el año de la furia (w&d rafa russo)

Authenticity is a strange thing in cinema. Russo’s film deals with events in Montevideo in 1972 which lead up to the coup which brought on a decade of military dictatorship. However, if this film was made to be watched anywhere, it probably isn’t Montevideo. The North Americans have done this for years, but casting actors whose accents are clearly not from the place where the film is set instantly jars. Most of the secondary actors are recognisable Uruguayan faces, including my compinche Fernando Dianesi, but they are just background noise, like the moodily filmed Ciudad Vieja exteriors. The lead actors are Spanish or Argentine. Hence, the film becomes a curious study in cultural appropriation. The confusion around casting extends to the rest of the film as it seeks to engage with its political context whilst incorporating genre elements of a romantic thriller. The result is uncomfortable and consistently unconvincing. El Año de la Furia feels indicative of a trend which has been driven in recent years by the streaming giants who have significant budget to invest and are desperately seeking stories. Recent political history works as a canvas upon which a story can be drawn. The true historical events and players are exploited for the purposes of mainstream ‘entertainment’. The result is a two dimensional exposition, which cannibalises real events. Cinema is always waging a Borgesian war with actuality, (cf The Map and the Territory), but recent developments have meant that the bad habits of Hollywood have now permeated the global industry.

(Whilst not a particular fan of Tarantino, one of the most interesting elements of his work is the way he transparently manipulates and deviates from assumed ideas of historical truth in his films, as though to say it is not the duty of cinema to seek authenticity. A film like El Año de la Furia, with its closing notes and aspirations to historical accuracy fails to recognise the way in which its use of narrative and character inevitably distorts audience perception of actual events. In its defence, the filmmaker might say, ‘So did Shakespeare…’)

mudar de vida (w&d paulo rocha, w. antónio reis)

Rocha’s 1966 offering is a beautifully shot tale neo-realist tale set on the Portuguese coast. Adelino has returned after years in exile in Angola. The coastal community he returns to is desperately poor, and his former sweetheart is now married to his brother. He returns to his former life, labouring and working on the fishing boats that crest the Atlantic, but the hardship of this life is destroying his health. He falls in with a younger woman and begins a tremulous affair with her, which arouses the ire of a conservative community. The film ends with the couple looking as though they are on the point of perhaps leaving together to start a life somewhere else. The narrative is very much in the Neo-realist vein. The images of the fishermen rowing on the open sea and bringing in  the boats and the nets are shot with an urgent, vivid clarity. There is one devastating scene where the family’s beachfront timber house begins to collapse as the high tides undermine the wooden scaffolding that holds it up. People scramble to break it down and recover anything they can, including the timber. It’s an astonishing scene of coastal erosion. Other scenes of the villagers participating in the local festivities are just as brilliantly shot and the film builds up a compelling vision of this impoverished seaside community. It felt curious watching it to think how this world would transform in the second half of the twentieth century with the arrival of mass tourism. The insidious poverty would presumably be alleviated, and this landscape which in the film is harsh and unforgiving would soon come to seen idyllic to German and British visitors. As such the film offers a fascinating portrayal of the transformation of Europe over course of the past fifty years (my lifetime), both in terms of labour and comfort, and consciousness. That which was considered abrasive and harsh is transformed into the supposedly idyllic. What has subsequently befallen the communities Rocha depicts would be fascinating to discover. Have they survived or has tourism hollowed them out?

brodeck’s report (phillipe claudel, tr. john cullen)

Brodeck’s Report is one of those slightly deceptive books, set in an undefined, postwar village in a country which is never stated. The writing includes the use of a foreign language which feels like a variant on German. The village has its own language, as well as its customs and its sins and its secrets. It is narrated by Brodeck, a man who was sent to a concentration camp and lived to tell the tale, only to return to his village to find that the evil is still present. Brodeck is commissioned by the village elders to write a report about the killing of a mysterious stranger who has descended on the village for no obvious reason and whose understanding of the village’s crimes eventually provokes a violent, fatal response. The novel is constantly allusive, swathed in mystery and a certain mysticism. In the closing notes the writer acknowledges the work of Primo Levi. The use of the holocaust as a literary device is always problematic and in Brodeck’s Report, it engenders a certain unease. The descriptions of Brodeck’s time in the camp feel sketchy, relying on the power of images, whose power perhaps never feels as compelling as they ought to, to describe the evil they represent. That these images are then juxtaposed against similar images from the village leaves the reader in an awkward position: should the reader interpret the villagers’ actions as equivalent to those of the Nazis? Or is the book saying that all middle European societies have inevitable Nazi tendencies? The book’s poeticism only seems to shroud these issues in more confusion. 

flee (w&d jonas poher rasmussen, w. amin nawabi)

As we settled down to watch Flee, we realised that we had seen it before. It was in Sundance last year, I believe, alongside Censor, which permitted us to watch it on their platform. However, within a few minutes of that strange sensation when you re-acquaint yourself with images that you’ve forgotten you’ve already seen, the film took over and it felt like the first time all over again. Flee is a film about a refugee, but it approaches the subject matter using animated recreations of filmed scenes, something the final image makes clear. The effect is enormously powerful. There are limits to the possibilities of naturalistic representation. There comes a point when the presence of an actor representing a supposedly real event interferes with the audience’s reception of that event. The scene doesn’t feel quite “true”. Rasmussen’s use of animation as he tells the story of Amin’s flight from Kabul to Moscow and eventually Copenhagen, erases this doubt. Using animation allows the viewer to avoid the question of literal, documentary truth and engage with the story on another register. The use of interspersed archive footage, from Afghanistan and Russia (something I don’t recall from the Sundance cut - was it added later?) helps to root us in the reality of these places, but we identify with Amin all the more because his story is not framed by an actor playing him. It’s a highly subtle form of storytelling which has the effect of making Amin’s experiences feel achingly real. 

adults in the room (w&d costa gavras, w. yanis varoufakis)

Adults in the Room is a fascinating and unlikely work from the veteran director, Costa Gavras. He’s 89 years old and still hard at it, an inspiration to us all. This is clearly something of a passion project. The film is a fictional account of the events surrounding the Greek financial crisis which began in 2009, following the global crisis and rattled on for years and years. The film picks up with the election of Syriza in 2015, with Tsipras as the new prime minister and Yanis Varoufakis his finance minister. The events the film describes are based on the book by Varoufakis, who is credited as co-writer.

The Greek financial crisis has been lengthy and complex and not, in this day and age, obvious material for a feature film. It is remarkable how the director succeeds in recounting the intricacies of the negotiations of the Greeks with the Troika of financial organisations, managing to both maintain the film’s rhythm as well as never lose the spectator. Part of the film’s thesis is that this is something that the financial organisations desire. They want to obfuscate, they seek to make it seem as though their decisions are beyond the understanding of the common man or woman, and hence have to be taken on trust. Varoufakis and Costa Gavras go about deconstructing this mystical thesis highly effectively. We always understand both points of view, and at the times the conflict makes for great drama. The film feels as though it belongs to a register which cinema has abandoned: a Brechtian exhumation of contemporary political economic history, where cinema seeks to engage the viewer in issues that normally are supposed to go over their head. (The work of Adam Mackay might be one of the few contemporaries working in this vein.) This quasi Shakespearian approach is generally despatched to be dealt with via documentary, with the suggestion that it’s in slightly bad taste to taint the hallowed halls of fictional cinema with these mordant details.

It’s a film which feels as thought it shouldn’t really work and yet it does. I remember following the Greek crisis for years with no real idea of what was occurring. I left Adults in the Room enlightened. The counter-argument to that of the charismatic Varoufakis might perhaps be underplayed, but the issues are clear. It’s also fascinating to watch the presentation of Varoufakis, played by Christos Loulis, a man who for a while seemed like the epitome of some kind of undefined counter cultural messiah. It’s curious how Varoufakis seems to have subsequently dropped off the global radar, no matter how influential he might still be in Greece. The film succeeds in making the viewer contemplate the possibility of another order of things, even if, looking through the prism of Brexit, the endgame feels more ambiguous than the film suggests. 

trick mirror (jia tolentino)

Trick Mirror is a collection of 9 essays. Many of these essays address the issue of feminism, or being a woman in today’s (post?) feminist western world. Others dovetail and overlap with this theme as they explore notions of identity in the age of the internet and social media, and the construction of the self. There are essays on university life and marriage, but also the way in which the USA has always been a huckster’s paradise (which lead to Trump) and another on the link between religion and ecstasy, that being ecstasy the drug. The essays which most struck this reader were the ones that dealt with the relationship with the internet and another titled Always be Optimising.

The latter again interrogates feminism: “Today’s ideal woman is of a type that coexists easily with feminism in its current market-friendly and mainstream form.” Tolentino then goes on to question to what extent feminism has been sublimated by capitalism, and the cult of the spectacle, and how far this has truly made for the liberation of women. It’s a thesis that seeks to ruffle feathers, and is all the better for it. “The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite - de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter less.” It is also one that perhaps, as we live in a world where the commodification of the image is ever more prevalent, goes beyond the gender divide.

Tolentino’s article on the internet is one of the sharpest critiques of a thematic that has erupted in the 21st century and is only destined to become more problematic. “The internet was dramatically increasing our ability to know about things, while our ability to change things stayed the same, or possibly shrank right in front of us”, she writes. The way in which knowledge has been neutered by being located in the virtual world, whilst the real world goes about its process of removing rights and restricting education is something that requires writers like Tolentino to shout about as vociferously as possible.

However, in contrast to reading, say, Virilio, who might be said to explore similar cybernetic territory, Tolentino writes with a relaxed, intimacy. She is willing to add her own autobiographical experiences and put them to the test, holding the reader’s hand as she talks through the complexities of being a woman in the internet age. It’s no doubt this capacity for the candid that has helped to build a solid base of readers, and gives her leeway to move from a specific, personal to a more general, philosophical viewpoint. Whether you agree with what she’s saying or not, she is always readable and engaging. The fact that she is also skewering some of the biggest problematics of capitalism, feminism and modernity, is a bonus. 

cemetery of splendour (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

Acknowledging that there might be much in the way of context which I could not grasp, and that perhaps it was overkill to watch three Apichatpong films in a week, I have to say that Cemetery of Splendour was the first to try my patience, and not really work for me. Which, as noted, might be down to circumstances. At the same time this also appears to reveal quite how delicate a process this kind of meditative filmmaking is. A hair’s breadth too drawn out, which is what the long cemetery sequence at the end felt like, or too solipsistic, and the experience runs the risk of becoming torpid, and the film of appearing self-indulgent. Cemetery of Splendour is constructed around the idea of sleeping sickness affecting soldiers in Thailand, but I struggled to understand who these soldiers were and why they had been struck down. All the questions which shouldn’t come to mind started to interfere and I felt as though I has been left outside of some kind of magic circle with all the real action happening over there, behind the screen, just out of sight. 

le père goriot (balzac, tr ellen marriage)

Reading Balzac, in a similar way to reading Zola or Proust, is to dive into a corner of a vast sea. La Comédie Humaine, “consists of 91 finished works… and 46 unfinished works” (cf wikipedia). To read one of these works on its own seems a bit akin to watching a single episode of an endless TV soap. There is no way of placing the work in context, because the reader is lacking the other 140+ pieces of context, and to spring to quickfire conclusions seems an act of ignorance.

So, having completed my first novel from this vast collection, Père Goriot, to offer any kind of commentary feels ‘atrevido’. The novel tells the story of an impoverished father who continues to support his two daughters, in spite of the fact that they are married to figures from high society and are ostensibly well-off. Goriot lives in a boarding house with the young legal student Rastignac, among others, whose own ambitions to move into high society will be conditioned by his strange friendship with the devoted father, who is taken advantage of by his ungrateful daughters.

The thrust of the novel’s moral education for both Rastignac and reader is clear and the study of Paris’ social worlds is effusive. One of the most intriguing elements of the novel concerns its pre-history. Goriot, we are told, made his fortune in the wake of the revolution. At a time of food scarcity, he began to control wheat supplies and this lead to him becoming rich. Later in the novel, impoverished and near his end, he repeatedly says he will go to Odessa to return to the wheat business. Within the course of a single generation, the whole upheaval of the revolution, as described in the novel, has been forgotten. The aristocracy have regained complete control of society and absorbed any social differences. Goriot’s sole ambition is to get his daughters into that society, which he achieves, only to find that this offers none of the security either for them or for him he imagined. The result is that the revolution, the most seismic event in the recent history of Europe, as well as Goriot’s life, is reduced to a footnote. It becomes, in the novel, a kind of black hole, with Parisian society accelerating away from its centre at warp speed. The poor are poorer than ever and the rich more venal than ever. History has moved on without, it seems, having taken on any of the lessons that the years of strife might have imparted.

mysterious object at noon (d. apichatpong weerasethakul)

Mysterious Object at Noon would appear to be Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s first full length feature. A doc/ drama, it combines an immersive trip through rural and urban Thailand, with the narration of what appears to be a folk story about two sisters/ teachers who are the same person, or who replace each other, which is of course something of an Apichatpong trope. At one point the film shows a set of travelling players giving an open air performance of the story to a village, with the actresses wearing identical, beautiful costumes. The viewer has to do quite a bit of work to stitch the story together, and the fact that there is no definitive version is revealed by the sequence at the end, where a group of school kids offer up their differing versions of how the story should end, which all seem to feature a bewitched tiger. Many of the tropes of his later work are therefore present, like tantalising clues. It was also notable, the day after watching Memoria, how similar rural Thailand looks to rural Colombia. The film helps to determine the director’s aesthetic, taking the viewer into a sensory exploration of modern Thailand in all its languid diversity. 

memoria (w&d apichatpong weerasethakul)

I picked the perfect evening to go and watch Memoria. There are some days in your life when you want nothing more than to be plunged into a dense, visionary spectacle. Memoria delivered in spades. Only the goofiest, most irreverent of creators gets to smash the system with so much glee. In which regard this film made me think of other Latin based films which somehow manage to interrogate the edge-of-life feeling which the islands of life and empty spaces lend to Latin America, those being the films of Reygadas and the recently viewed Latin excursion of Wong Kar Wai.

I don’t know why Apichatpong chose to film in Colombia, but in so many ways it works. From the flash scene of kids dancing in the square of a remote town to the moment a man falls to the floor in Medellin, scared he has been shot, and then starts running, the film locates pinpricks of Colombian life that pepper the movie, that make it feel it is of that place, despite the multinational creative team. The scene set in the uni courtyard is another, as is Swinton’s character just drifting into a jazz rehearsal in a cramped room, with other students watching with blank but attentive faces. The detail feels both improvised and pitch perfect. Something that surprised me about the film, was the sly humour which Swinton embraces as well, with several scenes provoking an entirely unexpected laughter.

Memoria is a quest film, as Swinton goes looking for the source of her auditory hallucination and finds that it was either to do with someone hiding under a bed in a remote tropical village or it was the departure of an alien spaceship, or both. It is also, one supposes, a premonition of a death she has already lived. At some points it could almost be said that everything gets a bit M Night Shyamalan, not that anyone else would probably think that.

Don’t watch this film at home unless you are properly stoned, or it is the middle of the night when nothing and no-one is going to disturb you. If possible, watch it in on a vast screen in a near empty sala. Let the sounds disconcert you. Strain to hear every word. Watch Tilda’s face become a mask of Tilda’s face. Watch the dead walk amongst you. Dream about your origins as you ride the clouds with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, in no particular hurry to discover where you are going or where you have come from.