clean (alia trabucco zerán, tr. sophie hughes)

Clean is marketed as a literary thriller. Marketing it as a deep dive meditation on the inequalities of Chilean society probably wouldn’t be seen to be as effective. It tells the story of a cleaner, a 40 year old woman from the south of the country, by implication Mapuche, who has come to the capital and worked for the same affluent family for seven years. It’s a job that dehumanises her and destroys her psyche. She narrates the book, charting the family’s descent towards tragedy. Although this tragedy feels like something of a macguffin: the author’s real interest would appear to be the narrator’s gradual disintegration, as she yearns for the south she realises she has foolishly left behind. 

maria (d.larrain, w stephen knight)

Pablo, we’ve got another one for you. 

Si? Cuéntame.

Woman, beautiful, emblematic, tragic death…

Me gusta.

Some great scenes - JFK, Onassis -

Lindo.

Angelina is on board, so it’s A-List -

Fenomenal.

You get to do lots of fancy tracking shots -

Impecable

Tasteful but popular, highbrow but multiplex -

Bueno, un poco Friedman, pero eso es Hollywood, after all -

Big global narrative but essentially apolitical -

Entiendo.

You’re the go-to man for the tragic Clytemnestra narrative -

Por supuesto.

What do you say?

¿Por que no?

Having said all of which I enjoyed Callas, with its slightly offbeat narrative structure and dialogue beats, with its highlighting of the secondary characters, with its predictability. Like Onassis, I have no real interest in opera, like Onassis I could drive a boat through the gaps in the timeline and the sketchiness of the supposed biographical elements; like her amiable servants, I am happy to look the other way and not see what one imagines were the less regal aspects of her behaviour. Jolie holds the whole thing together with a mannered aplomb, and although it never hits the highest dramatic notes, it’s an intelligent, understated take on a sprawling story. 

la batalla de chile, segunda parte: el golpe de estado (w&d. patricio guzmán, w. pedro chaskel, jose bartolome)

The scary thing about watching Guzmán’s fabled documentary (albeit only part 2) is that it feels closer than ever. A brilliant exercise in both compiling material and editing it, The Battle of Chile acts as account of events and a warning. This could happen in your back yard. With the efficiency of a thriller, the film traces the lead up to September 11th, 1973, the first 911, when the military staged a coup against Allende’s government. We know what’s coming, and surely Allende knows it too, but history is remorseless and irreversible. The film is an act of courage, in the filming of it, in the conception of it and in the execution. As such it contains a moral authority which cinema can rarely aspire to. Who knows how much of that courage will be needed as the world lurches in the direction of the golpistas. 

tésis (w&d alejandro amenábar, w. mateo gil)

Tésis is a film which has acquired the notoriety it clearly sought. A great, if underdeveloped premise, has Angela, a female film student writing a thesis about violence in cinema, leading her to search for illicit, unwatchable material. So far so engaging. Thereafter, perhaps too soon, she discovers that the source of the worst of this material lurks within the university where she studies. The film then becomes an investigative cat-and-mouse game: will the killer get to her before she can discover and reveal him? There is quite a lot of random pursuits and false leads, although some of the plot twists are entirely predictable. Curiously for a film that would appear to be suggesting a critique of Hollywood storytelling, with the villain of the piece saying in one of the film’s most interesting scenes that the Spanish film industry needs to ape the North Americans and give the public what they want, the film then seems to take on his advice. Instead of taking us to the heart of the problem (and perhaps discovering why Angela is so interested in this subject), it embarks on the kind of roundabout story beats which would not be out of place in the concluding episodes of a supposedly gripping Netflix series. There are moments where the darkness the film purports to reveal shine through, as in the closing hospital sequences where patients gaze like drug addicts at the titillating violence on their TV screens, but these moments are interspersed with the generic jokey tone of the Scream franchise.

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. 

the savage detectives (bolaño, tr wimmer)

 Re-Reading the Savage Detectives.   

In another winter you came to me. I was lost then.

As perhaps now. Lost in the nights that have lost

Their discipline. Errant children, out on the lash. 

With me, a single parent, left to fret. You came to

Me then, on the eleventh floor, Wembley Stadium 

Grinning at my rear window, Paddington bear 

Goofing down the canal. You came to console,

Unbidden, the mystery guest, with your tired 

Eyes and tequila prose. And now you’re back.

It’s the middle of a midwinter night and you’re 

Riding pillion again, humming a tune so catchy

I can’t help but sing along, the Encrucijada

Blues. You’ll see me through these insomniac

Ciudad Vieja nights, just as you did then, the

Resolute beat of your words casting spells,

Luring the night to its false, gleaming, dawn. 

cowboy graves (bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

Returning to Bolaño after so long feels like coming home. This book is a collection of three separate texts, excavated apparently from his hard drive, composed in the nineties and in the year before his death. As Juan Antonio Masoliver Ródenas’ afterword puts it eloquently, the themes and characters are culled from the Bolaño universe. Familiar figures pop up. New arrivals appear. The stories range between Mexico, Chile and Europe. There is nothing new here and plenty that is new. To what extent are the stories autobiographical, marked by the presence of Bolaño’s alter ego, Arturo Belano? Two of the tales feature the day of the Pinochet coup, and these have the smell of the real, albeit we know they are not the real, they are fictions, spun from the writer’s skull. The author will always be a touchstone of my literary life. Part of the pleasure of reading is diving into the themes and issues which fascinate the reader. Few writers of my time have scaled the divides of my own life; but the one who unfailingly goes there is Roberto Bolaño.

el castigo (d. matías bize, w. coral cruz)

Bize’s chamber piece is what they might call whipsmart in the pages of TimeOut, if TimeOut still exists. A single shot sustained over 90 minutes, marked by the setting of the sun in a forest beside a main road, with the nagging tension of a lost child and a disintegrating marriage. The single shot film is perhaps the acme of low budget filmmaking, (cf La Casa Muda, Victoria etc), a skill which when well-executed demonstrates the Aristotelian power of cinema as a rival to the stage. El Castigo (The Punishment), takes place in a space which is perhaps no more than 500 square metres, where the action is occurring offstage. Ana has punished their 7 year old child by leaving him at the side of the road for two minutes, after he nearly caused a crash. When they come back the child is missing. With this simple premise, the film dissects her and Mateo’s marriage, and the possible collapse of their comfortable lives. It’s beautifully acted by Antonia Zegers and Néstor Cantillana, and, as is necessary, brilliantly filmed by Gabriel Diaz. In a medium which so often rewards those who do the flashy things well, doing the simple things well becomes the mark of a bold sensibility, prepared to swim against the tide. 

los colonos (w&d felipe gálvez, w. antonia girardi, mariano llinas)

The story of Red Pig, the Scottish mercenary and Indian killer Alex MacLennan, is one we came across when we visited Punta Arenas. The savage war that was waged against the Selk’nam in Tierra del Fuego, on both sides of the border, is the central pillar of Gálvez’ curious film, which follows in the footsteps trodden by Théo Court’s poetic Blanco en Blanco, also featuring Alfredo Castro. Los Colonos is split into two parts, the first describing one of Maclennan’s savage trips, the second reflecting on this seven years later. Camilo Arancibia’s wistful mestizo, Segundo Molino is the connecting link between the two parts, when a Santiago politician arrives to question him about Maclennan’s terrible crimes, provoking in Camilo and his wife the question of what it means to be Chilean as the nation celebrates its centenary. There’s a sense at times that the film doesn’t quite know what it wants to be: a mixture of Western, social commentary, historical testament. There’s even an apocalyptic sequence featuring a Scottish soldier who appears to have gone full Kurtz, (played by old acquaintance Sam Spruell). Perhaps it’s the presence of Mariano Llinas in the screenwriting team that leads to the inclusion of so many fascinating detours and side avenues: the sequence at the end of the world felt like it could quite happily have made for a whole film on its own. Maclennan, the central figure, drops out of the narrative before the final act; the conflict between him, the Texan and Segundo is arbitrarily curtailed. This final act feels relatively disconnected from the aesthetic and tone of all that has gone before, at once more assured now that the dialogue is not in English, but more stately, consisting essentially of two long set piece scenes. It might also be relevant to the film’s unevenness that its financing has come from so many different territories, many of them a long way away from the land of the Selk’nam. In spite of this unevenness, Los Colonos is always watchable, even if it feels as though, in the shadow of the overwhelming scenery, it sometimes pulls its punches. 

voyager (nona fernández tr. natasha wimmer)

Another Chilean tome which mines the alignment of the Atacama and the stargazers with the dark history of the dictatorship. In this case Fernandez participates in an Amnesty project to rename distant stars after a group of activists who were disappeared by the Pinochet regime. In the book, she mediates on the arbitrary nature of star signs; the process of growing up under the influence of the dictatorship; her mother’s sickness; how we might want the world to be perceived by extra terrestrials. Particularly fascinating is the way the writer investigates the notion that our genetic make up is connected to the very foundation of the universe itself, something successive generations of creatures, leading to humans, all share, once again reminding ourselves of what a mess we have made of this planet, where every individual has so much in common with every other individual, neighbours all of us within our tiny barrio in the giant megalopolis which is the universe. In spite of which man’s cruelty towards fellow man continues to flourish.

the secret life of trees (zambra, tr mcdowell)

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

mis hermanos sueñan despiertos (w&d claudia huaiquimilla, w. pablo greene)

Huaiquimilla’s film is a worthy if dogged dramatisation of the events leading to a fire in the juvenile remand centre of Puerto Montt, where ten young adults died. The closing titles also refer to the more than a thousand others who have died whilst within the system. The movie recounts the story from the point of view of the young adults, focusing on a pair of sympathetic brothers who don’t appear to deserve to be locked up. Perhaps one of the weaker elements of the film is that all the kids are excessively likeable, so the logic behind why they have ended up where they have, and the social conditions within Chile which lead to its youth being locked up, aren’t explored, in spite of the use of occasional flashbacks. Whilst the lead character, Angel, is known as the poet, and his brother Franco, (known as Pulga or Flea, a Messi reference) has dreams of playing for Barcelona, the edges of these characters feel as though they have been ironed out in the script, which veers towards the functional. The film has received support from various International Film Labs, and there is more than a suggestion of the construction of a vision which meets Western requirements of Latin American stories, no matter how well acted and authentic the film feels. 

de la noche a la mañana (w&d manuel ferrari, w rodrigo muñoz galvez & gabriel medina)

De la Noche a la Mañana is a movie about getting lost. In this case Ignacio, a Porteño architect, finds himself dazed and confused in Valparaiso, where he goes ostensibly to give a talk on modern architectural trends. His reasons for going feels slightly contrived: two students approach him at the end of a class he gives in Buenos Aires saying they were in touch a while ago and on the basis of this and nothing else he leaves his newly pregnant wife, paying his own to Valparaiso where he discovers the uni has been occupied by the students, no-one knows anything about his proposed talk and the two female students who invited him are nowhere to be found. He proceeds to have a lost weekend in Valparaiso, where he is robbed, offered a life-changing job and seduced by a younger teacher from the uni who offers him a place to crash. Tonally there’s a lot to like about the film’s dry humour and the way in which the hangdog character of Ignacio is developed. However, the narrative starts to feel as though it turns into something of a shaggy dog story about half way through. Nothing very bad is going to happen to Ignacio and nothing very exciting either. The film’s dry depiction of university life has something in common with Santiago Mitre’s El Estudiante and its depiction of an Argentine lost in the wilds of South America (although Valparaiso is not that remote a place to get lost) felt reminiscent of Santiago Loza’s La Paz. The role of the architect in Latin America is also a fascinating one, with the tremulous relationship between urban and natural environments which the film explores in Ignacio’s opening seminar. But having laid a foundation, setting the story up for an earthquake to strike, the film then seems reluctant to confront the possibility that any real harm could ever come to its forlorn protagonist. 

blanco en blanco (w&d théo court, w samuel delgado)

The atrocities committed in Patagonia at the turn of the twentieth century are another relatively unknown chapter in the history of colonialism. Alexander McLennan, aka Red Pig, paid bounty hunters by the indigenous ear, in the process nearly wiping out the Selk’nam peoples. That historical figure is rechristened in Court’s brooding film as Mr Porter, a malevolent off-screen presence. The film opens with the arrival of Alfredo Castro’s creepy photographer, Pedro, on Porter’s isolated, windswept estancia, hired to photograph Porter’s child bride. Pedro then finds himself trapped there, caught up in the aimless, drunken lifestyle of the international band of mercenaries/ crofters. He struggles to fit in, finally participating in the indian hunts which the men conduct, and photographing them.

The film is light on narrative and heavy on atmosphere. The cinematography is breathtaking, José Ángel Alayón effortlessly capturing the desolation and the beauty. It’s slightly more opaque on the narrative front. Pedro is a reactive figure, an observer, and the film is happy to hang back and see events from his distanced perspective. There’s no great effort made at emotional engagement. Something which bothered this viewer initially, but then less and less. Gradually the horror of this place creeps up on the viewer, horror which is a mood as much as a sensation. The ending, framed by farce and cruelty, is a desperate and appropriate anti-climax, with Pedro having finally, irretrievably gone over to the dark side.

Nb: It seems a pity that the trailer for this film exploited its most inspired and haunting image, one which otherwise might have elicited a gasp and awe. This seems important on another level, as this moment is the one which straddles the apex between the two Patagonian worlds, the one which went before colonisation and the one that came after. As such the image is the film’s touchstone, which, seen out of context in a trailer,  loses the value which it holds within the narrative of the film. 

when we cease to understand the world (benjamín labatut, tr. adrian nathan west)

I am not sure how I came across Labatut’s spectacular text. It was only in the final section, when the word araucana cropped up, that I realised the writer would appear to occupy the same Southern Cone as me. I had assumed the book to be the work of some nebulous Frenchman, out to save the planet from the repercussions of the first world’s scientific acts of hari-kari. 

Labatut’s book is about the way in which the world has evolved and been formed over the course of the last century, and not, as the epilogue makes clear, for the better. The book looks at half a dozen or so high priests of science, including Heisenberg, Bohr and Schrödinger, and the way in which their theories interacted with their lives. We learn how these eminently masculine souls wrestled with their flesh and their minds to come up with ways of contemplating the world which not only seemed at first extra-terrestrial, but also laid down the matrix upon which, the book contends, modern technological society is structured. From computing to global warming.

This in itself, the writer’s capacity to convey ideas of enormous complexity in a graspable, human fashion, would be one achievement. However, When We Cease to Understand the world achieves something else. The longest chapter in the book deals with sub-atomic theory, the idea that an atomic particle is both a wave and a fixed point. How this seeming paradox came to be defined and what it means for the world. We start to read the book as a work of non-fiction. It is discussing real people, real events, real history. However, as the book evolves, it gradually starts to inhabit spaces that seem beyond the author’s objective knowing. The inside of a scientist’s mind. The secret world that only they can know. We, as readers, perhaps assume that the author has somehow obtained letters or a journal written by the scientist, to allow him, the author, this privileged access. Only as the book hurtles towards its atomic finale, do we start to glean that this is not a work of non-fiction, but a work of fiction. Or perhaps it is both fiction and non-fiction at the same time? 

the third reich (w. bolaño, tr natasha wimmer)

After an extended Bolaño hiatus, the blog returns to its most-read writer. In times of crisis turn to a sure bet. Unfortunately, Third Reich proves to be strictly minor Bolaño, a long shaggy dog story about a German war games champion who gets stuck in Catalonia when a holiday friend of his girlfriend mysteriously vanishes in a windsurfing accident. This brief synopsis instantly marks the novel out as being in prime Bolaño territory, even more so if it’s added there’s a scarred Latin American beachcomber who plays a prominent role in the narrative. However, the novel itself feels baggy, it’s wide Bolaño, rather than focussed Bolaño. It goes round the houses as it plays out its central device which is a board game reenactment of the second world war between the protagonist and the scarred beachcomber. The second world war took six years from start to finish, and if the novel isn’t quite that long, there are undoubtably moments when it feels as though it’s being played out in order to accommodate the twists and turns inherent in the device. The narrator also tends towards the cold intellectual Bolaño rather than the warm poetic one. One imagines the novel as an earlier work, and in this context it is of course fascinating to see how the writer evolved, how he chiselled his craft, to merge ideas with content with emotion. On the other hand, it might be that this was not an earlier work at all. In which case this kind of ad hoc observation should be labelled as trite and indicative of nothing. 

feos (w guillermo calderon, d aline kuppenheim)

Feos (which means “the uglies” in English) is a featherweight theatre piece which nevertheless punches hard. It recounts the story of two hideously disfigured people who meet at the cinema, go for a coffee, then go back to his and make love. The majority of the 50 minute play is taken up by the conversation in the cafe. The action cuts in and  out of their conversation as they gradually get to know one another. It’s a love story, but a love story between two people who believe themselves fundamentally unloveable. They feel this way because of their disfigurement. Part of the skill of the piece is that this disfigurement has a metaphysical edge, as everyone feels themselves to be unloveable, in their own secret fashion. The beauty of love is that it succeeds in overcoming this innate, common instinct, no matter what you look like. Calderon again reveals his exactitude as a dramatist, burrowing away at this scene in order to extract every nuance, every tragic-comic detail. Calderon writes like a dog with a bone it’s in love with: he won’t leave a scene until every last scrap of meat is off that bone. It’s an intense but affecting style, whose potency gets its pay-off in the last scene, when the lovers go back to his flat and decide that, in spite of the fact they are so unloveable, they will commit to love each other. 

There is a twist to the show. Which is that these two “people”, are actually puppets, manipulated by no less than five puppeteers (who received a great reception when they came out to take a bow). The effect of this is that it acts as a distancing device, which allows us as an audience to disengage sufficiently from the action to not feel as though we are being voyeuristic as we observe the intimacy of these two damaged characters. It also means we don’t gawp; this isn’t a freak show. In some way, knowing that these characters aren’t actually human, allows us to engage more with their feelings. We don’t need to feel pity for them, because we know they’re not “real”. Rather we engage with our own experiences of meeting someone who helps to make our own stay upon this sometimes painful earth make sense.

We saw the play on the night that Guillermo Calderon’s play opened at the Royal Court in London. He’s a writer who always takes the high road, never the low. Which sometimes makes him challenging, but the work is all the richer for that. His writing makes you acutely aware of the possibilities of theatre, in a way which few contemporary playwrights are capable of. Feos is a bold, beautiful piece which celebrates the importance of seeing, being seen, and also not being seen, the darkness. It’s also a piece whose many words reinforce, when they reach a quietus, the value of silence and the way in which these opposites nurture each other. 

woes of the true policeman [bolaño]

According to the notes, Bolaño spent many years working on the Woes of the True Policeman, a novel which is clearly unfinished. How many writers have stuff lying around, which was in reality part of another project, a project which gradually took over. There might be novels that spring from nowhere, fully formed, but it seems more likely that every novel is the distillation of years of thought, notes, unfinished scraps. As a narrative, overall, Woes of the True Policeman is frustratingly incomplete: a host of parts which don’t add up and aren’t fully formed enough to stand on their own two feet.  There’s clearly a reason for this. An alternative title for the book might be Notes towards the Creation of 2666. Because this is a book which acts as an escort for another book which is now regarded as a masterpiece. The central character, Amalfitano,  is one of the protagonists of 2666. The book is steeped in the fictional history of the novelist Archimboldi, another key figure in 2666. The book touches on the issue of the femicides in a Mexican border town which also constitute a major element of 2666. 

It would appear that Woes of the True Policeman is made up of material which Bolaño chose, in the end, not to include in 2666. Or perhaps, if he hadn't been dying whilst he was completing that work, this would have been material which he would have found a way to have included had he had more time to work over the text. Certainly the section on Archimboldi, which includes synopses of his novels, accounts of his friendships and enemies, etcetera feels as though it might have slotted into 2666 fairly seamlessly. 

All of which is to say that the novel is of more interest to the Bolaño aficionado than it might be to the casual reader. The narrative has too many loose ends, the novel is too bitty. Having said all of that, the one thing which that any reader can take from this novel is the unadulterated pleasure of reading Bolaño's prose. There might have been greater stylists in twentieth century literature, but they will be few and far between. No-one picks up an idea and plays with it with quite such kittenish pleasure as Bolano, and that pleasure is something the reader basks in. For a partial, frustrating, unfinished novel, there’s still a hell of a lot to enjoy.

jackie (d. pablo larraín, w. noah oppenheim)

Watched the day after Trump’s inauguration. Someone has been quite smart with their distribution strategy for Jackie, as the cinema was packed, not a spare seat to be had. Perhaps not the kind of reception Larraín is accustomed to in this country. Many will discover him for the first time through Jackie. He delivers with exemplary independence. This is a forthright portrayal of a North American heroine, chiseled in unconventional style. The film’s primary brief is to humanise the political gods. Where the standard biopic too often gets trapped in exposition and wonky re-enactment, Larrain delivers a fractured portrait of a woman whose strength and vulnerability appear to go hand in hand. At the same time, the film echoes her mission to make the White House more accessible. Larraín and Oppenheim’s Jackie is versed in the history of the house and its presidents. She realises that she and her husband now form part of that history and its traditions. (“For tradition you need time.”) The first lady is given a deeper understanding than the men who exercise power, an understanding that comes to her aid as she struggles to come to terms with her grief. It is also an understanding the film communicates to its audience. At this particular historical moment, a supremely timely understanding.

The history of the US and Larrain’s home country is notoriously complex. Even in so far as his family is concerned. (Pablo was born into the Larraín family just as Jackie was incorporated into the Kennedy family: he understands dynasties and history.) Yet, in a way, this would appear to have made him an ideal biographer for the outsider subject. He’s in no way overawed by the subject matter; rather he seeks to contextualise it. This film has a lot in common with his sly masterpiece, Post Mortem, in that regard. Larraín looks at the other side of the historical coin; what it’s like to find yourself caught up in the vortex of terrible times. Larraín is aided by a script which just manages to stay on the right side of pretentiousness, but it’s the mercurial, everyday camera work and the elegant use of music, along with the supple editing which mark the film out. Not to mention Portman’s bravura performance. There’s one set-piece shot, when the camera looks down from the sentinel position on Kennedy’s coffin as it reaches the Capitol, which shows you what this film could have become. An exercise in the grandiose and faux-stateliness. Instead, Jackie is a film which, almost against the odds, succeeds in being both humane and wise. History belongs not just to those who exercise power, but to those who are caught up in its wake. Which is all of us. 

endless poetry (w&d alejandro jodorowsky)

I wonder what I would make of this if I was Chilean. There are moments when Jodorowsky’s vision of Santiago has echoes of Larrain’s Tony Manero, or even Patricio Kaulen’s Largo Viaje, but these moments are fleeting. Pinochet gets some mock-ironic treatment at the end, but it’s all a little arch. 

To return to the beginning, and why should a film be judged according to geography? Jodorowsky is an acclaimed director, whose cinematic heritage includes Cocteau, Dali and Fellini. As well as containing his trademark surreal flavour, Endless Poetry is also an autobiographical work, which stars his son. Adan, as the filmmaker himself. It narrates the story of his young life in Chile, before emigrating to Paris; his struggle to become a poet and his bohemian adventures. He befriends the poets Enrique Lihn, Stella Díaz Varín, Nicanor Parra, and breaks free from his family. It’s refreshing to see film used as an autobiographical medium. It might occur on a clandestine level, but rarely explicitly. (The Terence Davies trilogy comes to mind) Much of the world’s great literature is autobiographical. The process of creating an autobiographical text involves a self-conscious incorporation of the learning accrued by the author; something they then go on to share with the reader. There’s no reason film shouldn’t do this too, and Jodorowsky makes a bold stab at it. He uses surrealist language to broaden the film’s scale. Some of the effects are beguiling. The opening sequence converts a rundown barrio of Santiago into the thriving working class district of his youth using the wonderful imagination of his art department, a sequence which signals a playful break with naturalism, exploring the frontiers of film’s capacity to incorporate dream and memory. 

The narrative as such is episodic, revolving around the various personal relationships in young Jodorowsky’s development. Much of this is quixotic and stylised. Whenever the film tries to break though into a more authentic emotional register, it falls flat. This is partly because Adan Jodorowsky isn’t a great actor, but also because it seems to go against the film’s playfulness. At other times it feels as though the imagery is being employed for the sake of it, rather than from any dramatic need. The film’s big set-piece scene, a vast carnival sequence involving devils and skeletons, feels forced, as though there was money that needed spending. The director and his DOP (Chris Doyle) needed fireworks and this is what they came up with. 

All of this makes for an uneven film. For all it’s moments of brilliance, it feels never quite grabs the viewer by the throat as it might have done. There’s a self-indulgence which doesn’t help the cause of this kind of much-needed aesthetic adventurism. Likewise, it feels, in the end, as though it’s a shame that the film doesn’t have more to say about the politics of its provenance. Much as Chileans might not care for a constant referencing of Bolaño, the comparison has relevance. Bolaño, like Jodorowsky,  is a Chilean exile enamoured with the notion of the poet, to such an extent that his work includes real poets, just as Jodorowsky’s does. However, Bolaño, succeeds in ensuring that any flights of fancy always feel rooted in political realities. An investigation of this poetic phenomenon is also an investigation of the society the poet emerges from. Jodorowsky, by contrast, seems to have constructed something which floats free of its political origins. Endless Poetry ends up feeling too magical realist for its own good; for all its chutzpah it ends up reinforcing Latin American stereotypes without revealing their origins.