ivan moscow (boris pilnyak, tr aaron schwartzman)

Pilnyak’s post revolutionary text is a tiny box of surprises. Structured around the brief life of the eponymous hero, it moves from Moscow to the deep Russian countryside, where Ivan Moscow is seeking to construct a factory that will produce unlimited nuclear energy. The fact that the novel is written in 1927 and the author was executed by Stalin in 1938, only adds to the unexpected nature of Ivan’s project, which is somehow connected to his love for an Egyptian mummy and the enigmatic Alexandra. Ivan fights in the revolution and dies in a plane crash, but the details seem incidental to a novel which feels like a forefather to the writing of Pelevin and incorporates in its 120 pages an interpretation of revolution, futurism, the conflict between urban and rural russia and its inherent mysteries and much more besides. 

the banshees of inisherin (w&d martin mcdonagh)

There was a time, twenty years ago, as McDonagh was consolidating his reputation as a playwright on the London stage, that an Irish friend of mine came round to supper and lacerated him as a plastic paddy, who was exploiting his roots. His argument was that McDonagh and his brother, raised in Camberwell, were essentially Londoners cashing in on their heritage by writing London-friendly versions of rural Ireland. Everyone knows that it’s never been a hindrance to be Irish if you want to get ahead in London, and most of our greatest English language playwrights have been Irish, through and through. McDonagh may not be Irish through and through but still succeeded in creating apparently authentic tales from the backwaters, often tales which played on masculine venality and stupidity. The plays were imbued with a dark humour and no little violence and were immensely successful.

Since when the playwright has been reinvented as a film director and whilst the rhythms of Irish speech still permeate his work, even when set in the USA, he has left the country in peace for a while, only to return with the Banshees, a folk tale from an island off the west coast of Ireland, imbued with dark humour and calculated violence. It’s a warped folk tale about a dull man who happens to be nice set against a charismatic man who turns out not to be very nice. There’s plenty of affection and mordant wit in a fable about friendship, masculinity and living on small islands. With some bravura acting and delirious greenery, this feels like the most McDonagh script ever written and it really doesn’t matter wether the inspiration came from Donegal or Camberwell, it’s still deliriously effective.

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Brief ps after a night in a Forest Hill pub, having touched on Camberwell & Brixton on the night of SK’s death and discussing this film with regard to the director’s relationship with his brother, among others. Noting that the tension within the film between the characters played by Farrell and Gleason so neatly reflects the fraternal tensions and silences within the director’s own environment and how the film is a fine example of the capacity of art to act as a safety valve for the travails of the artist.

aftersun (w&d charlotte wells)

My friend Ana came out of the screening saying: that’s the most Uruguayan British film she had ever seen.

The British go to a foreign country to grapple with their fragile psyches. They don’t interact with the locals, but they do learn about their deep secrets. It’s a lower middle class White Mischief, modern day economic post-colonialism, albeit filmed and edited with a low-fi charm. The holiday movie has a Rohmerian pedigree, and the director’s style is reminiscent in many ways to that of her fellow countrywoman, Lynne Ramsey. Both Ratcatcher and Morven Caller came to mind, albeit Ramsey’s delirious holiday movie succeeded in integrating the local world with slightly more gusto than the Turks who are melded into the background in Aftersun, with Turkey and the resort itself an exotic location for a delicate investigation of childhood trauma.

Why is Aftersun a Uruguayan movie? Because very little happens, and the movie sinks or swims on the audience’s capacity to be captivated by the dreamlike web spun by the cineaste. 

calle mayor (w&d juan antonio bardem, w. carlos arniches)

Franco era cinema is a fascinating topic. Reading around Calle Mayor, one learns that the director was arrested during filming and was only able to complete the movie after an international campaign to get him released, a campaign which included the film’s Amercian leading actress, Betsy Blair. In addition, the film was deliberately set up as a Spanish-French co-production to assure that it could be presented in festivals and get around Spanish censorship. As a result it premiered to great acclaim at Venice and became a massive hit in Spain when the authorities subsequently permitted its release.

These notes are relevant, not just because of the personal risk that Bardem was taking in making the film, but also to contextualise how radical Calle Mayor was at the time. In a world of Titane and Infinity Pool it’s hard to perhaps contemplate how a relatively low key drama might have resonated with such potency. Nevertheless, the narrative is quietly brutal. In a small Spanish town, a well-heeled group of amigos decide to play a practical joke on ageing but still attractive thirty something, Isabel, setting her up with Juan, a personable banker from out-of-town. Isabel falls head over heels with Juan, who realises he is being a bastard but can’t find a way out. He seeks the help of his friend, Federico, who advises him to fess up, but when Juan runs away, Federico takes it on himself to tell Isabel the truth. The film ends without any redemptive ending: Isabel and Juan will remain trapped, shackled by the realities of small town life.

Bardem’s script includes some lovely throwaway lines about the joys of US cinema and its pristine kitchens. The sound mix, particularly in the scene where Federico tells Isabel the truth about Juan, is remarkable and the cinematography is always considered. The film creates a compelling vision of the fecklessness of small town life, where the pampered sans and daughters of the middle class indulge their wayward games and fancies and no-one emerges with any great credit. 

mis hermanos sueñan despiertos (w&d claudia huaiquimilla, w. pablo greene)

Huaiquimilla’s film is a worthy if dogged dramatisation of the events leading to a fire in the juvenile remand centre of Puerto Montt, where ten young adults died. The closing titles also refer to the more than a thousand others who have died whilst within the system. The movie recounts the story from the point of view of the young adults, focusing on a pair of sympathetic brothers who don’t appear to deserve to be locked up. Perhaps one of the weaker elements of the film is that all the kids are excessively likeable, so the logic behind why they have ended up where they have, and the social conditions within Chile which lead to its youth being locked up, aren’t explored, in spite of the use of occasional flashbacks. Whilst the lead character, Angel, is known as the poet, and his brother Franco, (known as Pulga or Flea, a Messi reference) has dreams of playing for Barcelona, the edges of these characters feel as though they have been ironed out in the script, which veers towards the functional. The film has received support from various International Film Labs, and there is more than a suggestion of the construction of a vision which meets Western requirements of Latin American stories, no matter how well acted and authentic the film feels. 

the emperor’s tomb (joseph roth)

Roth’s other Trotta novel is understandably less celebrated than The Radetsky March. It’s a patchy, rangy book, which sweeps from pre-war Vienna and Slovenia through the protagonist’s participation in the war, imprisonment as a POW in Siberia, and then return to Vienna where he finds himself impoverished following the collapse of the Hapsburg empire. It feels like a 500 page novel squeezed into a hundred and something pages and doesn’t entirely hang together, no matter how fascinating the individual episodes might be. Nevertheless, the sections themselves, in particular the Siberian and post-war episodes offer an unusual vision of how these moments of history happened on a human scale. As a POW  in Siberia, (an experience my great grandfather also supposedly shared), we see the ragged edges of a war which no-one is all that concerned about. Post-war Vienna, in Roth’s vision, has a curiously modern feel, where sexuality is fluid and artistic flavours of the month come and go. People try and fail to spin businesses out of nothing, which mostly fail. All of which feels very like the twenty first century.

woyzech (d. herzog, w. büchner)

Herzog’s Woyzech is a faithful treatment of the play, which is notable for two reasons. One is the way in which the naturalism of cinema permits the story to be completely immersed in the world it emerged from. The small German town with its tavern, town square and nearby fields represents Büchner’s world in the way the theatre never can, for better and for worse. The second is the acting of Kinski, who could have been born to play the part.

The naturalism is actually quite strange, as Büchner’s text is famously unnaturalistic. Woyzech is one of the first great anti-heroes of the 19th century, stepbrother to Raskalnikov. His brain is disordered, he doesn’t fit within the bucolic constraints of provincial life. Büchner emphasises this via the strangeness (the unnaturalness) of the play’s dialogue. The inner workings of Woyzech’s mind are placed on display and spoken out loud. There are moments when the prettiness of Herzog’s pictures jars with this, as though the strangeness is seeking a way to get out, to make its presence felt. The only real outlet is Kinski himself, and the actor’s wild mannerisms feel suitably out of keeping with the idyllic surroundings.

A side note. I think the first time I saw this play was in Stratford, directed by my friend Sean Holmes. He was permitted to stage it in a large barn which was being used for more experimental work for a while, I believe. I have a memory of it being a brilliant white space, which he informs me it wasn’t, and the action playing out in a series of vignettes scattered across the space, which we looked down on from above. I recall it having an alt brilliance to the banal stagings of the RSC. (Living in Montevideo people eulogise the RSC but back then it seemed like it produced the most banal theatre imaginable.) In the cast were a future Hollywood star and other young actors who were clearly relishing the opportunity to do something a bit more leftfield. (Yes, gentle reader, for the RSC, Woyzech was still leftfield back then and probably still is.) Also in the audience on the night I saw it was Sarah Kane. 

the last tycoon (fitzgerald)

The Last Tycoon is an unfinished novel, and there’s something fitting about this in so many ways, as so much of Fitzgerald’s writing is about the unattainable, the out-of-reach. Furthermore, it feels as though the author was perhaps, like his protagonist, Stahr, at the end of the line, conscious of his fragrant mortality. The novel is about a dying man, and the writer knew of what he was speaking.

The novel is full of comments about the role of the writer in Hollywood. Cecilia, the narrator, daughter of a fellow producer, says: “I grew up thinking that writer and secretary were the same, except that a writer usually smelled of cocktails… they were spoken of in the same way when they were not around - except for a species called playwrights who… were treated with respect if they did not stay long - if they did they sank with the others into the white collar class.”

Fitzgerald, perhaps his era’s finest novelist, looks on with a jaundiced detachment at the way the movies changed the pecking order of image and word, relegating the writer to the role of a factotum deployed to help realise the dreams of the great visionaries such as Stahr. At another point Celia says: “Writers aren’t people exactly. Or, if they’re any good, they’re a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person.” Stahr has a pragmatic attitude to narrative, which is something embodied by actors telling the public want they want to hear. “Our condition is that we have to take people’s own folklore and dress it up and give it back to them.” This feels as true today as it was back then, even if some of the folklore is now cannibalising itself (Star Wars, Marvel, The Crown).

At one point Stahr decides to make a film about revolutionary Russia and watches Chien Andalou and Dr Cagliari, with Fitzgerald adding the brilliantly subversive note that “he had the script department get him up a two page treatment of the Communist Manifesto”. Perhaps we can sense here Fitzgerald seeing how cinema and its adjuncts would eat politics whole and repackage it for the masses, in order to make a profit. But it’s Fitzgerald who is the cynic, rather than Stahr, finding himself trapped in a world where the values he inherited are being used in a back lot for a B-feature. 

the brig (d. mekas, judith malina, w. kenneth h brown)

The Brig is a film as claustrophobic as its setting. A military prison the size of a large postage stamp where ten prisoners and their guards cohabit. The prisoners are reduced to numbers and the guards have no qualms in dishing out corporal punishment, part of a process of breaking the prisoners down into malleable subservients, suitable to be reintegrated into the US marines. The film feels as though it must have influenced Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, but it also feels astonishingly balletic, as though it has been choreographed by Pina Bausch. The ten prisoners and as many guards move around the space with a rhythmic ferocity which contains a perverse beauty.

The Brig is a slightly disingenuous film, which was awarded the prize for best documentary at Venice, but is actually a brilliantly filmed account of a stage play by the Living Theatre, originally directed by Judith Malina. Mekas filmed the play during a special performance staged for his camera. Many have commented at the brilliance of the movie in capturing the cruelties of a military penal system and in this it is unflinching, but clearly credit here should go to Malina, the writer, Kenneth H. Brown and the actors themselves. However, what has made this such an iconic film and marks it apart from other filmed versions of stage plays, is the brilliance of the composition and the camera work. The camera is right in there, and we experience the play in a way the theatre audience never could. At one point the cameraman’s shadow appears on a wall. Whether this was deliberate or not, it is testament to its sly infiltration, and the brilliance of the filmed version of a devastating play. 

bardo (w&d iñárittu, w nicolás giacobone)

Iñárittu is a showman and Bardo is nothing if not a show. From the opening, a delirious, icarus-esque swooping over the desert, segueing to an underwater sequence on the LA subway, to a bravura non-interview in a Mexican TV studio, to the close, the film is composed of vivid, sometimes delirious sequences where the camera jockeys for position with text and actors. Once again Iñárittu frequently uses a fish-eye lens, as though he is trying to cram as much information into the screen as it can take. The nods to other filmmakers, in particular Tarkovsky, are explicit. Like many a gaudy show, it is in danger of outstaying its welcome once the bells and whistles become predictable, even repetitive. We know when we enter the gents in a vast Mexican club that we’re not going to go out the same way we came in, that this is just a portal to another cine-set which is waiting behind the next door.

This is undeniably an imperfect film, but perhaps all the better for being warts and all. The themes the filmmaker addresses are interlocking: family, fame and Mexico. It probably helps to know something about Mexico and its relationship with the USA to get the most of the film, which opens with the conceit that Amazon is going to buy Baja California and a vast set-piece sequence about the Mexican-USA war of 1845. The protagonist, Silverio is a Mexican filmmaker caught between two worlds, just like Iñárittu, struggling to retain his Mexican identity when he has made his career in Hollywood. The typography of the credits alludes to the Mexican flag, and the times when the film becomes most discursive is when characters address the dichotomy between being Mexican and remaining in Mexico, or leaving it. It should be remembered that it’s not just the director who heads North. In large swathes of Mexico much of the population has crossed the border to find work. In this sense, the Silverio/ Iñárittu journey reflects that of much of the nation, even if the majority of those exiles’ arguments about their reasons for having left might be less recondite.

At the same time, the film is a telling celebration of the capital, DF. Most of the film takes place in its streets and there are times when Bardo captures the glorious dissonant energy of Mexico DF with real aplomb. This is a very different DF to Cuarón’s ode to the city in Roma. (In Bardo the indigenous maid is refused entry to the beach, so she wouldn’t be able to save the children if they were in danger of drowning, a telling indictment of the country’s classist society). Iñárittu’s Mexico is wild, sweaty, drunken, consumed by family and friends, petty jealousies and deep loyalties. The very messiness of Bardo, its incompleteness, feels completely authentic to the culture it is seeking to portray. Down to the complexity of Mexican identity, as noted by a scene where Cortes claims to be the first Mexican on top of a pile of indigenous bodies in the Zocalo (another ‘spectacle’), or when Silverio is mocked in a fictitious interview for his ethnicity. Mexico is a melting pot and has been for thousands of years, the Spanish just added more blood to the mix. Bardo grapples with the multiple contradictions of Mexico and being Mexican with more than enough vigour to compensate for the director’s self-indulgence.