the turin horse (w&d bela tarr)

Amidst the raft of new films about to appear under discussion in the small corner of the BBC where I once again find myself working, The Turin Horse has not featured. Not once has its name been mentioned. Bela Tarr belongs to that parallel cinematic world, the one that makes no money but is adored by the festivals. Someone whose work never has been and never will be 'commercial'; but who has made film after film nevertheless. He reflects the peculiar taxonomy of the film world.  It would be interesting to see a proper Jeremey Deller style Venn Diagram, mapping the vagaries of cinema, from Transformers to Tarr. 

Tarr himself comes across in his interviews as lugubrious, armed with a self-effacing sense of humour and a didactic if understated belief in the value of what he's doing. Something which is reflected in his films. These have an economy all their own. Turin Horse is two hours twenty long. It takes place on a single location which looks a bit like the set of a Martin Mcdonagh play. The dialogue is sparse. There are essentially two characters and a horse. It ends as it begins, in darkness. My sister, with whom I went to see it, came out declaring it was bleak, and there are what can only be called Beckettian echoes, but in spite of its austerity, it seemed to me a film steeped in a shrewd, unpretentious humour. To my eyes this was neither a long film nor a heavy one; it was eminently enjoyable. In another parallel universe, one where Bresson is the norm, it might even be considered overly 'commercial'. 

Not that this is going to be acknowledged. The director will be tarred with the usual clichés and banished to the 'difficult' salon. People will continue to prefer their US TV box-sets as a way of filling up rainy afternoons. It's the way of the world and there would appear to be no escaping it, but if you're thinking of going to see The Turin Horse, go with an open mind and  your sense of humour switched on. Just because it's long and in black and white doesn't mean it's not full of enjoyable detail nor that it doesn't contain several comical moments. And if you're a fan of the potato there's even more to get your teeth into.

the suit (d peter brook)

A lull. A lull which goes with the process of creation as well as the fact that whilst the play is on I tend to find myself going to the cinema less. In truth I missed writing about Cold Souls, which I saw in Cinemateca and quite enjoyed, but I was up to my neck in Harper and somehow didn't have the headspace.

London offers more headspace. In large part because it's less creative. For me, obviously. Anyway. Back in town scarcely 48 hours, I saw that it was possible to get a £10 ticket for the Brook. I sort of feel that there's an obligation to go and see the Brook. Because I have missed so many previous opportunities. Yet, as with the last play of his I saw, whilst The Suit is charming and astutely directed, it feels like this is late Brook, Brook-lite. The play is a fable from the townships of Apartheid South Africa. There is a sprinkling of politics, but not enough to either offend or engage, some lovely songs, a certain amount of ingenious if unspectacular stagecraft and some pleasant, relaxed acting. There is nothing to dislike, but nothing to get too excited about. There seems very little sense of risk. Perhaps Brook was always a more conservative director than his sense of formal innovation suggested. Marat/ Sade and US were as much a reflection of their time (and perhaps Marowitz, who knows) as his own sensibility. What he brought was the elegance and, at the time, visionary stagecraft. This might sound off, given that The Suit is set in one of the most overtly political environments of Brook's and indeed my own lifetime. There are references to the abuses of the school system and the poverty. But in the end this seems incidental. The director's mission is to charm, to woo international houses, as no doubt the play will do. The South African context feels like colour (as, say, a white box is colour); in spite of the supposedly tragic end to the fable, the audience leaves in a feelgood mode.

I enjoyed The Suit, but I feel I enjoyed it more than I needed to. I would have liked to have enjoyed it less, and felt more. 

flacas vacas (d. santiago svirsky, w. verónica perrotta)

Flacas Vacas takes a formula and applies it to a local environment. The formula is three women in their thirties going away on a disastrous holiday. The environment is the Uruguayan coast. The movie is clearly billed as a comedy and features classic comedy elements such as a squashed pet turtle and the gradual destruction of the holiday cottage. The relationships between the three women evolve, if not in quite the saccharine Hollywood manner the formula might have suggested. There's a handsome stranger (played by Dario, a man I met the other night who dedicates three sessions a week to studying the theatrics of Mnouchkine. Whose work he saw once in Santiago.) The Dario character is perhaps the least interesting of the lot, doing what men do - taking cocaine and shagging the slightly prettier woman after suggesting he was going to shag the slightly less pretty woman. But the female characters are all convincing and believable. One of them is played by the writer, Veronica Perrota, whose sassy script keeps the film honest. The cinematography is astute: every time there's a wide, the film looks a bit iffy. Suggesting the camera was not top of the range. But sensibly the DOP has gone for close-ups and carefully framed shots, giving the piece a slightly clumsy artfulness which keeps the focus on the actresses and helps to recount what is essentially the story of three women's lost weekend.

The fact that the movie has been made and released is telling. This is a post-dictatorship, nascent middle class movie. The politics are kept under the table. The characters don't seem in any way 'third world': they're slightly confused women whose problems relate to relationships and men. And getting on with each other. As such, Flacas Vacas offers a convincing portrait of a new Latin American demographic. It's not the most profound of films, but like the US model it perhaps echoes, it's not trying to be. Personally, I'd have liked the film to have explored in slightly more detail the darker edges of its characters' lives, but this is a comedy first and a drama second. As such, it's an effective, intelligent piece of movie making which is fluffy enough to please its target audience without ever being gratingly fluffy; retaining the necessary hint of psychological veracity to ensure that it doesn't get lost in pursuit of a happy-ever-after conclusion.

chef [jaspreet singh]

Kashmir seems a long way away from Montevideo, but Singh's novel brought it back to life. The novel (as often seems to be the case in Indian literature) is a first person account of the trials and tribulations of a sympathetic but hapless chef in the Indian army. The twist in Singh's take on Kashmir is that he presents the conflict from the point of view of a soldier-chef, Kip Singh, a Sikh from Delhi. Who is seduced by the charms of the Himalayan province, losing his faith in the army and the Indian state in the process.

As well as offering this insight into the conflict, Chef is also a novel which explores the loss of innocence.   In fact, Kip's failure to lose his innocence and sleep with a woman becomes a tragic loss of innocence in itself. The innocence of believing that all will turn out OK, that the world is designed to bring happiness. In his frustration and his struggles to come to terms with his fate, Kip's life echoes the struggles of the place he falls in love with. The tone of the book remains dry and wistful throughout. Kip's eye remains as dispassionate as his tastebuds, which have been coached by his mentor, the older, tragic chef, to absorb and enjoy contrasting influences. There's a great deal of wonderful writing about food and its possibilities. The older chef, for example, loves Brie, and bemoans the paucity of Indian cheeses. The willingness to reach out and delight in another culture and its cuisine not only broadens the palate, it also broadens the imagination. With all the trouble that can cause, as Kip discovers when he starts to fall for a suspected female Pakistani terrorist.

Chef is an assured novel. The writer skips willingly between timelines. In Kip he has created a character who feels like he could have walked out of the pages of a novel from the 19th century: a genuinely decent, likeable hero, whose courage is revealed in the little things he does, not in grand gestures. It's sometimes said that your lead character should be riven with conflict and will not be dramatically interesting if he or she is too sympathetic. Chef shows this not to be the case, revealing a figure whose gradual understanding of the conflict he has become unwittingly caught up in makes for an unlikely but  noble hero. 

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.