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.

 

la grazia (w&d paolo sorrentino)

Sorrentino’s latest is a solid, affectionate meditation on ageing. It’s beautifully lit. Everything is high-Roman. Exquisite buildings, furnishings, tapestries. And yet the most powerful scenes occur in a prison school room. One of the attributes of cinema is the capacity of a small part, even a tiny part, to have an outweighing impact on the narrative. When the politician’s daughter goes to visit the woman convicted of killing her husband, and later, in the same room, the politician goes to visit the schoolteacher convicted of killing his wife, these scenes elevate the whole film on to another register, the register of passion and violence and reality which the politician appears to have been immune to, as he enters the final furlongs. The performances of both actors here, in what might have been at the most probably two days of filming, eclipse so much of the rest of the film, it feels like a magic trick, and indeed, though these characters are secondary or even tertiary, it’s their fates which provide the most cogent dramatic through line, even including a pair of ironic footnotes in the end credits. 

pasolini (w&d abel ferrara, w. nicola tranquillino, maurizio braucci)

Ferrara’s biopic offers Dafoe one of his finest roles. This is clutch material for the director, and the film feels assured, confident, but surprisingly safe. It opens by presenting scenes from 120 Days, suggesting it will investigate the darkness or hell that Pasolini will speak of in an intriguing interview. But the film is almost too well shot and acted. Everything feels pitch perfect. Ferrara’s rough edges have been smoothed out, there are no moments that either shock or disgust. Having said which, the film, set over the course of the day of Pasolini’s death, is educative, an effective introduction to the life of the Italian poet-cineaste. 

the battle of algiers (w&d. gillo pontecorvo, w. franco solinas)

Doubt there is very much I could say that hasn’t been said before about this remarkable film, which seems to offer a template for political filmmaking, with percussive edit, sound and music, interweaving dramatic scenes within a historical context, that has never been adopted. Rather, political filmmaking tends to be relegated to talky TV shows where the screenwriter’s dialogue skills are put to the test, and the cinematic aesthetics remain secondary. The power of TBoA comes from the mesmeric use of sound and camera, as the viewer is taken into the radical heart of the casbah. The colonial forces, echoing events today in Palestine, seek to control the local population, but no matter how much they think they’re winning, they’re not. Wanton bombings, carefully controlled gates into and out of the ghetto: this all feels far too familiar. The need for colonial forces to regulate societies they occupy will always be confronted by an enemy for whom the collective patria has more value than an individual fate. 

accattone (w&d pier paolo pasolini, w. sergio citti)

A second Pasolini film in a few weeks is a direct contrast to Theorem. Where that felt like a calculated, ordered and indeed theoretical piece of filmmaking, Accattone, made only seven years previously, has a chaotic, rambling feel, reflecting the life of the eponymous protagonist. Accattone is a pimp, and not a very successful one. He comes from a culture where it’s considered undignified to do a day’s honest work. His gang hang out drinking on the outskirts of Rome, in streets where the after effects of the war are still all-apparent. Accattone is both charismatic and unsympathetic, an existential proletarian anti-hero. Pasolini paints an unsentimental portrait of Roman low life which is perhaps stepfather to Coppola’s Godfather. Italian machismo in full flight, with women as second class citizens and a life of crime the only honorable profession. It’s a raggedly brilliant tale, part of a European cinema which, like Varda’s film, was seeking to create characters with greater psychological depth. 

teorema (w&d pasolini)

This is a paint by numbers narrative. Wealthy industrialist family is thrown into sexual turmoil by the arrival of louche Terrence Stamp, who doesn’t appear to do anything except read Verlaine and screw. When he leaves the siblings, wife and maid all have their own respective breakdowns. It’s all beautifully unsubtle and formulaic. Sometimes you don’t need anything more than a basic blueprint to get your ideas across. 

vermiglio (w&d maura delpero)

Italy in the last months of the second world war. An alpine community, isolated from the war and everything else, save for the warplanes that sometimes fly overhead. Two deserters, one from the village and another a tender Sicilian, seek refuge. A local girl, one of the schoolmaster's many children, falls for the Sicilian and marries him. The war ends and the Sicilian heads back to visit his family. Will he return or not?

The narrative is spun around this slender thread, but Delpero's deeper interest is in detailing the growing pains of the sisters in this remote world. The filmmaking displays a meticulous artistry. The rendition of this remote world is perfectly realised and the nuances of the sisters' coming of age stories, which might have been tainted by melodrama, are perfectly captured. This is immersive filmmaking: we walk out of our world and into that of the film. Our time stops and the time of the film takes over.

perfection (vincenzo latronico, tr. sophie hughes)

Perfection had me thinking of Huysmans. A novel which is self-consciously smart, driven by a notion of aesthetics as much as narrative. A sardonic take on modern urban living, lancing the boil of pretentious but vacuous hipness. Which is all very well, and a remit Vincenzo Latronico pulls off effectively, however, this is a dry text, and his targets, southern European designers playing at being sophisticates in Berlin, feel like easy targets. Of course the twee middle class mores of liberalism can do with bing taken down a peg or two, but the novel, (hotly tipped to win the International Booker), never seeks to address what underpins the aspirations of its feckless protagonists, and never looks to scratch the superficial surface it describes with such precision. 

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

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

la bella estate (w&d laura luchetti)

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

baudolino (umberto eco, tr. william weaver)

Eco is a curious writer. One whose work as a semiotician attracted a whole generation of philosophy students and the admiration of many of Europe’s most prestigious intellectuals, but also one whose fame is based on a rip roaring medieval detective story. It’s many years since I read Name of the Rose, and in spite of labouring somewhat through Baudolino, I hope to return to it one of these days. Baudolino, tells the tale of the eponymous protagonist, who is adopted by Frederick Barbarossa, gets involved in all kinds of scrapes and battles with the emperor, before setting off on a hapless mission to find the kingdom of Prester John, the lost Christian prophet who reportedly ended up in the Indies. The novel is divided into two parts, written through forty chapters. The first deals largely with the Middle Ages politics of central and Eastern Europe. The second, a section that is more magical allegory, deals with Baudolino’s mission to the East in search of the lost prophet, and includes centaurs and cyclops other mythical creatures. There’s the sense of a writer straining to locate the precise register to tell what might have been a fascinating story, had that register been nailed down. Eco’s interest in pre-Renaissance Europe, aka the dark ages, is attractive. What were the people of that warlike continent like? Why is their history less well known than that of the Roman Empire? To what extent were the innumerable international conflicts a reflection of what we would now describe as globalisation? Where did our received idea of Europe end and the myths begin? These and other questions are latent in the text, but it never feels as though the writer quite gets to grips with them. As such, Baudolino is a lengthy curiosity, which lacks the narrative coherence of Name of the Rose. 

zero zero zero (roberto saviano, tr. virginia jewiss)

Zero Zero Zero is an all-embracing account of the cocaine industry as well as being a sort of tragic bildungsroman. The book’s origins are intertwined with the author’s destiny. Having found himself committed to a life of 24h security patrols and restricted freedoms following his first book, Gomorrah, which took on the mafia, Saviano now writes from with a reinforced bubble. His book is in part a quest to understand why this bubble exists, why his life has become this closed, hermetic existence. (In the ‘Thanks’ section, there’s a nod to Salman Rushdie, “who taught me how to be free even when surrounded by seven armed bodyguards”. As the author’s life has become a kind of huis clos, he has less qualms about seeking and exposing the facts behind an industry which he claims makes the world go round. This makes for a rangey read, flitting from Mexico to Italy to Africa to Spain and a hundred other points on the compass which are touched by the narcotics industry, which is essentially the whole world. At times, the writing gets so caught up in the detail that it is hard to follow, but as this is a book which people will come to via the author’s fame, something he is aware of, it represents an invaluable guide to the world’s shadow economy, the one that doesn’t figure on the books, nor will be discussed in summit meetings of the G7, but whose vast mark-ups ensure it is perhaps the most lucrative business in town and undoubtably one of the largest too. Through it all Saviano’s voice emerges as a kind of Cassandra, singing a song he knows no-one wants to listen to, but if he doesn’t sing - who will

Nb - One of the more powerful angles of the book is the way in which Saviano’s own semi-incarceration clearly feeds into his understanding of how people operate in prison or facing the risk of prison. With his own life in constant jeopardy, he can emote more readily than many commentators or writers to the impulses of people living on the edge. One of the most telling chapters in the book is the one where he talks to a drugs mule, explaining the training and execution of this painful process. Of course, the drugs mule is very far down the pecking order, effectively just another victim of the industry, as is, in his own way, the author himself. 

la notte (w&d antonioni, w. ennio flaiano, tonino guerra)

La Notte takes L’Avventura’s elaboration of mood (what they call clima over here) and welds it to a disciplined twenty four hour structure. Moreau and Mastroianni make for an impeccably charismatic troubled couple, as the film documents their marriage on the verge of collapse. Cinema in mid-century Italy embraced existential angst with a vigour that even the French can’t claim to match. The French fascination with the rules of form meant they were always more playful than their Italian neighbours, who seem to be perpetually chewing on the hollow bones of affluence. (Perhaps it is more than coincidence that the Godard film which feels closest in tone to the likes of Antonioni, Fellini et al was shot in Italy.) In La Notte, Antonioni pushes the ennui and angst towards a kind of perfection, a perfection which is conveyed through the cinematography and lighting, where every shot is another element in the couple’s exquisite decadence. It is at once claustrophobic, deadening and brilliant, as is the case of their marriage.

Unfortunately I was teaching on the night of the screening of LÉclisse, the third in this kind-of trilogy. But seeing the first two on consecutive days, you can see how the director had no choice but to gravitate towards colour and the fractal explosion at the end of Zabriskie Point. La Notte would appear to be pushing an aesthetic as far as it can go. Even if there was one more step, the end of this journey, the one he and his characters is on, is clearly nigh. The constrained concerns of the mid twentieth century cannot be masticated for much longer, no matter how beautiful they (and their avatars, Antonioni’s perfect actors) may be. People will soon stop wearing perfect suits, their hair will be a mess, the codes of civilisation will be challenged and overthrown, to an extent. The whole of late twentieth century thought is encapsulated in the films of Antonioni, leading to Jack Nicholson going awol on the edge of the world’s great desert. 

l’avventura (w&d antonioni, w. guerra, elio bartolini)

L’Avventura hinges on a brilliant moment of melodrama, which is also something so down to earth that the audience can readily connect with it, in spite of the fact that this is a film about wealthy socialites. A group of loose friends go on a day trip to an island in a yacht. One of their party, Ana, is in a troubled relationship with her fiancé, and disappears off the face of the earth. The group search the rocky, uninhabited island but Ana persists in her vanishing. Later there are reports of another boat in the area, and then reports of her having been seen on the Sicilian mainland. Her fiancé and friend, Sandro and Claudia, go in search of her, but there are tensions between them, which leads to the revelation of a secret which might explain Ana’s disappearance.

This story, which is echoed at the start of La Notte, is direct and straightforward in a film where so much is opaque and confusing. It gives a spine to the film’s 144 minute narrative, even if the second half of the film struggles to maintain the dramatic tension as the focus shifts to Sandro and Claudia’s relationship. As much as anything else, Antonioni is a master of mood. Scenes unfold gradually, allowing the tensions and conflicts to reveal themselves without ever needing to be underlined. The humorous character is later revealed to be heartless, the charmer is stripped bare by the end. There is a preoccupation with what we might now call toxic masculinity, but this is always crafted, never bludgeoned. This leads to the creation of what the textbooks might describe as 3-D characters, albeit the kind of 3-D characters that Anglo-Saxon moviemaking tends to shy away from: complex characters struggling with the simpler things of life like desire, faithfulness, the bricks and mortar of the (post-)Christian societies we inhabit. 

the march on rome (w&d mark cousins, w. tommaso renzoni, tony saccucci)

This is a film of two parts. The first takes a 1922 fascist film, called A Noi!, directed by Umberto Paradisi, and deconstructs it with a forensic brilliance. Cousins, who narrates with his beguiling Belfast tones, examines the way the film was made, observing details which would be likely to be missed on a single viewing, and deconstructing its propaganda agenda and deceits. The film narrates how A Noi! is connected to the sudden rise to power of Mussolini and the triumph of his fascist agenda, which lead in the end to unmitigated tragedy. The second half of the film is more discursive, lacking the core material to anchor it of the first, and ends up being something of a beautifully shot meditation on fascism (with the director also having a cinematography credit.) Whilst the message is clear, the film itself seems to drift. Nevertheless, it was greeted with warm applause by the partisan cinemateca crowd. 

the skin (curzio malaparte, tr david moore)

Malaparte’s novel is a collection of extraordinary scenes. Set at the conclusion of the Second World War, it contains all the decadence of a dying continent, measured against the brash optimism of the ‘invaders’, the US troops who the narrator, Malaparte himself, has been seconded to as a translator, as they make their way up through Italy from Naples, then Rome, towards the Alps. The novel is composed of 11 chapters, each one effectively a set piece, dealing with one or another aspect of this clash between brave new and decadent old worlds. What we get is a decidedly anti-heroic vision of the war, perhaps appropriate given that it comes from the point of view of the losers, but this anti-heroicism spills over to the US troops as well. There are no heroes in this dystopian landscape, only survivors or the dead. Malaparte comes from a European tradition of scandal and shock. Names like Pasolini or Celine might be placed alongside his. He seeks out the venal in humanity in a bid to touch the base notes of this thing called civilisation, which is so close to barbarianism. Those who fail to recognise the connection between the two states of being are either stupid or hypocrites. Another touch note reading the book was Von Trier’s Europa. In the UK we have been overwhelmed with a glorified and false vision of this war. The Skin is more than a corrective, it’s an enema, extracting the blood and guts of all the grotesque and disgusting detritus of war and placing it on full display. 

e la nave va [and the ship sails on (w&d fellini, w. tonino guerra)

Fellini’s late film is reminiscent in some ways of Östlund’s recent Grand Prix winner. A privileged group aboard an ocean liner, which will then run into difficulties as the conflict between the elite and the below decks comes to the fore. However, where Triangle of Sadness seeks to wreak a Swiftian chaos, Fellini’s satire is gentler and more tender. The characters on board his vessel are figures from the opera, who have come to cast the ashes of one of their own into the sea. These are strange creatures, some of them scarcely human, but their love of song redeems them. Many of the film’s most vibrant sequences occur via music, such as when the opera characters sing for the men who work in the boiler room, or join the dance of the Serbian refugees. Fellini is after all, a humanist as well as being a satirist. Whilst there is something rather arch and contrived about the film, there are also exquisite moments of what might be called cinema magic. These include the opening sequence, where historical footage collapses into the artifice of fiction, and another moment when the artifice is stripped away and the camera pulls out of the fiction to show the remarkable set constructed for the ocean liner. Fellini has often flirted, a la Pirandello, with the film within the film, the way that the cinema director is either conman or magician, depending on your perspective. En La Nave has an elegiac feel, its narrative constructed around a funeral, set on the eve of the First World War, with the world about to be transformed. The magician’s tricks will soon be swept away. 

le mépris (w&d godard)

I figure it must have been in 1983, there or thereabouts, that my erstwhile friend Jason took me to a double bill at the Electric on Portobello Road of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf and Le Mépris. Back then the Electric was still a fleapit. I have a vague memory that we entered in daylight and exited into the night. That serendipitous shifting of the spectrum which seems to have been caused by the clash between light and darkness that cinema constructs. I was seventeen, I believe, and that screening of Le Mepris has always remained as a keystone in the process of falling in love with cinema. It has been, entonces, nearly forty years since I last watched the film. I guess it must have been in part Bardot herself, but my greatest memory of the film was of the shimmering Mediterranean which Godard’s film, a film about the making of a film of the Odyssey, a quintessential Mediterranean text, celebrates. The quality of the light from that far-flung world must have dazzled, all the more so to then emerge into the darkness of the London winter night.

How much has altered. When I watched it I would have been younger than all the cast and they would have seemed like gods to me. The trials and tribulations of relationships, around which the narrative is constructed, would still have seemed like a foreign land. I imagine I would have had no idea who Fritz Lang was, let alone Piccoli. Watching it yesterday, only the immortalised Lang would be older than me. The film within a film is about gods and men, although this is part of a sly game, because in the modern world, rather than the grecian one, the film stars have become gods. Bardot is an effigy of beauty, Palance of unredacted masculinity, Lang a sagacious world weariness. If any director filmed actors with an awareness that he was constructing a panoply of Homeric immortals, it was probably Godard, faithful to the first three letters of his surname.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about Le Mépris, a story told in three acts, is the way in which Godard reins in his ironic detachment. This is a drama, in the conventional sense, with conventional narrative beats and characterisation. The characters are at once less obviously his puppets than in other films, and more so, subsumed as they are in the meta-drama of his personal narrative which underpins the film. (Filmmakers struggling with the complications of being both ambitious, beautiful, and human.) The extended scene between Bardot and Piccoli, which makes up the second act, foregoes the winks at the camera, permitting the actors to remain absorbed in the budding tragedy of their characters’ failed relationship.

With Delarue’s delirious strings, Raoul Coutard’s crystalline cinematography and the plasticity of the small cast, this is almost a model for what a film might be, a mix of the romantic and the intellectual, the Apollonian and the Dionysian. No wonder it seduced me back then, a young man on the brink of his journey into the big wide world of gods and monsters. 

pereira maintains (w. antonio tabucchi, tr. patrick creagh)

This is an affectionate portrait of a fat man who finds himself compelled against his wiser instincts to do the right thing. Set in Lisbon during the time of the Spanish Civil War, when Portugal was about to enter into its own dictatorship, the story narrates how Pereira, the protagonist, finds himself caught up with two sympathisers of the Republican cause and proceeds to help them even though they are feckless and he realises this will probably lead to his own demise. As well as being a tale of unassuming heroism, it is also a lovely portrait of 1930s Lisbon. It’s a slight book, but it has a sting in the tail and Tabucchi manages his narrative with a disarming charm. If, as is so often noted, for evil to triumph all it requires is that good men do nothing, here we see a man who has little pretension to being in any way political showing us that it is possible to act, and that there’s often a case for following your instincts even if they appear not to be in your interests.

martin eden (w&d pietro marcello, w maurizio braucci)

Cinemateca’s programming sometimes has a random feel. Every now and again it throws up a gem which I would never have got to see on the big screen if I were not a socio, who goes two or three times a week. As such I will go and see a film purely on the basis it is showing. I knew nothing about Martin Eden or the director before watching it. There was no danger of being seduced or betrayed by the hype. What I discovered was a film whose complexity and verve, both aesthetic and political, took me by surprise.

Martin Eden is an adaptation of a Jack London novel, published in 1909. My grandfather liked the work of Jack London, as did so many born at the start of the 20th century. London’s writing appealed to a working class demographic, fully aware of what they had missed out on by not having had a secondary education. My grandfather was not a widely read man but he respected the power of the word, and treasured poets like James Elroy Flecker. The narrative of Martin Eden follows the eponymous hero, a working class man who sets out to acquire an education and become a writer. The film, adapting the novel to southern Italy, follows this Italian Eden as he struggles against rejection, determined to be recognised as a writer, something he finally achieves, albeit at the cost of his soul.

Pietro Marcello and screenwriter Maurizio Braucci’s adaptation of the novel to an Italian context is of itself bold, but the streets of Naples, both the poverty and the opulence, make for a perfect setting for the tale. However, the director goes further in his re-imagining of London’s novel. He sets it in an ahistorical zone, which could be 1929 or could at times be 2020. For long periods it feels like we’re in the first half of the twentieth century, the time when the book became popular, at other times, a container ship glides past in the background and we are given a Brechtian jolt, realising that the story could be happening today. As indeed it could. The war on education is something that has become more and more endemic in the twenty first century. In constructing the tale in an anachronistic fashion, the film draws out parallels between this century and the last. In so many ways, when you remove the surface patina of technology, smartphones and the like, so little has changed. The adroit use of music reaffirms this, as does the utilisation of vintage footage, which is inserted into the fabric of the film, lending depth and complexity to its texture.

Finally, there is the complex issue of the film’s politics. Eden goes on a journey towards Fascism, after having rejected socialism as being anti-individual. The way that Martin Eden maps on to the nuances of Italian politics is clearly one of the reasons Marcello has chosen to adapt the novel. The rise of an individual ‘liberty’ seeking right wing has become prevalent all over the world and has echoes in the protagonist’s journey. It’s to the film’s credit that it sets out a more complex political worldview than the standard right-left dialectic, one that perhaps has far more relevance to the way that the world is headed than the more standard Loach-Hollywood dichotomy. The issue is too complex to be addressed here in a single paragraph, but it is rare indeed for a filmmaker to be exploring politics with such a nuanced, potentially controversial perspective.

Martin Eden isn’t flawless. In the adaptation of the novel, there are gaps and threads which feel somewhat loose. Nevertheless there’s a bravura and ambition to the film which reminds one of Bertolucci at his best. The film taps into a tradition of politically aware, neo-operatic Italian cinema which used to be so potent but seems to have been on the wane. It’s as bold a piece of contemporary filmmaking as you are likely to encounter.