the limey (d soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

The Limey includes footage of its star, Terrence Stamp, from another film, Ken Loach’s Poor Cow, to show Stamp as a young man (and handsome devil). Soderbergh cleverly weaves this footage into his film, part of a masterful edit, lending The Limey an instant nostalgia factor. This nostalgia factor is amplified watching the film 25 years after its release. The Limey seems to hark back to a different, bolder era, when filmmakers were permitted a certain licence to indulge and hence enrich what might otherwise have been fairly regulation genre fare. In The Limey, alongside Out of Sight, Soderbergh constructed a pair of whip-smart films which perhaps would struggle to be financed today. Reminiscent of French thrillers like Cercle Rouge or Le Samurai, The Limey makes a virtue of its difficulties: the choppy edit, a la Godard, the playfulness of the dialogue, Stamp’s weirdly monochromatic acting, only broken every now and again by a sly smile behind the eyes. It’s a minor direction masterclass. If this is where film is headed, we thought back in those last of the pre-millennial days, we’re in good hands. 

schizopolis (w&d soderbergh)

Doing a spot of research whilst trying to make my mind up whether to head to Cinemateca to catch another in the Soderbergh season, I read several people saying Schizopolis is the worst film ever made. Which meant that I really didn't have much choice: I had to go and see it. Schizopolis is not the worst film ever made, I am disappointed to have to say. It's not the best, but it's also far from the worst. It is quietly and pleasantly bonkers, as one might expect from a film where the director plays three characters, all variations on the same person, who is probably himself. What is admirable about Soderbergh is the way he games the system, making big studio films alongside his own smaller scale projects. There’s something quasi Godardian about all this., not least in the sense that he clearly doesn’t give a fuck what anyone thinks of a film like Schizopolis, which was never going to be a box office hit and which many people will deem a self-indulgent mess. Which it sort of is, but sort of isn’t, as Soderbergh plays with humour and confusion to construct a narrative of multiple identities which almost works. On another level, it’s a slice of unadorned American life, shot without any trimmings, revealing the petty neuroses of the most powerful citizens on earth. 

kafka (d. soderbergh, w. lem dobbs)

I have memories of Soderbergh’s second feature coming out and being an unmitigated disaster, both critically and at the box office. The zietgesity wunderkind of SL&V coming back down to earth with a bump. Perhaps this is a false memory, but in the Soderbergh canon, you don’t offer hear people referring to Kafka. Of course it always helps a film to go in with low expectations, but Kafka, for all its predictability, still succeeded in charming. Perhaps it was the sight of Guinness and the youthful Irons helming a familiar looking cast, featuring one of those zany double acts with Keith Allen and Simon McBurney, the type of humorous conceit which never normally works, but in this case seems to. Perhaps it was the sight of Prague in all its pre-touristy glory. Or perhaps it was just the evident glee of a young director getting to fulfil his dream of making a passion project, all homage to expressionism, Fritz Lang, and so on.

Later in the Cinemateca cafe, Victor appeared. He had a garish orange painting. On closer inspection it showed McDowell from A Clockwork Orange. In that film’s expressionist glory, there lurks perhaps another homage to Lang’s violence. It was too auspicious to pass up, and so I bought the picture for Sñr Amato, who had also chanced to come to the screening of a blousy Sunday evening. Hopefully the picture will find a home on the bright shore of the Maldonado coast, a far cry from the foggy dunes of Prague. 

aliss at the fire (jon fosse, tr. damion searls)

When Fosse won the Nobel prize last year, a few people got in touch. Being the one of the few English directors to have worked on a Fosse play, there was a kind of perceived reflected glory. When I directed Winter I had a brief email exchange with Fosse, my second correspondence with a Nobel prize winner. He was warm and open. Which is pretty much the oposite of his work, which is closed and cold, or if not cold, like a figure in a big coat huddled over a fire which isn’t giving off much warmth. Aliss at the Fire is the first of his novels I have read, albeit the tone is very similar to his plays. An intense and mysterious examination of human interactions, interactions which span the generations. Fosse comes from a world where the dead grandparents walk side by side with their living heirs. It’s a worldview which ties into one held by so many cultures that have been shunted into the shade by the rampant god of capitalism. We encountered it in a Mexican graveyard, for example. Part of Fosse’s appeal is that in a society where human ties are frayed to breaking point, he spells out the incontrovertible truths of our tragic connections. We are all children of someone who is a child of someone and so on and so forth. Aliss at the Fire spins out its slender cross-generational tale like a ghost story, one where the terrifying thing isn’t the jump scare: it’s the proximity of someone who is dead, the way they are just outside the window, looking in. 

poor things (w&d lanthimos, w. tony mcnamara)

I realise this is a stretch, but it crossed my mind that Lanthimos’ film is perhaps stepsister to Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, which I saw on the Montevideo stage last year. Like Faustus, Bella Baxter goes on an educational tour of Europe (the Grand Tour). Like Faustus, hers is a voyage of discovery: the limits of human pleasure, and power. Faustus is almost the anti-Hamlet, the proto-magic cyborg, who can indulge his whims at will, just as Bella does. Like Faustus, Bella satisfies her desires in an almost mechanical fashion, bereft of any eroticism. For all the sex in Lanthimos’ film, it is doggedly anti-erotic, in a Barthesian or Bataille-esque sense: this is sex as ‘furious jumping’ rather than an exploration of temptation or transgression. Faustus is a child of the devil; Bella Baxter is a child of a Scottish Frankenstein - neither are their own person, even if Lanthimos twists the tale at the end to suggest that this is where she is headed. Bella’s encounter with the radical sex worker echoes Faustus’ visit to Heidelberg, which is echoed by Hamlet’s academic companionship. All of which makes Bella a kind of Faust de nos jours, only one who rather than being condemned to hell, is rewarded for her vaulting ambition, as she is rebirthed into a 21st C variation of the happy nuclear family, with her husband, her lover and her tamed monster in a garden of Eden. If Marlowe’s Faust represents the last cry of medieval man, whose blind faith in magic/ knowledge will soon give way to Hamlet’s alienation, does Lanthimos’ Bella Baxter represent the last gasp of optimism in the possibilities of five centuries of faith in science and its empiricism? 

a tale of love and darkness (amos oz, tr nicholas de lange)

Oz’s lengthy book is part autobiography, part deep dive into his roots. The first half deals extensively with the Ukrainian origins of his mother’s family. He traces the routes of both sides of his family towards their arrival in the state that would soon become Israel. His mother’s subsequent decline in her new land is illustrative of the uneasy ties of Oz’s parents’ generation to their new land. They were bookish, urbane people who had deep ties to the lands they left behind, far from the arid soil of Palestine.

The Palestinians themselves, as Oz makes clear in the two sequences where Palestinian people feature in this 700 page book, were a reminder of the immigrants’ foreignness. The Palestinians exist on the edge of this account, shadowy creatures who the new arrivals assume crave the annihilation of the newcomers. Which, from the perspective of the immigrants, has a certain logic, given the war footing at the founding of the state. Then, in two episodes, the young Oz succeeds in stepping out of his silo and having actual human interaction with Palestinians. In the first instance, Oz, aged 6, is dragged into an Arab-owned Jerusalem clothes shop by his nagging aunt. In the cavernous women’s clothes shop the child wanders off and finds himself terrified and lost, until he is rescued by the kindly Palestinian owner of the shop. In the second episode, an adolescent Oz is invited, the year before the state of Israel is officially brought to exist, to an event at the house of a wealthy Palestinian in an Arab quarter of Jerusalem. There, he is attracted to a young Palestinian girl, and seeking to show off, he causes a terrible accident to her young brother.

For a contemporary reader, these incidents have more impact than almost anything else in the book. It’s impossible not to see them as parables, which Oz might have intended. The outsider clumsily trying to assert his presence, sowing disaster. What is perhaps curious is that the implication of these stories are never followed through. The Palestinians remain a categorical ‘other’ and return to the edge of the narrative. There is consciousness, but there is no attempt at reconciliation. Instead the dominant conflict in the writer’s worldview is between the immigrant Jews of his parents generation and the Kibbutzers who have another vision of Jewery, one that is active, vigorous, uncowed. Oz moves away from Jerusalem and becomes one of this new school, working on a rural kibbutz, to his father’s dismay.

However, as the book sometimes makes clear, the story is still more complex than this. Because there has been another sector of the new Israel which has always existed, co-existing with the Palestinians, Christians and other sectors of society that made up this multicultural land. They too have been displaced from this narrative by the arrival of the immigrants. And the old Jerusalem that Oz catches glimpses of before the state of Israel is declared will soon be dismantled, with the arrival of the first Nakba. The Arab quarters will be annexed, geography rewritten, and the seeds of an ongoing, unresolvable crisis which will haunt Israel forever will be sown.

Oz’ account of the way the UN declaration of the state of Israel was received in Jerusalem and the war that followed is one of the most effective pieces of writing in the book. But every word about the hardship endured in those days now feels as though it has been mirrored and multiplied a million times by the violence inflicted on Gaza, part of that unacknowledged other which the new state has displaced.

“After that they talked for a while, the others, not my man, my man did not talk but just stroked my cheek and patted me twice on the shoulder and left. Who knows what he was called? Or if he’s still alive? Is he living in his home? Or in dirt and poverty, in some refugee camp?”

Nb - i recognise that this is only one of Oz’s books and it might be injurious to comment on the author’s attitudes through a reading of this work alone. However, it is an autobiography, and as such feels representative of the new Israel’s first generation, something the writer’s accounts of his interaction with Ben Gurion only helps to reinforce. It’s also worth noting what Khoury has to say in My Name is Adam: “I can’t understand how a novelist could write about Jerusalem without revealing the scale of the tragedy that befell the original inhabitants of the city’s western districts, which the Israelis occupied, expelling their occupants from their homes. I both blame him and wonder at him for not seeing the light in the stones of Jerusalem, of whose gradations of colour the Palestinian novelist Jabra Ibrahim Jabra wrote at such length. Oz saw only a dark city clothed in the fog of his European memories, but anyone who visits Jerusalem knows that it is a city of light and that its roseate stones radiate and glow even in the darkness.”

el caso padilla (w&d pavel giroud)

El Caso Padilla recounts the tale of the night the Cuban poet, Heberto Padilla was released from prison and proceeded to give a speech lasting several hours to his fellow writers in the hall of the Cuban Writers Union. The speech is a self-flagellation and a warning, and Padilla is clearly speaking under duress. He confesses to having written poetry which in its tone and its negativity is counter-revolutionary. He then goes on to name various writers who share his views, some of whom come forward to perform a public mea culpa after Padilla has finished speaking. The documentary is constructed around the filmed footage of the night, which the film claims at the start has never previously been seen, even though fragments were used in a play by the Cuban Abel Mello on the same subject around five years ago.

The film is frustrating in many ways. In order to understand the context of his confession, it would have been helpful to have been given more of an insight into Padilla’s personality and history. At the end we learn that he emigrated to the USA, and sought to define himself as someone who was neither of the left or the right, although the trauma of these events must have scarred him. It’s one thing to confess to being a traitor, it’s another to implicate your friends and colleagues. It’s also frustrating that the film doesn’t offer any clue as to the fate of his fellow writers, characters who feel as though they emerge from an anti-Bolaño novel.

Which also leads on to the other thought the film provoked. Which is that writers might be free to say what they like under capitalism, but that’s because capitalism doesn’t give a shit about what they have to say. There’s also another kind of censorship under capitalism, which is the censorship of the market. The very fact that Castro, like Plato, may have felt threatened by the poets who were once his champions feels like a testament to a power that poetry still possesses within that society.

All of which is not to defend censorship or the Cuban regime. Anyone who has visited Cuba will be aware of that it’s a society which is far from Utopian. Nevertheless, in a historical moment where, once again, the political and social values of “the West” are being stripped bare to reveal the brutality that underpins them, the case of Padilla feels as though it is probably more nuanced than the film suggests. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Mello, the playwright who wrote about a play about Padilla, was employed by a university in Havana to teach theatre when we met him there, in spite of his criticisms of the state and the fact he spends half his time in Spain. Cuba is complicated and the film, whilst doing a service in exploring the case of Padilla, doesn’t really do justice to these complexities. 

anatomy of a fall (w&d justine triet, w. arthur harari)

[Warning, spoiler!] So, the blind kid’s anecdotal testimony swings the trial and gets his mum off a murder charge. The implausibility of this only helps to reveal the effectiveness of Triet’s clever  courtroom drama, (which isn’t really a courtroom drama). This is actually a movie about relationships more than anything else. Principally, Sandra’s relationship with her dead husband, her son and her lawyer. What are the limits to a relationship? Is trust more important than truth? Do conventional ideas about marriage have any real bearing on how relationships actually work?

It’s curious that the script goes for the Rambertian decision to give the married couple the same first names as the actors who play them. There is much play made towards the latter part of the film and trial of the fact that Sandra’s life has echoes in her fiction, and that within the fiction might be found the truth of what happened on the day Samuel, her husband, died. In truth, this, like many of the strands in Anatomy, is slightly loose, an idea that is teased into our consciousness as we watch, without really going anywhere. Which is perhaps just as well, because had the film relied on this plank too much, it might have turned into a Branagh adaptation of Agatha Christie. In a similar way to the fact that Sandra’s charming lawyer, the baleful Swann Arlaud, is someone who was once in love with her. There’s no narrative reason for this to be the case, but it adds another ingredient to this complex soup of a film, which succeeds in part because so much mud is thrown at the wall that things are bound to stick. The lengthy argument scene, the only time Samuel speaks, is a fish out of the film’s water (perhaps reminiscent of the dialogue scene in Hunger), another of these quietly random elements that are stuck together to construct a film which …

Which ultimately talks, as so many great films do, about society. It’s reminiscent of Farhadi’s A Separation, a film that took us inside the Iranian legal system to offer a sweeping portrait of its society. It feels as though Triet is using the theatricality of the courtroom as a lever to prise open questions about love, relationships, and how we, in the west, live now. The little lies which help to construct the basket within which we float down the stream. The legal interpretation of our actions and these lies, which is the codification of our morality, ends up being an instrument of blunt force, with which society attempts to perform its autopsies. The actuality of our actions and our lies lie beyond the law’s scope of true understanding. Sandra’s deceits may be innumerable and suggest guilt; her innocence or purity can only be inferred from her unreliable son’s unlikely tale, which is a form of love that transcends justice. 

unrueh/ unrest (w&d cyril schäublin)

Schäublin’s curious film left both myself and sñr Flamia somewhat bemused. It’s a very elliptical telling of the way in which events at a Swiss watch factory on the 1870s influenced Kropotkin, who happened to be drifting around the valley where the factory is located at the time. The socialist principles of the watchmakers are emphasised as they offer to donate some of their wages to striking workers in Baltimore, part of a worldwide union movement that doesn’t prevent four of the female factory workers from being unjustly sacked. Kropotkin moseys around, looking out wistfully, perhaps nursing a crush on one of the factory workers. Whilst obviously based on facts, the film seems less concerned with exploring and developing its narrative and more interested in becoming a mood piece. Much is made of the element of time, with the valley having several different time zones. Whilst this helps to restrict the homogeneity of life, it also makes it hard to plan. It felt as though there was a lot bubbling under the surface of a likeable premise, but the lid is never lifted to release the full radical force of Kropotkin’s ideology on the audience. Which is a pity, as one suspects that the Cinemateca audience would have been well up for it. 

le théorème de marguerite (w&d anna novion, w. agnès feuvre, marie-stéphane imbert, philippe paumier)

Novion’s film boasts four screenwriters, and feels as though it’s been polished and chiselled to kingdom come. It’s the story of a female mathematician who loses her way, discovers her inner woman, becomes a mahjong wizard, finds her way, loses herself in her obsessive quest for greatness, and finally finds love. As a narrative it’s as contrived as it sounds, hitting formulaic beats which may well have come out of a screenwriting textbook. Which is not to say that it’s ineffective. There’s a lot of craft in the construction of the film, plenty of art design, graphics, and a concerted effort to show us that maths isn’t boring. On the contrary, the true mathematician is an artist, seeking to unearth universal truths for the good of society. In many ways it feels as though Le Théorème de Marguerite would make for a great case study. What makes for an effective movie as opposed to a great movie? Or are these criteria in any way useful? Perhaps someone can attempt to construct an equation to solve these riddles, or perhaps this is indeed the question that Marguerite is seeking a solution to, as she turns her walls into a beguiling work of cave art, which might just contain the secret to the universe.