el empleado y el patron. (w&d manolo nieto)

Manolo Nieto uses similar tropes to his previous film, El Lugar del Hijo, pushing a neo-realist use of location and event. The film concludes with a Raid, a rural horse race on the Uruguay Brazil border, in which Carlos, the empleado of the title, participates. This geographical zone is also one where El Lugar del Hijo was set, and Arauco Hernandez Holz’s vivid cinematography is another echo. Against this backdrop, the film tackles issues of class and land. Carlos, the empleado, is drafted in by Rodrigo when there is a labour shortage. He’s the son of a man who worked for Rodrigo’s father. Both these families have their own relationship with the land, and both inhabit it in a different fashion. One of the most striking scenes is when Carlos’ family appear on horseback whilst he is driving a tractor. They loom up on the horizon like something out of a John Ford film. Carlos’ family belongs to the Wild West, with its gaucho values, whereas Rodrigo’s capitalist family have adopted a life of easy luxury, selling soy to Europe. Rodrigo buys off the cops when he’s busted with marijuana on the wrong side of the border and he has even been converted to vegetarianism by his pretty, brittle wife, Federica. This contrast leads to inevitable conflict, even if it’s a conflict both men seem reluctant to embrace, wary warriors unwilling to lay their cards on the table. This reluctance makes for a slow burner of a movie, one which simmers and never quite comes to the boil. There is even the sense the denouement, where Carlos participates in the raid, perhaps seeks to overcompensate, as the sequence extends itself towards a dramatic resolution that feels telegraphed. Nevertheless, El Empleado y el Patron is a movie which succeeds in representing the twin poles of a country still caught in a timewarp, where gaucho values are celebrated, but struggle to sustain their place in a globalised world. 

deserto particular (w&d aly muritiba, w henrique dos santos)

Muritiba’s film is a febrile tale set in Brazil’s North East. The set up is simple. Daniel, a jaundiced cop who is going through a midlife crisis, has fallen for Sara, an on-line crush. Suspended from work and exhausted by having to look after his elderly father, Daniel flips and sets off to find Sara, who has lately gone off-line and abandoned him. Hunting down Sara in a small town proves harder than he expected, until he gets a call from a friend of hers and they finally hook up. Only for Daniel to discover, a la Lola, that she was a he. The film then becomes about Daniel seeking to come to terms with his attraction to a bloke, and Robson/ Sara struggling to keep his/her life together as it looks as though his secret is about to get out. Deserto Particular is a film that is constantly on the point of coming to a climax that it constantly puts off. Gender identity has become one of the dominant themes of twenty first century culture. It’s an issue that crosses geographical boundaries and as such offers a film employing this thematic a universal appeal, however, it is also becoming something of a cliché, and it’s not hard to guess where Deserto Particular is headed long before it gets there.  What makes the film hold up are the performances. Antonio Saboia as Daniel retains a convincing macho aura, even as his infatuation with Sara threatens to overwhelm him. But stealing the show is Pedro Fasanaro as Sara/Robson. Fasanaro gives a beautifully restrained performance, as convincing as Robson hanging out with his workmates as he is as a femme fatale. It’s a beguiling performance which helps to steer the film beyond melodrama. 

victims of the aurora (thomas keneally)

Keneally’s short novel reminded me a little of an early Sergio Blanco play I saw last year. (Was it last year? Time seems to have succumbed to snowblindness of late.) The play was about a group of people stranded on the Arctic ice, who gradually pick each other off. The premise of a murder mystery in a snowbound wasteland, where every track is a clue, where just to go outside means to risk your life, has allure, but is very hard to pull off. In part because of the restrictions of this world. Keneally’s high Edwardian tale is set on the expedition of Captain Sir Eugene Stewart to the South Pole, as narrated by the expedition painter, Anthony Piers, who in a framing device is recounting the story from his Californian nursing home, sixty years later. The expedition journalist is murdered and Piers is tasked by Stewart to find out who did it. The ingredients, which include forays into the scientific and artistic goals of the expedition, as well as premonitions of the Great War, make for a rich blend. Yet this is a slight book, over almost before it has begun, and the shards of brilliance which sometimes penetrate the text also have the effect of illuminating the way in which the novel is, to a certain extent, coasting, drifting over its material without ever seeking to explore what it all means. At one point the narrator notes that in the Antarctic, seven million cubic miles of ice lie on top of the six million square miles of the continent. What lies beneath the surface is as vast and important as that which lies above, but no matter how entertaining, the novel rarely succeeds in sending a plumb line below, to explore those hidden depths.  

benedetta (w&d paul verhoeven, w david birke)

The other day, talking about The Norseman, a film I have yet to see, I asked if there was anything more to it than the trailer suggests. I say this because, whilst in that instance, the jury would appear to be mixed, in the case of Benedetta, there is undoubtedly more to it than what it says on the tin. The publicity for the movie, another period piece, makes hay with the film’s salacious angle. Lesbian nuns always seems to be a selling point. Verhoeven’s film lives up to these elements and more, with plenty of tremulous sex and fantasy scenes. What run of the mill girl growing up in the shadow of the Black Death didn’t want to get it on with Jesus, the movie would appear to suggest. And if you can’t have Jesus, a shapely fellow nun is the next best thing. All of this is indeed over-the-top, ribald fun. However, there’s a hint of a more intellectual verve at play, particularly given the Covid context this film has emerged into. Supposedly based on a true story, the film closes with the revelation that the town which the more humanist Benedetta became abbess of, was one of the few places to survive the Black Death unscathed. Is there a correlation between sin and the damnation of plague? Did the plague come to us because we have lost touch with our raw feelings and emotions, our base humanity, in this material world? Benedetta doesn’t answer any of these questions, but they do float around in the background. The director himself seems to be testing the limits, deliberately presenting images which to some might be as shocking as Benedetta’s actions were to her contemporaries. You can, of course, ignore all of this, and go along for the well crafted and enjoyable ride, but it feels as though there’s more to Verhoeven’s game than sheer hedonism. 

compartment number 6. (w&d juho kuosmanen, w. andris feldmanis)

Another tale from the Arctic circle, Compartment Number 6 is a railroad road movie which follows the Finnish protagonist, Laura, from Moscow to Murmansk. Laura finds herself in a sleeper carriage with Ljoha, a drunken Mayakovsky lookalike. Initially intimidated by him, their trip then turns into an odd couple romance. The film opens with a literary party in Moscow, where people quote Pelevin, and in this moment one wonders whether Compartment Number 6 might offer an insight into that other Russia, the one that seems to have been kicked into the long grass, both by Putin and his henchmen and the rest of the world. Pelevin’s Russia is full of strangeness and a warped literary cynicism which goes back to Gogol, Bulgakov and their ilk. But after suggesting it might investigate these offbeat roots, the film doesn’t really go there, no matter how much Yuriy Borisov, as Ljoha tries. His erratic but doleful performance lends the film a slightly more left field outlook, but this is really Laura’s story. Not all that dissimilar from this year’s breakout European film, Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, Compartment Number 6 is another film by a man which is a study in a woman achieving some kind of altered consciousness through an unexpected love affair that doesn’t work out as it might have done. This zeitgeisty theme is well framed by the train journey and the Maguffin of Laura’s quest to find the Murmansk petroglyphs, but the film’s ultimate destination feels seems more prosaic than the spectacular scenery it presents.

Mr Curry, more generously, suspected that the issues we shared with the film might have been down to the source material novel from which the film has been adapted.

a dream in polar fog (yuri rytkheu, tr. ilona yazhbin chavasse)

A Dream in Polar Fog offers a deep dive into the world of the Siberian Chukchi people, who live on the Russian coast near the Bering Sea. Set in the years before the Russian Revolution, it tells the story of John MacLennan, a Canadian sailor who suffers debilitating frostbite after an explosives accident. The captain of his icebound ship sends John, in the company of the local elder, Orvo, to the nearest town to be treated. But on the way, they are caught in a blizzard. Nearing death, a female shaman amputates John’s hands. When he returns to the coast, the ship has sailed. This is the set up for Rytkheu’s tale, which is thereafter an account of John’s integration into the Chukchi way of life. Rather than seeking any chance to flee, John finds himself more and more integrated, embracing a more traditional, holistic and ecological existence in the company of the Chukchi, who become his family. In this sense, the novel, published in 1970, feels way ahead of its time. Even more so, when one realises the novel emerges from an industrial Soviet culture which Rytkheu had previously embraced as a writer. Rytkheu’s need to capture and convey a way of life he knew as a young man shines through in the sometimes prosaic text. The author acknowledges the way in which technological advances have helped the Chukchi, but he is also fiercely protective of a way of life which is threatened by the onset of ‘civilisation’. The novel’s value as an anthropological text is clear, as well as offering a fascinating glimpse into one of most curious borders on earth. At one point the narrative mentions that people from Nome used to visit a festival on the Siberian coast. Curious, I looked up where Nome might be, to discover it is in Alaska. At their closest point, Russia and the USA are less than a hundred miles apart. The polar fog the people of these lands inhabit has little respect for arbitrary political or ideological divisions.

a dirty war (anna politkovskaya)

The journalist, Anna Politkovskaya, was murdered in 2006. Reading this book of her articles written for Novaya Gazeta about the second Chechen war, and knowing what we know about Putin’s Russia, the fact of her murder, no matter how shocking, no longer seems surprising. In much the same way as being a journalist in Mexico is a perilous profession, being a journalist prepared to go after the truth in Putin’s Russia is a job with a low life expectancy. Politkovskaya details the events of the war with a sanguine tone, describing its barbarous cruelties with her weather-beaten prose. The world had little interest in the suffering of the Chechens, and Politkovskaya seems all too aware of this. The absurdities of the Russian military campaign, one which appeared to benefit no-one and nothing save for consolidating Putin’s grasp on power, are repeatedly flagged up. One of the many grotesque chapters deals with the military office in charge of documenting the fatalities of Russian soldiers, charged with finding a way of delivering information no-one wants to hear. One can imagine his relief at finding someone willing to listen to him.

Of course, these past months we have all been compelled to finally take our heads out of the sand and pay some attention to the horrors that Politkovskaya detailed and warned about over twenty years ago. She was the Cassandra that no-one wanted to hear. Why did no-one care about Chechnya and Grozny’s fate? Perhaps because it was a Muslim country, perhaps because it was that little bit further away than Ukraine, perhaps because it was deeply inconvenient for vested interests who depended so much on the largesse of Russian wealth. Read Politkovskaya’s book and weep, not just for Ukraine, but for all the other people who have been victims of an aggression which seems to be almost nihilistic. Politkovskaya herself being another of these victims, an irony which she would no doubt have reported with the deadpan humanity which marks out as one of the bravest journalists of the twenty first century.  

arcadia (nicolson)

Nicholson is a restless writer, constantly seeking windmills to tilt his theories against. Arcadia takes the premise that the ancient English estates which were formed at the end of the Middle Ages and consolidated in Tudor times offered a vision of indentured Englishness which was collective, bucolic and aspirational, in spite of the fact these estates were autocratic and had little respect for individual freedoms. HIs wider theory is that within a social framework, the citizen has to accept compromises about the degree of liberty as opposed to the degree of security, whereas contemporary UK is a society that has chosen to value liberty above any great sense of security.

Nicholson’s focus is the Wiltshire estates of the Pembroke family, where Phillip Sidney wrote his great poem, Arcadia, (dedicated to his sister the Countess of Pembroke), and which inspired a sleepy, idyllic vision in the work of Aubrey, Browne and others. This was a nostalgic vision, one  with one foot in an idealised past and another in an inevitably compromised present. The book traces the way that the very power of these estates lead to the conflict with the king that produced the Civil War, but suggests that underneath this conflict was a more ideological struggle between a communal vision of Britain and an individualistic vision. HIs slightly heretical conclusion is that people had a better standard of living with less freedom than with more. When one thinks of the harsh rural world depicted by Hardy, where the labouring rural class had few rights and less security, a world which was in Nicholson’s view a direct result of the defeat of the more paternalistic, autocratic Tudor society, the logic of his argument is clear. There is even an ecological element to Nicholson’s argument, as the Tudor estates permitted smallholdings, whereas the subsequent break up of the copyholder system lead to the construction of vast farms owned by the few, driven by the need for profit as much as a requirement for sustainability. Nicholson’s writing tends to flourish when it is more comprehensively tied to the articulation of his theory and the latter half of the book tends to get lost in the detail of history. All the same this is a book that speaks of Britain past and Britain present with a degree of imaginative and intellectual verve which puts those phoney fogeys of the current government to shame.

“It was an organic ideal, a belief not in mutual exploitation but in the balance of different parts of society. To some extent, ever since, these have been the values of the counter-culture, an underlying thread of idealism which has run throughout the history of the modern world.”

desierto. (charles bowden)

“He is old enough to pre-date the modern border. Until about 1930 it was a line on a map, not on the earth, and Don Pedro remembers cattle drives from the valley up to Tubac in Arizona. The same kind of border the Yaquis knew and crossed in their endless comings and goings for refuge and guns and bullets. For these people at some level it is all a piece of ground and the ground is absolutely connected.”

Bowden’s book is an account of a land that transcends the border humans have imposed on it. This land is the territory that exists between the hills of Sinaloa, the wastelands of Texas and the coastal reaches of Southern California. Within this territory live Mexicans, North Americans, and the indigenous people whose forefathers predated the arrival of either. It is also the home to coyotes and lions. It is a territory whose modern economy is dominated by the exploitation of the desert and the narcotics industry. Bowden’s book, reporting back from the front line in the nineties, is the godfather to Cormac McCarthy and the stepson of Edward Abbey, whose influence he acknowledges in the opening pages. Thereafter it’s a ride of remarkable brilliance through the highways and byways of the territory. Bowden hangs out with the Sari fishermen, the Sinaloa narcos, and the gringo entrepreneurs who get swallowed by the savings and loans scandal that prefigured the crash of 2008. All of this against the backdrop of the desert, that immutable space which contextualises all human actions and puts them in its cruel shade. Bowden possessed the unusual capacity for a gringo, firstly of having curiosity for the Mexican and native cultures, and secondly of being able to gain their trust sufficiently to write about these worlds with the authority of a quasi insider. His voice, little known, is that of a poet-journalist who understood a land which can never be understood within the conventions of human power, no matter how much that power seeks to scar its landscape.

Nb. I remember in Michoacán when the elder of the community, Don Esteban, told us how when he was younger he would head to the US and there was no demarcated border. For generations the border wasn’t even an idea. Then it became an idea, but nothing more. Now it is a frontline. However, the land and nature, Bowden suggests, know no border and his remarkable book offers a glimpse of this alternative geography.

europa (w&d haider rashid, w. sonia giannetto, erfan rashid)

I was the only person in the cinema at the ICA to see Europa, a tale of an Iraqi immigrant crossing the border into Bulgaria. The disinterest in the film seemed unsurprising, although I am sure that were this to have been a film about an immigrant from somewhere whose conflict is more widely covered in the news, there might have been a larger audience. Attitudes towards immigration are inherently racist, and the recent traumatic events on Europe’s border have sadly made this even more clear, if it was ever in doubt. In the style of Son of Saul, the camera keeps close to Kamal’s face as he tries to stay alive in the forest, eluding vigilantes and desperately seeking out food and water. There is one remarkable scene where he manages to flag down a lift from a middle aged woman, who is increasingly scared of him, and finally screams at him to get out. The ambiguous conclusion is equally powerful. Europa is an indictment of Western Europe’s callous immigration policies, told in a high energy style. Kamal is a person, not a number on a spreadsheet, whose elemental quest to stay alive, rather than being alleviated, becomes even more nightmarish once he crosses into the fabled fortress of Europa.