pillion (w&d harry lighton, w. adam mars-jones)

For reasons that have to do with a long-held editorial stance the doe-eyed critic is not able to comment on Pillion, except to say chapeau to whoever chose to have Skarsgård reading several volumes of Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Screenwriter? Director? Art director? The actor himself? A tiny stroke of genius. (And of itself this detail/question illustrates how fluid is the process of 'writing' a film.)

a complete unknown (w&d. james mangold, w. jay cocks)

Wasn’t it at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, that someone shouted Judas? Hadn’t Dylan already gone electric before he came back to Newport in 1967?

One asks these questions because the act of watching a biopic is one of constant interrogation of the veracity of the purported facts being conveyed. One gets the impression that Mangold and his writer, Jay Cocks, have culled every available source of documented image to lend their film authenticity, but of course, no one truly knows what was said in heated conversations with Joan Baez or Suze Rotolo. And no-one really knows what that early Dylan was thinking or feeling. It’s a lifetime ago and the memories are shrouded in myth and rumour. As Pinter noted, memory is an unreliable companion. So what the biopic generates is more questions than answers, and the more it purports to approximate to the truth of what occurred, the more it probably errs.

All the same, Chalamet does a decent job of imitating Dylan. There was a quote the other day from the man himself about not understanding from whence his lyrics came, as though he was indeed Keats’ nightingale, the song leading the singer, a baffling blessing of genius. This bafflement never surfaces in the film. Dylan remains an enigmatic seer, in tune with his genius, plugged into a higher plane, one which inevitably leads to conflict on the human plane, above all when it comes to the issue of romance, the structural hook on which the film is vaguely hung. That coruscating strangeness is never broached, we never feel as though we begin to explore Dylan as poet, rather than cultural figure mired in the perils of fame and the public eye. This angle is the one the film pursues, an and it does so efficiently, without ever taking the viewer into the more baffling corners of the singer’s brain.

soundtrack to a coup d'état (w&d johan grimonprez, w. daan milius)

Soundtrack is a tour de force of editing. Editing to music is an art, and Grimonperez and his editor, Rik Chaubet, weave the jazz notes of the score into the found footage with aplomb. In truth, the jazz link in what is essentially a film about Patrice Lumumba and the Congo is slightly tenuous, anchored on the one visit Louis Armstrong paid to the country shortly before Lumumba’s murder. But this is also a film about connections: linking Lumumba to Castro to Malcolm X to Thelonious Monk, who briefly mentions how he went to check out the activist. What were the connections between the jazz greats and politics? The clips of Dizzy Gillespie’s satirical presidential bid are marvellous, but the deeper resonance of the musicians’ political consciousness is mandated mostly by the sound of their music. Clearly Nina Simone’s lyrics are charged with a political anger, but this becomes the backdrop, or soundtrack, to the tale of Lumumba. There is a verve and a jazz feel to the film, it’s a jazz edit, and this bowls the viewer along through the film’s two hours plus. It might also be noted that the only actually filmed footage for Soundtrack to a Coup, rather than found footage, would appear to be of Koli Jean Bofane, both reading from Congo Inc, and narrating a harrowing story from his childhood.

all we imagine as light (w&d payal kapadia)

Having seen Kapadia’s first film recently, I came perhaps expecting to be mildly disappointed. How could a feature reproduce the off-the-cuff feel of a documentary? Would it have the same freshness, the same variable dynamic? The director appears to confront this concern from the opening shots of the city, with a Vox Pop voiceover. Those of us who do not know Mumbai are in uncharted territory, as are those of us who expect a script that will adhere to conventional beats. An obviedad, as they say in Spanish, but the film’s tone is always perched between silence and the noise. The noise of the city, the silence of the characters. Whose words sometimes appear almost as a voiceover, as they move like flaneurs through the metropolis. Their words are delicate things, lightly spoken, competing with the hubbub. In both films Kapadia shows herself to be a master of the use of sound, with the score by Topshe adding a constant non-intrusive presence. The acting, in part as a result, is always on point, sanded down, extracting emotion with the minimum of effort. This film is almost the anti-Titane, another emblematic female-directed movie. Where that film was strident, this one is featherlight, demanding attention, resisting dramatic beats. It makes for a viewing process that is constantly active, as opposed to reactive (reactive being the holy grail of commercial cinema - to get the audience hooked by the next dramatic twist, the next blow to the cerebral cortex). When Anu heads to visit her lover for an illicit night of passion, she is literally railroaded: flooding has stopped the trains. The night never happens. When something dramatic does happen, towards the end, it is never clear whether this is a real event or a figment of Prabha’s imagination. All We imagine as Light enraptures, it holds the viewer’s hand so gently the viewer barely notices it, and leads them down the by-ways of one of the world’s great cities, whose characters are as anonymous and significant as we are. 

Nb - The way this film’s conclusion echoes Kapadia’s first film is a sly, beautiful device. 

fantastic machine (d. axel danielson, maximilien van aertryck)

Fantastic Machine is a documentary about the image and its evolution from pinhole camera to viral digital media. Given the broadness of the remit, it is perhaps unsurprising that the film doesn’t have too much of a central thesis, beyond the wonder and nightmare of the audiovisual arts. Perhaps the most telling moment comes when the then president of Ireland introduces the first screening of television in the country, likening the potential impact of this new technology to the power of a nuclear weapon. This man from another generation, speaking in severe black and white, comes across as a seer. The film touches on the way in which the image is something the medium has always manipulated even whilst purporting to be completely objective. This is represented through a neat edit sequence where the photographers are seen on the other side of a tragic, award-winning photograph. Fantastic Machine is full of these shiny moments, and is relentlessly entertaining, which sometimes seems at odds with the suggestion it is defrocking the superficiality of the image. It would have been lovely to have had something of Barthes, Virilio or even Baudrillard referenced in order to substantiate some of the ideas which are floated. Nevertheless, the film has a cracking and effective edit, and there are enough nuggets in there to keep anyone happy for an hour and a half. 

all the beauty and the bloodshed (d. laura poitras)

Poitras’ doc is split down the middle. One part the history of Nan Goldin, radical photographer, a second part Nan Goldin, radical campaigner against the Sackler family. The second part lends the movie its narrative drive; the first part has more heft and weft, because Goldin’s art and its roots are fascinating, and the window it opens on 70s New York is engrossing. At one point a photo of hers of Jarmusch, with his shock of hair, popped up, even though the director is never referenced, and the complexities of that sub-culture came rising to the surface. It is also interesting to note that Warhol and The Factory were never mentioned. Goldin’s rise through the badlands of the Bowery is well told, but the film suffers from docu-syndrome in so far as the more information you are given the more you realise you’re not being given, which is frustrating. The campaigning against the Sacklers strand was met with contempt by Mr Curry, who said he had known too may privileged NewYorkers on their hobby horses to engage with their agenda, and the truth is that, as a campaigning film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed feels a tad underwhelming. The issue the campaigners are attacking is never investigated with any real rigour, as the focus remains throughout on Goldin’s contribution to the cause, rather than the cause itself.  

this stolen country of mine (d. mark wiese)

This Stolen Country of Mine is a film about the effects of globalisation on Ecuador. The film is split into two strands. In one, a campaigning lawyer, Fernando Villavicencio who fought against Correa’s corruption is the focus. The lawyer investigated the contracts made with principally Chinese multinationals (although one imagines other unnamed countries must have been involved) for mining and petrol concessions. The contracts are found to be corrupt, the lawyer campaigns at the risk of his life, and finally, a decade later, Rafael Correa is impeached. The second strand revolves a younger man, Paúl Jarrin, who would appear to be a middle class campaigner who has joined a campaign in a remote Andean region to physically drive the Chinese multinationals out. The clash between local people and the globalisation giants around eco-issues, the retention of their rights to their land, their water, their nature, will be the defining conflict of the 21st century, supplanting the left-right divide, no matter how much this might map onto it. It’s here that Wiese’s film comes into its own, as the filmmaker follows the campesinos as they take up arms and physically attack a mining camp, setting fire to it. Confrontations with police, repression and assassination attempts are part and parcel of the villagers daily lives. At the film’s conclusion, Paul is fleeing into the mountains to lie low, like a modern day Butch Cassidy. There is clearly an element of personal courage on the part of the filmmakers which lends the footage a dramatic heft. The only curious element here is the way in which the Chinese seem to have replaced the North Americans as the regional antagonist. Even this seems to speak of the shifting geo-political sands. 

triangle of sadness (w&d östlund)

Alfred Jarry meets Voltaire meets Lost meets Buñuel should work, shouldn’t it? It’s certainly a great pitch for a certain class of elite film financier. Östlund more or less delivers on target in a rangy, showy movie that is intermittently entertaining and intermittently overdrawn. Östlund’s greatest skill, it seems to this critic, is his capacity to forensically analyse and destroy the nuances of modern mores. So the elaborate conversation between the film’s eventual protagonists, Yaya and Carl, about who pays the bill, which serves as a kind of entree to the meal we are about to consume, is gloriously minimal and spiky and skewers contemporary discourse about gender politics, among other things. I could have watched a whole movie of this kind of dialogue and acting, but the film aspires to a wider remit, and soon moves towards broad neo-Carry On comedy. Arms manufacturers blown up by their own weapons in a homage to Churchill, projectile vomiting and a lurid battle of the quotes, which includes Reagan, Marx, Lenin and Edward Abbey (¿?). Somewhere down the line, all nuance is thrown out of the window, before we get to the Hobbes/ Buñuel finale. There’s no shortage of ideas in Triangle, in fact it feels as though there is probably a surplus and some redistribution might have been in order. But each to their own, and in its own cultish way, it is doubtless destined to become one of those films of which future generations will say, as they might now about Ubu - have you ever triangled your sadness?

far beyond the pasturelands (d. maude plante-husaruk, maxime lacoste-lebuis)

How much is a mushroom worth? Far Beyond the Pasturelands is an account of how, in the Nepalese highlands of the Himalayas, villagers take time out of their lives to go and search for a particular rare strain of caterpillar mushroom, which are worth five dollars  a pop, and presumably far more when they eventually get to market. The film’s remit remains strictly within the mushroom picking season of the villagers, so how this process fits into the wider matrix of globalisation is never revealed. At the same time, the villagers in their tents are seen watching a Bollywood movie or getting their phones charged as they camp out for the season, miles from their homes and any notion of urban civilisation. They seem to enjoy their foray into the highlands, even if the work is back-breaking and frustrating: it’s possible to go an entire day without finding a single mushroom. The wider context of their lives is only alluded to, although the desire to give their children a better education to escape poverty comes through as a common theme when we hear what the villagers have to say. 

benedetta (w&d paul verhoeven, w david birke)

The other day, talking about The Norseman, a film I have yet to see, I asked if there was anything more to it than the trailer suggests. I say this because, whilst in that instance, the jury would appear to be mixed, in the case of Benedetta, there is undoubtedly more to it than what it says on the tin. The publicity for the movie, another period piece, makes hay with the film’s salacious angle. Lesbian nuns always seems to be a selling point. Verhoeven’s film lives up to these elements and more, with plenty of tremulous sex and fantasy scenes. What run of the mill girl growing up in the shadow of the Black Death didn’t want to get it on with Jesus, the movie would appear to suggest. And if you can’t have Jesus, a shapely fellow nun is the next best thing. All of this is indeed over-the-top, ribald fun. However, there’s a hint of a more intellectual verve at play, particularly given the Covid context this film has emerged into. Supposedly based on a true story, the film closes with the revelation that the town which the more humanist Benedetta became abbess of, was one of the few places to survive the Black Death unscathed. Is there a correlation between sin and the damnation of plague? Did the plague come to us because we have lost touch with our raw feelings and emotions, our base humanity, in this material world? Benedetta doesn’t answer any of these questions, but they do float around in the background. The director himself seems to be testing the limits, deliberately presenting images which to some might be as shocking as Benedetta’s actions were to her contemporaries. You can, of course, ignore all of this, and go along for the well crafted and enjoyable ride, but it feels as though there’s more to Verhoeven’s game than sheer hedonism. 

paris 13th arrondissement (les olympiades) (w&d audiard, w. nicolas livecchi, léa mysius, céline sciamma)

It’s been a while since I’ve been fortunate enough to watch an Audiard movie. Paris 13th, (which has a much better title in French), showcases all his verve and style with the expected aplomb as it tells its multi-racial story of what we take to be the new France, or at least the new Paris. Three characters come together in a chirpy love triangle, with both Émilie and Nora sleeping with the charismatic but feckless Camille. The action is resolutely set in the 13th Arrondissement. I tried to think where might be an equivalent in London, and couldn’t come up with one, as even the margins in London are becoming gentrified. A decade ago it might have been Peckham, where I am now, but these days you can’t buy a house for less than half a million in Peckham, so I have no idea. It’s almost as though the city has eaten the poorer suburbs, and one wonders if this might not also be the case in Paris. Audiard studiously avoids any shots with the Eiffel Tower or any other prominent landmark in Paris 13, keen to assert that this is a film about Paris really lives, rather than how it is mythologised. Perhaps more surprisingly, there’s no overt racism either. The second generation immigrants are fully assimilated Parisians now, the multi-cultural society flourishes in a way that the last great Paris banlieu film, La Haine, suggested might never happen. La Haine hangs heavy over Paris 13, which is filmed in an assertive black and white. La Haine in turn smouldered in the wake of the films of the nouveau vague, Paris Nous Appartient, A Bout de Souffle, etcetera. It’s as though all these films have set out to own Paris, to marry their vision of that cultural beast, French cinema, with its most celebrated icon, the city of Paris itself. Audiard presents an ultimately optimistic view of a diverse, sexually liberated society which is still underpinned by the conservative notion of romantic love. Perhaps this is why there remains something slightly unconvincing about the movie. The sex is too well filmed, the characters are too pretty, the surface never feels as though it’s really ruffled. There are too many loose threads and convenient solutions in the script. (Camille just happens to find himself running an estate agents, and when one thinks about the realities of estate agents in this era of housing inflation, the set-up feels scarcely credible.) The notional naturalism, fundamental to a narrative that is so ostentatiously set in a particular barrio, doesn’t quite hold up. (The philosophical sex worker is another unconvincing trope.) Ultimately the film feels too feelgood, too much of an excuse to put pretty bodies through the motions, before they will become middle aged and flaccid and disillusioned. The optimism of Paris 13 might charm, but as a depiction of a capital city in Europe in the 2020s, it feels more Rohmer than Godard, and given the stakes that Audiard flirts with (race, sex, gender, immigration) it doesn’t entirely convince.

the power of the dog (w&d jane campion)

 As I sat in the Renoir’s boxy downstairs Phoenix screen, having paid a small fortune, I thought to myself that, from the point of view of this blog, it is for the best that by and large in Montevideo I don’t get to see the hot new releases and that this blog is not part of that conversation. Because the issue of hype contorts everything. I went to see Power of the Dog with much anticipation, and after half an hour or so, as these lines attest, I found my mind drifting somewhat, on the verge of a kind of ‘is this all you’ve got’ disappointment, which had more to do with my expectations than the actual film. The film is beautifully realised, (that word which in the lexicon of Spanish cinema does so much good work), and in many regards impeccable, and perhaps that was part of my problem with it. It felt so highly polished, with barely a loose end flapping, that it seemed as much a finely rendered product as a distinctive work of art.

On a more discursive note, it’s interesting to place Power of the Dog within the orbit of the reimagined 21st C Western. The work of Kelly Reichardt, with Meek’s Cutoff and First Cow, comes to mind and I am sure there will be others. There is not a gun fired in Power of the Dog, or even seen. The West becomes a space where personal relationships have room to evolve, for better or for worse, in a relatively ungoverned environment, where societal pressures exist at arm’s length. Where power doesn’t function as it has been depicted in the work of Hawks et al, but in a more cerebral fashion, which Cumberbatch’s Phil, who graduated from Harvard, has sought to reject, but eventually finds himself snared by. These films are made from the perspective of the conflict the cowboys eventually lost. Modern USA is festooned with faux cowboys, who stride around cosplaying values which their prosperity has helped to defeat. Campion’s film negotiates these choppy waters with restraint, subtlety and anthrax. It’s a curious and perhaps beguiling combo, only I wish I had got to see it a year later, in the relatively hype-free environment of the city I normally inhabit. 

on the president’s orders (d james jones, olivier sarbil)

Emerging from the film, contrasting thoughts come to the fore. Firstly that this is filmmaking which does indeed get eye-catching access to a world which is little known, that of the Philippine slum of Caloocan, in Manila. Olivier Sarbil’s camera is right there on the ground floor, capturing the feverish intimacy of an overcrowded patch of land. This is a fundamentally visual film, steeped in the colours and textures of the slum. A group of slum kids are filmed washing in the street. They look like something out of a Dolce and Gabanna video. The film’s visual flair is its strength and its achilles heel. Because at the end of the day, this doesn’t feel like a film which is all that interested in establishing context or any kind of account of the realties of the role of drugs within this society. Anyone who resides in an environment where you see good people ruined by cheap drugs, will know the fearful damage they can cause, stripping out the life and possibilities of the people who live there. Dutarte’s ruthless campaign to eradicate drugs feels instinctively immoral, but on the other hand it’s still a reaction to a pressing social issue. The film’s only real interviews are with the police chief, who is either promulgating or turning a blind eye to the execution of suspected dealers. His tough guy image ends up looking like a macho pose and the audience waits for his inevitable fall from grace, supplied by the end notes. However, it would have been interesting to have been offered some kind of wider perspective from within the Philippine community. Who controls the drugs trade? What other strategies have been tried to mitigate or eradicate it? The film’s reluctance to engage with the deeper context of its material brings us to the question of who is making this film and to what end? It’s notable in the credits that there’s doesn’t appear to be a single Philippine name involved (this might be wrong, but if so they are clearly a significant minority). It feels as though this is a movie which has been made with a view to being exhibited on Western screens, allowing people to dip into a dangerous world without needing to engage with it or even think about the content to any real degree. As the credits rolled, a woman in the cinema said out loud: What a beautiful, terrible film. One can’t help thinking that the filmmakers would have been delighted with this. It feels as though the film will find a happy niche on a suitable streaming service. Everyone’s a winner, but no-one is much the wiser about the complexity of Coloocan’s social issues and how they should be addressed. This is outside-in filmmaking, rather than inside-out. 

nb - I read that: “the International Criminal Court has opened a preliminary investigation into Duterte and these extrajudicial killings. And, it’s asked to review footage from the film.” (https://www.justsecurity.org/66514/on-a-presidents-orders-new-frontline-docs-look-at-duterte-and-mbs/) So perhaps, to put the counter view, the above reading of the film is overly harsh.  

the souvenir (w&d hogg)

1984. Thatcher’s Britain. An elegantly wasted young man called Anthony. The Fall on the soundtrack. There was a lot about The Souvenir that felt familiar. 

It’s curious that the publicity for the film has suggested a sub-Downton world of elegant dresses and tuxedos, as though the publicity people feel it’s impossible to market a British film which doesn’t posit itself beneath the chandelier of post-war imperialism. Anthony is always dressed in a slightly fogey-ish manner. He’s the anti-Thewlis from Naked. One who has concocted a myth around himself that’s part Lawrence of Arabia, part Bond, which actually conceals the fact he’s a desultory heroin addict. An alternative way of looking at Anthony would through the refracted mirror of another doomed youth figure from the early Thatcher years, Sebastian Flyte from Brideshead. Except Anthony isn’t really posh, he just affects to be. Anthony's pose is in fact a commentary on how the British are so readily suckered by the image of the charming aristo. In contrast Julie, the film’s protagonist, is posh, but affects not to be. Hogg opens her film with documentary footage of Sunderland, where Julie has thoughts of making a film, as though to affirm that she, like her fictional filmmaker, is determined to move away from her pigeonholing as a doyenne of the upper middle classes. 

Although The Souvenir is still a film steeped in the complexity of the British class system, it succeeds in being far more than a film about class. It’s about love and drugs and notions of feminine strength, as well as being a meta-film about filmmaking. It’s this density which permits the film to get away with its somewhat lugubrious storytelling, dragged out to the bitter end. There’s always something going on, the unexpected is around the corner. Some of the deviations - the trip to Venice - feel like adornments, tacked on to flesh out the spectacle, as much as the narrative. Yet at other  times, the juxtapositions, between opera and pop music, between the overblown Harrods dining rooms and the council estates, feel like a jagged, effective way to portray a country which was evolving and adapting, seeking to construct a new identity, one it is has never really found. 

Hogg captures the nuances of Julie’s strength, masked by passivity, putting the boot into all those theories of the active protagonist, showing how someone can grow through experience and resistance, as much as through becoming a warrior. The love affair between the two leads is delicately painted, with tiny moments of convincing, intimate humour, illustrating the way in which two ill-matched souls could fall for one another. Without ever quite grabbing you by the guts, something Hogg has never seemed inclined to do, the film carefully builds. Living with an addict is not a black and white scenario. It’s full of greys, some light, some dark. The temptation is to paint the addict as dysfunctional, asocial, alarming; but The Souvenir doesn’t do this. Instead it shows, in a world where being a misfit is a necessary evil, how two misfits can help each other grow, and, perhaps, survive. Or perhaps not.

the poetess (d. stefanie brockhaus, andreas wolff)

Saudi Arabia is one of the most closed societies on earth. To see pictures of Riyadh and Mecca reminds us how little we know about a country that exercises so much influence. It’s almost as though the niqab, the garment that covers women’s bodies from top to toe, allowing only their eyes to be seen, is a metaphor for a society which can never be known or seen or understood. 

As the title suggests, The Poetess is about a female Saudi poet, Hissa Hilal, who uses her fame as a platform to criticise the clergy. It’s a film about women’s rights in the world, and the muslim world in particular, but it’s also a film which demystifies a culture about which we, in the ‘West’ are so ignorant. This extends to the regional love of poetry, with the poetess acquiring her fame by appearing on a kind of X-Factor for poets in the Arab world. We also see her out shopping with her daughters, doing interviews for the BBC and other media outlets. Behind the veil, there’s a fierce and humourous intelligence, revealed through her interviews, but also through the poems she reads in the competition. How much courage does it take to criticise the clergy if you’re from Saudi Arabia? And to use your role on a massive regional TV show to do so? However, Hissa Hilal seems to do it without breaking sweat, suggesting that she might live in a society which marginalises women, but she personally doesn’t feel in any way intimidated. 

Stefanie Brockhaus and Andreas Wolff’s film uses the structure of the TV competition to knit their compelling story together. It’s a great tale of an unassuming heroine, which expands our understanding of a closed world, and reaffirms the foolishness of any society which tries to make women into second class citizens. 

another news story (d orban wallace)

Wallace’s film is a compelling account of the Summer of 2015, which follows the path of migrants as they head from Lesbos in Greece to Germany. The film shows two sides of the story: on the one hand the journey of the migrants themselves and on the other the press as they cover the story. In the process, the documentary is constantly questioning the framing through which the migrants’ stories are received by the public. The press is the filter through which we engage with the issue; Another News Story turns the table and questions their agenda. The laconic Bruno, a news editor, explains that this is just this week’s story: next week he might be at the Venice Film Festival. Through this miasma of news noise, the doc hones in on the story of a Syrian woman trying to get her family to Germany. Keeping up with her almost every step of the way, the film reveals the truth behind the news story: the middle-of-the-night dashes across borders; the endless waiting; the confrontations with police who are sometimes heartless and sometimes unexpectedly kind. Wallace also returns to revisit her in Germany, once her journey has been completed, but this is also after the attack after the attack on the Bataclan, when the mood in Europe is becoming and less and less sympathetic towards the immigrants’ plight. There’s no doubt that his film offers a more comprehensive recounting of the story, in contrast to the TV news, although even Wallace’s film cannot help but be a partial story. Documentary film or story-telling only allows us to go so far in our understanding; perhaps this is the point where fiction alone can begin to convey the ‘reality’ of the experience being lived by those millions who have been forced to flee their homes and embark on their own personal Odysseys. 

safari (d ulrich seidl)

Seidl’s deadpan, disturbing documentary is a fearsome piece of stripped-down filmmaking. As the title suggests, the film follows various  Austrian characters on safari at a game reserve in Namibia. The reserve is run by a German couple whose visitors include a family of four, father, mother, son and daughter. It’s obvious that these people are extremely wealthy. Safaris aren’t something many can afford, as one of the hunters observes, stating they bring far more money into the country than ordinary tourists.  

The film is set up to intersperse moments of action, as the hunters track down game in the bush, with snippets from staged interviews, where they talk about their attitudes to hunting, killing and death. Those characters seem harmless enough on first viewing; their attitudes appear to be formed by a need to prove their alpha status, for example when the son questions his sister as to why she’d draw the line at killing a lion or a giraffe. They come across as banal figures, playing out some kind of power fantasy as they tramp through the bush, searching out targets. Another older couple are even broadly comic, with the wife spending her time sun-bathing whilst her husband drinks beer in a hide, waiting for game that never arrives.

But in the last third of the film the killing takes on a different dimension. The mother has already shot an impala and posed by it, but now the son shoots a zebra. The beast’s beauty appears to be unconquerable even in death, but then the filmmaker shows the zebra being skinned by the African workers, who also increasingly figure in the film’s narrative. Then the father shoots a giraffe. It feels like an act of terrible, senseless vandalism. When they get to the beast, it is still dying. The camera observes its death throes in a chilling sequence, made all the more so by the family’s pride in their actions. It’s not a boastful pride; it’s a kind of self-serving bourgeois pride in a job well done. Seidl then films the giraffe being loaded onto a truck, driven away and skinned, with the family looking on. The images of the entrails are worse than anything you’d encounter in a horror movie.  The film has captured the obscene reality of killing: a beast that was alive and wondrous a few hours ago is reduced to a carcass. 

The exact message of the movie is never stated, but the viewer comes away with a deep feeling of unease; that this kind of sport should still exist; at the senseless violence of man; and an implicit critique of a class of people who choose to indulge themselves using killing as a kind of bonding experience. The film is framed with two shots, pre and post credits, of horn players performing in a European forest, suggesting that this is a movie which is more concerned with questioning European values than anything else. The reserve is owned by slightly racist Germans, (with suits of armour in their colonial home) who have created a kind of savage idyll. Safari is a very simple piece of filmmaking, but the director succeeds in creating a deeply unsettling narrative from his material. 

lady bird (w&d greta gerwig)

I realise I’m not the captive audience for Gerwig’s coming of age story, nevertheless I can’t quite get around the feeling that it’s an inordinately twee, safe piece of filmmaking. Rohmer seems to be cropping up a lot this week, and there are indeed strong links between Lady Bird and Call Me by My Name, both featuring somewhat bland but supposedly likeable protoganists going about the business of growing up, losing their virginity, etc. But again, if the reference to Rohmer is permitted, there’s not a great deal of angst (which I confess was one of the predominant emotions of my late adolescence so I might have a skewed perspective), or self-doubt. Soarise Ronan’s Lady Bird is a brittley self-confident character, who fends off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without ever looking like she’s in any danger of being derailed by them. Maybe it’s unfair to compare an account of a Sacramento childhood to a post-war European one, but even Sofia Coppola’s films have considerably more edge than Lady Bird. Again, I recognise that I might be perceived as being curmudgeonly in my response. This is just a crowd-pleaser, you might say. The fact that the heroine’s home on the “wrong side of the tracks” looks like one 90% of the world’s population might sacrifice a family member to obtain, despite having only one bathroom (how did they survive?!), despite the fact that a series of young male leads seem more than happy to throw themselves at Lady Bird’s feet, this isn’t supposed to be taken all that seriously. Only, taken seriously it has been, with the film lauded and the director garlanded. Sure, it’s not a bad film, slightly less engaging than Submarine, for example, but the heavyweight response to this lightweight fare says a lot about the weird cul-de-sac that Anglo-Saxon cinematic culture has managed to find itself driving down. 

(nb - I was far more interested in discovering Ladybird’s brother Miguel’s story, but this ended up feeling like a narrative footnote more than anything else, designed to lend colour rather than depth. How come she has a (presumably adopted) Latino brother? What does this say about her family and values in modern day USA? Or was it just thrown in as a bone to keep the liberal demographic happy? Am quite surprised not to have come across even the slightest commentary regarding the convenient existence of the marginalised Miguel in any of the reviews.)

i am not your negro (d. raoul peck, w. peck & baldwin)

The number of times the name of James Baldwin crops up on this blog is testament to his influence. Anyone casting even a cursory glance over US history or culture needs to know Baldwin’s work. The issue of race in the US is inextricably interlinked with the up-to-the-minute issues of globalisation, unfettered capitalism, neoliberalism and all the rest. The film has several clips of Baldwin being ineffably articulate as he confronts a myopic white TV presenter, among others, outlining the issues concerning race as he sees them. The brilliance of the man is there for all to see as is the way in which he punctures the balloon of white privilege. Peck’s film rightly makes the point that these issues haven’t gone away. In recent years, they seem to have intensified. Paradoxically, issues around race continue to generate a remarkable artistic reaction. Perhaps there’s a recognition that until the USA begins to finally and seriously come to terms with the inherent racism which scars it, and which the election of a black president has done little to alleviate, it cannot begin to advance as a society. Baldwin’s relevance is as crucial as ever and this film is as fine an introduction to his work as you could hope to encounter. Having said which, it would be great to see the film of Another Country being made by the right director. 

the salesman (w&d asghar farhadi)

Last year there was a successful, UK financed, Tehran-set horror called Under the Shadow. It told the story of a woman who won’t leave her home in spite of the fact that it’s being attacked by a Djinn. It was a rudimentary, if effective piece of filmmaking, which received considerable plaudits in the UK. The fear was contained within the apartment’s walls. The Tehran it described (actually filmed in Jordan), was claustrophobic and restrictive.

Farhadi’s film shows a Tehran which has much in common. Once again a woman, Rana, finds herself feeling under threat in her own apartment. However, in this case, the threat isn’t supernatural. It’s the down-to-earth fact of a man coming in to her apartment when she was in the shower and assaulting her, possibly raping her. Farhadi’s world is real, tangible, and in its way far more scary. At the same time, it’s more morally complex, more profound. Rana’s husband, Emad, doesn’t know quite how he should react. Rana doesn’t want to go to the police because they are a potential threat as well. Emad sets out to find the culprit and exact revenge, a revenge which Rana herself doesn’t want any part of. This dark moral complexity is beautifully handled and, for an hour and a half, completely absorbing. Suddenly, not just the apartment, but everything, becomes a potential threat, because within such a rigid society, any unorthodox behaviour could be seen as an indication of guilt, even on the part of the victim. Both Rana and Emad are liberal souls. They are both actors, taking part, as it happens, in a version of the Death of a Salesman. But Emad’s liberal instincts have no place in a society where justice is an unreliable concept. If the state can’t be trusted, then the individual is compelled to become his own judge, and that’s not a comfortable position to occupy. 

The fact that the protagonists are actors contributes to a sense that Farhadi is both celebrating and evaluating the role of culture in everyday life. The troupe of actors, for whom this is clearly not a full-time job, clean up the theatre and dedicate their time to the pursuit of culture. Only in the cultural field, such as the film itself, can our societal values be interrogated in a neutral space. The script sets up various subtle parallels with Miller’s text. The tension builds and builds until the final twenty minutes or so. Up to that point the handling of pace and dramatic tension has been masterly, but the denouement is drawn out and ends up feeling melodramatic. Theatre can get away with this kind of protracted ending more readily than film. It starts to feel as though the director is dotting his i’s and crossing his t’s. 

In spite of this The Salesman is a remarkable piece of filmmaking, in its way far more terrifying than any kind of horror. It’s not the unknown which is truly terrifying; it’s the dominion of banal, day-to-day fears which have the power to turn any society into a place of consummate, inescapable fear. 

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(ps Thinking about this, it’s striking how few films emerge from what might be termed ‘restricted’ or ‘restrictive’ societies. Clearly censorship plays a part in this, as does the repression of artistic freedom, something which impacts on film in particular, as it requires more infrastructure than say, a novelist or a singer, in order to create its narratives. But this is also true of, for example, of the Mexican experience in the US. An enormous semi-clandestine society, whose stories have never been told in film. There will be countless other examples. It goes to show how political, economic and artistic freedom are tightly interwoven in the creation of cinema. Unless this is another example of the way in which the tyranny of cinema’s distribution chain in turn censors which films we are permitted to receive?)