l’avventura (w&d antonioni, w. guerra, elio bartolini)

L’Avventura hinges on a brilliant moment of melodrama, which is also something so down to earth that the audience can readily connect with it, in spite of the fact that this is a film about wealthy socialites. A group of loose friends go on a day trip to an island in a yacht. One of their party, Ana, is in a troubled relationship with her fiancé, and disappears off the face of the earth. The group search the rocky, uninhabited island but Ana persists in her vanishing. Later there are reports of another boat in the area, and then reports of her having been seen on the Sicilian mainland. Her fiancé and friend, Sandro and Claudia, go in search of her, but there are tensions between them, which leads to the revelation of a secret which might explain Ana’s disappearance.

This story, which is echoed at the start of La Notte, is direct and straightforward in a film where so much is opaque and confusing. It gives a spine to the film’s 144 minute narrative, even if the second half of the film struggles to maintain the dramatic tension as the focus shifts to Sandro and Claudia’s relationship. As much as anything else, Antonioni is a master of mood. Scenes unfold gradually, allowing the tensions and conflicts to reveal themselves without ever needing to be underlined. The humorous character is later revealed to be heartless, the charmer is stripped bare by the end. There is a preoccupation with what we might now call toxic masculinity, but this is always crafted, never bludgeoned. This leads to the creation of what the textbooks might describe as 3-D characters, albeit the kind of 3-D characters that Anglo-Saxon moviemaking tends to shy away from: complex characters struggling with the simpler things of life like desire, faithfulness, the bricks and mortar of the (post-)Christian societies we inhabit. 

la tregua (w. mario benedetti)

Benedetti is venerated as one of the finest Uruguayan writers. He used to drink coffee in Cafe Brasileiro, one block away from where I live. At one table would be Galeano scribbling away, in another Benedetti. Many years ago I read some of his short stories and enjoyed them. Therefore La Tregua, his most famous novel, came as something of a shock, in terms of its banality, its petty sexist viewpoint, its dogged one-dimensionality. The novel is presented as a diary, kept by the narrator, Martín Santomé, as he approaches retirement, aged 50. The narrator’s wife died many years ago, he has patchy relationships with his three children, and he’s scared of growing old. Then he falls in love and begins an affair with Laura Avellaneda, a winsome underling in the office. She’s half his age, and at first he comments that he doesn’t find her terribly attractive, but gradually love finds a way and Santomé starts to dream of a contented retirement, pottering around going for coffee and the cinema, with Laura by his side. The only thing that disturbs this reverie is the occasional bout of jealousy brought on by Santomé’s awareness of the age gap, and the news the his youngest son is gay, something that fills him with disgust. One searches for moments when the voice of the narrator and the voice of the author might diverge, suggesting a sly commentary on the author’s part regarding his protagonist’s staid, questionable attitudes, but increasingly it feels as though this search is in vain. In the end it feels as though La Tregua merely captures the most mundane, grey uninspiring aspects of Uruguayan culture, a land of the prematurely aged, the quietly lascivious, the European rump ensconced in a strange unwieldy continent whose origins provoke little curiosity, whose blessings mostly revolve around coffee.

the unsent letter (d. mikhail kalatozov, w. grigoriy koltunov, valeri osipov, viktor rozov)

As regular readers to this column (?!?) might realise, the writer is somewhat beguiled by the achievements of Soviet cinema. One aspect of cinema is that it has little option but to function within the parameters of the socio-political structure it inhabits. Because cinema makers on the whole need money. What emerges in Kalatozov’s work is perhaps a prioritisation of technique and aesthetic over content. Content is dangerous, it can get the filmmaker into trouble. Technique, on the other hand, in particular in cinema, a new art with fervent Bolshevik roots, permits an innovative freedom. With his crossfades and his heightened art direction, Kalatozov exercises this freedom with remarkable panache. The narrative of The Unsent Letter is straightforward. Four geologists are sent to the Siberian taiga to discover diamonds, which will be a key development in the industrialisation of the Soviet republic. After much fruitless searching and a certain amount of Chekhovian angst (one of the geologists, Andrey is engaged to another, Tanya, but a third, Sergey, develops a smouldering passion for Tanya), they do indeed discover the diamonds, charting the location. Mission accomplished, they prepare their two boats to head back downriver. However, the night of their departure, a terrifying forest fire strikes. The boats are lost, Sergey dies, and the remaining trio have to make their way out by foot. Planes fly overhead but can’t see them for the smoke. The radio packs up. Andey is wounded and cannot walk. A seemingly innocuous tale becomes darker and darker. It turns into a survival story (pace The Revenant). Who will live, who will perish? Given the prosaic nature of the narrative, it’s perhaps hard to see how the film can sustain itself over the course of the closing hour. If this was Hollywood, the cliches would be coming thick and fast. But Kalatozov pulls it off. This is deeply immersive cinema. The lingering smoke, the Siberian marshes, the onset of Winter snow, are all realised with a cinematic flair which captivates the viewer. The camera makes us the other party in this journey, albeit from the safety of our cinema seats. We urge the three characters to survive and mourn those who don’t. 

Clearly there’s a hard-fought propaganda element to all this. The struggle of the Soviet peoples etcetera. The dream-montage which shows the development of the region has, to 21st century eyes, a dystopian air, pure nature subsumed by industry. Nevertheless, the pure skill of the filmmaking succeeds in ensuring that the human story, that of the heroic instinct to survival, supersedes any political preconceptions the viewer brings to the screen. The Unsent Letter is as gripping a film as one could imagine, which ranks alongside films like The Wages of Fear, Duel or Alien to reveal cinema’s capacity to immerse the viewer in a terrifying reality. 

the bad sleep well (w&d kurosowa, w. hideo oguni, eijirô hisaita, ryûzô kikushima, shinobu hashimoto)

Kurosowa’s modern day take on Hamlet is in stark contrast to his other Shakespeare versions. Any film that opens with a twenty minute wedding set piece can hardly be called pared down, but in contrast to Ran and Throne of Blood, this is a sober vision of Shakespeare, with Nishi, his Hamlet, a superbly tailored, charismatic protagonist. (As an aside, the tailoring in the film captures the eye just as much as it does with the more flamboyant period films. Kurosowa’s eye for detail is always both exquisite and to the film’s benefit.) There’s a brooding confidence in this opening. We are introduced to a large cast, located in a complex plot. It’s too much for the viewer to take on board; nevertheless details - the drunken brother-in-law, the second wedding cake, the crippled bride - leap out. As the film unfolds, everything we have seen begins to makes increasing sense. The opening is a puzzle which the film will resolve. Nowadays, there’s a phobia of losing the audience in the first ten minutes, which prohibits this type of approach, (reminiscent of The Deer Hunter), but Kurosowa reveals how effective it can be. 

As the film takes shape, the connections to the source material start to become apparent. This is a film about corruption and families, which feels just as relevant as ever. The Shakespearian element maps onto 1950s Japanese politics, not to mention 21st C USA politics. Kurosowa’s Nishi-Hamlet is an unashamed hero, the doubts articulated by Hamlet himself are kept at bay. The Japanese director’s fascination is focused on the way he exercises his revenge for his father’s death, infiltrating himself into the confidence of the company boss by marrying his daughter and making himself indispensable in the workplace. The more brilliant his strategy, the more terrible his eventual fate. The Bad Sleep Well is a jaunty 140 minutes, which never drag, a kind of vertical insertion into the closed world of post-war Japanese power which feels like a hybrid of The West Wing and The Sweet Smell of Success. 

la dolce vita (w&d federico fellini; w. ennio flaiano, tullio pinelli, brunello rondi, pier paolo pasolini)

The fascinating thing about watching unarguable classics comes in part from observing the way in which the director frequently approaches his or her film with no regard for the conventions of storytelling. Dolce Vita is a collection of bravura sequences rather than any kind of coherent, identifiable narrative. There’s the helicopter sequence, the miracles sequence, the Ekberg sequence, the aristocrats sequence etcetera. Each sequence could act as an extended short on its own. Fellini isn’t interested in telling a story in the conventional understanding of that term, he’s interested in creating a world. The brilliant world he creates, that of a paparazzi journalist in good-time Rome, is evident enough, but the ‘why’ and the ‘what’ are more complex. The movie is in effect a kind of prose poem focussed on the dissolute life of the charming Mastroianni. No-one quite exudes sophisticated hedonism like Mastroianni and he’s so charismatic that you can buy the idea that this is actually the perfect way to live. Yet as the film unfolds, the cracks begin to appear. His night with Ekberg is charming but converts him into a dogsbody, fetching milk for a stray cat. His relationship with his father is distant and less fulfilling than it should be. The one time he comes clean and declares an emotional attachment, the object of that declaration mocks him. He becomes increasingly misogynistic. The final scene is protracted, gratuitous, the tedious fag-end of a party which has gone on for far too long. Mastroianni is dressed like a roué. He has become abusive. No woman in the audience is going to like him anymore. His is the rake’s progress. Clearly there’s something in Fellini’s own psychodrama playing out here, which would require a more extensive knowledge of the context of the film within the director’s oeuvre. It feels as though it’s on the border of what is called in Montevideo ‘auto-ficcion’ which might just be the film’s skill. What is perhaps more curious is the way in which the film seems to wilfully seek to tire the viewer out. Yet another character says: ‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen the dawn”, something which we have witnessed several times in the course of three hours, something which is an elemental part of Marcello’s disrupted rhythms. It’s as though the filmmaker wants us to realise not just the beauty and bright lights of the world that Marcello inhabits, but also the erosive, draining impact of this lifestyle. He wants you to stumble out of the cinema, stunned, ready for your bed, never wanting to go out on the town again.  

à bout de souffle (d godard, w truffaut)

Who would have thought I had never actually seen Breathless in its entirety? Clips galore, a million posters or stills on bedroom walls, Belmondo and Seberg, as iconic as Bogart and Bergman, Godard’s vainglorious ambition realised. Perhaps even more so, as Bogart gradually fades into the cinematic palaeolithic age. Who has stepped into the breach to follow Seberg and Belmondo? Or has romantic cool been killed off, once and for all? Answers on a postcard.

My friend, Jason, had stills from À Bout de Souffle on his study wall. (We had individual studies where I went to school, that was how it was.) If Godard understood one thing that Anglo-Saxon filmmakers didn’t, until then, it was the seductive power of the image, cinema’s secret weapon, a weapon whose potency can still elevate cinema above and beyond the Dickensian nouvel vague of the boxset series. The irony being that once they cottoned on, every Anglo-Saxon film school, and film school student, began to follow in Godard’s footsteps, so that the image has now acquired, within the arcane corners of subsidised cinema, the breeding ground for the mainstream, an almost religious devotion. As a result delivering films which are a collection of moments, like misshaped pearls strung together on a string, each one struggling for transcendence, rarely coming together to form a collective whole.

Or perhaps Tarkovsky is to blame. Still, the experience of watching a film that one has imagined already watched, but one hasn’t actually seen, is disconcerting. Every moment a predictable surprise. What I didn’t expect, perhaps, was the amorality of Belmondo’s anti-hero. He’s an unreconstructed bastard and he’s proud of it. Populist existentialism. This is one aspect of Hazanavicius’ film, Redoubtable, which feels spot-on, as the commoners approach his Godard and ask when he’s going to start making entertaining movies again, like À Bout De Souffle. The film exudes a rip-it-up delight, which goes hand-in-hand with the slapstick violence sequences, as though cast and crew are giving two fingers to the values of their elders. (Not without justification, given what the French were up to in Algeria etc). This is proto-punk, guitar-smashing par excellence. Albeit carried off with a breathless Parisian charm.

all the king’s horses [michèle bernstein]

Who were we? What were we doing? Stumbling round the city like flat-footed dancers. Drinking and driving. Ducking and diving. Were we ever young? Did we ever feel young? What does it mean to be young? Is there a curse? Is it contagious? What was the plan? What wasn’t the plan? Did the city belong to us or did we belong to the city? Was any of it real? Did it even happen?

Somewhere in another universe people knew that they were cursed with more than just knowingness; they were cursed with the wand of knowing that they would never have to lift a finger, that the things people fought for and cried about would barely touch them because it was all too easy. So even if they did find themselves crying or fighting it wasn’t really real, not in the naïve way of those who really cry or fight. For whom the moment is all-consuming, a be-all or end-all. They laughed and/ or cried with the desperation of people who wanted to know what it would really be like to laugh or cry, to be hurt, not to have to hurt, to be heartbroken, not the other way round. The more glamorous it all seemed the more they wanted to curl up in a corner and start again somewhere else, start again as children. Who would perhaps retain the shard of naivety you need to love, not just be loved: that most disposable, objective of pleasures which bears almost no connection with the subjective glee of the suffering of the lover, as Barthes might have said, just to let them know what they were missing out on. Of course they couldn’t be born again, they couldn’t be re-christened, so instead they strolled around the city in all their shiny but inevitable cynicism, (a cynicism they couldn’t help, which they hated), doing what they did, and one day, because there was no reason not to, one of them wrote a book about it.

It wasn’t a great book and it wasn’t a terrible book. It was, if anything, a curious book, which was greater than it aspired to be but not as great as it might have been had life not been the way it was. It was a kink in the slipstream of literature, one that laughed at itself, just like the writer found herself laughing at herself, and him, because if you didn’t laugh at yourself, and all your wasted talents, what else could you do? You couldn’t cry and you couldn’t fight so all that was left was to laugh. And the book said nothing really, because the idea that books can say things is one of the great myths of literature, which is almost a myth in itself. But it did do one thing. It captured a time and a moment and the way they lived, these strange, happy, unhappy people. Their names were Guy and Michèle and they lived in Paris; but they also lived in London and New York and sometimes they lived in a parallel universe, the one you inhabit, the one whose air you breathe, little knowing that they’re watching you, envying you, laughing at you, wondering what it’s like to live inside another kind of brain.