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. 

fathers and sons (turgenev)

Turgenev’s novel has always felt like a lacuna in my reading. In a way it is an Austen-esque novel with an Austen-esque title. A novel that examines the petit bourgeois of the nineteenth century, their dreams, and frustrations, both romantic and pragmatic. Of course there’s a seismic difference in the way in which the respective writer’s country’s histories played out. Arkady gets his pleasant romantic finale,  but the book is dominated by the would-be anarchist, his friend Bazarov. It’s Bazarov’s fate which foreshadows the history that was to come, half a century later. It’s feasible to think that Arkady and his young bride, Katya, could have lived to see the revolution. So whilst the novel, published mid nineteenth century, is on the one hand a sentimental critique of bourgeois Russia, it is also prophetic. Bazarov himself is a man out of time, deluded as to the scope of his ambition and power, and revealed to be a child when faced with the realities of love, in the shape of the queenly Madame Odintsova. Arkady, who makes peace with his father and his way of living, is the survivor, supposed inheritor of a rural Austen-esque life of diligence and tranquility. There are, of course, other echoes. Of Chekhov’s mercurial landowners, Bely’s radical anarchists and Dostoyevsky’s extremists. Turgenev’s novel seems to exist in a state of suspended animation, half-way between two worlds. To an extent the novel surprised me with its moderation, its gentle examination of the lives and loves of a younger generation which is akin to the lives and loves of any younger generation, full of missteps, embarrassment and endings that could go either way. There’s something paternalistic in the novelist’s approach, and like any parent, it exudes love for each and every one of the book’s children, its characters.

 

the odyssey (w&d nolan)

Random Thoughts on the Odyssey

Throwback to the seventies. Waiting for Burt Lancaster to pop up. 

Damon is playing a man who is in exile and far from home. However, he always comes across as someone, in every scene, who is completely at home. With himself, with his surroundings, with his colleagues. Of course, he is at home because he is on a film set, which is where Matt Damon, the person, rather than the character, feels at home. But this works against the character he is supposed to portray, and strips the film of much of its tension. 

Like Scott’s Napoleon, one can imagine a teenage film buff dreaming of making a big budget movie of one of his favourite texts. Don’t we all do that? Filmmakers or not? Dream of making a film of a text we love? Only Nolan has the chops to make it happen on a budgetary scale that can allow him to realise his vision. The trouble is that the film comes across like an adolescent vision: lots of noise, battles, pretty girls and clunky dialogue. 

Rhythm - the film casts the rapper Travis Scott as a variant on the blind Homer (who was an enigmatic invention too). He beats out his song to the rhythm of the hexameter. Nolan was always a master of rhythm, the way in which a film is constructed out of carefully edited beats and the manipulation of time. Momento, Dunkirk, Inception, all benefitted from this vision, capable of translating complex ideas into the language of cinema, with its impatient rhythms - you only have an hour and a half to three hours to fit it all in. But here, as for me, in Oppenheimer, he seems to have lost his touch. The rhythm is off. Odysseus’ return journey takes seven years or more, but events in Ithaca can’t keep pace with this and remain trapped in the present day. The timelines, which gelled in such a Borgesian manner in the other named films, don’t quite seem to click together. 

Finally - what is this film actually about? When Damon talks to Hathaway at the end, expressing a jaundiced regret for the genie of war he has let out of the bottle, we flash back to the dreadful pillage of Troy. And yet, over the course of this past decade, we see things far worse on our phones, day-in, day-out. When they used to sing of war, those who listened thankfully had a disconnect from its realities. Nolan is singing of war; but we no longer have the privilege of that disconnect. Modernity, the smartphone which the director famously shuns, means we carry the realities of war around in our pockets. The film’s recreation of war feels like a pale, sanitised imitation. As ever, the barbarity of another middle eastern conflict, Gaza, overshadows everything. Hollywood exists in such an escapist bubble that it really has no right to pontificate about civilisation and war. Or if it wants to, it should do it consciously and overtly. Metaphors feel cowardly. The message of this movie has all the punch of an instagram post. 

in diamond square (w. merce rodoreda, tr peter bush)

Rodoreda’s quietly expansive novel covers the years before the revolution in Spain, the war itself, and the aftermath. The narrator, Natalia, is a Barcelona native. Rodoreda recounts her life with simplicity and moments of lyricism. As such the novel gets under the skin of an ordinary woman, who has moments of dire struggle and moments of comfort and happiness. And lots of pigeons. Her first husband, Joe, decides he’s going to make money out of pigeons and converts their home into a pigeon sanctuary. Natalia puts up with this for as long as she can bear it. Eventually Joe is called to the Aragon front, and the pigeons leave. These are the kind of cotidian details that make up people’s lives and the author captures Natalia’s cares with precision. The novel also serves as a document registering a Barcelona that has been lost. A friend was there this month and talked of how it has been overrun by tourists. Barcelona is now a global city. Whether this is for the better or the worse of its citizens is open to debate. Rodoreda’s novel shows a level of poverty which was terrifying, and which conditions life choices Natalia feels compelled to make. At the same time, the novel reveals a communal life in the heart of the city which has doubtless been eroded by property speculation and hyper-tourism.

ajuste de pérdidas (w&d miguel calderon, w. guillermo fadanelli)

The Loss Adjuster would be the English title. It’s a bracing little mockumentary, made by the artist who features within his own film as himself. It follows Pedro, a Loss Adjuster, a disillusioned, charismatic bon viveur and art collector who, spoiler, we are informed at the end of the film is a real character being played by someone else. It’s hard to know who in the film is real and who is played by an actor, something that retrospectively colours the viewing. Pedro visits sites of tragedies to ascertain what was responsible. He buys art. He’s filmed smoking cigars and drinking whisky. He has a louche, hyper Mexican approach to life. The film took, for me, an even more surreal turn, when Pedro, on a boat going through some everglades, starts explaining how he’s met an actress who wants him to participate in a play by a female English writer, none over than Sarah K. Pedro, who is not an actor, accepts, because he fancies the actress. The play is Blasted, even if the title is never stated. There is a coherence to performing Sarah’s play, a meditation on violence and the effects of misogyny, in Mexico. There are scenes where Pedro argues with the director, who also happens to be the actress’ partner, about how to represent Ian, holed up in a Leeds hotel room. Pedro, searching for someone’s grave for reasons I couldn’t entirely understand, eulogises the work of the young English writer. It’s not entirely clear if he realises she is no longer alive. For obvious reasons this was the point in the film when it went from being quite entertaining to downright fascinating. Even if the angle the film is seeking to explore never seemed entirely clear, it is never less than intriguing. One suspects that the young English writer would have appreciated it.  

a second life (w&d laurent slama, w. thomas keumurian)

Slama’s Paris based film is mostly English language. It’s constructed around the charismatic presence of Agathe Rousselle, star of Titane, who looks as though she was born to play a moody bilingual traipsing round the streets of the capital in an indie movie. The aesthetic is breezy, handheld, capturing the energy of the city on the opening day of the Olympic Games. Elizabeth, a US citizen who is more French than American, works for a concierge firm, welcoming rich tourists. She’s also quasi-suicidal, for reasons we never get to understand, beyond a certain Camusian gallic leaning. One of her clients, pink-haired Elijah, played with a winsome charm by Alex Lawther, becomes fascinated by her, perhaps because she comes across as an alt-Parisian it-girl, and tags along with her as she gets increasingly stressed out by her job. Elizabeth (name derived from a Bergman character) is also deaf, and inevitably loses her expensive hearing aids. Slama directs with an energy which perhaps compensates for a somewhat whimsical narrative which never confronts the source(s) of Elzabeth’s disaffection with the world. At the same time, this feels like guerrilla filmmaking done with a certain aplomb, benefitting from great casting. The fact that it’s made mostly in English, with several sympathetic gringo characters, makes one wonder if it was conceived with one eye on the US festival circuit - it’s hard to empathise with North American tourists in Paris, even if they are hypnotists. (Is this supposed to be the anti Emily-in-Paris?)