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. 

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.