blow up (w&d michelangelo antonioni, w tonino guerra, julio cortázar, edward bond)

Blow Up is one of those films which has a constant presence at the back of the mind. You imagine you know it backwards. Which is why it’s so good to get the opportunity to see it again on the cinema screen and realise that, in keeping with the themes of the film, what you imagined isn’t necessarily the same film as the one that’s really there. 

For example, I remembered the fake tennis match at the end, but hadn’t remembered that it came, precisely, at the end. It’s an act of sheer brio. A dozen painted-faced youths turn up and play pretend tennis and that’s that. An act of consummate narrative brilliance, pulling all the theoretical threads of the film together whilst making it crystal clear (or crystal opaque) that there’s no use hoping for a neat plot resolution. 

In case you hadn’t got it, this is a film about perception. What we see, what we think we see, what we imagine we see and what we don’t see. Reading some of the notes about the film, there seems to be a suggestion that Antonioni wasn’t interested in dialogue, but this seems like another oversight. Besides the famous “I am in Paris” line, one of the great pre-Lynchian Lynchian moments, there are also some nailed on exchanges as Hemmings’ Thomas talks to Sarah Miles about what he has or hasn’t seen. At other moments the dialogue feels like another musical note in a film that is so obsessive about composition. The lines might feel as though they’re discordant, but that’s part of the film’s deliberate discordance. As is Hemmings’ hyper-active acting, which rather than being forced, feels representative of a time when there was a furious energy at play, but an energy which was never clear as to what its objectives were. 

There is even a latent energy in the propeller which Thomas buys, the implication of a movement which has been stilled. Which is also a way of viewing photography. Roland Barthes’ punctum: the moment which the photograph captures and the unseen life contained within that image’s crystallisation. It might be that Antonioni’s film contains a plea for us to look harder, to penetrate the hidden corners of the visible in order to glimpse the supposedly invisible. Something which a society which has become increasingly image-dependent, without in any way improving its faculty for reading those images, would do well to heed. Further to that, you can see in Blow-Up the way that history’s tendrils stretch back to that supposedly revolutionary time of the swinging sixties, which was far from being all that it appeared. Rather than being the advent of a utopic freedom, it was actually the dawning of advanced materialism. Another Antonioni quote states that he didn’t want the film to be a London film, but the images which capture a city at the beginning of a process of transformation towards the modern behemoth it is still becoming, make it unequivocally a London film. And one of the greatest, without a shadow of a doubt. 

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Note - Edward Bond has a scriptwriting credit for English dialogue, adding to the impression that the film’s dialogue was something that was taken more seriously than has been suggested. With the director, Guerra, Bond and Cortazar on the script side, one wonders if there’s ever been a stronger script team put together for a movie. 

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

Klimt and Schiele

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

Sartre

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


Domestics

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


Novel

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


Apollo & Dionysius

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

Bar Room Brawl

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

la grande illusion (w&d jean renoir, w. charles spaak)

A meditation on La Illusion

The first world war was one of the last wars fought without being extensively filmed. There are moving images, but the cameras were still primitive, pre-sound, and the footage has more of the feel of a dream than a documentary.

Thus, apart from the obvious historical significance of the war, it also marks a before-and-after in terms of how great events are perceived. Today, we live in a world where if something has not been filmed it is almost as though it never happened. So much more will be known and documented in a quantitative sense from the 20^th century onwards than was known and documented in the centuries that came before. Something which permits a mystique to the latter which the former cannot emulate.

Renoir’s film hinges on a changing social code. Von Stroheim’s German commander, von Rauffenstein, believes in the existence of an aristocratic world which exists above and beyond the commonplace one. This belief allows him to befriend his enemy, the Frenchman Boeldieu, (Pierre Fresnay) with whom he feels more kinship than his fellow German soldiers. It’s made clear in Boeldieu’s last scene that he feels the same way as his German counterpart, even if a pragmatic patriotism leads to him betraying this kinship.

The film treats this relationship between von Rauffenstein and Boeldieu sympathetically, in spite of the narrative’s overt support of a more democratic and patriotic approach to life, embodied in Gabin’s earthy heroism. As such, it’s tempting to read the officer’s complicity as a metaphor for something more than mere aristocratic indulgence. The way in which these men are capable of understanding a broader framework, above and beyond the geo-political one in which they are trapped, suggests perhaps the last remnant of the possibility of living beyond the confines of history. We are all caught in the trappings of our surroundings: class, race, religion, nationality, language etc. Renoir appears to posit the existence of a greater freedom, one which the war is seeking to remove. The war, and by implication, modernity too. Beneath its jovial patriotism there lurks an existential treatise, hardly surprising for a film made in France in the thirties.

This greater freedom might perhaps be associated with the privilege of not being filmed or documented. Was it so ridiculous of the apocryphal Red Indian to believe that the photograph was a theft of his soul? The more we are defined as who we are, the more the image of who we are is pinned down, the harder it is to escape the circumstances of that moment of definition. The facebook/ selfie era restricts the possibilities of individuality, rather than enhancing it.

Perhaps this is too much of a leap to extrapolate from Renoir’s movie. But part of what lends it a power above and beyond the classic narrative of a wartime prison escape is the way in which the film captures, twenty years after the events it is documenting, a particular place and time. Showing the ways in which a mutating world seeks to define the individual through notions of race, nationality and creed. A form of definition which blights and limits, rather than liberates.

lola (w&d fassbinder, w. peter märthesheimer, pea fröhlich)

We were ten minutes late for the start of the movie. Caught up in the exaggerated emotional morass that every creature, from newt to orang utang, occasionally finds itself stuck in. Fassbinder's colours, as a result, were perfect. Lit with deep melodramatic shades, suggesting a land where everything is overblown and heightened. The pacing of the storytelling was similar, a kind of hop-skip-and-a-jump approach, breathy scenes accumulating like cumulonimbus, the narrative a set of dominoes lined up and falling over, one after another.

All of which created a cinematic tone which did not feel entirely comfortable, pitched somewhere between soap opera and social realism. However, this slight awkwardness or discomfort was perfect for our state of mind, which might not have been able to cope with anything too measured. The film billowed along like a schooner, its more laconic social critique occasionally peeping through like the moon on a scuddy, clouded night. It never felt close to being unimpeachably brilliant filmmaking, but the director's spicy palate always had sufficient to keep the viewer along for the ride, wanting to learn Lola's ultimate fate, wanting the hypocritical mask to be ripped off post-war Germany's complacent face.

caché (w&d haneke)

Don’t trust what your eyes are telling you. Look beneath the surface. The title tells us this. The opening sequence spells it out. And the closing sequence repeats the message with a dose of painstaking subtlety.

Auteuil’s Georges and Binoche’s Anne inhabit a strange, attractive Parisian property. Most of their life seems to take place in the sitting room/ diner downstairs. This contains hundreds of books, a mighty television set, the desk at which Auteuil works and some comfy sofas. This is the vortex of the family home, although the family rarely congregate here. Instead, it becomes the space of anxiety where Georges and Anne watch the mysterious videos which document their lives. Then there’s upstairs, the bedrooms. Their son’s bedroom is normal. Posters for Eminem. A computer with a games console attached. But his parent’s bedroom is like a cave. Dark, bare, sparse. It’s a space dedicated to sleep. No hint of pleasure. The seeming normality of their lives is not sustained in the bedroom. Instead, the room reveals the emptiness of their marriage.

When Caché came out the world and his wife revelled in the film’s blend of Hitchcockian mystery and rigorous austerity. Overlooking the way the filmmaker offers moments where he foregoes subtlety in favour of a broader satirical tone. As Georges edits his TV discussion about Rimbaud, he urges the editor to skip the conceptual stuff and get to the bit about his homosexuality. His colleagues are congenial media types who tell outlandish stories and exude a breezy self-confidence. These are the taste-makers, the very people who are no doubt lauding Haneke’s work to the skies, praising his rarefied critique of modern morals. At the same time, the TV shows Italian troops in Iraq, as though to emphasise the way in which the real barbarities of Western ‘Civilisation’ continue to occur under our noses. Will history judge the intervention in Iraq any differently from the French misadventures in Algeria? The ironies lurk beneath the surface in a world where the comfort of those-who-have shrouds the suffering of those-who-do-not.

Watching the film a second time, nearly ten years later, the shock effect of Majid’s suicide is no longer present. Instead, perhaps, it becomes easier to dwell on the curious intimacy of his relationship with Georges. A friendship formed at the age of 5 retains more power than any created in adulthood. The two men have already learnt almost all the lessons that life will have to teach them when still in childhood. The cliff that divides people from different social and political backgrounds as well as, one assumes, the pain of loss. Perhaps it’s because he’s sought to repress so much of his childhood that Georges cannot relate to his own child. Georges emerges as a pathetic figure, metropolitan man stripped bare. For all his intelligence he has no idea how to cope when the going gets tough, he’s soon out of his league. Which puts him in the same category as the father in Funny Games and the other in Time of the Wolf, whose good natured intentions are blown away before he can even start the negotiations. There’s something Nietzchean about Haneke’s critique of modern masculinity (which recurs again with the White Ribbon’s narrator). Apart from its commentary on the value he places on life, Majid’s suicide is the kind of carnal act of which Georges would be incapable. Modern Europeans might wear black but beneath the pseudo-existential veneer there’s pastel-coloured underwear. They don’t know how to kill goats and their primary response to any kind of threat is to get stressed out and discuss it with their partners.

The irony in all this is that Haneke is a man who makes intellectually provocative films. He values the intellect as a weapon with which he seeks to skewer the society he inhabits. And he does so successfully. The neurotic chattering classes lap up their medicine. March against the war or the dictaduras. Meanwhile, the men and women of action launch wars and dismiss art as a symptom of weakness. They would walk out of Caché before they had had the time to realise the director was subverting the artform with his opening shot. Which is why Haneke’s cinema is one of the the most definitive examplars of the crisis of Western society, intellectual or otherwise. Post-existentialism, we don’t know whether we should be reading Zizek, watching football, speculating on the stock exchange or the property market, or fighting for a cause we don’t believe in. Going to the cinema and watching a film by Haneke allows us to both indulge our Western decadence and suffer barbed criticisms for our indulgences at the same time. It’s a modern church, where our souls are allowed to engage in the struggle for meaning for a couple of hours before we head back towards our humdrum, DIY normality. Where risk is something that occurs on television, in a land far removed from our own.

time of the wolf (w&d michael haneke)

There’s a moment in Time of the Wolf where Eva, the daughter, asks to listen to some music a man is playing on a tinny tape recorder. Beethoven. I suppose I must have stolen that moment. And many others as well. Although I was never particularly aware of the impact the film must have had on me. Until I saw it for the second time, last night. The first time, if memory serves me well, and I’m far from convinced that it does, was in the flat of Mr C, when he still owned the flat in Kilburn, before he moved to Archway and then headed East. It was always a pleasure to work in that flat, with it’s kitchen/ living room and marble worksurface. It was a productive space, from within whose walls emerged the first film we made, a blend of Cortazar, Woman of the Dunes and other random influences.

Haneke’s film must have made its points. It was, as ever, far preferable to see it on the  big screen in Cinemateca. Haneke’s films are like way stations. Each one defining in their pared back austerity the state of the world and the state of your life. Last night, there were no more than half a dozen people in the cinema. They don’t know what they’re missing. An old man at the end said, as we left, that the film grabbed you from the start. He was right. The start which seems like a homage to Funny Games, as a middle-class people-carrier noses its way through the countryside with no idea of what it is about to confront.

However, in spite of the film’s savage opening, this is a gentler, more humane piece of storytelling than Funny Games. We assume that everything’s going to go all Cormac McCarthy on us (ie The Road) with horses eating one another and humans too. But somehow the savagery is kept in check. It’s internal, even, curiously for Haneke, poeticised. There remains the suggestion that beneath it all he’s a  repressed Romantic, searching out the humane within the disjointed chaos of a world which has, more or less, forgotten what it means to be humane. There’s something about the messianic figures who arrive bearing torches which suggests that Haneke believes there might be hope after all; that one way or another once we rid ourselves of all the junk that weighs us down we’ll remember what it means to belong to a community. And learn to breathe again.  

solaris (w&d tarkovsky, w. frederick gorenshtein)

Dyer in Zona talks about Tarkovsky's roving camera. He talks about the camera 'breathing'. It's true. Tarkovsky's camera is more like a living creature than an inanimate object. The machine that feels. We can never settle, just as the narrative never settles, caught up in the restless quest of its characters. It's a device that has been used in horror or suspense movies extensively, but rarely in drama. In horror it's clear that the intention of the roving camera is to put the viewer ill-at-ease, to subvert the feeling of security that the standard viewing position offers. But Tarkovsky does not appear to be out to unsettle us. Rather, he wants us to be aware of how 'real' the scene is. To fracture the assumed complicity of viewer and screen, in order to rebuild. Just as with 'reality' we can never be entirely sure what's going to come next, so within the world of Tarkovsky's camera. Don't blink. Because when you look up everything might have altered irredeemably, and you'll have missed the reason why.

Not that logic is necessarily the key factor in the sequence of events within a narrative adapted from a Stansislaw Lem novel. Some of the most entertaining dialogue occurs when the script starts to explain the apparitions in the spaceship. The 'real' characters, we are informed, are made of 'atoms', whereas the apparitions are made of 'neutrons'. So that's cleared that one up. Tarkovsky would appear to be escorting us into a zone where the rules of physics have become susceptible to unexplainable distortions. The search for a logical solution is spurious. The question is whether one chooses to go with the flow or resist it. A choice to be made by both spectators and characters.

I went with it. As Dyer’s book corroborates, reaction to Tarkovsky’s art is a highly personal affair. One can quite understand someone walking out at any point. It’s a reasonable response to a film that drifts and ebbs like a river, bringing to mind cinema seen through the lens of Heraclites rather than Ridley Scott. At some point the film wrapped me up in its dreams and I floated downriver with it, gravity-free, headed for the great ocean which contains another earth with its alternative philosophies. Like any journey downriver on a foreign planet (Apocalypse Now?), there are moments which drift, punctuated by moments that take your breath away. You would need to write a book, in the vein of Dyer, in order to begin to do justice to the power of this cinema, a few words here are but a frippery.

a lesson in love (w&d ingmar bergman)

Those sassy Scandanavians. This may not be Bergman’s finest film, but all the same there’s a dexterity to the composition and thematic which marks it out. David is a successful gynaecologist who is having an affair with one of his patients. But when he learns that his wife is headed for Copenhagen to hook up with her old flame, Carl-Adam, he realises the error of his ways and takes drastic action.

Although there’s something slightly stagey about the film’s scenes, a reminder of Bergman’s debt to the theatre, there’s also a great deal of play with regard to the timeline and the revelation of information to the audience. At first we have no idea that the attractive woman who David sits next to in the train is actually his wife and the film cleverly manages to sustain the conceit for an entire scene. The writer plays fast and loose with the use of flashback, jumping back twenty years to show the unlikely circumstances under which David and Marianne’s marriage came about. The film, with its set-piece scenes might look a bit dated, but if a contemporary scriptwriter chopped and changed as effectively as this, the critics would be swooning.

In addition, there’s the whole mannered, measured attitude towards the complexities of love and marriage, in such stark contrast to a more straight-laced Anglo-Saxon approach. There’s an understanding that the course of true love does not run smooth which allows Bergman leeway to playfully explore his characters’ attitudes towards fidelity and sex, themes that would recur. It’s a comedy with fangs, which owes more to Shakespeare than the ‘romcom’, to which genre it could probably be described as belonging. 

eversmile new jersey (d. carlos sorin, w. sorin, goldenberg & scheuer)

This is a curio. It features the most acclaimed Hollywood actor of our times. It's made in Patagonia. With everyone speaking English. Directed by someone who would wait 13 years to make his next film, but who would then go on to become one of the most acclaimed Argentine directors.

Watching Eversmile, you can undertand why Sorin hit a career lull in its wake. Perhaps conceived as a Wendersesque road movie, it feels like a collection of parts and ideas that add up to a film that never gets going. The fact that all its Patagonian characters speak dubbed English in strange accents doesn't help. The actors seem unsure of themselves and the script doesn't seem to know where it's going. In some ways its like a palimpsest for what would come later. A road movie built around the unlikely premise of a travelling Irish dentist, you can detect the crossover points where quirky new wave Argentine cinema and US indie cinema would later meet. (It's worth noting that one of the biggest Indie crossover hints of recent years, the schmaltzy Little Miss Sunshine, is a rip-off of Trapero's Familia Rodante.) Day-Lewis is allowed a few grandstand moments as the luckless dentist, including some trademark hollering scenes. On these occasions he seems to be enjoying himself but at other times his performance is as lost as those of the dubbed Argentines. 

It's hard to say whether the film's quality is a reflection of the state of Argentine cinema in the late eighites or the result of the fact that it's a botch-job caused by the fact this as international co-pro. (All the post was done in the UK). Whatever, the story has a happy ending, even if the film doesn't really have any ending at all. Day-Lewis became Day-Lewis. And Sorin set about the task of working out what it meant to be an Argentine director. In a way Bon-Bon El Perro is the same story as Eversmile, only with a dog instead of a girl as a travelling companion, everyone speaking Spanish, and much better made. The lesson would appear to be that you have to be prepared to have a few fracasos in order to find out what works and what doesn't work. Also, that the wheels of the film industry grind slow, and it pays to hang on in there.

shoeshine (d. de sica, w. amidei, franci, zavattini, viola)

De Sica’s film occupies a place alongside Bicycle Thieves and Los Olvidados. It would be easy to say that in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War European intellectuals suddenly discovered a conscience and began to recognise society’s underclass, but the truth is that this is no more than a continuation of C19^th Realism. The presence of the poor was nothing new in Western European thought; but it might be that the neo-realists were the first to use the magnifying glass of cinema to tell their story.

Although dated, obviously, Shoeshine is in its way as harrowing a journey as anything portrayed by Loach or Clarke. Two engaging shoeshine boys, Pasquale and Giuseppe, make a parlous living. Some of the clients are American GIs, who are shown as being poor payers. The two kids dream of owning a horse (shades of Kes). When Giuseppe’s brother gets them in on a scheme to sell black market US blankets, they suddenly find themselves rich. They buy the horse. This pre-empts a remarkable sequence when the pair ride the horse through the streets of Rome, cheered on by their fellow shoeshiners. This is cinema at its most visceral and the method in which it’s filmed, clearly on the hoof, only adds to the impact.

However, the kids are busted by the police and the action then moves to a juvenile prison. What started off seeming like a sentimental tale dealing with charming scamps gradually turns into something darker, ending in conflict and tragedy. There’s vast skill in the way the narrative is constructed to gradually lure its audience with what initially appear to be harmless childish adventures, only for them to later realise that what’s really at stake for these lovable kids is not only their future role within society but also a struggle for survival. The image of the horse becomes representative of the natural life these children will never be allowed to lead. As such, Shoeshine feels as though it still contains a disconcerting relevance, sixty years on, not only in the ‘third’ world but also in the ‘first’.

savages (d. oliver stone, w. stone, don winslow, shane salerno)

Raging against the Dying of the Light.

It’s strange to now be of an age where one has observed entire careers unfold. I watched Salvador in York, nearly thirty years ago. It should go down alongside Kiss of the Spiderwoman as a film which opened our perceptions to what was occurring in the world around us. After that, my friend Sedley watched Platoon compulsively in the front room in Stockwell, replaying the video time after time, hooked on the way the narrative functioned. Tom Berenger, now almost forgotten, pitted against the nascent Dafoe. Born on the Fourth of July helped to establish Stone as a man not only prepared but gung-ho to talk about the things which middle America considered taboo. Thereafter JFK came out and articulated something which had crossed the mind of anyone born after 1963, separating the generations. Something was fishy in the state of Texas, USA. Even if Costner’s magic bullet theory wasn’t the actual truth, the film reflected a growing consensus that the received truth governments offer is something we should never accept on trust. (Elroy’s novel American Tabloid makes even more effective capital out of this truism.) With this kind of capital in the bank, Stone could continue to address the big topics and claim a relevance, even if the quality and rigour of his films began to ebb away.

Which brings us to his latest, Savages. The subtext of Savages is fairly clear and not entirely stupid. The big banks, nay even capitalism itself, (which has financed Stone’s art and no doubt made him rich), have the same ethics and ruthlessness as drugs cartels. Chon and Ben, the young, ethically friendly dope producers are the subject of an aggressive takeover bid from some bad Mexicans, headed up by Salma Hayek with resident Hollywood Latino, Benicio Del Toro in tow. Which is about as much as anyone needs to know. Thereafter the acting is at best insipid, the narrative is porous and more than anything else the tone is so ill-judged that one wonders what happened to the old radical and how he ended up getting caught up in this dross. The man who made Salvador now portrays the Mexicans as blundering psychopaths and the pretty gringos as romantic leads. In another life, Chon and Ben might have been amongst the victims in Platoon. Now we have to endure their desperate attempts at squaring their moral turpitude with a Bhuddist perspective, one which leads to them becoming eco-warriors in Indonesia.

One can only assume that this was a studio job and Stone was in it for the money. Which kind of begs the question of how he’s managed to get himself so trapped by a system he’s spent so long trying to subvert. Stone was never the most subtle of filmmakers but you had the impression that there was conviction and a kind of bad-ass integrity. As these begin to wane you can’t help asking yourself why he feels the need to carry on, tarnishing a legacy which stands alongside some of the finest filmmakers of his Hollywood generation. 

skyfall (d. mendes, w. neal purvis, john logan, robert wade)

Roland Barthes liked Bond narratives. He wrote a long and engaging essay about their structural form. He also liked Carry On movies, so we shouldn’t get carried away, but Barthes’ appreciation is a pointer to the fact that Bond could be seen as the closest thing to an existential hero (or anti-hero) British popular culture has ever produced. Bond inhabits his own moral universe, where society’s rules do not apply. In part this is because he works for the British secret service, with its dubious ethics, but it also has to do with his perception of the world. A perception that might be said to originate in a jaundiced perspective engendered by having to be oneself in spite of the British class system, something that drives him towards his default loner condition. (It might be worth noting that Fleming’s background has plenty in common with those of Philby, Maclean and Le Carre.) In order to escape the torpid Whitehall world, he effectively goes rogue, even if that’s something which the system seeks to integrate to its advantage. Bond’s tragic flaw is not that he is a defender of the British faith (ie that he is a servant to the notion of ‘duty’ even if that proves to be to his detriment); but that no matter how much he indulges and exerts his individuality (in the role of the outsider) his talents and his soul, what remains of it, will always be appropriated by the state he works for.

All of which explains why Bond is such a fascinating fictional creation: a brilliant expression of the tension between individuality and the demands of society/ the state. Bond cannot escape his Britishness, but he will go as far as he can in order not to be tied down by the rules decreed by his nationality. Hence his pervasive and engaging cynicism.

Skyfall’s lachrymose denial of all of the above is an indicator of how conservative British society (and filmmaking) has become over recent decades. It’s a far cry from the character Connery once made his own. Skyfall seems to do everything to locate Bond within a narrative of renascent colonial glory. The depiction of Dench-as-M-as-quasi-Queen (reinforced by the now-famous Olympics stunt) to whom Bond is devoted, and who has become a maternal figure in his life, distorts his whole relationship with the state. The new Bond is a loyal and devoted soldier whose acquiescence to authority negates his anarchistic streak. (Shown to be destructive and narcissistic as he downs scorpion-laced shots in the tropics.) M herself is viewed in a turgid shot, reminiscent of the most depressing Hollywood cinema-as-propaganda, in front of coffins draped in Union Jacks. M is then given the job of defending her agency’s role in modern global politics, embellishing the notion of the importance of Britain retaining a telling military presence in the new global game. This argument and these images reflect Britain’s recent and continued role as military adventures, something much of the new world finds hard to swallow, as though we still lived in the post-war global matrix that Fleming himself inhabited, when European wars determined the planet’s fate.

Does any of this matter? If Mendes and co want to turn Bond into an apologist for British foreign policy, where’s the aesthetic problem? The trouble is, in terms of creating an effective Bond movie, it matters a lot. This is an emasculated Bond, whose beauty is purloined along with his cynicism. Rather than defining himself in existential struggle against a ferocious opponent, the yin to his yan, he’s defined by his patriotism and servility. This is not what we want need or want from Bond and ultimately leads to an increasingly dull and over-extrapolated narrative. After the impressive opening sequence, the movie flatlines, when it is not rescued by Deakins’ cinematographic flair. We are presented with an asexual, ascetic Bond who finds no real pleasure in life. The closest we get is a muted homoerotic hint in a relationship with Bardem which is more flirtatious than threatening. Where the villain should be Bond’s alter-ego, the evidence of anarchic power untrammelled, here his relationship with Bardem is muted and fraternal. They are two sons of Empire, only the one with the Spanish accent really didn’t fit in. The portrayal of Bardem’s character feels desperately contrived and the assault on Whitehall so mundanely implausible, and cheap, that it makes us realise the worth of real implausibility in the Bond narratives, where villains have powers beyond anyone’s wildest dreams.

Both Bardem and Bond have been betrayed by Empire, and whereas one is happy to take his medicine, the other  has become slightly peeved and even more Oedipal. This converts M into the central character, as though someone handed the scriptwriters the section from the bible marked “jeopardy” and they have valiantly tried to crowbar it into a narrative that doesn’t require it. With the effect of turning Skyfall into cheap melodrama, when M’s maternal role is emphasised by the decision to return to his parents’ home for one of the least spectacular dénouements in the Bond franchise. This is the froth that comes from trying to devise a narrative with an emasculated hero (in much the same way as happened in Quantam of Solace). The close-cropped Craig is a shorn Samson: in a conservative society, there’s no room for mavericks. The Bonds of this dull world have to learn to fill in their forms, curtsey to their superiors, tug their forelocks and iron out their anarchic muscles.

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Appendix:

Here are some of the things we don’t need to know about Bond:

We don’t need to know about his parents or his upbringing.

We don’t need to know he has an Oedipal relationship with M.

We don’t need to know that he’s capable of emotion.

We don’t need to know that he has a matey relationship with his parents’ former gillie.

We don’t need to know about his politics or those of the organisation he works for.

We don’t need to know that he’s capable of nostalgia.

We definitely don’t need to know that he’s a patriot.

Here are some of the things we require from a Bond film:

A charismatic villain with an outrageous if potentially convincing motivation for their villainy.

Exotic locations.

Cynicism.

Sex.

Imaginative use of dramatic action sequences.

An ahistorical perspective (history being the playground within which Bond frolicks).

A clearly demonstrated lack of respect for authority, towards both his superiors and his enemies.

the eel (d. shôhei imamura, w. imamura, daisuke tengan, motofumi tomikawa)

Imamura’s film is an exuberant, eccentric fairy tale. Yamashita kills his wife in a fit of jealous passion and then adopts an eel whilst in prison as an ersatz substitute. His passions have rendered him incapable of having real relationships with humans. An eel is safer.

The film then gradually traces the return of his humanity. He finds a sleeping princess, Keiko, (she’s actually taken an overdose) who he rescues. She falls for him and comes to work in his barber’s shop. Gradually Keiko helps him overcome his sense of alienation and when her own problems come back to haunt her, Yamashita finally begins to face up to his true feelings.

As the plot outlines, this is an ultimately sentimental tale, even its starting point is an act of murder. At times it feels as though the director runs the risk of being overly whimsical, with the secondary characters who help to make up Yamashita’s world all having their particular eccentricities (creating a UFO landing ground or displaying a passion for flamenco). Sometimes these feel like gimmicks, in contrast to Yamashita’s more nuanced relationship with his eel. In another way it could be said that they give the film something of the feel of a US indie movie: there’s a hint of Imamura’s idiosyncrasy in the work of Wes Anderson, for example. 

the legend of suram fortress (d. parajanov, dodo abashidze, w. vaja gigashvili, daniel chonqadze)

This is a wonderfully chaotic film, a beautiful collection of images, stories, characters, thoughts, dreams. Like stumbling across the notebook of an unknown genius in a language that you can’t read, but whose very form is enough to tell you all you need to know. In a way perhaps cinema at its purest is a return to the pictogram, sign and meaning unified to reveal all in the image of a frame. If this were really so, Parajanov is one of those few poets who offers hints of what a wonderful world it could be.

Legend of Suram Fortress is ‘about’ a fortress which has been destroyed and cannot be rebuilt. Until, the soothsayer, whose circuitous story we have already learnt, reveals what’s required and a valiant young warrior agrees to entomb himself in the castle walls. However, most of this emerges in the film’s final ten minutes. In the preceding seventy, we travel the length and breath of Georgia, meeting too many characters to keep count of. Pomegranates are abused, bagpipes are blown and camels wend their way towards the coast. In one dazzling scene, medieval warriors pace the waterfront with supertankers lurking in the sea behind them.

There must be a whole host of ways of interpreting The Legend, with subtexts relating to national myths; the filmmaker’s own relationship to the USSR; and who knows what else. These aspects for now pass me by. What remains is the declaration of a filmmaker who’s willing to challenge his audience into re-evaluating what the experience of watching cinema can be. Not the act of following the thread of a narrative, but leaping from star to star. As such he almost seems to be challenging the whole notion of the Western narrative tradition, which had been waiting for cinema to be invented and Parajanov to arrive and show that stories don’t need beginnings, middles and ends. They need visions.  

when father was away on business (d emir kusturica, w abdulah sidran)

Kusturica's second film is not well known in the UK, although most people I've met here seem to have seen it. I'd never heard of it. The director's reputation might be on the wane, but there was a point at the end of the 20th century when he felt like the freshest, most important new voice in cinema. A trio of films, Black Cat, White Cat; Time of the Gypsies and Underground were feted for their irreverence and flair. When Father Was Away on Business was his second film, using many of the same actors who appear in the later films and is a bravura piece of work which stands up beside the director's more celebrated offerings.

The film belongs to a strong Eastern European satirical tradition (going back to Schweyk, Brecht etc). Tito's Communist rule is pervasive and one misplaced remark can lead to exile. This is what happens to Malik's father Mehmet after his lover denounces him to his brother-in-law. Mehmet "goes away on business" and later the family will follow him. The satire is gentle but affecting, most of all because it presents events through the eyes of the child, for whom football and girls are just as important as politics. 

However, above and beyond its politics, this is a great film in so far as it captures a complete social environment. As well as being a satire, it's also like a work of 19th C realism. Here is Communist Sarajevo captured with all of its energy, beauty and flaws. The film runs at 2 hours and 15 minutes, with an array of storylines and twists in the plot, but it never feels over-elaborated or rambling. The director's hand is firmly on the tiller, guiding the screenplay through its various episodes, whilst revelling in this world which has gone and will never return. The frequent use of significant football matches, usually against the Russians, provides a framework based in history, a history which must seem all the more distant now in Bosnia, when the nation participating in the football matches no longer exists. In addition, the affectionate relations shared across the religious divide seem remarkable given the imminence of what was to come at the time this small masterpiece was made.