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

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

la batalla de chile, segunda parte: el golpe de estado (w&d. patricio guzmán, w. pedro chaskel, jose bartolome)

The scary thing about watching Guzmán’s fabled documentary (albeit only part 2) is that it feels closer than ever. A brilliant exercise in both compiling material and editing it, The Battle of Chile acts as account of events and a warning. This could happen in your back yard. With the efficiency of a thriller, the film traces the lead up to September 11th, 1973, the first 911, when the military staged a coup against Allende’s government. We know what’s coming, and surely Allende knows it too, but history is remorseless and irreversible. The film is an act of courage, in the filming of it, in the conception of it and in the execution. As such it contains a moral authority which cinema can rarely aspire to. Who knows how much of that courage will be needed as the world lurches in the direction of the golpistas. 

fort apache (d. ford, w. frank s. nugent, james warner bellah)

Ford’s sweeping cavalry western is the kind of stuff we in the Anglosphere were raised on. The cavalry is coming. The injuns speaking ‘mexican’. John Fucking Wayne. Watching it one can trace a line in the thinking of those who believe they have a right to annex other people’s territory by any means possible; to trick, cheat and attack those ‘others’ who help to define the supposed values that the aggressor represents.

And yet, whilst being the kind of film that helped to consolidate those opinions, merely by presenting the matrix, Fort Apache is in fact a complex work of art, conscious of the moral ambiguity of the material. Hell, even Wayne feels betrayed by the American hero. In choosing to tell this story, Ford analyses the cruelty and duplicity involved in the conquest of the West. Fonda’s Captain Thursday is revealed in the end to be a foolish popinjay whose arrogance leads his troops to destruction. In one great scene between Wayne and Fonda, the tension between the two reaches boiling point. The casting of Wayne as Fonda’s rival is inspired: the true American is not the one who seeks a genocidal confrontation, it’s the one who is prepared to risk his life to achieve a peaceable settlement with the Apache.

One wonders if the sweeping cinematography and the comedic Irish characters work to obscure this message. The film is layered with enough sub-plots and B-stories to make the most exacting script doctor happy. The images are still breathtaking, all these years later. In so many ways it feels like an emblematic US film. But contained within the apple is the worm of rapaciousness. In a way Fort Apache might have been the place where Doctor Strangelove was born. 

young mr. lincoln (d. john ford, w. lamar trotti, rosemary benét)

Films gain relevance through context. For decades, Ford’s Young Lincoln might have seemed outdated, irrelevant, a throwback to another North American era, one that had little to do with the present. However, watching it at this point in history, its lessons about what might truly represent US values is a sharp corrective. The quintessential American hero, Lincoln is homespun and folksy. He knows how to speak to the common people, successfully thwarting a lynching through the power of his oratory alone. He also has a clear idea that there is a difference between right and wrong. When two brothers are accused of murdering a local, Lincoln offers to defend them, convinced they are innocent in large part by his relationship with their mother, who reminds him of his own mother. Obviously, in this America, he is right, and he gets them off. The last third of the film is given over to events in the courtroom. The incohate values of the mob are thwarted and order is restored. It’s the beginning of the leader’s rise to greatness.

There’s something hokey about the film, in spite of Henry Fonda’s subtle performance, a performance which constructs Lincoln as an outsider, seeking to find his place in society. After seeing his son getting lost in the maze of his mind in The Trip, this is a complete counterpoint, with Henry Fonda’s Lincoln sure of his own judgement, confident in the innate rightness of his actions. There appears to be no place for Ford and Fonda’s Lincoln in today’s United States. 

the trip (d. roger corman, w. jack nicholson)

The Trip is both a cultural emblem and a work of art. As a cultural emblem, it’s astonishing. Perhaps the high water mark of a liberated, prelapsarian LA, before Manson, before Altamont, before the dream died. Because the film, for all its druggy flightiness, is anchored in a Southern California actuality. The clubs and the streets, as well as the modernist mansions and the beaches. This is a world where drug taking is not so much transgressive as integrated into the development of the soul, the world of psychic experimentation, á la Aldous Huxley. Drug-taking isn’t hedonistic, it verges on a shamanic, religious experience. This appears to be what Corman is seeking to capture, and whilst it is easy to ridicule this intent, there is perhaps something remarkable about it, a road which LA and the rest of the world turned off of, fearful of the dark edges and the anarchy. (How curious that at the end of the Pennbaker Dylan doc, he is referred to, disrespectfully, as “an anarchist”.)

Form and content overlap, the medium is the message. In order to convey his protagonist’s journey, Corman has to employ visual effects which, in a technological medium, are bound to date. The film feels like a half-way house between Cocteau and Gaspar Noe. The capturing of dream, or nightmare, has always been one of the most elusive quests of art. The Trip includes visual motifs which are dreamlike, something that maps onto a LSD trip. Whilst at times it seems to drift, when the film builds towards the more nightmarish nighttime sequence in the bars and streets of downtown LA, it gathers pace and narrative tension. That it holds together at all is minor miracle, and credit to the screenwriter, none other than then unknown actor, Jack Nicholson. It makes one wonder what kind of material he might have continued to produce as screenwriter and/or director. Much of his rare talent is distilled in the acting roles he would take on over then course of the following fifteen years. But in another, less evidently commercial context, he might have had even more to offer. 

the transmigration of bodies (w. yuri herrera, tr. lisa dillman)

Herrera’s novela was originally published in 2013, something that is surprising given that it seems to belong to that nascent genre, the covid novel. It’s a short, elliptical tale, featuring characters with symbolic names (The Unruly, Romeo, The Redeemer, who is the narrator).The Redeemer is a form of fixer stroke PI, who is charged with recovering the bodies of the son and daughter of two rival families who had fallen in love, each dying in strange circumstances. One of the most notable elements of the book is the way it is set within a world where some kind of contagion is rife and people are supposed to use facemasks. It reads now like a quasi biblical parable from the parallel world we recently inhabited. Perhaps it is also kin of Escalante’s second film, the sci-fi thriller La Región Salvage. Mexico being a country which exists on a parallel hyper-symbolic plane, one which the rest of the world shared for a few brief years. 

don’t look back (d. d a pennebaker)

Pennebaker’s film is catnip for this reviewer. Dylan in London in ’65. That point on the crest of a rising wave when the world was turning, the times were changing, and the impish poet was at the epicentre of it all. With the laconic suaveness of a Swami. Bubbling with life and wit and energy. Whilst Great Britain tried to get its head about what it all meant. Young men in ties, women in starchy dresses, believing that this will be what normality will always look like.

At the same time as charting the locus of a global shift, Pennebaker’s doc is also great on the rigours of touring, The only time Dylan seems to move out of his gnostic mode is when he is forced to become mother hen, confronting a drunken Donovan and trying to get to the bottom of who threw a glass in the street. When he sings It’s All Over Baby Blue to a packed hotel room later that same night, there’s a beatific smile on his face. 

emilia perez (w&d audiard, w. thomas bidegain, léa mysius, nicolas livecchi)

Audiard’s film has become a bizarre phenomenon. Feted by awards, condemned by word of mouth. At once a blow for non-gringo, anti-imperialist impulses, and a betrayal of Mexico, trans people and the countless victims of Mexico’s dirty war. A radical reinterpretation of how to tell a political story which is mundane and over-simplistic.

There are many elements of the film which are either laughable or questionable. Audiard laces his story with songs, some of which feel cloying and witlessly sentimental. The whole premise of a reformed narco financing a charity to locate the dead victims of the narco wars feels wrong, before we even get to the issue of the arbitrary sex change. The closing shoot-out is generic and unimaginative. Audiard apparently didn’t do much if any filming in Mexico itself and there is an undeniable whiff of the interloper rolling into town and appropriating other people’s tragedies for his own benefit.

And yet, having said all of this, in comparison to a film like Villeneuve’s Sicario, it does feel as though the director is seeking to do more than just cash in on a suitably cinematographic conflict as a backdrop for his film. It’s a far cry from Escalante’s Heli, but Audiard at times feels as though he is seeking a more poetic or lyrical discourse on the issues of power and violence. Regular narrative structures struggle to do any kind of justice to this topic and run the risk, as was the case of Sicario, of resorting to caricature. Audiard seems to have succeeded in offending, whilst intending to avoid these caricatures. Something he formerly succeeded in doing in The Beat that my Heart Skipped, for example.

Working in the business, one often comes across people suggesting ideas that at first glance seem preposterous, but, within the strange economy of cinema aesthetics, seem to work (Carax, Lynch, to name just two.) Going out on a limb sometimes pays off. One can imagine Audiard positing ‘Sex Change Narco,  the musical’, and the execs looking at him blankly. Thinking either he’s a genius or an idiot. When maybe the truth is a bit of both. It’s a position that has both paid off spectacularly and backfired, spectacularly. 

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.