shutter island (d. scorsese, w. kalogridis)

There must be a million of these type of scripts drifting around Hollywood, waiting to see if it comes up lucky. Scripts which look like they're clever, but turn out not to be as smart as they think they are. Scripts that have ladles of meaning and reference - in this case Dachau; Hitchcock; the Cold War and its debt to the Nazis; psychiatric methodology and more - but have no real coherence; scripts that, the more they protest the existence of their soul, the more you suspect they lack one at all. Welcome to Hollywood: sound and fury signifying nothing.

Sad, therefore, that a director who is still as skilful as Scorsese should find himself lumbered with such a script, based as it is on a book by a highly successful commercial writer. Is this the equivalent of Gershwin writing jingles for toothpaste ads? A great skill applied seemingly exclusively towards a notion of commercial gain?

Presumably the director set out with the notion that he could do something interesting with the material. The film opens with heightened B-Movie colours and music, and a beaten-up looking DeCaprio looking suitably askance. The set-up is not unpromising, and for a while it works. There's the lone star up against the world, there's the wartime reveal, the slow build-up of character. Scorsese goes in for some operatic effects, suggesting he's having fun, even if once again, the notion of Hollywood using the Holocaust to beef up its narratives veers on the distasteful. (Carefully composed piles of bodies; artful violence...) The nods towards Hitchcock seem to come thick and fast - Vertigo and North by Northwest and maybe more. Then, as the second act begins, the script begins to explain itself. Characters start to talk all the time. About what's going on 'on the island'. About the ethics of 'the island'. The more they talk the less we're interested. Finally they've talked themselves out of it, and the film indulges in its de rigeur twist, and we can all file out of the cinema going, 'it went on a bit, didn't it'.

Actually, I left wondering what it would have felt like to walk out of Mean Streets or Raging Bull or even King of Comedy on first release. Few filmmakers have ingrained themselves so comprehensively within our cinematic language and vision. Plenty have analysed Scorsese's gradual fall from grace, so I won't try too hard. In a way it seems as though, having played his part in shattering the idols, and then becoming an idol, Scorsese is now attempting to hark back and pay tribute to the cinema his films out-paced. Hence the fifties, the B-Movie plots, the operatic anti-naturalism. It doesn't seem to do him many favours; but he's lost his stories, and he doesn't know where to turn, so he looks over his shoulder hoping they're lying in the road (or the DVD collection) behind him. When what he really needs is a proper script. Which needs a proper reason for being written.

the white tiger [aravind adiga]

Adiga's book has been an international publishing phenomenon, as well as winning the Booker prize. In practice it's a glass half full/ glass half empty book.

Here's the glass half empty:

White Tiger is a somewhat one-dimensional piece of writing. The narrator and anti-hero, Balram, tells a simple story over the course of a week, describing how he went from the 'darkness' of India's rural backwaters, to glory as an entrepreneur. The catalyst in moving from one world to the other was a violent crime, although in truth the narrator's canny intelligence has already marked him out as a contender within the bustling new India. The plot moves along at a brisk if not rollicking pace, punctuated by Balram's asides on the nature of his country. However, this is one of those books where a lot seems to happen and at the same time, next to nothing seems to happen. Balram recounts his life history, and although the critics praise the 'shocking' act of murder which lies beneath his genial tone, the fact is there's nothing that shocking about it. This is the world of fiction after all: it's supposed to contain murders and the like, and the action within White Tiger always feels relatively tame. It offers a wry account of a new India, which people, particularly in Britain, probably want to hear, but it's far from the coruscating vision of Rohinton Mistry, whose darker, more savage novels capture the true horror of India's overwhelming poverty.

Glass half full:

White Tiger's rawness is one of its great strengths. Its narrator's prose has the kind of unpolished verve which successfully captures the chaotic energy of a rapidly changing nation, struggling with the cruel juxtaposition of great wealth and even greater poverty. At the moment, on You Tube, the IPL is doing its level best to turn cricket into the biggest brand sport in the world, a sport based in India, out-selling the Premier League or the NBA. The remarkable thing is it might just succeed. Turn it on and you'll see razzmatazz, foreign stars, baying crowds, beamed around the world. Balram belongs to this New India, where the clash between wealth and poverty will inevitably lead to violence; it's just a question of whether that violence can be contained. White Tiger lays bare the corruption, venality and the way in which both rich and poor are committed, day by day, to the business of maintaining and improving their station. Whilst comparisons have been made to Dickens, there's something in the narrator's free-flowing, conversational style that seems more reminiscent of 18th century British literature: the free-wheeling prose of Fielding, or the acute observational skills of Defoe, married to the scathing satire of Swift. Adiga is a writer riding the wave of vast change within his country, as technology, population explosion, scarcity and the potential for wealth combine to generate hardship, but also possibility, for those who are prepared to grasp the nettle. The writer's voice seems to articulate this brave new world, which has such people in it.

the helmet of horror [pelevin]

There's approximately half a dozen characters. Each one is trapped in an identical room. Each room opens onto a maze, each maze taking its own distinctive format. The characters have a computer each, and they communicate with one another on a message board. They have names like Organizm, UGLI 666, and Monstradamus. A censor edits any personal information relating to their life beyond the prison. Fairly quickly, they work out they're in some kind of maze, liable to be confronted by some kind of Minatour. Who will be wearing a Helmet of Horror. Which affects everyone's perception, including the reader's. At some point the Minatour makes an appearance and then leaves, having hurt no-one. Theseus also appears briefly.

Pelevin's novel was apparently commissioned as part of a series on myths. It has a great deal of Pelevinesque flair. There's discussions of what I believe is called phenomenology; mazes within Gothic cathedrals; myth and much more. There's also a beguiling reference to the Guardian Unlimited website, testament to the writer's globalised consciousness, which is allowed free rein within a virtual world. Perhaps he envisioned this as a virtual book. If so, it would appear to be virtual in so far as it is not quite whole; for this reader it was certainly no more than virtually understandable. Nevertheless, it's an enjoyable, skimpy read, and again, in a nod to the cyber-world, the reader finds him or herself surfing the cyber-chat the book consists of, some of it making sense, some of it making non-sense. Perhaps if you know your greek myths better than my rudimentary knowledge it would knit together more coherently, but it might also be that you can't read the Helmet of Horror with any degree of confidence of knowing what's really occurring unless you have degrees in astro-physics, particle Buddhism and Bishop Berkeley. Like, no doubt, the prankster Pelevin himself.

she a chinese (w&d xiaolu guo)

There's an interview in the Guardian with Guo, where she's quite scathing about the British film culture, in particular, one gets the impression, with regard to its distribution strategy and criticism. The film has a niche spot in the ICA, tucked into a season of female film directors. It's probably not an easy sell, as they say, but that doesn't quite justify the fact that its picked up so little attention.

The film itself is split into two parts. The first part occurs in China, as the young and charismatic protagonist Li Mei, played with verve by Lu Huang, moves from the countryside to one of the country's many growing cities. After various adventures, and after developing a slightly sign-posted affinity with Big Ben, she comes to London, where the second half takes place, as Li Mei struggles to get by as an illegal immigrant, collecting unlikely bedfellows along the way. I found myself getting more from the film's observational Chinese narrative than the English one which might be because of the window it offers into another culture, or might be because the relationships of the second part lend the piece a slightly more melodramatic air. Nevertheless, the film as a whole holds together, and there are many neatly observed moments which give it a quirky, unusual feel, as the director uses situation and images to build up her portrayal of Li Mei's world, in particular the snake in the Chinese river, and the anatomy class in which she partakes in London.

She, A Chinese is something of a gentle ride, and sometimes feels as though its narrative might have benefited from being a tad more ambitious. Nevertheless, Guo handles her material deftly, and it doesn't come as a surprise to learn the film had done well on the festival circuit. However, in spite of several sex scenes and the cross-culture London storylines, it probably doesn't fit into the right marketing quadrant to warrant the kind of exposure Guo might have hoped for. Which is probably something for which it should be applauded. (The fault lies not with the film but the system). It's refreshing to see a UK financed film that adopts an understated approach, casting a cool cinematic eye over one woman's journey through a globalised world.

the darling [russell banks]

Banks' novel is a peculiar beast. The subject matter is rich and provocative. It opens with Hannah Musgrave, also known as Dawn Carrington, a former member of the now almost forgotten US radical terrorist group the Weather Underground, returning to Liberia to search for her three missing sons. Their father, Woodrow Sundiata, was murdered as he became caught up in the power games that took place as President Doe fell to the forces of Charles Taylor. After fleeing without her sons, who abruptly took up the call to become child soldiers, Hannah has lived on a farm of her own, rearing free range chickens. Now she's back, looking for her lost children.

It's an exciting premise with which to open the book. As Hannah smuggles her way back into Liberia, the quest is on. However, it's never followed up. The book then unfolds in a series of flashbacks, describing Hannah's life in the lead-up to her flight to Liberia, her time there, and the years she spent in the US before returning. In the end, the opening of the book is rounded up in a desultory fashion some four hundred pages later, with Hannah's sons becoming just another of the things she's left behind in her protracted, curiously soul-less life.

Banks appears to be attempting to create a narrative which examines the fate of idealism in the US, and the way in which its seeming extinction has impacted on its global role. The choice of Liberia as a setting, a country founded by freed US slaves in the 19th century, seems both a commentary on the course of global politics in the centuries that have followed, and perhaps a metaphor for a land whose politics are governed by self-interest. At the heart of this is the curious figure of Hannah, whose naivity is matched by her lack of heart, someone prepared to walk out on almost any situation if needs be, a supposed idealist in practice ruled by the demands of realpolitik.

The book is narrated in Hannah's voice. It's never clear to what extent we're supposed to take at face value her constant philosophising, self-justification and mental nurdling about the fate of her parents, her ex-lovers, and her family. The farm which has become in later life her redoubt, something of a Utopian feminist collective, where the workers go skinny dipping with the owner, gradually fades out of the narrative, so that when it reappears in the closing stages the effect is jarring. As the book goes on there are several clumsy narrative devices, as Hannah helps to spring Charles Taylor, the Liberian opponent to Doe, from a US prison, and her former Weather Underground companion Zach pops up unexpectedly to keep the story ticking over. At times it feels as though the architecture of the novel's ambition dwarfs the actuality of the book's achievement. Seeking to write a grand novel about the late twentieth century, Banks finds himself occasionally floundering, no more so than in the book's closing pages' references to 911, which seem shoe-horned in to lend added weight.

The only beings with whom Hannah seems to construct lasting and meaningful relationships are the chimpanzees she protects in her sanctuary, chimpanzees which the civil war will eventually devour along with everything else. Reflecting on this (p 340) Hannah says that 'I dealt with my chimpanzees as though I were one myself. And what was wrong with this? What was ethically and even practically wrong with having empathy towards the other? For a long time I answered, Nothing. Nothing at all. It's good politics...' until she says, you betray them, when 'taken to its extreme, perhaps even pathological, form, empathy is narcissism.' In some ways this seems to be getting to the nub of the book: Hannah can empathise with other cultures, but she can never sympathise, or identify herself with them. Hence she's constantly discovering that her instincts only lead towards heartlessness. However, this seems to be a problem the book, as well as the narrator, faces. It leads us into the world of Liberia, and its dark African politics, but it can't help but posit itself firmly on the outside, and there's never any insight on the African perspective of the chaos that's been unleashed in the country. The reader views it in the same way as Hannah, a meaningless hell, where children turn from being adorable teenagers into merciless, psychopathic killers at the drop of a hat, in spite of a loving, stable upbringing. Why are Hannah's children transformed into monsters? The book offers no answers, leaving the reader to conclude that it must be because they're African, they belong to some 'Other' which a US citizen, even though she's their mother, will never be able to connect with. In spite of all her philosophising on her own fractured relationship with her parents, Hannah comes up with no rationale for what happens to her own offspring. Her quest is fruitless. She goes back to her farm. She is none the wiser. And neither, after her story, are we.

rainy season [w jose agualusa]

Rainy Season is composed of 9 sections, each of which consists of several miniature chapters of their own. The book seems at first somewhat lop-sided. The early sections are given over to an account of the life of a female Angolan poet, Lidia do Carmo Ferreira. (The author's use of the figure of a lost female poet having uncanny resonance with the work of Bolano.) Then the narrative moves forward in time, towards the seventies and the event of the Angolan revolution, when the Portuguese were overthrown. A host of characters are introduced, including Lidia's daughter, Pauleta, her flatmates and fellow political activists and local characters. The narrative feels somewhat random, and becomes hard to follow. The narrator's first person voice gradually becomes more important, and his story begins to be told.

For a while it seems as though the author's material is in danger of spiralling out of control. Rainy Season is a concise book, and the shifts from character to character, from Luanda to Lisbon to Berlin to Olinda and back to Angola seem too much for the narrative to bear. And then the story focuses in on the aftermath of the revolution. When Lidia, the narrator, and all the other sundry characters, become political prisoners, their lives at the mercy of whichever faction is dominant within the new Angola, riven by civil war.

In this coalescence, this pulling together of its divergent strands, the book changes gear, and like a puzzle where the pieces finally find their home, a terrible clarity emerges. The short, precise chapters offer all the information that the narrator has at his disposal. Information takes on a different quality within the confines of a prison, a prison lost in a lost conflict. Timelines are immaterial, and blurred. It might be a year between chapters, it might be ten. Information is a current that flows, rather than a clear chronology. Things are lost along the way. Some remain constant - such as the narrator's awareness of Lidia's fate; such as the presence, although not the pre-eminence, of death. The fate of tangential, marginal characters reveals as much as the fate of the figures at the heart of the story, a story whose tendrils stretch across the devastated land.

I think that I commented earlier about Agualusa that I wondered how his work might tackle the events of Angola's recent history. That at times his style seems too gossamer, too fragile. Here, those qualities are revealed to be a by-product of a world where there is no real expectation of survival, and the notion of history has become the loosest of dreams. The fragility of day-to-day existence permitting little space for reflection on what has caused the chaos, or where the chaos might lead. A time when everything seems marginal, precious, slight. Agualusa's book is like a spider's web, which somehow encompasses fifty years of history, a history which at any moment might have been blown away. In its opaque way, it reveals as much about the tragedy of political imprisonment, and the vicissitudes of late twentieth century living for so many societies, as many a weightier tome. In a world where words and stories are dangerous, his book suggests that even used sparingly, they retain great power, and his narrative reveals that a tragic order can be constructed out of what appears to be chaos.

I read it in stages, never quite knowing where it was taking me, finishing it on the train to Ipswich yesterday, astonished at its capacity to move me, something I'd never have guessed as I tried to make sense of the early sections, never knowing the power of the connections that would come to be revealed.

marat/ sade [d peter brook; w peter weiss, adrian mitchell)

This is a film of a stage play. The play takes place in a single room. It is not inherently cinematic. Watching it offers a partial, exacavatory experience of one of the most significant European theatre productions of the last century. Far from a satisfying experience, it is nevertheless compelling, and offers a fascinating insight into the career of Brook himself, the fate of British theatre, and the destiny of theatre per se. And if theatre be a mirror to the times, then it tells us a great deal about the way our society has evolved in the past fifty years.

Firstly, the play itself, is a minor masterpiece. Whilst it's well known that it deals with the French revolution, notably the assassination of Marat by Charlotte Corday, and it's also well known that the play is an enactment staged by the Marquis de Sade within the madhouse of Charenton, what is perhaps less well known is that it's set fifteen years or so after the events of the play have taken place, during the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. As such, Weiss not only creates a play within a play, but the temporal shift allows him to play with varying perspectives on the violence that the revolution generated. In 1964, when Brook staged the play, the issue of the role of violence as a tool to transform society was still one that could at least be contemplated; not least in a world where colonialism was still an oppressive force. Whilst we know that the French revolution was the cause of bloodshed, war and suffering, it was also the mechanism by which, in theory at least, France began the process of transformation into its modern state.

Theatre directors might have their philosophical streak, but they are also, by inclination, showmen. Brook takes the implicit agendas of Weiss' play and creates a vivid, non-stop carnival of theatricality. The stage is littered with the bodies of madmen and women who at any given moment might choose to lay their claim to dramatic attention. The film perhaps does not do full justice to the latent anarchy, save for the explosive final scene, (reminiscent of the end of that other great radical sixties work, Zabriskie Point), when chaos is allowed to reign. Brook's showmanship, and the rigourous brilliance of his cast, honed as a group within the RSC over the course of various productions, offers Weiss' intellectualism all the flesh and blood it needs to confront the audience with the consequences of the issues the script addresses; the limits of libertarianism, the inevitability of governmental constraint, the madness that underpins utopia. Whilst Marat/ Sade is perhaps conceived as something of a hymn to European radicalism, it would be easy to present the counter case, that Weiss and Brook are arguing for the importance of societal control over our more anarchic instincts which lead towards violence. Violence will always have a part to play in the ordering of society, and the question then becomes one of how that violence is managed. A Foucaultian thesis which is strengthened by the fact that De Sade's reference to the savage execution of a prisoner in Royalist pre-revolution France sounds identical to the example used by Foucault at the opening of Discipline and Punish.

Whatever the politico-philosophical arguments, what's clear is that at this point in its history, as it backed its greatest director, the RSC was an organisation prepared to engage with a kind of daring, neo-intellectual theatre, one that sought to examine and comment on its times. In retrospect, it might be seen to be the high point of its existence as a cultural body. It's not entirely the RSC's fault that it has subsequently become something of a factory, producing work which is primarily there to keep the tourists happy as they pitch up at Stratford for their dose of Shakespeare. It's more a reflection of the way British society has evolved, a country trading on its past in order to earn a living in the future, an attitude that is inherently conservative. Within this context, the notion of theatre being a medium for examining the philosophical framework of the culture/ society still survives, but within carefully demarcated zones. The madness has been placed under control, allowed to parade itself from time to time, but on the whole a policy of stability is pursued, in a bid to minimise risk and ensure steady if unspectacular returns.

the gate [w francois bizot]

Some people flirt with danger, some people become acquainted with it, and some have lived with it. Bizot undoubtably belongs to the latter category, as his book documents the time he was held captive by the Khmer Rouge, barely escaping with his life.

The Gate is an eye-witness account of the early days of the Cambodian genocide, written by a French Buddhist scholar whose love affair with the country turned spectacularly sour. However, his affection for the people of that country shines through, and is even discernible in his relationship with his chief captor. The young Bizot develops a complex relationship with Douch, a man who would later find his inner mass murderer. At the time Bizot knew him, the revolution had yet to take on its full genocidal scale, but the conversations documented between the prisoner and his guard go some way towards revealing how an attitude that most would describe as inhuman has its origins in a warped idealism, the by-product of a terrifying faith.

John Le Carre writes an eloquent introduction to the book, and it becomes clear that something of a myth grew up around Bizot. Much of the book feels like a somewhat regulation account of remarkable times, but on occasion there are flashes of insight into the terror that is engulfing Cambodia, a terror that is latent not to a culture, but to humanity, that add another dimension to Bizot's recollections; reminding the reader that he has known things which we, should we be lucky, should never have to confront.

C.I.C.T. (d. peter brook)

I recently had a go at reading Moonlight, Pinter's last play. It had its moments, but I couldn't engage with it. There's something strange about the last work of those who might be genii. The ghost of what has gone before, allied to the constant desire to convey. I also wondered if art isn't, to some extent, age specific. Things that appeal in youth perhaps pall in middle age. If this logic is valid, then those works aimed at old age are the ones least likely to be understood, both because the elderly remain marginalised within our culture, but also because old age still seems so distant to this writer, even if it's not as distant as it once was. To phrase a truism.

Brook's new play, the first of his I've seen, deals with Colonialism and its attitudes, faith, and, to a certain extent, the meaning of life. Although many of the all male cast are youthful, at the heart is the notion of the legacy or inheritance a prophet leaves behind.

The stagecraft has the light touch one would expect from the master of the empty space. Yet, it's also obvious that imaginative gestures which were breathtaking thirty or forty years ago, have now become commonplace. The simplicity that Brook unearthed has become integrated into a mainstream, if not always at the level of the big budget theatres, certainly within any T.I.E. show, or international touring piece. The likes of Cheek by Jowl, Goold, Meckler to name but a few, have all taken on board Brook's ability to play with realism and space, creating an alternative theatrical universe, and what was once new is no longer.

The play itself explored both the notions of faith and French colonialism in early 20th century West Africa. The seeds of key conflicts of today are apparent within the text as it probes a localised, pre-emptive clash between mystical Islam and Western values. The audience at the Barbican seemed only barely engaged. All of us had come to pay homage; listening to the play's words was a secondary exercise. Some of the dialogues about the nature of faith and the meaning of life became abstract, and hard to follow. More than one punter dozed.

At the end, the actors left the stage. The lone musician, surrounded by his tools, let the music still. The audience sat in silence. No one knew if there was another trick up the director's sleeve, or if this silence was all that remained. The silence held. No one knew what to do. The uncertainty contained a kind of magic. It's the simplest of devices but all the same, after treading water for an hour and a half, suddenly we were in at the deep end, having to take responsibility.

The applause, when it arrived, was fulsome.

precious (d. lee daniels, w. geoffrey fletcher & sapphire)

New York, in the early 80s. Pre-Giuliani and zero tolerance. Closer to Carpenter's Escape From New York and Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. A time when there was still a sense that the city had that edge which it could be argued is part and parcel of a great city, the product of classes nuzzling up to one another, the presence of what could be deemed an underclass, the knowledge that whilst for some, life is a treadmill in the shadow of affluence, for others it is still, as has always been the norm rather than the exception, a battle for survival.

Nowadays, these cities are more likely to be found in the emerging economies, which are producing great wealth, but the majority of whose populations still live in a poverty which those in the West, even the poorest, might struggle to understand. New York, from what I can understand, has been cleaned up. The poorest of the poor have become invisible, as they are in my city. The argument isn't whether this is for the better or the worse, not here at any rate; merely to observe that Precious harks back to that time. In spite of its grittiness there's an element of nostalgia at play in the film, which is a paean to another time, another New York.

As such, there's a warmth to the film, which far outweighs the supposedly off-putting material. The characters who Precious meets, and who contribute to a kind of redemption, from her classmates to the male nurse to the social worker, are all sympathetic and humane. After emerging from the abusive hell of her family, Precious discovers that goodness does exist, indeed it is all around her. There's something Dickensian about the story, as the inarticulate and morose teenager finds her voice, and discovers that thing which Obamaites might term 'hope'.

Lee Daniels, the director, in association with his screenwriter and Sapphire, the author of the original novel, use restraint to ensure a fidelity to this journey. The director isn't afraid to let a long scene play itself out, allowing the full horror of the reality of what's happened to Precious to register on the face of her social worker. The film is given a muted grade, dulling the colours of the streets through which Precious passes. Some critics seem to feel that the film shows an exploitative attitude towards poverty, but this seems to miss the point. It's not the story of how someone was abused; it's the story of how someone discovers a way to recover from that abuse. The fact that 'the city' is a key player in the process perhaps adds to the sense that in spite of the city's greater poverty in that day and age, with all the ills that poverty brings with it, there might also have been a greater stock of kindness within its walls. Although that attitude too could be nothing more than a misplaced romanticism, something all nostalgia flirts with.