thief (w&d michael mann, w. frank hohimer)

Mann’s early film is laden with flair and atmosphere and bad blood effects at the very end. The director’s eye for a frame is impeccable. His ability to capture mood matches it. This is accompanied by dialogue scenes with a free-flowing rhythm which bestows the sense of improvisation, of actors and director reaching for the moon together. The scene between Caan and Tuesday Weld when he convinces her to hook up with him is allowed to ramble and rumble. There are no short cuts and this helps to make characters who might otherwise have seemed generic into ones who are both plausible and tragic. As ever, this is a celebration of the ambitions of the small-timer (who wants to cash out just once). Movies about heroes are hung on the shoulders of stars, but stars are actors who are capable of turning the minor character into a heroic figure. Caan is brilliant in the role, a jaundiced head of hair who almost falls for the dream, before remembering that dreams aren’t for everyone. 

flesh (david szalay)

Flesh is a good title. It grabs you. You want it. Which is also how Szalay writes. It’s quasi Pinteresque. Succinct. But enigmatic. Riveting. Absorbing. Ambiguous. Flesh is a book that talks about the here and now. In a way. The little man and where the little man might fit. Into the here and now. Where does he fit? Is he little? These are the questions the book might be asking. István is that little man. But he is also, in his way, exceptional. He kills. He saves lives. He ascends. It’s a dizzying ascent and the novel dizzies. And then?

And then comes the novel’s get-out-of-jail card.

There’s something faintly Hemingway about the book, in an understated fashion. Heroic deeds and terse sentences. Flesh reveals something of our world. And it hides away from other things. But it does all of this with precision and efficiency. As though the writer is constructing a machine. Which might just be his protagonist.

i soliti ignoti (w&d mario monicelli, w. agenore incrocci, furio scarpelli, suso cecchi d’amico)

It’s intriguing to watch films that are perhaps little known outside their country. Obviously the robust Italian cinema industry was already delivering work by directors whose names have entered the pantheon. The prolific Mario Monicelli, however, is not on that list. The title could almost be translated as The Usual Suspects. This is a heist movie, with a comic bent, somewhere between Rififi and The Lavender Hill Mob. The heist is a macguffin which offers a cross-section of society’s lower depths. A failed boxer gathers together a team, including a youthful Mastroianni, to pull off a job. The director delights in showing everything that can go wrong, right up to the very end. In keeping with Bertolucci’s early films, it shows Roman society as one where people are reluctant to work, they want to find a short cut to some money, and the greatest punishment the ringleader has to face is being made to do an honest day’s labour, something which is seen by his gang as shameful. This is a celebration of street smarts, of the little man, the loser. The criminal is just someone who’s seeking to get by. It’s a narrative tradition that reaches back into European history, through Dickens to Hugo to Shakespeare to Quevedo and the laughter of the Cinemateca public reinforces its enduring appeal.

Nb IMDB lists Italo Calvino as uncredited screenwriter. The film is based on a short story of his. Although it might be said that it doesn’t feel overtly like anything written by Calvino.

the asphalt jungle (w&d john huston, w. ben maddow, w.r. burnett)

Whilst on one level a straightforward heist morality tale, there’s something more deeply human operating in Huston’s glorious noir. The venality of the human species is laid, bare, determined by the amorality of capitalism. In the pursuit of wealth, everyone’s a loser in the end. The film is adorned with a host of topnotch performances from its ensemble cast, including the ingenue Monroe. Characters are conscious of the mistakes they make, the deep water they find themselves adrift in, and this recognition makes them strangely sympathetic, as though they have to suffer the journey to destruction in order to remember who they really are. Huston manages the innately difficult task of introducing new characters at regular intervals, without in any way affecting the rhythm or the tension. The hunchback driver, Lou, only really comes into his own well past the midway point, but suddenly he’s a vivid character, tragic in his own way. The director and his screenwriters post the heist itself at the midpoint of the film, rather than the end of the second act or the dénouement. The heist loses nothing of its tension, but this placing also allows the film to focus on its true interest, the hubris that greed provokes before the fall.

 

land and freedom (d. loach, w. jim allen)

Loach’s film is resolutely British. For all that Loach positions himself as being on the margins of the film industry, his narrative models tend towards the conservative. A young man goes to Spain on a coming-of-age journey. He has to overcome obstacles. He gets rewards. He obeys the beats, before returning to Liverpool, where he will die fifty years later, in a framing device that offers no insight into how his Spanish experiences changed him or those he loved. Like Orwell, whose book is clearly an influence, much of the narrative and tragic dimension of the film is taken up by the conflict between the anarchists and the communists on the republican side. Whilst this was clearly of note, the enemy in the Spanish Civil War really wasn’t Stalin, no matter whether his actions caused more harm than good. Without denying this element of the history, it seems a very British perspective to focus on the rifts within the movement. The film could undoubtably be read as an allegory for the travails of the Labour Party, which seems slightly beside the point. There is one famous lengthy scene of a discussion in a village about how to proceed, whether to collectivise the village agriculture or not. Whilst this scene is intriguing and perhaps inspired by Watkins, what it really does is highlight how the film, with its more sentimental approach to the narrative, dances around the edges of the theoretical, political issues, including the scene as a kind of sub-clause, an extended footnote. Again, this feels like the take of a deeply British sensibility, where serious things need to be kept at arm’s length. Loach handles the action sequences with surprising agility. The acting is committed, and it’s notable that at least two of the cast went on to have impressive careers behind the camera. It’s a solid, worthy piece of filmmaking that nevertheless never really threatens to catch fire and burn the house down.

 

el espíritu de la colmena (w&d víctor erice, w. ángel fernández, santos de blázquez)

Erice’s film lurks at the back of the room when people who know about film talk about film. It possesses a mystique, one of those films which has to be seen,  but which not that many have actually watched. It is one of several cult films where the protagonists are children (Night of the Hunter, Come and See, Ivan’s Childhood, Kes etc). I had managed to spend fifty years or so not watching it, but last night it finally caught up with me. It’s a woozy, mesmerising journey through childhood in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. 1940, the Republicans have lost, a generation is about to go into political lockdown. Ana and Isabel are sisters living in a rural village with their parents, who have survived the war. They are girls who have a vague awareness of the wider world, something they pick up through osmosis, perhaps. Which is a plausible way of communicating how we are all affected by those things which happen beyond the horizon, even though we are not directly conscious of this, or even fully aware of what those things beyond the horizon actually are. Erice threads tropes - Frankenstein, shaving, the taste of an apple. Was it just me who saw in the dead republican an echo of Guevara laid out on a table in La Higuera? Nothing much happens and at the same time all sorts of things are happening. The director plays with time, allowing the film to reveal or remember how childhood is a time of endless time, of games that always hide their true meaning, a time of fierce competition, quiet fears, small joys.

nb - in English this film is called The Spirit of the Beehive

hyperpolitics (anton jäger)

Jäger’s lauded book is a plausible interpretation of the way in which political engagement has morphed over the course of the past century and more. It takes in the rise and fall of the unions, the rise (and fall?) of fascism, and the rise of 21st century micro movements, such as Brexit or Black Lives Matter, movements which appear in a kind of suspended animation, at a remove from established political discourse, yet provoking a commitment which the day-to-day of political engagement struggles to emulate. It’s perhaps his concluding pages which are the most disheartening. Removed from any kind of social cohesion, capitalism’s children are increasingly atomised, cut off from even the possibility of contemplating fixity or a  long-term vision. Jäger cites Houellebecq, Baudrillard and Ernaux in his analysis of a society fraying at the seams, desperate for some kind of anchor, reduced to following the platitudes of witch doctors, spin doctors or snake-oil salesmen.  

contos do esquecimento (w&d dulce fernandes)

Fernandes’ documentary could be the flip side of Pinho’s O Risa e a Faca. Her film documents the discovery of a mass grave in a Portuguese town called Lagos, near Lisbon. The mass grave had been concealed by a vast rubbish dump. When the rubbish dump was cleared in order to build a car park, the bones of 158 skeletons from the fifteenth century were found. These were some of the earliest victims of the slave trade which would mushroom with the development of the Americas. In the case of Portugal this meant specifically the Angola/Congo - Brazil passage. Fernandes approaches this discovery with a quiet fury. The film is composed of a series of fixed camera or drone shots of landscapes which are pertinent to the discovery of the bones. The film as such is both a testament and a memorial to the victims, something which the voiceover comments is barely offered by the developers, who place a crazy golf course on top of the parking and a small, underwritten plaque to commemorate the victims. Fernandes’ film is a retort to this lack of respect: it honours the dead, who were never honoured in life, with its sober, measured rendering of their tragic fate, questioning as it does the basis on which the wealth of Europe was founded.

mean streets (w&d scorsese, w. mardik martin)

New York. Petty gangsters. Grime and flair. The first world before the first world was made reputable. De Niro like a violent scarecrow. Keitel like a man who would never quite fulfil his destiny. Scorsese as the enigmatic assassin, something out of another movie altogether, one by Hal Hartley or Soderbergh.

I saw Taxi Driver in this same cinema, and in truth there can’t be many better cinemas to watch early Scorsese than Cine Universitario, a damp, empty sala, which sings of the poverty and the glory of cinema, a medium that as well as making the most of technology, also defies it. You can have your iMax and your 4-D effects, but cinema will always be, at heart, flickering images thrown onto a sheet on a wall, the world’s greatest ever conjuring trick. 

the invite (d. olivia wilde, w. cesc gay, radisha jones, will mccormack)

The Invite, a film that appears to occur in real time based around a dinner party,  comes from a pedigree that would include the plays of Yasmin Reza, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, even My Dinner with Andre. There’s a notable theatrical bent to this sub-genre, which requires a polished script and actors who are capable of carrying it off. In all of this The Invitation hits the mark. However, this is also a marriage therapy film, more in line with something from Bergman. Unhappy couple have to confront marital demons and either sink or swim. There might be something smug about Wilde’s comedic interrogation of marriage, but on the other hand, just because the film is coddled in a kind of North American cocoon (money no problem, the outside world kept happily at bay) doesn’t mean it isn’t done with a certain flair and also - every society has the right to poke fun at itself and in the same week I watched a remarkably po-faced Hollywood film, at least The Invitation couldn’t be called that.