blow up (w&d michelangelo antonioni, w tonino guerra, julio cortázar, edward bond)

Blow Up is one of those films which has a constant presence at the back of the mind. You imagine you know it backwards. Which is why it’s so good to get the opportunity to see it again on the cinema screen and realise that, in keeping with the themes of the film, what you imagined isn’t necessarily the same film as the one that’s really there. 

For example, I remembered the fake tennis match at the end, but hadn’t remembered that it came, precisely, at the end. It’s an act of sheer brio. A dozen painted-faced youths turn up and play pretend tennis and that’s that. An act of consummate narrative brilliance, pulling all the theoretical threads of the film together whilst making it crystal clear (or crystal opaque) that there’s no use hoping for a neat plot resolution. 

In case you hadn’t got it, this is a film about perception. What we see, what we think we see, what we imagine we see and what we don’t see. Reading some of the notes about the film, there seems to be a suggestion that Antonioni wasn’t interested in dialogue, but this seems like another oversight. Besides the famous “I am in Paris” line, one of the great pre-Lynchian Lynchian moments, there are also some nailed on exchanges as Hemmings’ Thomas talks to Sarah Miles about what he has or hasn’t seen. At other moments the dialogue feels like another musical note in a film that is so obsessive about composition. The lines might feel as though they’re discordant, but that’s part of the film’s deliberate discordance. As is Hemmings’ hyper-active acting, which rather than being forced, feels representative of a time when there was a furious energy at play, but an energy which was never clear as to what its objectives were. 

There is even a latent energy in the propeller which Thomas buys, the implication of a movement which has been stilled. Which is also a way of viewing photography. Roland Barthes’ punctum: the moment which the photograph captures and the unseen life contained within that image’s crystallisation. It might be that Antonioni’s film contains a plea for us to look harder, to penetrate the hidden corners of the visible in order to glimpse the supposedly invisible. Something which a society which has become increasingly image-dependent, without in any way improving its faculty for reading those images, would do well to heed. Further to that, you can see in Blow-Up the way that history’s tendrils stretch back to that supposedly revolutionary time of the swinging sixties, which was far from being all that it appeared. Rather than being the advent of a utopic freedom, it was actually the dawning of advanced materialism. Another Antonioni quote states that he didn’t want the film to be a London film, but the images which capture a city at the beginning of a process of transformation towards the modern behemoth it is still becoming, make it unequivocally a London film. And one of the greatest, without a shadow of a doubt. 

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Note - Edward Bond has a scriptwriting credit for English dialogue, adding to the impression that the film’s dialogue was something that was taken more seriously than has been suggested. With the director, Guerra, Bond and Cortazar on the script side, one wonders if there’s ever been a stronger script team put together for a movie. 

flights [olga tokarczuk]

Flights is almost two books for the price of one. The book is constructed around the notebooks of a travelling woman, who one takes to be the author, as she moves around the world, reflecting on the nature of travel. These observations are made up of brief sections, often less than a page long. In amongst these observations are threaded various stories, some modern, some historical. These stories make up the second part of the book. A man whose wife and child go missing on a Croatian island. A Dutch pioneer of anatomy who becomes obsessed by his own amputated leg. A woman in Moscow who walks out of her own life. Observations from the notebooks infiltrate the stories, so that the reader can glimpse the craft of the author’s architecture. As the book unfolds the recurring theme of the body begins to emerge. What’s revealed when we delve beneath the flesh?  What is a body, after all? Is the body in one place the same as the body in another? Tokarczuk’s restlessness fuels her writing. The book’s structure mirrors the subject of its enquiry, showing the arteries, intestines etc, which sustain the vital organs. Which lends the book a curious, occasionally frustrating brilliance, as we dip into one narrative only to be whisked on to the next. Which, one supposes, is also akin to the process of travelling. On the one hand a superficial occupation which means that you never get to know the place you’re visiting with any great degree of profundity; but also a means to enhance the horizons of the mind, to begin to be able to gauge the extent, variety and richness of this world we have been given to inhabit. 

news from planet mars (w&d dominik moll, w gilles marchand)

How we loved Lemming. Not to mention Harry He’s Here to Help. I think they’re some of my favourite movies from around the turn of the century. Deadpan humour, a sardonic, Hitchcokian slant. Moll was one of the most important filmmakers around, one whose decidedly European sensibility (should there be such a thing) managed to get a foothold in British cinemas. And then, nada, for over a decade. In fact, I note from IMDB that he made The Monk in 2011, a film which passed me by. From time to time, I would wonder, whatever happened to Dominik Moll? So when, casually browsing the Cinemateca webpage, I saw a new Moll film, it was too good an opportunity to miss. 

News From Planet Mars, to give it its English title, is a likeable, if somewhat predictable tale of a downtrodden man who has to turn his life around. Philippe Mars lives in his high rise Paris flat, separated from his TV presenter wife. The film catches up with him whilst she’s on location in Brussels, covering a Euro summit, meaning he has their two teenage the kids for an indeterminate time. His kids think he’s a loser. And it looks as though they’re right. His ear is accidentally severed by a psychopathic work colleague. He survives, as does his ear, but the colleague ends up moving into his flat, and then bringing his equally disturbed would-be girlfriend too. Everything that can go wrong for Phillipe does. But finally he turns the corner, regains his kids’ respect and realises he has to quit his dead-end job. It’s all a bit neat and tame. There are a few touches reminiscent of prime Moll: animals on the loose; the ear incident; the sudden disposal of his sister’s dog, but these are garnishes. 

Whilst it’s good to have Moll back, the edginess of his earlier work doesn’t shine through here. Looking back, it feels as though Europe has become a far less stable place in the last ten years. The uneasiness which underpins Moll’s best work feels prophetic of a society where you can no longer take things for granted, where the carpet is moving under you. Perhaps modernity has caught up with Dominik Moll and it’s left him uncertain where to go next. Like the rest of us. 

you were never really here (w&d lynne ramsay)

Ramsay’s film is one of those frustrating films which are better than most others, but still not nearly as good as you feel it might have been. Joaquin Phoenix, verging on the portly, is military vet who makes a living out of carrying out hits with nothing more than a hammer. He’s haunted by a multi-layered traumatic past, revealed in gossamer-thin flashbacks. There’s the recurrent image of a body/ head twisted in fabric, a link to Ratcatcher. There’s an intensity of image which is both beautiful and potent. The fact that Phoenix barely speaks is immaterial: we still know how his mind works. Using a fertile cinematic grammar, Ramsey explores his psyche through an exploration of the image. 

However, You Were Never Really There is, essentially, a B-Movie. There’s very little in the way of narrative development and the storyline of the Phoenix character deciding he has to rescue a young girl feels like an excuse for a narrative. There’s none of the play of Alice in the Cities, a movie which is perhaps comparable in terms of an older man constructing an unlikely bond with a girl. In effect this is a film with an incredibly detailed surface, without suggesting there’s all that much beneath it. Perhaps it should be approached os an exercise in aesthetics, but the violence (implicit rather than explicit)  carries its own baggage: it is justified? Is a narrative constructed around a violent killer viable entertainment fodder? Lynn Ramsay does Tarantino seems a bit unlikely, but this might have been the film’s real hook. Instead it feels as though the filmmaker shies away from the more complex implications of her chosen story. 

pond [claire-louise bennett]

I am seated in the upper terrace of the food court in Paddington Station. On the table is a coffee of some description, a piece of carrot cake, a phone, this laptop and a book. The book is called Pond. It’s published by Fitzcarraldo, and their books are highly distinctive, with the same blue cover, so if anyone were to pass by who knew anything about them, they might say to me - Which one is that? But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Neither is the author of the book going to appear and say, Oh look, you’re reading my book. Because these things don’t happen. Not in London anyway. They might do in Montevideo. I’m musing about this somewhat idly because I met the author a few months ago, in Montevideo, and told her that when I went back to London, I’d read Pond. I could have bought it as a kindle book beforehand I suppose but I had a feeling that I wouldn’t want to read it digitally. Some books you can read on a screen, and some you can’t. Or, if you do, they lose something. For something reason. Anyway, I’m reading it now. And I can’t remember all that much. It was a sunny day in a leafy garden, Spring time. I was with the man from the British Council, who I don’t really know, and who, it emerged, had an interest in punk, which made him seem far more human than most men from the British Council, who belong to a strange organisation which merely exists in order to remind people that once upon a time, Great Britain, (to give it one of its names) was a concept that had cultural weight, a weight that is now so diminished or crinolined that you’d struggle to feel it if it cuddled up and nestled in your arms. I’ve finished my coffee. That last remark might not be fair to the British Council. It might be full of a vibrant modernity I’ve never been observant enough to discern. Anyway, that was a few months ago and the three of us had a convivial conversation about how novels do or don’t work and I threw in the name of Bernhard as a reference for where I thought the author might be coming from, but I was winging it really, just chucking stuff out there, as you do. Now that I’m actually reading the book it makes me think about other writers. Like Proust or Joyce, or my friend who wrote to me for two months about nothing at all, really, just the fluff of life, and it was the most captivating thing in the world. And I thought that writing, real writing, is the capturing of the parallel life that we constantly live. The life we lead in our minds alongside the life we lead with our bodies. Not the life we lead with the things we say or do. All the rest. The warp and the woof. Which is the hardest thing of all to capture because it’s always just there and then it’s gone. And if you try and capture it and you don’t do it ever so well it’s just verbiage. Cabbage. Some kind of hideous puree which is supposedly nutritious for babies but tastes like recycled codswallop. But if you do it right, it’s like a magic trick. Someone just came over and removed the empty coffee cup and the wrapping of the now-consumed carrot cake. They took them away whilst I was writing and although I looked up at them they didn’t even glance at me. Let alone the blue book on the table. It’s so hard to connect in the modern world that it’s a miracle whenever anyone succeeds. On which note I should probably go to Heathrow and catch my flight back to South America. 

híbridos, los espíritus de brasil (d. vincent moon y priscilla telmon)

Híbridos is an immersive documentary, which explores the connection between spirituality and music in Brazil. There’s not a word of dialogue. The film floats, effortlessly, from place to place. The camera is a vivid player, getting right in there as as its subjects dance or dream. From time to time, the camera appears to becomes part of the dance. The frame is almost always tight. A mass of people cling to a rope in Recife and we see their impassioned faces, barely getting a glimpse of the architecture or the setting. We are another face, crammed in to this ecstatic process. Just occasionally the camera pulls back and shows a crowd in Rio or Salvador from a distance, but it’s no more than a breather, before it plunges back into the maelstrom. A group of barefooted dancers on what appears to be waste land on a hill in Sao Paulo dance for Jesus, the city just discernible in the dying light behind. A vibrant, African-tinged dance erupts in a tiny space in the North East, men and women jostling for space; a group of what appears to be Ayahuasca users enter into an orgasmic trance, their faces contorted and covered in mud. The film ends with a lengthy sequence of a shaman, struggling to contain whatever it is that has possessed him, in a hut in the middle of nowhere. There are few countries that have as diverse a range of influences, both musical and spiritual, as Brazil. African, evangelical, native traditions blend and merge. The cumulative effect is disorientating, stupefying, terrifying, any of these words. It’s a remarkable film and testament to the power of the documentary to conjure worlds within worlds with nothing more than an elastic camera, high-end sound recording and a savagely brilliant edit. 

good time (d. benny safdie & josh safdie, w. josh safdie, ronald bronstein)

I’m not really sure what this film was about. For a while it looked as though it was going to be captivating. Then it wasn’t. Then you can’t help thinking that bloody Marty has got a lot to answer for. Because it’s not a bad film, it’s got an edginess, which the camera captures, it’s got an energy, it feels for a long time that it’s going to be about what it means to be young and scared and lost in this modern world, and then all of a sudden you realise it isn’t about that at all. It isn’t really about anything. It’s just about a guy who wants to rob banks and isn’t very good at it. The film never really tells you why he wants to rob banks, and drag his mentally disabled brother into it, what he wants to do with the money, what he’s running away from or where he thinks he’s running to. All of which might have been helpful. It just depicts a vaguely charismatic man who must surely have been able to find a better way to use his talents than holding up a bank with a degree of incompetence which is impressive. There’s a hint of Victoria in the set-up, without the parallel romantic sub-plot, which was the thing that gave Victoria its charm. Like the German film, Good Time takes place over the course of a single day/night and ends in anti-climactic disaster. Like Victoria it also benefits from some astute camerawork and a striking lead performance. However, the longer the film goes on, the more hoops Pattinson’s protagonist is made to go through, the less convincing it becomes; and the lack of any kind of driving reason for the action we’re watching becomes more and more apparent. Maybe US filmmaking is reducing itself to a grammar of dramatic beats; which becomes the raison d’être for the experience of watching the film. No-one cares what it’s about anymore. Watching movies has become a purely visceral process; in which case the Safdie brothers might well be destined for a long and successful career. At the same time, if I had the time and/or energy to indulge in a more adventurous interpretation of the film’s narrative and what this says about cinematic storytelling, I’m not sure there would be anything there; life is a series of tweets that constantly provoke the next reaction; we are all Pavlov’s dogs. (Which is completely unfair as there was clearly a great deal of artistry in the creation of Good Time, but that made it, for this viewer, all the more frustrating that there wasn’t more ambition concealed within the film’s ostensible premise.) 

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Since writing the above, in transit, I’ve read reviews which praise the way in which the film captures New York’s racial diversity and the inherent racism of the US, noting that Pattinson’s Connie Nikas befriends a Haitian refugee (I didn’t get that she was Haitian when watching it) and manipulates the fact that the security guard he assaults is of Ethiopian descent to get himself away from the police. Retrospectively, I can just about get this; I can also understand why the film was praised and seen as evidence of a fresh and distinctive new voice. I can get all of these things, but it doesn’t alter that fact that there’s something mundane and implausible about the narrative, that the film appears to aspire to emulate Scorsese or Cimino or even Five Easy Pieces, but to this viewer’s eyes it lacks both the pathos and the narrative risk-taking necessary to pull off the comparison successfully. However, let’s not deny that I looked at the film from a glass half-empty perspective, rather than a glass half-full. Good luck to the brothers; I know I’ll be curious to see where they go next, and, in the context of my recent London industry weekend, I’ll be prepared to pay my tenner at the box office to find out. Which is as big a win as anyone can reasonably hope for. 

transit [anna seghers]

Transit is a novel, set in Second World War Marseilles. The unnamed masculine narrator is in flight from Germany, keeping one step ahead of the Nazis. He ends up being another one who lands in the last open port in France, waiting for a ship which will permit him to escape Europe. However, the narrator proves to be a jaundiced, disengaged figure. On his way to Marseilles he stops off in Paris and somehow inherits the identity of a dead writer whose wife, he learns from a letter plans on leaving him. Once the narrator comes across the dead man’s wife, he inevitably falls in love with her. Meanwhile, in a port city that is at once ferverish and dull, he half-heartedly goes about the business of seeking the permits he requires to both remain and leave. He is caught in a life-and-death Kafkaesque game, but the writing strips the drama out of the scenario, because the only thing the narrator is interested in his ersatz wife, whom he dreams of fleeing with. His machinations are all targeted towards trying to achieve this dream, albeit done in the knowledge that his actions are morally dubious. However, what does this mean in a world where the need for survival trumps any moral instinct? 

Seghers’ novel is a downbeat text that feels wilfully anti-dramatic. Her characters are stuck in limbo, somewhere between the hell they are fleeing from and the heaven that might await, should they escape. She casts a surgical eye over this black joke of history. It’s as though the life and death scenario, with all the drama this might implicate, is secondary to the way in which history has cut and pasted people’s lives in a manner that could never have been anticipated. Like her narrator, the author’s eye is distant and ironic. Every now and again the gods play with people to remind them that they exist. When that happens, the futility of being human becomes achingly apparent. 

triple agent (w&d rohmer)

Rohmer’s chamber piece has a curious topicality, in a modern day era of Russian spies and double crosses. A white Russian in exile in pre-war Paris and his Greek wife get caught up in the machinations which eventually lead to the HItler-Stalin pact. It would appear that the film is based on fact, with an addendum that the sympathetic heroine died from TB in prison in 1940, after being tried for her alleged part in her husband’s plot to abduct an exiled Russian general on Stalin’s behalf. (A charge which Rohmer’s film suggests was ridiculous.) There’s a stately feel to the film., which appears to lack the subtlety of Rohmer’s earlier work. The delicate character study of the heroine is swallowed up by the march of history and the film’s epic scope as it covers the years leading up to the second world war. The film’s attempt to show the way in which ordinary people become victims of historical contrivance, though supremely relevant, is never as effective as the story suggests it should be. Having said which, there’s something peculiarly haunting about the way in which the film incorporates black and white archive footage, charting events which retrospectively appear inevitable. Are we in the midst of a similar era today? Are there ordinary or not-so-ordinary couples whose lives are on the point of being torn apart? 

confession of the lioness [mia couto]

Confession of the Lioness is another journey with Couto through the fabular land of rural Mozambique. It’s a story told from two points of view. The mysterious female character, Mariamar, and the weary hunter, Archie Bullseye. The premise is that there have been a succession of lion attacks in Mariamar’s rural village, the latest of which has claimed the life of her sister, Silência. Archie has been hired as a hunter to come and kill the lions. But the more we read, the more we realise that Archie’s not that interested in killing anything anymore. He’s in love with his brother’s wife, his brother who’s in a mental hospital after killing their father. He’d rather hunt with his pen than his rifle, and takes to writing a journal, which the book contains. Meanwhile, Mariamar fell in love with Archie when he visited the village 16 years ago to kill a crocodile and now she pines for him. 

As the book unfolds, it becomes, somewhat wonderfully, far less clear, rather than more clear. Is Mariamar actually a lioness? Is the Mariamar who talks about Archie and lives in her mother’s house the fictional invention of this lioness? None of the presumed threads leads where you expect. Archie and Mariamar never have their moment together. Archie loses all interest in his mission. Things don’t work according to the narrative rules we’ve been taught to expect. We’ve entered a weirder, more complex narrative world. Which at the same time paints a portrayal of a strange rural society, one which the inhabitants of the city will never really understand. Like Archie and his writer companion, we are these visitors, offered a glimpse of another way of life and thought, one which belongs to the lions and their antagonists, the people who co-exist with the lions.