hamnet (w&d chloe zhao, w. maggie o’farrell)

Two connected thoughts on Zhao’s take on the novel.

Firstly - In The Rider and at times in Nomadland, Zhao employed what might be described as cinema verité to great effect. Naturalistic lighting, a roving, deliberately unsteady camera. Muted performances punctuated by dramatic moments. In Hamnet, she stays true to this, in spite of what must have been an inflated budget (although the CGI London riverbank scenes feel slightly low-cost). The trouble is, and perhaps this is exacerbated by coming from an English POV, cinema verité in a faux elizabethan England is always going to be a stretch. Rather than the viewer being sucked in by the style, it draws attention to everything that possesses the artifice of cinema. In a sense the nature scenes are the most effective: here the backdrop feels no more than regularly artificial. In contrast Elizabethan Stratford/ London feels like a construction, as indeed it is. The plague that is a motif and key plot diver is communicated via cinematic shorthand.  Secondly, given the presence of star names doing a lot of heavyweight acting, rather than getting lost in their story, as is the case of The Rider, one is constantly aware of the heavy-lifting the stars are doing. The naturalism is undercut and what remains is pure performance. Which also explains why Buckley was a shoe-in for the Oscar.

uncle anghel (panaït istrati, tr. maude valérie white)

Uncle Anghel is a novel of two halves. The first is told from the point of view of Adrian, a young villager whose uncle, Anghel, a formerly prosperous innkeeper, has gone to ruin. Adrian returns from travelling just in time to attend the death throes of Anghel, a formidable, cursed soul, who has no regrets. The second half of the book is narrated by Adrian’s cousin, Jeremy, who is present at the deathbed. Jeremy tells the story of his rumbustious childhood living with the famous bandit, Cosma. These adventures have less of a Schopenhaurian feel than the first half of the book. It has the flavour of a Jack London adventure story, as the author returns to the tales of his youth. 

the song of the earth (jonathan bate)

Bate’s examination of the links between romanticism and ecology offer up the moral that the poet is the unacknowledged connection between the soil and the mind. As such the poet, like the aborigine in the outback, can sing us out of the dystopia which we have constructed. At times beautiful and other time befuddling, the book ranges from Heidegger to Clare and gives perhaps unexpected prominence to Byron. Bate is strong on that paradox of modernity whereby an appreciation of nature is coupled with an alienation from nature. Are his conclusions in the end somewhat hippy-chic, as he discourses from this Oxonian ivory tower? There was a feeling in the reading of the book (and feelings are not to be negated according to his thesis) that the urgency of the opening chapters, or the radicalism of the opening chapters, became diluted as the book expounded its argument. However, this might also be an inevitability in the actual process of writing itself; perhaps according to Bate, the tendrils of poetry are the truest form of the word, and the more that writing seeks to investigate the roots of those tendrils, the less, ironically, it becomes possible to hear the flower’s song.

The Graeco-Roman counterpart to the story of Eden is that of the lost Golden Age. It is a story which has had an extraordinarily long and fertile history as a mythic and literary archetype. It tells of how all beasts had horizontal backbones and a gaze that looked down towards the earth, until there came Prometheus who ‘Upended man into the vertical’, and ‘tipped up his chin / So to widen his outlook on heaven’. Once man looked away from where he walked, the earth became vulnerable. The desire for transcendence, the aspiration to higher realms, was predicated upon a denial of biological origin, a departure from ground.

daisies (w&d vera chytilová, w. pavel jurácek, ester krumbachová)

At a time when there is much discussion about the difference between female filmmaking and male filmmaking, it is perhaps instructive to savour a film I have spent many years waiting to watch. It is fascinating to note how many of the film’s images have crept into the cinematic consciousness, so that watching the film was a little bit like reacquainting with something you have never known. Chytilová’s film is non-linear, imagistic, provocative, playful. Non-linear in so far as there appears to be no concrete story, just the adventures of two young friends in a city, their encounters, their pranks, their dreams. Imagistic in so far as the image is prioritised over the word. Provocative in several fashions: featuring  two young women frequently scantily clothed, seemingly assured in their sexuality, feels as though it is a challenge to those who adhere to a masculine perspective of how young women should behave (and the film has them repeatedly take the piss out of older men). It might be that fifty years later the attitudes of the two Maries have become the norm, which only makes one wonder how a contemporary version of Daisies might seek to provoke. Playful in so far as there is a constant sense of the director seeking spontaneity, (and cinema is the hardest medium in which to be spontaneous), creativity, fun. As I ran up Shaftesbury Avenue after the movie, in an incoherent and disruptive fashion, swimming against the tide, I felt a certain affinity with Chytilová’s anti-world stance. 

the secret agent (w&d kleber mendonça filho)

I had been told so much about this film, and harboured a longing to see it for so long. And there are few better cinemas in central London to watch it than the Garden Cinema, where our own Latino experience occurred last year. Kleber Mendonça Filho sets out to make an epic, a homage to Recife and to an era. The film opens with a brief montage of stills of musicians, and then moves into a superb opening scene as Wagner Moura’s character, Armando, fills up with petrol. The scene is perhaps ten minutes long and completely captures the sense of being in the middle of nowhere in deepest Brazil. Then Armando arrives in Recife and the film settles down into something else, a leisurely north eastern reflection on corruption, carnival and the cinema. The film is peppered with humour and the grotesque. It’s in the tradition of Babenco’s Lucio Flavio, without quite possessing the hard edge of the Argentine director’s movie. It feels like a movie about that time, told from the standpoint of a safer time, something the film’s 21st century framing device would appear to acknowledge. 

souvenir (michael bracewell)

This slight half-fiction, populated by pop stars and flaneurs, does what it says on the tin. It remembers. In a succession of vignettes, Bracewell traces an unofficial history of the capital from ’78 to ’85. This is the land of music and fashion, of the unheralded and the heralded. People who went to parties in council blocks or art galleries, people who walked the streets wondering at the dazzle, clocking the passers-by, living outside thoughts of the future. It’s a small, beautiful book which captures the city in the years before I knew it, albeit the traces of that time were still around when I arrived in 88, the last gasp of the pre-digital era. If you really want to know what London was like in those days, you can do much worse than spend an afternoon with Bracewell’s Memoir. 

These Polaroid photographs, by contrast, were deeply English, neo-Romantic in spirit: Paul Nash, John Minton, Derek Jarman; the lane in deep green evening light, abstraction on the beach, the personality of inanimate objects (a jar on a windowsill, a dirty windowpane, a stricken tree, moss on blackened brick); the stilled or violent atmosphere of time and place thickening to numinosity.

no other choice (w&d park chan-wook, w. donald e. westlake, lee kyoung-mi)

11am on a Friday morning is a great time to watch a film which questions the new world order we are all subject to. Chan-wook’s film has enough highways and byways for the viewer to undergo their own personal journey down its highways and byways. After the set up, with Man-su losing his job and embarking on his dastardly scheme to become re-employed, there were moments when the film teeters on the edge of self-indulgence, in the style of a Jacobean tragedy which becomes obliged to go through its revenge story beats. (With some gratuitous comedy beats thrown in). Yet, as the narrative starts to swirl towards its centrifugal conclusion, the investment of director and audience is rewarded. Chan-wook’s meditations on the diabolical nature of a world given over to dehumanised capital, aided and abetted by AI, comes into flower in a darkened lights-out factory. The dedication to Costa Gavras in the closing credits feels like game recognising game. 

the shepherd and the bear (w&d max keegan, w. sabine emiliani)

Keegan’s doc is what might be called lovingly made, as it follows the travails of an ageing shepherd in the Pyrenees. The shepherd is one of the last of his line, happy to spend months living in a small shack in the high country. When bears are released into the wild, re-establishing a bear community, local livestock owners are fearful. The ancient conflict between man and nature has a new battleground. The shepherd keeps doing his thing, no matter what, even after a few savaged sheep carcasses make spectacular appearances. The film, like the conflict, simmers rather than coming to a boil, but it’s a well crafted portrait of a remote rural society which highlights the paradoxes around ideas of re-wilding and environmentalism, concepts that can lead to the sense of an agenda being imposed by metropolitan diktat on the rural communities who inhabit the countryside and the wild places the environmentalists seek to preserve.

 

sorcerer (w&d william friedkin, w. walon green, georges arnaud)

Back in the Ipswich Film Theatre, half-full for this restored print of Friedkin’s minor classic. I might have seen the Wages of Fear, but if I have I can’t remember when. Friedkin expands the story in a bold opening, stitching together three long sequences which introduce the key characters, all renegades of one form or another, living on the edge of their country’s laws. The long shots, the zooms, have a bravura feel, which echoes the scope of a film that moves from Mexico to Palestine to Paris and New York in the opening twenty minutes. These characters come together in the Colombian jungle, on an oilfield run by the gringos. The colonial aspect of the story is clear: the USA wants the oil and it will do anything to get it. This sets up their trip through the jungle, two souped-up lorries like something out of a Mad Max film. The fact that there are two trucks, as in the original, is a simple but brilliant device to maintain tension. One of the trucks is going to get to the destination, but we don’t know which one. Friedkin is a dystopian anarcho-futurist. A kind of Verlainian Marinetti. These trucks are behemoths, but they are also, literally, timebombs, primed to go off. It makes for scenes of forced but remarkable tension. There’s elements of Aguirre to the movie, the challenge of the white man to tame the untameable terrain. Although the one who survives will be brought down not by nature, but by man.

pillion (w&d harry lighton, w. adam mars-jones)

For reasons that have to do with a long-held editorial stance the doe-eyed critic is not able to comment on Pillion, except to say chapeau to whoever chose to have Skarsgård reading several volumes of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Screenwriter? Director? Art director? The actor himself? A tiny stroke of genius. (And of itself this detail/question illustrates how fluid is the process of 'writing' a film.)

happiness and love (zoe dubno)

Came across Zoe Dubno via an article on her friend, Adam Tooze, which included Tooze’s sclerotic take on the Biden-era democrats whose complacency has, in his view only facilitated the rise of Trump. Tooze is one of those writer-journos, like Jäger, whose take on geo-politics or eco-politics (in both senses) is always worth reading, so was curious as to what kind of a novel a close friend of his would come up with.

Whilst reading up about her, I discovered, like Calderon, she’s a fan of Bernhard, and indeed this is made explicit through a note at the end of the book acknowledging the influence of The Woodcutters on the novel. Fans of Bernhard in the Anglo-Saxon world are a select bunch. As I began to read the novel. I realised that it could almost be seen as a homage to the Austrian. Happiness and Love is a stream of consciousness thought-piece set at a New York supper party, supposedly held in honour of a recently deceased actress friend.

Apart from this structural echo, the narrator’s tone is also decidedly Bernhard-esque. She is full of loathing for Eugene and Nicole, the pretentious pseudo-intellectual couple hosting the party. Eugene is a mediocre but well-connected artist, subsided by his wife Nicole, scion of a wealthy family. The echo with Tender is the Night is probably not accidental . (“Nicole trapped in the perfectly terrible cage of her own creation”). The novel, through the narrator’s voice and that of another actress who arrives late to the party, lays into these over-privileged mediocrities with gusto.

There is an unlikely synchronicity, a crossover, with the last novel I read, also about metropolitan socialites. At one point someone in the novel says: “I see no difference between someone reading Virginia Woolf and Twilight.” Perhaps, as in the case of Latronico’s Perfection, Dubno runs the risk of being hoisted on her own petard. (Or indeed, Fitzgerald himself.) In focusing on the objects of her scorn, Dubno could end up actually promoting them. Maybe this is why she makes the decision to switch from the narrator’s voice to the actress’ to deliver the coup de grace at the book’s conclusion - by framing this sclerotic attack in the third person Dubno intends to lend the book’s critique a sense of a greater objectivity.

Or perhaps not. Whichever, the novel is a great addition to the canon of novels about the superficiality and vainglory of the upper classes. (Although referring to my above point I note that it was listed as one of Vogue’s best books of last year…)

I also enjoyed the writer’s observations on contemporary trends in literature:

That’s why it’s such a great failing that literature these days has become so incredibly banal, so fixated on worthlessly depicting the mundane thoughts that their authors have as they drink a cup of coffee and mourn that their lives aren’t more special. They’ve given us in Hollywood a monopoly on joy and humor and wonder.

mrs dalloway (virginia woolf)

The other day we walked through Bloomsbury and saw a sign for a Dalloway court, or some other confection made up to honour Woolf’s protagonist. Even though Mrs Dalloway doesn’t live in Bloomsbury, she lives in Westminster, and she never goes there. This seems to reflect the way that Dalloway (and perhaps Woolf herself) have become signifiers which might not have that much to do with their original essence. It’s not clear to what extent the author even likes her protagonist, a woman who has chosen an easy metropolitan life above any bohemian  instinct she might once have had. Who has rejected the more dangerous Peter Walsh and married Richard, a minor member of parliament, someone who couldn’t be more establishment if he tried. The Prime Minister comes to her party. She’s a far cry from the ideal of Bloomsbury independence and self-publishing. The emotional heartbeat of the book, surely influenced by Joyce, is the tragic returning soldier and his Italian wife. The soldier suffers from shellshock, or PTSD in today’s terms, and his delirium is at odds with the addled comfort of Dalloway’s life. When news of his death infiltrates her party, she feels resentment. A resentment at the realities of politics and history intervening on her idyllic set-up. Which in reality is far from idyllic, as she has lost touch with Walsh and her friend Sara Seyton, the two real conduits for any kind of emotional or artistic life she might have lead. Dalloway has been mirrored onto Woolf, but she feels like a vacuous copy. The sort of lady who lunches that would now be found in Notting Hill and environs rather than Westminster.

This mirrors the way that Woolf has been appropriated as an exemplar of a certain kind of studied, pseudo-aristo, pseudo-bohemian Englishwoman. An image that lurks at the edges of brands like Marks and Spencers and Laura Ashley. She has been appropriated by the marketeers of this type of ghoulish loveliness, to be consumed by the Mrs Dalloways of her day. Walsh, whose underwhelming career has played out in India, as part of the great colonial project, feels an extreme ambivalence about this England to which he has just returned. “Lord, lord, the snobbery of the English! thought Peter Walsh, standing in the corner. How they loved dressing up in gold lace and doing homage!"

At the same time, Woolf’s prose contains the lyricism of poetry. The most vivid moments are reserved for Septimus, the shellshocked soldier, and it’s via his shellshocked voice that the writer achieves an Eliot-esque song: “Burn them! he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead; do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.”

+++

“It might be possible, Septimus thought, looking at England from the train window, as they left Newhaven; it might be possible that the world itself is without meaning.”

sentimental value (w&d joachim trier, w. eskil vogt)

We watched the film at the Ritzy, a cinema which used to be one of my many London homes, but one I hadn’t visited for almost a decade. Given this the title seemed more than  appropriate. The film itself made me think of Trueba’s Volveréis. A film within a film, the overbearing shadow of a father. The ghost of Bergman, perhaps. As well as the observation that this kind of measured, serious cinema-making, which to an extent wears its heart on its sleeve, is the preserve of a European mindset, one which, like the house within the film which is a kind of church for the protagonists, feels almost out of time, in need a makeover. The most curious scene within the house (revealed within the shot not to be the actual house but a re-creation on a sound stage) is the final image, where it has undergone an IKEA makeover. The more ramshackle charm of the absent mother’s house is turned into something sleek, clean lines, graphic design. For some this new version of the house will be an upgrade. For others, it will be a reduction to a norm. What exactly this says about the film Gustav is finally making with his daughter, or the film Trier himself is making, is hard to tell. An ironic commentary? Or a declaration of faith in the existence of a new future, where this type of film will continue to be made, and these kinds of filmmakers will continue to be financed? It also provoked the thought that Trier’s cinema might have become so fashionable and lauded precisely because it is the kind of cinema that the Anglo-Saxon world recognises it is incapable of producing. His films are rare, exotic gems from a distant stratosphere. 

the book of blam (aleksandar tišma tr michael henry heim)

The Book of Blam was Tisma’s first novel in a trilogy. In some ways, having already read Kapo, it feels as though the author must have been building up towards the extremes of the later novel. The Book of Blam, set in Novi Sad, is a circuitous read, stitching together diverse fragments taken from the life of the book’s protagonist, Blam, tracing his ancestry, his lost love life, his failures, his escape from the pogrom, but also the fate of his family and friends, almost all of whom died during the war. As stated, this feels like a less traumatic entry point into Tišma’s writing, which, given the cruelties the book relates, seems astonishing. Tišma’s even handedness in describing events in Novi Sad during the war is extraordinary. 

l’histoire de souleymane (w&d boris lojkine, w. delphine agut)

The second screen at the Ipswich Film Theatre is small enough to make one miss Cinemateca and question whether it’s worth spending ten quid to watch something you could project larger on your wall. However, the cinema is also half-full on a bitterly cold night, and this engenders the sense of a communal experience which reminds one why it is still worth it. Lojkine’s film is a classic piece of neo-realism, following a day and a half in the life of Souleymane, an illegal immigrant from Guinea, trying to get by in Paris. The line between documentary and fiction feels suitably fine, and the film feels credible, even when the narrative takes advantage of every possible twist to make his day as bad as possible. If this smacks of script development, the film wraps up with a brilliant scene where Souleymane states his case for asylum to a sceptical if sympathetic female official. The scene is a long dialogue scene, but we as the audience are right inside Souleymane’s experience, and look on with the same pained hopelessness as the interviewer. This is the brass tacks of the world, the place where life-changing decisions are made, where the pitch has to be more than perfect, it has to be authentic. The scene is theatrical, urgent and compelling. For a small moment in our privileged world we get to live, from one side of the fence or another, the arbitrary cruelty of our geo-political system. 

martyr (kaveh akbar)

Akbar’s novel is a tremulous US-Iranian tome, featuring a maudlin poet and a cunning plot twist. It’s a novel that meanders, drifting between scenes from Indiana, Iran and New York. It might be described as a coming-of-age tale, even if Cyrus, the protagonist, is nearly thirty. But he’s a loser, baby, and this is the story of his coming to terms with being an immigrant and a slacker, as he seeks out the secrets of his family history, supposedly left behind in the unknown lands of the orient which he has never visited. The novel is punctuated by Cyrus/Akbar’s poems, and held together by a thread that pretends to deal with Martyrdom, as the title suggests, even if Cyrus’s declarations in favour of martyrdom lack credibility, and feel as though they come from the US side of his nature, rather than the Iranian. He’s too comfortable in his uncomfortable skin for us ever to really believe that he would do anything more extreme than catch a plane to New York. One remains with the lingering query of how different his journey and the novel might have been had he taken a plane to Tehran instead. 

bass instinct (two fingas)

Bass Instinct is set in nineties London. Its protagonist is a cycle courier stroke DJ stroke Ladies Man. Much of the book is couched in the terms of a black macho identity, where women are little more than bodies and the music and the weed is all that makes life worth living. As much as a novel, this feels like a document of a time and a place, that esoteric world of clubs and high rises, of men and women doing humdrum jobs by day before transforming into romantic superstars when they head out into the glory of the city’s nightlife. This encapsulates the bittersweet glamour of living in one of the world’s great cities, where your mere allegiance to that tribe appears to endow you with magical powers, in spite of having little to back up that endorphic sensation.

 

patria (homeland) (fernando aramburu, tr alfred macadam)

Patria is a phenomenon as much as a novel, the fate of books that get adapted into blockbuster TV series’. The doorstopper book relates the Basque independence conflict through the fate of two families, whose friendship is destroyed by politics and ideology. It’s a saga, which reveals the way in which ETA split the Basque world in two  and the novel reflects this, skipping backwards and forwards in time in clipped, syncopated chapters.

 

yek tasadef sadeh/ it was just an accident (d. jafar panahi)

It Was Just an Accident opens with all the hallmarks of Iranian cinema: neorealism, long scenes in cars, an opaque layer of mystery. It also won the Palme D’Or, an instant source of scepticism. However, I would suggest its roots are more tied to that rare genre, the camper van drama, which includes Little Miss Sunshine and the Sorin’s Historias Minimas. In Panahi’s tale, the minivan contains five clearly defined characters and a kidnapped torturer. Unless the kidnapper, driver and owner of the van, Vahid, has made a mistake and kidnapped an innocent man. This becomes a twisted road movie, which is also a meditation on state abuse and revenge. Panahi’s narrative has a straightforward, traditional brilliance: we need to know if the kidnapped man is indeed the torturer, and if he is what actions his victims will take. It deserves all the garlands and prizes it has received. Cineastes don’t need to spend big bucks to construct a film which is gripping and thought-provoking. The irony is that this film is reflective of issues in so many countries: the next night we went to see a documentary about the Uruguayan dictatorship, and Panahi’s story speaks eloquently to that time: the cruelty and damage inflicted by state terrorism on defenceless people who might, one day, seek retribution.

three days of the condor (d. sydney pollack, w. james grady, lorenzo semple jr, david rayfiel)

At the time of writing, the USA is on the verge of attacking Venezuela. Since Pollack’s film was released, the USA has invaded Iraq, and intervened in Libya.

Redford is a CIA desk jockey whose job is to analyse literature for clues of global turbulence. He stumbles across a text linking Iraq, Libya and Venezuela without at first joining the dots. But his discovery triggers the summary execution of his colleagues. Someone desperately needs to make sure that what Redford has discovered doesn’t get out. The narrative plot points might be tenuous, but the underlying thesis is as valid as ever. At the end of the film Redford confronts the head of the maverick CIA within a CIA - and realises it’s all about the oil. Same as it ever was.

Besides its ongoing geopolitical resonance, Three Days of the Condor remains a terrific thriller, blessed by extravagantly good Hollywood performances from Redford, Dunaway and Von Sydow. Pollack’s camera roams New York, with a protagonical role for the World Trade Centre, where the CIA office is based. Dunaway and Redford somehow manage to convince in their star-crossed one-night stand. This is a Hollywood thriller par excellence, which also happens to be an endlessly relevant treatise on the political systems of the past 50 years.

+++

As I post this, as ever weeks after watching the film, the USA has just bombed Venezuela.