the maniac (benjamin labatut)

Labatut’s novels read like documentaries. The Maniac is split into two parts. The first is a fictionalised biography of John von Neumann, the Hungarian genius who participated in the greatest advances in mathematics and physics in the twentieth century. Von Neumann was present at the birth of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the modern day computer and, as the novel goes on to explore in greater depth, the birth pangs of what is now known as artificial intelligence. Labatut goes under the hood of von Neumann’s curious mind, constructing a portrait of him from fictionalised accounts of those who worked with him and loved him. In so doing, the author presents both the man, his ideas and his flirtation with madness. One of the key takeaways of Labatut’s novels is the way in which genius, which shapes the world, is almost always a hair’s breadth away from what we might call madness. Both despair and exhilaration go hand in hand with the imaginative vision required to stretch humanity’s boundaries. The Maniac is in many ways a treatise on technology and the pernicious effect it can have. Where we tend to view technology as an unbridled good, Labatut, like von Neumann and many of the scientists who feature in the book, end up exercising extreme doubts about where the quest for technological advancement is taking humanity.

The second half of the book deals with the advancement of AI, framed around the success of a computer in defeating the world’s greatest go player. Much of von Neumann’s later life was taken up with the quest for self-replicating forms that might be used in some form by humanity to ensure its survival and the eventual conquest of the universe itself. The Maniac explores the perils inherent in creating machines which can outthink humans, a subject which has become increasingly topical, in its account of the computer’s victory. The beauty of Labatut’s work is that he leads the reader into this rarefied world, seemingly the arcane province of scientists and experts, and, holding our hand, encourages to jump into an inscrutable future. 

la práctica (w&d martín rejtman)

Rejtman is a whimsical auteur, and La Practica is no exception to this. His flawed characters negotiate the pitfalls of modern urban living. Things that can go wrong probably will. Connections will be missed and relationships are likely to be dysfunctional. There’s a dry acerbic humour hovering at the edge of the screen, even where there’s no apparent joke to laugh at. Gustavo is a porteño yoga teacher living in Santiago. He’s getting divorced from his Chilean wife, another yoga teacher, but determined to stick it out in the city rather than return home. His job gets harder when he does his knee in and becomes an inflexible yoga teacher. The film drifts through his life with him, as he deals with divorce, meets ex-students, tries to recover. The action is minor scale and affectionately comic. Gustavo is played by Esteban Bigliardi, who played a similar character in Rodrigo Moreno’s Los Delinquentes. There are other echoes to Moreno’s film, with Gustavo experiencing some kind of epiphany when he spends an earthquake night outside in an Andes forest. The juxtaposition between ‘the natural world’ and the urban world perhaps opening a space of personal reconciliation for the protagonist. This feels like an axiomatic southern cone tension: what does the wilderness have to teach us in a world where the city delivers a tenuous and unsatisfactory security?

smoke and ashes: a writer's journey through opium's hidden histories (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh’s non-fiction book is a rendition of much of the research he has done for the construction of his sequence of novels on the opium trade and wars of the nineteenth century. He looks at how the East India Company, later absorbed into the British Empire, set about trading with China by creating a market for opium which they fed by growing opium in India, and exporting it. In India, Ghosh argues, there were two distinct poles of trade: Calcutta in the east,, which was rigidly controlled by the British, and Bombay in the west, which functioned as a more liberal market, thereby setting up the basis for Mumbai’s future commercial acumen. Ghosh also looks closely at how Guangzhou became the nodal point for the entrance of opium into China, a place where foreign interests held sway, rather than the Chinese emperors, a kind of proto Hong Kong/ Singapore.

Whilst there are times in the book when it becomes immersed in detail, cataloguing, for example, the various east coast North American families whose fortunes were founded on the opium trade, Smoke and Ashes might nevertheless be classed as one of the most important books on modern history you could possibly read. Because, using a novelist’s sensibility, Ghosh reveals the way in which opium trading, the equivalent of the narco-industry that the western world’s ‘war on drugs’ is so keen to demonise, was one of the cornerstones of the great capitalist advancements of the European colonial era, if not, he might argue, the key pediment which held up the roof over the whole process. Ghosh identifies how the pursuit of profit lead to an abandonment of any kind of moral criteria in business dealings, as though this might be considered a luxury which wealth could not afford. He follows this line of thinking through to the opioid epidemic which is still gripping large swathes of North America. As a novelist, more than a historian, Ghosh has no qualms in making these judgement calls. His takedown of the British empire, with its opium factories and tenured ‘opium agents’ is devastating, and all the more powerful for being written by someone who was born as a child of empire, on the other side of the historical power divide.

We are still living in the wake of the world Ghosh reveals in the book and the moral complexity of our position (written as an Englishman) is something we are far from recognising, let alone understanding. 

"Or, as an article in a journal published by the US National Defense University notes: ‘English merchants, led by the British East India Company, from 1772 to 1850, established extensive opium supply chains … creating the world’s first drug cartel.’"

"There could be no clearer summation of the most important accomplishment of the doctrine of Free Trade—the erasure of all ethical constraints in regard to profit-making."

copacabana (d. martin rejtman)

Rejtman’s documentary addresses the wave of Bolivian immigration to Buenos Aires. This relationship between Bolivia and Argentina is at once close and distant. Spanish is the lingua franca between the two countries and the north of Argentina which borders Bolivia is, culturally, similar. But Bolivians retain a fierce identity in their music, dress and traditions which marks them apart. There has been a steady stream of immigration from the Andean country to Buenos Aires. A Bolivian man shows his almanac with photos of an early Bolivian community established there in the sixties. Rejtman films in Bolivia, Buenos Aires and, in the closing sequence, on the border. It’s an observational doc, made of long sequences which show Bolivians dancing or processing. The complexities of immigration aren’t addressed: this feels like a Porteño spying on a secret world that exists within his city. There could be said to be a cross-reference here to the Bolivian labourers in César Aira’s novel, Ghosts. The distance which the camera imposes means that its subjects remain mysterious, semi-alien beings, walking the streets but carrying a different flame in their chests.

the old oak (d. ken loach, w. paul laverty)

My friend Flamia asked me in Bar Hispano what I thought of Loach’s latest. I tried to make the argument that the Loach aesthetics are predicated on a social realist furrow he has been ploughing for decades and that his narratives have a predictability to them that neuters any real engagement. Whilst maintaining that this is still valid, there is a dextrous tugging at the heart strings employed in this by-numbers tale of an oddball friendship between a fetching Syrian refugee and a gnarly veteran of post-Thatcher decay. TJ comes from a family of miners, and with the closure of the pits, he and his village have lost their sense of identity. (This despite the fact that TJ’s father died in a mining accident when a seam collapsed three miles out under the North Sea.) Yara and her family are Syrian refugees, struggling to adapt to the harsh realities of post-Brexit Britain. The regulars at the pub don’t take kindly to TJ choosing to support the Syrians and TJ finds himself caught between communities. Good will out in the end, Loach reassures us, with his bittersweet denouement. But there’s something which feels pre-packed, ready to be sold, about The Old Oak and Loach and Laverty’s reluctance to go beyond the range of cliché feels as though it short-changes their grander ambitions to tell stories about contemporary Britain.

Perhaps ironically, another friend I met yesterday told me he’s been watching Pennies from Heaven, which adopted a different register to talk about British society, and one can’t help feeling that it’s a shame Potter and Loach never got together to pool their differences. 

kinds of kindness (w&d lanthimos, w. efthimis filippou)

Lanthimos is back, baby! Todo bien con Poor Things, but it didn’t feel like pure Lanthimos, a smart director who knows how to play the long game and not get pigeonholed as one of those insufferably European arty types. All the same, this blog feels more affinity with weirdo Lanthimos, and in Kinds of Kindness, he’s back with a vengeance. We get mind control, reincarnation, and self-mutilation, among other choice cuts in this anthology piece, which is scripted with co-writer, Efthimis Filippou. There’s more than enough surreal meat on these bones. Stone and Plemmons deliver in spades, giving the more arcane philosophical elements of the film a consistently plausible human root. The script delivers, not least Stone’s monologue when she talks about dog-world, dialogue which is echoed in some of the smart cut-aways, not to mention Stone’s abuse of a stray dog in the film’s third chapter. The animal elements lend the film a Rilkean dimension: humans are shown to be naive, befuddled, cruel, desperate, in contrast to the more straightforward world of the animals. The ensemble use of the same cast across the three stories adds another playful dimension, reminiscent of Buñuel. What is the film actually about and how might this tie in with its cryptic title? I guess it’s about what it means to be human in this day and age, the desperate need to belong to a tribe in a world where fools are lauded as kings or queens. 

le samouraï (w&d jean-pierre melville, w. joan mcleod, georges pellegrin)

Some films radiate a kind of perfection. They delimit their boundaries and ensure that everything within them is honed and chiselled and ticks like a Rolex. Le Samourai is one of those. Its structure is straightforward. Delon’s Jef Costello is a hired assassin who kills someone in the first act. In the second act the police and the gangsters who hired him close in. The third brings the tightly worked denouement, which contains only one potential flaw (how do the police know that Jef is going to show up at the club when he does?). Melville directs with an extreme economy, his washed- out pallet reflecting a desire to sand the film down it its bare essentials. Having said which, the film isn’t averse to taking the risk of shooting on the streets of Paris, with these less controlled moments acting as a counterpoint to the carefully mounted studio scenes. The metro, the cafes, the cars: the film smells of a time and a place, and Delon’s hired killer moves through this world like a ghost. 

if we burn (vincent bevins)

‘The mass protest decade and the missing revolution’ is the subtitle of Bevins’ book. I came across the writer via Twitter, where he was one of the best English language posters on all things Brazil, and exercised a downbeat, laconic vibe, which his book perhaps might have had more of. If We Burn is a rigorous review of a decade of protest, which kicked off in Tunisia and then went around the globe, incorporating, according to Bevins, Brazil, Chile, Hong Kong, Egypt,  Bahrain etc. Those giddy days of 2011, when the ‘Arab spring’ broke, feel a long time ago now. Bevins looks with a cold eye at the reasons for the eventual underwhelming results of so many of these protests, questioning why the energy unleashed on the streets never lead to more comprehensive political change. Of course, his attitude is that of an insider. If you live in one of the countries that was not touched by this spirit of protest, or no more so than normal, as was the case with most Western European countries, then the argument already feels distanced. If anything, it might be possible to reframe the Brexit vote as an act of mass protest, a protest which was far from progressive.

Bevins is perhaps at his best when writing about Brazil and the way that the right wing Bolsonaro supporters hijacked what was originally a straightforward protest about bus fares, lead by activists who were nearer to being anarchists than anything else. He writes about how these movements resisted hierarchical structures, which, he argues, was part of the reason they could be manipulated by the far right into a destructive critique of Dilma Rousseff and Lula’s left-wing governments. As such, If We Burn reads like a cautionary tale for any would-be activists. The more successful your campaign, the more likely it is to be railroaded by forces beyond your control. The book is both a vindication of idealism and a damning critique of the perils of naivety that are inherent to any form of idealism.

animal (w&d sofia exarchou)

Animal’s opening shots appear to come from the very end of the film. Set in a hotel resort on a Greek island, the film takes place in the Summer tourist season, but the opening images are wintery, spidery, beautiful. There’s more than a hint of Lynne Ramsey in the way Exarchou paints her story with images. A poeticism which will course through the two hours of a film where narrative always appears to be of secondary importance. In pride of place is character. The film looks at a bunch of ‘animators’ who will perform over the season for tourists from Europe and Russia. The central character is Kalia, a Greek woman who is approaching middle age and finds herself trapped in the youthful lifestyle of all night discos, casual sex and a determined instability. Played with great pathos by Dimitra Vlagopoulou, Kalia is a mother figure to her younger colleagues, especially the dreamy seventeen year old, Eva. But as the film progresses, we understand more and more how lost Kalia is. Exarchou’s use of narrative and edit always resists melodrama, often cutting before the scene reaches its denouement, but in the hypnotic, desperate final karaoke scene, we enter directly into Kalia’s putative nervous breakdown as she sings one of her stalwart songs, Baccara’s Yes Sir I can Boogie. It’s a devastating moment which is all the more powerful  for sneaking up on the viewer without the usual mechanics of plot. Rather we have been slowly immersed in Kalia’s world and her desperation, so that when it is revealed in full, it is almost overwhelming.

Animal feels like a big, ambitious film about Europe, about modern youth, about listless, disconnected communities. The older tourists feed off the blood of their youthful animator hosts, whilst the wealthy retirees, with their their grotesque taste, get the chance to pretend to be young again. It’s often funny, sometimes hideous. Without making any great statements, the film articulates the transience and joys of youth, something our vampire society tries to package and inject, with no real care for the harm it might be causing the younger generation in the process. Animal is an artful piece of neo-realism, which weeps as it sings its cheerful hits.