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. 

some sort of epic grandeur (matthew j. bruccoli)

This being the first biography of Fitzgerald I have read, this review is not so much a critique of the Broccoli’s comprehensive account of the writer’s life, more a reaction to what it tells us about the man, his marriage, and the business of writing.

Firstly, the account of the Fitzgerald’s marriage is heartbreaking. The way two people can be so perfect for one another and so toxic at the same time. In spite of the collapse of their relationship, the love they continued to share, a broken, useless, destructive love, is present in the letters they continued to send one another. Fitzgerald doesn’t come out of the story well; but neither does Zelda. They are both flawed and  feast off each other’s flaws, flaws which once nourished their genius but later consumed it.

Fitzgerald in Hollywood is another film in itself. The greatest writer of his generation treated like just another hack. Perhaps he wasn’t cut out for screenwriting, (or perhaps he was), but this sequence of the biography speaks to the way in which Hollywood is a business, reputations are meaningless, and even the greatest talents are potentially talentless within this world.

Fitzgerald was a drunk, just as much as Bukowski. Why did he drink? In order to place a distance between himself and the world he inhabited which matched his soul’s distance? The irony of the world’s most elegant writer getting into fights, getting slung out of the theatre, behaving in a manner so embarrassing that even his closest friends turned their backs on him, is immense. But perhaps his elegance had no real place in the word, only in fiction. As a way of coping with the feeling of lacking any sense of belonging, he drank to excess. Drink insulates one against the cruelty of the world, but it also insulates against feeling like you don’t really belong. 

deprisa deprisa (w&d carlos saura)

Saura’s early 80s movie has something of the trashy aesthetic that would colonise Spanish cinema with early Almodovar and the Movida Madrileña. Its Bonnie & Clyde narrative is set on the poor outskirts of Madrid, dusty tower blocks surrounded by waste land, a city starting to expand but not in any hurry. Pablo and Angela are two kids who are part of a gang which goes on a crime spree, stealing from institutions and people unprepared for their anarchic violence. All the members of the gang look more likely to be in a band than hard bitten criminals, and there are several scenes which take place, a la Scorsese, in pared-down 80s discotecas. Music is important to the group, and it is perhaps worth noting how their identity is formed in large part by Spanish, rather than Anglo-Saxon music. When the gang’s ambitions turn to the bigger fish of taking down a bank, disaster inevitably follows. But it seems clear that the director’s interest is less in the criminal elements of the movie and more in portraying a new Spanish generation, one that has become apolitical, takes drugs, doesn’t give a fuck. It feels as though it might have been influenced by Mean Streets. The stripped down, handheld aesthetic, with its washed-out colour palette and anti-heroes must have felt like a shot of pure modernity in the post-Franco era.

Nb -this IMDB note seems worth sharing: Jose Antonio Valdelomar González (Pablo) was recruited by Saura in a casting for non-professional actors. He was paid US$3,000. In 1992 he was found dead of a heroin overdose at Carabanchel prison (Madrid), where he was arrested for robbing a bank.

diva (w&d jean-jacques beineix, w. jean van hamme)

Diva is another in the vein of eclectic French cinema which embraced a discordant, vaguely operatic structure, foregoing character development in the name of spectacle and provocation. It sits alongside the films of Carax and Jeunet, to name but two. Where this strand emerges from in French culture is an intriguing question. Perhaps all the way back to Rabelais, or Huysmans. Definitely in the arch tomes of Blaise Cendrars, even Jules Verne. This nearest equivalent I can think of in the British canon is Greenaway. The makers of these stories create fantastical fables, which paint unlikely stories with a broad palette. There’s no particular reason why anyone would make a film about a postman who is obsessed with opera and finds himself caught up in a subplot of a vice ring run by a corrupt police inspector, but it’s precisely this melange which makes Diva such a bracing, unlikely watch, catapulting it to cult status. The kernel at the heart of this weird fruit is the opera singer herself, who radically refuses to have her voice recorded, insisting in only existing in the real. Wilhelmenia Fernandez as Cynthia Hawkins, the US singer, lends the film gravitas. Her presence cuts through the slightly hackneyed world of the French policier, and lends a poetic dimension to the journey of Jules, the postman who is obsessed by her voice. This journey is in no way conventional in story terms: we are given little insight into the protagonist’s evolution as a result of his misadventures. Rather, he glides like a note through the film which is in many ways an exercise in mise en scene, with the set piece sequences and locations knitted together into an unlikely collage. If there is a subtext to the movie, it is that meaning should remain as ephemeral as the singer’s voice. As an audience we want to capture meaning, possess it, but just as Cynthia Hawkins resists being recorded, so the real meaning of Jules’ adventure escapes us. The subplot of the vice ring is nothing more than a motor to keep the film ticking, to arrive at the point where the singer is confronted by the beauty of her own voice for the very first time.

Ps it is lovely to see a still distressed Bouffes du Nord theatre make an appearance, and the use of this theatre as a magical space is another key element in the film. At one point we see Hawkins singing from the point of view of Jules, and the back of a few heads seem to interrupt our vision. For a tiny moment, it feels as though those heads might be in our theatre, or cinema: we are placed in Jules’ seat, present for the sound of a miracle. 

chronicle of a death foretold [márquez, tr gregory rabassa]

Having read the book in a day, which is not hard to, and having then been trapped in a mosquito net of sleeplessness, I pondered what Márquez’s novel was really about. Pondered and decided it had to do with the random stupidity of violence and of codes of violence. Márquez writes with the voice of one who is investigating a crime which took place in the past, at least twenty years ago. The fate of Santiago Nasser is conveyed with a detached tone. One that renders the violence, as it is conveyed twice towards the end of the book, all the more shocking. Márquez first offers a surgical description of the autopsy, in all its gory detail, and then repeats the account of the knife thrusts themselves when describing the murder within the book’s narrative. Each time, the violence jars, renting asunder the placid tone of the novel, just as the supposed act rent asunder the placid tone of the small Caribbean town where the murder occurred. The description brought to mind Bolaño’s chapter on the Killings in 2666. 

There is, no doubt, something masterly in the author’s handling of his material. At the same time, it’s perhaps hard to read without a smidgeon of concern for the way it presents its world as something out of the old testament. An approach to the presentation of ‘world’ literature that can also be seen in the work of many authors whose work has become successful in those parts of the world which generate revenue streams. Perhaps it might be said that the author is helping to construct the mythical bedrock of a still youthful country. That this work will indeed become, one day, part of the old testament of his nation’s literature. 

An alternative POV: The novel, which by the middle of the twentieth century had become a hideout for the middle classes, the literary classes, or else for tales of remarkable endeavour, is returned by Márquez to the people. He drags it back to the world of Chaucer or Lazarillo de Tormes: a space to recount the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. And in so doing he helped to democratise an art form that had become beached on the shore of the literati. 

white masks [elias khoury]

Khoury’s novel is a patchwork quilt of a book; a murder mystery with the mystery stripped back as far as possible and the murder itself reduced to the role of an accomplice. Because this isn’t a novel about a murder; it’s a novel about a society, the society within which the murder occurred. Khoury, going against all the rules of the genre, isn’t really interested in the murder; he’s interested in what war and sectarianism can achieve, how they can tear the social fabric asunder. Each of White Mask’s 7 chapters, apart from the first, narrated by the victim’s widow, offers a tangential take on the life and death of Khalil Ahmad Jaber, a civil servant who starts to lose his mind after his favourite son is killed fighting. An architect, a blinded soldier; a doctor; a widowed mother, among others, all are granted their opportunity to tell us what they know about Khalil, but more than that, to tell us about themselves and the way their lives have been transformed by the civil war. Thus, voice by voice, chapter by chapter, the writer constructs his quilt, revealing the values and the desperation of his Beirut. 

After reading Khoury’s Yalo, I realised it was one of the few books I’ve come across that offered some kind of insight into what’s occurring now in Syria. You can glean all you want from non-fiction; you can watch documentaries; you can feel informed. But you can’t know what it is to live there, how daily life functions, the compromises that have been forced upon people merely in order to survive. Only literature can begin to achieve that.

Neither Yalo nor White Masks deal with Syria: both are novels that address the dreadful, seemingly endless Lebanese civil war which was part of the backdrop of my own youth. However, without going into the political history of the region, to find parallels between Syrian and Lebanese society is not that much of a stretch. These books might have been written about a war which ended over thirty years ago, but the societies are similar, as is the gruesome nature of the civil wars which both countries have endured. Khoury’s writing retains its immediacy and importance; there are few sources as valuable as his novels for understanding the decades of strife and conflict which continue to afflict the Middle East.

lola (w&d fassbinder, w. peter märthesheimer, pea fröhlich)

We were ten minutes late for the start of the movie. Caught up in the exaggerated emotional morass that every creature, from newt to orang utang, occasionally finds itself stuck in. Fassbinder's colours, as a result, were perfect. Lit with deep melodramatic shades, suggesting a land where everything is overblown and heightened. The pacing of the storytelling was similar, a kind of hop-skip-and-a-jump approach, breathy scenes accumulating like cumulonimbus, the narrative a set of dominoes lined up and falling over, one after another.

All of which created a cinematic tone which did not feel entirely comfortable, pitched somewhere between soap opera and social realism. However, this slight awkwardness or discomfort was perfect for our state of mind, which might not have been able to cope with anything too measured. The film billowed along like a schooner, its more laconic social critique occasionally peeping through like the moon on a scuddy, clouded night. It never felt close to being unimpeachably brilliant filmmaking, but the director's spicy palate always had sufficient to keep the viewer along for the ride, wanting to learn Lola's ultimate fate, wanting the hypocritical mask to be ripped off post-war Germany's complacent face.