red sparrow (d. francis lawrence; w. justin haythe)

Heathrow, waiting to catch a plane to Houston, where I will not leave the airport. 

Mr Curry decided we should go and see Red Sparrow rather than A Fantastic Woman for reasons which were never entirely clear and the truth is that the movie offers less to get excited about than its ‘hot-under-the-collar’ press would hope. Within ten minutes Mr C had murmured to me “This is an airline movie, right?’ And he was. Any film which has a plot point revolve around floppy disks feels unlikely, introducing a degree of contrivance which undermines even the most far-fetched of narratives. At some point, even though we know we’re watching a Bond-esque fantasy, we need to feel there’s some kind of underpinning in at least a hypothetical truth, and a detail like this seems is so unwieldy that even the most tenuous connection to that hypothetical reality is ruptured and we start to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Which may or may not annoy the filmmakers, who knows. Maybe they don’t care and they’re just laughing all the way to the bank.

What is interesting, however, about Red Sparrow, is its representation of the the American other, in the shape of the Russians. These Russians, are ruthless. They have a devotion to the nebulous idea of the state/ motherland. And, in Red Sparrow, above all else, they are obsessed by sex and its power dynamics, rather than its pleasure dynamics. One can’t help thinking that this is no more than a mirror to the state of US society: that the portrayal offered within the film of the Russians is a way of exploring the concerns and values of the filmmakers themselves. None of which reflects their country in a particularly flattering light. 

strong island (d yance ford)

Strong Island is a meditative, deeply felt and personal documentary, made be Yance Ford about the death of his/her brother, William. William was shot after a petty dispute. His killer was never brought to trial. The documentary analyses the impact of the death on what had been an aspirational family. Her mother was a successful teacher and William himself had just qualified as a correctional officer at the time of his death. Following his murder, their close-knit family was devastated by the way that the state refused to bring his killer to trial. Had the tables been turned, had William been white and his killer black, they had no doubt that justice would have been pursued. There are other aspects of the case which the film touches on, albeit in fleeting detail, such as the unmarked car that sat outside the family home in the days after William’s death and the calls in the middle of the night. But, more than anything else, it feels as though the making of this film is a cathartic, necessary journey for the filmmaker, whose face is captured in vivid close-up, wrestling with the duty bequeathed to ensure that a brother’s death would not be forgotten; that the art of the director’s cinema would offer at least a hint of justice, where the processes of the state have offered none. 

trust (w. falk richter, tr. maja zade, d. jude christian)

There’s a lot that might be said about the Gate’s production of Trust, a German play with a strong directorial input provided by Jude Christian, an English director, who also acts in the play. You could talk about the success or otherwise of its critique of modern society, which might be astute, or might be a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it. Or you could comment on the play’s influences, a dash of Crimp, a soupçon of Fosse, a flavouring of Ostermeier. You could start to talk about the way in which the staging explores notions of presentation; with the elongated stage itself turned into an evolving installation. Just as Richter’s text explores the way in which narrative ‘presents’ or ‘represents’ its themes, characters, story. Then there’s the whole issue of the fourth wall, the way the writing and the direction plays with it, sometimes putting it up, sometimes taking it down. There’s a whole Hare-ian debate possible about the relationship between the text and the staging.  Even if the text would appear to be willing the director into an appropriation of its words, something Christian has no hesitation in doing, throwing in a whole section on Brexit which can’t have been there in the original German production.

You could talk about all these things, when you talk about Trust, but more than anything i think it’s worth pointing out what a barmily enjoyable show it is. In a world where notions of pleasure, in the theatre and elsewhere, are up for grabs, Trust offers a new way to please old masters. The Barthesian delight in never knowing what’s going to come next: whether the play, with its tenuous narrative, is going to evolve or atrophy, and if it does so, (either), what form will this take and how do we get to the end? Trust reminds us that theatre is an experience which employs a text, rather than being contingent on a text; that theatre has so much more to offer than words (without in any way negating the value of words). 

One suspects that in Germany this kind of production would have none of the novelty that it possesses on a British stage. Which just goes to show the theatrical pleasures we’re missing out on, and emphasises how welcome Trust is, a play that encourages its audience to think about love, society, the importance of dramaturgy, whilst re-calibrating notions of theatrical enjoyment.

earthly signs: moscow diaries 1917-1922 [marina tsvetaeva]

Over lunch, I spoke with a writer about the process of writing. He mentioned that he had started using notebooks. We talked about the whether of the writing process. For whom is the writing written, and does it matter if it has no public. Which also reminded me of the commentary I recall reading somewhere, don’t know if it was by Barthes or Nietzsche, that everything a writer writes, down to their shopping lists, is part of their oeuvre.

Forgive a slightly high-falutin opening to reflection on Earthly Signs, Moscow Diaries 1917-22, as the book is titled. The above thoughts occur because one wonders, at the time of writing, whether Marina Tsvetaeva intended all the observations or notes that make up this book to be published. Or rather, one might wonder whether there were other observations or notes which, when the time came to put the book together, she decided to omit. The book is an account, as the title suggests, of the poet’s experiences in Moscow in the aftermath of the revolution, (as well as a brief aside about her time in Germany). It consists of eleven sections, which recount different moments and present different aspects of the harsh life she was leading. Sometimes there are repetitions, word for word, from one section to another. It’s a collage as much as a coherent narrative. What it does is open up the writer’s mind, presenting her political, emotional, maternal and psychological state of being.

Tsvetaeva is not a fan of the revolution. Her sympathies remain with the Whites. In one telling phrase she mentions the “new soulless communist soul forcibly imposed on Russ”. a phrase that sums up her attitude to a revolution which, more than anything else, she distrusts poetically. A long closing section brilliantly dissects her relationship with the poet Briusov, who briefly thrived in the new Soviet republic, because, as she explains, he had a machine-like addiction to power. (She damns Briusov with the following phrase: “Blok’s death was a thunderbolt to the heart; Briusov’s death was the silence that falls when a machine suddenly stops.”) Tsvetaeva seems to see the mechanisation of the soul and day-to-day life as the eventual outcome of the Bolshevik impulse, which in retrospect doesn’t seem to have been too wrong. 

However, her tone remains ironic and distanced. Here’s a writer who knows she’s fallen out of step with the direction her nation is taking, but also knows that through the act of capturing her thoughts, distilling her voice, on the page, she retains her individuality, her capacity to be herself. Time after time she comes up with a striking, eminently human thought, or disarms the reader with a sly or witty remark. Writing transcends politics and history; a century later, Tsvetaeva lives on as she knew she would, merely through the act of having captured herself on the page, even had no-one ever got round to publishing or reading what she’d written. 

The result is a brilliant, lucid account of what it was like to live through those days, with no particular axe to grind, with just children to protect and survival on your mind. Some sequences, such as the description of the women’s poetry reading night, are extended and wonderfully entertaining; at times other entries are little more than stray thoughts, captured against the will of time or memory. The net result is a wonderful, slim book which reveals more than could ever be hoped for about that remarkable moment in history and the remarkable poet who writes about it: “I can be bought, but only by all the heaven inside of you! By that heaven in which there may not even be room for me.”

lady bird (w&d greta gerwig)

I realise I’m not the captive audience for Gerwig’s coming of age story, nevertheless I can’t quite get around the feeling that it’s an inordinately twee, safe piece of filmmaking. Rohmer seems to be cropping up a lot this week, and there are indeed strong links between Lady Bird and Call Me by My Name, both featuring somewhat bland but supposedly likeable protoganists going about the business of growing up, losing their virginity, etc. But again, if the reference to Rohmer is permitted, there’s not a great deal of angst (which I confess was one of the predominant emotions of my late adolescence so I might have a skewed perspective), or self-doubt. Soarise Ronan’s Lady Bird is a brittley self-confident character, who fends off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without ever looking like she’s in any danger of being derailed by them. Maybe it’s unfair to compare an account of a Sacramento childhood to a post-war European one, but even Sofia Coppola’s films have considerably more edge than Lady Bird. Again, I recognise that I might be perceived as being curmudgeonly in my response. This is just a crowd-pleaser, you might say. The fact that the heroine’s home on the “wrong side of the tracks” looks like one 90% of the world’s population might sacrifice a family member to obtain, despite having only one bathroom (how did they survive?!), despite the fact that a series of young male leads seem more than happy to throw themselves at Lady Bird’s feet, this isn’t supposed to be taken all that seriously. Only, taken seriously it has been, with the film lauded and the director garlanded. Sure, it’s not a bad film, slightly less engaging than Submarine, for example, but the heavyweight response to this lightweight fare says a lot about the weird cul-de-sac that Anglo-Saxon cinematic culture has managed to find itself driving down. 

(nb - I was far more interested in discovering Ladybird’s brother Miguel’s story, but this ended up feeling like a narrative footnote more than anything else, designed to lend colour rather than depth. How come she has a (presumably adopted) Latino brother? What does this say about her family and values in modern day USA? Or was it just thrown in as a bone to keep the liberal demographic happy? Am quite surprised not to have come across even the slightest commentary regarding the convenient existence of the marginalised Miguel in any of the reviews.)

call me by your name (d. luca guadagnino; w. james ivory)

Guadagnino’s biggest hit to date is a film which many people I’ve met have told me moved them inordinately, but which left me strangely cold. It’s a coming of age tale, as the adolescent Elio explores his sexuality during a long hot Italian Summer. The film, employing a James Ivory script, takes its time to play itself out, with the rhythms matching those of the long Summer days that the script inhabits. Guadagnino adopts his trademark lush cinematography and lavish music, but the narrative itself is slimmed down, homing in on the comings and goings of Elio and the older American he falls in love with, Oliver.

Towards the end of A Bigger Splash, there’s a slightly uncomfortable storyline relating to African immigrants arriving in South Italy. Guadagnino is a sybarite, one can’t help thinking, and politics, or at least ‘social realism’ politics, isn’t really his bag. Call Me By Your Name makes no bones about being a primarily bourgeois piece of art. Elio’s archeologist father gets his kicks from discovering aristocratic Roman treasures which are salvaged from the sea floor. In this sense, Call Me By Your Name, an eminently apolitical work of art, might be said to be completely honest in its intentions. However, as a result, I found myself engaging less and less with the dreamy protagonist. Sure, the flowering of late adolescence is driven by a sexual impulse, but it’s also an age when other impulses flower: the idealistic or the political urge. It’s easy to understand why Call Me By Your Name, which captures Elio’s sexual anxiety with a surgical precision, has seduced an audience that identifies with Elio’s angst. We all went through that stage at one point or another. (And, given this, it’s also easy to understand how the story is far more than a “gay” story, as might be said to be the case with Haigh’s Weekend, for example). But the net effect is that Elio ends up feeling like a hollow character, sheltered and indulged by his almost creepily empathetic parents. 

Of course, no film can have it all and it might seem churlish to quibble about a lack of political perspective in what is essentially a glorified love story. But Elio’s self-absorption ultimately seemed to this viewer to make him a banal one-dimensional hero. The film is, to all intents and purposes, a Rohmerian fable, but the characters lack the self-doubt which Rohmer’s characters evince, which is what gives Rohmer’s characters their charm, the way in which they achieve their epiphany in spite of their doubts as to whether they really deserve it. Another recent film which could be a point of reference is Santiago Mitre’s El Estudiante, a film which boldly embraces its protagonist’s shallowness in way Call Me By Your Name shies away from. 

the lost honour of katharina blum [heinrich böll]

Böll’s novel seems redolent of a lost era. When the GDR and the DDR were still separate entities, when the Wall still stood. It’s the prerogative of the present to assume that the past was more innocent, unless, perhaps, one was born in wartime. Boll’s novel would seem to argue against the thesis that those more innocent days. The slight tale recounts the very modern trend of character assassination by the press, with Katharina seeking revenge for the way in which her life is traduced by the newspapers after she becomes involved with a suspected gangster. 

Of as much interest as the subject matter of the novel is the dry, even terse narration, with the authorial voice regularly filtering through. The book’s avowed aim is to offer a dispassionate account of the events surrounding Blum’s arrest and subsequent crime as they occurred, but the author’s sympathies are revealed via a sarcastic tone, which takes aim primarily at the authorities who are investigating Blum. The narrator’s irreverence keeps the story moving, via a series of short, sharp chapters. Ultimately, perhaps, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum doesn’t quite live up to its reputation; it has the feel of a minor, satirical work which touched a major nerve within its society at the time of writing. Having said which, satire is always trapped within the confines of the society it critiques; what shines through is the relish with which the author goes about lancing the boils. 

loveless (w&d andrey zvyagintsev, w oleg negin)

Loveless, watched in the company of Mr W on Valentine’s night, is another rigorous, absorbing film from Zvyagintsev. It offers a portrayal of Russian society that has a muted ferocity. The film’s narrative revolves around the disappearance and subsequent search for Alyosha, the 12 year old son of Boris and Zhenya, a couple on the brink of divorce, both of them now setting out on new relationships which they hope will offer them greater scope for happiness. As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Zhenya only married Boris because she became pregnant, and the reason she kept the child was that she wanted a way out from living with her tyrannical mother. The couple have fallen out of love and the one who suffers collateral damage is their son. His pain is shown in a shocking reveal as he hides whilst his parents engage in yet another cruel argument.

This may be social realism, but Zvyagintsev’s palette is epic, rather than parochial. Firstly, the narrative is permitted to wander. Where the child’s disappearance might have been the immediate focal point of a British version of this story, Zvyagintsev enters into two lengthy sequences showing both parents with their new lovers. The understated camerawork, which uses a slow, creeping zoom to emphasise the sense of us spying on these people as they go about their business, (and perhaps suggests the ghost of their son), registers both characters with a devastating honesty. They are given time and space to say what they think, to the point of damning themselves. Minimal gestures give them away. Rarely has the process of capturing a selfie been made to seem quite so pernicious or revealing of the innate narcissism of modern society.  

Then, as the film shifts to the mechanisms of Alyosha’s disappearance, there’s no attempt made to sugar the pill. There are redemptive figures in this bleak story, namely the volunteer helpers who assist the parents in their search. It’s not hard to think that a British version of the story might have focussed on their POV, as the only sympathetic voices. Zvyagintsev refrains from this option. Instead, he focuses on the parents’ gradual disintegration, which is also a gradual journey towards humanity. A limited humanity, which offers little consolation, but something, all the same. 

The narrative might be harsh and relentless, but given the subject matter, why shouldn’t it be? The aesthetic approach consolidates its epic quality. This is a movie about Russian society, but it’s also a movie about the way in which humanity, with its placebo gadgets, runs the risk of drifting towards a state of engrained lovelessness as it pursues a nominal dream of material comfort. There’s a sleight-of-hand to the way in which the film effectively makes the audience accomplices in failing to realise the seriousness of Alyosha’s fate. As the twists and turns of the parents’ narratives are forefronted, it’s only much later on that the full impact of the child’s disappearance hits us, in exactly the same way as it catches up with his parents. There’s a terrible, almost religious  subtlety to the film’s construction: we are all complicit in the fate of our world’s lost children. 

phantom thread (w&d paul thomas anderson)

I thought about The Servant quite a lot whilst watching Anderson’s latest this afternoon. Which tells you several things. One is that the film has its longeurs, which offer plenty of time for reflection, which may or may not be a good thing. Another is that the issue of the British class system is still alive and kicking and generating box office. It will be forever thus. 

Phantom Thread, which I confess I had confused for a long time with the latest instalment of the Star Wars franchise, is a curate’s egg of a movie. I kept on thinking that there must have been something I was missing. Who was Alma? How come this young woman with a German accent had landed on the South Coast of Britain in the fifties? At one point in the film there’s a reference to a Dominican man selling visas to Jews in the war and the camera cuts to Alma’s face, and I thought, a-ha, there’s a meatier storyline which is about to unravel, but I was wrong, there isn’t. There’s plenty of unravelling and meaty mushrooms, but not much in the way of a storyline. It feels at times like this must be a slightly clumsy adaptation of a novel, with the above unfulfilled strands and random moments like the Swiss honeymoon which serve no real purpose. (It isn’t, as far as I know). At other points it seemed likely that this could be a highly personal project for Anderson, which is perhaps dedicated to his wife, a slightly self-indulgent way of explaining the insufferable nature of artistic genius, something PTA does indeed possess, but which it might have been cheaper and more useful to explore in therapy. Finally, earlier in the film, I thought it might be making a timely commentary on the way in which women are used (in movies and in life) as decorative adornments, and that Alma’s story would challenge that seemingly irresistible trend. But Phantom Thread didn’t really do that either; the marriage of Day-Lewis and Vicky Krieps is a hardly a great leap forward for the feminist cause, especially when she has to poison her husband in order to obtain parity within their marriage.

All of which suggests a film containing a fragrant bouquet of ideas, but not that much staying power, either in the development of these ideas or the trama of the plot. In the end, the film seems to trip over itself in a bid to get to the end, hammering home the point about the sub-S&M relationship through the recycling of its slightly clunky poison mushroom trope. At the same time, there are some great moments and some great scenes. Day-Lewis is an actor with tremendous cerebral vigour, which he’s never afraid to employ. At times it feels as though his Reynolds Woodcock is an Irons/ Nighy pastiche, the distracted posh Brit per excellence, but then he puts his foot on the gas and produces moments of spectacular, excruciating insight, where the monstrous nature of the man he plays is stripped bare. No-one wrinkles an eyebrow quite like Day-Lewis.

These moments threaten to carry the film, but they don’t quite. To return to The Servant: the Pinter/ Losey film explored the class/ power dynamic far more surgically, aided not just by the performances of Fox and Bogarde, but also by the concision of Pinter’s script. The neat topsy-turvy nature of their relationship was always kept in check by the writing, maintaining the tension and the feeling that something was as stake, something Phantom Thread allows to slip in the last half hour. Perhaps Anderson is trying to do too much, or perhaps he was never entirely sure what he was trying to do. Or perhaps, as mooted, there’s actually a subtext to the story which has very little to do with the viewer, and everything to do with the artist’s struggle. The artist in this case being Paul Thomas Anderson, rather than Reynolds Jeremiah Woodcock.

three men in a boat [jerome k jerome]

A title to conjure with. A title that has conquered the world. Simple titles are so often the best. Eponymous or definitive. War and Peace. Crime and Punishment. Pride and Prejudice. One wonders if the book would have garnered quite the fame it has, if it weren’t for the perfection of the title. It’s a slight anecdotal tale. The fascinating aspect of the book is the window it casts on Victorian city life; the sense of stress that was already present, the need to escape. The book’s success tied to a contemporary fantasy of getting away and escaping for a bit, embracing a quieter rhythm, something which modernity had already consumed. There’s a certain ingeniousness to the way in which the narration meanders like a river on a plain, seemingly in no hurry to get to its destination; and one can understand how the narrator’s jovial tone has beguiled generations, whilst at the same time realising why this was Jerome K Jerome’s only real success, albeit a success that has bestowed a minimal immortality.