dengue boy (michel nieva, tr. rahul bery)

Dengue Boy belongs to that fin-de-siècle genre, the video game novel. I don’t get to read that many of them, but it reminded me of Pelevin, and I imagine William Gibson, (who I’ve never read). The virtual reality novel, where characters plug into worlds within worlds. Neva makes an explicit reference to Borges towards the end of the book, (The Aleph), suggesting a larger genealogy to the genre, and perhaps it might also be said to reference back to Huxley, Swift, More, etcetera. The invention of imaginary parallel worlds has always been the stuff of fiction. The technological gizmos of high capitalism only serve to garnish another layer of accessibility to these worlds.

Neva’s dystopian text is set in a futuristic climate-warmed hothouse world where concepts like cold are a thing of the past, only existing in expensive reproductions for obscenely wealthy tourists who travel to an ice-free Antarctica for a taste of something they have heard of in folk tales. The world is afflicted by giant mutant mosquitos which are capable of laying waste to everything in their path, spreading disease, death and destruction in their wake. These diseases are then monetised, as the bio-industry produces profitable vaccines to counter them. The reference to Covid 19 is implicit. In amongst the catastrophe porn, Neva invents a new sub-genre of mosquito splatter-gore. That the novel is Argentine is perhaps surprising, with its playful reimagining of Argentine geography post the rise in seal-levels which has liquidated Buenos Aires and the coast. Above and beyond the politics, the mash-up of ideas and excess seems to echo the trajectory of contemporary Argentina and its current Dengue Boy president. 

the fraud (zadie smith)

Hard to know how to place The Fraud. It’s a novel about London, about Victorian England, about being a writer, about slavery, about being black in a white world. It’s also about being a Scottish spinster who has a kinky relationship with her cousin and is in a menage a trois with the cousin’s wife. That’s before we get to the narrative spine of the novel, which is the recounting of the factual scandal of the Tichbourne Claimant which shook up Victorian Britain. There’s a lot going as the novel jumps around 40 years of history, looking to land punches left, right and centre. Sometimes they land, but at other times it feels as though the novel’s most urgent themes run the risk of getting lost in the wood of highbrow entertainment, as Smith wrestles with a sickening heritage whilst keeping the reader amused. 

the deserter (enard, tr. charlotte mandell)

I read a long essay on this book after finishing it, detailing the way Enard has been a defender of the idea of Europe, a Europe that stretches from Galway to Beirut, a Europe to which the Maghreb countries also belong. It’s a particular vision, which permits him to incorporate the Arab intellectual world, thereby paying homage to these cultures, so formative in the shaping of Europe, so constantly misrepresented as the colonial vision of Western Europe focused on mercantile expansion came to dominate. This is the fourth book of Enard’s I have read and I recognise, as the essay writer observed, that part of the fascination of his texts is precisely this investigation into what it means to call something European, above and beyond the economic or even socio-political perspectives.

The Deserter, as the writer of the essay observed, perhaps offers a more pessimistic vision than his previous books. It dovetails two narratives. Firstly, that of a deserter in an unnamed war, fleeing for his life. He connects with a traumatised woman, also fleeing, and her donkey. The prose and the story are stark, elemental. Enard makes much play of the sensory elements of their experiences. It might be described as a bleakly poetic text, albeit one which contains, perhaps, a hint of optimism, at the last. The deserter’s tale is interwoven with the account of the life of an East German mathematician, who survived Buchenwald, and who bought into the flawed aspirations of the DDR. His story is narrated by his daughter, and the kernel of her account is set on a boat near Berlin on the fateful date of 11/09/01, that foreboding hinge of two centuries. One steeped in atrocities and idealism, the other in a world without values. The daughter, now 71, is writing her account looking back at events from 2022, just as the war in Ukraine is igniting. These references suggest a fearfulness in Enard’s writing which hasn’t been seen before. As he looks into the future he sees more of the same: a vision out of a Sarah Kane play, an unravelling of all that has been stitched together to create that thing we call European civilisation. A process which has been in the process of beginning, of course, for centuries, in the concentration camps and the gulags, and the colonial misadventures.

The Deserter is a strange, slightly unsatisfactory novel, which feels as though it’s reaching for something that the writer cannot quite grasp. But an unsatisfactory Enard novel still makes for an absorbing, provocative read. He is a writer who uses the novel as a means to flex our thought processes, to make us question, if we see ourselves as European, what the hell that means, or if we don’t, who the hell those people might really be. Because, filtered through his imagination, they sure as hell are not the people they think they are.

Have looked up the essay - the essayist is Nicholas Dames and it can be found here.  

au cimetiere de la pellicule (d. thierno souleymane diallo)

The macguffin in Diallo’s documentary is a search for what he believes to be the first sub-Saharan film from Guinea, a film called Mouramani, directed in Paris by Mamadou Toure. This is the hook Diallo uses to go on a voyage through Guinea, hunting memories or traces of a lost film which plenty have heard of but none have ever seen. Does the film even exist? At the end of his playful doc, Diallo recreates the received content of the movie, but this isn’t the real raison d’être of his film. His concerns are twofold: the role of cinema within Francophone Africa, and the declining role of cinema in culture per se. The former leads him to excavate disused cinemas and warehouses, where he is told about the glory years of cinema in Guinea, long since past. Now, people watch films on their laptops or TVs. The communal joy of cinema is being eroded, something that is happening all over the world, and leads to him visiting a guerrilla cinema in Paris that has been reclaimed. Diallo, who references Joris Ivens, goes barefoot through the parks of Guinea and Paris, hunting his elusive game. It makes for an affecting insight into a little documented corner of the world, and an engaging meditation on the role of cinema in the 21st century. 

my weil (lars iyer)

Iyer’s novel is at once maddening and brilliant. It’s a sprawling anti-novel, deliberately resisting plot (although not completely successfully); constantly questioning its own existence, either through the author’s wilful detours or through his characters’ refusal to engage with their apparent narrative journeys. A group of PhD students in Manchester, questioning everything, rebels without a cause, trying to find a way through the jungle of sorrow that is today’s digital modernity. There is gold in them there hills, and Iyer’s text is a feast of thought and philosophy, crammed into the rainy streets of Manchester, where they flaneur around, getting on each others nerves, making each other laugh, getting wasted, playing badminton, even helping each other out. They are a community and we engage with them in a fashion that is, perhaps, disconcertingly orthodox.

I have never read Normal People, worried that it would be like the one episode I caught of the TV series on the plane in January. A kind of pseudo-intellectual bonkfest, masquerading as highbrow. To repeat, I’ve never read the novel, so have no idea whether the episode I saw is anything other than the inevitable betrayal of complex ideas in order to garner ratings. What I can say is I imagine My Weil is the alt-Normal People. A novel that revels in its (pseudo-) intellectualism to such a degree that it wilfully seeks to alienate its readers, to make them want to revolt at the author’s relentless demonstration of his particular brilliance. A novel that, it might even be said, doesn’t want itself to be read. So, of course, I loved it. 

crook manifesto (colson whitehead)

That a novel has the power to immerse you in a time and place and thoroughly lose yourself there, is one of the beauties of the form. Whitehead’s novel, in essence a sequence of three interconnected stories, featuring the same characters, does this effectively, transporting the reader to New York of the seventies, specifically the black New York of Harlem and neighbouring boroughs. It’s beautifully written, as the author’s twin protagonists, Pepper and Ray Carney, decent men moving in a murky world, get caught up in nefarious high jinks. There’s an affectionate tone to the writing, and we never suspect that anything too terrible will happen, but we’re along for the ride. There are odd hints of Pynchon in amongst the novel’s neo-classical perfection, (three sections of nine chapters each, neatly splitting the book into three parts), but the book would also seem to pay its dues to the hard-boiled simplicity of Chandler and Elroy. The final section could perhaps be read as a commentary on the NY from which someone like the future president might have evolved, as it probes the corruption in the real estate business.

"He crossed Sixth Ave. The Twin Towers still startled him when they lurched into view, freed by this or that turn around a street corner. Looming over the city like two cops trying to figure out what they can bust you for."

green border (w&d agnieszka holland, w. gabriela lazarkiewicz-sieczko, maciej pisuk)

Green Border is at once arresting, epic and yet strangely empty. The experience of watching it is visceral: a collection of Syrians and Afghanis are seeking to enter fortress Europe via the Belarus-Poland border, a great wooded area which offers no shelter and is soon revealed to be a trap, as the Polish and Belarus border guards take turns in forcing the immigrants back and forth across the border. They find themselves stuck in a terrible limbo, which is only alleviated by the kind actions of a bunch of activists who head into the forest and offer medical and legal assistance, in so far as they can. The film switches focus at this point, remaining with the Polish activists, as well as recounting the story of a border guard who discovers his humanity. However, this switch seems to dislocate the movie to an extent. The perils faced by the Polish activists, whilst extreme in their own way, cannot compare to what the refugees have had to face and are facing. The activists’ stories feel like a lighter touch, steering us away from the crueller realities the first half of the film has engaged with. Green Border becomes more palatable, it moves away from the obscene. The refugee characters are left half-drawn, or dead. We do not have to suffer with them anymore and we are grateful to the filmmakers for this, but at the same time, it feels as though we have been let off the hook. In many ways Green Border captures the complexities and paradoxes of seeking to make political work within the cinema market place. The demarcated limits of how much empathy is permitted are clearly on display. For all the Europeans’ noble intentions, they almost inevitably sell their own stories, and that of their supposed subjects, short. Meanwhile, those on the wrong side of the fence have to fight for funding from wealthier nations, funding which comes with its own marketplace imperatives as to what will be palatable to the wider target audience the film is supposed to reach. 

la chimera (w&d alice rohrwacher, w. carmela covino, marco pettenello)

There has been a lot of hype around La Chimera, which can be a recipe for disappointment. It is a strange, indulgent film, with the central motif being that the protagonist, Arthur, played with a glorious annoyance by Josh O’Connor, is seeking a thread that will reconnect him with his lost lover, even though she is dead. That motif sometimes seemed to stand for the film itself, as it seeks to find a path through the maze of its multiple tones and references. At once winsome, comic and faux-thriller. A film that interrogates our relationship with the past, whilst never wanting to take that interrogation too seriously: more Fellini than Antonioni. Fellini feels like a touchstone for a film with an offbeat humour and a wealth of extravagant but essentially loveable characters. The director’s sister has a cameo role as Spartaco, a dealer in stolen antiquities, and the film isn’t afraid to venture towards the far-fetched, as Arthur’s motley band storms her ship. Yet, somehow or other, all this hangs together. Arthur’s irascible journey as the unexplained gringo with his merry band of brothers becomes a sentimental journey of the Sterne-ian kind, one where emotion and ridicule go hand in hand to create a strange alchemy, aligned with ley lines and divination and the cruel workings of fate. 

kobieta z… (woman of…) (w&d małgorzata szumowska, michał englert)

Kobieta Z taps into the wave of trans films that reflect the post-Foucaultian changes in global society, or at least western global society. Aniela Wesoly starts the film as Andrzej and the film follows the journey of their transformation over the course of forty years. Boldly, the film resists making Aniela an attractive woman, pushing the journey of transformation into middle age. Andrzej is a dreamy young man, confident in his sexuality, making the conversion all the more impactful. Deep down they feel themselves to be a woman in a man’s body and they remain true to this belief, no matter what it costs them. Which is almost everything: their social status, their livelihood, their loving marriage, their looks. There is an upside to all this at the end, when their sacrifices appear to be rewarded with another kind of happiness. But the journey is long and bleak and follows the journey of their country from tightly buttoned communism to something far more liberal. The edit style is pacy and sinuous. Scenes are rarely given time to settle, and when they do, the film pulls out of them as soon as possible. This curtails the possible melodrama which Aniela’s story is liable to, as family and friends react to their transformation. What the filmmakers seem to aim for is an epic vision of Aniela’s struggle, one where we too will come up against the relentless antagonism of the forces ranged against them. 

la bella estate (w&d laura luchetti)

The Pretty Summer might be an English variant on this title, which would seem appropriate, as this is a pretty film with pretty people enjoying summer. And some winter. A slightly episodic drama which takes place from the summer of 1938 to 1939, it follows the coming of age of Gianna, a pretty young woman who has recently come with her brother to Turin from the countryside. She falls under the sway of artist’s pretty muse, Amelia, who leads her towards a life of moderate decadence. The shadow of what is to come hovers at the back of the film - there can be few better years in which to set a period film, with the sense of doomed youth that it portends. No matter how pretty you are, if it’s Italy 1938, the writing is on the wall. 

a day in the life of abed salama: a palestine story (nathan thrall)

Nathan Thrall’s book, published in 2023, is centred around a bus accident in the West Bank where several Palestinian schoolchildren were killed. The bus collided with a truck on a day of heavy rain and caught fire. The response from the Israeli rescue services took far too long. As noted, if kids were seen throwing stones at an Israeli truck, there would be a reaction in minutes. The response from the Palestinian rescue services was hamstrung by the tortuous procedural and geographical obstacles which the occupation of the West Bank has put in place. Thrall’s book perfectly captures the way in which Israel is an apartheid state, discriminating mercilessly against the Palestinians, both those who live within the official boundaries of Israel and those who live on the side which is in theory governed by the PA (or in Gaza, Hamas). Events of the past year have made this beyond obvious. What Thrall’s book shows, beyond the tragedy of the event it relates, is how the groundwork for the racist actions of the Israeli state in both Gaza and the West Bank had been constantly put in place ever since the Nakba. The tragedy Thrall’s book describes, of young kids needlessly dying a horrible violent death, now seems like a prelude to that which has come to pass. We inhabit an obscene era. Every day there are images of children, mutilated, killed in the most disgusting, cowardly manner. And it is excused by global politicians, or even celebrated by Israelis and other elements of a neo-fascist class which seeks to destroy the very notion of a shared humanity. Thrall was the Cassandra to all this, and the warnings contained within his devastating book are coming true every day in front of our desensitised eyes.

orbital (samantha harvey)

Orbital is a short, Calvino-esque novel set in space. Six astronauts on a space station pass their day passing days, spinning around and around the globe, zooming through timelines and over continents. The novel is more of a meditation than a story. A meditation on what it must be like to possess this perspective, to live weightless, to be pioneers for a new version of humanity. There are several bravura passages, including one which shows humanity’s seconds within the twenty four hour clock of the universe’s existence. The six characters are all given their due, with memories and dreams folded into the view they share of the planet earth. The vast immensity of space, with its strange silences, is a suitable backdrop for a book which navigates a path between sly tedium and great beauty. 

cerrar los ojos (w&d víctor erice; w. michel gaztambide)

I have never, to the best of my knowledge, watched Erice’s classic film, The Spirt of the Beehive. Or at least, I don’t think I have. Perhaps one day I will watch it and go - oh yes, I remember seeing this in Winchester or York or London or Adelaide. And that would be an entirely appropriate method of remembering, according to this, Erice’s third film. Close your Eyes deals with the issues of memory and ageing, in a luminous, humane fashion. As the third near three hour film I have seen in a row at Cinemateca, it is a wonderful correlative to the supposed need to cram a film with beats and desperate rhythms. Film is storytelling as much as it is percussive, and Erice’s meditative mystery tale is an exemplar of this.

Its simplicity is a large part of its effectiveness. A TV program about strange disappearances contacts Miguel, a director who has long since quit the business. The TV show is making an episode about Julio, the protagonist of the director’s last, abortive movie, who went missing overnight. Due to the actor’s disappearance, the film was never finished, and Miguel’s career fizzled out. Not that he is bitter: he has found a kind of peace living in a small coastal community, with his dog and his translations and spells as a fisherman. But the call to participate in the program will lead to a rupture in this quiet reclusive life, as he goes in search of not so much a meaning for his lost art, as a function. At the heart of the film, perhaps, is the idea that film is both eternal and functional, on a very straightforward basis. Looking at a screen is more than just a way of passing time: it can also change the way your mind works, the way you think, the way you see the world and what is in front of your eyes.

There is something of Prospero about Miguel, albeit a calm Prospero, reconciled to his fate. HIs art will reconfigure those things which have gone awry in the past. Cerrar los Ojos is a valedictory work of art, reminding this viewer of the way in which film is capable of unfolding layers of story and meaning without resorting to histrionics. 

la bête (w&d bertrand bonello, w.guillaume bréaud, benjamin charbit)

La Bête has a Cocteau-esque title and is almost as bewildering a film as Le Sang d’un Poète. Set across three timelines, it features a death-trap doll factory, a psychotic incel, Schoenberg, and AI. The movie occurs in the 2014, 2044 and 1904-ish. The fundamental axis of the story is simple: Gabrielle seeks out Louis, her true amour, across time and beyond death. He is a weirdo three times over. Firstly as her would-be lover who pursues her as a married woman in the nineteen hundreds, secondly as the LA incel and lastly as an elusive would-be companion in the near future. Léa Seydoux and George MacKay wrestle with the contrivances of the plot across two and a half hours. The tonal filmmaking feels erratic, at times throbbing with suspense, at others bogged down in cryptic metaphysical dialogue. Gabrielle feels threatened by an opaque disaster, or beast, which might be her lover or might be climate change. There are earthquakes and floods and vague talk of an unspecified disaster which lead to a world where emotions need to be cauterised. The nods to Lynch are overt. Does it measure up? Perhaps, perhaps not. It’s one of those films that take you on a perplexing ride from tedium to hyper-alertness. The dénouement sequence in LA towards the end of the film is brilliantly constructed and edited. But then this proves not to be the dénouement of the film, and the viewer has to come back down to earth, or rather the future, with Gabrielle having still more hoops to go through. It has the makings of a cult film, the kind of experience that some will revisit time after time, and wait for midnight screenings to accompany them through the long night, parroting some of the more risible dialogue, sitting on the edge of the seats for the moments of tension and screaming along with Seydoux at the anti-climactic finale. 

clandestina (w&d maria mire)

Mire’s experimental film juxtaposes the words of Margarida Tengarrinha, an artist who participated for decades in Portugal’s anti-fascist movement, with contemporary images which riff off those words. Tengarrinha used her talents to help forge documents for fleeing revolutionaries to cross the border into Spain during the fifties and sixties, eventually moving to Russia. (An interesting parallel with another Portuguese film seen this year, Astrakan 79.) Mire constructs vivid contemporary images to accompany the words, as a young woman silently goes through the same processes as Tengarrinha, working with her partner at a computer, tending to their child, setting up a false office full of pot plants. The modernity is designed, one suspects, to give a fresh perspective on the radical activities and dangers of the anti-fascist movement of another generation. However, there’s something a little winsome about all this, and the element of danger never feels overly present. The fact that the characters frequently use carnival type masks is engaging, but doesn’t help to take us deeper into the perilous, nightmarish world that Tengarrinha inhabited. It’s notable that the director is also listed as Art Director in the credits, and there’s a sense of playfulness at work in the project which isn’t entirely in keeping with the intensity of the source material. 

astrakan 79 (w&d catarina mourão)

Astrakan 79 is a documentary of two parts. The first two thirds are taken up with a recreation of the journey of a Portuguese fifteen year old, Martim, to Askatran in what was then the Soviet Union. The child of left wing activists, Martim left Lisbon on his year long adventure, sent by his parents to study modern practices in agriculture . When he arrived, it wasn’t what he expected. He had two passionate love affairs, made friends with South Americans, rather than the Russians, and eventually dropped out of the course, sleeping rough and getting picked up by the police. The story is told using photos Martim took, which have a beautiful, nostalgic grainy quality. The account is hypnotic, fascinating, the story of an adolescent caught up in the geopolitical matrix, like a lost chapter from The Savage Detectives. The film is rounded out with a lengthy interview between Martim, revealed to have become a potter on his return to Portugal, and his grown-up son. The interview is somewhat anti-climactic. 

the maniac (benjamin labatut)

Labatut’s novels read like documentaries. The Maniac is split into two parts. The first is a fictionalised biography of John von Neumann, the Hungarian genius who participated in the greatest advances in mathematics and physics in the twentieth century. Von Neumann was present at the birth of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the modern day computer and, as the novel goes on to explore in greater depth, the birth pangs of what is now known as artificial intelligence. Labatut goes under the hood of von Neumann’s curious mind, constructing a portrait of him from fictionalised accounts of those who worked with him and loved him. In so doing, the author presents both the man, his ideas and his flirtation with madness. One of the key takeaways of Labatut’s novels is the way in which genius, which shapes the world, is almost always a hair’s breadth away from what we might call madness. Both despair and exhilaration go hand in hand with the imaginative vision required to stretch humanity’s boundaries. The Maniac is in many ways a treatise on technology and the pernicious effect it can have. Where we tend to view technology as an unbridled good, Labatut, like von Neumann and many of the scientists who feature in the book, end up exercising extreme doubts about where the quest for technological advancement is taking humanity.

The second half of the book deals with the advancement of AI, framed around the success of a computer in defeating the world’s greatest go player. Much of von Neumann’s later life was taken up with the quest for self-replicating forms that might be used in some form by humanity to ensure its survival and the eventual conquest of the universe itself. The Maniac explores the perils inherent in creating machines which can outthink humans, a subject which has become increasingly topical, in its account of the computer’s victory. The beauty of Labatut’s work is that he leads the reader into this rarefied world, seemingly the arcane province of scientists and experts, and, holding our hand, encourages to jump into an inscrutable future. 

la práctica (w&d martín rejtman)

Rejtman is a whimsical auteur, and La Practica is no exception to this. His flawed characters negotiate the pitfalls of modern urban living. Things that can go wrong probably will. Connections will be missed and relationships are likely to be dysfunctional. There’s a dry acerbic humour hovering at the edge of the screen, even where there’s no apparent joke to laugh at. Gustavo is a porteño yoga teacher living in Santiago. He’s getting divorced from his Chilean wife, another yoga teacher, but determined to stick it out in the city rather than return home. His job gets harder when he does his knee in and becomes an inflexible yoga teacher. The film drifts through his life with him, as he deals with divorce, meets ex-students, tries to recover. The action is minor scale and affectionately comic. Gustavo is played by Esteban Bigliardi, who played a similar character in Rodrigo Moreno’s Los Delinquentes. There are other echoes to Moreno’s film, with Gustavo experiencing some kind of epiphany when he spends an earthquake night outside in an Andes forest. The juxtaposition between ‘the natural world’ and the urban world perhaps opening a space of personal reconciliation for the protagonist. This feels like an axiomatic southern cone tension: what does the wilderness have to teach us in a world where the city delivers a tenuous and unsatisfactory security?

smoke and ashes: a writer's journey through opium's hidden histories (amitav ghosh)

Ghosh’s non-fiction book is a rendition of much of the research he has done for the construction of his sequence of novels on the opium trade and wars of the nineteenth century. He looks at how the East India Company, later absorbed into the British Empire, set about trading with China by creating a market for opium which they fed by growing opium in India, and exporting it. In India, Ghosh argues, there were two distinct poles of trade: Calcutta in the east,, which was rigidly controlled by the British, and Bombay in the west, which functioned as a more liberal market, thereby setting up the basis for Mumbai’s future commercial acumen. Ghosh also looks closely at how Guangzhou became the nodal point for the entrance of opium into China, a place where foreign interests held sway, rather than the Chinese emperors, a kind of proto Hong Kong/ Singapore.

Whilst there are times in the book when it becomes immersed in detail, cataloguing, for example, the various east coast North American families whose fortunes were founded on the opium trade, Smoke and Ashes might nevertheless be classed as one of the most important books on modern history you could possibly read. Because, using a novelist’s sensibility, Ghosh reveals the way in which opium trading, the equivalent of the narco-industry that the western world’s ‘war on drugs’ is so keen to demonise, was one of the cornerstones of the great capitalist advancements of the European colonial era, if not, he might argue, the key pediment which held up the roof over the whole process. Ghosh identifies how the pursuit of profit lead to an abandonment of any kind of moral criteria in business dealings, as though this might be considered a luxury which wealth could not afford. He follows this line of thinking through to the opioid epidemic which is still gripping large swathes of North America. As a novelist, more than a historian, Ghosh has no qualms in making these judgement calls. His takedown of the British empire, with its opium factories and tenured ‘opium agents’ is devastating, and all the more powerful for being written by someone who was born as a child of empire, on the other side of the historical power divide.

We are still living in the wake of the world Ghosh reveals in the book and the moral complexity of our position (written as an Englishman) is something we are far from recognising, let alone understanding. 

"Or, as an article in a journal published by the US National Defense University notes: ‘English merchants, led by the British East India Company, from 1772 to 1850, established extensive opium supply chains … creating the world’s first drug cartel.’"

"There could be no clearer summation of the most important accomplishment of the doctrine of Free Trade—the erasure of all ethical constraints in regard to profit-making."

the old oak (d. ken loach, w. paul laverty)

My friend Flamia asked me in Bar Hispano what I thought of Loach’s latest. I tried to make the argument that the Loach aesthetics are predicated on a social realist furrow he has been ploughing for decades and that his narratives have a predictability to them that neuters any real engagement. Whilst maintaining that this is still valid, there is a dextrous tugging at the heart strings employed in this by-numbers tale of an oddball friendship between a fetching Syrian refugee and a gnarly veteran of post-Thatcher decay. TJ comes from a family of miners, and with the closure of the pits, he and his village have lost their sense of identity. (This despite the fact that TJ’s father died in a mining accident when a seam collapsed three miles out under the North Sea.) Yara and her family are Syrian refugees, struggling to adapt to the harsh realities of post-Brexit Britain. The regulars at the pub don’t take kindly to TJ choosing to support the Syrians and TJ finds himself caught between communities. Good will out in the end, Loach reassures us, with his bittersweet denouement. But there’s something which feels pre-packed, ready to be sold, about The Old Oak and Loach and Laverty’s reluctance to go beyond the range of cliché feels as though it short-changes their grander ambitions to tell stories about contemporary Britain.

Perhaps ironically, another friend I met yesterday told me he’s been watching Pennies from Heaven, which adopted a different register to talk about British society, and one can’t help feeling that it’s a shame Potter and Loach never got together to pool their differences.