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. 

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. 

cabaret (d. bob fosse, w. joe masteroff, john van druten, christopher isherwood, jay allen)

Germany, interwar. So much of my reading and watching seems to return to these times. Whilst there is a personal connection to pre-war Berlin, it is also disconcerting the way in which interwar Germany seems to resemble contemporary western society. The culture wars and the xenophobia. The hankering for a strong leader which goes above and beyond a hankering for democracy. The societal petri dish which leads to fascism is always latent, but these days the ingredients feel more combustible than ever. Cabaret, the film of a musical inspired by a book written by Isherwood, who must have been jotting down notes in the clubs and beer gardens and parks he would have frequented, does a sterling job of capturing Berlin in the thirties. A heightened, musical Berlin with a shadow hanging over it. How many of these english speaking German characters would be dead a decade later? Would Fritz and Natalia manage to flee? Would Maximilian end up dead on the eastern front? It’s a curious film in so far as the fate of the lead protagonists, no matter the scrapes they get into, seem to have less jeopardy than that of the secondary characters. Minelli is barnstormingly brilliant. I once, in another life, saw her perform two nights in a row at the Royal Albert Hall. Presumably singing many of the songs from this film. What stays with me most, however, is how the two nights were carbon copies, even down to the supposed ad-libs. Minelli was a meticulous pro. That quest for perfection underscores her representation of Sally Bowles. She appears to capture her character’s comic timing and apparent chaos effortlessly - something that suggests there must have been a world of effort involved.  Fosse choreographs the whole film, not just the dance sequences. The editing is sharp to the point of jagged. The rollercoaster ride reflects the rollercoaster lives that everyone was living in those dangerous days, both exhilarating and ghosted by imminent terror. 

palo y hueso (w&d nicolás sarquís, w. raúl beceyro, juan josé saer)

Palo y Hueso (Stick and Bone) is a low-fi, casi nouvelle vague tale from rural Argentina. Besides being an intriguing film in its own right, it has the added kudos of being adapted from a story by the great Argentine novelist Saer, who is credited as co-writer. There’s something about harsh tales from the countryside which suit that a Chabrolian black and white aesthetic (thinking of Sanjines and Paolo Costa, among others.) Palo y Hueso tells a simple story of an older campesino, Don Arce, who ‘buys’ himself a fifteen year old wife. He also happens to have a good-looking twenty-something son, Domingo, who lives with him. It comes as no great surprise that Rosita is more interested in Domingo than Don Arce. One of the more surprising elements of the film is the way in which the agent of change turns out to be Rosita, rather than either of the men. Although she finds herself in a weak position, she emerges as a strong character, prepared to take charge of her life. The film is threaded through with images of the local culture and landscape. The riotous festivities of the local pueblo contrast with the emptiness of country life. All of it is captured by a camera which feels as though it is constantly probing the slim tale’s possibilities, employing depth of field in the manner of Bergman, another who enjoyed putting the passions and bleakness of rural life on screen. 

two prosecutors (w&d sergey loznitsa, w. georgy demidov)

Loznitsa’s film does everything one might expect of it, including the long, brooding takes. It’s interesting to review the narrative’s structure. Adapted from a novel by Demidov, the film is essentially four sequences. In the first the prosecutor, Kornev, played with a deadpan naivety by Alexander Kuznetsov, visits a prison where he interviews an elderly former tutor and prosecutor, who has been the victim of the Stalin’s regime’s abusive torture. The second brief sequence occurs when Kornev is in the train to Moscow, and falls asleep as a peasant relates a meeting with Lenin. The third sequence has Kornev heading for the office of the Soviet state’s head prosecutor, a man shrouded in bureaucratic menace. In the final sequence Kornev returns in the train accompanied by two ebullient characters who are not what they seem, even if this feels quietly predictable. There is a simplicity and straightforwardness to the storytelling which perhaps betrays an exaggerated straightforwardness towards the film’s material. If there is no doubt that Stalin was a monster, ultimately responsible for heinous crimes, there is nevertheless no attempt made to contextualise Kornev’s fateful journey. It emerges as a kind of fable of totalitarianism without in any way addressing its roots. The film has a clipped, efficient feel, where the only real note of humanity comes from two murderous agents of the state. 

carol (d todd haynes, w. phyllis nagy, patricia highsmith)

Carol is a polished adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, which feels as though it ticks all the boxes without ever catching fire. The film is set in similar territory to Haynes’ earlier Far From Heaven, but it has a more muted feel. Like the earlier film, it deals with the crossing of taboos in post-war USA; but the colours are less vibrant and the melodrama is toned down. There are no obvious flaws, but this might be a flaw in itself: in spite of the transgressive nature of the relationship between Blanchett’s Carol and Mara’s Therese, it never feels as though they are running the same kind of risks that Moore and Haysbert ran in FFH. This could be down to the adaptation of the source material, Highsmith’s novel. The film opens with a self-evident homage to Brief Encounter, (albeit this is later revealed to be a tricksy device), but where the almost unseemly desperation of Trevor Howard’s passion shines through and propels that movie onto a heightened emotional plane, Blanchett always seems to hold things together in a polished performance which might have benefited from being more unhinged. When she threatens someone with a gun, it never seems likely that the gun will go off.

 

love and anarchy (w&d lina wertmüller)

This was my first Wertmüller film. I had no real idea what to expect. However, it seems clear that she fits right in with a golden age of Italian cinema. Fellini, Bertolucci, Pasolini. Directors who are unafraid of making bold, sweeping films that mix the serious with the bawdy. Love and Anarchy is set in a Roman bordello, as the naive Tonino commits himself to assassinating Mussolini - with the film set long before the war, evidently with zero success. In the process he falls for Tripolina, one of the prostitutes, whilst being encouraged by Salome, another. Could a man make a film about a naive would-be assassin hanging out in a whorehouse? It seems debatable. But in Wertmüller’s eyes this place is one big raucous family, and her female characters are exuberant and powerful. Cinema has a curious way of reflecting national traits. With her over-the-top, sometimes operatic direction, this is a film that seems to capture the craziness of Roman life, in much the same way as Fellini did. Italian cinema has a love-hate relationship with realism, allowing it to push narrative boundaries and characterisation to an extreme edge. Nothing feels particularly believable, but it is all relentlessly entertaining, and somewhere within the beating heart of the story is a fragrant political message.

 

alpha (w&d julia ducournau)

The critics have not been overly kind to Alpha. It is indeed, a messy film, so full of ideas and concepts that they seem to overflow. There’s a pandemic storyline, as society becomes gripped by a disease which turns people to crumbling stone. There’s a junkie storyline, as Amin, played by Tahar Rahim, struggles with his addiction. There’s a double timeline, with teenage Alpha and young Alpha living side by side within the film’s framework. Gradually we piece together that the pandemic scenes, with Alpha’s heroic mother, Golshifteh Farahani, sporting a different hairdo, happened in young Alpha’s past. There’s a coming of age storyline, as Alpha, (Mélissa Boros) fights for her independence and tries to reconcile with the family ghosts. There are loose strands featuring the anglo-french actors Finnegan Oldfield and Emma Mackey, which feel as though they might even have been included to keep the financiers happy. Finally, there are some great moments where the director explores her Berber heritage, a heritage from which Alpha feels alienated. The red wind whose myth permeates the film clearly has a saharan origin. So there is a lot going on, probably far too much and even more so than with Titane, one feels that the director might benefit from working with a screenwriter…. But none of this means that Alpha makes for anything less than a fascinating, visceral ride. As ever with Ducournau, there’s a vigour and energy to the filmmaking which propels the film over the course of its two hours, no matter how many highways and byways it goes down. It’s not perfect, but then who is?

 

brief encounter (w&d david lean, w. noël coward, anthony havelock-allan, ronald neame)

When the lights came up in Montevideo’s Cinemateca, there was more one person who could be seen unashamedly in tears. How can a black and white, subtitled British film made in 1945 continue to exert such an effect? The answer is twofold. On the one hand it’s simple. This is one of the classic cinematic Ur-Love Stories. The account of the doomed love affair of Dr Alec Harvey and Laura Jesson represents a transcendent vision of that thing called romantic love upon which so much of our western dreamlife is predicated. Their love is uncomplicated, unconsummated, and clear as mountain stream. It is a kind of dream we are born and bred to share and when we witness this framed within the rectangle of the cinema screen, it has a potency that real life, with all its complications, struggles to emulate. On the other, this is a result of delicious artistry. From Lean’s opening shot, as the camera initially focuses on Stanley Holloway flirting with the station cafe manageress, before panning to the protagonists, the film exudes a delicacy blended with high passion. We are spies on this couple’s intimacy. Coward’s script is a thing of joy, blending reserve with those moments when the reserve breaks and Howard declares, with an unbridled simplicity, that he loves Laura. The violence of love is laid bare, the way it creates great joy, but an equal measure of sorrow. Somehow Coward manages to squeeze in a reference to Keats, the prince of romantic poetry. This violence would, of course, have had a heightened resonance at the time of the film’s release, a moment when so many relationships would have flowered briefly only to be torn apart by war. Of course there is something that feels inimically British in the way that the characters wrestle to keep their passions under control, but at the same time the film makes one think of another great unconsummated cinematic love story, Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The yearning of love, also known as the tugging of the heartstrings, is a universal emotion. Lean and Coward’s encapsulation of these emotions, delivered in the flesh by the sublime performances of Howard and Johnson, reverberates across the decades.

 

romería (w&d carla simón, w. neus pipó simón)

Simón’s auto-ficción tale of a young woman getting to know her deceased father’s lost family and their drug-running secrets evolves gently, punctuated by the revelations Marina gleans along the way. It’s careful pacing leads towards an oneiric, staged finale, which shifts away from the steady naturalism of the rest of the film, a naturalism exacerbated by the frequent use of Marina’s, an aspiring filmmaker, camcorder shots. Even if there is an underwater sequence in the dream sequence which matches an earlier underwater sequence when Marina dives into the Atlantic waters off the coast of Vigo. This artful use of imagery helps to give the tale added depth. In a way it feels reminiscent of the work of Mark Jenkin, just as the rugged Galician coastline, which features prominently, echoes the rugged Cornish coastline. Both directors have carved out their niche on the edge of conventional cinema, allowing their personal aesthetic and themes to percolate into films which pay little more than lip-service to conventional narrative models. Marina’s journey is a slow, roundabout trip, featuring Galician grannies and heroin nights. It’s a film with capas that accompany the viewer as they follow the footsteps of Marina, who is in turn walking in the footsteps of her lost parents. 

nada (jean-patrick manchette tr. donald nicholson-smith)

Manchette’s tale is something of a political-policier potboiler. A group of anarchists kidnap a US diplomat and encounter a predictable fate. It’s pacy, pulpy and seems very much rooted in its time. To think that in the seventies politicians and businessmen were kidnapped or assassinated on a fairly routine basis in France, Spain Germany, Italy, the UK, USA. It must have made the countries on the other side of the iron curtain seem like oases of peace. That kind of terrorism has been scotched, seemingly, to such an extent that the instinctive response to a supposed assassination attempt (cf the USA) is to dismiss it as a false flag. Manchette mentions the Tupamaros, who also kidnapped a diplomat, this time British, but whose fate differed from those of his anti-heroes. That event was part of the other Cold War, the war of idealists against the military-business consortium. It was a war that was definitively lost, as we can see from the way in which the weapons industry now exerts an outsized influence on political action, just as much if not more so than in the seventies. The tragic, unheroic deaths of almost everyone involved in the kidnapping operation feels like cynical but truthful takedown of the thwarted dreams of an alternative society to the capitalist model. 

resurrección/ kuángyě shídài (w&d bi gan, w. zhai xiaohui)

When this film came out last year, I read some gushing reviews suggesting it was reinventing the art. In order to find out whether Bi Gan has indeed reinvented, or resurrected cinema, I came to pay my dues. What emerges is the work of a cineaste student let loose with a seemingly infinite budget. There are homages to Welles, Tarkovsky and the rest. There are set piece scenes which any cineaste would die to put together. What there isn’t is much of a story. In some ways the film’s scale seems akin to much modern Chinese cinema (Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, the panoramic vistas of Jia Zhang-Ki, etc). Would it be too much of a reach to suggest that this reflects a culture struggling to come to terms with its new-formed grandiose status? However, Zhang-Ki’s films are rooted in the actuality of Chinese development/ expansion. Whereas Bi Gan is reaching for something altogether more poetic and pretentious, an overview of the history of cinema itself. The absence of an anchor means that, no matter how impressive the imagery, the film feels as though it drifts through a calm sea, going nowhere in particular. 

how to win an information war (peter pomertantsev)

Arrived at Pomertantsev’s book about Sefton Delmer via reading Marias, who cites Delmer in his recondite spy novels. Pomertantsev talks through then way Delmer coordinated and was the creative urge behind the British propaganda campaign against the Nazis during WW2, mostly via the medium of radio. Delmer is a curious character, whose approach was amoral, Wellesian, instinctive, and possibly brilliant. The word ‘possibly’ is because the author seems so taken by his subject that it becomes hard to evaluate from the book how effective Delmer’s broadcasts were - at times, it’s hinted, they were even counter-productive. Pomertantsev connects Delmer’s work with the way in which information is manipulated in the 21st century. The upshot would appear to be that you have to fight fire with fire: the power of coordinated propaganda is so effective that the only way to fight back is by playing dirty, ignoring any arguments based on idealism. In a fucked-up world, this might be true. Then again, it might not. 

basta! (d. ugo ulive)

How often do you walk out of the cinema and say to yourself, what the fuck was I just watching? That’s my current state, having just seen the 22 minutes long Basta. People talk about shocking films, from Chien Angelou to Titane. I thought about Cronenberg, Park Chan Wook, but none of these hold a candle to Ulive’s assault on the senses. Filmed in Venezuela, it’s the most delirious, terrifying attack on big oil capitalism possible. Like the Military industrial’s own pornographic violence, there’s no coherence, no receivable discourse. When the bomb hits, you don’t get to think though the logic of its hitting, and this film, nearly fifty years after its making, has the same demonic power, albeit a power realised through art, the art of selecting the image, editing the image, adding sound, creating rhythm. In short, through the employment of the art of cinema. It’s completely and utterly hateful, revolting, obscene. And therein lies its secret. If ever a film chose to step out of the received ideas of what should be shown in a cinema, this is it. If you ever get the chance to watch it, do - but watch it somewhere where the sound is turned up, and you cannot look away or glance at your phone or go and get something from the fridge when it gets too much. 

(It turns out that Ugo Ulive, like myself, directed in El Galpon and for La Comedia. Jorge Blanco also had one play produced by La Comedia before he left Uruguay. It makes one wonder what might have been. These days in this country, the cinema and the theatre have almost no intercambio. It’s one thing or the other.)

los chicos y la calle (d carlos echeverría)

In 2001 Argentina and Uruguay suffered a brutal economic collapse. Kids that grew up in that era are sometimes called here, los chicos del pasto, the kids who ate grass. Made during this recession, Echeverría’s documentary looks at the street kids of Buenos Aires. It is orientated around a refuge, called CAINA, where the kids go for food, clothing and shelter, run by willing young men and women with clear social consciences. The doc has a Wiseman feel, albeit interrupted at times with interviews. The kids roam the streets near Retiro. The film captures the humanity behind their hard facade. No-one finds themselves living on the street without a story that explains how they got there. Kids that most would walk past or shy away from become people in their own right. The camera roams the streets with them, listens in on their stories, a testament to the trust the director and his crew managed to engender. Below the surface there lurk tales of sexual abuse and violence. It’s impossible not to contemplate what has happened to these lost children twenty five years on, now that those who have survived will be adults entering middle age. 

argie (w&d jorge blanco)

Cinema is a medium which is hostage to money. It’s the objective of every financed film to make the most of its budget to ensure the product meets certain aesthetic standards. The biggest crime is to look cheap. Even if a decade or so later, the aesthetic has moved on, ether as a result of fashion or technology, and by the time a film is twenty years old it almost invariably looks dated. Nevertheless, almost all films that make it to the mainstream are polished, to one degree or another. Unlike a novel, which can get away with the odd scraggy loose end, or Shakespeare, of whom this is also the case, cinema tends to be an unforgiving medium. If your film fails to meet a certain aesthetic standard, it won’t be taken seriously.

Which is perhaps why there seems to be so little space for the maverick within the industry. The filmmaker who is more concerned with what they want to say than how they say it. Cine povere, or Outsider Art. Argie is a great example of what we lose with this reductive filter. It’s not a perfect film. It’s rambunctious, messy, underdeveloped. There are several war scenes that border on the silly. The director, the Uruguayan Jorge Blanco, is also the lead actor. There’s an overwhelming sense of chaos, but that chaos is also energy. However, this is a film which could never have been made through conventional methods. Pablo is an Argentine exile in London at the time of the Falklands War who decides to take the battle to the natives. But he’s no terrorist, not even a soldier. He targets a woman he fancies, who also happens to fancy him. She’s a topless dancer in The Dartmouth Arms, straight out of the seventies early eighties, who also happens to be the daughter of a Spaniard who fled Franco. The Argentine and the topless dancer go on a pseudo Bonny and Clyde journey through the badlands of London, causing damage to no-one except themselves. It’s a farcical journey, summed up by Pablo taking out his violent frustration on a man who tries to pick up his girl, only to be told by her, as he’s beating him up, that the man is actually Irish.

There’s plenty of humour and pathos in Argie, but more than anything else it’s a completely valid political-cultural statement. The Argentine perspective on the war, at the time of the film’s making, had no voice within the UK. The back story of generals and repression and lost pride. The actuality of who the men who were fighting were. Blanco seeks to give them a voice, in a honkytonk style, maximising his improvised budget to conjure something quietly extraordinary. 

mars in aires (alexander lernet-holenia, tr. robert dassanowsky & john s. barrett)

Lernet-Holenia’s novel, the second of this year, takes place in the days at the start of the Second World War. A veteran Viennese soldier, Count Wallmoden, has no real inkling that war is about to break out. He becomes besotted by Cuba, a mysterious woman, a femme fatale. Just before he has an assignation with her, his company begins to march into Poland. The world is on the brink of war but Wallmoden is distraught he cannot meet up with Cuba. He is certain that the military manoeuvres will end shortly and this will all blow over. The account of the march into Poland is detailed and specific. It doesn’t have the feel of the start of a world war, and Wallmoden compares what is happening with the horrors of the First World War, which he fought in, and feels that it’s quite lightweight. Until he is almost killed as the battles intensify. It’s a fascinating account of a moment when the horrors that will be shortly unleashed are only just emerging from their chrysalis. The tale is also a ghost story. Cuba, Wallmoden is later told, has died. He later meets a woman in a deserted Polish mansion who has the same name. A ghost story in times of war feels even more  understandable or plausible. (One thinks of the seances in Gravity’s Rainbow and the fascination in the First World War.) Mars in Aires is a novel which on one level feels straightforward, but contains a concealed level of complexity, even danger. 

“However, there is no doubt that we – and how often! – for moments, for days, yes, sometimes even longer than that, are in completely different realms, even though we think we’re here, and we live a life there and do things about which we know nothing. But we do live it, that life, and perhaps it’s the real one.”

melancholia (w&d von trier)

If cinema, as occasionally noted, is a synthesis of multiple elements (screenwriting, acting, photography, music, art direction, editing etc), then the art of the director is to employ each of these elements to the nth degree. It might seem counterintuitive that Von Trier, who comes from a lo-fi school, which sought a return to a pared-back methodology, should end up excelling in every aspect of this directorial remit, but in Melancholia, we witness a seemingly effortless mastery of the medium.

Screenwriting - when discussing the quality of screenwriting, what is involved? Firstly the idea that the screenplay will introduce and discuss ideas that provoke thought, a condition so often neglected by the mainstream. Second that the narrative should take the viewer with it, should be involving. Thirdly, that the dialogue should be credible, even at its more recondite. So when Dunst’s character says that the earth is evil, in another film this line might feel trite or contrived. Whereas, in Melancholia, it feels not only credible, coming from the mouth of this character, but also resonant of the more complex ideas the film is raising. Cinema is not philosophy. It struggles to explore concepts with subtlety or depth. Von Trier appears to be investigating a Schopenhauer- ian or Manichean argument about the overblown importance of humanity, its relative insignificance within the immensity of the universe. Dunst character explores these ideas convincingly, brilliantly, in a way that allows us to understand the questions the film is posing. Should the world end, would it really be such a tragedy? What would be lost? It’s an existential, anti-renaissance line, which feels all too pertinent in this 21st christian century.

Acting - Acting is by definition, fakery. Someone pretends to be someone else. The question then becomes, how well do they do this? Do they still feel human? Or does the fakery feel contrived? Perhaps the greatest testament to the director’s skill is the performance of Kiefer Sutherland, an actor who sometimes seemed to relish the fakery, the exaggeration of acting for the camera. Here, as the hassled husband of Gainsbourg and Dunst’s brother-in-law his exasperation is completely convincing.

Photography - I was lucky enough to watch the film on a big screen. There can be few more imposing visions than the great planet Melancholia soaring over the horizon, at the same time beauty, monster and avenger. There is something of the formal composition of certain scenes that is reminiscent of Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad. Then, in the opening half of the film, Von Trier’s DOP, Manuel Alberto Claro, captures the nuances and energy of a wedding with all the brillo of the days of Dogma, a homage, in its way, to Festen.

Music - Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is used repeatedly throughout the film. Given the epic scale the film is looking to operate on, the choice feels just as apposite (and perhaps includes a nod and a wink) to Copolla’s uses of Wagner in Apocalypse Now.

Art Direction - someone (Simone Grau Roney) was doing something very clever indeed with the representation of the planet Melancholia, a second moon/ sun. The use of a simple piece of twisted wire as a messenger of salvation or doom is also extraordinary.

Editing - Editing is one of the least valued elements of the process of making cinema. You rarely get editors on the red carpet. Yet Molly Malene Stensgaard offers a masterclass. In the first half of the film, with its large cast, she ensures that the rhythm never drops as we flit from scene to scene, cutting at the perfect moment. In the second, which has only four characters, she ensures there is a rising sense of tension, propelling the film towards its glorious climax. 

the big nowhere (james elroy)

It’s so long ago since I read Elroy’s Underworld trilogy, which offered both a re-imagination and an examination of post-war US politics. One longs for either Elroy himself or another Elroy to analyse the Trumpian world with the same forensic discipline. Most history, as Marias observes, occurs in the shadows, and Elroy is a writer who is not afraid to walk in those shadows and take the reader with him. Perhaps because the trilogy felt so urgent, so necessary, I have resisted his crime novels. The Big Nowhere is the second of his LA Quartet, and whilst it doesn’t do so directly, it still flirts with politics, pulling up the skirts of the US establishment. Elroy writes with an urgency as he documents the way a crime investigation is railroaded by vested interests within the LAPD. There is no space for idealism or even honesty in this venal world. It’s a gripping, coruscating read, which gives a down-to-earth lowdown on what really makes the US tick. He is a writer blessed with a singular, scatty brilliance.

 

far from heaven (w&d todd haynes)

Todd Haynes achieves something complex in his Sirk homage. He bestows pathos on characters who at first seem laughable, even absurd. The film was released in 2002 and perhaps the lens through which an audience might watch the film has changed over the course of the last 25 years. Moore’s Cathy struggles to cope with her husband Frank’s gay infidelity,  The tone is melodramatic. Moore’s impeccably coiffed hair seems as much of a character as either of her children. Quaid’s Frank breaks down and weeps and then pinballs around like an archetypal repressed North American bourgeois. Everything is so on point that it feels like a pastiche, as indeed it is. It’s impossible not to laugh at these characters and their cliched fifties behaviour. Surely this is a world that we have left behind? Dennis Haysbert’s Raymond is the down-to-earth antidote to all this. A man whose solid decency transcends the boundaries of race and class. No wonder Cathy falls for him. All the same, this world and its characters feel like a caricature. Then something remarkable happens, in large part through the performances of Moore and Haysbert. The characters seem to slip the pastiche net. Their emotional distress touches us. The film becomes a film about love. its power and its limitations. These emotions are, of course, timeless.

Twenty five years later, even those elements of the film that seem wilfully contrived suddenly feel far more plausible. Conservatism is back. Prejudice is back. The closet is back. It seems like we’re slipping back into the absurd, divided world of the fifties. 

la femme d’ à côté (d. françois truffaut, w suzanne schiffman, jean aurel)

Truffaut’s melodrama feels slightly misconceived. Depardieu and Ardant are former lovers. She just happens to move in right across the street from him. Both are slightly nuts but keep it under control with their respective sane partners. However, when they inevitably reconnect, it’s a tinder box. Both veer towards a shared madness, an amour fou. The charisma of the two leads almost pulls it off, but as the film veers more and more towards melodrama, it flirts with the ridiculous. At one point Ardant’s husband says that he’s not a jealous man, “I’m not a Spanish husband”, (something the subtitles struggled to translate), but Depardieu and Ardant both have a Lorca-esque streak to them (she actually comes from the south, her children’s book editor is informed). One wonders what someone like Almodovar might have made of this tale. The tension between a Gallic cool and a Mediterranean excess doesn’t quite come off, as it did in a film like L’Apartment, for example, or even Pierrot Le Fou. It’s an interesting study in how a remarkable director can slightly misfire, no matter how enticing the ingredients, actors and premise. 

the voice of hind rajab (w&d kaouther ben hania)

If we accept that this thing we call life has always been a delicate balance between civilisation and barbarism. That at any moment the barbarians might rear their ugly heads and ignore the established rules of civilisation, then we also tend to believe, from the standpoint of the post-war liberal order, (which gave birth to the state of Israel), that this won’t happen here, or be perpetrated by those we consider our allies. Included in that idea of civilisation is that children should not become the victims of warfare. Wilfully killing children is the kind of thing the barbarians do. Be they the Nazis or the Mongols or any of the other peoples who codes of warfare pay no heed to our idea of civilisation. When the mass murder of civilians occurs, this is what we have come to term a genocide. There are many Israeli politicians who openly advocate for the eradication of the Gazan population. Their rhetoric has fuelled the acts of barbarism which we have witnessed, whether we want to or not, over the course of the past three years.

Hind Rajab was another of the victims of this barbarism. And the weapons which our ‘civilised’ societies have provided. This film pays homage to her suffering. It does so intelligently by not attempting to take us into a fictional Gaza which can never be recreated, rather recreating the events during the hours Hind Rajab was being killed from the point of view of the Red Cross workers in the West Bank, who are trying and failing to save her. Just as we, those who are opposed to the killing of children, try and fail. The Red Cross workers are impotent. They betray one of the core credos of modern filmmaking which is that the protagonists have to be active. They cannot be anything but passive bystanders as they witness the crime occur in real time. We are also passive bystanders, unable to roll back time, make the world see sense, save a child who is begging for her life. It is a terrible thing to witness but the action of witnessing which the filmmakers demand of the audience, the passive, impotent audience, is in some ways a homage to Hind Rajab’s short life and cruel death.

No-one can be a saviour or a superhero in the face of institutionalised barbarism. 

chikamatsu monogatari/ the crucified lovers (w&d kenji mizoguchi, w. monzaemon chikamatsu, matsutarō kawaguchi)

Mizoguchi conjures a subtle tale of tragic love which is also a vivid portrayal of a society where privacy is as wafer thin as the sliding paper walls of the houses the characters inhabit. It’s a world of secret passions and strict societal codes. There is endemic to the tale a severe critique of a wealth-driven culture (and by implication capitalism?). The only real villain is the business owner, Ishun, who wants to cheat on his wife and reacts with no mercy when his loyal and dedicated employee, Mohei, uses his signature to seek a loan of five silver marks for Ishun’s wife, Osan. This precipitates a series of increasingly unfortunate chapters which result in Mohei and Osan fleeing the city together. Osan is increasingly drawn to Mohei, who resists her, until the moment when he reveals his love for her. The story becomes a version of Romeo and Juliet, as the lovers commitment to each other presages their execution by crucifixion for adultery. The story unfolds with a parallel sense of jeopardy and redemptive love. All the characters seem trapped by a social code that fails to recognise the human nature of love. Even Ishun falls prey to this, and is ruined.

At the same time, this is a story of literal sliding doors, as the paper walls of the claustrophobic living quarters make for the inevitable revelation of secret passions and betrayals. Mizoguchi’s camera seems to glide through these spaces, a spy in the house of love. 

nuestra tierra (w&d lucrecia martel, w maría alché)

Martel deviates into doc. Nuestra Tierra is a rangy documentary which looks, as the title suggests, at the issue of the land, who owns it, who has rights. The location is Tucuman, the northern province of Argentina. Northern Argentina has a far larger native or indigenous population than other parts of the country. One of the notable aspects of Martel’s documentary is the way it makes explicit how little representation this element of society has within the general Argentine audio-visual world. The film revolves around a dispute over land rights in a valley which the indigenous Chuschagasta population claim they have always inhabited, which several white families now claim ownership of. This lead to a clash between the local indigenous population and three men of caucasian descent which ended with shots being fired and one indigenous man dying. The film is loosely weaved around the subsequent court case, brought by the relatives of the dead men. There was one pointed moment in the cinema when an academic opines that there are no official rastros (traces) of Chuschagasta in the valley. Rastros can also mean features, and Martel juxtaposes the academic’s words with the faces of the Chuschagasta who are present at the trial. The irony of the academic’s negationist argument was not lost on the Cinemateca audience.

The film seeks to both relate the dramatic events of the confrontation, of which there is grainy footage, and also to recount the stories of many of the inhabitants of the valley. It is an object lesson in a non-netflix method of storytelling. It resists sensationalism, preferring to dwell on the complex history of the region and its inhabitants, shifting from courtroom drama to archeological/ sociological study. There is no dominant central character. The viewer is encouraged to immerse themselves in this valley, to walk through its ravines, to gaze at the wild horses, to listen to the memories of the elders. In so doing, Martel creates an important document about discrimination and the inequities of Argentine society.