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?)

the reverse centaur's guide to life after AI: how to think about artificial intelligence before it's too late (cory doctorow)

Doctorow’s text is a bracing takedown of many of the AI myths, which, he suggests, are promoted in order to increase the share value of the tech firms that are driving the supposed AI revolution. These myths include the idea that AI can drastically reduce the need for a human workforce, as well as the fear that the machines will end up taking over the world. This is all, suggests the writer, a form of froth designed to pump up the value of the tech firms, attracting more and more investment, thereby creating a bubble which will, he contends, have to burst sooner or later. Doctorow is not anti-AI, he has many suggestions as to how it can be a beneficial tool (which is summed up by the perhaps clunky reverse Centaur metaphor), but he is anti the way the quest for AI is manipulating political and economic practice.

 

the deer hunter (w&d michael cimino, w. deric washburn, louis garfinkle)

When I got home I thought it was incumbent to look up the discourse on ‘Deer Hunter Racist’. There was not as much as I might have anticipated. Cimino’s film occupies a curious space. Known as a Vietnam war movie, the Vietnam sections of the film actually feel like background for the director’s real interest, which is is the dissolution of the immigrant American dream. It might be that twas ever thus, but this is effectively a buddy movie, about three men from a close-knit community who stray into a nightmare. A nightmare which just happens to have been caused by the demented actions of their government. Cimino’s film is always at its purest when the action occurs in the Pennsylvania mining town that Mike, Nick and Steve come from. First names as common as any in the Anglo-Saxon world, but their surnames are of Russian descent, a telling choice, given that it’s the commie Russians that the USA was supposedly trying to defeat in South East Asia. A Russian Orthodox Church looms over the small town, looking like something out of the Donbas, and it’s here that the citizens are married and buried. The first hour of the film is locked into the creation of this world and the personal relationships that lurk there. This could be American Graffiti, or The Last Picture Show.

Vietnam is the fly in the ointment. It’s not an unreasonable position to criticise the film for not reflecting the Vietnamese experience, or indeed for portraying the Vietnamese characters as bloodthirsty gamblers, hooked on Russian Roulette, an idea which was apparently the invention of Cimino and his screenwriters. But it would also be to miss the point. The Russian Roulette is a device, which ties in with the band of brothers’ love of hunting, guns and violence, a violence which does a 180 degree turn, turning the gun back on themselves. The deer aren’t going to provoke that, but the Vietnam War will.

Through all this De Niro gives a magisterial performance. Vaguely normal, vaguely handsome, vaguely ugly with his sailor’s beard, he has the air of a leader and a survivor, a man who is of the world he inhabits and yet is not. It’s intriguing that in the credits, the last image is of De Niro’s Mike falling over. For all his capacity to control and lead, he is unable to rescue his friend from the trap that has been laid.

So Deer Hunter is a film which opens itself to perhaps deserved criticism, whilst at the same time providing a coruscating vision of American Imperialism. It has been over thirty years since I last saw the film. Its impact was telling then and its power has not diminished. It’s also instructive to think that the chances of a similar film being made about more recent US adventures is minimal. As though the military PR men sat down and watched the ’Nam movies, and then told Hollywood: no more next time round. The scenes of the US Saigon embassy is in its final days could be mapped on to events in Kabul. A critique of a government willing to cripple and kill its own in pursuit of its imperialist ambitions is no longer the kind of thing the studios are willing to finance. Instead we get the false war wish fulfilment of Tarantino or the vapid escapism of the Marvel franchise. (Or “ancient Greece”)

false war (carlos álvarez, tr natasha wimmer)

Álvarez’s exile novel is a bricolage. There are scenes from Cuba itself, but also Miami, Mexico City and Berlin. The novel adopts the fractured narrative so beloved of postmodernism (or wherever it is we have got to), skipping not just from country to country but also across timelines. The unifying thread is a deadpan discomfort, shared by many of these characters, from the first person narrator to the female psychologist. There are various strands whose juxtaposition makes for an abrasive read: no sooner does the reader begin to connect with one sequence than they are thrown into another. It’s reminiscent of Enrigue’s Hypothermia  or Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd, other writers who appear to embrace a mosaic narrative, as they seek to portray the complexity of the modern day frontlines between first world and third.  

o riso e a faca (I only rest in the storm) (w&d pedro pinho, w. miguel seabra lopes, luisa homem)

France 2 - Morocco - 0. No extra time. Which gives me time to get to Cinemateca for the 7.10 screening of Pinho’s film. About which I knew nothing, except that it was set in Africa and was on the long side.

Africa is Guinea Bissau, the Portuguese speaking West African nation. Long is 3 hours 37 minutes. Which is getting up to Angelopoulos levels of long. It starts with a scene that could be out of Antonioni’s Passenger, as Sergio, a white Portuguese man, breaks down on a wind-blown Saharan highway. He is on his way to Bissau, where he is due to deliver a report on the construction of a road which, he is told by a fetching white NGO worker, will threaten the habitat of the last remaining hippopotamuses in the region. His predecessor, in a Bolaño-esque move, has vanished. We never get to see the hippos, but we do get to see just about everything else. There’s a reason this film is so long. It’s because it seeks to faithfully capture every aspect of Sergio’s trip. From a social and anthropological perspective, but also a personal level, as Sergio goes on a voyage of spiritual and sexual discovery.

Of course, there is an angle that says this is excessive. The film should have condensed the material, made a more coherent narrative, reduced the elements. Who wants to sit and watch a film that’s three and a half hours long set in country most viewers outside of West Africa will never have visited. On the other hand, how do you make a film about neo-colonialism and its offset, neo-liberalism? What happens when you simplify the thesis that underpins the film? There are at least three scenes which cut to the heart of the matter. One in a club, when the ‘progressive’ Horacio gives Sergio a lecture on the advantages of development, another with Daria, the woman he fancies who can’t believe he turned down Horacio’s bribe, and a third when Sergio finds himself with a sex worker in the desert, paid for by a Portuguese worker who’s trying to make up for losing his temper with him. This last scene is raw, naked and wilfully on the nose. The sex worker, who speaks perfect English, better than Sergio, berates him for trying to understand and empathise with something that goes beyond his understanding or his capacity for empathy. This is the North-South divide laid bare. The progressive north is like the rich man in the parable. No matter how well-intentioned, its citizens can never truly grapple with the realities of being born in the ‘under-developed’ world.

These scenes, among others, can only play out within the context of Sergio’s journey and the wider world he and we get to know. On their own they would be top-heavy, expositional. But the scale of Pinho’s ambition allows him to incorporate them, pebbles on the river’s floor. This expansive approach permits the film to access so many elements of Guinean society, from the clubs of Bissau to the riverine villages in the mangroves, to the Koltesian outposts in the desert. And this is the short version - there’s a five hour director’s cut!

I walked back from Cinematica in my second world city. O Risa e a Faca is, without doubt, one of the most challenging, astonishing pieces of contemporary cinema I have seen. I realise, in the writing of this, that my perspective is that of the white male European. Perhaps the black, female, non-european would have another take. (There’s a great moment when the black Brazilian drag queen is told s/he’s not black and reacts with annoyance, provoking the question, what exactly does it mean to say someone is ‘black’ or ‘white’ (The Nigerians told me I had black blood in me somewhere, I wasn’t a ghost)). But - parenthesis over - this is a remarkable film which explores the boundaries of our world, and how we can even attempt to speak about those boundaries in a medium with costs that are, for the vast majority of countries, prohibitive.

[Final thoughts - this film seems to sit alongside Martin’s Great Yarmouth and the work of Pedro Costa, (there may be others) suggesting a boldness to Portuguese filmmaking which is going under the radar. - This film is the anti-Sirat. No sudden dramatic thrills. No emotional volte-faces.] 

stalingrad (vasily grossman, tr. robert & elizabeth chandler)

It’s taken a month to read Stalingrad. Which given the thematic, seems quite rapid. Vasily Grossman’s epic text is in many ways an anti-novel. It has no central character as such. Minor characters appear and take over the book for chapters at a time, then vanish, never to be heard from again. Split into three parts, it feels in the opening part as though this will be a classic Russian novel (with an acknowledged homage to Tolstoy), following the fate of a single Stalingrad family, the Shaposhnikovs, but as the book evolves, this central thread becomes more and more tenuous. Characters of apparent significance are despatched to Kazan, or death. This is a counter-intuitive methodology, which would go against all the tenets of the courses dedicated to the art of the novel. Yet there it stands, Stalingrad, a bastion, a monument, a living embodiment of sacrifice and struggle. Day by day, it feels, both in the reading of it and in the chronology of events, Grossman draws us into the looming conflict, which finally explodes in the third book.

Literature isn’t about character journey or narrative structure. It’s about capturing reality. So, Grossman will move from the frontline to a factory hundreds of miles away - where the weapons which permit the frontline to keep fighting are created. Or even, in one extended sequence, the coal mines from whence the power to keep the factories running is sourced. War is a chain of social interactions and commitments. To document its reality, the writer has to be prepared to dig down into the roots. Even the camels on the steppe and the fish in the rivers are affected by the hell that has been unleashed by Hitler, and the writer’s pen pays its dues to the beasts too.

The book, more than aware of its own significance, moves from scenes with peasant women to scenes with Hitler himself. The battle of Stalingrad signalled the beginning of the end of the fascist war of conquest, a war that would end in ignominious defeat. In the UK we are weaned on D-Day and Dunkirk as the great heroic events of the Second World War. Grossman explains with an almost clinical brilliance how it was at Stalingrad that the tide was turned. German soldiers idly speculate on taking India next. The riches that lie to be claimed in the Urals will continue to fuel their conquests. But a few brave soviet soldiers hold them back, fuelled, the writer argues, by a commitment to the communist cause and the sense of solidarity that the philosophy engenders, a solidarity that endows the resistance with the strength to defeat the geo-political odds. 

the misfits (d. john houston, w. arthur miller)

Whose film is this? It feels as though there are three separate animi for the movie, each pulling in their own direction. The film opens with some classic, droll MIllerian dialogue, as Monroe’s Roslyn is introduced. Miller wrote the script for his then-wife, and much of the opening sequence deals with the pains and pleasures of being, or being married to, America’s pin-up girl. The Rino sequence is light, almost frothy, with Monroe showing off her comedy chops. When the film moves out of the city, the tone changes. It becomes a meditation on the America west, reminiscent of the plays of Shepherd as much as Miller. There’s a metaphor at the heart which feels as though it might work better in the theatre than film, as Gable, Wallach and Clift go hunting for wild mustangs to make a buck. Nevertheless, the filming on the Nevada salt flats is visceral. Here it feels like Houston’s film, a vigorous tale of men and their values, the rights and wrongs of the American way, with an implicit critique of the men’s petty greed reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Finally, of course, this is Marilyn’s film. She is the pivot around which everything revolves, the one who questions the men’s phallocentric vision of the world, the one who gets the big emotional moment, filmed curiously in the middle distance, as though Houston felt uncomfortable with her scene disrupting his high-octane hunting sequence.

All of which makes for an awkward, angular film, which struggles to fit in its variant, misfitting parts. Nevertheless in spite of the over-simplified, sentimental finale, it acts as a warped homage to warped dreams. The dream of the American west, the dream of the American beauty, the dream of the Miller-Monroe marriage. It’s not perfect, but then no marriage is.