bone ash sky (katerina cosgrove)

The shadow of Palestine hangs over Cosgrove’s novel. It connects two massacres, the Armenian genocide and the Sabra and Shatila killings in Lebanon in 1982. The novel traces the forced flight of a family from Ottoman Armenia in 1916, following three generations who eventually make Beirut their home. The key narrative hook is told from the POV of Anoush, the third generation, whose grandparents were Armenian and whose father was a falangist allied to the Israeli invaders who participated in the 1982 massacre. There might be said to be a twin thesis to the book. On the one hand, with echoes of Elias Khoury, there is the logic of generational angst meaning that violence is hard-wired into people’s DNA, and history will continue to throw up more and more instances of inhuman brutality. On the other hand, the novel reaches for an optimistic, multi-faith final act, as Anoush succeeds in transcending religious difference in a cosmopolitan city which has, for now, achieved the same thing. The events of the past two years, (and I write these words on the 7th of October), would sadly seem to lend more credence to Cosgrove’s first thesis. 

upstream color (w&d shane carruth)

As I left the house on Monday to go and see Primer, the lock on the door broke. So I missed Primer. Which was annoying as it’s a film I have long wanted to catch as well as being an opportunity to return to the cinema after too many weeks rehearsing at night, not to mention other outstanding issues. En tonces — this, the second in the maverick Carruth’s season was the film I caught.

What a weird and wonderful creation it is. After ten minutes I adored it. By half way I was still plugged in. By the end I was thoroughly baffled, but the bafflement seemed worth it. Woman gets kidnapped, and contaminated with weird bugs, which appear under her flesh, then get transferred to a pig, all part of a program that is later uncovered. At the same time she starts an affair with a corrupt but amiable broker. The register switches from sci-fi to down-at-heel US indie romcom, to thriller, and the viewer is never quite sure what is going on or where the film is headed. But it’s beautifully shot, the tone is menacing and intimate, it might have been the greatest indie film ever made, but it isn’t quite, but what the fuck. Better than sitting through something which cost a fortune and ties up all narrative possibilities by the time it reaches the “inciting incident”. 

the view from the train: cities and other landscapes (patrick keiller)

Keiller is the maker of several cult films, which I have never seen, even if they have dwelled in my consciousness for decades. So it is perhaps perverse to engage with a book of his before seeing them. Having said that, the author is self-consciously operating, both as writer and filmmaker. within a defined intellectual framework. He cites the writing of Aragon, Lefebvre, Benjamin, amongst many others. His space is space: the space of the city, the space of the city within film, the space of film. His writing interrogates the representation of space, and how this has lead to its reconfiguration since the genesis of film and photography in the nineteenth century. The book is composed of various essays, written over the course of twenty years. This allows him to trace how the city he inhabits, London, has shifted over the course of this time, as well as permitting him to reference Dickens among others as descriptors of the city that came before. The book is something of a pot-pourri, but the essays on the early years of cinema, and how that medium was received and changed perceptions, are gloriously readable. 

the transmigration of bodies (w. yuri herrera, tr. lisa dillman)

Herrera’s novela was originally published in 2013, something that is surprising given that it seems to belong to that nascent genre, the covid novel. It’s a short, elliptical tale, featuring characters with symbolic names (The Unruly, Romeo, The Redeemer, who is the narrator).The Redeemer is a form of fixer stroke PI, who is charged with recovering the bodies of the son and daughter of two rival families who had fallen in love, each dying in strange circumstances. One of the most notable elements of the book is the way it is set within a world where some kind of contagion is rife and people are supposed to use facemasks. It reads now like a quasi biblical parable from the parallel world we recently inhabited. Perhaps it is also kin of Escalante’s second film, the sci-fi thriller La Región Salvage. Mexico being a country which exists on a parallel hyper-symbolic plane, one which the rest of the world shared for a few brief years. 

A touch of sin/ tian zhu ding (w&d jia zhang-ke)

Zhang-Ke’s magisterial film yokes complexity with simplicity, micro with macro, tragedy with comedy, violence and humour. Each of the four tales within the film employs the eternally potent dramatic tool of violence, to offer a savage X-ray of society, moving from high end hotels to scabrous street restaurants where anonymous faces slurp noodles like there’s no tomorrow. I was watching it with Mr Presno, who said at the end: But they can’t show that in China can they? How Zhang-Ke gets financing for his films remains a mystery but in many ways they give the lie to the idea of China as an overwhelmingly repressive state, in part because they are permitted to show the worst of the corruption and decadence of the new money with its communist party kickbacks. Despite being split into four parts, A Touch of Sin in many ways employs a classical narrative character framework. Each of the featured four flawed characters have to fight to find their significance within a world which reduces the individual to a part in a vast machine. Whether this is through the cathartic act of killing the bad guys, as in stories 1 and 3, or choosing a tragic end, as in story 4, or just assuming a role beyond the moral or social remit of society, as in the story 2, each character realises themselves though their capacity to enact violence. This model makes for straightforward storytelling, which is at the same time a radical critique of the society they emerge from. 

zero zero zero (roberto saviano, tr. virginia jewiss)

Zero Zero Zero is an all-embracing account of the cocaine industry as well as being a sort of tragic bildungsroman. The book’s origins are intertwined with the author’s destiny. Having found himself committed to a life of 24h security patrols and restricted freedoms following his first book, Gomorrah, which took on the mafia, Saviano now writes from with a reinforced bubble. His book is in part a quest to understand why this bubble exists, why his life has become this closed, hermetic existence. (In the ‘Thanks’ section, there’s a nod to Salman Rushdie, “who taught me how to be free even when surrounded by seven armed bodyguards”. As the author’s life has become a kind of huis clos, he has less qualms about seeking and exposing the facts behind an industry which he claims makes the world go round. This makes for a rangey read, flitting from Mexico to Italy to Africa to Spain and a hundred other points on the compass which are touched by the narcotics industry, which is essentially the whole world. At times, the writing gets so caught up in the detail that it is hard to follow, but as this is a book which people will come to via the author’s fame, something he is aware of, it represents an invaluable guide to the world’s shadow economy, the one that doesn’t figure on the books, nor will be discussed in summit meetings of the G7, but whose vast mark-ups ensure it is perhaps the most lucrative business in town and undoubtably one of the largest too. Through it all Saviano’s voice emerges as a kind of Cassandra, singing a song he knows no-one wants to listen to, but if he doesn’t sing - who will

Nb - One of the more powerful angles of the book is the way in which Saviano’s own semi-incarceration clearly feeds into his understanding of how people operate in prison or facing the risk of prison. With his own life in constant jeopardy, he can emote more readily than many commentators or writers to the impulses of people living on the edge. One of the most telling chapters in the book is the one where he talks to a drugs mule, explaining the training and execution of this painful process. Of course, the drugs mule is very far down the pecking order, effectively just another victim of the industry, as is, in his own way, the author himself. 

blue jasmine (w&d allen)

What to make of Allen’s curious tale of his protagonist’s demise? What to make of the unsympathetic husband who runs off with the teenage au-pair? It’s hard to get a handle on an Allen film these days, especially one which purports to adopt a female perspective. Blanchett’s Jasmine is a wreck of a woman, and on one level, it’s to the film’s credit that it portrays her warts and all, as she unravels, stitches herself back together and then unravels oncemeore. She is the trope of the neurotic, dippy but beautiful woman whose refusal to see what it going on around her will be her downfall, a downfall she in so many ways deserves. Nevertheless, to Blanchett’s credit, we can’t help rooting for her, even if just a bit. We want things to work out for her in the end, and when they don’t, it smarts. This is indeed, a three dimensional character, and there is a certain courage to be found in the construction and her depiction. Great characters can be a pain in the neck.  

The other less Flaubertian way of reading the film is as a critique of the excesses of Wall Street, although social commentary always rings somewhat hollow in Allen’s world. He is a director whose insularity lead to him treating the world as essentially a vehicle for his movies to be set in, an attitude as solipsistic and neo-imperialistic as that of his successor, Wes Anderson, who inherited Allen’s love of guest stars and ‘exotic’ locations. However, Allen at his best also riffs off of the loss of his European soul, the paradox of having cinematic power but lacking the cinematic profundity to match up to his idols. Allen’s very fecundity, his capacity to stitch together an off-the-cuff story with a few gags, which would always be financed, year after year, seemed to be something which, at the peak of his power he railed against. The creation of an anti-heroine, in the shape of Jasmine, is the fruit of the labours of this other Allen, a filmmaker who occasionally lived up to his own aspirations. 

malign velocities (benjamin noys)

Has the world accelerated into an inevitable collapse? Did globalisation, the frenzy of hyper-consumerism and hyper-production contain the seeds of its own demise? These questions seemed mildly absurd even six months ago; today they seem urgent, and either utopian or dystopian. Using Nick Land’s outlandish theories about accelarationism as a starting point, this short book essentially refracts notions of progress as mapped out in the twentieth century, ranging from the machine-love ideas of the Italian futurists through Leninist revolutionary ideals to a more nuanced vision of Stalinism than you might normally expect. (Indeed it wouldn’t be hard to present this current epoch as the most Stalinist since Stalin, one which blithely accepts surplus deaths in the tens of thousands as a price that society needs to be prepared to pay for the greater good of the whole.) The book traces a path from these highly ideological worldviews through to the development of neo-liberalism and Chinese commune-capitalism. The political map is redrawn: it’s not so much a case of left against right, as a vision of technological materialist advancement measured against a more pantheistic, anti-progressive agenda, a qualified reclamation of the Luddites. It’s not an easy book to read and at times it feels to the lay reader as though it ties itself in knots as it wrestles with the jargon of post-modernist philosophy, (much as the work of Nick Land himself often verges on the impenetrable), but there’s enough in Malign Velocities to make you rethink the whole course of 20th century history if you’re so inclined, and who knows, as we witness the full, terrifying complexity of 21st history unfold, that might not be such a daft thing to be doing right now. The past has constructed a honey trap, we felt as though we were racing towards a glorious technological future when, right this very minute, it looks as though the only place we were really headed was back towards the pre-globalised future. 

bleeding edge (pynchon)

Travelling in Poland earlier this year I frequently found myself thinking; Pynchon was the only one who really understood what the second world war was about, above and beyond these concepts of victory and defeat. Gravity’s Rainbow soared above all that, like the parabola it describes. Of course, you then expect all his novels to be equally revelatory, especially if the issue underpinning this one is that great known unknown, which goes by the name of 911. For a while it feels as though the novel might take you closer to the heart of the mystery, that Pynchon’s New York will be a palimpsest, the script within which another truth will be revealed. It bubbles with signifiers and characters. The novel ties in the dotcom crash with property development with PROMIS with false flags and mercenaries on roofs with Stinger missiles and the brew is so heady it’s hard not to get high on it. Pynchon employs the kind of semiotic shorthand which he excels at to throw everything into the mix, including the great bouffant clown himself. There are so many possible readings of what happened on the that day, and he does his level best to cover as many of them as possible. But if the point of a mystery is that it conceals a secret (and maybe it isn’t?), then the novel ultimately disappoints. Although that disappointment is determined more by expectations, expectations that have haunted Pynchon for fifty years now, than by any kind of literary failure. Where Gravity’s Rainbow felt as though it not only soared above, it also plumbed the depths, it seems significant that when Maxine, Bleeding Edge’s Oedipa Maas, sees something underground, in Montauk, something so terrifying that it might just be the thing that unlocks the mystery, she flees and the novel never goes there again. As though the revelation is too much for the author to bear, so he leads his protagonist and readers on a wild goose chase instead. Maybe they got to him? (Triple question mark) Or maybe as a character in the novel says “paranoia's the garlic in life's kitchen, right, you can never have too much."

the time by the sea (ronald blythe)

Blythe’s memoir is a warm-hearted, discursive ramble though the years he spent living in Suffolk, mostly in Aldeburgh. He describes his friendships with Britten, Imagen Holst and many others. A whole host of writers whose work is little read today, like Blythe himself, populate the book’s pages. The book is redolent of a lost post-war Britain. There’s far more poverty, but far more idealism as well. It feels as though the Britain Blythe describes still retains its ties to the nineteenth century and those  that preceded it. Much of the book is written in the shadow of George Crabbe, a figure more or less forgotten today. There are anecdotes about Samuel Palmer, Shakespeare, Clare. The romantic link between countryside, art and daily life is celebrated in the works of writers, composers and artists.  Nowadays it feels as though the British countryside, (particularly in Suffolk) has become a privileged retreat, colonised by second home owners and the wealthy; transformed from a county whose hardship people like my grandparents sought to escape. Blythe’s book therefore captures something that feels as though it is irretrievably lost. The car, central heating, out-of-town supermarkets: all these things have transformed rural life. A glimpse of how the author lived that transformation, for better or for worse, is also to be gleaned from this memoir. 

second-hand time [svetlana alexievich, tr bela shayevich]

This is a monster of a book. So much so that I read it in two phases, roughly half and half. It’s not that it’s hard to read: the prose of reported speech flows like a smooth stream, words piling up on each other, short, brutal words which compose, amassed, a remarkable testimony. It’s more that the density of meaning underpinning these simple words is so potent that I needed, at one point, to take a breather, which I did for a few months, before returning to it.

The book recounts, in the words of people who lived through it, the break up of the USSR, the transition from a homogenous communist state to a brand of oligarcho-capitalism. The book describes the termination of an empire, a termination which was not, like the British Empire, a gradual process, but a seismic one, which happened over the course of less than a decade. People who had lived with values and a belief-system set in stone suddenly found that that belief-system, and those values, crumbling. Alexievich talks to those people, and their children, and details what it’s like to live though this process, in their own words.

As such the book is both a castigation and a lament for the Soviet Union. The book doesn’t spare details of the crimes of a totalitarian regime. There are many accounts from the camps, of lives torn in half, destinies shattered and desperate hardship. At the same time, the first half of the book details with pathos the way in which the intellectual values changed. How under the Soviet model, the greatest currency was ideas, books; under the post-Soviet the greatest currency reverted to being that which it ever was. The accounts of people huddling in Soviet kitchens, the safest place to speak, to talk about ideas, are bewilderingly touching. These accounts never suggest a vindication of the Soviet system, (far from it), but they do suggest that a society with a different set of values, one not predicated on material gain, might be a feasible concept. Perhaps in these moments, the book comes closest to suggesting how a Marxist dream might have worked, if it wasn’t for all the reasons that it didn’t. (Which the book details unsparingly). 

At the same time, Second-Hand Time also succeeds in placing the USSR within the narrative of Russian dream-history and expansionism. This is something, as the book makes clear, which will never change. Russia in itself is such an unwieldy, mysterious geographical entity that it has always and will always generate a particular geo-political perspective. It perhaps requires a certain mysticism to knit the country together, one that goes hand-in-hand with neo-fascist dreams of empire. Something which helps to explain the effectiveness of the current political regime, one which clearly follows in the footsteps of the Communist autocracy. In the end, as Alexievich’s book clearly observes, for so many, the difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’ is marginal at most. The standard of living remains the same, the stultifying nature of regional life remains the same; the consumption of vodka remains the same. 

Finally, and perhaps the element of the book which has helped to lead the author to the Nobel Prize, among other plaudits, Second-Hand Time revindicates the force of oral history. There’s something Homeric about the great rain of words which fall on the page. Somewhere in this deluge, the reader knows, lies the absolute truth of the time the book describes. A historian or a novelist can aspire to the truth, but the reader knows that truth will always pass through the prism of their consciousness. Here, refracted through then prism of a hundred consciousnesses or more, shards of extreme truth glint like precious metals underground. This is what it was like and what it is like now. There is no argument. These voices have no agenda, beyond the desire that what they have known in their brief time upon this world has a value which can live on after them. Which is all any of us, perhaps, really aspire to. 

bricks and mortar [clemens meyer]

Bricks and Mortar is not an easy read. It’s a kaleidoscopic text, which assembles a portrait of the prostitution trade in an unnamed East German town over the course of thirty years. There are multiple narrators, operating across multiple timelines. Details criss and cross, but the information is so opaque that you’re more conscious of the fact that you’re probably missing a connection than aware of the fact that you are making one. (At least this reader was). There’s a narrative threaded in there, for example, about a man who is murdered by a bren gun and then dumped in a “mire” outside the city. The killer tells us about this, and later a policeman (who’s sleeping with a prostitute, natch) discovers the body of the man, next to two other bodies. The Bren gun used to kill the man is referenced in other chapters. But I never really understood exactly why the man was killed or what the significance of his death was, in terms of the overarching narrative. 

In many ways the book is similar to All The Lights, Meyer’s collection of short stories. Random voices float to the surface from the bottom of the East German swamp. Meyer collects them and lets them be heard. However, Bricks and Mortar is a novel in so far as it possesses a narrative loosely woven around various characters, the enigmatic ‘AK’ and the Count, as well as Hans the Slaughterer. This semblance of a narrative makes it a more challenging read. You want the chapters to connect, to add up, and when they don’t, really, it’s frustrating. Which may well be part of the point. Meaning is elusive. Significance is hard to grasp. Life is cheap. The tease of coherence makes Bricks and Mortar a far harsher read than All The Lights, as though the writer is saying ‘you know you want it (to make sense) but you’re never going to get it.’ The fact that this is novel set in the world of organised prostitution doesn’t do anything to lighten the tone. 

Tonally, it might be said to have something in common with Meyer’s Fitzcarraldo stablemate, Enard. There’s a similar harsh relentlessness, allied to a resistance of any real emotional engagement. As though history should be wary of the emotions. It feels like macho writing, and it has been noted elsewhere that the female voices who appear in Bricks and Mortar are few and feel perhaps more one-dimensional than the male voices. Another obvious comparison would be with Berlin Alexanderplatz, but whilst it shares the sense of an all-encompassing portrayal of a society, it doesn’t have the playfulness of Döblin’s prose. I battled with the novel and ended up feeling as though it was one you admired (and resented) rather than enjoyed. But who says literature is there for enjoyment?

narcoland [annabel hernandez] & toro negro (d. carlos armella, pedro gonzález rubio)

Narcoland and Toro Negro

Mexico is a bewitching country which also happens to be in a state of disarray. To use British understatement. Annabel Hernandez' book is like reading an account of a messy operation. Surgical, but far from clean. She bravely deconstructs the chaos of her country, tracing links bewteen governments and drugs dealers, laying bare a cynical manipulation of power and wealth. It's a sometimes confusing read, as a blizzard of names from over thirty years are assembled to construct the patchwork quilt which is that same nation carved up by the various cartels and their government allies. The war on drugs is once again shown to be the war for drugs, with the book scratching at the surface of the ties that link events in Mexico to the politics of its Northern neighbour. For those that know about this sort of thing, there's a beguiling reference to Daniel Hopsicker, hinting at those other conspiracies which go hand in hand with the sheer volume of financial gain the drugs industry generates.

Toro Negro is a little-known documentary which has nothing to do with the drugs trade. Instead it tells the tale of a petty bullfighter, whose kamikaze courage outtflanks his skill and whose life is bathed in poverty. His battles with his girlfriend are as fiercely contested as those with the bulls. It's a vivid, hands-on doc, so intimate that at times it seems almost voyeuristic. The director acknowledges his own presence with one revealing shadow shot; there are moments when it seems as though he cannot help but cross the line from being the passive eye to becoming an active participant in the bullfighter's personal dramas. Toro Negro prowls the breeze block houses and shanty bars where its impoverished characters live, in the process lending the documentary the detailed pathos of a novel by Zola or Dickens. It's a great film, and it's also a fine counterpoint to Hernandez' book: the micro to its macro. It documents the desperation that drives young men and women to flirt with violence and death. The bullfighter may have found another way, but his spectacular, foolhardy courage makes him a blood-brother to those who choose to take the narco-path. Many of the leading narcos detailed in Narcoland started off poor, desperate, ready to do anything to get a step up; ready to ride the horns of the bull if that is what it takes. 

blue is the warmest colour/ la vie d'adele 1&2 (w&d abdellatif kechiche, w. ghalia lacroix)

Klimt and Schiele

In the party scene, there's a brief, insubstantial discussion of the difference between Klimt and Schiele. Adele, perhaps surprisingly, claims not to know who they are, something that annoys Emma. However, one might say that in this day and age, when the two Austrian artists have been co-opted and cannibalised by a graphic design world, why should you want to know much about them? Fifty years ago, their art might still have retained a transgressive air. Now, it has been absorbed by the mainstream. Which is not to say that someone couldn't come along and liberate them, but Kechiche is not your man for this. Rather, they are located within Emma's banal, bourgeois art world: both the gallery scene she hangs out with and the art itself. It's always a risk portraying "fictional" art in a work of fiction. Because the values of the art represented reflect something or other. In this case the art tells us that Emma is a minor talent making work for what would appear to be a bourgeois market. There's nothing radical about her work and the struggle to define herself she tells Adele about on the park bench (cf Sartre) doesn't appear to have affected her evolution as an artist. One of the clunkiest exchanges happens when Adele is asked her opinion of Emma's art. She mutters some platitudes. It seems as though living with Emma has neither generated any enthusiasm for art nor any discernible capacity to evolve her own opinions. 

Sartre

The first half of the film has a clear journey and conveys this journey with charm and humour. Adele, still at school, begins to realise she's gay. We follow her journey as she comes to terms with this and begins her affair with the seemingly dangerous, blue-haired Emma. At one point, Emma starts talking to Adele about Sartre. There's a trope throughout the film that Adele doesn't know all that much about anything intellectual. She's Dionysius to Emma's more considered Apollo. (Although her interest in literature at the film's opening seems like a genuine engagement, so much so that the shoe is on the other foot as her would-be lover reads up on Marivaux). Emma tells Adele how reading Sartre helped her to understand who she was as a person, implicitly suggesting that his work assisted her in the process of coming to terms with her sexuality. The exchange is in keeping with much of the film's dialogue: airy conversations which are given space to breathe. There's more than Sartre at play here, but all the same the script succeeds in paying homage to the king of the existentialists whilst developing its narrative at the same time. Later, in the same park, Adele will kiss Emma, initiating the relationship. Adele makes contact with her existentialist soul. For a while she's a kind of stepsister to Sandrine Bonnaire's character in Varda's Vagabonde. Prepared to put everything at stake for the development of that soul. A true Romantic, which is also to say a true conservative, because this is exactly the message young people are repeatedly encouraged to confront now: you have a duty to "find" yourself, to "become" yourself. Do it whilst you are young, before you settle down. Adele accepts the challenge and her life stands on the brink of vast, inspirational change.


Domestics

Only it doesn't change. Time passes. The two women are living together. They don't know each other's friends or anything much about each other's lives. Adele is Emma's "muse". She cooks and cleans for Emma in Emma's spacious flat. In some ways she's become little more than a drudge. But she doesn't mind. Although Emma does. Unsurprisingly she wants Adele to want more from her life. In short, this is a terrible, flawed relationship, only Adele is young and naive and has no way of knowing. The romantic dream has turned into a mundane bourgeois marking of the days. The jump forward in time takes us almost immediately to the point where the two women break up. We don't see the slow calcification of their relationship. We don't discover how this has affected their sex life. The nitty gritty of the story is not something which interests the filmmaker. Which, given the fact that Blue has made its reputation on the basis of Exarchopoulos's snot and Seydoux's tears might seem like a ridiculous thing to say. But at the end of the day this is the showtime part of the break-up. The fireworks. Which is well enough told, if somewhat deceitful. Because the real pain is elsewhere, hidden, unrevealed. And the real damage caused to Adele is not through the fact she and Emma split up, something they clearly need to do, but through the fact that rather than expanding Adele's horizons, the relationship appears to have curtailed them.


Novel

The film opens with a long sequence which discusses Pierre de Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne. Adele's boyfriend also talks about Les Liaisons Dangereuses. As with the discussion of art, there's something almost cheeky about Kechiche's conceit. We know we're in for a three hour movie, which is about as long as cinema can get away with. However, we also know that even the longest movie doesn't offer its creator(s) the space or scope which a novel offers its author to expound on themes and generate a sense of development over time. Kechiche almost seems to be saying: I'm aware of this, but let's give it a bash anyway. Blue is the Warmest Colour could be said to have a lot in common with Madame Bovray, for example. A woman follows her instincts in the face of society's unease, embarking on a journey which ends in tears. The result is constantly fascinating as well as being inevitably flawed. Kechiche's ambition in his storytelling repeatedly comes up against the limitations the medium imposes on the type of story he wants to tell. 


Apollo & Dionysius

In spite of encountering a certain resistance to Kechiche's film, I wouldn't disagree with anyone who suggested it's a terrific piece of filmmaking. You could argue that it's deceitful in its suggestion of being transgressive, when in fact, like Emma's art, it's safe and stoutly bourgeois in its outlook. You could further argue that its use of lesbianism could well be said to be exploitative, not so much for the sex scenes (which reminded me of Andrew Haigh's Weekend) but because the characters' sexuality is presented as being transgressive or dangerous when in fact this is a tale about relatively conservative youth and/or bohemia. The scene in front of the school when Adele is confronted by her schoolmates implies an outsider status for the characters, which the narrative then backs away from. It's a great scene, typical of the way in which Kechiche skilfully inveighs his film with a trenchant naturalism. But having set itself up as an investigation of how an Apollonian world appropriates and subsumes our Dionysian instincts, Blue seems to shy away from the complexity of this set-up, veering towards something more banal, more soapy. 

Bar Room Brawl

No matter the caveats, the chutzpah and flair of Blue, its capacity to capture the fiddly details of life and conversation and turn them into something compelling, is sometimes breathtaking. Kechiche's willingness to let his camera linger, as though it too is part of this relationship, waiting with a lover's anticipation for a secret sign that everything is going to be alright, (either when it will be or when it palpably will not), makes for some of the most vibrant, unconstructed scenes you could come across. His film offers a polished sheen to the guerrilla ethic, appropriating the strengths of low-budget filmmaking (basic set-ups, no stunts, no extravagant camerawork, insistent naturalism) in order to create a film that follows in the footsteps of Zola or Flaubert.

la jaula de oro (d. diego quemada-díez; w. quemada-díez; gibrán portela; lucia carreras)

A few years ago there was a film called Sin Nombre, which did very well for its director Cary Fukunaga. La Jaula is essentially the same film, following the path of three Guatemalan kids as they try to make their way across Mexico towards the promised land. The difference is that, whereas Sin Nombre offered a sentimental variation on the tale, La Jaula de Oro makes no bones about the cruelty and hardship involved in a journey which ultimately leads not to Los Angeles, as Juan, one of the trio hopes, but a desolate job in a snow-ridden corner of a troubled land. 

Guatemala and Mexico are perhaps even further away from Montevideo than Moscow, (say) might be from London. The barbarity revealed in the story feels as distant here as it would in London. There are those at the Montevideo Film Festival, where Jaula screened, who are perhaps sceptical of its vision of the downtrodden 3rd world being presented yet again for the voyeuristic delights of a 1st world audience. (It’s interesting quite how unpopular Ciudade de Dios is here, in spite of the involvement of Charlone). Nevertheless, Jaula possesses an undeniable integrity, refusing to let its audience off the hook. The three child actors whose journey we follow are as beguiling as we might expect, but their fates are not, and there’s no attempt made to sanitise the story.

In contrast to Sin Nombre, the film has a quasi-documentary feel, with the kids' fellow-travellers feeling like real people rather than extras. In addition Jaula mixes moments of great visual beauty with a roughness around the edges which ensures the viewer doesn’t become seduced by the picturesque nature of the journey across country. A paradox of the “immigrant road movie" (see also Winterbottom’s In This World) is that, in spite of the cinematic joys of witnessing landscapes and vistas we will probably never know, when telling the immigrant’s bleak story there’s little scope for the pleasures of aesthetics. Quemada-Díez treads this fine line with care. His movie might occupy familiar territory, but, as the gruelling last scenes emphasise, this is no fairground ride. Rather, it’s a film which seeks to take its place within the great abattoir of our tiny globe’s modernity. 

the past (w&d asghar farhadi)

The Past is such a portentous title that it almost threatens to scupper the titled project before it has got off the ground. The opening of Asghar Farhadi’s film has a laboured feel, as though its straining every sinew to convey everything that’s going on beneath the surface between Bejo’s Marie and Mosaffa’s Ahmad as they make the trip from the airport to Marie’s suburban home. Two people who were in a relationship but have lived apart for many years. It’s a rich sequence, but overly so, the weight of their back story threatening to overwhelm the present moment.

Fortunately, the narrative then abruptly plunges into the problems of the present. In particular, Marie’s relationships with her two girls as well as the son of her new lover, Samir. Elyes Aguis, gives a remarkable performance as Fouad, the confused child whose mother has recently tried to kill herself. His acting is all the more potent as a result of his character being kept on the margin of the narrative, where he acts as a mirror reflecting the anxiety and hurt which the actions of the adults has provoked. The adults are given a lot to deal with. Attempted suicide, separation, unhappy offspring. In the manner of a Hardy novel, the film painstakingly unravels the threads which bind the three protagonists together. This inevitably leads to a flirtation with melodrama, but Farhadi succeeds in steering a course away from the sharks of sentimentalism which circle his narrative.

This might be because, as well as being a relationship film, this is also a story about what it’s like to be an immigrant, first or second generation. Two of his actors are non-natives and the third is second generation French. Each takes on a character which feels in some way disconnected. Both Marie and Samir struggle to offer their children any sense of solidity, leaving them feeling rootless and confused. Ahmad’s arrival only serves to muddle the waters. Where the oldest daughter, Lucie, initially sees him as an ally, his presence ultimately resolves nothing. Whilst there is a potential pain inherent to any relationship, the film seems to suggest that this is exacerbated within a modern world which allows people to cross borders and distances with seeming ease, leaving them feeling isolated and helpless when things start to go wrong.

The Past possesses a dense narrative whose focus shifts from one character to another, concluding appropriately enough with the figure whose presence has been instrumental throughout but upto the very end has never been seen. Farhadi knows his key dramatic moments and plays them out for all they are worth. It is a reminder of what a well-worked screenplay really looks like: nothing flashy, just layer upon layer of subtle revelations, built up to create a compelling portrait of a few people who have been thrown together by fate and have to learn to make do, no matter how unsuited to life and relationships they feel themselves to be. 

starred up (d. david mackenzie, w. jonathan asser)

This being London, I found myself having two conversations about the director of the film, David Mackenzie, in a single day. The first, within the hallowed portals of Working Title’s London office, discussed the way he has suddenly become hot property, with Universal flying him out to LA in order to throw projects at him. The second was with someone who has known him, via his brother, for many years. Describing how his first film was shot in Spain and was supposed to have Bardem, before Bardem became famous, but didn't. (I can find no trace of this film in IMDB). In between the two points in Mackenzie’s life related there are a host of other films he has made, including his latest, and most apparently successful, Starred Up.

I say apparently because I’ve never seen another film of his. There have been, one notes, at least 8. In short, although Mackenzie is still relatively young, Starred Up is not the work of wunderkind. It’s the offering of a director who has been around the block and learned the ropes. Something which is evident in the way he pulls off what might have been a hackneyed prison tale and turns into a visceral, roller coaster journey. Above all, this is a film which is well-paced. For all that the lead, O’Connell, delivers a bravura performance, one can’t help thinking that if the editing and the camerawork weren’t in synch with this performance, his acting would appear overblown, and the full extent of the film’s melodramatic premise would reveal itself. This is not the greatest cinema script ever written: the ending feels contrived and the role of the the autobiographical figure, Ol, is underdeveloped. There’s no doubt there’s another film to be made which explores the writer, Jonathan Asser’s methodology in greater depth, where Starred Up only skates over the surface. (This in a week when we learn that books are to be banned in prison.) However, although under-developed, the film employs the Ol scenes to great effect. We are in the room with the prisoners as they grapple with and confront their fear of being ridiculous or losing status, a fear which can easily lead to violence in a testosterone fuelled society. These scenes are brilliantly composed and help to lend the film the sense of visceral energy it requires to convince us that this is what prison is really like. The whole place is a throbbing vein of overheated masculinity, embodied in O’Connell’s splendidly narcissistic performance. No-one can relax in this world and the assured direction means that the audience cannot either.

Where this could become frenetic in the hands of a less assured director, in Starred Up it feels like a convincing depiction of prison life. The highly regulated tone comes from the way in which the direction harmonises the various elements of the filmmaking process, from sound-design to acting, from editing to the muted grade. The film has the hallmark of someone at the helm who knows what they’re doing, reminding us that directors don’t fall out of trees, they are formed.

under the skin (w&d jonathan glazer, w. walter campbell)

Some points referring to Under The Skin:

Confused Narratives

Films don't have to make sense. They’re often more enjoyable if they don’t. As long as they’re not trying to make sense. The enigmatic can be the best cinema game in town. (cf Kubrick; Resnais; Antonioni) Albeit something that the British are rarely aware of. (Honourable exception Roeg, whose The Man Who Fell to Earth might be the godfather of UTS.)

Is this the most expensive low budget movie ever made?

One of the various clever things Glazer does in his film is appropriate a low-budget sensibility. By which it is meant: low budget filmmaking uses little-known actors or even non-actors. Low budget filmmaking doesn’t have the budget to try and “create” an ‘alternative’ world. So it focuses on the actual world. Which is what frequently gives low-budget filmmaking a sense of immediacy and relevance which a more, arch, “created” world does not. The first half of Under the Skin has the feel of an ob-doc about Glasgow street life. Which a glamorous alien/ hollywood star happens to be passing through. This juxtaposition sets off all kinds of sparks and gives the film a freshness which a more honed product lacks. Kudos to director and star for having the nerve to go down this route.

A little bit of humour goes a long way.

This is a film that’s laced with a mischievous sense of humour. Which helps to buy it space for the more esoteric angles it adopts. Humour gets the audience on board; the moments of humour are like way-stations on the film’s cryptic path. This is what Malick’s po-faced Tree of Life patently lacked, for example.

Is this a feminist movie?

Version 1: Men try to pick up chick thinking (correctly) she looks like a Hollywood star only to find she’s an alien luring them to their oily fate. Moral: men are fools who cannot see under the skin.

Version 2: Men try to pick up chick but in the process reveal their fundamental decency, to such an extent that the alien ends up taking pity on her victims and trying to discover her own humanity. She (it) only meets a truly malicious soul at the very end of the movie whose misguided attempt at rape preempts the finale. 

Whilst Glazer’s film clearly pokes fun at the masculine, there’s a warmth to its tone which belies the probable reading which the film will receive on Cinema & Gender courses in the 2020s.

only lovers left alive (w&d jim jarmusch)

There’s something sad about watching someone who possessed a winsome flair slowly losing their grip on it. I have yet to see some of Mr Jarmusch’s finest films, including Dead Man and Broken Flowers. However, in those I have seen (Night on Earth, Coffee and Cigarettes, Down by Law) there’s a distinctive aesthetic to be savoured. Part of their charm was the feeling of a creator capable of making a film that was more than the sum of its parts. The ingenuity involved in fooling the machine, which is one part of the great skill of beat-the-budget filmmaking (whether that’s a big budget or a little one). You don’t need to blow up skyscrapers in order to make something watchable. Or sink the Titanic. 

Unfortunately, Only Lovers feels as though if anything, the filmmaker was in possession of more funds than he needed. Locations in Tangiers and Detroit. Reasonably famous actors. Well dressed sets. To tell what is a sparse vampire narrative. There’s something about the vampire narrative that seems to bring out the worst in filmmakers. From Ms Denis to Mr Coppola. Maybe the directors are lured by the notion of cinema as innately vampiric: the immortality celluloid bestows, preserving its stars in the amber of perfect youthfulness. Or they see themselves concealed within the genre's narrative: the director as vampire, appropriating the actors’ blood to realise their own dreams. With the possible of exception of Dreyer, and by default Herzog, it rarely seems to work. Hiddlestone and Swinton’s decadent immortals are supposed to come across as louche and sophisticated but actually come across as an unsophisticated idea of what a louche, sophisticated Englishman or woman might be, a kind of cartoon version. The whole film, with many a ridiculous line, feels as though it might have worked better as a cartoon, which would at least allow the creator’s imagination to take the viewer to places which this stylised naturalism aspires to but never reaches. 

gravity (w&d alfonso cuarón, w. jonás cuarón, clooney)

Something has slipped out of kilter in the three weeks or so since I watched Gravity, the most expensive film ever seen in a cinema. I know, when we walked out into the Leicester Square evening, on our way to somewhere else in another galaxy far far away, I did so with slack jaw and a genuine sense of wonder. Wonder at rediscovering what cinema is capable of. Wonder of truly discovering the power of 3D for the first time. Wonder at the sense of having been closer to being in space than I had ever been before and knowing that this is testament to the skill of the technical team who took me there.

I know I felt all this, but when, sitting on a tube or something, I think back to the film, this is not what I remember. The thing I remember is the hokum lines that Clooney hokums his way through, in that neo-50s. sub-Jimmy Stewart style of his. They don’t come back to me in a specific fashion. I intuit a memory of lines about the Greenpackers and cherry pie and the value of striving, of never giving up, of being a homespun US citizen. I have no idea why this has become my dominant memory of Cuarón’s movie. I know that I read that Clooney himself came up with much of his dialogue. I also know that this diminishes my memories of the film to an unwarranted degree. All of a sudden it has become little more than a banal treatise on American values. All the fireworks have melted into thin air. There are no more flying spanners. There’s just George, bumbling away, taking it all in his stride.

I think that the moral of this story is that, no matter how remarkable the film, it can never supersede the limitations of its characters. Of course, many would say that Clooney’s character is perfect. I even remember at the time of watching it thinking how much better it was that he should have been cast than say, Robert Downey Jnr. (Who was scheduled to play the part until he dropped out.) But I can’t help it. That impression has not lasted and what remains in the memory tract, which should have been the glorious artistry and dazzling effects, is the faintly annoying message of yet more Yankee heroism. Which, in the cold light of day, I just don’t buy. 

But, hell, it’s only a movie. The most expensive movie I ever saw.