jerusalem (w butterworth, d. rickson)

A few general thoughts concerning this play.

Firstly, it's the third good piece of writing I've seen in London in the last month or so, following on from Apologia and Pornography. Which must be some kind of a record.

Secondly, have been musing since watching it on Monday whether it isn't a closetly intellectual piece of writing. This said because many of the main tenets of conventional dramatic storytelling aren't really adhered to. Byron doesn't go on much of a journey; he starts as a ribald Falstaffian figure and ends as a ribald, bloodied Falstaffian figure, albeit one moved to rage by his enemies. In a more conventional dramatic text (using the phrase in inverted commas), the interaction of the characters leads to some kind of learning, and whilst one or two of Byron's rats make half-hearted discoveries about themselves, they're still more interested in securing some whizz. In essence, the play functions as a manifesto for Byron's hedonistic Englishness. Rylance's performance is impressive, lending the old soak a demented gravitas, and his (and Butterworth's) vision of some kind of primordial Englishness emerges through a mixture of humour and grandiloquence.

Thirdly, the play, steeped in its Shakesperianism, reminds us of things that sometimes get forgotten. (In an era when scripts can almost be put together using spreadsheets.) Monsters make for great theatre (Byron also probably owes a debt to Tamburlaine). Theatre is about putting on a show, rather than education. Showmen put on the best shows, and a dash of lunacy doesn't go amiss either. In fact, in Jerusalem's genealogy, Marlowe plays as big a role as Shakespeare. The character who can unleash language, and play with it like a rapier or a rubik's cube, who can make language sit up and talk... That's a character people will always want to see, a writer people will always want to listen to.

I have only a vague idea of what Butterworth and Byron's Englishness truly represents - the manifesto wasn't altogether clear - but you kind of know you could listen to Byron spinning his tall tales all night.

dark spring [w unica zürn]

Dark Spring is a book so slight it doesn't take much more than an hour to read. It is recounted from the point of view of a twelve year old girl, living in Germany after the war. Its 80 pages recount the girl's emerging sexuality. Things happen, some of which have no right to happen. However, more than the sequence of events, which of their own might be perceived as being salacious, the key to Dark Spring's compelling, slightly nightmarish brilliance, is the way in which it captures pre-adolescent fears and desires, spearing them like one of Golding's children might have speared a fish, using a crude piece of wood, barely up to the task, but effective nonetheless.

I know very little about Zürn, save for the fact she had relationships with various surrealists, her psychiatrist was also, apparently, Artaud's, and she committed suicide by jumping from a window, something worth knowing before you read the book. However, I do know her little book captures a world which adults would rather forget. Rather than the child within the man, beloved of the Romantics, Zürn's text reveals the adult within the child. Reminding us that childhood, aware of the great secrets that have yet to be revealed, is forced to use its imagination to conjure up a vision of sex; as well as love; and that so much of what we will experience in adulthood, upon which our notions of happiness depend, will have been the result of choices made when we were of an age before we could possibly know what those decisions meant. Within a society that would prefer to believe these things didn't even cross its children's minds.

Dark Spring, (perhaps an echo of Spring Awakening), is one of those rare texts which is bold enough to tackle the shibboleths of childhood. This transgression ensures there's a timelessness about the book, in part because the society that acknowledges a pre-pubescent sexuality is a rare one. Zürn was brave enough to remind the world that it's something that does exist, and Dark Spring is a kind of true mirror to the sanitised fantasies of Alice in Wonderland.

Some writers resist society's codifications, and their books are like postcards from a reality it would rather ignore.

mesrine part 1 killer instinct (d. richet; w. mesrine & dafri)

The biopic. Currently the French seem to be churning them out. I've missed Coco Before Chanel, but the promise of Cassel, one of the great screen actors of today, lured me in to see Mesrine. That and the self-avowedly boy-sy subject matter. Gangster flicks seem more attractive in French.

The opening shots give the appearance of a film that looks like it knows what it's doing. Split screen, Cassel in some kind of fat disguise, a bubbly French chick. But at the same time, whilst the sequence appears to be suave and composed, not a lot is actually disclosed here, a tension is summoned and then more or less exhausted as the titles roll. Then the action jump cuts to a lean young Cassel, with a neat tache, in Algeria, and its all hand held cameras and a kind of Gaspar Noe tension. Then Cassel's back in France and the journey to becoming public enemy number one begins in earnest. And continues. And continues. Mesrine seduces a pretty woman with his gallic charm. Then another. And another. And so on. Mesrine uses his gallic charm to get out of a scrape. And again. Mesrine kills someone. And again. And then he does it in Canada.

It feels as though there's two main problems with Mesrine, Killer Instinct (if we discount the corny title). The first is the curse of the biopic: a script which sprawls, trying to grab all the best bits and thereby only succeeding in diluting them. So you end with an insipid trawl through the protagonist's life, with no narrative focus and a steadily declining return of interest. Secondly, it doesn't look like Richet really knows what kind of a movie he wants to make. At moments there's an adventurous Scorceseian camera, roving round the room, implicating menace or emphasising mood. But these are against the grain, and on the whole it's conservatively shot, with static, slightly theatrical set-ups. Add to this the issue of the script's (and perhaps Cassel's) desire to have Mesrine played all ends up - lconic charmer, psychotic nutter, a family man who has no qualms sticking a gun in his wife's mouth. Again, there's a suspicion that those concerned have been watching Scorcese, including Raging Bull, Goodfellas and Casino, but Cassel's portrayal has none of the 'he's-going-to-lose-it-any-moment' of Scorcese's protagonists. Cassel is always too cool, too in control.

Mesrine has been critically lauded, spoken of in the same breath as Riffifi and Cercle Rouge and other iconic crime movies of French cinema. It doesn't deserve to be. Mesrine, Killer Instinct never succeeds in throwing off the shackles of the biopic, as though it's hobbling along with ankles chained and wrists hoping one day to be released from the cuffs.

lucky kuntz [gregor muir]

A couple of years ago, whilst researching Brit Art for Mr Blue, people told me I should 'speak to Gregor', because Gregor was there. He knew where the bodies were buried. So I called him up, in his office, finding it surprisingly easy to get through to him. I could have sworn that he got up and went to shut the door, before coming back to the phone. He then proposed that, rather than do the research ourselves, we should buy the rights to his memoirs, which he was in the process of writing.

The idea was given short shrift, largely because there was scarcely any budget for a researcher, let alone the payday Mr Muir presumably anticipated. Fast forward a couple of years and those memoirs have now been released. However, the bodies remains securely under lock and key.

Researching the YBA scene (as it does not like to be called by any of the artists, who are keen now to negate any notion of 'a movement') one quickly comes across the vast power wielded by Damian Hirst. Hirst is not just a former friend to most of the artists, he has also now become a patron in his own right. People don't like to run the risk of offending him, and lips are kept tightly sealed. One prominent figure in the movement's history seemed so paranoid as he spoke to us, it was as though he expected to be hauled away at any moment by the art police. Muir appears to be no exception to this rule. He no doubt has stories to tell, but you can almost feel him clumsily trying to find a way around having to say anything that might be too scandalous. This makes for the most insipid of memoirs and suggests its very hard for an insider to write an account of a group he or she has been a part of.

Furthermore, in the somewhat predictable account of lost alcoholic nights, the narrator exudes a kind of vacuousness which permeates everything he discusses. At one point two or three people he knows die, and he says that he fears the onset of depression. However, this is staved off less than a week later by Muir deciding to wear a sarong and go out and drink as much vodka as he can. In no time at all he's right as rain. At the end of the memoir, Muir briefly suggests that he had to make his break from 'the artists' and forge a new direction, but the notion of Muir having any kind of a crisis seems far fetched; he has landed on his feet in the groovy groovy art scene, and there will be more parties, of that we can be sure.

All of which only has any real significance when thinking about the value of the art which these artists produced. Hirst for example, claims to be creating works of seriousness, which comment in some way on the human condition; and death. It generally feels as though his art treads a line between knowing showmanship and potential genius. Is he an artist who is truly grappling with the great themes (no matter how jovially); or is he a quack doctor, providing a gullible public with what he knows they want: the finest ad man of them all. Reading Hirst's multiple interviews with Gordon Burn, his Boswell of choice, one might be inclined to believe the former; but reading Muir's book describing his vision of the world wherein these works were hatched, one might be inclined to suspect the latter.

Gregor Muir's book does few favours to the artists on whose coat-tails he has risen to a comfortable life. It lacks the boldness to reveal any insights that will surprise anyone; be those insights intellectual; or merely those of a fly on the wall during the course of one of the more intriguing moments in recent London art and socio-cultural history.

unaccustomed earth [jhumpa lahiri]

Lahiri's book is a collection of short stories. Having said which, it's a collection of short stories split into two sections, the second of which, Hema and Kaushik, is more of a novella, being three connected stories, dealing with two characters who have an affair in the third and final story.

The first part, untitled, consists of five stories which deal with the experiences of immigrant Bengalis in North America. One story takes place in Seattle, but the rest occur on the East Coast, describing the experience of three generations of Indian (or rather Bengali) families who have chosen to settle in the United States, whilst maintaining links with India, as well as London, something of a staging post for Bengali families on their way to the States. These stories are all 'well written', hinting at Chekhov or other writers I may once have read. They're unremittingly gloomy, as though suggesting that to be a Bengali immigrant is some kind of curse; that carrying the weight of a heavily family based tradition whilst trying to forge a North American identity is a pressured and perhaps doomed enterprise. The first character I found myself in any way relating to, the brother in Only Goodness, turns into an unreliable drunk who wrecks his sister's marriage to a deeply unsympathetic Brit.

These stories set the groundwork for the second part, which ends, to no great surprise, tragically. It was a relief to find that these last three stories were not only connected, but dealt with characters who seemed to have overcome their rigid, stultifying heritage, finding work as a photographer and a classics scholar, respectively. Hema and Kaushik come alive off the page, and there's no doubt that Lahiri has a talent for capturing voices and teasing out a narrative.

However, the great however of my day-to-day work, for all its measured, cut-glass effectiveness, it consistently felt to me as though in the end the writing was struggling to capture emotional truths which it pretends to be capturing effortlessly. Kaushik's hysterical reaction to his step-sisters, like his eventual fate, felt altogether too neat, too literary, to be true, and this was the case in most of the stories. Lahiri appears to be a writer reluctant to stray far from a world she knows inside out. Whilst the writing shows great precision in the depiction of a culture, and in the premise of the emotional conflicts it concocts, it felt to my mind as though there was something brittle, even a little shrill, in its final representation of those conflicts and their consequences, as though the coldness of the prose mitigated against a credible engagement with the truth of pain; or loss; or even love.

Is this even remotely fair? Because it's not to say that Lahiri is not a talented writer. Her skill is self-evident, seemingly effortless. My own subjectivity is caused by many factors, not least the permanent shadow of Bolano hovering over the short story form, or my current struggle to connect with most Anglo-Saxon prose. All the same, it seems to me that Unaccustomed Earth sets out its stall to capture the heartbreak of the commonplace; the fatality of the mundane, and we need to be convinced of the heartbreak or the fatality in order for this approach to work.

anti-christ (w&d von trier)

Thought #1 on walk back through Notting Hill, the size of the stucco facaded houses still catching me by surprise. Every film of Von Trier's could be viewed as some kind of Situationist provocation, less of a film and more of an artwork. And Anti-Christ is no exception.

Except for Thought #2 which occured before it all kicked off in the final part of the film, which is that Von Trier identifies and tackles subjects that few filmmakers are brave enough to go for. In this case the power of nature and the potential differences between a female and a male consciousness. (Which might exist, and be more subtle than preferring shopping to watching football or chardonnay to rioja, or any of the other neutralised terms in which that difference has come to be permitted within a consumer culture.) Among other things. If you removed the graphic sex, and the somewhat operatic prologue, there's a serious treatise looking to be made, no matter how much the fireworks would appear to distract.

Thought #3: the film's dedicated to Tarkovsky, which many will consider a cheek of itself, but there's also echoes of Antonioni and obviously Don't Look Now, as well as Mercy and probably a few hundred horror flicks I've never seen. His engagement with the medium is so much more absolute than any of his contemporaries. My brother gave me the box set of his first three films for Christmas, and its astonishing how visually and technically assured a filmmaker he was from the beginning. His relationship with Dogme was always a game within a game; and in Anti-Christ his capacity to conjure astonishing imagery goes hand in hand with Dodd Mantle's shaky, edge of the bed camerawork. All of which contributes to the constant presence of the filmmaker behind the lens, playing with his audience, challenging and provoking them and sometimes laughing (with or at) them - in particular in the beautifully cheeky talking fox moment. Von Trier is as Brechtian as Godard, whilst also being as big a showman as Tony Scott. The contradictions are part of his charm.

I have just written and scrubbed Thought #4 which was along the lines of whether the film, in all its excessive dramatic glory, is any good or not. You're going to be a fairly strange type of character if you get through the final scenes and say that you enjoyed them. Then again, as Von Trier is well aware (he sometimes makes porn films), the things that disturb are just the flip side of the kind of things people watch for their most basic pleasure. They're all images, so what's not to like? (The scene with Dafoe being dug out of the mud seemed to even hint at Ian's fate in Blasted). For every Von Trier film I like there's one I don't like (mas o menos). In a way that's all part of the game which the director is playing, reminding you that he's on his side of the fence and you're on yours, and through that act of reminding bringing us closer together. It's not about liking what's going on: it's about the taking part. And it's pretty hard not to feel as though you've participated in something, no matter how gratuitously gruelling, along with the poor actors Dafoe and Gainsbourg. This is not far off being cinema as mud wrestling, and what else should we want cinema to be?

35 shots of rum (d. claire denis; w. denis & jean-pol fargeau)

That rare joy of going to see a film about which you know nothing, and finding yourself transported to a place you never imagined you'd visit...

Denis' film takes place in a world of Parisian immigrants. Initially we meet Lionel, who drives a metro train, and his work colleagues, all of them black. Lionel lives with his daughter, Josephine, in an apartment block which contains their extended family, although it's never altogether clear how Noe and Gabrielle are connected. The narrative dances on the line of abstraction; the connections between the characters are never stated. In the coda scene, Lionel and Josephine, so close that they sometimes seem like lovers, travel to Lubeck and meet Josephine's aunt, before laying flowers at her mother's grave. Whether her German mother's relationship with Lionel was long lasting or brief is never clear; what is clear is the depth of the relationship between the aunt and Josephine. As though Denis is stripping back all the detail of race and nationality, homing in on the emotional ties that supersede everything else.

And yet... the first ten minutes of the film are slow and cryptic; extended shots of Paris from the cab of Lionel's train, a gradual introduction to the characters. Then there's a scene in Josephine's university. She's studying (presumably) politics and development; a classful of immigrants from the South discussing Stiglitz and the possibilities of restoring the balance between third and first world. The scene ends with a student talking about Fanon, (and suggesting that many of these students would not have read him) stating that revolution will not occur because of any coherent plan, but because those who are about to revolt have run out of air to breathe. The scene (reminiscent of Zabriskie Point) slots into the film like a fly in the ointment, establishing the political context of the film's character's lives, only for the politicized approach to be then discarded as readily as it's taken up.

Instead the focus turns to the slow unwinding of the relationships of these four sympathetic, dysfunctional figures, a dance that comes to life when they're stranded in a late night bar together, and they dance with one another. They dance to the unlikely sound of The Commodores 80's hit, The Night Shift, and the scene has echoes of the haunting scene in Ozon's 5x2. Dance, a language freed of words, might be the purest form of drama, and as the song plays itself out, each of the characters has their hearts revealed, and all the melancholy that underpins their lives and tangled loves is played out in a weirdly moving dumb show.

I haven't seen Beau Travail, I know nothing of Denis' work, and truth be told 38 Shots of Rum is one of those film that defies intelligent criticism. Because it's doing something that seems almost intangible, or magical, or what you will, and that magic operates entirely within in a cinematic lexicon. If you wrote the scenes out on the page, they might not amount to much. But assembled as they are, with a deliberate, elliptical pacing, they're transformed into some kind of revelation, of how a small corner of Paris lives, and how we also live, wherever we are.

our lady of the assassins [fernando vallejo]

The narrator is a gay grammarian, living in Medellin. He hooks up with a young contract killer, called Alexis, whose contracts have dried up following the killing of the head honcho, Pablo Escobar himself. Killing is such an integral part of Alexis' life that he happily executes anyone who gets on his, or his lover's, nerves. Taxi drivers who talk back, whistling strangers, cops in the wrong place at the wrong time. And there's so much killing going on in Medellin that no-one seems to notice. The only thing that can put an end to Alexis and the narrator's killing spree is the arrival of Alexis' bullet, which is never likely to be too far away.

Vallejo's insouciant narrator is morally compromised, aware of the fact and not in the least bothered by it. His jaunty tone suggests that in a country where corruption is the norm, a few murders here and there count for nothing. Life is cheap in Medellin, and given that, Alexis' amorality is perfectly acceptable. To my mind there was something a little too pat about all this; perhaps I was missing some of Vallejo's irony. It's interesting to note that Vallejo was apparently writing in exile. Because his slight book doesn't feel like a letter from the front line; there's no anguish, just a kind of sculptural pleasure taken in the chaotic mess that Medellin has made of itself. There's something coldly impersonal about the grammarian's narrative, which may be part of the point, but didn't seem to help explain why his young lovers had evolved into such adorable killing machines; or what their families or even they themselves felt about the ruthless world they inhabited.

It's also perhaps worth noting that 1994 is a long time ago in Colombian history. No doubt the drugs and the gangsters are still out there, influencing the city's shape. However, as a footnote, it seems worth mentioning the taxi driver who drove C and I to Almagro earlier this month. He was Colombian, and had been living in Madrid for a few years. He was from Cali, a city which is Medellin's equal in narco-notoriety. We asked him what it was like, and I suggested it must be a dangerous place to live. But, as we drove through the dry flat plain of La Mancha, he told us that it was always Spring in his city, with a never ending parade of flowers. He and his wife had saved up enough to build a house for themselves there. As to whether it was dangerous or not, he suggested it was no more dangerous than any other city. The vision I'd had of a city patrolled by teenage soldiers of the drugs lords, touting machine guns in the back of their four by four jeeps, a vision not so very different to Vallejo's portrayal of Medellin, crumbled. Our driver even told us which barrio to go to if we want to see some theatre. Apparently it's called San Antonio.

preston falls [david gates]

Preston Falls tells the straightforward tale of Doug Willis, a middle-class, suburban New Yorker whose dreams are in tatters. The book traces the course of his mid-life crisis as he takes time out from his job, ostensibly to work on renovating his upstate country cottage in Preston Falls, but in practice disintegrating in a blizzard of displaced machismo, Dickens and drugs. We meet Willis on the cusp, and watch him go over it. The book is split into four sections. The first describes Willis and his wife Jean and kids, Mel and Roger, arriving at Preston Falls for a long weekend, which goes rapidly sour. The second charts the phases of Willis' disintegration as he's left alone, finding himself sucked into his evil's lawyers games, reading Dickens, trying to re-ignite a spark of his guitar playing youth. The third section turns the narrative around, presenting the consequences of Willis' actions from Jean's point of view as she struggles to deal with the children, and the last is a kind of coda.

Gates' prose has a rat-a-tat-tat effectiveness. He writes primarily in the present tense, using the past for the book's numerous flashbacks. This helps to add urgency to the drama, as though opening up the possibilities of every action: these are not cast in the stone, every decision could have been another, and the reader seems to feel Willis bringing his fate down upon himself with a relentless but always avoidable stupidity, or fatalism. This doesn't make him in any way sympathetic. Rather the author employs his surgical prose to pick at every failing of his book's hero, in much the same way as the hero uses every one of his failings to contribute to his demise. It's a theatre of cruelty, wherein Willis is the object of the gods' derision, but where his feeble neglect of his paternal duties denudes him of any kind of tragic dignity.

You might say this book was firmly in Updike territory. It's twenty years since I read Updike and the taste his work leaves in my mouth is one of wanting to have it both ways. Portray the child in the man, whilst in some way converting the retreat to childhood into a kind of Romantic voyage. Gates, it seems to me, is debunking any notion of a Romantic journey. It's kind of what we think is going to happen when Willis is left alone in the wilds of Preston Falls, and appears to be what he's looking for, but reality is harsher than he's ready for. Once again, there's the grand North American tension between the lure of nature's wilds and civilisation's charms, but there's no doubt where Gates positions his characters on this spectrum in the end: once you've sold your soul to the home-comfort devil there's not much hope of getting it back again.

Further down the line from Updike, the book brings to mind two films. One is Herzog's Grizzly Man, where Treadwell thinks he can walk with the bears but he can't; and the other is Kaufman's recent Synechdoche, another work that spins a thread between New York and its upstate neighbours, watching a man go to pieces as he tries to make sense of the vast distance between these closely linked geographic spaces. The US and its arts will always be immersed in the desperate tension between the material comfort it has afforded its citizens (or at least those born on the right side of the tracks) and the spiritual cost that seems to be the price they have to pay for that material comfort. It's an important theme, and Preston Falls isn't scared to get down and dirty with it.

rudo y cursi (w&d carlos cuarón)

As it happens, last week over lunch in Almagro, one of those Spanish lunches that last forever, Fernando, one of the actors from Gatomaquica, was saying that it was incredible given the size of the country that Mexico had produced so few good films over recent years. He'd lived there for a while and been disillusioned by their film/ theatre worlds. The usual suspects were rolled out: Peros, Y Tu, and thereafter it all got a bit harder, although let Reygadas not be lost in the mix. It's probably not a question of a lack of talent, but undoubtedly most intriguing Mexican directors seem to head across the border. The Mexican relationship with Hollywood not so very different from the British.

Sad to say, Rudo Y Cursi, in spite of its superstar billing, doesn't do much to mitigate against Fernando's point of view. It seems to have all the right ingredients, but never comes close to convincing. Perhaps it's football. How many successful football movies have been made? Not many. Salles also used football, with rather more subtlety, in his latest film Linha De Passe. There are obvious reasons why Latin American cinema should turn to football for subject matter, with this being one field where innate talent can permit someone from a poor background to rise up through society. However, Rudo Y Cursi, unlike Salles' film, wants to have it both ways: a bit of social commentary with lots of humour thrown in. The actors never seem quite sure whether the film should be played exclusively for laughs or whether there's actually something else going on, ending up resorting to a mannered high comedy style which does neither justice, and suggests they're enjoying themselves rather more than the audience. Cuaron's screenplay feels underdeveloped, and the whole thing has the feel of a film that has been dashed off rather than tended. Like one of those superstar football teams (Real Madrid since they decided to acquire Beckham) which assumes that as a result of the sheer weight of famous names on the pitch cannot help but succeed, but in practice never really has much of an identity, and never wins anything.