mother father sister brother (w&d jarmusch)

Jarmusch is a master of style. Cinema is a visual medium (natch) - nevertheless those artists who embrace their aesthetic identity tend, perhaps surprisingly, to be pushed to the margins. The list of directors who are valued for style as much as content is short. Parajanov, Greenaway to name a couple. Jarmusch has long been a master of the acerbic, stripped back narrative, which allied to his aesthetic charms can produce masterpieces. Down By Law, Dead Man, Night on Earth and so on and so forth. He is also one of the few directors who can use the portmanteau format effectively (Coffee and Cigarettes, Night on Earth). Mother Father Sister Brother goes back to this format. Three extended shorts glued together to make a whole movie. There are recurring tropes - skateboarders, water, and (to an Englishman the slightly annoying) riff on the phrase ‘Bob’s Your Uncle’. The three pieces are also showcases for his cast, a mix of the famous and the less-well-known. The theme is family. In the first two pieces, the leitmotif is discomfort, and Jarmusch’s employment of the awkward silence is impeccable. The final piece, Sister Brother, is the only one which depicts a loving family relationship. The overall vibe is arch, even mannered, perhaps offset by the siblings’ evident affection. The film falls somewhere between Chekhovian versus Style-Over-Content, dependent on the viewer’s predilections and, presumably, personal family condition.

Nb - The second short, featuring a fearsome Charlotte Rampling, takes place in Dublin. It feels as though it was written to take place in London, and got switched for tax breaks? Jarmusch’s engagement with British culture, which features the aforementioned Bob’s Your Uncle riff, also has Rampling, an English doyenne waxing lyrical about PG Tips. One wonders of this is a deliberate choice, ie an act of irony, or a strange misrepresentation. In which case, did no one have the courage to tell the director that there is no way that Rampling’s elegant character would be serving PG Tips, given her refined gastronomic tastes? It’s one of those details which makes the second short feel slightly off-kilter, an essay that doesn’t quite square with its material.

aparajito (w&d satyajit ray)

The middle chapter in the Pather Panchali trilogy, Aparajito is a sensitive coming of age story, as Apu moves firstly from Benares to the countryside, following the death of his father, and then from the countryside to Calcutta, where he studies whilst his mother pines for him back in the country. The three chapters in themselves allow Ray to depict three different elements of Indian culture. The devotion and poverty of the Ganges town, the more lyrical ballad of the countryside, (albeit a peace interrupted by the sound of the train on the horizon), and lastly city life. Even if Apu’s Calcutta seems less frenetic that its modern day incarnation. These transitions help to paint a picture not just of a young man growing up, but also of an entire society, its possibilities, its limitations, its aspirations. 

the disappearing act (maria stepanova, tr sasha dugdale)

Stepanova’s novella can be read in the course of a single day. It recounts the cute tale of an exiled female novelist who nearly joins the circus. A dream of so many. At the edge of the novella lurks the spectre of Putin and Ukraine. But they are kept on the edges, as the mercurial narrator tiptoes through a chaotic twenty four hours, seeking to escape fame and fortune, dreaming of another life. 

wizard of the kremlin (w&d olivier assayas, w. emmanuel carrère)

Assayas is a prolific filmmaker with the rangy curiosity that goes with this desire to create. As such, this pivot to big-budget geo-political drama is perhaps not quite so surprising. This is a film about the world as it is, if not today, then at least yesterday. Adapted from a novel by Giuliano da Empoli, the film describes Putin’s rise to power, supposedly aided and abetted by the maverick guru, Vadim Baranov, modelled, so wiki tells me, on Vladislav Surkov. Baranov is a onetime theatre director and TV producer, whose communication skills facilitate Putin’s rise, and who later helps shape his bellicose foreign policy, although this is somewhat glossed over. As a device to enter Putin’s world it might work, although the script seems to struggle with that old screenwriting chestnut, the passive protagonist, because everything Baranov does is overshadowed by the actions of his two bosses, first Berezovksky and then Putin. Towards the final third of a long film Baranov appears to start to take matters more into his own hands, but then the film runs up against the paradox that its ostensibly sympathetic central character, played with a wan intelligence by Dano, is just as psychopathic as Putin, as his participation in the annexation of Crimea and the Donbas implies. 

The film seeks to cram twenty five years of history into its two and a half hours. For the world of nineties russia, the novels of Pelevin or Sorokin might offer a more intriguing entry point. There will be several books on Putin’s rise - Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People gives a forensic account which a film cannot hope to emulate. One also wonders if Assayas might have been influenced by the work of Kirill Serebrennikov. The Wizard of the Kremlin is a valiant stab at documenting contemporary history within a dramatic format, but it also sometimes feels as though the screenwriters may have been biting off more than they could chew. 

to lose a war (jon lee anderson)

Anderson’s prose is elegant and efficient. Unlike TV journalists, he’s always after the story that hides behind the headlines. It’s old school reporting. He finds people whose voices would never normally be heard. He also hangs in there. This book is a compilation of nearly thirty years of reporting on Afghanistan, from the departure of the Russians to the departure of the North Americans. He recognises the patterns, not least because the Afghanis themselves repeatedly spell this out to him. This isn’t a territory that can be conquered. It still consists of warring tribes and factions whose loyalties are willing to shift to whoever will best serve them, be that Russia, NATO, the US or the Taliban. Out of all this emerges the hubris of empirical overreach. Even as the US and NATO are installing themselves in Kabul, ‘modernising’ the city, Anderson is aware that out there in the plains, deserts and mountains, there are local people biding their time, waiting for the moment when the imperial mission will crumble. Part of the reason he’s so aware is that, unlike most reporters, he has actually gone beyond the capital and spoken to ordinary people. With the current flirtation with the idea of invading Iran, there is no more timely book for the decision-makers in Washington to be reading, even if one questions whether many of them would have the intellectual capacity to read and engage with Anderson’s book. 

ljósbrot / when the light breaks (w&d rúnar rúnarsson)

My friend Mr Plester should see this film, as it has a scene of two people eating hotdogs in Reykjavik. Apart from that, When The Lights Breaks could be described as a tender study of grief. A young man, Diddi, is killed in a car crash.  He was about to tell his girlfriend that he was leaving her for Una, played by Elín Hall. Her Bowie-esque disposition (cerca Man Who Fell to Earth) holds the film together with an assured performance that shows the nuanced complexities of both revealing and hiding your feelings at the same time. When the girlfriend arrives, Una struggles to hide her secret. Her curious, near-androgynous look masks her vulnerability. She’s both hyper-human and a-human at the same time. In a film blessed with sympathetic performances, hers stands apart; she flies and the rest follow, like geese, in her wake.

 

apocalypse now (w&d coppola, john milius, michael herr)

Things that strike one on rewatching:

Coppola’s editorial boldness. The superimposition of faces over images. The management of rhythm. It’s a long film but it never feels long.

The American nightmare. Am also reading John Lee Anderson’s book on Afghanistan at the moment. It’s astonishing, perhaps criminal, how the same trope recurs over and again. The imperial overreach. The dystopia. The chronicle of a failure foretold. But whereas North American cineastes grappled with Vietnam, the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns have never had their Apocalypse Nows or Deer Hunters. Perhaps the decline of an empire goes hand in hand with the failing capacity for self-awareness. 

unfinished business (michael bracewell)

Bracewell’s novel is reminiscent of Szalay’s London and the South East. Middle aged man losing his way after a life spent in offices. After reading Souvenir, with its playful non-fiction elements, Unfinished Business feels less adventurous in its approach to a London that has been loved and lost. There’s a plethora of characters who gravitate around the hapless narrator, including his ex-wife and in-laws and daughter. Bracewell plays with time as we skip in and out of the present. At one point he writes of the narrator: “To walk through London, he always felt, was to walk through the many chapters of his unwritten autobiography.” The novel is perhaps at its sharpest when it reveals the way in which our personal histories become inscribed in the bricks and mortar of the city.