my name is adam: children of the ghetto volume 1 (elias khoury, tr humphrey davies)

How should we read this book? It’s several years since I read Khoury. Yalo and White Masks both looked at the Lebanese wars which ravaged Beirut during my youth. Here, he turns his attentions to Palestine and the Nakba. There are two narrators: Khoury himself, who in a preface tells us that what we are about to read are the notebooks of Adam Danoun, an Arab-Israeli who he knew in New York, who had protested against the fictions in his novel Yalo. So doing, the author validates the scrappy, discursive nature of the novel, which includes stories within stories, endless asides, and a long opening sequence about medieval Arab poetry. However, there is artifice at work here. Because the story of the Nakba cannot be conveyed in clean lines. Due to the way that history has sought to crush the Palestine soul and spirit, stealing its land and its right to speak, the events of 1948 are inevitably shrouded in speculation and myth, an oral tradition, as hazy and open to distortion as the stories of the early Arab poets. Khoury’s self-avowed unreliable narrator helps to lead us, tiptoeing through the story of his birth in the ghetto of Lydda, now renamed as Lod, and the terrible events of those days when the town was annexed by the IDF. Even the idea of a ghetto is one that has been imported by the Israelis from Europe and imposed upon a Palestine population whose lands and homes were being seized. Finally, Adam meets up in New York with a fellow Palestinian, fifteen years older than him, who experienced the gruesome war crimes, the burial squadrons, the hunger. All those things which are being repeated once more in the charnel house of Gaza.

If there was anyone I should like to talk to regarding Gaza, whose perspective I would value, it would be Khoury. The messiness of this novel feels like an honest reflection of the world it has taken upon itself to depict or reveal. Beneath the hatred, Khoury locates the common ground. He references other Palestine writers, but also Israeli writers, including Oz. The value of literature as a way of understanding what seems beyond the scope of understanding is fundamental to his work. The lengthy sequence on Waddah and the other Arab poets only serves to reaffirm this: from where will we gain our understanding of the medieval mind, if not from the words they left behind.  

What interests me about this novel isn’t its admission of the crime, important though that is, but its ability to trace the outline of the mute Palestinian, who was to become one of the staples of Israeli literature, and to infer the underlying meaning of the founding of the Zionist state, which is that for the Jews to become a people like other peoples – “other peoples” here meaning European peoples – they had first to invent their own Jews.

“Listen, guys,” said Ma’moun. “These people know nothing. They think they’re in Europe. They’ve come and they’ve brought the ghetto with them so they can put us in it.”

“No! I bear no grudge against the Jews. They too die and as soon as they die become dead people just like us and cease to be Jews. We stop being us and they stop being them, so why the killing? I swear I don’t get it. I don’t have a grudge against anybody, but why?

The eaten-away face of the young girl became imprinted on my heart and has remained with me throughout my life. This is what people are. People are cadavers. Even children who look like angels are cadavers.

film after film (j hoberman)

Hoberson is a New York based critic. This collection is made up of three parts: selected reviews from his articles for the Village Voice, a more academic section on the evolution or non-evolution of cinema, and a central collection of essays on the relationship between film and the events of the era that he was writing in, which encompassed 9/11 and the Iraq war, among other things. Besides being well versed in both popular and “world” cinema, Hoberson also displays an academic frame of reference which isn’t always to be found in the work of Anglo-Saxon film critics, happy to refer to the obvious suspects such as Bazin, but also the likes of Virilio, Baudrillard etc, without fear of sounding pretentious. (That fear being the bane of Angel-Saxon writers.) The results, particularly in the central section of the book, are a welcome reminder of the idea that cinema, even in its most commercial guise, is intricately linked with the politics of the time in which it is produced. Notably, Hoberson traces the way that the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan were reflected by Hollywood, both literally and allegorically. He also refers to the “cinematic” dimension of the attack on the Twin Towers and the way in which the defence department summoned filmmakers from Hollywood to participate in blue sky debates about combatting America’s enemies. Apart from being studded with impeccable reviews, including films by Reygadas, McQueen and Kariostami, amongst many others, Hoberson’s book brilliantly yokes together a diverse range of films, from A History of Violence to Munich to A Mighty Heart, among many others. The overlap between geo-political ambition on a militaristic and cultural scale has rarely been so well analysed from a US perspective. 

n-w (zadie smith)

I came back to Smith via an article she wrote about Tár, a lucid article which touched on the falsity of the world when you ascend to the stratosphere of fame. I say ‘come back to’, because twenty years or so ago Smith was, for a while, so ubiquitous it was impossible not to be aware of or read her. I recall reading or trying to read White Teeth in the bath in Vauxhall, before giving up on it, disappointed, for one reason or another. Once I walked past her at the perhaps predictable venue of the Frieze Art Fair. I say predictable, because it seemed like the perfect kind of framing for her detached elegance, a post-colonial jewel on the UK map. It felt as though Smith became a representative of the establishment, part of that British literary world that exudes a certain arrogance, the likes of Amis, Rushdie & co. This is what was fascinating about the article in question, which appeared to reflect on the paradox of first world success, the way it affects the relationship between the artist as creator and the artist as producer, or artist vs. product; one of the more insidious cultural crises of capitalism, although of course artists have always flogged their work, or had to weigh up how much energy they should be dedicating to flogging their work.

This is all context for the journey of this reader. Smith comes with baggage, and perhaps for this reason I have, ever since that bath time experience back in the day, shied away from her work. Which brings us to N-W, her fourth book. Firstly, it should be said that it is a fluid, easy read. Secondly that it is structurally playful, essentially comprising three books in one, each with their own chosen register. Thirdly, that it succeeds in representing a vision of post-colonial, diverse, London, with its range of characters, argots, and experiences. The common root of these experiences is the London housing estate where the characters grew up, a place not a million miles away from Gabriel Krauze’s more hard-edged Who They Was. The other side of the literary coin might be Lanchester’s bland Capital. The great modern urban novels (as opposed to the great urban character-driven novels), such as Ulysses or Berlin Alexanderplatz, employ an approach which isn’t afraid of alienating the reader. N-W flirts with this, with its fragmented structure. The third section is composed of 180 sequences, telling the story of Natalie/ Keisha from childhood to motherhood. The first section employs a similar device to describe a more specific temporal moment in her friend, Leah’s midlife crisis. But there’s always a sense of close-cropped control in the text. Even when Natalie goes rogue, and starts responding to personals where couples are looking for a black woman to have sex with, breaking away from her tightly-corseted life/career path, it feels like an aesthetic device, on part of writer and character. The danger is held at arm’s length as they observe the details of the random houses Natalie finds herself visiting.

Strangely, as the bookending sections of Natalie and Leah feel like they have a personal element to it (the philosopher’s hand on the prodigy’s knee, the crisis around motherhood), the section where it feels as though the most visceral content spills over is the central section. This is more classically composed, as the happy-go-lucky Felix spends a fateful day cruising around his London, more extensive than the N-W of the title. Everything in this central sequence feels both more expansive and more nuanced, in particular a vivid and complicated interlude with his over-privileged ex-lover who lives in Soho. The city’s interaction between second-generation immigrant and old money is laid bare, in a manner that succeeds in being ugly and affecting at the same time. Again, this is an entirely personal view, but it feels as though Felix’s peregrinations capture the city in a vertical fashion, where the other sections remain horizontal, skating over the surface of the teeming city, notes from the overground.

Having said all of which, N-W feels like a novel which is seeking to engage, to get in there, to ask what is this city/ country that is being invented, in the light of the history that precedes it and which its characters are caught up in. 

amour (w&d haneke)

This was not perhaps the wisest of weeks to finally catch Haneke’s paean to old age and death. At a time when I have recently witnessed how fast decay can take hold of the body, Haneke’s splenetic description of Emmanuelle Riva’s demise was a gruelling watch. As ever, he goes about the task of charting this demise with rigorous efficiency. Although it might be that the trope of the sudden moment of extreme shock, witnessed in so many of his films, was beginning to lose its edge here. When Piccoli articulates his love in an act of brutal kindness, it comes as no real surprise. There is also a curious dream sequence, with its bona fide jump scare, which seems somehow coarse for this most frostbitten of directors. Haneke’s lingering camera always invites reflection. Watching Amour, a film that engages with the realities of dying in a way that cinema almost never does, one can see why death in cinema veers towards the cartoonish or the symbolic. The awareness of death is not something we cannot bear too much of. One can applaud the director for having the courage to confront the issue, but one is also relieved that one doesn’t have to face it all that often. 

laurus (w. eugene vodolazkin, tr, lisa hayden)

At its richest and strangest, Laurus, a meditation on death, sainthood and Russia, summons up the aura of a Chagall painting. Vivid colours which defy gravity, lovers whose love beatifies them for a moment in time (as love beatifies all lovers), a sense of infinite space beyond the edges of the canvas or the page. Vodolazkin’s tale narrates the story of a boy who acquires the gift of healing from his grandfather, a gift that it also a burden. This is another story set in times of plague when the skills of Arseny, the novel’s protagonist whose name changes several times, (ending as the eponymous Laurus), can make all the difference between life and death. The author locates two facets of Arseny’s abilities: on the one hand there is the more technological skill of being able to identify which plants offer which cures; on the other a more mystical capacity to channel a healing energy through his touch. Laurus is very much a novel about Russia, and the forces at work in the construction of the Russian psyche. This duality in Aresny feels like a commentary on the equilibrium which Russia seeks between the poles of mysticism and modernity, between the worlds of East and West. All of which is implicit rather than explicit. Arseny himself evolves from medicine man to holy fool to ambassador. The book acquires a quixotic feel as we follow his life story towards death. The writer’s take on the relationship between life and the afterlife is one of the more powerful elements of the novel; there’s a reflection on what it means to be mortal that few Western writers are willing to engage with. The sense that our travails upon this earth are part of a wider journey, one humans are very far from understanding, one that defies time (which is illustrated by the novel’s willingness to engage with anachronism). Laurus is a novel which constantly seeks to go beyond materialism to provoke a contemplation of the transcendent, the words flying off the edge of the page towards an unknown corner of the galaxy. 

capital (john lanchester)

The prologue of Lanchester’s novel promises much. The premise is set out: a street where every home is worth is a million pounds. The great London victors of the property wars, those blessed to have been in possession of a house in a desirable barrio of London in the late years of the twentieth century, early twenty first. Who, as the writer explains, just by sitting still in their homes day after day were racking up capital, getting rich. The street is called Pepys Road and would appear to be on one of the more salubrious streets of Clapham. The absurdity of the London housing boom is a subject that begs to be interrogated and there’s no better place for investigating it than in a novel.

However, the novel never really seems to follow through on this premise. It’s another in the current vogue of novels told from multiple perspectives (see Coe’s Middle England and Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other), a format that by and large feels more effective in theory than execution. In theory the potential for crossover, for one household to effect another, with great dramatic possibilities, is strong, but this never really happens in Capital. In addition, in the end at least half of the book’s key characters don’t actually live on the street. And if they do, the impact of their undeserved wealth on their psyche is never examined. Whist being an entertaining enough read, it feels as though Lanchester never nails any of his targets. Rather the novel drifts along towards what feels like a sort-of happy ending, except for the fact that one of the protagonists has ended up in a detention centre, under threat of being sent back to her native Zimbabwe and facing whatever kind of horrors she might have to face there. Whilst it is in some ways admirable to compose an overarching novel about London, its winners and losers, there’s always a danger that the presentation of the losers ends up seeming trite. 

Capital could have been a correlative to Who We Was, Krauze’s take on the criminal underclass. It could have shown the complex underside of the other world, that of the unwitting millionaires. There is a  hint of a darker storyline where the residents of the streets are sent the same menacing postcard, but this is never thread which feels undercooked. The man behind this menacing campaign, an angry frustrated artist, is at one point described as going through his Dostoyevski stage. And naming Dostoyevski makes one wonder what the Russian would have made of this story, as well as realise how much modern London needs and lacks its own Dostoyevski. 

me and you (w&d bertolucci, w. niccolò ammaniti, umberto contarello, francesca marciano)

Why are so many great directors’ final films such a disappointment? At what point does the artist lose touch with the zeitgeist? It’s a recurrent theme. Bertolucci’s film feels like an attempt to keep up with the ‘yout’. The thing is, when he made Before the Revolution, he was the ‘yout’. His final film feels like a desperate attempt to rediscover what it felt like to be young, knowing that the train has long gone. Perhaps, if the film acknowledged, this, if it came from a more transparent place, it wouldn’t have felt so off-centre. All the old tropes are there: a disillusioned youth, trying to find meaning in his life; a hint of incest; a flirtation with the darkness at the edge of society. But the fire has gone, and so too, the budget. This is a small scale film, most of it shot in a basement, with none of the visual flair one normally associates with the director. From IMDB, one learns it was made nearly a decade after his previous film, The Dreamers. Perhaps he accepted the idea of making the film on a reduced budget, just out of the sheer desire to return to a set, to get a taste of the action one last time. Sic transit gloria mundi. 

die, my love [ariana harwicz, tr. sarah moses & carolina orloff]

Harwicz’s short novel brought to mind her compatriot Schweblin’s Fever Dream. Both novels are set in a menacing countryside, feature a confused mother as a narrator, and are vertiginous nouveau-roman reads. Schweblin has become a darling of contemporary literature. Harwicz so far has not. The differences between their texts perhaps explain why. Where Schweblin’s text has a measured, even orderly tone, Harwicz’s prose sits on sanity’s borderline. There’s a slightly surprising (and then unsurprising) reference to Mrs Dalloway thrown in there somewhere. Harwicz’s narrator’s voice is the bride stripped bare, the unedited stream of an unhinged consciousness. Except, for the fact, of course, that to write ‘unhinged’ prose in a legible fashion is a great art. Harwicz’s prose contains a poetic density. Constructed out of small chapters, no more than a few pages long, the novel creates space for the taboo to be voiced, for the madness within civilisation to be articulated. 

Which is about as rational as you need to get. The fact of the matter is that this is a breathtaking little novel, which may not be to many people’s tastes, but is all the braver and more brilliant for being so. It’s a novel from the margin, the novel of an immigrant, the novel of a hyper-charged female psyche, but it’s also a novel which captures the inner voice of anyone and everyone, regardless of gender, with our subliminal Pinteresque cruelties and our unacknowledged Klimtian beauty. 

punk rock an oral history (john robb)

This is the third book of oral history I’ve read in recent months. It’s an innately satisfying way to get your history. John Robb’s edited account is comprehensive, looking at the evolution of punk in the early 70s through to the end of that decade, by which time the movement had mutated and fractured. 

Punk arrived half a decade early for me, but I knew the Britain that the opening chapters describe, a time when the idealism of the sixties had perished, when Britain’s inner cities felt hollowed out and dedicated to concrete. The grimness of British high streets in the late seventies was pandemic. (In fairness, in the more deprived parts of the country this is something that hasn’t changed all that much.) There was nothing to do except hang out and look for trouble, or look to avoid trouble. On a tangential note, I think this is when I first began to feel European as much as British, because visiting Europe seemed to offer another vision of urban interaction, one which ran parallel to the British version, but seemed warmer, more inclusive. This might have been rose-tinted spectacles, but at the very least it suggested a communality which persists to this day.  My friend Jason listened to PIL’s Metal Box. By this point, about 1980, the Pistols were already past tense, and the unravelling and recalibration of punk which the book captures so acutely was under way. The Damned was more Captain Sensible than The Damned. The Clash were already transforming into a brand that could be appropriated by frat boys and their ilk.

However, as the book makes clear, many of the punk pioneers were only a few years older than me. Again and again the book highlights the tiny world that the movement sprung from, a few musicians cross-fertilising, swapping from band to band, influenced by each other’s music and fashion. People in Manchester, Glasgow or other towns would get the night train to London, sleep on station floors and then carry back their R&D to the homeland. Perhaps this localised world still exists, in the sphere of styles of music whose name we don’t even know yet, but in an information age, it seems hard to conceive of the same kind of scene emerging. Firstly, the minute it could be defined, it would be hyped to kingdom come, and secondly the sheer range of musical possibilities has mushroomed. 

So in a way, the book ends up feeling like a lament for a lost era no-one would particularly want to have to revisit. There’s a lot of nostalgic affection expressed by the interviewees for the halcyon days, but also a frequent clear-sightedness about the way in which this was a fleeting moment which was contained the seeds of its own destruction, and was perhaps all the better for being so. It’s a great introduction to punk, that much-used word whose meaning is so hard to pin down. 

confession of the lioness [mia couto]

Confession of the Lioness is another journey with Couto through the fabular land of rural Mozambique. It’s a story told from two points of view. The mysterious female character, Mariamar, and the weary hunter, Archie Bullseye. The premise is that there have been a succession of lion attacks in Mariamar’s rural village, the latest of which has claimed the life of her sister, Silência. Archie has been hired as a hunter to come and kill the lions. But the more we read, the more we realise that Archie’s not that interested in killing anything anymore. He’s in love with his brother’s wife, his brother who’s in a mental hospital after killing their father. He’d rather hunt with his pen than his rifle, and takes to writing a journal, which the book contains. Meanwhile, Mariamar fell in love with Archie when he visited the village 16 years ago to kill a crocodile and now she pines for him. 

As the book unfolds, it becomes, somewhat wonderfully, far less clear, rather than more clear. Is Mariamar actually a lioness? Is the Mariamar who talks about Archie and lives in her mother’s house the fictional invention of this lioness? None of the presumed threads leads where you expect. Archie and Mariamar never have their moment together. Archie loses all interest in his mission. Things don’t work according to the narrative rules we’ve been taught to expect. We’ve entered a weirder, more complex narrative world. Which at the same time paints a portrayal of a strange rural society, one which the inhabitants of the city will never really understand. Like Archie and his writer companion, we are these visitors, offered a glimpse of another way of life and thought, one which belongs to the lions and their antagonists, the people who co-exist with the lions. 

klf: chaos, magic and the band who burned a million pounds [john higgs]

John Higg’s quirky book on the KLF’s burning of a million quid on the island of Jura felt a little heavy on pontification and a little light on detail. It is, as the author observes, a fascinating moment in the history of the music business, as well as being a pungent semiotic event. The book seeks to contextualise this by giving potted accounts of various connected movements, from Dada to Discordianism. The writer is good on the social history of the time and the state of British culture in the early 90’s, all of which sometimes made it feel as though the narrative might have worked better as a novel. In the end, you don’t feel as though you have too much of a handle on Cauty and Drummond’s actions: rather you feel you have a very strong handle on the author’s interpretation of their actions. 

años de calle (w&d. alejandra grinschpun, w. laureano ladislao gutiérrez)

The Sala Zitarossa is filled to the rafters with young people and no-one quite knows why. The film is shown free as part of a season of documentaries which normally attract around 30 people, rather than the hundreds who have turned up today. They watch respectfully this compelling account of the lives of four Buenos Aires street kids, told over the course of ten years. (Años de Calle translates as Street Years). The filmmakers, Alejandra Grinschpun & Laureano Ladislao Gutiérrez first find their subjects in 1999, when the political posters are for Menem. The filmmakers are contributing to a photography outreach program, taking photos of street kids and giving them cameras to take photos with. The kids, ranging from 13 to 17, show them around their habitat in the railway sidings which run through the heart of the city, the high rise buildings framing their cardboard shelters. Five years later, 2004, the filmmakers catch up with them again. Andrés is in prison. Gachi is about to have her third child. They retain the beaky optimism of youth, in spite of the hard years they’ve already lived. By the last time of filming, their attitudes have hardened. One, Ruben has vanished, his mother trying to trace his whereabouts. Andrés is back in prison, spending the eighth year out of ten incarcerated. His subdued monotone seems a lifetime away from the cheeky kid we first met. Gachi doesn’t want to talk to the camera anymore. The camera has done nothing for over the years. She lives in a noisy garage with her partner and some of her kids. She hides her face from the camera. The only one who seems to have been able to escape destiny is Ismael, who is now himself giving photography courses to street kids, recycling the knowledge the filming has given him. Once again, in Buenos Aires as in London, the arts prove more than just decorative: they represent a means of social mobility that other professions cannot offer. It’s hard to contemplate Ismael as a lawyer or a doctor, but photography would appear to have offered him a niche in a brutal world. This is a lovingly composed film, crafted over time. It’s lack of adornment or ego is to its credit: the souls who are its subject matter are the film’s tragic heroes. Años de Calle is the anti-Boyhood, with its North American complacency. This is an account of lives lead on the other side of tracks. 

liv and ingmar (w&d. dheeraj akolkar; w. ragnhild lund)

Any memoir which comes straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, should come with a sucrose warning. Similar to the one that ought to be put on the side of coca cola cans. Retrospectively, we all want to hang on to the good and partition the bad off into some unopenable drive. It’s logical. Yet, this doesn’t do much for the process of capturing the truth of what really occurred. Pinter, in both Betrayal and Old Times, is wonderful at dissecting the small deceits we make in order to make the past more palatable. He retains a truth-seeking gaze that others might term cynical; I’d like to think this is a British attribute but I’m sure we British can soft-soap it with the best of them when we want to. 

Liv and Ingmar is essentially a long filmed interview with Liv Ullman as she talks about the four years she and Bergman spent living together on a small island off the coast of Sweden. It was an idyll that turned into something out of the Shining. Bergman controlled the hours that his wife was allowed to stay out of the house and waited for her in the road, tapping his watch if she was late. He built a wall around the house to keep the world out. They argued with a vengeance. Ullman narrates a funny anecdote about him putting his foot through a door. Finally, after only four years, she couldn’t take it anymore and left with their daughter. But not before Bergman had recycled much of their domestic trauma for use in his films.

Forty years later, Ullman reflects wistfully. She and Bergman made up and became friends. They continued to make films together. As colleagues, their lives would appear to have been considerably more harmonious. He called her his Stradivarius, a monicker she appears to value. Of course, it’s for the best for everyone that Ullman now harbours positive memories of her time with Bergman and is able to laugh at the director’s various moments of sadism when he exploited her discomfort as an actress. However, the anger and the pain, two of the film’s subtitled sections, never really communicate themselves. For that, we have to watch the films. If anything, Liv and Ingmar reminds us of the dangers of being informed about the lives of artists, who all too often appear to possess a degree of self-obsession which is less appealing in the actuality than in the fictions they concoct in order to mask it. 

the door (w&d istván szabó, w. andrea vészits)

Szabó's film is a curio. It seems to be keeping with Cinemateca's penchant for screening the new films of old masters, preferably with a famous name attached. This may reflect a laudable ethos or it may be slightly cynical. What it does ensure is a succession of strangely off-key offerings which have the faintly tarnished feel of visiting an elderly relation whose best days are clearly behind them. There may be flashes of what once might have been, but on the whole it makes for an unsatisfactory experience, like being offered stale biscuits and weak coffee. 

Szabó's film is constructed around an engaging story, as Hungarian writer, Magda, befriends the curmudgeonly Emerenc, played with full frontal acerbicness by Helen Mirren. Emerenc has secrets. Her waspishness appeals to Magda, and there's the suggestion that it helps the younger woman come to terms with herself, as wife, woman and writer. However, there's no real sense of dramatic tension. The film is set in 60s Budapest but all the characters speak a clearly-dubbed English. The camera work is conservative, straight out of a TV drama. Perhaps most gallingly of all, given the director's former achievements, we don't really get any sense of the world of 60s Budapest. Everything feels so tightly budgeted that it's reduced to relative anonymity. A chamber piece which lacks the intensity required to make a chamber piece feel either relevant or compelling.

sister (d. ursula meier, w meier, antoine jaccoud, gilles taurand)

Ursula Meier’s first film was the high/low concept movie Home, about a family living beside a motorway, a curious blend of the cerebral and the emotional. On the one hand it appears to reference Godard’s Weekend or the work of Ballard. On the other it’s a study of the modern family and the extraordinary pressures it faces. It’s also one of those films where the conceit controls the narrative. A where-can-this-go-next kind of film.

Sister, her follow-up, has a different kind of feel. We’re in more traditional European art movie territory. It has been compared to the work of Dardennes brothers but this is also the neo-realist territory of Bicycle Thieves and its ilk. Meier locates her story (interestingly her credit is for ‘scenario’, thereafter working with other writers to flesh out the story and dialogue) within the world of the Swiss winter ski season. A brother and a sister live in a high rise block, below the gleaming peaks, and struggle to make ends meet. Simon, 12, has turned to petty theft. He steals anything from skis to goggles and sells them on at discount prices. Meanwhile his sister, Louise, who is in her early 20s, is something of a waster, going with random guys and unable to look after herself. It’s Simon’s criminal enterprise which keeps them afloat.

This premise immediately sets the film up for moments of exquisite tension, with the pint-sized Simon constantly on the point of getting caught. This strand is balanced by the development of his relationship with Louise, one that becomes ever more complex. At one point, he resorts to paying her for affection. In an uncomfortable scene, the 12 year old curls up in bed with her. These are characters for whom the distinction between maturity and immaturity barely exists: survival in their strange isolated world is all that matters. Until the final scenes, when Louise finally starts to take responsibility for both her own life and Simon’s.

All of this is told with an economy which ensures the narrative, surprises and all, moves along briskly. A couple of showy cameos are more or less seamlessly integrated and the acting of the two leads, Kacey Mottet Klein & Léa Seydoux is impeccable. Klein gives on of those astonishing performances which only children can, one which seems to almost transcend ‘acting’.The cinematography makes the most of the peaks and troughs of the mountain landscape, suggesting the way in which its geography maps on to human geology: those who bask in the white glory of the summit, where the cold is another luxury, are opposed to those condemned to the muddy trenches of the valleys.

Meier’s vision is perhaps reminiscent of the work of Jelinek, observing the way that those who inhabit the uplands, whilst ready to condemn Simon as a thief, have no scruples buying their bargains from him. Everyone is complicit in an amoral system. Beneath this observation lurks, perhaps, an icier critique. Why should some be granted the financial freedom to roam the beautiful peaks whilst others have to steal to get by. The moment when Simon seeks a hug from the idealised mother figure, Gillian Anderson, is the moment where the worlds collide. Here the social critique is fully rounded, as the audience roots for the thief and hopes that her victim can find it in her heart, and perhaps redeem herself, by forgiving him. It’s an affecting narrative moment in a impressively constructed film. 

gebo and the shadow (w&d manoel de oliveira, w. raul brandão)

The writing credits for this film by the 104 year old Portuguese director feature de Oliviera himself and Raul Brandão, whose play the film adapts. In a manner not dissimilar from another veteran’s recent offering, Killer Joe, (although Friedkin is a stripling at the age of 78), this is an unadorned cinematic adaptation of a stageplay. The play tells the relatively simple story of an elderly man whose son returns after eight years, only to steal from him and leave. The action takes place over the course of 24 hours. Although ‘action’ is a somewhat misleading term.

The opening image is a beguiling, near-cubist framing of a boat at a jetty, in low light. From there, the camera takes us to a small, enclosed house, located within a network of alleys. We will only leave the house on a couple of occasions, and get no further than the corner of the street. The son, upon his return, observes his parents’ house populated by the grand old dames of European cinema, (Cardinale and Moreau, who has a scene-stealing cameo), and says it feels like a cemetery, or words to this effect. It’s hard to disagree with him: no-one under the age of 60 could hold out for too long here, and indeed half the audience of  a half-dozen walked out of the Cinemateca before the film had finished. The theft of his father’s savings offers a Dostoyevskian twist. It’s more or less warranted. Why should the elderly hang on by their bootstraps whilst the young have living to get on with? The son’s actions are shown to be immoral by his wife’s reaction, (she has lived with his parents during his absence and tries to stop him stealing), but if there is a parable at work within Gebo and the Shadow, then it would be the way in which Europe’s elderly generation has stockpiled wealth whilst much of its youth now flounders on the brink of poverty.

It’s hard to say if this subtext is something Oliviera and Brandao are seeking to express. If they were, then the retort might be that the oldsters should make way and free up resources for a younger cinematic generation. (According to IMDB the budget for the film was over 1.5 million euros.) There’s something staggeringly impressive in the way the filmmaker continues to work beyond the age of a hundred, but Gebo and the Shadow is not doing much to redefine the medium. 

the golden scales [parker bilal]

Parker Bilal's novel is a detective story, set in contemporary Egypt. The book's Sudanese hero, Makana, has been thrown out of his own country and seeks to get by in Cairo as a private detective. His Chandleresque lineage is evident. Bilal depicts Cairo as a kind of LA of the East, a nexus which drags in not merely Egyptians and Sudanese, but also Brits, Russians, Italians. Egyptian society operates on a pivot between Islamic extremism and hedonistic European capitalism, both of which compete for position and influence. Perhaps this conflict is the one balanced in the scales of the book's title. A key event is the bombing of a Red Sea resort by Jihadists. Only, Bilal astutely locates this supposed act of geo-political war within the context of personal vendetta and misplaced egos. The implication is that of history as cock-up rather than conspiracy, something the world-weary Makana adroitly understands.

The detective novel is a fine surgical tool for getting under the skin of a society. The Golden Scales takes us into the Jihadi's den and the capitalist's penthouse. Along the way we are offered an insight into Egyptian society that the media, for all the coverage the country has received in the past few years, cannot hope to emulate. In addition, in the tradition of the best detective novels, it provides a riveting read as the reader roots for Makana in his quest to discover the whereabouts of the wonderfully monickered Adil Romario, a playboy footballer who has vanished without trace. 

pies en la tierra (w&d mario roberto pedernera)

The disability film has always been ripe for exploitation. There is little an actor likes more than to don the cloak of the handicapped. Knowing that he or she has already stolen a march on the public's emotions. All too often this results in a pornography of the disabled. The audience adopts the position of the voyeur.

So it is with trepidation that we watched the opening sequence of the Pedernera’s Pies En La Tierra, showing the mumbling, wheelchair-bound Juancho as he goes about his daily struggle. He gets by looking after a roadside shack which primarily sells fish, caught by a young acolyte. To return to the home he shares with his aged mother, he has to go cross country and then downriver by boat. The shack they share is rundown and as basic as basic gets. Juancho mumbles a lot about what a lovely day it's going to be tomorrow. Then his mother dies and he sets out on a trip, just him and his wheelchair, heading off into the unknown, in search of a distant cousin.

The moment it became clear that this was a film which might truly get under the skin of its central character, rather than exploiting him, was when the camera captures Juancho’s purely instinctual decision to leave. In the moment, once the decision has been taken, we can see there’s no turning back. Thereafter, the film is on effortlessly strong ground. Juancho, his wheelchair and a dog that decides to accompany him, are all alone in the middle of nowhere, Argentina. Anything could happen, and the film is not afraid to play on this tension, notably in a sequence where he loses his wheelchair. His progress is painstaking and perilous and utterly compelling.

This is a road movie and there are clear echoes of several similar films. The Straight Story; Las Acacias, Sorin's Camino de Dan Diego, even Sallas’ The Motorcycle Diaries. In common with Sallas’ Che tale, it is unafraid to examine the more spiritual aspects of the narrative. But where Sallas sought to create a hagiography of Che as he moved through an indigent Latin American landscape, Pedernera emphasises his protagonist’s weakness, and the strength of those he meets. When Juancho hooks up with a charismatic Christian folk singer who encourages him to come out of his shell, (a terrific performance from Carlos Belloso), the film’s spiritual element becomes even more overt. The film rises to the challenge, creating a moment of astonishing lyricism which manages to fuse Belloso’s Christian rock with an outdoor cinema screening and Juancho’s gradually perceived need to finally come to terms with his disability.

The mumbling incoherence of the beautifully acted Juancho (Francisco Cataldi) inverts the tradition of the eloquent disabled outsider, thereby placing at the heart of the film a completely believable portrait of a man who knows he has to overcome, but who isn’t sure what he has to overcome or how he’s supposed to do it.

Pies en La Tierra is now on release in Argentina. It was by pure chance that I caught the film. But one can only hope it achieves the recognition it deserves. It’s rare to stumble upon a film and find yourself captivated, but first-time director Pedernera has pulled off something remarkable.

zona [geoff dyer]

It’s a party just off Clapham Common. The host is a young woman who will later become an auspicious feminist. Judy Rumbold is there, something I find vaguely exciting, as I’d spent the last four years or so having her Guardian pieces force-fed to me as part of my crash course on all things fashion. (Alaia; Westwood; Gaultier; Alaia. It’s still the eighties, just.) The party is full of literary/ journo types fresh out of Oxbridge. All quite clearly on their way to somewhere, their destinations marked out, their lives bursting with their first and finest and final flowering, when it still feels like there’s such a thing of freedom of choice.

The hostess invites me into a room that is locked. Inside there’s about half a dozen people. There’s a man sitting on the sofa. He’s clearly very important, in spite of the fact that he’s no older than anyone else there. The others in the room as good as genuflect towards him. His every word is hung upon. Which is not something he seems to mind. The hostess introduces me to him. His name is James Wood. She says we need to speak about Saul Bellow and leaves us to it. We speak about Saul Bellow. I don’t think I have anything of any great import to say about Bellow and I’m not sure that he does either. But the important point is to talk about him. Of him. To be known, one to the other, to have spoken of Bellow. Our conversation is cloistered, a kind of samizdat. It lasts about ten minutes. At the end we acknowledge the Bellowness of our conversation. I leave the room, with the satellites still wheeling round the critic, grateful that Bellow and myself have given him back to them. The room is locked behind me.

This is my first and only meeting with the man who will later write, with some insight, of Geoff Dyer: “To spend one’s life writing is a betrayal of the writer’s life: Dyer knows this is a lunatic paradox, that even Romantics have to sit at boring desks and write, but he would rather have his battered paradox than Barnes’s clean coherence.” At the same time as the critic and myself are discussing Bellow, Dyer is quite possibly getting hammered down the road in Brixton. Ten years later I will stumble across Dyer’s memoir/ novella of Brixton life and it will register as authentic. Thereafter I shall never read anything else by Dyer or Bellow, never meet the critic or Rumbold or the feminist or discuss literature ever again.

And Dyer will begin to mutate into one of the more unlikely success stories of the London literary scene. Who quite possibly now has his own room where the door is locked. Where he might discuss Tarkovsky. Or Alan Watts. Or Calasso. Or Azzedine Alaia. Or not.

Now, having ignored Dyer and this world for so long, I find myself reading his latest book, whose full title is: Zona, A Book about a Film about a Journey to a Room. It’s a blow by blow account of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In another culture, this might not be such a surprising tome, with its overtly Barthesian premise, but in London it marks Dyer out as a maverick. People are far more likely to talk about Tarkovsky than watch his films. The intellectual exercise of writing a book about Stalker would by and large be viewed as a pretentious Europhile project. Of course, having pulled it off, it then becomes brilliant. As indeed it is. Zona is a small tour de force, a mini-Pegasus, flying over Tarkovsky’s territory, his zone, appropriating the master’s work as a means of displaying the writer’s breath of vision as well as his loyalty. It’s a book about the way in which time works, the way in which we create anchors to measure our progress. For Dyer, Stalker is one such anchor. It’s a point of constant reference, with regard to his relationship with cinema, and hence art, but also his own changing desires and ambitions.

At the heart of the book, as at the heart of the film, is the Room. The room is the place where our greatest desire can be realised. It’s only here that one starts to question the writer’s authenticity. His greatest desire, as he puts it, is so banal that it threatens to undercut the validity of his whole project. As though, on the cusp of the room, his inherent Englishness suddenly exerts itself, and he rises up against any risk of being branded a pseudo-intellectual Europhile. All of a sudden, the book veers towards GQ territory. Denuding his deepest desires, Dyer redeems himself. He doesn’t want to be a savant or a yogi or a radical or a revolutionary. He wants to get wasted and be an extra in Shame, hanging out with a desiccated, overacting Fassbender, whom he vaguely resembles.  

I have my doubts. I have a feeling that in the background of Dyer’s supposed orgy, his veritable Room, there would be a screen with a film on it. Something by Antonioni. Which would gradually lure him in. Whilst others hedonised, his mind would drift. In spite of his best intentions to pillage like an Anglo-Saxon, he’d turn to the critic, who just happened to be there because he’s a critic, not a writer, so can get away with the odd orgy without feeling like he’s blowing his creative juices, and find himself locked into a conversation about Barthes. Or Flaubert. Or Virginia Bloody Woolf. 

mobile home (d francois pirot, w. pirot, marteen loix, jean-benoit ugeux)

This pliant comedy is my second Belgian film in a month. Like Meisjes it is a bittersweet comedy. Two friends, Simon and Julien decide to buy a mobile home and go travelling in order to escape their small town lives. But the mobile home breaks down before they can get away. Trapped, having invested all their savings in the vehicle, they are forced to work in order to raise funds to fix it. But the longer they stay the harder it becomes to leave.

The film is leavened by the acting of the two leads, Arthur Dupont and Guillaume Gouix. The journey they go on in the film is not the intended one. Unable to flee their flaws, they discover things about themselves they hadn’t expected or wanted to. It’s a neat narrative device and the film works well on its own terms. It manages to change gears and unearth some real pathos as Julien realises the importance of his relationship with his father. There’s nothing groundbreaking about Mobile Home, but there’s an assurance to the direction and it does what it says on the tin.