enjo (conflagración) (w&d kon ichikawa w. keiji hasebe, yukio mishima)

Icihkawa’s adaptation of Mishima’s novel is effortlessly stylish and beautifully shot in languid black and white. It tells the story of Mizoguchi, a Buddhist monk with a stammer whose purity causes problems for his monastery, an institution which has become dissolute, making money out of tourism, with the head monk having a lover and fathering a child. Mizoguchi is known as the son of a devout monk who committed suicide. The film proceeds elegantly to expound a story which leads to the inevitable conflagration of the title. Whilst the storytelling isn’t always as clear as it might be, in a telltale sign of being an adaptation, the film’s visual rigour would appear to reflect Mizoguchi’s fervour which contends with the presence of the post-war occupying US forces which are contributing to the corruption of the buddhist doctrine. This critique of the US influence on Japanese post-war culture comes almost as a side-note, though there are evident metaphorical implications to Mizoguchi’s ultimate act of arson. 

nazarín (w&d buñuel, w julio alejandro)

Mexican Buñuel season, Cinemateca 5/6

Nazarín tells the story of a priest who is too virtuous for his own good. Adapted from a Galdós story, it’s a lumpy film, opening with a long sequence in the small community where the priest is based, before expanding in the second half into rural Mexico, as the priest is compelled to flee, followed by two devoted women who revere him. The opening half hour feels dialogue heavy and theatrical. The film struggles to catch fire, (until it does), and it’s only when the priest sets out on his odyssey that the film and the narrative gather pace. There is an obvious critique of the Catholic church, with the priest’s goodness proving to be his undoing (perhaps reminiscent of Greene’s The Power and the Glory), but more than anything the film offers Buñuel a chance to explore and reveal a deeper Mexico, a Mexico far from the big cities. His depiction of the campesinos and the pueblos is impressively filmed by DP Gabriel Figueroa, and this world, with its rogues and dwarfs is beautifully brought to life. The paradoxical majesty of the Hispanic architecture juxtaposed with poverty and struggle and the smallness of man in the face of the epic countryside, is captured as the priest’s calvary leads him and his followers towards a bitter end. The films of Reygadas are second cousins to Buñuel’s vision in Nazarín. 

lettre de sibérie (d. chris marker)

In the end I got to Letter to Siberia, as it seems Cinemateca discovered the print or restored it or something. It’s highly playful Marker, with jokes and cartoons and a beautifully executed version of the Kuleshov effect. The film is a voyage through Siberia as revealed from found footage. It takes us irreverently through the traditions, history, palaeontology and architecture of a region which is larger than the USA and scarcely known. A place where wooly mammoths can emerge whole from the permafrost, where the reindeer is source of nutrition, transport and much more. The film tells us a lot about Siberia, but it tells us just as much about the possibilities of the documentary, a medium that so often feels po-faced and awash with its own seriousness. We might detect the influence of Marker in the work of Varda, Herzog, Adam Curtis and Mariano Llinás, to name some whose use of the documentary seeks to go beyond the talking heads of pseudo authenticity.

our man in havana [greene]

This was the third Greene novel I read in 2017. I read Our Man in Havana in Havana itself, hidden away in a windowless room on the edge of Havana Vieja, a block away from the Malecon. The Havana Greene describes is pre-revolutionary, although there were rebels in the hills and there’s an unspoken pressure on civil society, which is represented by the figure of the Mephistophelean police chief Captain Segura, who apparently has a cigarette case made out of human skin. Segura is, nevertheless, one of the less malicious antagonists the protagonist, Jim Wormwold faces. He’s a sly, intelligent man, whose evil traits are rooted in an understanding that within Cuban society, there’s no room for sentiment. And it feels as though Greene traces an echo of this in the way that British society functions. Wormwold is singled out as a suitable candidate to represent the British Secret Services in Havana, no matter the personal consequences for him or his family. His task is to stay alive and do his best not to cause too many needless deaths. 

There’s a lightness to the tone of Our Man… which makes it a breezy, amusing read. Greene sends up the British security services, with Wormwold an admirable anti-Bond, a little man who runs a vacuum cleaner shop, whose main preoccupation is keeping his teenage daughter happy. The novel is at once a portrayal of Cuban life, seen through the eyes of an ex-pat, and a critique of Britain’s post-imperial ambitions as it seeks to punch above its weight. Wormwold’s fleecing of the civil service he has been seconded to is admirable. It’s fascinating to see the way in which brand Bond has become a kind of flagship for Britain over the course of the past fifty years; a cruel, unthinking kind of Britishness which has its flair but is ultimately pretentious nonsense. Whereas Greene’s protagonist is a homespun anti-hero in the tradition of Jerome K Jerome or Sterne. 

As for the portrayal of Havana: the streets Wormwood treads and the bars he visits are still there, still recognisable in their Caribbean chaos, although he might well be saddened by the degree to which the city has fallen into decline, following nigh on 60 years of the US blockade. The wealth that once encouraged foreigners to set up shop and sell vacuum cleaners has long gone.

Potential site of Jim Wormwold's Shop/ Home in Calle Lamparilla, Havana

the guide [r.k.narayan]

Last year I went to see a fairly disastrous Messiah play at the National Theatre. The premise was that people are so desperate for salvation that they will willingly adopt anyone who they see as a prophet, whether he's real or not. The play ended up collapsing under the weight of its  own idea, because the danger of the false prophet narrative syndrome is that you never get under the skin of the prophet: the narrative is about his or her effect, rather than who they really are and how they came to inhabit the role that has been thrust upon them.

A writer such as Dostoyevsky instinctively understood this and Narayan follows in Dostoyevsky's footsteps with this precise novel about a man who unwittingly finds himself revered as a guru after being released from prison. The fact that we know he has come out of prison ensures that the mystery of his origins is present from the beginning. Narayan's narrative is then divided between the prophet's gradual acceptance of his role and the telling of his fascinating backstory. Raju was born the son of a poor shopkeeper and his fall from grace is as much a result of his intelligence as his foolishness. It's his intelligence that impels him not only to want something more from his life than his parents achieved, but also to obtain it. His downfall comes when, overwhelmed by a catastrophic fit of passion, he abandons his intelligence. This same intelligence would appear to be what the 'people' recognise in him when they adopt him as a swami, or a holy man, and in a way they might be right, even though he is convinced they are not. 

Narayan conveys his tale in a fluid, pacey prose. The book explores the fine line between initiative and corruption as well as the seemingly impossible task of rising through India's class system, or at least that of the fifties. The plot remains fresh and surprising, with no shortage of twists and turns. Like Onetti, Narayan captured his country through the prism of a fictional town, Malgudi, a fictional space which allows for all of India to be contained within its nutshell boundaries. 

les amants (d. louis malle, w. malle & de vilmorin)

A man wandered to the front before the screening of Les Amants at NFT2 and mentioned that the cut we were about to see was the censored British version, not the uncensored French. He then said he was sure that this wouldn't affect our enjoyment, and assured us that the film would be as pleasurable as the wonderful weather outside. This was probably not a polite dig at the kind of lunatics who choose to watch a black and white subtitled fifties film on the first truly beautiful day of the year, but if it had been it would have been justifiable. I had my own reasons for retreating to the sanctuary of the cinema: when the world is on your shoulders, there's nowhere better to escape to, beyond the range of mobile phones or the diversions of one's own brain.

Truffaut liked Les Amants, but said it wasn't a masterpiece. I'd heard of the film but as I watched it I didn't really get it. The beautiful Jeanne Moreau is bored with her husband, a Dijon newspaper man. She makes regular trips to Paris where she stays with her socialite friend, Maggie, and conducts an affair with the blandly elegant Spanish polo player, Raoul Flores. Her husband grows suspicious and insists she invites Maggie and Raoul to Dijon for supper. Driving back home, she breaks down, and is picked up by a humorous young man, Bernard, played with a hint of modernity by Jean-Marc Bory. Bernard drives her home, her husband insists on him joining the quartet for supper, which is a desultory affair, everyone goes to bed, planning to wake at four to go fishing. Moreau escapes the attentions of firstly her husband then Raoul, before wandering out into the night air where Bernard jumps her. They have passionate sex, declare eternal love, and drive off just as the others are getting ready for the dawn fishing expedition.

It's only worth summarising the plot in such detail to demonstrate that there isn't that much of a plot. There's clearly something Flaubertian about Moreau's character (named, funnily enough, Jeanne), on whom no moral judgement is passed at any point. However, there's not enough there to explain why, as I later learnt, people queued round the block to see the film when it first came out in Paris, or indeed why the film had been censored by the British to such an extent that it was worth mentioning before the film screened.

Its at times like these that the NFT notes come in handy. The missing scene was one which, whilst not quite showing it, implied that Bernand had had the good grace to perform cunnilingus on Jeanne, which helps to explain why she was quite so ready to hop into his 2CV and drive off to start a new life with him. It also explains why the British Board of Film Censors had little option but to save the British public from the side-effects of this French perversion, as well as explaining the film's attraction to French men, and women, when it first came out. However, without this revelatory moment, the first time, apparently, it had been performed on a cinema screen (or implied, because, so the notes tell us, Bertrand glided down Jeanne's body before disappearing from shot), the full effect of the film is kind of lost. Obviously the main point for Malle and Moreau (who were lovers at the time the film was made) was to push the boundaries, and embrace realism in all its erotic as well as psychological possibilities. Once the British censor reached for his scissors, (let's assume they're a he), the full potency of their endeavour was somewhat undermined.

I'm not sure if, even had the relevant scene been present, it would have altered my perception of the film. Its quest for realism has been left behind in the decades that have passed. It may well be that Les Amants helped open the door to the sixties, but once the door was open the horse well and truly bolted. Nevertheless, it's worth watching to see Moreau give her remarkable performance as a woman in search of meaning in a life which appears to have bequeathed her none. The echoes of Madame Bovray are strong, and although the film's narrative does not do her character's story justice, her performance undoubtably does.