cerro bayo (w&d victoria galardi)

Cerro Bayo is an affectionate fable from Patagonia. It's a character driven piece which examines a family's coming to terms with the attempted suicide of the grandmother, a suicide attempt which is never fully explained. Instead, the film examines the differing reactions of her two daughters and the way in which various members of the family seek to get to hold of the grandmother's legacy.

The drama is less significant than the gently comic portrayal of these people's way of life. Despite the fact they live with a certain degree of affluence, there's a pining for the big city. One of the daughters live in Buenos Aires, where things are clearly not working out for her all that well. Both the grandchildren have plans to get away. When Ines (played by Ines Efron, the remarkable star of XXY) fails to win the local beauty pageant competition, she is devastated. The fact that she's far from the being the likeliest candidate for the prize never seems to have crossed her mind. Her skateboarding brother feels similarly trapped, but thinks he's found an escape route only to have it snatched away.

At one point the film uses a track by Beirut, an effectively jarring moment, which helps to position it as a comedy of manners which could have played out in any small, isolated community. Fittingly, the film refrains from showing almost anything of the festivities which mark the first snowfall on the mountain. This is a chamber piece which refrains from big dramatic statements as its carefully honed script focuses in on the little dramas which make up the everyday lives of people from three generations. 

selkirk (w&d walter tournier)

Selkirk is a curio: an animated account of the life of the man who was the model for Robinson Crusoe. Made in Uruguay. The opening sequences, set in a Scottish port, are so full of charm that it has you rooting for it straight away. Selkirk produces the maps that will guide a ship round the treacherous Cape Horn and on to the gold of the East Asian islands. Once on board ship he succeeds in getting the entire crew in hock to him. So when they get a chance to leave him behind on a desert island, they don't take much persuading.

Clearly made for kids, it appears to have all the ingredients to become a kind of cult hit. Apart from the fact that it all becomes rather predictable. Not because we already know the story, but because Selkirk never acquires any real depth as a character. It may be sticking resolutely to the original story, but the end effect is to make the viewer feel that Defoe probably knew what he was doing when he embroidered the reality.

You have to admire the stop motion animation and the geniality of the project. However, in spite of the fact that the kids munching popcorn all around me seemed to remain engaged, it's hard not to think that there's something missing, some sense of depth to the narrative which would lend Selkirk's achievement of survival a more heroic slant.

vaho (w&d alejandro gerber bicecci)

Vaho follows in the traditions of Mexican cinema narrative, threading together the stories of three young men, whose childhood friendship was abruptly cut short when one of them was inadvertently responsible for the lynching of the school caretaker, killed when the neighbourhood wrongly believed him to have molested Abigail, the young school beauty. In reality Abigail, trapped in the school, looking for her lost backpack, was in fine fettle, but fear stalked the community and tragedy ensued.

This whole sequence is told in flashback, with the opening forty five minutes of the film describing the humdrum, slightly desperate lives of the three former friends. The flashback sequence then places into perspective everything we have seen up to then, revealing the reasons for their disassociation from society. Perhaps the most intriguing strand is that of the young plumber's son, whose father was instrumental in the killing and has later turned to drink. His son's way of dealing with all this is to immerse himself in a group which celebrates the old Aztec traditions. He dons the feathers and the footshakers to dance at the markets, picking up a few pennies. The presence and lack of respect for the ancient culture seems emblematic of the holes in Mexican society that the movie shows up.

These holes have in large part been filled by Christianity. The movie's strongest sequence takes place during the Calvary festivities of the town, when men drag huge crosses to a new Golgotha, with Roman centurions charging by on horseback. There's an energy and daring to these scenes which feel like cinema verite. Overall the film struggles to contain the various strands it introduces. The bold narrative device of the flashback helps to anchor it, but at times gives it the feel of two separate movies squeezed into one.

for bread alone (mohamed choukri)

This book is mentioned in Teju Cole's Open City, when the young Moroccan his narrator meets in Brussels recommends him rather than Ben Jelloun. Choukri's book is told in the first person and from the notes supplied by Paul Bowles, who translated it, it's largely autobiographical. Given this, it may well not be representative of his wider work.

The underlying narrative of For Bread Alone is Mohamed's journey towards the light of literature. Born in desperate poverty, his father a vicious bully who kills Mohamed's younger brother, his mother constantly pregnant with children who may or may not survive infancy, the book recounts his teenage years as he learns to fend for himself, taking in the pleasures of sex, alcohol and opiates along the way. It's a bawdy, energetic read, which glories in the narrator's discoveries of the pleasures of life as he does all he can just to survive. It may not be great literature but at the same time, in a message the book is consciously making as it closes with Mohamed's discovery of literacy, it's a testament to the power of literature. How it can honour the uncharted life, destroy obscurity, grant a voice to the voiceless. As such, you can see why Cole's Moroccan valued this book, (and why Harbor by Adams feels like such a prescient modern text). Choukri articulates a life which was destined to go, like the stories of so many others, unfeted, unknown.

leaving atocha station [ben lerner]

It might be hard to explain how much pleasure this book has given me during the course of various frenetic, pre-departure days, punctuated by alcohol, hospitals and multiple viewings of The Tempest.  

Lerner's mendacious anti-hero poet is something of a blood brother to Alan Pauls' anti-hero in The Past. Both are addicts, both are unhinged. Lerner's narrator is perhaps funnier. His self awareness is lacerating. He lies with all the panache of a dromedary, if indeed dromedaries lie.

Amongst its many brilliances, this is a brilliant book about the pleasures and pains of inhabiting a second language. The way in which a foreign language acts as a cloak, behind which the stranger can allow him or herself to be reinvented as an enigmatic, fascinating character. Even though the enigma represents nothing more than ignorance and insecurity. 

The counterpoint to all this is that Lerner's narrator, feckless though he is, is also given by the author language which reveals a mind of unfettered brilliance. Out of the soup of words, he conjures those phrases which great writing nails, the ones that make you go: Exactly! That's exactly right!

This is of course Lerner's brilliance on show, rather than his narrator's. It is Lerner who instructs the reader in how to read John Ashbery, how to misread a woman's words, or even your own, how to meditate on the relationship between politics and poetry. It's quite a skill. You don't have to have been to Atocha station with its unmentioned jungle to appreciate all this. Or even Madrid. If you have, it's an added bonus.

open city [teju cole]

Open City is an idiosyncratic novel which plays a crafty game with its readership. Ostensibly a roman a clef, it tells the story of Julius, a Nigerian doctor who has come to work in New York. We don't know all that much about Teju Cole, but we do know he's a Nigerian who's come to live in New York. To what extent does Julius represent Teju? Is this an autobiographical novel?

Julius is the flaneur of New York City, and Brussels, documenting his chance encounters and observations. At times it feels as though he's going nowhere, just round in circles. Chance encounters where he defines himself as a visitor and an African, but also a citizen of the metropolis. Whether Julius' views are identical to Teju's is the novel's chief conceit and whenever we feel as though we're getting comfortable, something comes along to disrupt the reader's assumptions.

The section of the book which feels the tightest is when Julius leaves New York and travels to Brussels. Out of his comfort zone, in a dreary, Wintry European town, haunted by his long lost German grandmother, Julius' observations seem even more acute. He has a casual sexual encounter. He meets up with some North Africans and finds himself walking the line between the Third and First, Muslim and Christian, Black and White worlds. These characters, like figures out of Lorraine Adams' Harbor, occupy the hinterland on the edge of the Western World, where he, the Nigerian exile, might also belong, but so clearly doesn't.

At times, Open City is dazzling. At others, it feels mundane. It articulates the voice of a dispassionate observer, something echoed in Cole's laconic tweets. If you go to Flickr you can see the author's remarkable photographs. Cole has the eye of an artist, adrift in the wide world, unsure of his place, as are so many in our transient society. Don't go to him looking for clear storylines or concrete beginnings, middles and ends. Rather, join him on his peripatetic walk through the crumbling edifice of our civilisation. His approach, for all his love of Flemish painting and 19th century classical music, has all the hallmarks of the itinerant African narrative, relocated to another place, tone and sensibility.

shame (d steve mcqueen, w abi morgan)

If anything makes me want to quit writing these things it's a film like Shame. To find myself reacting negatively to the work of someone who's debut feature I enjoyed so much takes the wind out of my sails. It probably makes me look like a malcontent, wilfully perverse. When these essays are supposed to be part of the process of being an active participant rather than a passive one. A mark of respect as much as an indication of my taste, good, bad or indifferent. Perhaps that makes the whole process somewhat narcissistic. Yo que se, as they put it so succinctly in Rioplantense Spanish.

Narcissism is appropriate, because if Shame is anything else, it's an almost grotesquely narcissistic film. Preening in the mirror of its attractive star. And his self-conscious attractiveness. He's a man without any real suggestion of a sense of humour, a kind of idiot savant womanising machine. No wonder he's unhappy. His unhappiness is revealed by shots of his face, contorted, repeated. Or shots of him hiding his face, as though he realises that this face is the cause of all his troubles. People have said that this is a film about sex addiction, or just addiction. It's clearly to a large extent a film about family. And its disfunctionality. But above all it's a narcissistic film about narcissism.

Narcissism isn't terribly attractive. The way to deal with this within a narrative is to observe the narcissist from outside, as in the case of Keats' poem. Try and get inside a narcissist's head and it's not going to be anything other than dull. How does the film attempt to combat this? It does so by purporting to be risque, to be out there, to be about sex and sexual deviance. But in reality that's just the arena for Brandon's narcissism to flower and for McQueen's camera to titillate. Any attempts at narrative within this context have nowhere to go, they are all going to end with an agonised portrait of the agony of Fassbender in his agonising penthouse. The character of Sissy has far more depth than that of her brother; but she is dealt with in the cursory fashion of unhappy females, doomed to do everything you'd expect, coming to a jarringly obvious end.

Hunger was a remarkable film in so far that it felt as though the director trusted his cinematic instincts to triumph at the expense of plot and character. There's a boldness to this attitude which allowed McQueen's visual and aural flair to flower. In Shame this flair is yoked to a pedestrian narrative which if anything seems to dilute McQueen's talents.

There's been a lot of love and garlands for this movie, but to my mind it felt, no matter how much I wanted to like it, like the work of people who inhabit a rarefied world where the makers' brilliance has become so all consuming that they need to make a film about it.  There's an almost Cameroonian air of self-satisfaction to its purportedly bleak examination of what it's like to suffer being overwhelmingly successful. The more Fassbender's face contorts - the agony and the ecstasy - the falser the whole farrago felt. In a way, it's a perfect film for our times, set in the uber shrine of mass individualism which our society is still aspiring to, in spite of the clear failure of the world it depicts.

Maybe I've misinterpreted it. I kind of hope so. 

nine muses (w&d john akomfrah)

Figures in fierce coats stand braced against the cold. These are the immigrants. The ones who came to this country, left the sun behind, and now have to contend with the snow and the ice, find a place in a new world, join the madness.

There's some riveting camerawork, as these figures face lakes, open roads, the North. This is a portrait of Britain, seen from the skewed angle of the...

Hang on, I thought, about 45 minutes in. That's not Scotland! That's not Loch Maree! All those 4x4s aren't in Britain. Those traffic signs look kind of... American? Indeed, as my learned colleague observed later. It's all part of the metaphor. The immigrant confronting the barren cold... I'd got this. I just thought the barren cold was British. Which is what all the beautifully selected archive footage implies. I mean, this is a film about the experience of being an immigrant in Britain, isn't it?

So the subtlety of the use of Alaska as a metaphor went over my head. It seemed to me that the filmmakers had received a hefty grant and made the most of it. By going to Alaska. This is a point that Nine Muses makes somewhat relentlessly, as the Alaskan footage recurs and recurs and recurs and recurs. It's cold out there. You need a good coat.

This footage is punctuated by the above mentioned archive footage and series of increasingly ponderous readings taken from the "Naxos Classical Archive". After the initial Paradise Lost quotation which seems appropriate, we then get Dante, Hamlet, Richard 2, Beckett and Joyce. All of which succeeds in elevating this film into a work of massive pretentiousness, which, were it to have been done by a German featuring Goethe, Kant et al would probably have been laughed out of court.

There is something refreshing about the director's take and presentation of the immigrant process. Buried deep within Nine Muses, under the snowdrifts, it feels as though there might have been a bold and compelling film. But in the end there's an Alaskan wooliness to the whole endeavour which holes it below the waterline.

weekend (w&d andrew haigh)

It might be that the will is flagging, as I saw Haigh's surprisingly successful movie before 2011 had drawn to a close. The film itself has a clear agenda: to tell its gay narrative with as much vigour as any straight narrative, not to pull its punches, not to be in any way embarrassed about what it's doing. It's a gay Before Sunrise and just as wordy as Linklater's film. The two lead characters are convincing, their relationship, doomed to be nipped in the bud, is, in its way, quietly affecting.

Which perhaps explains the film's success. In truth, despite all the noises recently about the rude health of the British film industry, it seems to me that even at our most maverick we still seem to be producing films which are parochial. Little stories that search out their niche in the market. In that sense we're not that far removed from the fledgling film business of the country I'm returning to shortly, in spite of the money, energy and kudos lavished on the film industry here. Weekend isn't that far removed from Archipelago or Tyrannosaur or much else in terms of the scale of its ambition. Of course, so much of that ambition is re-routed to Hollywood, where people go if they want to get paid well. Thinking on the films of Anderson, Roeg or even someone like Lean, they seem to come from a different, less risk-averse time. As ever, this says more about the industry and the financiers (and hence, obliquely, the intellectual optimism of the country) than it probably does about the filmmakers themselves. There probably are plenty of filmmakers with a grander vision, but there's not much chance of the films they want to make being produced here. 

the artist (w&d michel hazanavicius)

Leaving the cinema there was some debate over whether this is a reactionary film or not. In difficult times, the public takes succour in escapism. A film about silent cinema becomes an unlikely success as we look for anything to take our mind off recession and the collapse of Western capitalism. Into the breach steps a tale from a time when stars were stars and cinema was simpler.

I could buy this argument, but I’d like to offer the counterpoint. Hazanavicius’s film instead compels us to revisit a brief, golden time when the filmmaker’s message wasn’t sullied by language. When the image was paramount. It could almost be seen as a tribute to Derrida. We revisit a less forensic, cynical age, when delight in the image was still permitted to flourish and watching cinema was akin to stepping on the Moon. In this regard it would appear to have something in common with Scorsese’s Hugo, albeit The Artist is a more satisfying, witty film than the old master’s.

So I’m not convinced that The Artist, no matter how enjoyable, is all that escapist. It’s more of a paean to those things we have lost than an invitation to bask in the delights of what we have. Perhaps that’s why it’s weirdly moving. Valentine is a man out of time, losing touch with the world that is to come. A feeling that all of us are constantly condemned to repeat in this hyper-technological age, forever one step behind whatever is just about to emerge and turn the world around again.

I sometimes wonder what it must have been like to have lived a normal life before the invention of the printing press. If you didn’t speak Latin or live in a monastery. Were minds less rich for the lack of information? Did the intellect not sing its own song still in whatever form it took? The Artist reminds us that for all our so-called sophistication, we’re still susceptible to those things which have shaped human perception since before time began. Things such as the other and the heart. And dogs.