Seconds Out is a playful novel, reminiscent of the work of Cercas, which explores the nature of time, among other things. It's based around the 17 seconds that occurred between Jack Dempsey being knocked down and returning to the ring during a 1923 heavyweight boxing title fight by the Argentine challenger Luis Firpo. Even those with no interest in boxing will be aware that 17 seconds doesn't sound right. Standard procedure, which was not applied in this instance, is a count of ten seconds. Dempsey gets off the hook, returns to the fight and wins. This twist and the way in which the news is reported in Argentina has catastrophic effects. The book has a chapter for each of the 17 seconds, examining the incident from the perspective of Dempsey himself, a photographer and the referee. Extending the investigation of the moment, the book is framed by the device of two Patagonian journalists on a local paper who have to write an article fifty years afterwards on an event from 1923. Verani is writing about the fight whilst Ledesma, his colleague, writes about the simultaneous visit of Strauss' Viennese orchestra and their playing of a Mahler symphony.
Using disparate ingredients, Kohan stitches together a loose tapestry of information, bringing Mahler's biography and early 20th Century Argentine history together. It makes for a strange, breezy read. The presence of a mysterious narrator, who's trying to get to the bottom of a suicide which occurred at the time of the fight and used to be a junior to the two journalists, adds to the sense of a narrative which is always on the point of revealing a great secret. In truth, the revelations which do occur seem somehow underwhelming. There's something of a flawed conjuring trick about the book: it grips the attention with the anticipation of the trick to come; but the trick itself is less impressive than the set-up. However, it may be that that's part of the point. It's an anti-narrative. From the point of view of an Argentine, the wrong man wins and history forsakes the challenger. Argentina becomes a place where the likes of Strauss never visit. The clock runs backwards. Seventeen seconds that changed the perspective of a nation, Kohan might be suggesting.
Sunday, 20 March 2011
Thursday, 17 March 2011
norwegian wood (d. anh hang trun)
My erstwhile friend Mr C, at a point in his life where he was internet dating, used to say that there were two things which every woman he met put at a premium. One was lazy Sunday mornings. The other was Murakami. Personally, I resisted getting caught up in the craze for the Japanese writer that seemed to sweep London. It's to the credit of Mr Trun that his film version of the successful book leads me to think my snobbery was, as usual, misplaced.
On one level, there's something scarily melodramatic about the story. Girl's boyfriend kills himself, boyfriend's best friend falls in love with girl, who can't get over her ex. Then someone else falls for best friend who can't get over girl. Who kills herself and thereby cuts Gordian knot. There's an extended anguish scene as Watanabe suffers beside a suddenly even more portentous sea after Naoko's demise which in another film would be teeth-pullingly indulgent. But somehow, Trun gets away with it. Just like he gets away with the slight vaguaries of the script as it attempts to squash the novelist's narrative into cinematic form. There's some intriguing but redundant social protest scenes in the opening act, and the exact purpose of Wanatabe's decadent friend Nagaswa remains unclear. Nevertheless, the film, which is over two hours long, gradually seems to find its groove. Wanatabe's tragic compromise becomes more and more understandable. The tortured architectonics of love, something that has to be endured as much as savoured, slowly make some kind of sense.
The scale of the film allows the director to investigate an idea of romantic love, its longeurs, its wayward course, its sometime futility, in a way that a 'tighter' narrative might struggle to achieve. This is territory which the novel usually deals with more convincingly than cinema, because the novelist has dispensation to let the story wander where it will. Had the screenplay police got hold of this film, they would have squeezed the heart out of it. Young lovers do tend to spend a lot of time wandering around aimlessly, trying to find their way, and Trun's depiction of Wanatabe's puzzling journey captures this acutely.
Well, anyway, it convinced me. Maybe it's down to the lush cinematography and the winsome Japanese actors. Maybe I'm seduced by the exoticism. But to me it feels like, fifteen years after he made Cyclo, Trun's almost lazy style was made for Murakami's romantic tale. To be watched on a Sunday afternoon. After spending the morning being lazy yourself.
On one level, there's something scarily melodramatic about the story. Girl's boyfriend kills himself, boyfriend's best friend falls in love with girl, who can't get over her ex. Then someone else falls for best friend who can't get over girl. Who kills herself and thereby cuts Gordian knot. There's an extended anguish scene as Watanabe suffers beside a suddenly even more portentous sea after Naoko's demise which in another film would be teeth-pullingly indulgent. But somehow, Trun gets away with it. Just like he gets away with the slight vaguaries of the script as it attempts to squash the novelist's narrative into cinematic form. There's some intriguing but redundant social protest scenes in the opening act, and the exact purpose of Wanatabe's decadent friend Nagaswa remains unclear. Nevertheless, the film, which is over two hours long, gradually seems to find its groove. Wanatabe's tragic compromise becomes more and more understandable. The tortured architectonics of love, something that has to be endured as much as savoured, slowly make some kind of sense.
The scale of the film allows the director to investigate an idea of romantic love, its longeurs, its wayward course, its sometime futility, in a way that a 'tighter' narrative might struggle to achieve. This is territory which the novel usually deals with more convincingly than cinema, because the novelist has dispensation to let the story wander where it will. Had the screenplay police got hold of this film, they would have squeezed the heart out of it. Young lovers do tend to spend a lot of time wandering around aimlessly, trying to find their way, and Trun's depiction of Wanatabe's puzzling journey captures this acutely.
Well, anyway, it convinced me. Maybe it's down to the lush cinematography and the winsome Japanese actors. Maybe I'm seduced by the exoticism. But to me it feels like, fifteen years after he made Cyclo, Trun's almost lazy style was made for Murakami's romantic tale. To be watched on a Sunday afternoon. After spending the morning being lazy yourself.
Monday, 14 March 2011
the collaborator (mirza waheed)
I heard someone talking on the radio the other day - world service, now rediscovered as the finest the BBC has to offer - talking about the traditions of Middle Eastern literature. And how it was hard for the West to understand to what extent literature from that region is of necessity a literature of protest. He was editing a collection, which I would buy if I could remember it's name, so it felt like he knew what he was talking about. I think the point was something along the lines of the fact that the mere act of writing fiction within the context of an autocratic regime meant to potentially commit an act of transgression.
Waheed's book comes from the furthest reaches of the Middle East, the land where the Mongols built their palaces and dreamed of going to die. A land famed for its beauty, divided in two, perched in the Himalayas. The land known as Kashmir. This is also a book of protest. It tells the simple story of a young man who grows up in his Kashmiri village with his friends, near the Line of Control, only to find that his friends all leave for Pakistan in order to train to become fighters in the liberation movement, whilst he is left behind. And then how the village is taken over by the Indian army and, in the space of a few months, destroyed. A couple of acts of savage barbarism are enough to force all of the village to flee, save for the young man and his parents. The youth is coerced into working for the Indian army ad dreams of killing Captain Kadian, the man who sends him on his missions to survey the remote killing fields. It is the grimmest of rites of passage as well as a lifting of the veil on the atrocities performed on a regular basis.
When we were there, in 2009, we stayed on a houseboat on Dal Lake. The man who looked after us was one of the saddest men I'd ever met. His name, he said, was Jimmy. He was short, he shivered all the time, when he talked it left you feeling suicidal. Yet it was clear that whatever misfortune had afflicted Jimmy, he was a good man who wanted the best for you, the strangers passing through his world. Jimmy came from a village several miles from Srinigar. He talked a bit about it. He told us how it used to have electricity but now it didn't. He hinted at army brutality and tragedy. If you asked him more, he shook his head and looked away. The trauma he had lived through didn't appear to be something you could 'get over'. Jimmy was scarred for good.
Reading The Collaborator offers more of an insight into the unnamed things that Jimmy's village, in keeping with villages all over Kashmir, have suffered. The book offers what is a fictionalised account of what really happened, as seen through the eyes of a Kashmiri writer. It's not an account that the Indian government would accept or wish to see propagated. At a time when people are rebelling against repressive regimes across the Middle East and beyond, Waheed offers some insight into what they're up against and what it is like to be pushed to the point where you would rather die in the cause of freedom than soldier on under the yoke. Under these circumstances, it becomes the task of the writer to lead the way and speak out. The very act of writing becomes an act of protest.
Waheed's book comes from the furthest reaches of the Middle East, the land where the Mongols built their palaces and dreamed of going to die. A land famed for its beauty, divided in two, perched in the Himalayas. The land known as Kashmir. This is also a book of protest. It tells the simple story of a young man who grows up in his Kashmiri village with his friends, near the Line of Control, only to find that his friends all leave for Pakistan in order to train to become fighters in the liberation movement, whilst he is left behind. And then how the village is taken over by the Indian army and, in the space of a few months, destroyed. A couple of acts of savage barbarism are enough to force all of the village to flee, save for the young man and his parents. The youth is coerced into working for the Indian army ad dreams of killing Captain Kadian, the man who sends him on his missions to survey the remote killing fields. It is the grimmest of rites of passage as well as a lifting of the veil on the atrocities performed on a regular basis.
When we were there, in 2009, we stayed on a houseboat on Dal Lake. The man who looked after us was one of the saddest men I'd ever met. His name, he said, was Jimmy. He was short, he shivered all the time, when he talked it left you feeling suicidal. Yet it was clear that whatever misfortune had afflicted Jimmy, he was a good man who wanted the best for you, the strangers passing through his world. Jimmy came from a village several miles from Srinigar. He talked a bit about it. He told us how it used to have electricity but now it didn't. He hinted at army brutality and tragedy. If you asked him more, he shook his head and looked away. The trauma he had lived through didn't appear to be something you could 'get over'. Jimmy was scarred for good.
Reading The Collaborator offers more of an insight into the unnamed things that Jimmy's village, in keeping with villages all over Kashmir, have suffered. The book offers what is a fictionalised account of what really happened, as seen through the eyes of a Kashmiri writer. It's not an account that the Indian government would accept or wish to see propagated. At a time when people are rebelling against repressive regimes across the Middle East and beyond, Waheed offers some insight into what they're up against and what it is like to be pushed to the point where you would rather die in the cause of freedom than soldier on under the yoke. Under these circumstances, it becomes the task of the writer to lead the way and speak out. The very act of writing becomes an act of protest.
Saturday, 12 March 2011
archipelago (w&d joanna hogg)
Joanna Hogg is back and she's not taking any prisoners. Archipelago contains perhaps even fewer moments of drama than Unrelated. The takes are even longer. Less things happen. She's pushing you to the limit of your endurance. Single-handedly, Joanna Hogg is creating the new Anglo-Saxon anti-Hollywood, and she's doing it a cinema near you, now!
That last part might be a case of distortion. Nevertheless, the Renoir was doing good business of a Friday evening. There might be a market for the middle-class Ozu homage after all. Or is it just Mike Leigh for the middle classes without the sentimentalism?
Funnily enough, I went to see it with my sister. Archipelago is a film about British families, and, as noted, specifically the more affluent British, the type who can afford to rent a nice house in the Scilly Isles for a fortnight, with comely domestic help thrown in. With her acute observational style, Hogg successfully skewers the gauche British approach to our emotional lives. Edward, about to go away for a year as a volunteer Aids worker in Africa, is not allowed to bring his girlfriend. His sister, Cynthia, is a minor hysteric and their mother is clearly in the throes of breaking up with their father, who never appears. The arguments all happen off-screen. On screen, the most anyone's prepared to do is allude to a problem, never address it. All of which seemed entirely accurate, and, as I say, seated next to my sister, knowing as we do something of this kind of world, it should perhaps have felt a little close to the bone. But I can't really say it did.
Archipelago follows a similar model to Unrelated. A family on holiday, their dynamics explored, with an outsider present acting as a kind of measure of the family's humanity. The shots are also measured, and the cinematography captures a slightly joyless, sub-Tropical beauty of the Autumnal Scilly Islands, presenting a washed-out, colourless palate similar to the range of the family's emotional register. In a way, this is a faultless film, but it's faultless because its parameters are so clearly defined. In one of the more affecting moments of the film, the posh artist friend of the family talks to Edward about finding your course and sticking to it, learning how to be strong in order to be able to do the thing you want to do, in his case art. It's one of the few moments when it feels as though the screenplay is going beyond gently poking fun at its listless characters.
Perhaps he speaks a little of Hogg's own efforts to make the films she wants to make. Which is admirable, and it's hard to criticise someone with a such a unique vision. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that perhaps I should have felt a little more uncomfortable, given the circumstances under which I was viewing the film. Also, that this accomplished director might perhaps gain from veering off-course, rather than sticking to her guns, in her next re-imagining of British cinema.
That last part might be a case of distortion. Nevertheless, the Renoir was doing good business of a Friday evening. There might be a market for the middle-class Ozu homage after all. Or is it just Mike Leigh for the middle classes without the sentimentalism?
Funnily enough, I went to see it with my sister. Archipelago is a film about British families, and, as noted, specifically the more affluent British, the type who can afford to rent a nice house in the Scilly Isles for a fortnight, with comely domestic help thrown in. With her acute observational style, Hogg successfully skewers the gauche British approach to our emotional lives. Edward, about to go away for a year as a volunteer Aids worker in Africa, is not allowed to bring his girlfriend. His sister, Cynthia, is a minor hysteric and their mother is clearly in the throes of breaking up with their father, who never appears. The arguments all happen off-screen. On screen, the most anyone's prepared to do is allude to a problem, never address it. All of which seemed entirely accurate, and, as I say, seated next to my sister, knowing as we do something of this kind of world, it should perhaps have felt a little close to the bone. But I can't really say it did.
Archipelago follows a similar model to Unrelated. A family on holiday, their dynamics explored, with an outsider present acting as a kind of measure of the family's humanity. The shots are also measured, and the cinematography captures a slightly joyless, sub-Tropical beauty of the Autumnal Scilly Islands, presenting a washed-out, colourless palate similar to the range of the family's emotional register. In a way, this is a faultless film, but it's faultless because its parameters are so clearly defined. In one of the more affecting moments of the film, the posh artist friend of the family talks to Edward about finding your course and sticking to it, learning how to be strong in order to be able to do the thing you want to do, in his case art. It's one of the few moments when it feels as though the screenplay is going beyond gently poking fun at its listless characters.
Perhaps he speaks a little of Hogg's own efforts to make the films she wants to make. Which is admirable, and it's hard to criticise someone with a such a unique vision. Nevertheless, I can't help feeling that perhaps I should have felt a little more uncomfortable, given the circumstances under which I was viewing the film. Also, that this accomplished director might perhaps gain from veering off-course, rather than sticking to her guns, in her next re-imagining of British cinema.
Thursday, 10 March 2011
submarine (w&d richard ayoade)
The opening shot is of a teenager in his Welsh home, plastered with carefully selected posters and an unsubtle image of a submarine. The teenager's voiceover kicks in. It all seems dangerously familiar. A British coming-of-age comedy drama. The student audience is laughing within seconds. I get that sinking feeling.
Then, within minutes, it goes. Don't judge a book by the cover, the saying goes, and in spite of the fact that from the cover it looks like this is going to be gauche, in spite of the fact it has a cameo by Considine as a wacky neighbour, in spite of the fear that this will be Gavin and Stacey, the movie - in spite of all this, the film confounds the sceptic and something beautiful emerges from this potential mush.
Flair is a rare beast amongst British directors, and flair with a hint of heart is even rarer. With Submarine, Ayoade, however, demonstrates that he's in possession of this rare combination. The film is beautifully shot. The nouvelle vague homage doesn't feel forced. And the teenage protagonists, odd couple Oliver and Jordana, not only convince, they actually have you rooting for them. Because, of course, of their flaws, their horribleness, their awkwardness, their teenage selfishness. At one point, the film captures a conversation between them where they're not speaking. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, think back perhaps to those endless late adolescent hiatuses of love, when neither party can find the words to move on, when all avenues seem blocked, when it seems like this moment will just never end. Well, it resonated with me anyway.
After the show, the DOP, Erik Wilson gave a long talk to the alumni of his ex-film school, where the screening took place. He explained that Ayoade handed him over 120 films to watch for his prep. (He admitted he hadn't watched all of them.) Somehow, Ayoade has pulled off the trick of transforming his influences into something original. Just as each and every one of us has to live our own personal coming-of-age narrative, Submarine succeeds in convincing that Oliver's coming-of-age story is like none that has ever come before. Which is no small feat. Largely because at heart it's so French, this felt like one of the most bracingly intelligent movies to have come out of the UK in a long while, all the more so because it dresses up its intelligence in a sheen of underwhelming teenage angst.
Then, within minutes, it goes. Don't judge a book by the cover, the saying goes, and in spite of the fact that from the cover it looks like this is going to be gauche, in spite of the fact it has a cameo by Considine as a wacky neighbour, in spite of the fear that this will be Gavin and Stacey, the movie - in spite of all this, the film confounds the sceptic and something beautiful emerges from this potential mush.
Flair is a rare beast amongst British directors, and flair with a hint of heart is even rarer. With Submarine, Ayoade, however, demonstrates that he's in possession of this rare combination. The film is beautifully shot. The nouvelle vague homage doesn't feel forced. And the teenage protagonists, odd couple Oliver and Jordana, not only convince, they actually have you rooting for them. Because, of course, of their flaws, their horribleness, their awkwardness, their teenage selfishness. At one point, the film captures a conversation between them where they're not speaking. If that sounds like a contradiction in terms, think back perhaps to those endless late adolescent hiatuses of love, when neither party can find the words to move on, when all avenues seem blocked, when it seems like this moment will just never end. Well, it resonated with me anyway.
After the show, the DOP, Erik Wilson gave a long talk to the alumni of his ex-film school, where the screening took place. He explained that Ayoade handed him over 120 films to watch for his prep. (He admitted he hadn't watched all of them.) Somehow, Ayoade has pulled off the trick of transforming his influences into something original. Just as each and every one of us has to live our own personal coming-of-age narrative, Submarine succeeds in convincing that Oliver's coming-of-age story is like none that has ever come before. Which is no small feat. Largely because at heart it's so French, this felt like one of the most bracingly intelligent movies to have come out of the UK in a long while, all the more so because it dresses up its intelligence in a sheen of underwhelming teenage angst.
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
villa [guillermo calderon]
The upstairs theatre at the Royal Court was more or less full for the reading of the first of Calderon's double bill, the penultimate event in the theatre's Latin American season. Which means about a hundred people witnessed what is likely to be one of the finest piece's of playwriting to be seen in a London theatre this, or any other year.
Three women sit on the stage, scripts in hand, and vote. We don't know what they're voting for. We don't know who they are. We don't have a clue what this is all about. Gradually it becomes apparent that the play, Villa, takes its title from the debate conducted by the women about what kind of memorial should be created to mark the spot within Santiago where Pinochet's torturers conducted some of the most heinous crimes. Each one has her own idea, which she promotes. They vote again. Democracy seems flawed. They can't decide. A spoilt vote has as much value as an 'actual' vote.
On Saturday, at a seminar about Latin America, Calderon stated that for him, theatre had to be prepared to be a reminder of the bad things within society, something which in a supposedly booming post-dictatorship Chile is all the more important. The job of theatre, whether it likes it or not, is to be both the bearer of bad tidings as well as a medium that ensures the past is not forgotten.
Whilst this sounds like a grim remit, what Calderon's own words did not reveal, but his play does, is that the bringing of bad tidings is also an act of seduction. There's no point alienating people if you want them to engage. Villa, somehow, almost mysteriously, succeeds in infiltrating the full horror not only of what has gone before, but of our society's desperate attempts to find a flawed reconciliation with what has gone before, into a text which is funny, charming and has you on the edge of your seat. To such an extent that, in a play which examines the contradictions of using art to commemorate acts of political violence, the viewer doesn't know if they should not feel some latent guilt in the pleasure to be derived from the playwright's brilliance, as the text lays bare the full extent of the Pinochet regime's inhumanity.
This is a diversion, but it seems to me that the really great dramatists are those who understand the curious semiotic of the English word for a work of theatre. We call it a play. When you are lucky enough to come across a writer who really knows what they're doing, the play feels like an act of play, and the theatre feels like a place of play. This is not to say that serious issues are belittled. It means to say that the writer allows his or her audience to re-connect with their capacity to engage with the world on a level removed from the everyday, to re-form it. So that it can be seen anew. Calderon's work has elements of Beckett, Pinter and Pirandello. It re-opens old wounds but does so with a surgeon's precision and brilliance, so much so that it's only when the wound is gaping and the blood is flowing that we, the audience, realise quite what we've got ourselves into. Or what he, the playwright, has got us into.
Calderon himself directed the play and the impeccable work of his three actresses seems like a testament to the director's mastery of his own text. At the end of the play, in amongst all the other questions the play provokes, including whether I should really be typing this on a Mac, and to what extent is architecture fascist, or rather to what extent does modernity tip-toe in the shoes of our fascist past, or, to what extent are the tools we supposedly use to engage with society's ills actually tools which inure us against society's ills or - Well, let's be honest there's so many questions coming out of this play we, the audience are like kids in a sweet shop -
In amongst these questions two more banal ones crossed my mind. What kind of experience will Discurso, Villa's companion piece, which is staged tomorrow, offer? And secondly, why, given their support of this remarkable writer, has the Court not gone further and offered London a full production of the play, rather than just a reading?
Three women sit on the stage, scripts in hand, and vote. We don't know what they're voting for. We don't know who they are. We don't have a clue what this is all about. Gradually it becomes apparent that the play, Villa, takes its title from the debate conducted by the women about what kind of memorial should be created to mark the spot within Santiago where Pinochet's torturers conducted some of the most heinous crimes. Each one has her own idea, which she promotes. They vote again. Democracy seems flawed. They can't decide. A spoilt vote has as much value as an 'actual' vote.
On Saturday, at a seminar about Latin America, Calderon stated that for him, theatre had to be prepared to be a reminder of the bad things within society, something which in a supposedly booming post-dictatorship Chile is all the more important. The job of theatre, whether it likes it or not, is to be both the bearer of bad tidings as well as a medium that ensures the past is not forgotten.
Whilst this sounds like a grim remit, what Calderon's own words did not reveal, but his play does, is that the bringing of bad tidings is also an act of seduction. There's no point alienating people if you want them to engage. Villa, somehow, almost mysteriously, succeeds in infiltrating the full horror not only of what has gone before, but of our society's desperate attempts to find a flawed reconciliation with what has gone before, into a text which is funny, charming and has you on the edge of your seat. To such an extent that, in a play which examines the contradictions of using art to commemorate acts of political violence, the viewer doesn't know if they should not feel some latent guilt in the pleasure to be derived from the playwright's brilliance, as the text lays bare the full extent of the Pinochet regime's inhumanity.
This is a diversion, but it seems to me that the really great dramatists are those who understand the curious semiotic of the English word for a work of theatre. We call it a play. When you are lucky enough to come across a writer who really knows what they're doing, the play feels like an act of play, and the theatre feels like a place of play. This is not to say that serious issues are belittled. It means to say that the writer allows his or her audience to re-connect with their capacity to engage with the world on a level removed from the everyday, to re-form it. So that it can be seen anew. Calderon's work has elements of Beckett, Pinter and Pirandello. It re-opens old wounds but does so with a surgeon's precision and brilliance, so much so that it's only when the wound is gaping and the blood is flowing that we, the audience, realise quite what we've got ourselves into. Or what he, the playwright, has got us into.
Calderon himself directed the play and the impeccable work of his three actresses seems like a testament to the director's mastery of his own text. At the end of the play, in amongst all the other questions the play provokes, including whether I should really be typing this on a Mac, and to what extent is architecture fascist, or rather to what extent does modernity tip-toe in the shoes of our fascist past, or, to what extent are the tools we supposedly use to engage with society's ills actually tools which inure us against society's ills or - Well, let's be honest there's so many questions coming out of this play we, the audience are like kids in a sweet shop -
In amongst these questions two more banal ones crossed my mind. What kind of experience will Discurso, Villa's companion piece, which is staged tomorrow, offer? And secondly, why, given their support of this remarkable writer, has the Court not gone further and offered London a full production of the play, rather than just a reading?
Sunday, 27 February 2011
animal kingdom (d. david michôd)
I don't know if this is down to my state of mind at the moment or the film itself. Animal Kingdom's merits as a film are indisputable. The acting is impressive, the story-telling is effective, there's a bleached deadness to the grade and sufficient longeurs in the editing to allow the film to breathe. I was engaged throughout. Yet even as I left the cinema the film had already washed over me and now, less than two days since seeing it, I struggle to recollect any overwhelming feeling in response to it. As I say, I don't know if this is due to the film or my own personal sense of current alienation. Perhaps, being a film that in some ways deals with the notion of alienation, through an impressive central performance from James Frecheville, it hit a nerve that is partially dead.
There's a lot of Scorcese in the background in the tale of a crime family from the Melbourne suburbs. Scorcese gets everywhere these days. You can't move for Scorcese. The slow-motion takes, reminiscent of Mean Streets, were one of the film's weaker tropes. However, early Scorcese works not just because of its vivid technical qualities, but also because of the film-makers ability to present his world, the edges of Little Italy. In a similar way, Michod captures the low-level Anglo-Saxon tropicality of an Australian suburb. Seemingly the antithesis to gloomy , rainy England, in actuality Australia sometimes feels like a Platonic experiment at the creation of a sun-bleached nirvana that has gone weirdly off the rails. And Michod gets to grip with this sense of unease, showing us a society where sociopaths determine social structures and no-one can escape their influence.
As I say, there's much to admire in this film. I have a feeling Michod will make more films and become successful. It will be interesting to see if he stays in his native land or not. The offers will be flooding in. Making a good crime thriller is one of the hardest things to do. The audience doesn't just have to buy into the actions of characters at odds with society; they also have to believe in their world. Animal Kingdom achieves all that. Even if it leaves you as numb as J, it's monosyllabic protagonist, a young man whose future seems doomed both before the film begins and after the credits have rolled.
There's a lot of Scorcese in the background in the tale of a crime family from the Melbourne suburbs. Scorcese gets everywhere these days. You can't move for Scorcese. The slow-motion takes, reminiscent of Mean Streets, were one of the film's weaker tropes. However, early Scorcese works not just because of its vivid technical qualities, but also because of the film-makers ability to present his world, the edges of Little Italy. In a similar way, Michod captures the low-level Anglo-Saxon tropicality of an Australian suburb. Seemingly the antithesis to gloomy , rainy England, in actuality Australia sometimes feels like a Platonic experiment at the creation of a sun-bleached nirvana that has gone weirdly off the rails. And Michod gets to grip with this sense of unease, showing us a society where sociopaths determine social structures and no-one can escape their influence.
As I say, there's much to admire in this film. I have a feeling Michod will make more films and become successful. It will be interesting to see if he stays in his native land or not. The offers will be flooding in. Making a good crime thriller is one of the hardest things to do. The audience doesn't just have to buy into the actions of characters at odds with society; they also have to believe in their world. Animal Kingdom achieves all that. Even if it leaves you as numb as J, it's monosyllabic protagonist, a young man whose future seems doomed both before the film begins and after the credits have rolled.
Saturday, 19 February 2011
inside job (d. charles ferguson; w. chad beck, adam bolt)
1. Whilst the financial crisis of '08, (since it has failed to obtain a less prosaic monicker), was occurring, and indeed it its aftermath, experts and laymen alike would say, and still say, that the world of derivatives and credit swaps and the like was so baffling that its complexity in some way became linked to the notion of a black hole of (toxic) money. The banks and their experts had created a black hole of knowledge, something so devious that it had outrun even the gurus of the financial world. As though that knowledge had in some way morphed into an anti-knowledge, one capable of bringing down the whole house of cards. Inside Job, with the help of a few simple diagrams, comprehensively punctures that myth. It's not that complicated. People knew what they were doing. They are responsible. Not the anti-knowledge.
2. This clarity extends itself to the interviewing style. We never see the interviewer, or interviewers. But we hear their voice. Common sense is a somewhat ephemeral concept which can doubtless be manipulated. But when an interviewer asks a perfectly reasonable question and is rebuffed, the confidence of the interviewer in resisting the rebuff reminds the viewer of its common sense. Does it matter that an expert changes the name of his paper from 'Stability in Iceland' to 'Instability in Iceland'? Not a lot, in the wider scheme of things, but revealing the expert's reaction to the disclosure of this fact helps to reveal the levels of duplicity and intellectual laziness necessary to construct and support a system as catastrophic as the one that was constructed, with the expert's help. If the interviewer were an actor we would be lauding his understated brilliance.
3. The words 'holy cow' in the mouth of a Frenchwoman are surprisingly potent.
4. I watched this in a cinema in Notting Hill. The audience was not, I'd imagine, what could be described as downtrodden. They gasped in amazement at the film's revelations. What happened in 08 in some ways transcends political boundaries. Which is not to say it was not the work and product of right wing thinking, but is to say that the creators of the economic model which lead to '08 were not acting out of an ideological instinct. Unless greed is ideological. What the film shows is the complete lack of any ethical dimension to the actions of those promulgating and profiting from an economic model they themselves instigated. In that sense this class (a tiny elite with appropriate intellectual underpinning) seems to embody a form of fascism, whereby the actions of the individual have become entirely disassociated from the actions of society. The miracle of all this, which perhaps encouraged their sociopathy, is that they are the ones whom society chose to reward or allowed to be rewarded on what can only be described as a disproportionate scale.
5. It is a pity, as well as presumably revealing, that the film didn't succeed in conducting an interview with any single banker working for one of the significant corporate players during the events of '08.
6. Who really matters? Mervyn King appears in one shot in this film. He is not name-checked.
6. The cinematography is impressive. If ever a documentary could get away with sweeping helicopter takes of NY riverfront, this is it. All to often a documentary's aesthetics get in the way of its intentions. In this case, the film cannot afford not to be watched because its aesthetics could be dismissed as being those of a low-budget attention seeker.
7. Final point. It's not my style to bullet point a review, but in some ways Inside Job seems such an important film, that the critic's job with regard to it is not to give an opinion, but to attempt to highlight why it should be seen. Furthermore, it will be ignored and tarred with the accusation of being in some ways ideological. Because merely to document what occurs in certain parts of our world is deemed 'left wing'. [There will be those who say it is left wing to watch Al-Jazeera when today, of all days, shows why it is an imperative if you regard news as being a source of information regarding what's going on in the world.] If Inside Job has an axe to grind it is that the events which lead up to the financial crisis of '08 have been ignored, marginalised or mystified by mainstream media. Which allows politicians to do the same thing. Next time this kind of financial collapse occurs, the outcomes will be even more malignant than in '08. And we still don't have any real idea of the full cost of '08.
2. This clarity extends itself to the interviewing style. We never see the interviewer, or interviewers. But we hear their voice. Common sense is a somewhat ephemeral concept which can doubtless be manipulated. But when an interviewer asks a perfectly reasonable question and is rebuffed, the confidence of the interviewer in resisting the rebuff reminds the viewer of its common sense. Does it matter that an expert changes the name of his paper from 'Stability in Iceland' to 'Instability in Iceland'? Not a lot, in the wider scheme of things, but revealing the expert's reaction to the disclosure of this fact helps to reveal the levels of duplicity and intellectual laziness necessary to construct and support a system as catastrophic as the one that was constructed, with the expert's help. If the interviewer were an actor we would be lauding his understated brilliance.
3. The words 'holy cow' in the mouth of a Frenchwoman are surprisingly potent.
4. I watched this in a cinema in Notting Hill. The audience was not, I'd imagine, what could be described as downtrodden. They gasped in amazement at the film's revelations. What happened in 08 in some ways transcends political boundaries. Which is not to say it was not the work and product of right wing thinking, but is to say that the creators of the economic model which lead to '08 were not acting out of an ideological instinct. Unless greed is ideological. What the film shows is the complete lack of any ethical dimension to the actions of those promulgating and profiting from an economic model they themselves instigated. In that sense this class (a tiny elite with appropriate intellectual underpinning) seems to embody a form of fascism, whereby the actions of the individual have become entirely disassociated from the actions of society. The miracle of all this, which perhaps encouraged their sociopathy, is that they are the ones whom society chose to reward or allowed to be rewarded on what can only be described as a disproportionate scale.
5. It is a pity, as well as presumably revealing, that the film didn't succeed in conducting an interview with any single banker working for one of the significant corporate players during the events of '08.
6. Who really matters? Mervyn King appears in one shot in this film. He is not name-checked.
6. The cinematography is impressive. If ever a documentary could get away with sweeping helicopter takes of NY riverfront, this is it. All to often a documentary's aesthetics get in the way of its intentions. In this case, the film cannot afford not to be watched because its aesthetics could be dismissed as being those of a low-budget attention seeker.
7. Final point. It's not my style to bullet point a review, but in some ways Inside Job seems such an important film, that the critic's job with regard to it is not to give an opinion, but to attempt to highlight why it should be seen. Furthermore, it will be ignored and tarred with the accusation of being in some ways ideological. Because merely to document what occurs in certain parts of our world is deemed 'left wing'. [There will be those who say it is left wing to watch Al-Jazeera when today, of all days, shows why it is an imperative if you regard news as being a source of information regarding what's going on in the world.] If Inside Job has an axe to grind it is that the events which lead up to the financial crisis of '08 have been ignored, marginalised or mystified by mainstream media. Which allows politicians to do the same thing. Next time this kind of financial collapse occurs, the outcomes will be even more malignant than in '08. And we still don't have any real idea of the full cost of '08.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
our private life (w pedro miguel rozo, d lyndsey turner)
This afternoon the following quote from Cortazar arrived via twittersphere: "pero quién sabe si todo eso lo decía o solamente lo pensaba". Rozo's play deals, ostentatiously, with the division between thought and word, suggesting that in a more modern environment, people become more adept at concealing their thoughts, something which in older times, in more basic communities, were as exposed as the words that people used. This is an engaging, if not completely original idea. Part of the pleasure of watching this English language production was seeing the way British actors, schooled as they are now in naturalism, dealing with the writer's presentation of their characters' thoughts, which are, essentially asides. Asides are a key component of 16th, 17th, and 18th century theatre. The ascendancy of film has lead towards the domination of naturalism, which has no space for the aside. The spoken thought is now consigned to the margin in British theatre.
Not, however in Latin American theatre, or what little I may have seen of it. Rozo's play, in common with the work of Uruguayan authors such as Calderon, Sanguinetti and Morena, revels in the theatricality of the aside, as the actors establish a complicity with the audience. Some of the play's actors seem to have gained more of a grasp of of it than others. Adrian Schiller, in particular, as the devious but charming psychiatrist and Bolano lookalike, seemed to delight in unveiling his hypocrisy, his performance helping to set the tone once the play had got past a slightly stilted opening section.
The family, that cauldron of secrets and lies, is the perfect domain for this style of combative theatre. Rozo investigates the duplicity of a would-be middle class family with some verve. Again, there were moments when the play struggled to engage with the move beyond naturalism. This is a heightened, perhaps expressionist style of theatre (which pays its dues to the telenovelas Rozo also writes). It requires pace, verve and variation in order to be true to the writing's rhythms rather than the search for emotional truth. (Not for nothing is Berkoff one of the more popular British authors in Latin America.) At times the play really hit its stride, whilst at others it seemed to flag, although it's likely that the timing will improve as the play runs.
If Rozo's play doesn't have the theatricality of La Munequita or Ararat, it's still refreshing to see the production engage with a contrasting theatrical style, a reminder perhaps of the flair of London's Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre rhythms. The space between word and thought is so simple to explore in theatre and offers up vast psychological and dramatic potential, something that can counteract the predictable and marry tragedy with bitter humour. So often I left the best productions I saw in Latin America with the feeling that the theatre there contained something more visceral and adventurous than our more studied methods of creating plays. This may well be a romantic and absurd generalisation, but if it has any basis in fact then there are flashes of these differences to be denoted at the Court's upstairs space in its production of Rozo's acerbic play.
Not, however in Latin American theatre, or what little I may have seen of it. Rozo's play, in common with the work of Uruguayan authors such as Calderon, Sanguinetti and Morena, revels in the theatricality of the aside, as the actors establish a complicity with the audience. Some of the play's actors seem to have gained more of a grasp of of it than others. Adrian Schiller, in particular, as the devious but charming psychiatrist and Bolano lookalike, seemed to delight in unveiling his hypocrisy, his performance helping to set the tone once the play had got past a slightly stilted opening section.
The family, that cauldron of secrets and lies, is the perfect domain for this style of combative theatre. Rozo investigates the duplicity of a would-be middle class family with some verve. Again, there were moments when the play struggled to engage with the move beyond naturalism. This is a heightened, perhaps expressionist style of theatre (which pays its dues to the telenovelas Rozo also writes). It requires pace, verve and variation in order to be true to the writing's rhythms rather than the search for emotional truth. (Not for nothing is Berkoff one of the more popular British authors in Latin America.) At times the play really hit its stride, whilst at others it seemed to flag, although it's likely that the timing will improve as the play runs.
If Rozo's play doesn't have the theatricality of La Munequita or Ararat, it's still refreshing to see the production engage with a contrasting theatrical style, a reminder perhaps of the flair of London's Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre rhythms. The space between word and thought is so simple to explore in theatre and offers up vast psychological and dramatic potential, something that can counteract the predictable and marry tragedy with bitter humour. So often I left the best productions I saw in Latin America with the feeling that the theatre there contained something more visceral and adventurous than our more studied methods of creating plays. This may well be a romantic and absurd generalisation, but if it has any basis in fact then there are flashes of these differences to be denoted at the Court's upstairs space in its production of Rozo's acerbic play.
Thursday, 10 February 2011
black swan (aronofsky; w. heyman, heinz, mclaughlin)
I feel more normal today.
Yesterday, walking back solo through Notting Hill, I felt less so.
There may have been many reasons for this, but one of them was Black Swan. Which I had just been to see.
Many years ago, I remember coming out of Venn Street Clapham Picture House having just seen Naked. The only Mike Leigh film that's ever touched a nerve. I felt edgy, watchful. The world that the film had conjured (as much Thewlis' performance as anything else) seemed all around me. In truth it was. I was young. I lived in London. Life seemed transient and precarious.
The circumstances under which one watches a film affect one's reaction to it.
Less than a day later it's easy to look back on Aronofsky's film and laugh at its gaucheness and cliche, and sheer over-the-topness.
Which should not be to forget that I also found myself laughing within the cinema, at Cassel's splendidly seedy manipulator, at the film's exaggerated Apollo/ Dionysis schtik, at a director pushing boundaries with glee.
But the laughter a day later is that of the critics who see the film as at best infantile, at worst, abusive. And it's not hard to see why.
A thick skin and you're insulated against the ridiculous.
Or some feathers, perhaps.
Because this is, in spite of its various absurdities, a visceral film. About things that in the moment seem real but from outside can look ridiculous. Creativity, neurosis, desire.
I don't live in New York and I've never liked ballet. I'm no gamine waif. But somehow, the film, with its remarkable camera work and its shrewd use of music and all the other tricks that it employs, succeeded in bowling me over.
I came out of the cinema and the world, this plush world I walked through, felt borderline repulsive; borderline homicidal.
It's a reaction. I almost used the word over-reaction. But that would be wrong. It was a reaction. To the director's cinematic will.
Art, as this most metaphysical of films (no reason metaphysicm should not also be visceral) relates, is more than the sum of its parts, and should not be afraid of crossing the line unto what might be perceived as ridiculousness.
The ridiculous is out there, and it doesn't do us any harm to touch it every now and again, to lose control, to strive to, or perhaps to actually achieve, the going-beyond the line. Drawn by ourselves or society or god or the universe or physics.
I feel normal now. But for a while last night I didn't. Which is almost entirely to the film's credit.
Yesterday, walking back solo through Notting Hill, I felt less so.
There may have been many reasons for this, but one of them was Black Swan. Which I had just been to see.
Many years ago, I remember coming out of Venn Street Clapham Picture House having just seen Naked. The only Mike Leigh film that's ever touched a nerve. I felt edgy, watchful. The world that the film had conjured (as much Thewlis' performance as anything else) seemed all around me. In truth it was. I was young. I lived in London. Life seemed transient and precarious.
The circumstances under which one watches a film affect one's reaction to it.
Less than a day later it's easy to look back on Aronofsky's film and laugh at its gaucheness and cliche, and sheer over-the-topness.
Which should not be to forget that I also found myself laughing within the cinema, at Cassel's splendidly seedy manipulator, at the film's exaggerated Apollo/ Dionysis schtik, at a director pushing boundaries with glee.
But the laughter a day later is that of the critics who see the film as at best infantile, at worst, abusive. And it's not hard to see why.
A thick skin and you're insulated against the ridiculous.
Or some feathers, perhaps.
Because this is, in spite of its various absurdities, a visceral film. About things that in the moment seem real but from outside can look ridiculous. Creativity, neurosis, desire.
I don't live in New York and I've never liked ballet. I'm no gamine waif. But somehow, the film, with its remarkable camera work and its shrewd use of music and all the other tricks that it employs, succeeded in bowling me over.
I came out of the cinema and the world, this plush world I walked through, felt borderline repulsive; borderline homicidal.
It's a reaction. I almost used the word over-reaction. But that would be wrong. It was a reaction. To the director's cinematic will.
Art, as this most metaphysical of films (no reason metaphysicm should not also be visceral) relates, is more than the sum of its parts, and should not be afraid of crossing the line unto what might be perceived as ridiculousness.
The ridiculous is out there, and it doesn't do us any harm to touch it every now and again, to lose control, to strive to, or perhaps to actually achieve, the going-beyond the line. Drawn by ourselves or society or god or the universe or physics.
I feel normal now. But for a while last night I didn't. Which is almost entirely to the film's credit.
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