doubles vies (w&d olivier assayas)

Assayas is prolific. He’s one of those directors who makes almost a film a year. There aren’t many who manage to do this nowadays. (Allen, Eastwood, Winterbottom.) You need a well-oiled machine to be able to go through the whole process of development, financing, pre-production, production, post with such consistency. Studios are set up to do this, but individual directors generally aren’t. The problem with the machine is that there’s a danger that the product starts to feel like just like that. A product. And there’s a sense with Doubles Vies, for all its fleeting moments of brilliance, that this is just that. 

The film opens with a wordy, brilliant sequence where publisher Alain informs the novelist Leonard Spiegel that he’s not planning on publishing his new novel, but he does so in a roundabout, amiable fashion, inviting him to lunch before stabbing him in the back. The decision is taken in he context of where Alain’s publishing house is going, with much discussion about the destiny of the novel in the digital age, both as an idea and a tangible product. Alain is having a fling with his head of digital operations, the go-getting bisexual Laure. The film appears to be laying down all kind of markers, as an investigation into the shape of thought in the future; the value of the word; the death of the attention span. In which context the highly wordy script makes sense: the film is challenging an audience to pay attention, to roll with intellectual ideas, a revindication of cinema as a space of thought/ philosophy rather than pure entertainment. There’s a lovely running joke about Haneke’s White Ribbon as well as a mediation on the ethics of auto-fiction, which might have struck a nerve with the Uruguayan audience. 

And yet, beneath all this, Doubles Vies ends up a very traditional French sex-comedy. Everyone is sleeping with someone else. The deceit stacks up and is mined for comedy. The ideas don’t really go anywhere, or if they do, it’s over this viewer’s head. The final pay-off is unadulterated sentimentalism. This is a bouillabaisse of Frenchness, pungent, reliable, a heartwarming dish. It reaffirms the tropes that the french are intellectual lovers, who drink in elegant bars whilst talking with aplomb about les idées du jour. Whether there’s any real substance behind all this is another matter altogether. 

la flor, parte 1 (w&d mariano llinás)

Paradox: should one write a review of La Flor, having only seen one third of the whole film? Under normal circumstances, the answer would be no. But La Flor is 808 minutes long. The first part alone is nearly three hours long. The film is made up of six stories, featuring the same four actresses, stories which are not connected. In the only part of the film which might be described as brief, the prologue, the filmmaker gives a rundown of each story, supplying an elegant diagram describing the shape of the film, a diagram which has the forma of a flower (or ‘flor’ in Spanish). The film, we are told, consists of four unfinished stories, another story which has a beginning, a middle and and an end, and a final story. Last night, in the company of Snr O, I watched the first two parts. 

Llinás specialises in shaggy dog stories. Another three part epic, Historias Extraordinarias, used voiceover to construct three narratives over several hours which never really went anywhere. Something similar occurs here, even though there’s no private-eye style narration. The first tale is a self-consciously B-Movie Mummy story, of possession in the Andes. It’s rudimentary and effective. The second chapter is more complex. This tells the story of a singing duo, who were a couple, albeit a couple whose story has been fictionalised in order to create a false marketing myth. The conflict between the two singers leads to a highly charged, brilliant rendition of their hit song, a duet in which the couple use the song like a weapon with which to wage their ongoing conflict. There’s shades of a sixties french romantic drama at work, something quasi-Godardian, very nouvelle vague, with faces in profile dominating the screen and much use of depth of field. 

Interweaved in this second story is another B-Movie strand, as one of the singer’s assistants is involved with a shadowy gang which is seeking to extract a serum for eternal youth from the venom of a “centurion scorpion”. The two narratives sit awkwardly within the same tale. The B-movie strand undercuts the potency of the music narrative. The chapter drags on, loses focus, becomes self-indulgent. Llinás’ temporal ambition, converting cinema into a kind of epic, oneiric poetry is revelatory. It sings of a lost art, part Abel Gance, part Homer.  However, it feels as though the filmmaker is wary of permitting any kind of emotional engagement; he wants this to be a definitively ludic, Borgesian viewing experience, nothing more and nothing less.

Which left me, as a viewer, frustrated; wanting to see the other episodes to see if the film could rise above its addiction to intellectual tomfoolery. It seems more than likely that La Flor will acquire a cult status. Like Tarantino, Llinás is an auteur of self-indulgent brilliance. Whether the whole adds up to more than the sum of the parts is something that can only be assessed after watching the film in its entirety. Perhaps it’s unfair to write this review without having seen the film as a whole; but then again it’s entirely within the spirit of La Flor’s ludic narrative philosophy to react in a manner which is not entirely coherent.

the inheritance (peter stephan jungk, tr. michael hoffmann)

The Inheritance is a novel about a man who is seeking to realise his inheritance. There’s not much in the way of subtext. Daniel has an uncle who lives in Venezuela. Daniel is his only kin. He has left a will, but the will is less definitive than it should be and Daniel accuses the Venezuelan executors of the will of stealing two million dollars which is rightfully his. The struggle to reclaim the monies takes years. Daniel gyrates from London to Caracas to Panama to Miami. It also leads to the breakdown of his marriage. However, there is another factor in the breakdown of the marriage: Daniel has an affair with a neighbour which his wife finds out about. The fact that he has no income; he is a listless poet; that his family live from hand to mouth and that he’s having an affair are never really acknowledged by the narrator as the real reason for his problems: rather he blames it all on his failure to realise an inheritance, which he doesn’t really seem to deserve on any kind of higher moral grounds. If this was a novel about misplaced obsession and fatal flaws, it might have been powerful; however the author seems, for reasons that aren’t always easy to discern, devoted to his protagonist, for whom it’s impossible to feel any kind of sympathy as his case goes from bad to worse. 

los enamoramientos (the infatuations) [javier marias, tr. margaret jull costa]

Marias is an author much in vogue. I had tried to read one of his previously, and hadn’t got on with it. I opted for The Infatuations as I read it was a novel about Madrid. Where I find myself at present. In truth, Madrid is but a marginal presence in the novel. True, the book is predicated around the act of going for breakfast, a regular Madrileño habit. Thereafter it feels as though it could occur in any capital city. Which in no way diminishes the book’s quality. The narrator, Maria, becomes mildly obsessed with a perfect couple she spies on over her breakfast coffee, whose happiness raises her spirits before she goes to work. When the husband is brutally murdered, she finds herself an unwitting confidant of the murderer. As this brief outline might reveal, there’s a fair amount of contrivance in the plot, something the erudite author plays on, as he riffs on Shakespeare and Balzac, among other references for unlikely death scenarios. The pleasure of the text is to be found in the way Marias teases out the thoughts and permutations of the unlikely scenario he has constructed. With an almost forensic or neurotic diligence, depending on your point of view, Maria explores every conceivable avenue that the book possesses. Marias clearly loves to write and he never seems to use one word where half a dozen would do. The effect is sometimes exasperating, but it also delivers nuggets of brilliance, as the writer sifts through the narrator’s stream of his consciousness.

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(It crossed my mind as I was returning to the city from the Casa del Campo, that one way in which this might be said to be a Madrileño novel is that the city’s perspective is sentinel. Madrid is perched on top of a steep hill, looking down towards the river and the plain. Marias’ perspective, and that of Maria, feels similar. The story is looked down on from on high, with every detail in the landscape inspected and surveilled. A forensic consciousness.)

a soldier of the seventy first [joseph sinclair]

A little bit of context regarding why I read this book is necessary. Currently in Madrid, I have been dipping into Hugh Thomas’ Madrid, A Reader’s Guide, a lovingly edited anthology of pieces on the city through the ages. As a result, I came across the events of 1812, when Wellington’s army arrived in Madrid during the Peninsula Wars (to be received it would appear with enthusiasm by the locals, as they had succeeded in pushing the French out). I possessed the vaguest understanding of the Peninsula Wars, knowing not much more than they proceeded the battle of Waterloo and established Wellington’s military reputation. The detail about the occupation of Madrid intrigued me. I began, as one does, to dabble in the writing of a tale about a psychic soldier who meets some Spaniards who have fled Colombia in the wake of Bolivar’s liberation wars and returned to Madrid. However, they’ve returned with a small item of gold from the fabled lake of El Dorado, looking for allies to help them now return to the Americas in a bid to recapture the remainder of the gold haul from the lake, which ties in with another true story of the botched attempt to drain Lake Guatavita, 

As a result of all of the above, which is undoubtably the result of having too much time on my hands, as they used to say, I did some research on contemporary accounts of Wellington’s wars and came across this book. Stuart Reid’s useful introduction informs that the book, published originally in 1819. “deservedly caught the public imagination and soon went through the first of  a succession of book editions”. Ostensibly written by one Joseph Sinclair, Reid states that the book is probably the result of more than one first-hand account, edited by John Howell. There is an additional layer of interest for me in that in the first part of the book, before the Peninsula Wars, the narrator is part of the British expedition to the River Plate, spending several months in a Montevideo he seemed to enjoy, in spite of the heat, with descriptions of the “native” population.  

Thereafter the narrator spends many years fighting his way around Portugal and Spain. The depiction of life is one of hardship, violence and a kind of weary, masculine companionship. The second part of the book becomes a succession of battles with the French, with the odd anecdote thrown in. If anything, the book highlights the importance of the figure of the writer. Whilst not negating the value of the first-hand account, it reveals the prime importance of an ability to shape, condense, editorialise events in order to convey their significance. Or perhaps this is line between journalism and literature. One imagines that the contemporary success of the book is down to the fact that this was the journalism of the day, a way for people to vicariously experience political events that shaped their world, most famously in this case, the battle of Waterloo. As the significance of these events diminishes, superseded by the onrushing tide of history, Sinclair’s account loses its capacity to absorb the reader. 

What we are left with is the petty savagery of 19th century war. Men holed up in appalling conditions in an alien society for years at a time.  The physical endurance demanded by the job, which only luck and a robust constitution could help you survive. Perhaps sensitivity too: there’s nothing gung-ho about this soldier. He doesn’t enjoy killing or violence. He’s a fly caught up in the geo-political whirlwhind of his days. On the front line, which is the worst possible place to be. 

lazarillo de tormes [anon, tr. michael alpert]

This novel, written in 1554, is composed of seven chapters. Each one describes the narrator’s relationship to a master. The narrator’s story begins when he’s just a boy, forced to flee from his mother’s house. He is taken in and taken advantage of by various masters, including a blind beggar, a mean-spirited priest and a penurious aristocrat. The novel is a tale of survival and the acquisition of cunning. In the final chapter, we learn that he now has a position of town crier, which he says is a ‘Civil Service’ job. It would be interesting to know the original Spanish description. All over Latin America, the goal in life has been for many to become ‘municipal’ - to have a job supplied in some capacity by the state. (In at least one country this can include being an actor.) The novel makes clear why this was and has continued to be such a cherished ambition. The narrator documents a life of direst poverty. His main aim in life is to acquire food. This aim forms him: he has to learn how to be cunning in order to satisfy his hunger, how to steal from his mean-spirited masters. It’s a poverty which also helps to contextualise the colonisation of the Americas. People set out to make a new life to escape this poverty. In the process, looking at it today, it might be said that they only succeeded in exporting this poverty, whilst the powers that be did a decent job of importing as much wealth as possible. As Michael Alpert’s introduction points out, the novel is notable because it employs an anti-hero as its protagonist. Perhaps nowadays this might be described as giving a voice to the underclass. It reflects the way that a fundamental element in the praxis of writing literature has always been to explore the complexity and variety of the writer’s social world. Lazarillo de Tormes is classed as anonymous (there are various theories regarding the author’s identity), but one thing we can say is that the writer was someone who cast a measured eye over the whole range of his society; someone who looked beyond the confines of their silo. 

note: I purchased and presumably first read this novel in January 1983, at which point I would have had no idea about most of the above.

the general in his labyrinth [márquez]

My parents are ageing. I’ve been staying with them for the first time in a year. They are ok, but that trickster death is popping his head around the door, saying, bear me in mind, before he slips off somewhere else. Marquez’s novel is about the last days of the great revolutionary, Simon Bolivar, but it is also about the egalitarian process of dying, a process that makes all men equal. Marquez traces the General’s final voyage, ostensibly towards exile, but in practice towards his final end. 

At times the book feels like a prosaic read, riddled with details and flashbacks. The narrative, like the journey, is stop-start. It flows, then it comes to a halt, then it picks up again. It’s not a history book, but the writer clearly felt the need to educate his reader with pertinent facts; the country’s greatest living novelist writing about its founder and great patriot. Anyone who has travelled in South America knows the obsession with the continent’s founding fathers, venerated and elevated to mythic status. Young countries seeking to construct a mythic history. Marquez seeks to humanise this figure, bring him down to earth, inject his flaws into the narrative, although at times it feels like the writer struggles. There’s a hint of uncertainty in the way the writer documents Bolivar’s voracious sexual appetite, describing him like a rock star with groupies, before at the very end there’s a reference to his first and only wife who died soon after they got married. In fact, the contradictions and complexities of Bolivar’s history are never explored in any depth. His Damascene conversion to the cause of independence, something which Alexandra Wulf’s biography of Humbolt refers to, is ignored. The psychology of the liberator feels underworked, the text promising more than it delivers.  

Rather, the novelist seems most engaged in the aforementioned issue of the process of dying. If there is any way to bring a glorified historical character back down to human scale, it is to chart his weakness in the face of the one enemy he can never defeat. The book is a portrayal of Bolivar, but it’s also a portrayal of the stalking horse, death, who lies in wait on the bend of a river down which we are all headed.

ash is purest white (w&d jia zhangke)

Jia Zhang-ke latest film is a sweeping tale which chronicles recent Chinese history through the story of Qiao, a gangster’s moll who takes the fall for him and then discovers when she emerges from five years prison that he hasn’t shown her the same loyalty. Instead he’s gone off with another woman, and in addition gone straight. As such the film is split into two parts, pre and post prison. The first part, building up to the incident where Qiao saves Bin’s life, is by far the most effective. It details how the charismatic Bin manoeuvres himself in the small but growing mining town. The film offers a vivid portrayal of a society on the point of transition, a metaphor for the country. Qiao becomes a sacrificial lamb on the altar of change. The second part is more picaresque, with the narrative having less of a sense of purpose, leading to a consciously anti-climactic finale. It feels a little bit as though the film is slipping out of the director’s grasp, in much the same way as Bin is fated to always escape the grasp of Qiao. Nevertheless, even if the film doesn’t quite live up to its promise, there’s something in the overarching vision that Jia Zhang-ke conjures which lends the film a flawed grandeur. 

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.