the five devils (w&d léa mysius, w. paul guilhaume)

Mysius’ film is superbly constructed, beautifully filmed and edited, with a great score and some phenomenal acting. All of which makes one wonder why one comes away from the film feeling slightly underwhelmed, no matter how enjoyable it might be. Vicky, played by Sally Dramé is a nine year old girl whose parents are going through a difficult patch and who happens to have psychic powers. Which is something she has in common with Julia, her aunt, who appears mysteriously in her life after a long unexplained absence. Julia and her dad, Jimmy are second generation, their parents coming from Senegal (where Jimmy was born, but not Julia). This perhaps ties Vicky & Julia’s psychic powers into some kind of African witchcraft trope, and indeed, Vicky is partial to creating concoctions which include ingredients such as dead crow. Sally Dramé is one of the best child actresses you will ever meet and more or less steals the show, as she gradually gets to the heart of the menage á trois which is her family origin story. As such, the film, in spite of its stranger elements (such as her mother, Joanne’s penchant for swimming in life-threateningly cold lakes, and a rhythmic gymnastic strand), is a fairly classical French relationship narrative, with antecedents such as Huis Clos or Dangerous Liaisons. Personally I was reminded of a film I remember loving called L’Apartement (Mimouni), which felt when I saw it like the apotheosis of French cool, and it might be that Le Cinque Diables will have a similar effect on a younger generation, rather than one of my jaundiced era. It’s a really well made film, but one has the sense of something stranger, less organised, trying to break out, which never quite manages to rupture the lake’s impervious but static beauty.

mccabe and mrs miller (w&d robert altman, w. brian mckay, edmund naughton)

There are a few Altman films I have always hoped to see on the big screen, and this is one of them. The anti-western western, by a master of the high Anglo-Saxon art of gentle satire. (The transformation of Gosforth Park into Downton Abbey represents everything that has gone wrong with Britain in the 21st century.) M&M is a typically baroque piece of work which opens with a lengthy, darkly lit sequence where Beatty’s McCabe visits a desultory tavern in a forlorn mining settlement which will one day become a thriving city. The sequence is shadowy, almost mysterious, as the locals ask themselves who this McCabe might be, mythologising him as a gunslinger (which he isn’t). It lasts for perhaps 15 minutes and sets out Altman’s stall to create immersive, confusing (as immersive procedures tend to be) and a novelistic kind of cinema, with Dickensian undertones. The narrative of M&M is underwhelming: Julie Christie’s opium smoking entrepreneur comes to town, in a strangely off-key sub-cockney performance, and goes into business with McCabe to set up the best whorehouse in town. The big players want to buy McCabe out, he arrogantly shrugs them off, with catastrophic albeit predictable results. The chemistry between Beatty and Christie, two luminous screen presences, never quite seems to flower and Christie’s role feels underwritten. The pacing is stately. Nevertheless, the world of the movie, this remote mountainous corner of the USA, is perfectly realised, and there’s an almost regal authority to Altman’s management of the grand set piece scenes, culminating in a final, glorious snow-bound shoot-out that is the equal of any Western that precedes it. This might not be his greatest movie, and the gender politics occasionally make one cringe, but, embossed with the hallmark of its humanist director, it is nevertheless a minor masterpiece. 

From Wikipedia:

Carpenters for the film were locals and young men from the United States, fleeing conscription into the Vietnam War; they were dressed in period costume and used tools of the period, so that they could go about their business in the background, while the plot advanced in the foreground.

opening night (w&d cassavetes)

Cassavetes’ baroque movie, once again placing his wife centre stage and riffing off their marriage, is one of the great theatre films. Once upon a time the worlds of theatre and film essentially overlapped, nourishing each other in a mutually beneficial feedback loop. Perhaps it can be said that this is still the case on Broadway and the West End, but, having worked in both mediums, the relationship feels more tenuous than it was back in the day. Cassavetes’ film describes the build up to an opening night in New York of a new play, staring Myrtle (Gena Rowlands) as the vampish lead who is well into middle age and scared of being defined as old. The part she has been contracted to perform is that of an ageing woman and she fights back against the writing and the role, as she goes through her own mid-life crisis. Ben Gazzara is the director trying to hold everything together. The film meanders and deviates and could be described as self-indulgent, were it not for the fact that this very self-indulgence is integral to the movie’s dynamic. In an early scene, Gazzara spends an age on the phone to Myrtle assuring her she is brilliant, in spite of the fact it is four int he morning and his wife wants to go to bed with him. Everyone loves Myrtle but they all know she’s a disaster area. The film is a remarkable study in stardom and its excesses, as well as what makes for the type of person who can become larger than life, both on stage and off it. In the closing sequence, Rowlands and Cassavetes are playing a couple on stage, within the play, but it is clear that they are riffing and improvising and basically making the whole thing up. The director, producer and writer can hardly bear to watch. But when the curtain goes down they are cheered to the skies. Cassavetes’ vision feels both deeply cynical and deeply honest: when you get to be *the star* anything you can do is untouchable and revered, even though Rowlands is blind drunk and making it up as she goes along. The scene goes on too long, it becomes self-indulgent, and anyone who has ever been inside a play and seen the actors start to take it over, will see this for the painful exercise it is, but that’s the whole point. The figure they applaud and deify is in all likelihood a liability, and a danger to themselves. The toxic industry of stardom is a bride stripped bare in Cassavetes’ tortured masterpiece. 

how to blow up a pipeline (andreas malm)

Perhaps the reason Malm’s text feels a tad underwhelming is because it is getting so much coverage right now. It doesn’t hurt having a film made, ostensibly of the same book, and I look forward to seeing it, because it’s hard to see how this slight and largely theoretical text would make a movie. The book’s killer title is an obvious selling point, but the book then tells us very little about how to actually go about blowing up anything. Rather, it’s a meditative discourse on the validity of violent (“terrorist”) actions in defence of a cause, in particular the cause of resisting ecocide. Referring to classic campaigns, assessing to what degree they were actually non-violent (Gandhi; MLK; the Suffragettes etc) and concluding that effective resistance cannot occur without an extremist wing being prepared to go beyond the dictates of the law, an action which contains an implicit violence against the status quo. Quite how that should manifest itself in concrete terms is something the book seems to shy away from, even as it refers to more recent acts of environmental resistance.

reason to leave (w&d park chan wook, w. chung seo-kyung)

Park Chan Wook’s latest is both a sludgy police melodrama and a minor masterpiece. You can have both in the same can. The story is pure B-movie: Policeman falls for chief suspect femme fatale with predictable results. But there are so many elements of this film which are brilliant that the banality of the narrative is irrelevant. Firstly there’s the construction of the narrative, split into two parts framed around two different cities, which somehow gels perfectly. Secondly there’s the use of edit and photography, with the director frequently placing a character in a scene where they are not present. Somehow these scenes add to the texture of the film creating a filmic universe where the camera’s all-seeing-eye maps onto that of the characters. In a way this feels truer to life than a mere physical representation of the scene. We are present in other people’s lives when they are not there. We may not have a physical presence, but we exist in the mind. Wook directs with such confidence that these metaphysical ideas are allowed to permeate the film, constantly propelling it on to another layer. There are moments where the edit is baffling, as a character trips between reality and imagination, but gradually this all stacks up and the film gathers power as it roars towards its high-peak melodrama finale. Finally, it is fascinating to see how the film succeeds in incorporating technology into the everyday, in a way that it feels as though Western cinema constantly struggles to do, still fighting to leave the twentieth century. Technology in the film (smart watches, cellphones) is more than a tool, it is another limb, something that permits the characters to deepen their relationship with their own interaction and consciousness.  

havana year zero (w. karla suárez, tr. christina macsweeney)

Suárez’ novel is a whimsical account of a turbulent year. In 1993, following the collapse of the USSR, Cuba is cut off from Soviet subsidies. The country is plunged into extreme poverty. People dream of escape, or madcap get-rich schemes which have no chance of coming to fruition. Suárez’s protagonist, Lucia, (a pseudonym, we are told, as are all the names in the book), is told by her former maths professor, Euclid, that a document exists proving the telephone was invented in Cuba, by an Italian scientist-inventor called Antonio Meucci. Euclid has fallen on hard times and convinces Lucia, who is also his former lover, that if they can find the document it will transform their fortunes. Her search leads her to Angel, (who will be her future husband), a novelist, Leandro, and an Italian woman, Barbara, all of whom have their own reasons for wanting the document, and all of whom might potentially already have it in their possession. Inevitably this scheme starts to collapse under the weight not so much of its unlikeliness, but because of the tangled personal web that is being woven, seemingly by the document itself. People fall in and out of love, and this is what changes lives, rather than any kind of deus ex machina. Suárez' novel is breezy and readable, offering a glimpse of the joys of Havana and the way in which these pleasures are sustained, no matter the economic situation. It is also perhaps notable for the absence of any political commentary, something which is usually seen as de rigeur in a novel from the socialist caiman island. 

soula (w&d salah issad, w. soula bahri)

Soula tells the tale of its eponymous heroine, a young woman with a child born out of wedlock, desperately trying to keep it together in spite of the fact she is a social outcast. Soula is a free spirit, who enjoys the things young women all over the world enjoy: drinking, smoking, hanging out, having fun. But in the society she inhabits, this isn’t encouraged. The film is made up of various chapters set over the course of around 12 hours, each time stamped, as we follow the course of a tragic day. Soula flees from her home, is betrayed by her friend, raped, picked up by her crazy cousin, who sets out to drive her 300kms with his newly arrived friend from France to a party town on the coast. In the midst of all this she has to try to ensure her baby daughter is safe. The film and Soula’s crazy night ends in predictable tragedy. The film does a vigorous job of representing the way in which women are maltreated in Algeria, and the hairline fractures that exist in a society seeking to balance western liberalism with the perceived social conditioning of religion. 

great yarmouth: provisional figures (w&d marco martins, w. ricardo adolfo)

Back in the day, an event took place within an island country, known as Brexit. That event exposed a country split in two, and more than that, it exposed a philosophical divide, xenophobia versus inclusion, Singapore style capitalism versus social democracy. Of course, the elements that were at work in the the process which has become known as Brexit were at play all along, and had been for decades, centuries even. These conflicts are the product of history, geography and power, and these elements are always present in the social structure. All of which brings us to Marco Martins astonishing, brutal film, Great Yarmouth.

Great Yarmouth is one of the first films to assess the state of the British nation in the latter stages of the second decade of the twenty first century. Perhaps inevitably, it’s not a film made by a British director. Where the likes of Morgan rattle off royalty porn and Graham explores political porn, (I realise the latter in particular is unfair, but let’s leave it there), very few seem to want to get down and dirty with Brexit porn. Marco Martins film examines the period just before the full effects of Brexit come into play. Set in the distressed Norfolk town, a town where the effects of immigration and xenophobia doubtless played into the Brexit vote (71.5% Leave), one of the main sources of work and profit is a turkey farm an hour’s drive away. The turkey farm has a problem: British people don’t want to do the dirty work of killing turkeys, a process Martin’s film shows us, unflinchingly. In order to deal with this problem, Portuguese workers are drafted in. These workers also generate a secondary industry of accommodating and feeding them. The immigrants are treated little better than the turkeys, stuffed into rancid hotels, inhabiting three to a room the decaying rot of the onetime Norfolk riviera. In order to drive the Singapore style capitalism, the UK needs workers who are prepared to do the things the British aren’t, something freedom of movement permits.

At the centre of the film is Tânia, a Portuguese woman who has a job as the immigrants’ ‘mother’. She has a relationship with one of the local men who get rich off the accommodation side-business. Tânia acts as overseer, rent collector and trouble shooter. The accommodation racket is a lucrative business in a two horse town and the film hints at the criminal elements involved. Tânia is trapped in a hellish limbo, both perpetrator and victim of the grotesque system she is caught up in. Great Yarmouth is a perfect setting for this hellish limbo, and anyone who has known an East Anglian seaside resort will recognise the tawdry sub-USA vibe of line-dancing pubs, slot machines, and cheap breakfasts. Beatriz Batarda gives a phenomenal performance, a raging against dying light, a desperate attempt to cling to humanity in a world where that status has little real currency, something made explicit in the film’s coda, which declares that humans are no more special than birds, and possibly more cursed than their avian cousins.

More than anything, Great Yarmouth, which an end-piece tells us is based on the verbatim accounts of local residents, is an eviscerating account of a society that has been cannibalised from the inside out. It might be that no film since Nil By Mouth has depicted such an impassioned, tragic vision of this sceptred isle. It’s a film which grabs you by the entrails and never lets go. We staggered out of the cinema into an autumnal night, thankful that we were far away from Great Yarmouth.

The film ends with a vision of the turkey factory, empty. Both the slaughter and the profit have ended. The immigrants have gone and the factory has died.  

essayism (brian dillon)

Dillon’s succinct and rather beautiful book weaves the personal with the enthusiast with the academic, as he discourses on the nature of the essay. His references range from Barthes to Derrida to La Rochefoucauld and Bacon, also taking in Didion and Hardwick and Cioran. The book consists of approximately twenty five essays, some themed around a particular writer, others more discursive, and others still plainly autobiographical. As much as an investigation into the possibilities, limitations and wonder of the essay form, this is also a book about how essays can save your life, which is no small beer. Much of Dillon’s reading echoes favourites of mine, or of any curious soul with intellectual leanings born in the late sixties, even if Dillon is Irish rather than British (we are not so very different). In part, as well, this is another examination from the Fitzcarraldo stable of those intellectual waters which exist at the margin of the Anglo-Saxon consciousness, and therefore attract the outsider, the one who seeks an intellectual framework above and beyond that handed down by the syllabus. (The patron saint of this line of thought, a figure who has now recurred in three Fitzcarraldo books I have read this year, is Sebald, who I have failed to engage with as furiously as Dillon, Cooper and Mallo.) Dillon balances the lure of the likes of Barthes, Derrida and Cioran with Sebald, Hardwick, Brookner and Didion, but it is still intriguing to see the way in which the former bunch of deconstructionists, essayists, aphorists and creative philosophers have become a kind of scapegoat for the intellectual echelons of Anglo-Saxon capitalism, the apogee of all that is wrong in a world where ethics and profit are supposed to be happy bedfellows. The outsiders, those who struggle to find a place in this world, are drawn to the sinuous prose of Barthes, or the arcane mysteries of Derrida. It is also interesting to note that, in celebrating the essay, Dillon celebrates a profoundly un-commercial form of writing (it has not always been so, because there was a time when the essay was the most profitable format out there), one which has none of the commercial clout of the novel or the screenplay. Dillon, like his stablemates Cooper and Penman, would appear to be a survivor of the war against the intellectual that is rigorously waged on British soil, and his book is a triumph of complex simplicity and the shining power of the marriage of word and idea. 

the march on rome (w&d mark cousins, w. tommaso renzoni, tony saccucci)

This is a film of two parts. The first takes a 1922 fascist film, called A Noi!, directed by Umberto Paradisi, and deconstructs it with a forensic brilliance. Cousins, who narrates with his beguiling Belfast tones, examines the way the film was made, observing details which would be likely to be missed on a single viewing, and deconstructing its propaganda agenda and deceits. The film narrates how A Noi! is connected to the sudden rise to power of Mussolini and the triumph of his fascist agenda, which lead in the end to unmitigated tragedy. The second half of the film is more discursive, lacking the core material to anchor it of the first, and ends up being something of a beautifully shot meditation on fascism (with the director also having a cinematography credit.) Whilst the message is clear, the film itself seems to drift. Nevertheless, it was greeted with warm applause by the partisan cinemateca crowd.