the secret life of trees (zambra, tr mcdowell)

This short novel has been much praised, and as such this reader came to it with high expectations. Zambra’s book is so slight it’s almost, but not quite, transparent. Set over a night when the protagonist’s partner fails to return home, it adopts a structure which allows it to drift and muse, shifting the point of view to that of the protagonist’s young stepdaughter, imagining her take on these events years down the line. In some ways the novel seems in keeping with the likes of Chejfec, a nouveau roman, albeit one with a soft, tragic centre. It would clearly appear to be riffing off the fate of the disappeared, a Latin American  phenomenon, one of the many crimes of the dictatorships. (Although one notes with a shiver the way far-right Anglo-Saxon groups in their vile T-shirts have adopted Pinochet.) Yet the allusion to the disappeared is so understated that one wonders if readers from other parts of the world would even pick up on it. Intriguingly I read an interview with another Chilean novelist, Labatut, saying he resented being compared to most of his contemporaries, and I found myself wondering if Zambra would be one of those. Perhaps The Secret Life of Trees is indeed a work of minor genius, in which case something was going over my head as I read it; in other ways it feels too slight and wispy to even stand on its own two feet: a gust of wind would be all that it takes to blow it over.

brodeck’s report (phillipe claudel, tr. john cullen)

Brodeck’s Report is one of those slightly deceptive books, set in an undefined, postwar village in a country which is never stated. The writing includes the use of a foreign language which feels like a variant on German. The village has its own language, as well as its customs and its sins and its secrets. It is narrated by Brodeck, a man who was sent to a concentration camp and lived to tell the tale, only to return to his village to find that the evil is still present. Brodeck is commissioned by the village elders to write a report about the killing of a mysterious stranger who has descended on the village for no obvious reason and whose understanding of the village’s crimes eventually provokes a violent, fatal response. The novel is constantly allusive, swathed in mystery and a certain mysticism. In the closing notes the writer acknowledges the work of Primo Levi. The use of the holocaust as a literary device is always problematic and in Brodeck’s Report, it engenders a certain unease. The descriptions of Brodeck’s time in the camp feel sketchy, relying on the power of images, whose power perhaps never feels as compelling as they ought to, to describe the evil they represent. That these images are then juxtaposed against similar images from the village leaves the reader in an awkward position: should the reader interpret the villagers’ actions as equivalent to those of the Nazis? Or is the book saying that all middle European societies have inevitable Nazi tendencies? The book’s poeticism only seems to shroud these issues in more confusion. 

flights [olga tokarczuk]

Flights is almost two books for the price of one. The book is constructed around the notebooks of a travelling woman, who one takes to be the author, as she moves around the world, reflecting on the nature of travel. These observations are made up of brief sections, often less than a page long. In amongst these observations are threaded various stories, some modern, some historical. These stories make up the second part of the book. A man whose wife and child go missing on a Croatian island. A Dutch pioneer of anatomy who becomes obsessed by his own amputated leg. A woman in Moscow who walks out of her own life. Observations from the notebooks infiltrate the stories, so that the reader can glimpse the craft of the author’s architecture. As the book unfolds the recurring theme of the body begins to emerge. What’s revealed when we delve beneath the flesh?  What is a body, after all? Is the body in one place the same as the body in another? Tokarczuk’s restlessness fuels her writing. The book’s structure mirrors the subject of its enquiry, showing the arteries, intestines etc, which sustain the vital organs. Which lends the book a curious, occasionally frustrating brilliance, as we dip into one narrative only to be whisked on to the next. Which, one supposes, is also akin to the process of travelling. On the one hand a superficial occupation which means that you never get to know the place you’re visiting with any great degree of profundity; but also a means to enhance the horizons of the mind, to begin to be able to gauge the extent, variety and richness of this world we have been given to inhabit. 

my blueberry nights (w&d wong kar wai, w. lawrence block)

Wong Kar Wai had already made one affecting and intuitive road movie in the Americas, Happy Together, before he got round to his North American debut. Happy Together retained a Hong Kong/ Chinese feel through the use of its lead characters, a gay couple spiralling out of control on a road trip through Argentina, something My Blueberry Nights foregoes, with its resolutely Anglo-Saxon cast. Perhaps as a result of this, it feels like a film without a centre. The episodic narrative follows a character played by Norah Jones, who seems rootless in all the wrong ways. Not only does it feel as though she’s not really going anywhere, it also feels as though she doesn’t come from anywhere, save Hollywood Central casting. The same could be said for Jude Law, whose erratic Northern accent is supposed to suggest that he’s an itinerant Mancunian who has ended up running his own bar in New York, for reasons the script never deigns to explain. Which is not to say that the film doesn’t have its moments of bravura, Wong Kar Wai, charm, most noticeable in the performance of Rachel Weisz as a vampish  femme fatale who drives her alcoholic husband to suicide. Weisz gives it all she’s got and for a while there’s a sense of real passion, rather than contrived pseudo-passion, the kind of heightened sexual tension that made In The Mood for Love such an electrifying watch. However, this is no more than an episode in Jones’ journey, an episode that soon fizzles out with David Strathairn’s convenient automobile accident. The lighting becomes the most interesting aspect of a film which, for a supposed road movie, feels excessively pedestrian; whilst the director joins the list of greats whose Hollywood nights ended up providing more of a snack than a main course. 

sin [zakhar prilepin]

Prilepin’s novel is composed of a series of scenes from the protagonist’s life. They show him in childhood, adolescence, as a young father and a sergeant in the Russian army in Chechnya. These fragments vary from the harsh to the lyrical. Bit by bit, Sasha’s character evolves. There’s a languid poeticism to the writing and clear affection for the everyman protagonist. Despite ending with a sequence which takes place in Chechnya, this is a more lyrical novel than Sankja. Once again it shows the author’s facility for getting under the skin of present day Russian youth. Sin could be compared to Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist: it has the same elegiac quality as it captures the ebbs and flows of a young man’s life. 

diary of a bad year [j m coetzee]

This is an unusual, fractured narrative. There are two narrators and three writers on almost every page. An ageing writer has been commissioned to write a book of “opinions” about the modern world. Each page contains his apercus on the state of the modern world. His thoughts range from terrorism to globalisation to Blair to Pinter; the nature of love and sex in the modern world, and much more besides. The material is profound but dry. Counterpointed against this is the sub-narrative, as he meets and employs a shapely Filipino woman who acts as his secretary. She in turn is in a relationship with a financial whiz kid, who sees her relationship with the writer as a possible means to rip him off, by using the writer’s dormant but healthy bank account to his own advantage. She is given a voice at the bottom of the page to narrate the consequent fate of her relationship, outlining the way in which the writer has influenced her own life.

This makes for a somewhat structural novel, something the writer’s opinions later address, as he writes about the way in which writers become more formalistic as they get older; their texts tending towards the theoretical, becoming more and more disconnected from the human angle. It reads at times like a cri de coeur by Coetzee himself, railing against his own fate as both a man and an author. Of course, this is just one of the book’s conceits: with no knowledge of the man, this assumption could be entirely false. Even if it is, there are still times when the book feels like an intellectual exercise. In large part this is because the two (literally) sub-narratives remains somewhat fragile. The net effect is a book that’s somewhat sketched out. Which might be the writer’s commentary on the nature of reading in the digital age. When the writer’s opinions really bite is when he comments on the enduring power of the classics, in particular the works of Tolstoy and Dosteyevski. His writing about them appears to contain a lament for the diminishing power of the novel, with the novelist no longer capable of embracing and containing the great themes within the confines of their pages. We’re now reduced to fragmentary narratives which are so self-aware that they can no longer aspire to any kind of universality. It makes for a curious, fascinating, if unsatisfactory reading experience; and perhaps that’s the whole point. 

the reluctant fundamentalist [moshin hamid]

Hamid's book is the kind of text you can read in a single sitting. I read it in two. The narrative is compelling, the style flows easily, and the book's remit appears to be bold and topical. I came across it via an article discussing why there's been no truly successful novel about the fall of the twin towers. One of the article's conclusions was that the event itself was experienced so profoundly by the world's public that fiction finds it hard to live up to the real thing. Hamid's novel, as the title suggests, at least offers a fresh perspective on the theme by adopting a narrator who's Pakistani, living in Lahore, talking to an American spook. The implication is that the narrator is the reluctant fundamentalist of the title and that his personal experience of 9/11 contributed to his radical politics.

The book follows the narrator's fortunes working for a Morgan Stanley/ McKinsey style organisation called Underwood Samson. His job is to value companies, presumably facilitating asset stripping or hostile takeover. He has secured his post in spite of his third world pedigree, and in order to ensure this does not handicap him he works harder than his peers and looks set for a golden future. The novel's description of the conflicts felt by the narrator as he seeks to realise the Western dream of affluence and power is acute. No matter how hard he tries he will always be an outsider. When he watches the towers go down from a Philippines hotel he cheers in spite of himself. Later on a trip to Valparaiso in Chile he crumbles, unable to participate in the deconstruction of a venerable publishing company. He quits and returns to Lahore.

As the novel restlessly trespasses over four continents in the course of its 200 pages it feels for a moment as if Hamid is the writer who will be capable of relating the East/ West; North/ South; Third/First world divide. His premise is perfect and his observations are meticulous. However, sad to say, the book kind of fizzles out. Firstly, the narrator's transformation into a cult political teacher in Pakistan (the fundamentalist of the title) is dealt with in the space of a few paragraphs, so cursory that they fail to investigate this essential stage in his development in any depth. Secondly, the conceit around which the tale is spun of the narrator talking to a US spook in a Lahore marketplace goes nowhere.

All of which leaves the reader with the impression that they've only really read half a novel. A strong, promising half a novel, but also, ultimately, a lazy one. Underneath the book's supposed examination of what might lead a man to become a fundamentalist (or even a terrorist), one cannot help thinking that this ends up being another contribution to the Orientalism debate. Hamid's book with its ferociously simple prose style and lack of any considered denouement seems tailor made for consumption by a 'Western' audience. There's no real subversion in the narrator's destiny; he doesn't shock or upset or alienate us. If there have to be "fundamentalists" in this world, (and the shortcuts the book takes as it addresses the narrator's transformation don't leave us much the wiser as to what this word really means), 'we' would probably want them to be just like him.

the looming towers [lawrence wright]

It's September, and the anniversary of the most celebrated event in most of our lifetimes has just come round again. A crisp Northern Hemisphere day, with a blue sky ready to pick up the brush strokes of a jet engines vapour trail. Those of us over the age of ten will probably always have this date as a kind of touchstone, as another generation had the assassination of JFK, or perhaps another the dropping of the first atomic bomb, or another September day when the world went to war. Before that, the immediacy of events was dissipated. Even given its precedents, 911 probably impacted on the world in a way no other event had ever done, the first time that an event could be experienced almost equally vividly on all sides of the world. That New York morning might have produced the first truly global hour the world has ever known.

The Looming Towers details the way in which Bin Laden and his followers tried to get reception from a satellite connection to the television, in the mountains of South Afghanistan, without success, switching to a radio broadcasting the Arabic BBC channel instead. I was at work, in Lambeth. It was still the early days of internet, and I didn't have it. Phil mentioned something about a light plane crashing into one of the towers. Early in the afternoon I walked home, looking suspiciously at the skies. Sedley came round and we sat in front of the TV.

Within days, it was clear that the world had changed. How it had changed was still to be revealed. Indeed, what that phrase 'the world had changed' means is obviously open to debate. Easy to say, harder to gauge. The easiest way for someone who was not a historian or a politician or a military strategist to assess this change might have been in the sense of unreality that seemed to shroud the world for a while. You didn't know what to expect, and that sense of uncertainty touched everything.

There was also a great deal of unclarity as to what exactly had happened. Early reports talked of additional explosions and additional planes being highjacked. In the days that followed, no one seemed to have much of a clue who the perpetrators were. When suddenly a list of Arabic names and faces appeared, these people seemed almost abstract. The lack of information surrounding them only added to the uncertainty, and doubtless contributed to the rise of the multiple conspiracy theories.

One of the astonishing things, it seems to me, surrounding the events of 911, is that we still have so little idea or information surrounding who the perpetrators were and how they managed to carry it off. Normally, in a crime of the century, the perpetrator becomes a figure of vast notoriety. Of the high-jackers, only Atta ever generated much publicity, and even that was limited. Instead, attention was focussed on Osama Bin Laden. However, again, very little information was disseminated about him. His image was replayed and replayed, but who he was, and what he wanted, remains, for almost all, vague. (That Winter when we went to Madrid, they were selling Osama masks for new year celebrations. Drunken Spanish Bin Ladens threw grapes in the air and drank cava to celebrate the birth of the Euro.)

This is where Wright's book comes into its own. It's the first piece of journalism I've read that sets out to demystify Al Qaida, and its leaders. The book traces the origins of what has become known as Muslim Fundamentalism, as well as outlining what this much used phrase really means. The way in which Osama and his predecessors manipulated the Koran is explained, justifying actions which other Muslims would see as heretical (including the killing of other Muslims, the killing of innocent civilians etc). It traces these developments over the course of 60 years, putting together the personages and policies which lead to that day in September at the start of a century.

There are many intriguing elements to the story. One that struck me in particular was the way in which the story of Al Qaida demonstrates once again how history is created by mavericks and oddballs whose philosophies and tactics appear to be governed by luck as much as judgement. Other books which it might be interesting to compare and contrast to The Looming Tower include Schama's account of the French Revolution or Wheen's life of Marx. The 'game-changers' as they might be called, are rarely ruthless masterminds. They're dedicated opportunists, following their instincts. Bin Laden lost his fortune and was reduced to near penury, him and his family and followers surviving on a subsistence diet, living in poverty. According to Wright's description, there were many times when it seemed like there was no way forward, but in the end, he (claimed to have) planned and executed an event which has helped to shape the way in which the world is perceived.

The book also deals extensively with the divisions between the CIA, FBI and other government departments that meant the terrorists were able to enter and train in the USA. In truth, the least detailed part of the book is its account of the build up to 911 itself, at least in comparison to the efficiency with which it details the earlier part of its story. Whilst Wright perceives the security failures as the process of an overly rigid bureaucratic system, something which seems extremely credible within a society as litigious and hierarchical as the States, the door is undeniably left open for the conspiracy theorists to suggest there was a more active malice at work in the system, one that ensured the security lapses allowed the high-jackers to remain at loose.

No doubt Wright would have none of this. In contrast to the conspiracy theorists, his book appears to be impeccably researched. The list of authorial interviews at the back of the book is impressive. In a footnote at the end of the book, Wright notes that 'there are few forces in human nature more powerful than the desire to be understood.' Given the immense ignorance that remains about the events of the event we now call 911, Wright has gone a long way towards allowing those who do have an idea about what happened and why it happened to be heard. In the process he has written what would appear to be the first authoritative piece of history concerning an event which has affected all our lives, in ways it will take a lifetime to understand.

tree of smoke [denis johnson]

Tree of Smoke is an epic Vietnam novel which was published in 2007. Straightaway, in that one sentence, there's a great big Why forming. Or several. Why another Vietnam novel? And why now?

The novel appears to be impeccably researched and assiduously structured. It covers the years 1963-70, with a coda set in 1983. Each year has its own chapter. The book doesn't reach Vietnam until 1965, having started in the Philippines, the States, and other parts of South East Asia. There is a cast of about half a dozen characters, most of whom are connected in some way to the mythical 'Colonel', who is the uncle of the man who might be the main protagonist, Skip Sands. The Colonel has a Kurtzian approach to the war, believing that the constrictions imposed by bureaucracy and the rules of engagement will lead to defeat. He sets up his own mini-kingdom near the front line, which is attacked during the Tet Offensive. Eventually the Colonel's enemies within the CIA get the better of him. However, dynamic though his story sounds, it's but a part of the tale, and much of the attention focuses on Skip, who spends most of the war hidden away in an old French villa, reading and translating the books which the doctor who used to live there left behind. One of the passages he translates is by Artaud, the reference acting like a small hinge opening a door onto Johnson's underlying poetic ambitions.

Because for all the keenly noted detail, and the sense of place which is conjured up, the book often feels as though its only tangentially concerned with the Vietnam war. It's actually something of a character study, as half a dozen personalities including a North Vietnamese spy, an aid worker, and an infantryman, explore their minds against the backdrop of war's chaos. These characters are constantly reaching for philosophical truths to guide them through the chaos, truths which might offer some reason for soldiering on within a grubby world, truths that might help them maintain a faith in idealism, or God, or their country. Nowhere is this clearer than in the 80s coda when Storm, one of the more marginal characters up to now, ends his search for the colonel by participating in what looks like becoming a savage kind of sacrificial ritual. There's a constant search going on for meaning, a search that might be military, or might be studious, or might be self-sacrificing, or might just be venal.

Vietnam itself acts as the epic backdrop for these human struggles. The book feels like it's been unashamedly written in the shadow of all the Vietnam literature and movies that have gone before it, from Despatches to Apocalypse Now. However, there are also occasional hints of the other US wars being waged right now, as when a reference to capturing 'hearts and minds' leaps out of the text. The tree of smoke itself refers to a variety of things, including the cloud formed by an atomic bomb. Johnson might be intimating with these references and allusions that the US has and always will be a bellicose nation, something that those who come in contact with it need to understand; a state of being which has philosophical implications, shaping the way in which we think and act.

Or maybe this is a vague and unhelpful reading. However, Johnson's text, with its arcane poetics, appears to be inviting or provoking analysis: the very title itself, with its biblical connotations, seems to beseech interpretation. It's a book which self-consciously lays out the many levels it can be read on: part wartime saga; part lost book of the old testament; part poetic exegesis of the state of the writer's nation.

the man from london (d. bela tarr, w. tarr & lászló krasznahorkai)

Bela Tarr is a name to conjure with. On several occasions I've come near to making his cinematic acquaintance, but it's never quite happened. With a film of his finally out on release in London town, the critic makes his way through a sodden, Wintry Brunswick Centre, its Christmas fare suitably bedraggled, with a sense of anticipation.

The Man from London is also a title to conjure with. It turns out that the film is adapted from a Simenon novel. I wonder if school children still learn French with the assistance of Simenon novels. If they don't they're the poorer for it. Moody, dank, black and white - all words which can be applied to the Belgian crime writer's oeuvre and Tarr's adaptation of this novel. I spent quite a long time trying to work out where the film was set: an ancient harbour town with winding streets, presumably within shooting distance of the Channel. Probably, I thought, some small Normandy or Brittany port with a regular cameo on the shipping forecast and which the adventurous motorist can reach after a two day boat crossing from Lyme Regis. When the credits revealed the film was in fact shot in Bastia, on Corsica, it threw everything which had come before mildly off-kilter.

There's plenty of time to ponder the nuances of the film. (Such as how good is Swinton's French accent; and who does that Englishman sound like, again revealed in the credits). The Man from London is as leisurely paced as anyone could hope for, even if it comes in at a Tarrishly concise, Tarr 132 minutes. The opening shot, alone, lasts about 15, as the camera gradually tracks back and forth, following the events that occur when a ship, coming from Britain, docks. Not a great deal ever seems to happen, but what doesn't happen is compensated for by the possibilities of what might happen. This is emphasised by Tarr's roving camera. The film is composed of a succession of luscious camera moves, as a scene is introduced and then gradually explored. The camera is almost constantly on the move, hunting out details, peering behind pillars, suggesting to the viewer that something's lurking round the corner, even when it turns out there's actually nothing there. The times there is something - a suspicious looking man standing in a pool of light; a butcher going about his trade; or a man balancing something on his nose as he dances with another man with a chair - are always good enough to keep you wanting to find out what might or might not be round the corner. For the viewer it's a slow game of suspense, and sometimes hard work, but, as is the way with hard work, it can prove to be remarkably rewarding.

When Maloin, the lead, goes to his cabin, where the man from London has holed up, the camera parks itself outside until he emerges. It stayed there long enough for me to go through the thought processes of firstly thinking: I've probably got time to count the number of planks of wood that make up the door of the cabin; to then actually counting the planks of wood; and then thinking that it didn't seem like very many. I don't think I'd call this sequence suspenseful; I kind of knew by the time I'd got to the second thought process that the camera wasn't going to let me know what was happening inside, I'd just have to wait. It almost felt like a brief time-out - time to look at a wooden door - accept my exclusion, and wait for the film to come back to me. You watch The Man from London on Tarr's terms, not your own, and if you don't like it, you can always leave.

In the end, The Man from London is something of a fable, with the feel of one of Kafka's gentler short stories. It's one of those rare films which I felt would have benefited from being watched with a partner. You can curl up into it, let the time go by, share the experience, come out no more than a little bit the wiser, but having spent time dedicated to the act of spending time together. There's a lovely timelessness to the film, which goes with its understated humour. People tend to describe Tarr as austere or in some way punishingly intellectual, but on this evidence there's more of a warm-hearted and emotional intelligence at work than a heavily cerebral one; albeit one that likes to tell its stories at a leisurely pace, knowing that stories, like fire, can keep us warm through the long Winter nights, and the longer they last, the better.

import/export (d. ulrich seidl, w. seidl & veronika franz)

Seidl's film arrives at the ICA on the back of some auspicious criticism, with the suggestion that the film presents a modern vision of hell. The Guardian review referenced Jelinek and Haneke, suggesting that contemporary Austria is the frontline in the crisis of the Western soul. The plot intercuts the story of a Ukrainian woman who comes to Austria to earn a living with that of an Austrian who finds himself on a trip to Ukraine, where he installs bubble gum machines in desolate corners of post-Soviet concrete existence.

The two stories counterpoint one another. Olga, in the Ukraine, works as a nurse but also as a sex worker, performing to a video-streamed camera for on-line customers, trying to make sense of the instructions which strange men bark at her in German or English. Not being altogether cut out for this, she leaves her baby and heads for Austria, where she goes through various jobs until spending the last half of the film as a cleaner in a home for the dying. Pauli, the Austrian, initially has a job as a security guard, but after being abused by a group of immigrants and finding himself in debt to various shaven-haired thugs, he joins his odious stepfather on the bubble gum trip to Slovakia and Ukraine. The narrative deliberately refuses to satisfy the audience's subliminal desire to integrate the two stories: Pauli and Olga never meet, and besides the overlap of countries, their stories remain obstinately separated.

You know, early on, as an audience member, that you're not supposed to be enjoying yourself. Olga spends a lot of time walking through frozen estates in heels pushing her baby around in a pram, and Pauli, when he's not shadow boxing at home, is trained by an overly psychotic nutter for his mundane job as a security guard. Before long, Olga is contorting naked for a video camera (and for Seidl's camera) and Pauli's getting handcuffed and soaked in beer before losing his job. The director's ambition is clearly phrased in the stark camera work and bleak set-ups: he's going to make us suffer, he's almost challenging us to sit through his 135 minute festival of bleakness.

I'm all for this kind of thing. I like to see the Western, Eastern, Southern or Northern soul dragged through the mire. Visceral realism is fine by me. But I have to confess that Seidl's attempts didn't really convince. There's a fine line between being shown the deprivation of the Western (or wherever's) soul, and being shown something that someone's trying to sell as the deprivation of the Western soul. My feeling, as Seidl's film protracted itself through a long afternoon, was that this was a case of the latter.

Two things in particular made me suspicious. Firstly, Olga, in her travels through Austria, never seemed to meet anyone even vaguely sympathetic. I dislike sentimentalism in movies, life and love; the desire to make things prettier that they really are, the need to sweeten the pill. However, as I watched poor Olga struggle, it seemed to me that I was being presented with something equally inauthentic - miserablism, if you like. Despite her amiable nature, the only person who's ever nice to Olga swiftly dies of a heart attack. She gets a job with what appears to be a single mother, in an antiseptic house of steel grey, cleaning and looking after her two children. The little boy accuses her of stealing his mobile phone, and when the mother catches her having fun throwing snowballs with her kids, she abruptly sacks her. In the old people's home, Olga's told off for fraternising with the dying by a nurse, who later attacks her in a corridor. It's fairly clear that the only reason this had been set up is because Seidl decided a no-holds-barred catfight in a dark corridor would add to the bankruptcy of the soul his film seeks to depict. The cat fight is nasty, brutish and quite long, and is there for no narrative reason. Seidl is not interested in narrative, because, I couldn't help feeling, it doesn't really suit the miserablistic perception he's promoting. Just as the lamest of Hollywood movies will demand that everything ends sweetly, ignoring character or narrative subtlety, so Seidl demands that the milk is always sour, every morning, even when the cow's been freshly milked.

Another aspect of Seidl's film is its use of location. Two locations in particular: the home for the dying, where all of the second half of Olga's story is set; and the desolate estate in Slovakia where Pauli and his stepfather go on their unlikely trip. This estate is a sea of rubbish, where every home looks like it's on the frontline in the Russian bombardment of Grozny. The inhabitants would appear to be Romany. They live in squalour and would sell their grandmothers if they could make 50 euros from the deal. The estate is clearly a real place. Seidl did his research and found it. It would appear to be one of the less salubrious corners of Europe. However, as I watched the footage, two things crossed my mind. Firstly, the truth we are shown is not comprehensive. The truths we take out of slums are no more absolute than the truths we take out of palaces - filmmakers choose to show what they want to, and Seidl wants this to look as grim as possible. Secondly, this felt exceedingly self-conscious film-making: it draws attention to itself, saying, look what we (the filmmakers) have found. This is also the case in the scenes in the death wards. Seidl shows real people who are clearly close to death, in all their pathetic, childish regression. I don't know if I'm supposed to be shocked by this, or disconcerted. In the end, I reacted by finding it funny, in the manner of a watching a child showing off. No matter how hard the film tries to show us the rawness of life, in the end it's just a film. This is not 'reality'; it's reality through a lens, selected, framed and edited.

It is, perhaps, to Seidl's credit that his film demands such a personal response. (Having said which I have a highly visceral response to things like Notting Hill; Pretty Woman or a number of other products that I find verging on the unwatchable, and no-one gives them credit for that.) However, in comparison to Haneke's work, this seems like lazy film-making. It's not hard to shock, and Seidl uses the trick repeatedly. Rather than try and convey the sickness of the soul through narrative, he does it through a succession of set-ups. Olga's relationship to the child she leaves behind seems to encapsulate the film's problems. On the one hand, it could be seen as part of her sickness that she doesn't appear to miss it; on the other hand perhaps this is just the price of our cauterised, globalised world. Towards the closing stages, the script gives her a moment where she sings a song down the phone to the child, as though wanting to allow a shard of humanity in, but not enough to deflect from the film's nihilism. In the end, it seems to me, the simple fact recurs: the audience needs to care about the characters in order to care about what happens to their souls; and for the audience to care, the film-maker has to too. Otherwise it really is just porn.

unrelated (w&d joanna hogg)

Whilst a glowing review from The Guardian might have been expected for Hogg's lucid tale of a middle aged woman attempting to re-discover herself on a Tuscan family (not her own) holiday, it was slightly more surprising to flick through a copy of The Sun on the tube to Finchley and see that paper give it five thumbs-up as well. Less of a surprise was seeing Alan Rickman, doyen of UK crossover, in the loos at the Apollo afterwards, his Habitat shopping (a couple of tasteful pillows for those who might be interested) left outside. All these little signs suggest a film that has astutely located a previously unoccupied niche within the British cinematic culture.

Although set in Italy, Hogg's film is a succinct portrayal of Blair/Cameroon Britishness. The Italians in the cast, credited as playing themselves, drift around the edge of the picture, appearing primarily to lay tables or make breakfast or lend their cars to the holidaying Brits. The tourists' involvement with the local environment is marginal: they attend the Palio in Siena, but largely see it as an excuse to get wasted; they visit a church where Anna develops her flirtation with Oakley; and finally the two families and Anna walk to the home of a neighbour, where the English husband of an Italian woman explains how the sofa he's sitting on used to belong to Mussolini, and was presumably used by the dictator for his serial shagging. A literal encapsulation of the the film's implication that the passions which the Latin climate causes to bubble in the British breast lie just beneath the surface.

Aside from Oakley's attraction to the daughter of the Italian neighbour, something which is never developed, these English lead a solipsistic existence, entirely wrapped up in their own drama. Which suits the lost Anna, getting away from her husband, Alex, frustrated with her childless marriage. Her crush on Oakley seems as much maternal as sexual; when she breaks down and tells Vee, her friend, about her spectral pregnancy, she observes that Vee will always be at the centre of her world, which is her family, whereas she, Anna, will always be on the margin of other people's worlds. Unrelated's examination of Anna's menopausal crisis is effective; her aimlessness gradually starts to make sense, as does her subsequent recovery, as she goes through the lowest ebb and emerges, more alive, on the other side.

This portrayal is aided by the care shown in the film's composition and its unhurried takes. The camera frequently rests on Anna's face as the world bustles around her. In contrast to the way she feels about herself, she is at the very heart of the drama, her ever-changing thoughts traced with precision. Hogg is never afraid to let the camera rest on a scene to extract every ounce of significance from her compositions. In the first hour of the film, this contributes to a brooding tension, as Anna puts herself at risk by stepping out and entering the teenage world; a tension which dissipates as the film draws to a close, with the piece slipping towards a warmer, less dramatic denouement.

In a sense, there seem to be two films lurking within Unrelated: the story of Anna's reconciliation to her fate; and the story of what happens to the transgressor, the individual who finds themselves driven by circumstances to step outside the security of their social nexus. The former narrative wins through, although it is in the development of the foregone latter that Hogg perhaps reveals how powerful a film maker she might become. To my eyes, it felt as though, the impressive shouting scene notwithstanding, the characters in Unrelated were let off the hook, though this of course is in part a reflection of my own reaction to the well-observed social milieu the film captures so effectively. However, in its telling of Anna's narrative, (assisted by a beautiful performance from Kathryn Worth), Hogg demonstrates an eye for nuance and subtlety, both cinematic and psychological, rarely witnessed in a British film.

elite squad (d. jose padilha, w. andre batista, braulio mantovani)

Elite Squad deals with the way in which the police attempt to tackle the drugs war in Rio's favelas. The film was created out of Padilha's original project, which was to create a documentary about BOPA, the elite Brazilian anti-narcotic squad, which some see as a paramilitary unit. Elite Squad was the most expensive feature ever made in Brazil. It has provoked national debate, commercial success and international acclaim.

Padilha has quite a few axes to grind. He wants his audience to understand who the officers of BOPA are, how they work, and why they might be necessary. He also wants middle class Brazilian drug users to take stock of the part they play in their country's drug war, which is by and large concealed in the no-go favelas. Finally he wants, and succeeds, in making these issues accessible and cinematic.

Elite Squad, in spite of its acknowledged intellectual perspective, is a high octane piece of cinema making. On the one hand, Padilha and his team capture the vivid, restless energy of the favelas; the comical corruption of the Rio police force, and the violent excesses of the drug war. On the other hand, he succeeds in slipping in a sequence where one of his three principle protagonists, the nerdish, black law student, Matias, gives a succinct appraisal of Foucault's position on the mechanisms of power within society.

Padilha's film suggests that you can have it all. It is possible to make intelligent, 'socially conscious', commercial, dramatic cinema. All that's required is the verve and ambition to pull it off. The fact that the film caused such a stir within Brazil would no doubt appeal to Foucault himself. For so long the holy grail of politically minded artists has been the creation of a work of art which might have some influence on society. Illegally downloaded copies of Padilha's film were doing the rounds long before it opened. The director found himself accused of making a fascist film, hero-worshipping BOPA, whilst being sued by BOPA for defamation at the same time.

One of the fascinating aspects of the movie is the way in which it finds the line that exists between documentary and fiction. Padilha realised that there was no way he was going to be allowed to film the things he'd been told occurred in real life. BOPA's habit of torturing suspects and summarily executing others was never going to be captured in a documentary. Neither were the antics of the drugs lords, nor, in all likelihood, the extent to which psychological stress affected BOPA's members. For all the film's violence, the scene where Captain Nascimiento walks into his home and, out of the blue, shouts at his wife that he runs the show, remains one of the most powerful. Wagner Moura, who plays Nascimiento, has a passing resemblance to Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. His narration, which holds the film together as it tells the story of how he came to select one of Matias or his friend Neto to succeed him in his job, giving him a get-out clause to spend more time with his family, also echoes Liotta's in Scorcese's film.

Elite Squad is one of the rare films that succeeds in emulating Scorcese's sinuous, energetic style of film-making. It gives evidence of a director who's brazen enough to believe he can seize hold of the big issues affecting his society, then describe them in a way that's so gripping, people will want to go and see the film. Thereby having to face issues they would usually run a mile from. This is anti-escapism cinema, executed with remarkable, compelling flair.

el baño del papa (w&d cesar charlone & enrique fernandez)

A Uruguayan film on general release in London. Not something that happens every week/ month/ year. When I was in Montevideo people mentioned El Baño, but I assumed as it wasn't on release there, then, I would have missed it. The shock of its appearance here should not be underestimated.

However, the reason for its appearance, and success on the international festival circuit, is apparent from the opening frames. A group of smugglers, fuelled by nothing more than pedal power, pursued on the Uruguay-Brazil border by the corrupt customs officer, Meleyo, in his truck. Charlone's cinematography imbues the chase with the drama of Ben Hur. Has there ever been a villain on a bicycle? A bicycle rider signifies various things: poverty, hard-workingness, and a life lived in the open air. Film a group of cyclists trying to get away from a four-wheel-drive and the audience instantly knows who it's rooting for. The smugglers, Beto and Valvulina, are both family men, trying to make ends meet in a world where earning a living is far from straightforward. All over the world, people scamper across borders, trying to turn a profit out of the accident of geography, that peculiar dictate of fate which determines who gets what in a globalised world.

Charlone's camera skillfully depicts the simplicity of Melo, a small Uruguayan town which is part impoverished backwater, part new age nirvana. Earning a crust might be difficult, but the neighbours are friendly and you never have to worry about locking up your bike. It's easy to see why Beto, Valvunia, their families and friends exude a kind of innocent contentment, in between the moments when the rigours of survival get them down. Whilst the narrative's overt theme is the visit of Pope John Paul II to Melo, a nice enough hook, it's sub-text is about family, its trials and tribulations but, ultimately, its rewards. Whilst it seems sentimental that the film ends with Beto's daughter, whose university savings have been blown by his madcap scheme to build a public loo for the Pope's visit, forgiving him, it helps to articulate the film's point that, no matter how poor, if your heart's in the right place you'll get your reward.

As such El Baño has a slightly conservative feel, which from another perspective might be seen as 'universal'. Its artlessness is actually artful; its lack of polish makes it slick. In many ways it seems to have no more to do with the lives of the Montevideans I know than it does with the lives of Londoners. There are two sides to the 'universal' coin - on the one hand it means that your story has a fair chance of making the leap beyond your culture, appearing in cities around the world. On the other, there's a danger that, in appealing to everyone, your story ends up speaking to no-one. El Baño del Papa is a clever piece of cinema, warm and touching, with some convincing performances, but it doesn't reveal as much about Uruguay as I perhaps hoped it would.

gone baby gone (d. ben affleck, w. affleck & aaron stockard)

The film opens, more or less, and closes, more or less, with shots of locals on the streets of Boston. When Affleck's film feels at its strongest is when he captures the look and the feel of that nowhere land in the United States where people are far from beautiful and the streets offer little to inspire. The grimier the better, and in the opening 45 minutes or so, the dialogue matches the tone in its ambition to pin down the skankiness of the slouching States.

Affleck's direction in the opening hour is surprisingly supple, and he knows how to get the most out of his outrageously talented brother, whose performance was the only reason I allowed my arm to be twisted of a Saturday night to go and see the film. I've already mentioned the talents of Casey - he has a screen presence which should end up putting most of his competitors in the shade. Oddly you can always spot a great actor by their ability to slur or mumble their lines and still make them sound like they possess all the meaning in the world. (Not necessarily great for the screenwriter but in the end we don't go to the cinema to listen to words but to look at faces, as Barthes observed.)

Sadly, after a while, the plot takes over, a plot that becomes increasingly tortuous and ultimately melodramatic. Any film which casts Morgan Freeman nowadays has to deal with the fact that the minute he appears he exudes a kind of benighted, Mandela-esque dignity which will occupy the film's moral epicentre. Although Gone Baby Gone chooses to subvert this it doesn't get away from the fact that his presence means we know we have slipped sideways from badlands Boston to the world of 'moral consequences' (ie Hollywood). Once the dramatic effects of this change of scene kick in the film is on a slow ride towards mediocrity, having promised rather more.

couscous (w&d. abdel kechiche)

Length is a curious thing in films. I confess that one of the joys of films, as opposed to theatre, is that by and large they come in at under two hours. This figure seems somewhat arbitrary - whilst the epics of Gance or Griffiths might not fit too easily into the rhythms of modern life, there's no reason a film shouldn't be two and half hours long, even longer. But in practice, the balancing act of narrative development and audience engagement seems harder and harder to maintain the longer a movie stretches past the 120 minute mark, and it's rare to see a film that absorbs its audience so effectively that the extra time seems well spent, rather than an act of directorial indulgence.

Couscous makes it clear early on that it's a film of long scenes, long takes, length in general. The first half hour felt like it consisted of little more than half a dozen scenes, with a lengthy Sunday lunch taking up a good twenty minutes. The lunch takes place in the large household of a second generation French-Algerian family. The father of the family, Slimane, is not present, as he's separated from his wife, even though she prepares a large bowl of couscous for him which his sons take round. As in almost all the scenes in Couscous, the camera is encouraged by the director to linger, dwelling on the details of food, eating, conversation, (much of which gave the impression of being improvised), in a social realist manner. In this way Kechiche succeeds in getting his audience into the world of his characters, as they try to get by in the Mediterranean town they inhabit. The film has a languid pace, generating shrewd and often amusing observational moments, however it is clear from the first half that plot is not Kechiche's central concern.

Then, almost haphazardly, Couscous introduces its key storyline. Slimane uses his redundancy pay from the shipyard to buy a boat, and sets out on a Quixotic venture to turn it into a restaurant. The introduction of plot seems to work against the film's style, as it encourages the audience to believe the film is actually going somewhere. Struggling against bureaucratic opposition to his project, Slimane decides to hold a free launch night, which does not run smoothly. By the time the night begins, the film is already two hours into its running time. Unwilling to abandon his observational style, Kechiche films the launch in what feels like real time, thereby showing up the difference between film time and real time. A belly dance which lasts about five minutes probably doesn't feel too long in real time; in film time it threatens to become interminable. In the end it felt as though, even if Kechiche's film continued all night, there would still not be enough time for it to reach some kind of resolution, and sure enough, the ending comes with more than just one loose string flapping in the Mistral breeze.

Couscous successfully captures the feel of life for an immigrant family in Southern France. Cinema's ability to take the viewer into another world is one of the things that makes the medium such a remarkable artform. However, cinema is not like staring out of a train window in a foreign land for a couple of hours. It's also about the telling of stories, and the economy of storytelling. And as soon as the storyteller starts stretching their story beyond that vague two hour mark, there's a danger that the audience will start to wonder whether the reason for the protraction has more to do with the storyteller's fascination with their own process in the telling of the story, than the story itself.

california dreamin' (d. christian nemescu, w. nemescu & catherine linstrum)

There seems to have been a dearth of movies that demand to be seen in London this month. Perhaps I've missed some gems, perhaps it's just the start of a slack Summer season, or perhaps distributors are becoming ever more cautious and nothing that doesn't feature a ludicrous premise (in the case of British flicks) or a Hollywood star will ever be released again.

California Dreamin' features a Hollywood star, although not one who many producers would want to hang their coat on. Armand Assante's performance as the US military captain Doug Jones, whose company becomes stranded in a Roumanian village, hostage to the local honcho, is a peculiar one. He mumbles much of his dialogue, and whilst it seemed a little strange to see the US soldiers subtitled along with the Roumanian peasants, it did help to make sense of some of his more unlikely lines. Whether he was mouthing a strange translation from Roumanian into American-military speak, or just doing free-jazz improvisation, was impossible to tell. There was more than a hint of the Strangelove George C Scott to Assante's performance, all wild-eyed pent-up aggression with no outlet, but his oddness merely reflected an occasionally baffling movie.

The premise is straightforward and prepossessing. At the tail end of the Kosovan war a US communications team is effectively hijacked by Doiaru, the corrupt stationmaster, who has been waiting fifty years for the Americans to arrive. In a key speech, he says that he was expecting them to appear and get rid of the Nazis, then the Russians, then Ceausescu, and now when they do show up it's in order to go and bomb Serbs. The film makes play on the nature of Roumanian bureaucracy: nothing Jones barks into the telephone effects any change, and the company are stranded for four days. During which Doiaru's daughter, Monica, (the convincing Maria Dinulescu) has a fling with a fetching young US soldier; the company's discipline goes to pieces; and their presence finally provokes an insurrection against Doiaru which results in quasi-tragedy.

Nemescu splits the action up into four chapters, reflecting the four days the soldiers are stranded there. As a director his approach appeared to be to take the kitchen sink, throw it in, then see what else was lying around. Besides an inevitable Dracula-fest, which Assante sits through with a petulant/ comatose look on his face, there are various sub-plots involving Monica and the men who fancy her; an unexploded second world war bomb; the Roumanian government's attempts to displace Doiaru (played with an oxen belligerence by Razvan Vasilescu); a factory strike; and the remaining village politicking. The action is almost all rural, then all of a sudden Monica and her American soldier find themselves at a party in an unnamed town with a bomb going off beneath the bed. At one point the soldiers are taken to a replica of the Eiffel Tower, for no obvious reason save it makes for a pleasant frame. At another a Roumanian Elvis appears and sings Love Me Tender. It is a movie about the nature of being trapped and waiting, and at 155 minutes running time, it succeeds in conveying both the frustrations and delights of this experience.

In short, referring to a film which always prefers to go the long way round, it's a bit of a mess, containing about five movies in one. Its erratic structure is matched by its erratic tone - like a shapeless Kustirica movie, which is clearly going to be one of the baggier filmic structures you're likely to come across. And yet, California Dreamin' for all its longeurs, reminded me why I like movies and what I've been missing these past few weeks. It takes the viewer right into its peculiar world. The set-up of the clashing cultures was awkward (with some of the least soldierly US soldiers you're ever likely to see) but always fascinating, and the idea of having two people who cannot talk to one another but fancy the pants off each other was one of the more effective ideas in the pot-pourri. Nothing really hangs together, but all the same it's there, it's happening on the screen in front of you, and if you didn't see it you would have had no idea what it was you'd missed out on, for better or for worse.

That peculiar conflation of geography, economy, and a personal vision laid before your eyes in a dark room of a 'London' 'afternoon', (insert as appropriate), also known as cinema.

XXY (d&w lucia puenzo)

The coast of Uruguay is, as has been noted elsewhere by this writer, a beautiful place. And to come there on holiday as a teenager, to swim in the sea, get lost amongst the pines, have bonfires on the beach, discover alcohol, fall in love... there can be few better places to do all these things, so I've been told. XXY is the story of two teenagers, exploring the world, falling for one another, as teenagers do. There's only one catch. One of them, Alex, is a hermaphrodite. Which confuses things somewhat for Alvaro, the other.

Lucia Puenzo's story is a tightly told tale, a variation on a Rohmer theme, with a significant twist. Like Rohmer's adolescent holiday movies, its success depends on the performance of the two leads, Ines Efron and Martin Piroyansky. Efron has an emaciated, baffled teenage anger. Not sure if she's a boy or a girl, the reality of her condition is heightened by Alvaro's appearance in her life. In XXY there's both the love story and the hermaphrodite story working concurrently, and Efron's performance has all the angst of an adolescent discovering both love and sex for the first time, coupled with her attempts to come to terms with the cards nature has dealt her. Piroyansky's nerdish performance matches his partner's. He's closed in, uncertain, thinks he looks like a fool but doesn't want to be one. A firelit scene with his vain father is both funny and touching, with the director resisting any temptation towards sentimentality.

This is one of the strongest features of Puenzo's unfussy direction. The sex scene which lies at the epicentre of the piece is discreetly shocking. It starts with the music of a radio playing, creating what seems like an appropriate atmosphere. But as it gets going, Alex switches the music off. There's no soundtrack for what happens next. First love is rarely like they show it in the movies, and XXY ensures that it won't add to the misguided mystique.

The subject matter of the film, as the title indicates, is freakish, in so far as (as the old fisherman notes, and the young lads also know) a hermaphrodite is a rare exception to the natural order of things. Puenzo's direction assiduously works against the freakishness of her material, grounding Alex's exceptionality in the everyday. Furthermore, it highlights the fact that, at the age when we are on the cusp of sex and love and all that jazz... we all feel like freaks; we all feel exceptional in the face of so much complexity.

the last mistress (d. catherine breillat)

There's something reassuringly old-fashioned about The Last Mistress. Whilst Breillat has established a reputation in previous films as a provocateur, this is a costume drama and love story. There's more rogueishness in an old lady's claim that she's from the 18th Century, not the 19th, and they did things differently back in the old days, than in any of the film's occasional sex scenes.

The film tells of the ten year love affair between Ryno de Marigny and Vellini, a sultry Malagan. There's is a tempestuous love-hate relationship. Despite the fact that Ryno marries the improbably beautiful Hermangarde, and they secrete themselves away in a castle on a rocky coast, the ghost of his former lover lurks in the wings. Ryno and Vellini's love story will never have a cheesy ending: if they seperate they would appear to be going against nature; if they are together it is in the face of society. Breillat's film has both a jaundiced and a celebratory take on love: it's a never ending chapter of accidents which inevitably leads to pain and suffering; but it's also the only thing which really makes life worth living. The apotheosis of love is sex, and whilst the sex scenes have no shock value at all, in contrast to the scenes which made the director's reputation in previous films, they reek of an overpowering intimacy which can only be achieved when minds, as well as bodies, meet.

Besides its take on love, The Last Mistress is also an old fashioned celebration of the beauty of its stars. Fu'ad Ait Aattou, as Ryno, is a man-boy, with ornate lips which the cinematography falls for in much the same way as his future grandmother does, as she listens, sprawled in her armchair, to the tale of his love affair with Vellini. Roxane Mesquida, as Hermangarde, has the kind of radiance which some thought had died on a cliff with Grace Kelly. And as Vellini, Asia Argento once again shows her star quality: a quality that comes about not so much as a result of the talent of the acting, but a force of personality that seems to travel out of the screen, borne on rays of transparent light.

Breillat's film luxuriates in all this, as do the three older characters who punctuate the story, leeching life vicariously from the travails of the young. The perfunctory ending seems to suggest that the narrative, whilst intruiging, is not of such great import. What counts is the ceaseless game of love. There's a hint of Swann and Odette, another great Parisian love story, in Ryno's passion for Vellini. The Last Mistress makes no pretensions to be avant garde and breaks no taboos. Rather, it draws its strength from what is timeless, capturing emotions from the past which are as powerful now as they were then, and will always be.

persepolis (d&w vincent paronnaud & marjane satrapi)

The following sounds like a fascinating premise for a movie: a teenage punk girl growing up in the Ayatollahs' Tehran. Featuring, in the english language version, the voice of Iggy Pop. Animated, so that the flights of her fancy can come to life.

If only Persepolis has stuck to this brief. The pictures, based on Satrapi's comic strip, are charming. Recent Iranian history is more than fit material for a major animated film. Everything's in place.

Unfortunately all the right ingredients don't make for a compelling film. Part of the problem is that Persepolis is actually the first chapter in Satrapi's autobiography. Autobiography is not the easist subject matter for a film. Good autobiography (eg Proust) rambles, follows blind alleys, has no great need to stick to narrative conventions. The most important moments in a life might have nothing to do with the most dramatic moments. A fascinating life can make for a tedious autobiography, and the dullest of lives might make for the most exciting. From what the film discloses, Satrapi has lead a reasonably interesting life, but except for the Iranian context (and her near run-ins with the revolutionary guard make for the richest material) there's nothing crying out to be documented.

In the manner of autobiography, the narrative does indeed potter around, from Tehran to Vienna and back again, via one or two failed loved affairs and the inevitable family ties. As a book this might not matter, but as a film it lacks structure. Perhaps this relates to the difference between reading and watching, I'm not sure, but no matter how pretty the pictures, if they appear to be telling us a story and then don't, they run the risk of becoming tedious. I also got the feeling that the animation didn't help to develop or sustain tension. It's hard to think of great animated drama, on celluloid at least. Animated action perhaps (Manga), comedy clearly (Disney), even philosophical treatise, (Waking Life). But when it comes to drama, it's hard to reproduce the tension of a face captured on film, with line and pen.

This seemed most evident to me in the scene where the Revolutionary Guard bust a party which Marjane attends, leading to a rooftop chase. In theory, and in the hands of someone like Mungiu, this scene should have been gripping, but in practice it just felt like another mundane episode, with little tension at all.

However, Mungiu would no doubt have edited this story down at script stage. As it stands Persepolis feels like a compendium of stories and history lessons that don't quite hang together, no matter how rich the ingredients.