the limey (d soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

The Limey includes footage of its star, Terrence Stamp, from another film, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, to show Stamp as a young man (and handsome devil). Soderbergh cleverly weaves this footage into his film, part of a masterful edit, lending The Limey an instant nostalgia factor. This nostalgia factor is amplified watching the film 25 years after its release. The Limey seems to hark back to a different, bolder era, when filmmakers were permitted a certain licence to indulge and hence enrich what might otherwise have been fairly regulation genre fare. In The Limey, alongside Out of Sight, Soderbergh constructed a pair of whip-smart films which perhaps would struggle to be financed today. Reminiscent of French thrillers like Cercle Rouge or Le Samurai, The Limey makes a virtue of its difficulties: the choppy edit, a la Godard, the playfulness of the dialogue, Stamp’s weirdly monochromatic acting, only broken every now and again by a sly smile behind the eyes. It’s a minor direction masterclass. If this is where film is headed, we thought back in those last of the pre-millennial days, we’re in good hands. 

schizopolis (w&d soderbergh)

Doing a spot of research whilst trying to make my mind up whether to head to Cinemateca to catch another in the Soderbergh season, I read several people saying Schizopolis is the worst film ever made. Which meant that I really didn't have much choice: I had to go and see it. Schizopolis is not the worst film ever made, I am disappointed to have to say. It's not the best, but it's also far from the worst. It is quietly and pleasantly bonkers, as one might expect from a film where the director plays three characters, all variations on the same person, who is probably himself. What is admirable about Soderbergh is the way he games the system, making big studio films alongside his own smaller scale projects. There’s something quasi Godardian about all this., not least in the sense that he clearly doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of a film like Schizopolis, which was never going to be a box office hit and which many people will deem a self-indulgent mess. Which it sort of is, but sort of isn’t, as Soderbergh plays with humour and confusion to construct a narrative of multiple identities which almost works. On another level, it’s a slice of unadorned American life, shot without any trimmings, revealing the petty neuroses of the most powerful citizens on earth. 

kafka (d. soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

I have memories of Soderbergh’s second feature coming out and being an unmitigated disaster, both critically and at the box office. The zietgesity wunderkind of SL&V coming back down to earth with a bump. Perhaps this is a false memory, but in the Soderbergh canon, you don’t offer hear people referring to Kafka. Of course it always helps a film to go in with low expectations, but Kafka, for all its predictability, still succeeded in charming. Perhaps it was the sight of Guinness and the youthful Irons helming a familiar looking cast, featuring one of those zany double acts with Keith Allen and Simon McBurney, the type of humorous conceit which never normally works, but in this case seems to. Perhaps it was the sight of Prague in all its pre-touristy glory. Or perhaps it was just the evident glee of a young director getting to fulfil his dream of making a passion project, all homage to expressionism, Fritz Lang, and so on.

Later in the Cinemateca cafe, Victor appeared. He had a garish orange painting. On closer inspection it showed McDowell from A Clockwork Orange. In that film’s expressionist glory, there lurks perhaps another homage to Lang’s violence. It was too auspicious to pass up, and so I bought the picture for Sñr Amato, who had also chanced to come to the screening of a blousy Sunday evening. Hopefully the picture will find a home on the bright shore of the Maldonado coast, a far cry from the foggy dunes of Prague. 

contagion (d. steven soderbergh, w. scott z burns)

The classic modern text dealing with issues of pestilence is Camus' The Plague. Contagion is basically The Plague reworked and distilled, on a global scale. Just not as good. It feels like something everyone - writer, stars, director - has done for the cash. Indicative of another plague which has always haunted society: the plague of mediocrity.

Soderbergh usually creates films which have some element of surprise. He might be the closest Hollywood mainstream gets to having a maverick, with his unusual career pattern and portmanteau projects. But in learning to play the Hollywood game, he has taken on the Coppola, Scorcese tactic of Quid Pro Quo: I'll do something for you if you do something for me. Contagion seems like one of the ones he's done for them, to put some credit in his fantasy box.

It's a pity because the ingredients are there for a compelling drama. The bio-political state is an under-reported one, as someone must have said. The politics of contagion are there to be explored and are backed up by that great movie trope, the Doomsday scenario. Initially, the film nimbly traces the disease's exponential kill pattern, moving from Hong Kong to the US to Switzerland. The script seems to be positing a globalised movie, Camus's wartime town morphing into the whole of the 21st C planet.

Then it runs out of steam and gets stuck in the US. A succession of bizarre cameos, not least from Jude Law, fail to interconnect with one another. We get the decline and fall of Western Civilisation in the space of about 20 minutes, followed by its sudden recovery (to the refrain of a U2 track; this time the world reincarnates with a whimper). As though the film's ambition outstrips its capacity. The globalised vision is shrunk to a few streets in San Francisco and the Midwest. Perhaps there's another subtler allegory here? The globalised dream, the world as cyber-village, destined to collapse in on itself under the weight of the sheer detail it cannot bear. In the end there's no room in Soderbergh's movie for Asia, Africa, Latin America or even Europe. In another misconceived cameo (in a misconceived film), Marion Cottilard spends the whole of the epidemic holed up in a village in rural China after being kidnapped. When she's freed, after a dodgy deal, she chooses to run back to the village. Better to live in humane seclusion than our bastardised techno-commercial world, slaves to the bio-capitalists.

Contagion is ripe for Zizekian interpretation. However, this has nothing to do with its quality and all to do with the territory it has tried and failed to assimilate. In an echo of Camus' great novel, the film attempts to link the vagaries of fate with the exigencies of morality, investigating whether the two are connected: is the good man/ woman more like to survive than the morally neutral? Unlike Camus' book, having set up this territory, the film seems to duck all the issues it has raised, and everyone, apart from Winslett's saintly health officer, survives, be they good, bad or somewhere in the middle. (This being a film made for North Americans about North Americans, they are on the whole unfailingly and tediously 'good'.)

Incidentally, since seeing the movie on Wednesday night, I've picked up a cynical, malevolent toothache. Let's hope this isn't the harbinger for a global outbreak. I can't really face the prospect of Contagion 2: The Killer Toothache.

che part one (d. soderbergh, w. buchman)

Looking for clues as to what forms Soderbergh's take on the great Ernesto debate, it's worth noting that he uses Silvio Rodriguez over his credits, and credits Jon Lee Anderson as a consultant. Rodriguez, as most Latin Americans and very few Westerners are aware, became the troubadour of the Cuban revolution, albeit some years later, with his poetic chansons of occasionally mystical struggle (you're likely to find references to both Brecht and Unicorns in his songs). Rodriguez's presence adds authenticity, if any were needed, and shows a director making sure he's crossing his T's and dotting his I's. Anderson is a distinguished correspondent who's written one of the major biographies of Guevara (as well as frontline reports from Baghdad, etc): if his name's attached you assume a high level of historical accuracy is being sought. Even if history is something written by the victors.

The presence of this pair on the credits affirms Soderbergh's intention to tell the unadorned truth. None of Salles' exotic romanticism. Del Toro's Che is a doughty asthmatic. The early scenes show him coughing his way through the Cuban jungle. He's happy to play second fiddle to Fidel, (a highly mannered portrayal from Demian Bichir, suggesting he's rather overdone his research), and for the early stages of the invasion, he's relegated to doctoring and teaching duties, only being allowed near the front line as the campaign develops.

This is all in keeping with Soderbergh's mission to create a great historical epic without going all Hollywood on us. At times the approach seems reminiscent of his contemporary, Van Zandt. The film is all atmosphere and mood. Despite the occasional date being flashed up on the screen, it's unclear how long the revolution's been going and whether or not it's making any progress. The director seems almost at pains to avoid drama, as far as he can get away with it. Che breaks his arm, but we never learn how he did it. Che wanders through the Cuban backwoods, and doesn't fire at any soldiers. A skirmish begins and then the action cuts away, suddenly, without really informing the viewer what the final score was. 

Whilst it can be hard work, the approach is ultimately effective. The audience begins to get some kind of handle on what it's like to fight a guerrilla war. (Long and painstaking and occasionally dangerous). War isn't glamorous, it's hard labour. However, this is still war conducted with the benefit of hindsight: no matter how flinty the script, performances and cinematography, there's no escaping the fact they're going to win. The narrative saves its one cathartic moment of military action for the final sequence, as Guevara takes Santa Clara. One stunt, when a train leaps the rails, seems oddly out of keeping in such a low-key film, but is undoubtedly historically accurate.

The action is punctuated by moments from Guevara's address to the UN in 1964, when he's also interviewed by the clipped Julia Ormond. These scenes are filmed in a cine verite black and white, the director again flattening out the drama, the historic moment of the UN address bathed in a bureaucratic pallour. Soderbergh seems to realise that the glossiness of modern cinema isn't really equipped to capture the hard caulked realities of fighting and winning a revolution. (Perhaps it's haunted by previous takes on the subject - it's hard not to be curious how Omar Sharif played the great revolutionary in 1969 biopic, Che!, not to mention what kind of Fidel Jack Palance must have made.) The line between entertainment and historical accuracy is a hard one to tread. You kind of suspect a lot of people aren't going to possess the revolutionary stomach for the double bill, anymore than they would for yomping through jungles if the need suddenly arose. Those who do stick with it will, however, be rewarded, as the film stays with the viewer after it's ended, and its slow moving pace conceals a deceptive power. It has left me hungry to find out what Del Toro and Soderbergh, the most curiously versatile of modern US directors, have made of Part 2, more jungle, Bolivia, and the clearest narrative line possible.