small things like this (d. tim mielants w.enda walsh)

Mielants’ film has heavyweight support. Matt Damon and Ben Affleck are named as exec producers. Oscar winner Cillian Murphy takes the lead. The film deals with the issue of the abuse of girls in Catholic convents in Ireland over the course of decades. It occurs in that broad era known as the time before mobile phones. In a sense it feels as thought the casting of Murphy slightly unbalances the film, with his back story taking prominence over the that of the mistreated girls. We understand his actions and his morose disposition, but his story is not the film’s focal point. The film employs a downbeat tone to relate its narrative, endowing it with the seriousness it deserves, even if it sometimes feels as though it’s leading its audience by the nose. 

soundtrack to a coup d'état (w&d johan grimonprez, w. daan milius)

Soundtrack is a tour de force of editing. Editing to music is an art, and Grimonperez and his editor, Rik Chaubet, weave the jazz notes of the score into the found footage with aplomb. In truth, the jazz link in what is essentially a film about Patrice Lumumba and the Congo is slightly tenuous, anchored on the one visit Louis Armstrong paid to the country shortly before Lumumba’s murder. But this is also a film about connections: linking Lumumba to Castro to Malcolm X to Thelonious Monk, who briefly mentions how he went to check out the activist. What were the connections between the jazz greats and politics? The clips of Dizzy Gillespie’s satirical presidential bid are marvellous, but the deeper resonance of the musicians’ political consciousness is mandated mostly by the sound of their music. Clearly Nina Simone’s lyrics are charged with a political anger, but this becomes the backdrop, or soundtrack, to the tale of Lumumba. There is a verve and a jazz feel to the film, it’s a jazz edit, and this bowls the viewer along through the film’s two hours plus. It might also be noted that the only actually filmed footage for Soundtrack to a Coup, rather than found footage, would appear to be of Koli Jean Bofane, both reading from Congo Inc, and narrating a harrowing story from his childhood.

birth of our power (victor serge, tr richard greeman)

Serge is a neglected figure. Although flirting with autobiography, his writing lacks that spark of irony or self-reflection that the late twentieth century western literature was prey to, before it became overrun by the confessional tracts of the belligerent individual. He recounts the dreams of what we call politics. The revolution, the overthrow of the old guard, when Marxist idealism was still a recognisable thing. Having said that: what is politics, if not the actions of men and women at the coalface of history? Serge’s text here recounts his passage from Barcelona to Leningrad, 1917-1918. The war across the border rages and the radicals in Barcelona carry the hope that this might fuel their revolt. For now, they are frustrated. Serge flees to France, hoping to travel to Russia, but he is arrested and interned in a POW camp. Only when the war ends can he finally resume his journey. He arrives in a sepulchral Leningrad, another refugee seeking food, shelter and warmth. The reality of the revolution’s dreams are laid bare; glory will not be given, it will be earned.

There is something in the controlled naivety of Serge’s writing that draws the reader in, makes a friend of them. The reader becomes his belated co-conspirator, not least because Serge is clearly not seduced by the romance of revolution; rather he is wedded to it, warts and all. 

young ahmed (jean-pierre & luc dardenne)

You know exactly what you’re going to get with the Dardenne Brothers. You’re going to get a well-crafted movie dealing with social issues. Which is exactly what Young Ahmed delivers. Instantly, the efficiency of the storytelling grabs the viewer. Simple scenes with little flannel, told from the protagonist’s perspective, which present their portrayal of the film’s eponymous protagonist. No great science. Ahmed with his family. Ahmed at the mosque. Ahmed with the teacher who will become the focus for the conflict within the film. Ahmed commits the action which changes his life.

The trouble with the efficiency of this approach is that it runs the risk of feeling more about the way in which stories are presented than the issue the story seeks to present. In the case of Young Ahmed, whilst the representation of his ablutions and prayers felt urgent and necessary, the viewer comes away with little insight into the issue of the clash between the Muslim world and the West and the associated desire for Jihad which Ahmed has somehow accrued. We see an adolescent in crisis, as we might see in many a Dardenne movie, but the specific crux of his crisis, the aforementioned conflict, feels as nebulous at the film’s end as it did at the start. A few grainy moments of an on-line video and the mutterings of a manipulative mullah don’t quite seem to explain how Ahmed has become so disconnected from his society that he can now carry a burning desire to kill in the name of Allah.

Some might say that the Dardenne Brothers, white males, don’t have a right to tell Ahmed’s story, that it is a form of colonialism in itself. This writer doesn’t hold to that, stories belong to everyone and representation matters, no matter how it gets to the screen. But Young Ahmed does leave one questioning the issue of the formula as a storytelling mechanism. The Dardenne brothers have a formula, which works effectively within the constraints of cinematic narrative (90 minutes, two dimensional etc). But when a film starts to feel formulaic, it strips the blood from the body and what is left is in danger of seeming robotic.

un ange (w&d koen mortier)

Un Ange tells the story of a Belgian cyclist who travels to Senegal to hook up with his brother and party. There he meets Fae, a woman who isn’t officially a prostitute, but unofficially appears to be. This moot definition arises as a result of the carnet de salud  which official prostitutes are required to have. Thierry meets Fae in a  bar and appears to fall head over heels in love with her. They spend a crazy night together, where he proposes to her. This unlikely love affair is thrown off course when Thierry isn’t allowed to bring Fae into his hotel, as she doesn’t have the carnet de salud. He takes some drugs which freak him out, they go to another cheap hotel, he becomes paranoid and delusional and then he dies. 

The first hour or so of An Ange is brilliant. All the elements of film, sound, camera, lighting, edit are used to the max. Nicolas Karakatsanis’ camerawork is mesmerising. The set-up itself is fascinating, with Senegal providing the perfect setting for these artists to go to work. The film generates tension and empathy with both Fae and Thierry. However, as the brief resume of the narrative perhaps suggests, the trouble is that the narrative doesn’t hold up. The final half hour feels undercooked, as though this is a short which has been stretched out for all its worth. At the heart of this narrative problem, perhaps, is the issue of what them film is about. It opens with a voiceover from Fae talking about prostitution. The scenes in Senegal perfectly capture the uneasy first world/ third world sexual tourism issue. However, this issue feels as tough it’s ditched or ducked at the end, as the pivot of the film becomes Thierry’s drug addiction. A cutaway to his funeral in Belgium feels awkward. The fact that Thierry has become an addict as a result of his doping feels like a curveball the film doesn’t need and doesn’t entirely warrant (there’s even a reference to Armstrong in there). 

This is a shame, as so much of Un Ange is so well done. For a long time it feels as though we’re in the hands of a director of great skill. The edit, which includes flashbacks and one great dream sequence, is terrific. The film drives forwards in a flare of colour and dynamic camerawork and committed acting. Then, in the final straight, it runs out of gas. 

the promise (jean-pierre dardenne & luc dardenne)

It might be that I owe an apology to Jérémie Renier. Not that he’d be interested. When I give my class on directing actors at the film school (and what do I know?) I use one of his performances as an example of an actor being poorly directed. I always stress that Renier is a fine actor, and it’s not his fault that in this particular film he’s off the pace, its down to the direction, but nonetheless, there’s a small generation of aspiring filmmakers in Montevideo who will forever associate him with this example of how not to do it. As I say, this is always stressing that this is an actor capable of great things, and indeed in a joint class given with Javier Olivera, we also showed him excelling in a Dardenne brothers movie to emphasise the contrast between an actor well directed and an actor poorly directed.

All of which meant, when I realised about ten minutes in that the child who is the protagonist of The Promise was none other than a very youthful Renier, with his foppish blond locks and impish charm, it made me smile. Because he displays an innate brilliance in this early film of the Dardenne brothers. The brothers at their best have a mastery of the simplest elements of drama: a sympathetic hero(ine) put in a place of moral compromise, who has to realise a quest to redeem themselves. The premise of The Promise is at once straightforward and mesmerising. Can Igor free himself from the tyrannical hold of his desperate father, Roger (also brilliantly played with a mixture of canniness, greed and stupidity by Olivier Gourmet). All of this set in a world of immigration which the film shows was just as pressing an issue twenty years ago as it is today. 

The film manages to combine great flair in its camerawork and edit, with something so down-to-earth that it really feels at times as though you’re there, in this Belgian backwater. The restless energy of the camera, allied to the energy of the performances (including that of Assita Ouedraogo as Assita) gives the film an urgency which entraps the viewer. People are always moving in this film, in a combi van across an urban landscape, in a go-kart, or striding the night streets. The restless forces of a globalised capitalism on the march, captured in the bewilderment and moral complexity of a young man’s growing understanding of the world he lives in.

the case of comrade tulayev [victor serge]

Victor Serge is little known now, as Sontag’s introduction points out. In his heyday, Serge’s fame was such that Gide campaigned for his release from a Soviet prison, and he became the only writer to be freed by the Stalin regime, making his way around the globe until he ultimately settled in Mexico. 

The Case of Comrade Tulayev is an epic novel, with its roots in 19th century realism, coupled with a knowing, jaundiced twentieth century tone. The book is constructed around the murder of Tulayev, a senior Soviet official. It occurs in the late thirties, shortly before the outbreak of the second world war. Most of the characters the multi-person novel follows are battle-hardened men who participated in the Russian Revolution, many of them supposedly associates of Stalin, referred to throughout as ‘the chief’. Tulayev’s murder, which the reader knows has been committed by an insignificant, dreamy figure, is used as the excuse for a radical purge, where a whole swathe of the old guard is rounded up and found guilty of belonging to an imaginary plot. Most are executed, and their families are sent to internal exile in far flung corners of the empire.

The multi-character narrative is recounted in ten chapters. Each one effectively presents a different case study, with the action moving all over Russia and including sections in Civil War Spain and Paris. Serge creates an all-embracing portrayal of the purges within the pages of his book, revealing the savage political mechanisms which drive it and the complex reactions of its victims. Some are desperate, others succeed in placing it within a socio-historical context according to their Marxist principles. Most of the characters are world-weary figures who have seen so much that nothing more can surprise them. Their key conflict is whether they hang on to the principle of truth or not, in a land where truth has become a dangerous commodity. Serge writes with the authority of one who knows the reality behind the state’s lies, and his characters carry the burden of these lies/truths with them to the grave. 

This account does little justice to the ferocious wisdom and humanity of Serge’s novel, the writing of which appears to be an act of courage in itself. Speaking truth to power is never an enviable destiny; the weight of this truth permeates the whole, devastating novel, which manages to defend and honour the principle of the communist revolution whilst lambasting the inhumane bureaucratic system which colonised the revolution’s wake. 

news from planet mars (w&d dominik moll, w gilles marchand)

How we loved Lemming. Not to mention Harry He’s Here to Help. I think they’re some of my favourite movies from around the turn of the century. Deadpan humour, a sardonic, Hitchcokian slant. Moll was one of the most important filmmakers around, one whose decidedly European sensibility (should there be such a thing) managed to get a foothold in British cinemas. And then, nada, for over a decade. In fact, I note from IMDB that he made The Monk in 2011, a film which passed me by. From time to time, I would wonder, whatever happened to Dominik Moll? So when, casually browsing the Cinemateca webpage, I saw a new Moll film, it was too good an opportunity to miss. 

News From Planet Mars, to give it its English title, is a likeable, if somewhat predictable tale of a downtrodden man who has to turn his life around. Philippe Mars lives in his high rise Paris flat, separated from his TV presenter wife. The film catches up with him whilst she’s on location in Brussels, covering a Euro summit, meaning he has their two teenage the kids for an indeterminate time. His kids think he’s a loser. And it looks as though they’re right. His ear is accidentally severed by a psychopathic work colleague. He survives, as does his ear, but the colleague ends up moving into his flat, and then bringing his equally disturbed would-be girlfriend too. Everything that can go wrong for Phillipe does. But finally he turns the corner, regains his kids’ respect and realises he has to quit his dead-end job. It’s all a bit neat and tame. There are a few touches reminiscent of prime Moll: animals on the loose; the ear incident; the sudden disposal of his sister’s dog, but these are garnishes. 

Whilst it’s good to have Moll back, the edginess of his earlier work doesn’t shine through here. Looking back, it feels as though Europe has become a far less stable place in the last ten years. The uneasiness which underpins Moll’s best work feels prophetic of a society where you can no longer take things for granted, where the carpet is moving under you. Perhaps modernity has caught up with Dominik Moll and it’s left him uncertain where to go next. Like the rest of us. 

television [jean-philippe toussaint]

Television is another novel which inhabits the curious novella/ journal territory which seems increasingly popular at the edge of the latest modernist universe.

You, the reader, will accompany me as I take you on a stroll through my curiously disinteresting life. Which is nevertheless full of interesting details. In this instance, I am going to tell you about the monograph on Titian for which I have received a grant which permits me to spend the Summer in Berlin whilst my wife and kids are away but which I cannot motivate myself to write so instead I write about not writing it. Whilst also detailing my solitary adventures as a nudist bather, killing my neighbours' plants and generally not doing what I know I ought to be doing.

You might find it droll. You might find my observations on the role of television in contemporary life incisive. You might not. It doesn’t matter all that much. It’s only a novel after all. I don’t know if I am either droll or incisive. I might be. Sooner or later my wife will return and life will get back to normal and the time of this novel, called television, will have expired. A bit like a television program, in fact. Although I didn’t say that. You did.

I, the writer, not of the novel but of this review of the novel, if indeed it is a review of what can only barely be called a novel, have to confess that in this instance, I did find Toussaint and his meandering prose droll. At times I would even go so far as to say that it was even very funny. However, I would also say that Toussaint could be said to have succeeded in his ambition to create a commentary on the disposable role of television within a disposable society, because when I concluded the book, when I turned it off, it vanished from my mind almost as rapidly as, in the words of Mr Jagger, yesterday’s papers. Though not quite as rapidly. So perhaps it’s not like television after all. Perhaps the additional nano seconds are what make it literature. Entertaining literature, albeit disposable literature. But wasn’t literature once the equivalent of television? Before they had television? Maybe television is only literature in disguise. Or vice versa. And what about Titian? 

reticence [jean-philippe toussaint]

Toussaint's novel is essentially a shaggy dog story. A man arrives in a seaside town with his son and settles into a rhythm of paranoia and fantasy. His thoughts are conveyed with stream of consciousness, reminiscent of Bernhard and Bolano. A slim 130 pages, it should probably be read in one sitting, although I read it in four.  It’s one of those novels which relies on the implication of menace. The game is trying to figure out whether there’s any substance to the narrator’s musings or whether he’s just deranged.

Descendant of the Nouvel Romain, it has to be said that Reticence is ultimately underwhelming.  This is acutely apolitical writing.  An exercise in epistemology, it deals exclusively in the act of perception. (What little I’ve read of Nicholson Baker would be another point of reference). The word ‘political’ is one that has many variations to its understanding. In this context it perhaps means that it seeks to talk ‘of’ something. Toussaint’s novel approaches the stage before we can even talk ‘of’ anything. It addresses the acts of perception and interpretation humans engage in before they can get anywhere near the act of assertion. The world is a blizzard of data (even though this book was written in ’91). How can anything be asserted when we can’t even establish what the signifiers look/ smell/ sound like?

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. 

meisjes (d. geoffrey enthoven, w. chris craps, jean-claude van rijckeghem)

This is the kind of film which they make in the UK starring Bill Nighy, Judi Dench or Geraldine McEwan. An unabashed, formulaic crowd pleaser. It's set in an obscure Belgian town and tells the story of three elderly women who reform the trio they used to have forty years ago. This is part of Claire’s mission to reconnect with her wayward son, Sid, who used to be something in music but is now going nowhere. Sid’s music is not the kind of music which elderly women are supposed to like. Some tracks are a kind of grinding R&B, others more trip-hoppy, perhaps. But somehow he and the singers manage to find some kind of middle ground. The action builds towards the climactic concert where the film subverts itself neatly. Rather than a triumphant finale, Claire collapses and her incipient alzheimers emerges full-blown. The concert does take place, but it does so in her mind.

This twist saves the film from drifting into a sea of sentimentality. This isn’t a film I would ever have been likely to watch, were it not for the blind tasting of Cinemateca. How it arrived here I have no idea. The plotting is as obvious as a game of tic tac toe, and the act of creating a film based on the three glamorous grannies reeks of a calculated marketing technique. However, within the confines of its ambition, the film works, more or less. It’s effective, efficient and shows that the judicious application of the disciplines of cinema should be enough to create a functional 90 minutes of celluloid.

rostov luanda (d. abderrahhmane sissako)

Rostov Lunda is a documentary road movie, detailing the director's quest to find Baribanga, an old Angolan friend who he once knew in Russia. Sissako wends his way through Angola, with only an old photograph to help him. He stops to ask people if they've seen his friend wherever he goes, and as he does so, he creates a portrait of the former Portuguese colony, a state shredded by decades of civil conflict in the aftermath of independence.

Of course, had Sissako found his friend in the opening days of his journey, it would have made for a different film. The longer it takes to find him, the more mileage there is in his travelogue. Perhaps it is not altogether fortuitous that it is on his last evening he finally learns Baribanga isn't in Angola at all, but Berlin. Along the way Sissako meets a surprising and touching collection of individuals, of mixed racial descent. Angola is another rainbow nation, where the disenfranchised can be black, white or of mixed race. All are unified by their ability to have survived, where so many others haven't.

Sissako talks about how Angolan independence was seen as an inspirational moment in African development for his generation when he was younger. The troubles the country was heir to were testament to what has gone wrong on the continent. However, the director's selection of stories seems calculated to cultivate a new optimism; not least when a stately black woman explains how she was finally cajoled to learn to stand and use her feet again after years of sitting, lured by the irresistible pull of dance, a dance she demonstrates for his camera. Likewise, the underlying narrative ends with a satisfying conclusion, when Sissako finds Baribanga in Berlin.

the silence of lorna (w&d jean-pierre & luc dardenne)

The Dardenne brothers are figures who float at the edge of the Anglo-Saxon consciousness. Occasionally fashionable, a film of theirs will be feted, before they're forgotten again. The Silence of Lorna hasn't generated much critical acclaim, but in some small way it seems as though their films are an event, as filmmakers they're worth checking out no matter what they're doing. Not a state that can be sustained indefinitely - pace Allen and even Scorsese - but The Silence of Lorna suggests that the brothers are near the top of the game, and if this was a weekly review of note rather than an unsung warble from the blogoshpere I'd be beseeching as many readers as possible to go and see it.

The film is Lorna's story. Played with a restraint which is the all the more impressive for those brief moments, crucial to the narrative, when it's broken, by Arta Dobroshi. Lorna features in just about every scene in the film. She's an immigrant, who has settled in Belgium, and married Claudy, a hopeless junkie, in order to get her visa. This is part of a deal whereby she will marry a rich Russian following the end of her marriage to Claudy, after which she will finally get to settle down with her sweetheart, Sokol. Together they plan to open a cafe, and you kind of know that Lorna possesses the drive and the nerve to make it work, to become a 21st century success story of the globalised world.

There's only one hitch, which is that the fixer of the deal, Fabio, has decided the safest thing for everyone is if Claudy has an 'accidental' overdose and dies. No matter what the harsh realities of life dictate, and in spite of the fact their marriage is a sham, Lorna can't come to terms with this. When Claudy decides to quit heroin,  he turns to Lorna for help, and she can't help but provide it. She tries to fix a divorce instead, and, when Claudy's on the point of regressing back to drugs, she sleeps with him. After Claudy dies of an overdose, arranged by Fabio, Lorna realises or decides she's pregnant, and in spite of the fact she knows its going to fuck everything up, she refuses to have an abortion.

It's a simple tale, and classic storytelling. The neo-realist filming style, as plain and unadorned as can be, contributes to the narrative's believability. In another context the story might be melodramatic, but in this one, and told this way, it feels like a report from the front line of the global village, where the simple act of choosing to keep a child can become one of almost absurd courage. Lorna's insistence of preserving her humanity in spite of the price she will have to pay for it is heroic, and leads to a denouement containing a whole forest full of tension.

The directors succeed in coaxing a remarkable performance from Dobroshi, as well as from Jeremie Renier as Claudy. The film's simplicity is its strength. The Silence of Lorna is a film made in the image of its heroine: discovering a sense of value in what lies beneath the surface, in spite of the world's constant seeking of value in what can be seen on the surface alone.