daisies (w&d vera chytilová, w. pavel jurácek, ester krumbachová)

At a time when there is much discussion about the difference between female filmmaking and male filmmaking, it is perhaps instructive to savour a film I have spent many years waiting to watch. It is fascinating to note how many of the film’s images have crept into the cinematic consciousness, so that watching the film was a little bit like reacquainting with something you have never known. Chytilová’s film is non-linear, imagistic, provocative, playful. Non-linear in so far as there appears to be no concrete story, just the adventures of two young friends in a city, their encounters, their pranks, their dreams. Imagistic in so far as the image is prioritised over the word. Provocative in several fashions: featuring  two young women frequently scantily clothed, seemingly assured in their sexuality, feels as though it is a challenge to those who adhere to a masculine perspective of how young women should behave (and the film has them repeatedly take the piss out of older men). It might be that fifty years later the attitudes of the two Maries have become the norm, which only makes one wonder how a contemporary version of Daisies might seek to provoke. Playful in so far as there is a constant sense of the director seeking spontaneity, (and cinema is the hardest medium in which to be spontaneous), creativity, fun. As I ran up Shaftesbury Avenue after the movie, in an incoherent and disruptive fashion, swimming against the tide, I felt a certain affinity with Chytilová’s anti-world stance. 

anora (w&d sean baker)

Baker’s films might be said to be reminiscent of Rossellini. Plucky outsiders confronting a skewed social system and fighting for their dignity. Anora, or Ani as she likes to be called, might not appear to have much of it, getting by on her body and unashamedly sleeping with men for money, but deep down she has it in spades. The plucky outsider is a trope that has flourished throughout cinematic history, given that cinema is to such an extent a naturalistic medium. Like Parasite, the film I watched at the same cinema the day before, Anora explores the world’s wealth divides, with much of the action occurring within a privileged mansion (interesting to read that Bong Joon-ho constructed his from scratch). This space is also a voyeuristic space. We the audience, assuming we don’t belong to the one percent, react with the same awe as Annie or the Kim family. We are bred to want this, and we are perhaps no smarter than Ani, who surely ought to realise sooner that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. If there’s a weakness to Baker’s film it’s this: his youthful leads are charismatic and attractive but resolutely thick, without a political bone in their bodies. For all her charisma and street-smarts, it’s hard not to feel that Anora needs to wise up fast, and the film takes its time getting her to this point. It’s also curious to contemplate how the trope of the Russian oligarch is already on the wane. They probably can’t flit across frontiers like they used to, back when Anora was in pre-production. It would be interesting to know what a writer like Sorokin would make of all this: the risque stuff would be right up his street, but he would perhaps have Ivan and family not get off not quite as lightly as Baker lets them. 

parasite (w&d bong joon-ho, w. han jin-won)

Parasite escaped me when it emerged to a smorgasbord of acclaim. There’s a chutzpah to the direction which anchors the movie as it goes through various phases. The build-up, the takeover, the long night, the catastrophe, the coda. Perhaps something Shakespearian in this structure, and the film is rangy, shifting focus, with scope for surprises and new characters. Evidently the Upstairs Downstairs thematic is present, but at times it feels as though the film is too mired in narrative and humour to really get to grips with what it means to be poor in South Korea. It might be said that this is encapsulated by the way the deluge floods the Kim family home, but equally this could be a metaphor for a sinking planet (and has strong echoes of Östlund’s Triangle of Sadness with their mutual exploding toilets). The film’s humour and the warmth of this family unit clearly help to explain why Parasite became such a break-out hit. Bong Joon-ho’s direction is assured: he knows exactly which buttons to push to maintain the pace and keep the audience on-side.

red rocket (w&d sean baker, w. chris bergoch)

There’s a downbeat charm to its characters and the storytelling of Red Rocket. The set up of a former porn star who arrives back in Texas on the east coast of the USA, fleeing the west coast, battered and bruised, is a terrific way of showing the other side of the country, the rundown clapboard houses that look like they could fall over in the next hurricane, set against the backdrop of a refinery which is far from the most environmentally friendly place in the world to live. The late Brenda Deiss as Lil, Mikey’s mother-in-law, gives one of the most convincing performances of what might be called a ‘real’ person you are ever likely to see. This is a long way from Hollywood, in every sense. The editing and cinematography are great, with Baker composing his narrative using big set piece scenes but also a wealth of tiny, fragmented scenes which help to build up the sense of time passing in a concrete world.

At the film’s heart is Mikey, a character who appears at first to be a likeable dork, akin to a Paul Newman character in, say, Cool Hand Luke. An alt-American, with the swagger and charm and none of the guile. However, as the film goes on, it becomes increasingly clear that Mikey is far more than a dork. The storyline begins to revolve around him grooming the precocious seventeen year old, Strawberry, to become a porn star. A mission he is wholeheartedly committed to, with not the slightest moral compunction. I don’t know if it’s the directors intention to confuse the fuck out of us, but it became harder and harder to square the likeable dork with the pimp. Sure, he gets his comeuppance, but on another level it felt as though the film was still rooting for him. He is, in so many ways, Dirk Diggler’s elder brother, but his very charm becomes problematic as his seduction of Strawberry becomes the central thrust of the second half of Red Rocket’s narrative. Not everyone I have spoken to about this agrees with me, but the film left me feeling as though it wanted to have its strawberry cake and eat it. 

licorice pizza (w&d pt anderson)

3 things about LP

Running. LP reminded me of early Godard. I think it’s Bande a Part where the characters seem to spend half the film running around Paris. In a similar way to Godard’s characters, LP’s star crossed lovers’ energy cannot be contained, and boils over into several running sequences. This ardent youthful energy drives the film forwards, even when they and the film lose their way. Because this is a film that meanders, (PTA has rarely been a fan of the succinct), it tries to cram more in than it really can get away with, sometimes seeming to throw in sequences just for the hell of it, or to see Sean Penn fall of a bike. In this sense it’s a wonderful adolescent mess and the best way to get out of a mess is to run away from it.

Fellini. There was one moment, I think when Gary is arrested, where the ubiquitous Johny Greenwood score kicked in and it felt like pure Fellini. The whole movie is bathed in a kind of Fellini-esque nostalgia. It has the feel of what they call a passion piece, a homage to the director’s youth, also akin to Cuaron’s Roma. Not many directors get to make their passion pieces, so fair play to PTA, even if…

Politics. As regular readers will be aware, I went to see Boogie Nights not that long ago. Quite apart from its PTA-esque flair, Boogie Nights felt as though it contained a subversive commentary on the American dream. A commentary wrapped up in a tremendously entertaining movie, but one whose punch corresponded to the force of its sly message. The same could be said about Magnolia. LP has much of the flair but little of the commentary and less of the subversion. You could make an argument that the Nixon/ oil crisis reference is doing this, but it feels shoe-horned. People will love LP and part of the reason they will love it is precisely because it doesn’t ask its audience to think too hard. They can bask in its meandering flow. (In this sense if feels like a sister piece to Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, another film that ranges the hills without dying on any of them.) Many will be delighted by Anderson letting them off the hook, but to this cussed commentator it sometimes left the sensation of a beer with too much froth. 

call me by your name (d. luca guadagnino; w. james ivory)

Guadagnino’s biggest hit to date is a film which many people I’ve met have told me moved them inordinately, but which left me strangely cold. It’s a coming of age tale, as the adolescent Elio explores his sexuality during a long hot Italian Summer. The film, employing a James Ivory script, takes its time to play itself out, with the rhythms matching those of the long Summer days that the script inhabits. Guadagnino adopts his trademark lush cinematography and lavish music, but the narrative itself is slimmed down, homing in on the comings and goings of Elio and the older American he falls in love with, Oliver.

Towards the end of A Bigger Splash, there’s a slightly uncomfortable storyline relating to African immigrants arriving in South Italy. Guadagnino is a sybarite, one can’t help thinking, and politics, or at least ‘social realism’ politics, isn’t really his bag. Call Me By Your Name makes no bones about being a primarily bourgeois piece of art. Elio’s archeologist father gets his kicks from discovering aristocratic Roman treasures which are salvaged from the sea floor. In this sense, Call Me By Your Name, an eminently apolitical work of art, might be said to be completely honest in its intentions. However, as a result, I found myself engaging less and less with the dreamy protagonist. Sure, the flowering of late adolescence is driven by a sexual impulse, but it’s also an age when other impulses flower: the idealistic or the political urge. It’s easy to understand why Call Me By Your Name, which captures Elio’s sexual anxiety with a surgical precision, has seduced an audience that identifies with Elio’s angst. We all went through that stage at one point or another. (And, given this, it’s also easy to understand how the story is far more than a “gay” story, as might be said to be the case with Haigh’s Weekend, for example). But the net effect is that Elio ends up feeling like a hollow character, sheltered and indulged by his almost creepily empathetic parents. 

Of course, no film can have it all and it might seem churlish to quibble about a lack of political perspective in what is essentially a glorified love story. But Elio’s self-absorption ultimately seemed to this viewer to make him a banal one-dimensional hero. The film is, to all intents and purposes, a Rohmerian fable, but the characters lack the self-doubt which Rohmer’s characters evince, which is what gives Rohmer’s characters their charm, the way in which they achieve their epiphany in spite of their doubts as to whether they really deserve it. Another recent film which could be a point of reference is Santiago Mitre’s El Estudiante, a film which boldly embraces its protagonist’s shallowness in way Call Me By Your Name shies away from. 

fire in babylon (d stevan riley)

The Summer of 1976 was hot. I was ten years old. My family lived in Northwood. I lived there for the three months when I wasn't at boarding school. There was a large garden with a small wooded area at the back. An ample lawn, with flowerbeds on either side. At the bottom of the garden, in front of the house, there was a rosebed. The garden sloped downwards. At certain points in our lives, times when there was a lot of rain, my father would dig channels across the lawn. I presume this was to channel the rainwater away from running down towards the house, but I can't be sure. The sitting room had French windows which opened out onto the garden.

I spent a lot of that Summer playing cricket. I imagine I played mostly with my friend Nick and my oldest sister. The ball would get lost in the flowerbed on a regular basis. The great fear was that it would be hit down the garden and break a window, something which happened at least once. Days were long and hot. In between bouts of playing cricket, we'd go inside and watch it on the television. The old men of England were being terrorised by the West Indians. This is a key part of the film, Fire in Babylon, which tells the story of the rise of the West Indian cricket team in the seventies. The film accentuates to a certain extent the racial overtones of the cricketing conflict between the West Indians and an English team lead by a South African. However, from a child's perspective the issue of race was non-existent. The only thing that was clear was that the West Indians had fiercer bowlers who were too much for the likes of Close and Edrich, men who looked like the most boring of school teachers.

The film made me think about what a peculiar but enrichening slant a following of cricket generates in a youngster. Cricket is a global game, albeit one played by only about ten countries at the highest levels. India, Pakistan, the West Indies: as a youngster I never saw these places in terms of race; merely in terms of cricketing prowess. It's interesting to note that several of the cricketers who feature in this film have expressed reservations about the way in which their comments have been used: the issue of race might have been bubbling under but it was not the priority the film suggests.

All the same, Fire In Babylon looks like belonging to a series of films which seek to elevate sport, placing it within its socio-political context. (The soon to be released Senna will be another). Given the enormous industry that modern sport has become, this seems like both a canny and a justifiable approach. Sport can play a part in the collective consciousness in a way in which art can only look on in jealousy. Art can reclaim its role by seeking to contextualise those moments or feats which are extolled in the day only to be forgotten. Apparently when several of the current West Indian team saw the film, (a team that has reverted to being "calypso cricketers", a tag which Clive Lloyd's team hoped to leave behind forever), they had no idea of the full history of the West Indian team.

Sport is part of the lives of so many of us. On one level it's just commercialised froth; on another its part of the warp and woof of the world we inhabit.

inland empire (dir lynch)

In Lost Highway there's a corridor in the saxophophist's flat. It's no ordinary corridor. It pulses. It could swallow you up. You watch it like a child, scared of the dark, suspecting that if you go down this corridor and through whatever door lies on the other side, you're in for all kinds of trouble.

In Inland Empire, Lynch hasn't even bothered to show us the corridor. He's gone straight down it and from the moment the film starts, we're there, on the other side.

The film opens with grainy footage from what appears to be a hotel room. A man and a woman with their heads pixillated into a blur. It cuts to a room which looks like a stage set, where three people wearing rabbit heads iron, sit, talk. Canned laughter interrupts them. Back in the room, the woman begins to undress. She says she's scared. Laura Dern's neighbour rings on her doorbell. Welcome to Lynch world.

Which, the film is very clear in stating (in a film that is very clear about little) is also Hollywood. The Hollywood sign makes a guest appearance. Much of the action occurs on a studio sound stage. Dern's death scene, or one of her character's death scenes, occurs on Hollywood Boulevard itself, next to the faded glory of a star's sign on the pavement.

Watching this film is a hunt for clues. One of the clues is that this is a movie about/ within Hollywood, and the reality distortions that place conduces. When you're in a movie you inhabit unreality, which is the stuff of dreams, which is what this film undoubtably is. As Dern leapfrogs from scene to scene, sometimes a movie star, sometimes a character, sometimes a doomed drifter, she often appears to be looking at the action rather than participating in it. Her eyes are the eyes of the dreamer, and Lynch invites us to wander through the rooms of the dreamer's mind.

Which dreamer? Is another question. Who is the Polish girl? What are the Polish characters doing at all? The filmmaker who watched Inland Empire with me speculated that this was the aborted film within the film which the film within the film (which Laura Dern stars in and Jeremy Irons directs) adapts. He might be right, he might be wrong. These potshots at the film's 'meaning' are all we can take, unless we were PhD students doing a full and proper exegisis, as one kind of hopes there one day will be.

Watching Inland Empire hoping to find its 'meaning' feels like a foolish endeavour. Lynch, as in all his work, is smart enough to know that an audience can't help but bring their instinct for plot-resolution with them. Normally he throws them enough bones to make them think they've got a chance of digesting some kind of sense. You don't know what's going on but you can at least hazard an informed guess. Here, the wise course of action is to give up before you die trying. His tongue-in-cheek credits sequence teases the viewer. Inland Empire is self-consciously opaque; non-sense, if you like, tied together by the fact that every frame constitutes a connection with the other frames contained within the material of the film.

No other filmmaker in Hollywood could get away with this sort of gibberish. The very fact that Lynch can throws a fly in the Hollywood soup. Film is not about neat story lines and coherent story telling. It is about an amalgamation of images, knitted together to produce something that looks like a whole, but is as full of gaps as any dream. Only Lynch brings you the gaps. Which makes it more representative of a dream. Which might mean it's more truthful. Or might mean we're but children of the filmic age, and in a hundred years time they'll complain that Lynch was good, if a little obvious at times.