the odyssey (w&d nolan)

Random Thoughts on the Odyssey

Throwback to the seventies. Waiting for Burt Lancaster to pop up. 

Damon is playing a man who is in exile and far from home. However, he always comes across as someone, in every scene, who is completely at home. With himself, with his surroundings, with his colleagues. Of course, he is at home because he is on a film set, which is where Matt Damon, the person, rather than the character, feels at home. But this works against the character he is supposed to portray, and strips the film of much of its tension. 

Like Scott’s Napoleon, one can imagine a teenage film buff dreaming of making a big budget movie of one of his favourite texts. Don’t we all do that? Filmmakers or not? Dream of making a film of a text we love? Only Nolan has the chops to make it happen on a budgetary scale that can allow him to realise his vision. The trouble is that the film comes across like an adolescent vision: lots of noise, battles, pretty girls and clunky dialogue. 

Rhythm - the film casts the rapper Travis Scott as a variant on the blind Homer (who was an enigmatic invention too). He beats out his song to the rhythm of the hexameter. Nolan was always a master of rhythm, the way in which a film is constructed out of carefully edited beats and the manipulation of time. Momento, Dunkirk, Inception, all benefitted from this vision, capable of translating complex ideas into the language of cinema, with its impatient rhythms - you only have an hour and a half to three hours to fit it all in. But here, as for me, in Oppenheimer, he seems to have lost his touch. The rhythm is off. Odysseus’ return journey takes seven years or more, but events in Ithaca can’t keep pace with this and remain trapped in the present day. The timelines, which gelled in such a Borgesian manner in the other named films, don’t quite seem to click together. 

Finally - what is this film actually about? When Damon talks to Hathaway at the end, expressing a jaundiced regret for the genie of war he has let out of the bottle, we flash back to the dreadful pillage of Troy. And yet, over the course of this past decade, we see things far worse on our phones, day-in, day-out. When they used to sing of war, those who listened thankfully had a disconnect from its realities. Nolan is singing of war; but we no longer have the privilege of that disconnect. Modernity, the smartphone which the director famously shuns, means we carry the realities of war around in our pockets. The film’s recreation of war feels like a pale, sanitised imitation. As ever, the barbarity of another middle eastern conflict, Gaza, overshadows everything. Hollywood exists in such an escapist bubble that it really has no right to pontificate about civilisation and war. Or if it wants to, it should do it consciously and overtly. Metaphors feel cowardly. The message of this movie has all the punch of an instagram post. 

ajuste de pérdidas (w&d miguel calderon, w. guillermo fadanelli)

The Loss Adjuster would be the English title. It’s a bracing little mockumentary, made by the artist who features within his own film as himself. It follows Pedro, a Loss Adjuster, a disillusioned, charismatic bon viveur and art collector who, spoiler, we are informed at the end of the film is a real character being played by someone else. It’s hard to know who in the film is real and who is played by an actor, something that retrospectively colours the viewing. Pedro visits sites of tragedies to ascertain what was responsible. He buys art. He’s filmed smoking cigars and drinking whisky. He has a louche, hyper Mexican approach to life. The film took, for me, an even more surreal turn, when Pedro, on a boat going through some everglades, starts explaining how he’s met an actress who wants him to participate in a play by a female English writer, none over than Sarah K. Pedro, who is not an actor, accepts, because he fancies the actress. The play is Blasted, even if the title is never stated. There is a coherence to performing Sarah’s play, a meditation on violence and the effects of misogyny, in Mexico. There are scenes where Pedro argues with the director, who also happens to be the actress’ partner, about how to represent Ian, holed up in a Leeds hotel room. Pedro, searching for someone’s grave for reasons I couldn’t entirely understand, eulogises the work of the young English writer. It’s not entirely clear if he realises she is no longer alive. For obvious reasons this was the point in the film when it went from being quite entertaining to downright fascinating. Even if the angle the film is seeking to explore never seemed entirely clear, it is never less than intriguing. One suspects that the young English writer would have appreciated it.  

a second life (w&d laurent slama, w. thomas keumurian)

Slama’s Paris based film is mostly English language. It’s constructed around the charismatic presence of Agathe Rousselle, star of Titane, who looks as though she was born to play a moody bilingual traipsing round the streets of the capital in an indie movie. The aesthetic is breezy, handheld, capturing the energy of the city on the opening day of the Olympic Games. Elizabeth, a US citizen who is more French than American, works for a concierge firm, welcoming rich tourists. She’s also quasi-suicidal, for reasons we never get to understand, beyond a certain Camusian gallic leaning. One of her clients, pink-haired Elijah, played with a winsome charm by Alex Lawther, becomes fascinated by her, perhaps because she comes across as an alt-Parisian it-girl, and tags along with her as she gets increasingly stressed out by her job. Elizabeth (name derived from a Bergman character) is also deaf, and inevitably loses her expensive hearing aids. Slama directs with an energy which perhaps compensates for a somewhat whimsical narrative which never confronts the source(s) of Elzabeth’s disaffection with the world. At the same time, this feels like guerrilla filmmaking done with a certain aplomb, benefitting from great casting. The fact that it’s made mostly in English, with several sympathetic gringo characters, makes one wonder if it was conceived with one eye on the US festival circuit - it’s hard to empathise with North American tourists in Paris, even if they are hypnotists. (Is this supposed to be the anti Emily-in-Paris?)

the deer hunter (w&d michael cimino, w. deric washburn, louis garfinkle)

When I got home I thought it was incumbent to look up the discourse on ‘Deer Hunter Racist’. There was not as much as I might have anticipated. Cimino’s film occupies a curious space. Known as a Vietnam war movie, the Vietnam sections of the film actually feel like background for the director’s real interest, which is is the dissolution of the immigrant American dream. It might be that twas ever thus, but this is effectively a buddy movie, about three men from a close-knit community who stray into a nightmare. A nightmare which just happens to have been caused by the demented actions of their government. Cimino’s film is always at its purest when the action occurs in the Pennsylvania mining town that Mike, Nick and Steve come from. First names as common as any in the Anglo-Saxon world, but their surnames are of Russian descent, a telling choice, given that it’s the commie Russians that the USA was supposedly trying to defeat in South East Asia. A Russian Orthodox Church looms over the small town, looking like something out of the Donbas, and it’s here that the citizens are married and buried. The first hour of the film is locked into the creation of this world and the personal relationships that lurk there. This could be American Graffiti, or The Last Picture Show.

Vietnam is the fly in the ointment. It’s not an unreasonable position to criticise the film for not reflecting the Vietnamese experience, or indeed for portraying the Vietnamese characters as bloodthirsty gamblers, hooked on Russian Roulette, an idea which was apparently the invention of Cimino and his screenwriters. But it would also be to miss the point. The Russian Roulette is a device, which ties in with the band of brothers’ love of hunting, guns and violence, a violence which does a 180 degree turn, turning the gun back on themselves. The deer aren’t going to provoke that, but the Vietnam War will.

Through all this De Niro gives a magisterial performance. Vaguely normal, vaguely handsome, vaguely ugly with his sailor’s beard, he has the air of a leader and a survivor, a man who is of the world he inhabits and yet is not. It’s intriguing that in the credits, the last image is of De Niro’s Mike falling over. For all his capacity to control and lead, he is unable to rescue his friend from the trap that has been laid.

So Deer Hunter is a film which opens itself to perhaps deserved criticism, whilst at the same time providing a coruscating vision of American Imperialism. It has been over thirty years since I last saw the film. Its impact was telling then and its power has not diminished. It’s also instructive to think that the chances of a similar film being made about more recent US adventures is minimal. As though the military PR men sat down and watched the ’Nam movies, and then told Hollywood: no more next time round. The scenes of the US Saigon embassy is in its final days could be mapped on to events in Kabul. A critique of a government willing to cripple and kill its own in pursuit of its imperialist ambitions is no longer the kind of thing the studios are willing to finance. Instead we get the false war wish fulfilment of Tarantino or the vapid escapism of the Marvel franchise. (Or “ancient Greece”)

o riso e a faca (I only rest in the storm) (w&d pedro pinho, w. miguel seabra lopes, luisa homem)

France 2 - Morocco - 0. No extra time. Which gives me time to get to Cinemateca for the 7.10 screening of Pinho’s film. About which I knew nothing, except that it was set in Africa and was on the long side.

Africa is Guinea Bissau, the Portuguese speaking West African nation. Long is 3 hours 37 minutes. Which is getting up to Angelopoulos levels of long. It starts with a scene that could be out of Antonioni’s Passenger, as Sergio, a white Portuguese man, breaks down on a wind-blown Saharan highway. He is on his way to Bissau, where he is due to deliver a report on the construction of a road which, he is told by a fetching white NGO worker, will threaten the habitat of the last remaining hippopotamuses in the region. His predecessor, in a Bolaño-esque move, has vanished. We never get to see the hippos, but we do get to see just about everything else. There’s a reason this film is so long. It’s because it seeks to faithfully capture every aspect of Sergio’s trip. From a social and anthropological perspective, but also a personal level, as Sergio goes on a voyage of spiritual and sexual discovery.

Of course, there is an angle that says this is excessive. The film should have condensed the material, made a more coherent narrative, reduced the elements. Who wants to sit and watch a film that’s three and a half hours long set in country most viewers outside of West Africa will never have visited. On the other hand, how do you make a film about neo-colonialism and its offset, neo-liberalism? What happens when you simplify the thesis that underpins the film? There are at least three scenes which cut to the heart of the matter. One in a club, when the ‘progressive’ Horacio gives Sergio a lecture on the advantages of development, another with Daria, the woman he fancies who can’t believe he turned down Horacio’s bribe, and a third when Sergio finds himself with a sex worker in the desert, paid for by a Portuguese worker who’s trying to make up for losing his temper with him. This last scene is raw, naked and wilfully on the nose. The sex worker, who speaks perfect English, better than Sergio, berates him for trying to understand and empathise with something that goes beyond his understanding or his capacity for empathy. This is the North-South divide laid bare. The progressive north is like the rich man in the parable. No matter how well-intentioned, its citizens can never truly grapple with the realities of being born in the ‘under-developed’ world.

These scenes, among others, can only play out within the context of Sergio’s journey and the wider world he and we get to know. On their own they would be top-heavy, expositional. But the scale of Pinho’s ambition allows him to incorporate them, pebbles on the river’s floor. This expansive approach permits the film to access so many elements of Guinean society, from the clubs of Bissau to the riverine villages in the mangroves, to the Koltesian outposts in the desert. And this is the short version - there’s a five hour director’s cut!

I walked back from Cinematica in my second world city. O Risa e a Faca is, without doubt, one of the most challenging, astonishing pieces of contemporary cinema I have seen. I realise, in the writing of this, that my perspective is that of the white male European. Perhaps the black, female, non-european would have another take. (There’s a great moment when the black Brazilian drag queen is told s/he’s not black and reacts with annoyance, provoking the question, what exactly does it mean to say someone is ‘black’ or ‘white’ (The Nigerians told me I had black blood in me somewhere, I wasn’t a ghost)). But - parenthesis over - this is a remarkable film which explores the boundaries of our world, and how we can even attempt to speak about those boundaries in a medium with costs that are, for the vast majority of countries, prohibitive.

[Final thoughts - this film seems to sit alongside Martin’s Great Yarmouth and the work of Pedro Costa, (there may be others) suggesting a boldness to Portuguese filmmaking which is going under the radar. - This film is the anti-Sirat. No sudden dramatic thrills. No emotional volte-faces.] 

the misfits (d. john houston, w. arthur miller)

Whose film is this? It feels as though there are three separate animi for the movie, each pulling in their own direction. The film opens with some classic, droll MIllerian dialogue, as Monroe’s Roslyn is introduced. Miller wrote the script for his then-wife, and much of the opening sequence deals with the pains and pleasures of being, or being married to, America’s pin-up girl. The Rino sequence is light, almost frothy, with Monroe showing off her comedy chops. When the film moves out of the city, the tone changes. It becomes a meditation on the America west, reminiscent of the plays of Shepherd as much as Miller. There’s a metaphor at the heart which feels as though it might work better in the theatre than film, as Gable, Wallach and Clift go hunting for wild mustangs to make a buck. Nevertheless, the filming on the Nevada salt flats is visceral. Here it feels like Houston’s film, a vigorous tale of men and their values, the rights and wrongs of the American way, with an implicit critique of the men’s petty greed reminiscent of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Finally, of course, this is Marilyn’s film. She is the pivot around which everything revolves, the one who questions the men’s phallocentric vision of the world, the one who gets the big emotional moment, filmed curiously in the middle distance, as though Houston felt uncomfortable with her scene disrupting his high-octane hunting sequence.

All of which makes for an awkward, angular film, which struggles to fit in its variant, misfitting parts. Nevertheless in spite of the over-simplified, sentimental finale, it acts as a warped homage to warped dreams. The dream of the American west, the dream of the American beauty, the dream of the Miller-Monroe marriage. It’s not perfect, but then no marriage is. 

cabaret (d. bob fosse, w. joe masteroff, john van druten, christopher isherwood, jay allen)

Germany, interwar. So much of my reading and watching seems to return to these times. Whilst there is a personal connection to pre-war Berlin, it is also disconcerting the way in which interwar Germany seems to resemble contemporary western society. The culture wars and the xenophobia. The hankering for a strong leader which goes above and beyond a hankering for democracy. The societal petri dish which leads to fascism is always latent, but these days the ingredients feel more combustible than ever. Cabaret, the film of a musical inspired by a book written by Isherwood, who must have been jotting down notes in the clubs and beer gardens and parks he would have frequented, does a sterling job of capturing Berlin in the thirties. A heightened, musical Berlin with a shadow hanging over it. How many of these english speaking German characters would be dead a decade later? Would Fritz and Natalia manage to flee? Would Maximilian end up dead on the eastern front? It’s a curious film in so far as the fate of the lead protagonists, no matter the scrapes they get into, seem to have less jeopardy than that of the secondary characters. Minelli is barnstormingly brilliant. I once, in another life, saw her perform two nights in a row at the Royal Albert Hall. Presumably singing many of the songs from this film. What stays with me most, however, is how the two nights were carbon copies, even down to the supposed ad-libs. Minelli was a meticulous pro. That quest for perfection underscores her representation of Sally Bowles. She appears to capture her character’s comic timing and apparent chaos effortlessly - something that suggests there must have been a world of effort involved.  Fosse choreographs the whole film, not just the dance sequences. The editing is sharp to the point of jagged. The rollercoaster ride reflects the rollercoaster lives that everyone was living in those dangerous days, both exhilarating and ghosted by imminent terror. 

palo y hueso (w&d nicolás sarquís, w. raúl beceyro, juan josé saer)

Palo y Hueso (Stick and Bone) is a low-fi, casi nouvelle vague tale from rural Argentina. Besides being an intriguing film in its own right, it has the added kudos of being adapted from a story by the great Argentine novelist Saer, who is credited as co-writer. There’s something about harsh tales from the countryside which suit that a Chabrolian black and white aesthetic (thinking of Sanjines and Paolo Costa, among others.) Palo y Hueso tells a simple story of an older campesino, Don Arce, who ‘buys’ himself a fifteen year old wife. He also happens to have a good-looking twenty-something son, Domingo, who lives with him. It comes as no great surprise that Rosita is more interested in Domingo than Don Arce. One of the more surprising elements of the film is the way in which the agent of change turns out to be Rosita, rather than either of the men. Although she finds herself in a weak position, she emerges as a strong character, prepared to take charge of her life. The film is threaded through with images of the local culture and landscape. The riotous festivities of the local pueblo contrast with the emptiness of country life. All of it is captured by a camera which feels as though it is constantly probing the slim tale’s possibilities, employing depth of field in the manner of Bergman, another who enjoyed putting the passions and bleakness of rural life on screen. 

two prosecutors (w&d sergey loznitsa, w. georgy demidov)

Loznitsa’s film does everything one might expect of it, including the long, brooding takes. It’s interesting to review the narrative’s structure. Adapted from a novel by Demidov, the film is essentially four sequences. In the first the prosecutor, Kornev, played with a deadpan naivety by Alexander Kuznetsov, visits a prison where he interviews an elderly former tutor and prosecutor, who has been the victim of the Stalin’s regime’s abusive torture. The second brief sequence occurs when Kornev is in the train to Moscow, and falls asleep as a peasant relates a meeting with Lenin. The third sequence has Kornev heading for the office of the Soviet state’s head prosecutor, a man shrouded in bureaucratic menace. In the final sequence Kornev returns in the train accompanied by two ebullient characters who are not what they seem, even if this feels quietly predictable. There is a simplicity and straightforwardness to the storytelling which perhaps betrays an exaggerated straightforwardness towards the film’s material. If there is no doubt that Stalin was a monster, ultimately responsible for heinous crimes, there is nevertheless no attempt made to contextualise Kornev’s fateful journey. It emerges as a kind of fable of totalitarianism without in any way addressing its roots. The film has a clipped, efficient feel, where the only real note of humanity comes from two murderous agents of the state. 

carol (d todd haynes, w. phyllis nagy, patricia highsmith)

Carol is a polished adaptation of Highsmith’s novel, which feels as though it ticks all the boxes without ever catching fire. The film is set in similar territory to Haynes’ earlier Far From Heaven, but it has a more muted feel. Like the earlier film, it deals with the crossing of taboos in post-war USA; but the colours are less vibrant and the melodrama is toned down. There are no obvious flaws, but this might be a flaw in itself: in spite of the transgressive nature of the relationship between Blanchett’s Carol and Mara’s Therese, it never feels as though they are running the same kind of risks that Moore and Haysbert ran in FFH. This could be down to the adaptation of the source material, Highsmith’s novel. The film opens with a self-evident homage to Brief Encounter, (albeit this is later revealed to be a tricksy device), but where the almost unseemly desperation of Trevor Howard’s passion shines through and propels that movie onto a heightened emotional plane, Blanchett always seems to hold things together in a polished performance which might have benefited from being more unhinged. When she threatens someone with a gun, it never seems likely that the gun will go off.

 

love and anarchy (w&d lina wertmüller)

This was my first Wertmüller film. I had no real idea what to expect. However, it seems clear that she fits right in with a golden age of Italian cinema. Fellini, Bertolucci, Pasolini. Directors who are unafraid of making bold, sweeping films that mix the serious with the bawdy. Love and Anarchy is set in a Roman bordello, as the naive Tonino commits himself to assassinating Mussolini - with the film set long before the war, evidently with zero success. In the process he falls for Tripolina, one of the prostitutes, whilst being encouraged by Salome, another. Could a man make a film about a naive would-be assassin hanging out in a whorehouse? It seems debatable. But in Wertmüller’s eyes this place is one big raucous family, and her female characters are exuberant and powerful. Cinema has a curious way of reflecting national traits. With her over-the-top, sometimes operatic direction, this is a film that seems to capture the craziness of Roman life, in much the same way as Fellini did. Italian cinema has a love-hate relationship with realism, allowing it to push narrative boundaries and characterisation to an extreme edge. Nothing feels particularly believable, but it is all relentlessly entertaining, and somewhere within the beating heart of the story is a fragrant political message.

 

alpha (w&d julia ducournau)

The critics have not been overly kind to Alpha. It is indeed, a messy film, so full of ideas and concepts that they seem to overflow. There’s a pandemic storyline, as society becomes gripped by a disease which turns people to crumbling stone. There’s a junkie storyline, as Amin, played by Tahar Rahim, struggles with his addiction. There’s a double timeline, with teenage Alpha and young Alpha living side by side within the film’s framework. Gradually we piece together that the pandemic scenes, with Alpha’s heroic mother, Golshifteh Farahani, sporting a different hairdo, happened in young Alpha’s past. There’s a coming of age storyline, as Alpha, (Mélissa Boros) fights for her independence and tries to reconcile with the family ghosts. There are loose strands featuring the anglo-french actors Finnegan Oldfield and Emma Mackey, which feel as though they might even have been included to keep the financiers happy. Finally, there are some great moments where the director explores her Berber heritage, a heritage from which Alpha feels alienated. The red wind whose myth permeates the film clearly has a saharan origin. So there is a lot going on, probably far too much and even more so than with Titane, one feels that the director might benefit from working with a screenwriter…. But none of this means that Alpha makes for anything less than a fascinating, visceral ride. As ever with Ducournau, there’s a vigour and energy to the filmmaking which propels the film over the course of its two hours, no matter how many highways and byways it goes down. It’s not perfect, but then who is?

 

brief encounter (w&d david lean, w. noël coward, anthony havelock-allan, ronald neame)

When the lights came up in Montevideo’s Cinemateca, there was more one person who could be seen unashamedly in tears. How can a black and white, subtitled British film made in 1945 continue to exert such an effect? The answer is twofold. On the one hand it’s simple. This is one of the classic cinematic Ur-Love Stories. The account of the doomed love affair of Dr Alec Harvey and Laura Jesson represents a transcendent vision of that thing called romantic love upon which so much of our western dreamlife is predicated. Their love is uncomplicated, unconsummated, and clear as mountain stream. It is a kind of dream we are born and bred to share and when we witness this framed within the rectangle of the cinema screen, it has a potency that real life, with all its complications, struggles to emulate. On the other, this is a result of delicious artistry. From Lean’s opening shot, as the camera initially focuses on Stanley Holloway flirting with the station cafe manageress, before panning to the protagonists, the film exudes a delicacy blended with high passion. We are spies on this couple’s intimacy. Coward’s script is a thing of joy, blending reserve with those moments when the reserve breaks and Howard declares, with an unbridled simplicity, that he loves Laura. The violence of love is laid bare, the way it creates great joy, but an equal measure of sorrow. Somehow Coward manages to squeeze in a reference to Keats, the prince of romantic poetry. This violence would, of course, have had a heightened resonance at the time of the film’s release, a moment when so many relationships would have flowered briefly only to be torn apart by war. Of course there is something that feels inimically British in the way that the characters wrestle to keep their passions under control, but at the same time the film makes one think of another great unconsummated cinematic love story, Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The yearning of love, also known as the tugging of the heartstrings, is a universal emotion. Lean and Coward’s encapsulation of these emotions, delivered in the flesh by the sublime performances of Howard and Johnson, reverberates across the decades.

 

romería (w&d carla simón, w. neus pipó simón)

Simón’s auto-ficción tale of a young woman getting to know her deceased father’s lost family and their drug-running secrets evolves gently, punctuated by the revelations Marina gleans along the way. It’s careful pacing leads towards an oneiric, staged finale, which shifts away from the steady naturalism of the rest of the film, a naturalism exacerbated by the frequent use of Marina’s, an aspiring filmmaker, camcorder shots. Even if there is an underwater sequence in the dream sequence which matches an earlier underwater sequence when Marina dives into the Atlantic waters off the coast of Vigo. This artful use of imagery helps to give the tale added depth. In a way it feels reminiscent of the work of Mark Jenkin, just as the rugged Galician coastline, which features prominently, echoes the rugged Cornish coastline. Both directors have carved out their niche on the edge of conventional cinema, allowing their personal aesthetic and themes to percolate into films which pay little more than lip-service to conventional narrative models. Marina’s journey is a slow, roundabout trip, featuring Galician grannies and heroin nights. It’s a film with capas that accompany the viewer as they follow the footsteps of Marina, who is in turn walking in the footsteps of her lost parents. 

resurrección/ kuángyě shídài (w&d bi gan, w. zhai xiaohui)

When this film came out last year, I read some gushing reviews suggesting it was reinventing the art. In order to find out whether Bi Gan has indeed reinvented, or resurrected cinema, I came to pay my dues. What emerges is the work of a cineaste student let loose with a seemingly infinite budget. There are homages to Welles, Tarkovsky and the rest. There are set piece scenes which any cineaste would die to put together. What there isn’t is much of a story. In some ways the film’s scale seems akin to much modern Chinese cinema (Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still, the panoramic vistas of Jia Zhang-Ki, etc). Would it be too much of a reach to suggest that this reflects a culture struggling to come to terms with its new-formed grandiose status? However, Zhang-Ki’s films are rooted in the actuality of Chinese development/ expansion. Whereas Bi Gan is reaching for something altogether more poetic and pretentious, an overview of the history of cinema itself. The absence of an anchor means that, no matter how impressive the imagery, the film feels as though it drifts through a calm sea, going nowhere in particular. 

basta! (d. ugo ulive)

How often do you walk out of the cinema and say to yourself, what the fuck was I just watching? That’s my current state, having just seen the 22 minutes long Basta. People talk about shocking films, from Chien Angelou to Titane. I thought about Cronenberg, Park Chan Wook, but none of these hold a candle to Ulive’s assault on the senses. Filmed in Venezuela, it’s the most delirious, terrifying attack on big oil capitalism possible. Like the Military industrial’s own pornographic violence, there’s no coherence, no receivable discourse. When the bomb hits, you don’t get to think though the logic of its hitting, and this film, nearly fifty years after its making, has the same demonic power, albeit a power realised through art, the art of selecting the image, editing the image, adding sound, creating rhythm. In short, through the employment of the art of cinema. It’s completely and utterly hateful, revolting, obscene. And therein lies its secret. If ever a film chose to step out of the received ideas of what should be shown in a cinema, this is it. If you ever get the chance to watch it, do - but watch it somewhere where the sound is turned up, and you cannot look away or glance at your phone or go and get something from the fridge when it gets too much. 

(It turns out that Ugo Ulive, like myself, directed in El Galpon and for La Comedia. Jorge Blanco also had one play produced by La Comedia before he left Uruguay. It makes one wonder what might have been. These days in this country, the cinema and the theatre have almost no intercambio. It’s one thing or the other.)

los chicos y la calle (d carlos echeverría)

In 2001 Argentina and Uruguay suffered a brutal economic collapse. Kids that grew up in that era are sometimes called here, los chicos del pasto, the kids who ate grass. Made during this recession, Echeverría’s documentary looks at the street kids of Buenos Aires. It is orientated around a refuge, called CAINA, where the kids go for food, clothing and shelter, run by willing young men and women with clear social consciences. The doc has a Wiseman feel, albeit interrupted at times with interviews. The kids roam the streets near Retiro. The film captures the humanity behind their hard facade. No-one finds themselves living on the street without a story that explains how they got there. Kids that most would walk past or shy away from become people in their own right. The camera roams the streets with them, listens in on their stories, a testament to the trust the director and his crew managed to engender. Below the surface there lurk tales of sexual abuse and violence. It’s impossible not to contemplate what has happened to these lost children twenty five years on, now that those who have survived will be adults entering middle age. 

argie (w&d jorge blanco)

Cinema is a medium which is hostage to money. It’s the objective of every financed film to make the most of its budget to ensure the product meets certain aesthetic standards. The biggest crime is to look cheap. Even if a decade or so later, the aesthetic has moved on, ether as a result of fashion or technology, and by the time a film is twenty years old it almost invariably looks dated. Nevertheless, almost all films that make it to the mainstream are polished, to one degree or another. Unlike a novel, which can get away with the odd scraggy loose end, or Shakespeare, of whom this is also the case, cinema tends to be an unforgiving medium. If your film fails to meet a certain aesthetic standard, it won’t be taken seriously.

Which is perhaps why there seems to be so little space for the maverick within the industry. The filmmaker who is more concerned with what they want to say than how they say it. Cine povere, or Outsider Art. Argie is a great example of what we lose with this reductive filter. It’s not a perfect film. It’s rambunctious, messy, underdeveloped. There are several war scenes that border on the silly. The director, the Uruguayan Jorge Blanco, is also the lead actor. There’s an overwhelming sense of chaos, but that chaos is also energy. However, this is a film which could never have been made through conventional methods. Pablo is an Argentine exile in London at the time of the Falklands War who decides to take the battle to the natives. But he’s no terrorist, not even a soldier. He targets a woman he fancies, who also happens to fancy him. She’s a topless dancer in The Dartmouth Arms, straight out of the seventies early eighties, who also happens to be the daughter of a Spaniard who fled Franco. The Argentine and the topless dancer go on a pseudo Bonny and Clyde journey through the badlands of London, causing damage to no-one except themselves. It’s a farcical journey, summed up by Pablo taking out his violent frustration on a man who tries to pick up his girl, only to be told by her, as he’s beating him up, that the man is actually Irish.

There’s plenty of humour and pathos in Argie, but more than anything else it’s a completely valid political-cultural statement. The Argentine perspective on the war, at the time of the film’s making, had no voice within the UK. The back story of generals and repression and lost pride. The actuality of who the men who were fighting were. Blanco seeks to give them a voice, in a honkytonk style, maximising his improvised budget to conjure something quietly extraordinary. 

melancholia (w&d von trier)

If cinema, as occasionally noted, is a synthesis of multiple elements (screenwriting, acting, photography, music, art direction, editing etc), then the art of the director is to employ each of these elements to the nth degree. It might seem counterintuitive that Von Trier, who comes from a lo-fi school, which sought a return to a pared-back methodology, should end up excelling in every aspect of this directorial remit, but in Melancholia, we witness a seemingly effortless mastery of the medium.

Screenwriting - when discussing the quality of screenwriting, what is involved? Firstly the idea that the screenplay will introduce and discuss ideas that provoke thought, a condition so often neglected by the mainstream. Second that the narrative should take the viewer with it, should be involving. Thirdly, that the dialogue should be credible, even at its more recondite. So when Dunst’s character says that the earth is evil, in another film this line might feel trite or contrived. Whereas, in Melancholia, it feels not only credible, coming from the mouth of this character, but also resonant of the more complex ideas the film is raising. Cinema is not philosophy. It struggles to explore concepts with subtlety or depth. Von Trier appears to be investigating a Schopenhauer- ian or Manichean argument about the overblown importance of humanity, its relative insignificance within the immensity of the universe. Dunst character explores these ideas convincingly, brilliantly, in a way that allows us to understand the questions the film is posing. Should the world end, would it really be such a tragedy? What would be lost? It’s an existential, anti-renaissance line, which feels all too pertinent in this 21st christian century.

Acting - Acting is by definition, fakery. Someone pretends to be someone else. The question then becomes, how well do they do this? Do they still feel human? Or does the fakery feel contrived? Perhaps the greatest testament to the director’s skill is the performance of Kiefer Sutherland, an actor who sometimes seemed to relish the fakery, the exaggeration of acting for the camera. Here, as the hassled husband of Gainsbourg and Dunst’s brother-in-law his exasperation is completely convincing.

Photography - I was lucky enough to watch the film on a big screen. There can be few more imposing visions than the great planet Melancholia soaring over the horizon, at the same time beauty, monster and avenger. There is something of the formal composition of certain scenes that is reminiscent of Resnais’ Last year in Marienbad. Then, in the opening half of the film, Von Trier’s DOP, Manuel Alberto Claro, captures the nuances and energy of a wedding with all the brillo of the days of Dogma, a homage, in its way, to Festen.

Music - Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde is used repeatedly throughout the film. Given the epic scale the film is looking to operate on, the choice feels just as apposite (and perhaps includes a nod and a wink) to Copolla’s uses of Wagner in Apocalypse Now.

Art Direction - someone (Simone Grau Roney) was doing something very clever indeed with the representation of the planet Melancholia, a second moon/ sun. The use of a simple piece of twisted wire as a messenger of salvation or doom is also extraordinary.

Editing - Editing is one of the least valued elements of the process of making cinema. You rarely get editors on the red carpet. Yet Molly Malene Stensgaard offers a masterclass. In the first half of the film, with its large cast, she ensures that the rhythm never drops as we flit from scene to scene, cutting at the perfect moment. In the second, which has only four characters, she ensures there is a rising sense of tension, propelling the film towards its glorious climax. 

far from heaven (w&d todd haynes)

Todd Haynes achieves something complex in his Sirk homage. He bestows pathos on characters who at first seem laughable, even absurd. The film was released in 2002 and perhaps the lens through which an audience might watch the film has changed over the course of the last 25 years. Moore’s Cathy struggles to cope with her husband Frank’s gay infidelity,  The tone is melodramatic. Moore’s impeccably coiffed hair seems as much of a character as either of her children. Quaid’s Frank breaks down and weeps and then pinballs around like an archetypal repressed North American bourgeois. Everything is so on point that it feels like a pastiche, as indeed it is. It’s impossible not to laugh at these characters and their cliched fifties behaviour. Surely this is a world that we have left behind? Dennis Haysbert’s Raymond is the down-to-earth antidote to all this. A man whose solid decency transcends the boundaries of race and class. No wonder Cathy falls for him. All the same, this world and its characters feel like a caricature. Then something remarkable happens, in large part through the performances of Moore and Haysbert. The characters seem to slip the pastiche net. Their emotional distress touches us. The film becomes a film about love. its power and its limitations. These emotions are, of course, timeless.

Twenty five years later, even those elements of the film that seem wilfully contrived suddenly feel far more plausible. Conservatism is back. Prejudice is back. The closet is back. It seems like we’re slipping back into the absurd, divided world of the fifties.