birds of passage/ pájaros de verano (d. cristina gallego, ciro guerra; w. maria camila arias, jaques toulemonde)

As Epstein pointed out, (see review of Monos below), budgets for Latin American cinema are not easy to obtain and don’t tend to be big. Interestingly, this is the second Colombian film I’ve seen this year which would appear to have managed to put a respectable budget together. This is an epic, with neatly delineated chapters, taking place over a decade or so, charting the rise of a small scale family cartel in a remote, indigenous corner of the country, where they still speak the native language, and exist within a circumscribed cultural space, with its own rules and rivalries. The opening scene, showing a young woman getting ready to present herself to the world at a ceremony where she performs a striking dance with a suitor, is compelling. The suitor, Rapayet, emerges as the film’s protagonist, with the film following his rise and demise as a marijuana dealer in the seventies. 

The film looks amazing. It’s well shot, the insight into this curious coastal world feels revelatory, it lacks nothing in style. However, the narrative soon  becomes a somewhat prosaic tale of revenge and counter-revenge. The young woman we meet at the film’s opening becomes a secondary character. Her husband too remains slightly one-dimensional and resigned to his fate. The framing device at the start and finish of the film, when a storyteller sings the song of the tale we will see and have just seen suggests the filmmakers are aspiring to a mythic dimension as they recount the pre-history of the cocaine wars, (the man who ends up at the top of the pile comes from Medellin, no mas). But the film never seems to hit the additional notes required to raise the turbulent material onto another level. It’s a well-made, solid, engaging film, which uses its budget effectively, but never quite gets under the skin. 

voz lux (w&d brady corbet)

Being big fans of the director’s first movie, Mr C and I diligently made our way to the Curzon to catch his new offering. Where we encountered that difficult second movie syndrome. This feels like a film hung on a premise which has failed to be be developed. The ubiquitous Willem Dafoe provides sporadic voiceovers to join the dots, but the end these only highlight the gaps. The film is divided into three parts, with some creative casting (the mother becomes the daughter). After surviving a school shooting, Celeste writes a song which goes viral and leads to  her becoming a slightly generic pop star. The first act is the shooting, the second the aftermath and the third takes place years later, by which stage Celeste has transformed into Natalie Portman. Which is where things really start to go awry. Portman’s performance is turbocharged but aimless. There’s a desperate intensity which only serves to annoy everyone, including the viewer. On the one  hand this seems quite plausible: no doubt most mega pop stars are a pain in the ass in their private lives. On the other hand it kyboshes and unbalances the whole film. Corbett shows flashes of innovative talent, but as a whole the film doesn’t hang together. It might be worth noting that with Childhood of a Leader, he had a co-writer, Mona Fastvold, whereas on Vox Lux he’s going solo. Nevertheless there’s an incipient, nagging talent at work. He won’t be the first to have been struck down by the grizzly disease of second film syndrome. 

night flight [saint exupéry]

Curiously I finished the last ten pages of Saint Exupéry’s tale whilst in the sky above South America, which is where much of the novel takes place. (The rest takes place on the ground in Buenos Aires). I’d begun it a month or so ago, and although it’s short, the pressure of land-living lead to a fallow period of reading, and I only managed to recover the book once I myself had taken flight. It’s a short novel with an existential twinge. Curiously, again, I watched a documentary on the flight about a free climber, Alex Honnold, the man who climbed the sheer cliff face of El Capitan without ropes. (Free Solo, d. Jimmy Chin, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi).  Both Free Solo and Night Flight are meditations on society’s relationship with death. In Free Solo the climber, a naif, categorises himself as someone who has a warrior spirit, who finds value in life through the act of occupying the edge on which life and death is balanced. Saint Exupéry’s pilots explore similar celestial territory. Situated between the earth and the stars, they roam a neverland where the day-to-day realities are left behind; a celestial sphere which soars, Nietzschian, above humanity’s mundane glories. Night Flight, however, makes it very clear that this intergalactic consciousness is actually at the service of the mundane. The pilots are part of a system which has been carefully organised in order to deliver the mail from South America to Europe. Their existentialism is assimilated by society. Similarly, the free climber becomes part of a system, his individualism curbed by the presence of a camera crew and his growing awareness that the freedom he encounters in his perilous escapades is no longer something he can keep to himself. The world will claim its share. Both Saint Exupéry’s pilots and the free climber have been blessed to see and inhabit another world which mere mortals never get to experience. The longing to go beyond, to explore that space which is sacred, private, is still out there. But modernity curtails this instinct. We live this longing vicariously, through books or films. These adventurers are our high priests, our shamans, eccentrics communicating from the other side, revealing another way of living which the ‘civilised’ world has banished. 

the world of apu (w&d satyajit ray, w. bibhutibhushan bandyopadhyay)

The rain falls in Montevideo. I sleep in my new bedroom for the first time. The house has come close to flooding twice of late, and as the lightning flashes I can’t help worrying that if I were to sleep it will do so again, this time in earnest. The house is full of strange noises. Hungover, I try to adjust to the novelty but it isn’t easy. 

These kind of domestic details spring to mind because Ray’s film is so absorbed in similar details, transforming the mundane to something magnificent. The sequence where Apu and his bride, Aparna, learn to live with each other, is a celebration of the domestic; the simple joys which Apu learns to love, and then laments when they are cruelly curtailed. 

Having been fortunate enough to have seen films by Ray, Kurosawa, Bergman and Bertolluci on the big screen in recent months, what these filmmakers have in common is the ability to turn the screen into a world, one which transcends genre, or even classification. Humanism may be a common thread., but above all, the filmmakers seem to be embarking on a desperate quest to leave behind the traces of the worlds they have known or imagined. 

In which sense the great art of cinema is not so far removed from the great art of cave painting. These are the things I have seen. Marvel at them. 

our time (d reygadas)

It feels as though half the city is participating in the Montevideo film festival with the cinemas constantly full. The slew of films permits one to take in a range of cinema you would never normally process in such a short period of time. An inevitable fatigue begins to set in. Many of the films are over two hours long. Almost all have something challenging about them. These aren’t popcorn movies. 

It requires something remarkable to stand out, to grab the viewer with a sense of astonishment and wonder. Our Time achieves this. The opening hour is as good as anything you could hope to see in a cinema. The camera roves around a country estate near Mexico City. There are four groups of people. Young children, adolescents, servants and adults. Each one is its own defined unit, but the edges wash and overlap. There’s a sense of inhabiting a moment, which is extraordinary. (It made me think, obliquely of Virgina Woolf and the almost cubist quality of her writing.) Gradually the threads of a narrative become discernible, but there is no rush: the primary objective is to immerse us completely in this world with all of its layers and subtleties. 

Then, the film becomes extraordinary for other reasons altogether. The narrative kicks in, a narrative which recounts the gradual decay of the protagonists’ marriage. This is told in raw, even embarrassing detail. The husband’s jealousy transformed into a grotesque voyeurism, as he becomes a Shakespearian cuckolded fool, wilfully participating in his own fall from grace. The twists and turns of the marital collapse are traced with an excessive, masochistic glee. It is as close to watching the reality of a break-up as one imagines cinema could get. A sloppy, ineditable narrative which barrels all over the shop, dragging on, remorseless, driven by a logic that seems greater than the will of the two protagonists. Which is very much a mirror to the messiness of a break-up in real life; because break-ups are never clean, they always involve pain and humiliation in one guise or another.

When one then realises that these protagonists are portrayed by none other than the filmmaker and his wife, Natalia López, it adds a jaw-dropping layer of complexity to the experience. What kind of crazy fool would dare to expose him or herself in this fashion? Or are they not really exposing themselves at all? Where does life and end art begin, or vice versa? Is this an act of courage or stupidity? Our Time is one of the most insane pieces of filmmaking ever made. It’s like Charlie Kaufmann stoked on cocaine and tequila. A rambling, chaotic brilliant dark night of a movie that is unlike anything else you will ever sit through. 

barbara (w&d mathieu amalric, w. philippe di folco)

Barbara is a radical biopic. It’s ostensibly about the French singer, Barbara, played by Jeanne Balibar. But it’s also about the limits of cinema to capture truth; the possibilities and weaknesses of artifice. Director Amalric makes no attempt to tell a linear story. What we get are fragments, moments, recreations. The presence of the film crew is a constant: the trick of playing a scene and then pulling back the curtains to show the machinery functioning on the other side of the camera is used on various occasions. At one point, one of the real characters from Barbara’s life watches the filming of a scene in which he is fictionally represented, then permitting him to step in and explain to the crew that the room they’ve recreated doesn’t tally with the real room. Amalric himself appears frequently in the film as the director, frustrated by his inability to recapture the woman he knew in her entirety. This ludic film is held together by a barnstorming performance from Balibar. She both embodies the singer, and also embodies herself  as actress impersonating the singer. We see her rehearsing Barbara’s gestures. We see the line between the actress and the character elide to such a degree that at times it’s hard to tell which is which; a considerable achievement to both play the role and reveal the playing of the role at the same time. At the end of the film I was little the wiser about the details of Barbara’s life; but much the wiser about both her music and her idiosyncratic soul. 

about him or how he did not fear the bear (w&d nariné mkrtchyan, arsen azatyan)

Another film from the fringes of the former Soviet republic, describing, as the none-too-subtle title makes clear, the relationship of Armenia with present day Russia. The film’s opening titles state that it is based on a true story. A Russian soldier runs amok and kills an entire Armenian family. He then flees and seeks refuge in a Russian army base. The film follows three men who seek to go about the process of revenge by killing the soldier, one of them a priest. There is use of actual documentary footage, presumably taken from the protests that occurred at the time of the incident. There’s some stunning scenery in the mountains. There’s a near ten minute steady cam shot to open the film. There’s fruitful use of a children’s dance performance, complete with dancing bear, interspliced into the action. In short there’s plenty of lovely moments and promising ideas, but never enough to create a film that really grips the attention. 

monos (w&d alejandro landes; w alexis dos santos)

The producer, local boy Fernando Epstein, answered questions at the end of this screening of Monos, a Colombian film, made with money from at least half a dozen countries. Producers aren’t often invited to speak after the screening of their movies, usually it’s the star or the director. Obviously, part of the reason Epstein was there was because this is a Uruguayan film festival, but on another level it seemed highly appropriate. Because, as much as, or even more than the creative input of script and direction, Monos is a feat of production. As Epstein observed, this is cinema on a scale that is rarely seen in Latin America. The obvious physical challenges the filming must have demanded add value to what’s on the screen. There’s an ambition at work which makes for an unusual and powerful film.

The film is constructed around the premise of a cell of child soldiers in Colombia. Whilst it feels at times like a Hollywood conceit, the idea is inspired by experiences of real kids in the long-running civil war. The teenagers, known only by their nicknames (Lady, Wolf, Dog, The Swede, Bigfoot, Smurf etc), have been put in charge of an American hostage. They exist in an isolated mountain hideout, with nothing to do except squabble, party and get on each other’s nerves. The set-up is pure Lord of the Flies, and soon enough things start to unravel. Following an attack, the group move to a new base in the jungle, where the pressures of collective living ramp up. When their gutsy hostage tries to escape, things really start to get out of hand and there’s self-conscious nod to Apocalypse Now, as the film hurtles towards its conclusion. 

The script does somersaults as it tries to maintain a narrative thread, but the film is carried by the visceral camerawork, the completely convincing acting, the wild landscape and a portentously brilliant score by Mica Levi. It’s a real example of the way in which cinema depends on the contribution of multiple talents in order to make its 100 minutes or so of screen time work. It’s possible to criticise Monos as overblown or sensationalist. Or it could be viewed as one of those films which comes out of nowhere with a freshness and pulsating vision which mark it out as truly distinctive. 

de nuevo otra vez (w&d romina paula)

Romina Paula is something of a pin-up of Porteño letters. The neurasthenic characters of her plays have found a ready audience, as have her novels and short stories. They represent a kind of alt-Buenos Aires: highly educated, articulate, probably either in therapy or contemplating it. De Nuevo Otra Vez is her first film, which she has written, directed and starred in, as a character called none other than Romina Paula, who appears alongside her (actual) mother and her (actual) young son. The film describes a character on the edge of a low-key midlife crisis. With her marriage on the brink, Romina has fled Cordoba, with her son, Ramon, to stay with her mother in Buenos Aires. There she undergoes a series of reunions with old friends, dabbles in a same-sex flirtation, has vague thoughts of seducing her German language student, an idea which goes nowhere, and generally muddles by with the help of her German speaking mother. Her problems don’t seem very serious, and she never seems to take them all that seriously. It wouldn’t be hard to dismiss De Nuevo Otra Vez as middle class whimsy (perhaps with reference to Joanna Hogg). Yet, this remains an engaging, discursive film, which always feels as though it’s talking about something, even if that something isn’t always easy to pin down. It articulates with understatement a decidedly feminine take on the issues which afflict anyone entering middle age: how to continue one’s development as a human being, in spite of the fact the path seems to be laid out, how to avoid the trap of stagnating, now that the battles of youth have been fought. All of this is done with a tender, Rohmeresque vibe, which means that, in spite of the fact Paula’s film is self-consciously contemplating its navel (mirando el ombligo), it also feels as though it’s gently challenging both its own and its audience’s navels. This is a film where, as the creator herself said in the post-show chat, nothing really happens, but one which all the same creates a space to articulate the everyday concerns which anyone approaching the midway stage of their lives is going to have to face; an issue which deserves its own cinematic space. 

hamada (d. eloy domínguez serén)

Western Sahara is one of those places, is a bit like Transnistria from Extincion, whose political identity is hostage to the fortune of geo-politics, meaning its inhabitants are in effect second class citizens, with most living in refugee camps. Hamada follows a handful of citizens who seek to get by in the outer reaches of the Sahara, expelled from their homeland, living in a refugee camp. The central character is Zaara, a young woman with a never-say-die attitude who is desperate to both get a job and learn to drive. The latter proves more feasible than the former. The film casts an affectionate gaze at Zaara and her companions. It’s filmed in a fly-on-the-wall style. There are no interviews, just captured conversations, which sometimes feel as though they’ve been staged a little clumsily. Nevertheless, the film succeeds in capturing the life and times of the Western Saharans, although slightly more insight into the political context of their plight would not have gone amiss.