war and war (lászló krasznahorkai, tr. george szirtes)

László Krasznahorkai looks in his younger photos a bit like Thom Yorke. There’s something of the recondite, complex musicianship of Radiohead in the prose of Krasznahorkai, which drives around in circles looking for an exit that never opens up. So the driver starts talking about how he’s been driving in circles for hours, spinning plates, and how the way things are going petrol consumption is going to be the end of the world, but he can’t help it, he still needs to find a way out and if he stops the car that’s never going to happen, so he has to keep going and if he does ever find a way out he knows it’s going to lead to the great revelation of why the world is neither round nor shaped in a manner that anyone could ever possibly imagine. A secret some people have known at various times in history which keeps getting misplaced or forgotten, because the world is an amnesiac structure, but if he can ever find a way out of this circular motion, these circular structures, then he might just let us in on the secret, if the narcos don’t narcolepse us first, because they too want the secret or the money or the car or your soul. And the narcos usually get what they want, because that is the way of history.

In short, a hypnotic read. 

lights in the dusk (w&d kaurismäki)

The film opens with a group of Russians discussing Russian literature, naming Gorky, Pushkin and Tolstoy. This sets up the most Dosteyevskian of the director’s films. The narrative follows the grim fate of Koistinen, a night watchman who is targeted by a femme fatale in a honey trap, setting him up as the fall guy when the people she works for steal jewels from the site he is supposed to be guarding. Things keep going from bad to worse for Koistinen. He encounters fate’s barbs with a stoicism that seems almost perverse. The Helsinki which Kaurismäki shows is one that has become ‘modernised’. Neon and new builds dominate. But the space for human kindness has shrunk. Whilst retaining Kaurismäki’s deadpan humour, this film feels closer to his nordic neighbour Bergman in tone and mournfulness. 

i hired a contract killer (w&d kaurismäki, w. peter von bagh)

There is an economy to everything that occurs in a Kaurismäki movie. Behind the simplicity, the naive dialogue, there is a carefully curated colour palette, sound design, camera angle. The storytelling feels simple, but engrossing. As though the director’s roots stretch back to the silent era, when movies had to narrate without the assistance of language. The medium was contingent on the image. In a sense the greater the absurdity of the tale (in this instance Jean-Pierre Leaud hiring a contract killer to kill himself, a job he can’t do on on his own), the more it plays into Kaurismäki’s cinematic ethos. This is cinema beyond naturalism. The careful staging, the artful repetition of specific shots, the emphasis on the falseness of cinema, its constructive tendencies, allows the director to reveal there are other ways of telling film stories, reminding us that film is a hieroglyphic language all of its own, not so far removed from the glyphs found in Egyptian tombs.

The other striking aspect of this particular film is its depiction of a lost London, the London before the nineties blew up. When bomb sites might still pepper the urban terrain, when flats which would later be worth a million pounds were fleapits, before Docklands became Canary Wharf. (Which once again strangely makes me think of the Long Good Friday.) Leaud’s Henri loses his job of fifteen years due to privatisation and he is tarred as a foreigner and signed off with a Five Pound fake gold watch. Margi Clarke says that the working class has no homeland. The denouement takes place in the cemetery where Marx is buried. The film depicts a world lost to turbo-capitalism and property speculation, a world I fleetingly knew before it was redeveloped beyond recognition, even if the Warwick Castle still serves pints on Portobello Road. 

hamlet goes business (w&d aki kaurismäki, w. shakespeare)

On Friday we were lucky enough to attend a talk by the Argentine philosopher, Eduardo Rinesi on Shakespeare. Much of the talk focussed on Hamlet as a bridge between the renaissance world of machiavelli, and the coming world of the enlightenment, signalled by the work of Hobbes. Hamlet acts as a hinge between these two worlds, which saw the evolution of the idea of the contract, both legal and social, as society moved away from the blood feud, the revenge tragedy. The talk was engrossing and entertaining, and suggested echoes in the evolution of Latin American society, in a world where clowns roost on the political stage and seize power.

All of which set up perfectly Kaurismäki’s take on the tale. Aside from a twist at the conclusion, which could be said to lend a more Marxist take to the narrative, Kaurismäki stays faithful to Shakespeare. The originality comes from two elements: positing the story in the world of business (similarly to Kurosowa), where contemporary figures squabble to control a business empire; and the ingenuity required to relocate the play in a cinematic near-present. The former allows Claudius the priceless moment of suggesting he is sending Hamlet to London to negotiate with ‘Murdoch’, testament to the omnipresence of the Australian in the shaping of modern culture. As the writers of Succession realised, the modern globalised business world is fertile territory for Shakespearian drama. It would be interesting to learn if Jesse Armstrong is a fan of Kaurismäki.

As for the ingenuity, the director employs his now accustomed blend of deadpan humour and simplicity. If a gun is useful, he uses a gun. If poison works best, he poisons a drink or a chicken. The film flirts with realism, (notably during the titles and credits) whilst constructing its own logic, permitting characters to do whatever is needed to advance the plot. There are few exterior shots, but when Hamlet appears framed against a shipyard he has saved, it has a real impact. (And strangely makes me think of the Long Good Friday.) Kaurismäki is seeding ideas here about manufacturing, trade, globalisation and capitalism. Ideas which are often explored in his work, but tend to go under the radar, as audiences revel in his downtrodden characters, punkish sensibility and smiley Nordic misanthropy. 

yo la tengo @ museo de carnaval

There’s a healthy crowd in at the Museo de Carneval which is keen, buzzy, eager to breathe the rarified air of the Yankee muses. It feels like the kind of occasion that might have been banned under Cromwell and might not be encouraged by other authoritarian regimes. Fittingly, perhaps, when I get home I learn that Mudami has won the NY mayoral race. Yo La Tengo seem to represent the good profile of North America. Free thinking musos who don’t look like they’d ever wear designer clothes.

I saw Yo La Tengo at Somerset House about 25 years ago, when I was another person living another life. Ira Kaplan makes much play of the fact that many of their songs were written before much of the audience was born. It suggests a deserved pride in their longevity. Perhaps I have been reborn in the interim. I don’t know what got me into them. Their Hispanic name is a red herring: they’re from New Jersey and as evidenced by the brief comments, they’re not Spanish speakers. (Wikipedia offers the origin story of the band’s name.) They look pretty much the same now as they did back then. They also seem to take the same enjoyment out of playing. Their set is subtly constructed, ranging from feedback heavy rocking out to delicate ballads. The range is as impressive as the way the audience’s sensory journey is curated. They restore the faith on many levels, not least when they invite Eduardo, a young local guitarist on stage to play a song with them.

The set ends with a cover of I Do Believe by the Velvets. The song, sung a cappella, is moving. It offers a flavour of what it might have been like to watch the Velvets, veering from the melodic to the deranged. Fellow emissaries of the right kind of North American freedom.

persuasion (austen)

I turned to Austen’s late novel in a bid to go back to a classic after wading through too many contemporary novels that seemed to be saying less than they pretended to. Austen has a sanctified status in the UK. A pioneer of the female novel, a subtle investigator of the human heart. Not to mention a fertile source of eminently commercial period drama.

The novel sets out a clear and predictable obstacle for Anne, its protagonist. Eight years after declining the proposal of her suitor, Wentworth, on the advice of friends and family, she finds herself still in love with him. When he returns to her circle after years abroad with the navy, Anne is convinced Wentworth has moved on, as well as harbouring resentment against her for having refused him. At the age of 27, she feels her best days are behind her, and has to come to terms with disappointment in love and life. Part of the problem with the novel is that Anne is so damned nice, whist the rest of her family are monsters. Austen mines this for both humour and moral judgement. Her father and two sisters are vain and selfish. Next to them, any normal individual would look good, but Anne is positively saintly. Beyond her lack of confidence, she never does anything wrong. There comes a point in the novel when we long for Anne to screw up in some way, but this never happens.

Which reflects the fact that, from the moment the novel moves with Anne to Bath, not a lot seems to occur at all. There’s a long chapter of exposition on the part of Anne’s friend to tie up a subplot regarding her cousin who seems intent on marrying her; a few set-piece moments where Anne and Wentworth cross before the final resolution of their story. But it all feels disarmingly pedestrian. The penultimate chapter contains Anne’s meditation on the difference between the sexes, which one imagines marries to Austen’s view, along with her wry observation that you can’t trust novels on the subject as the medium has been dominated by men. A delightfully arch observation, but this alone is insufficient to lend the novel any real sense of depth. It’s a strange experience to read a novel that has been so lauded, adapted and fetishised within British culture, only to find oneself reaching out for a branch of significance as one drifts away on its mellifluous tide. 

pasolini (w&d abel ferrara, w. nicola tranquillino, maurizio braucci)

Ferrara’s biopic offers Dafoe one of his finest roles. This is clutch material for the director, and the film feels assured, confident, but surprisingly safe. It opens by presenting scenes from 120 Days, suggesting it will investigate the darkness or hell that Pasolini will speak of in an intriguing interview. But the film is almost too well shot and acted. Everything feels pitch perfect. Ferrara’s rough edges have been smoothed out, there are no moments that either shock or disgust. Having said which, the film, set over the course of the day of Pasolini’s death, is educative, an effective introduction to the life of the Italian poet-cineaste.