of this, Sinatra gives a bravura performance, part junkie, part matinee idol. The operatic notes of the direction clearly play to his hand, but we perceive another man in his performance to the smooth entertainer he became. The desperation of his character, Frankie Machine, is completely credible, which perhaps hints at another life Sinatra might have lived had the gods not smiled on him. 

cerrar los ojos (w&d víctor erice; w. michel gaztambide)

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, watched Erice’s classic film, The Spirt of the Beehive. Or at least, I don’t think I have. Perhaps one day I will watch it and go - oh yes, I remember seeing this in Winchester or York or London or Adelaide. And that would be an entirely appropriate method of remembering, according to this, Erice’s third film. Close your Eyes deals with the issues of memory and ageing, in a luminous, humane fashion. As the third near three hour film I have seen in a row at Cinemateca, it is a wonderful correlative to the supposed need to cram a film with beats and desperate rhythms. Film is storytelling as much as it is percussive, and Erice’s meditative mystery tale is an exemplar of this.

Its simplicity is a large part of its effectiveness. A TV program about strange disappearances contacts Miguel, a director who has long since quit the business. The TV show is making an episode about Julio, the protagonist of the director’s last, abortive movie, who went missing overnight. Due to the actor’s disappearance, the film was never finished, and Miguel’s career fizzled out. Not that he is bitter: he has found a kind of peace living in a small coastal community, with his dog and his translations and spells as a fisherman. But the call to participate in the program will lead to a rupture in this quiet reclusive life, as he goes in search of not so much a meaning for his lost art, as a function. At the heart of the film, perhaps, is the idea that film is both eternal and functional, on a very straightforward basis. Looking at a screen is more than just a way of passing time: it can also change the way your mind works, the way you think, the way you see the world and what is in front of your eyes.

There is something of Prospero about Miguel, albeit a calm Prospero, reconciled to his fate. HIs art will reconfigure those things which have gone awry in the past. Cerrar los Ojos is a valedictory work of art, reminding this viewer of the way in which film is capable of unfolding layers of story and meaning without resorting to histrionics. 

white sands (geoff dyer)

Dyer is a curious writer, whose texts incorporate some of the finer British qualities, as well as smelling of some of the less desirable elements of late colonial Britain. A conspicuous and unashamed intellectual, he is happy not just to write about visiting Adorno’s LA house, but also to quote the philosopher, even interrogate the meaning of what Adorno wrote. When Dyer gets passionate, as when he writes about jazz, or land art, his embrace of the possibilities of these worlds offer a refreshing deviation from so much Anglo-Saxon thinking and writing. On the other hand, that slightly nauseating arrogance that permeated late twentieth century British thought sometimes rears its ugly head. Again, Dyer indulges this in an unashamed fashion, wearing it on his sleeve, as in the tale where he and his wife manage to rid themselves of a potentially dangerous black ex-con on a Nevada highway. There is a sense of self-mockery at work, but it is always clothed in a blanket of privilege.

White Sands is ostensibly a travel book taking in visits to Tahiti, China and the USA. (The majority of the essays occur in the US). Presumably derived in the main from commissioned pieces, Dyer is unafraid to be contrary, dedicating an entire article about visiting The Forbidden City in Beijing to his fantasies of bedding a woman he is smitten by. This sideways take on the travelogue starts to feel laboured after a while. When he takes his mission seriously, as when he writes about three pieces of site-specific art, it as though his brain suddenly flips into fifth gear, and the finely chiseled intellect of his prose consistently comes up with intriguing and unexpected observations - about the way the artists are using space, or even the way that space uses art. Or vice versa.

Perhaps Dyer just needs to feel like he’s doing more than a hack job for money to get really excited. This book would make a great companion piece to Baudrillard’s America. 

the substance (w&d coralie fargeat)

It seemed strangely appropriate that we watched Fargeat’s Grand Guignol film on the same day I saw that Dennis Quaid, the film’s evil driving force representing the male gaze at its most lascivious and destructive, had come out in support of Trump, one of the very few Hollywood stars to do so. One suspects that Fargeat would be secretly pleased with this news, she might even have engineered it. The battle lines even more clearly drawn within the great metaphysical struggle over the beauty myth.

At the same time, it feels as though there’s something dangerously Trumpian in the film’s excesses. Trumpian in so far as the gesture and the controversy become more relevant than anything that is actually being said. Fargeat pushes the visual excesses of the story as far as she can go. This is set up from the start, with an edit style that seems derived from advertising, all fast cuts and pumped up musical beats. The characters are deliberately two dimensional. Subtlety is not going to be part of this discourse. It’s in-your-face, a punk assault on the senses. The object is firstly to titilate and then to revolt, two sides of the sensory coin.

The result is somewhere between shock and awe and tedium, two sides of the war coin, perhaps. The issue one might have with the film is that the war is woman versus woman, with woman losing twice over. It might be that everyone else also loses, in the end, but Demi Moore’s Elizabeth and Margaret Qualley’s Sue seem to get the rough end of the stick. Which again, might be the point: that no matter what, the fetishisation of women’s bodies by this society always means that women get the rough end of the stick.

I spent much of the film wondering what Mariana Enriquez would make of it. One suspects she would delight in its transgressive intentions, whilst perhaps hoping for something else to emerge from the melange. There’s no shortage of wearing of influences on sleeves. From Picture of Dorian Grey, (inverted), to Jekyll and Hyde, to Frankenstein. With direct references to The Fly and The Elephant Man. The combination of all these elements perhaps contributes to a sense that for all its outrageousness, this feels like a conservative piece of filmmaking, with few narrative surprises.

I also then found myself wondering what Trump would make of it. Suspecting he would publicly denounce it, whilst privately loving it, for all the wrong reasons. 

la bête (w&d bertrand bonello, w.guillaume bréaud, benjamin charbit)

La Bête has a Cocteau-esque title and is almost as bewildering a film as Le Sang d’un Poète. Set across three timelines, it features a death-trap doll factory, a psychotic incel, Schoenberg, and AI. The movie occurs in the 2014, 2044 and 1904-ish. The fundamental axis of the story is simple: Gabrielle seeks out Louis, her true amour, across time and beyond death. He is a weirdo three times over. Firstly as her would-be lover who pursues her as a married woman in the nineteen hundreds, secondly as the LA incel and lastly as an elusive would-be companion in the near future. Léa Seydoux and George MacKay wrestle with the contrivances of the plot across two and a half hours. The tonal filmmaking feels erratic, at times throbbing with suspense, at others bogged down in cryptic metaphysical dialogue. Gabrielle feels threatened by an opaque disaster, or beast, which might be her lover or might be climate change. There are earthquakes and floods and vague talk of an unspecified disaster which lead to a world where emotions need to be cauterised. The nods to Lynch are overt. Does it measure up? Perhaps, perhaps not. It’s one of those films that take you on a perplexing ride from tedium to hyper-alertness. The dénouement sequence in LA towards the end of the film is brilliantly constructed and edited. But then this proves not to be the dénouement of the film, and the viewer has to come back down to earth, or rather the future, with Gabrielle having still more hoops to go through. It has the makings of a cult film, the kind of experience that some will revisit time after time, and wait for midnight screenings to accompany them through the long night, parroting some of the more risible dialogue, sitting on the edge of the seats for the moments of tension and screaming along with Seydoux at the anti-climactic finale. 

le sang d’un poète (w&d jean cocteau)

Cocteau’s celebrated film, scored on this occasion by Federico Deutsch y Verónica Ramos, is composed of four sequences. A poet in his garret, with hints of revolutionary France. The same poet passing through a void into a gravity free corridor, where he spies on different events occurring in a series of rooms. The third sequence features a group of schoolboys, and then finally the set where the schoolboys’ playing area is transformed into a theatre where aristocrats gaze down from the balcony on the poet and Lee Miller as they pose. The film is elliptical, cryptic, potentially occult. It’s also full of moments which other films have stolen, knowingly or unconsciously. There were prefigurations of Nolan, in the gravity free corridor and Glazer as the poet sank into the void. Cocteau, however, goes beyond any kind of coherent storytelling, as he pushes his imagination to its limits. Rather than a story, the film feels like a collection of stories, or strands featuring blood, revolution, homoeroticism, cruelty, and destiny. Among other elements which I am sure I missed. 

clandestina (w&d maria mire)

Mire’s experimental film juxtaposes the words of Margarida Tengarrinha, an artist who participated for decades in Portugal’s anti-fascist movement, with contemporary images which riff off those words. Tengarrinha used her talents to help forge documents for fleeing revolutionaries to cross the border into Spain during the fifties and sixties, eventually moving to Russia. (An interesting parallel with another Portuguese film seen this year, Astrakan 79.) Mire constructs vivid contemporary images to accompany the words, as a young woman silently goes through the same processes as Tengarrinha, working with her partner at a computer, tending to their child, setting up a false office full of pot plants. The modernity is designed, one suspects, to give a fresh perspective on the radical activities and dangers of the anti-fascist movement of another generation. However, there’s something a little winsome about all this, and the element of danger never feels overly present. The fact that the characters frequently use carnival type masks is engaging, but doesn’t help to take us deeper into the perilous, nightmarish world that Tengarrinha inhabited. It’s notable that the director is also listed as Art Director in the credits, and there’s a sense of playfulness at work in the project which isn’t entirely in keeping with the intensity of the source material.