le samouraï (w&d jean-pierre melville, w. joan mcleod, georges pellegrin)

Some films radiate a kind of perfection. They delimit their boundaries and ensure that everything within them is honed and chiselled and ticks like a Rolex. Le Samourai is one of those. Its structure is straightforward. Delon’s Jef Costello is a hired assassin who kills someone in the first act. In the second act the police and the gangsters who hired him close in. The third brings the tightly worked denouement, which contains only one potential flaw (how do the police know that Jef is going to show up at the club when he does?). Melville directs with an extreme economy, his washed- out pallet reflecting a desire to sand the film down it its bare essentials. Having said which, the film isn’t averse to taking the risk of shooting on the streets of Paris, with these less controlled moments acting as a counterpoint to the carefully mounted studio scenes. The metro, the cafes, the cars: the film smells of a time and a place, and Delon’s hired killer moves through this world like a ghost. 

if we burn (vincent bevins)

‘The mass protest decade and the missing revolution’ is the subtitle of Bevins’ book. I came across the writer via Twitter, where he was one of the best English language posters on all things Brazil, and exercised a downbeat, laconic vibe, which his book perhaps might have had more of. If We Burn is a rigorous review of a decade of protest, which kicked off in Tunisia and then went around the globe, incorporating, according to Bevins, Brazil, Chile, Hong Kong, Egypt,  Bahrain etc. Those giddy days of 2011, when the ‘Arab spring’ broke, feel a long time ago now. Bevins looks with a cold eye at the reasons for the eventual underwhelming results of so many of these protests, questioning why the energy unleashed on the streets never lead to more comprehensive political change. Of course, his attitude is that of an insider. If you live in one of the countries that was not touched by this spirit of protest, or no more so than normal, as was the case with most Western European countries, then the argument already feels distanced. If anything, it might be possible to reframe the Brexit vote as an act of mass protest, a protest which was far from progressive.

Bevins is perhaps at his best when writing about Brazil and the way that the right wing Bolsonaro supporters hijacked what was originally a straightforward protest about bus fares, lead by activists who were nearer to being anarchists than anything else. He writes about how these movements resisted hierarchical structures, which, he argues, was part of the reason they could be manipulated by the far right into a destructive critique of Dilma Rousseff and Lula’s left-wing governments. As such, If We Burn reads like a cautionary tale for any would-be activists. The more successful your campaign, the more likely it is to be railroaded by forces beyond your control. The book is both a vindication of idealism and a damning critique of the perils of naivety that are inherent to any form of idealism.

animal (w&d sofia exarchou)

Animal’s opening shots appear to come from the very end of the film. Set in a hotel resort on a Greek island, the film takes place in the Summer tourist season, but the opening images are wintery, spidery, beautiful. There’s more than a hint of Lynne Ramsey in the way Exarchou paints her story with images. A poeticism which will course through the two hours of a film where narrative always appears to be of secondary importance. In pride of place is character. The film looks at a bunch of ‘animators’ who will perform over the season for tourists from Europe and Russia. The central character is Kalia, a Greek woman who is approaching middle age and finds herself trapped in the youthful lifestyle of all night discos, casual sex and a determined instability. Played with great pathos by Dimitra Vlagopoulou, Kalia is a mother figure to her younger colleagues, especially the dreamy seventeen year old, Eva. But as the film progresses, we understand more and more how lost Kalia is. Exarchou’s use of narrative and edit always resists melodrama, often cutting before the scene reaches its denouement, but in the hypnotic, desperate final karaoke scene, we enter directly into Kalia’s putative nervous breakdown as she sings one of her stalwart songs, Baccara’s Yes Sir I can Boogie. It’s a devastating moment which is all the more powerful  for sneaking up on the viewer without the usual mechanics of plot. Rather we have been slowly immersed in Kalia’s world and her desperation, so that when it is revealed in full, it is almost overwhelming.

Animal feels like a big, ambitious film about Europe, about modern youth, about listless, disconnected communities. The older tourists feed off the blood of their youthful animator hosts, whilst the wealthy retirees, with their their grotesque taste, get the chance to pretend to be young again. It’s often funny, sometimes hideous. Without making any great statements, the film articulates the transience and joys of youth, something our vampire society tries to package and inject, with no real care for the harm it might be causing the younger generation in the process. Animal is an artful piece of neo-realism, which weeps as it sings its cheerful hits. 

exit west (mohsin hamid)

It is noted with some amusement that the Obamas' production company has acquired the rights to Exit West. On imdb the putative film project, ‘in development’ is headlined by a pair of British tyros, one of whom is a friend of a friend. The presence of the Obamas is, these days, something of a double edged sword. On the one hand a badge of liberal consciousness in a world where the extremists are on the rise, on the other, a badge of compromise, a validation of a system, (US imperialism, with all that implies), which remains a dangerous and far-from-beneficial influence on the shape the world is and has been taking over the course of the last 50 years, or more.

Why would the Obamas be interested in Exit West? The novel opens in a Middle Eastern town, which might be Aleppo or Mosul, but is in fact a fictional space, where extremists are seizing power. The semiotics smell of Isis, (the ritual executions, the sense of lawlessness under the shroud of religious devotion). Nadia and Saeed find themselves falling in love against the backdrop of this turmoil. They know they have to flee, which they do, escaping through a magic door to arrive on a Greek island. From there they will hop to London and finally California. The complex process of flight and exile is reduced to a literary device, which, whilst convenient on an allegorical  level, might be accused of minimising the realities and risks of these migrations. However, this also reflects the way that the novel transforms from being a meditation on surviving the impact of religious extremism to a more spaced-out, opaque vision of the near-future, redolent of hypothetical dystopias such as the Parable of the Sower.

Clearly there’s a market for this kind of story, which in the end offers a positivist vision of a millennial future where religious fundamentalism, xenophobia and climate change have been overcome, laying the basis for a kinder, simpler civil society. However, this also means that the novel might be deemed open to charges of over-simplifying what are, in essence, seismic and perhaps intractable problems. The knottiness of these problems is skated over. You open a door and arrive on the other side. 

the savage detectives (bolaño, tr wimmer)

 Re-Reading the Savage Detectives.   

In another winter you came to me. I was lost then.

As perhaps now. Lost in the nights that have lost

Their discipline. Errant children, out on the lash. 

With me, a single parent, left to fret. You came to

Me then, on the eleventh floor, Wembley Stadium 

Grinning at my rear window, Paddington bear 

Goofing down the canal. You came to console,

Unbidden, the mystery guest, with your tired 

Eyes and tequila prose. And now you’re back.

It’s the middle of a midwinter night and you’re 

Riding pillion again, humming a tune so catchy

I can’t help but sing along, the Encrucijada

Blues. You’ll see me through these insomniac

Ciudad Vieja nights, just as you did then, the

Resolute beat of your words casting spells,

Luring the night to its false, gleaming, dawn. 

pax in lucem (w&d emiliano mazza de luca, w. alejandro díaz lageard)

Pax in Lucem is an affectionate and informed documentary about the life of Torres Garcia, who was the great grandfather of the co-writer and narrator, Alejandro Diaz. As such it occupies what is now somewhat well trodden ground in Uruguayan documentary filmmaking: the investigation of the family heritage. However, the story of Torres Garcia is complex and perhaps not so very Uruguayan, as he left the country at the age of 16 and only returned when 60. In a sense his story is one of perpetual confrontation with ruin and failure, as the commercial ventures he embarked on in New York and Paris ended on the point of bankruptcy. As the film recounts, the return to Montevideo was almost a choice of last resort, even if he was subsequently venerated as a prodigal son on his homecoming. The film is constructed around the process of recreating a work, Pax in Lucem, that was destroyed when the Museo de Arte Moderno in Rio caught fire. Some 60 of the artists’ most important works were lost in the fire, and the director talks emotively about this loss, as he follows the process of trying to recreate the original artwork. As such the film morphs into a meditation on originality, and is all the stronger for this philosophical desvio. 

club zero (w&d jessica hausner; w. géraldine bajard)

Hausner’s film about food ends up being a bit of a suet pudding. There’s a lot of ideas in there, but they never seem to settle into a coherent narrative. It could be subtitled Five go Mad for Fasting. Charismatic teacher, Ms Novak, played with a fierce lack of emotion by Mia Wasikowska comes to a private school to teach a class about conscious eating. What is conscious eating? It’s a process of moderating your food intake to an absolute minimum, for the good of your body and the planet. A select group of five are later initiated by Ms Novak, into Club Zero - which is when you stop eating altogether. The kids embrace this as an attack against the system and their parents - it’s essentially a teenage rebellion. The kids become wanner, their skin touched by a sulphuric yellow, as they gradually wither away, and head towards an entirely enigmatic fate, in between offering their parents diatribes on how the consumption of food only serves to fortify the capitalist system. It’s all very po-faced, reminiscent of mid-period Godard or Lanthimos, but the ideas seem to hover at the edge of the screen, chomping at the bit to be allowed in. There are the occasional gross-out moments which are stitched into the narrative, obvious calling-cards, but these moments have the feel of clunky necessity in a script which has been boiled to within an inch of its life.  

tender is the night (scott fitzgerald)

Fitzgerald’s text is one that has recurred several times in my reading. Initially it was read at University, where I wrote an essay on the connection with Macbeth, a connection which fascinated me as I started to get to grips with the issues that go with relationships. This is a novel about relationships: specifically the doomed love affair between Nicole and Dick. To what extent is our idea of love merely a crutch to help us see out the darkness of the universe in which we find ourselves abandoned? Nicole’s trauma has a specific incestuous root, but her sense of crisis, which Dick inherits, feels existential. The pointlessness, the pointlessness. We can conjure the most beatific and beautiful surroundings, but in the end we are all caged tigers. There’s a disarming nihilism at work here and the more glorious Dick and Nicole’s mystique, the more hollow it becomes.

I wonder where Fitzgerald slides to in my worldview as I get older. As I bypass youth and enter late middle age. Is Fitzgerald a young person’s writer? When we all go through the mirror does it all start to look tawdry? Which is the paradox that lends his novels their existential glory. Those shallow western dreams and their hollow hearts.

Then reading Bruccoli’s biography, the book is cast in another light. The tragic roman a clef. Because Scott and Zelda lived on both sides of the mirror. They had the Divers’ glamour lifestyle. But they also inhabited its hollowness, as their genius was ignored, hung out to dry, and their empire faded to dust.

It’s hard not to have a soft spot for Tender, for Dick’s relentless drive towards middle American mediocrity, for Nicole’s flight from a madness which is positively glorious. The vainglory of humanity, like a sparkling Mediterranean morning blue, iridescent, seductive, irredeemably flawed. 

 

men in the sun & other stories (gassan kanafani, tr hilary kilpatrick)

Kanafani’s stories deal with the consequences of the Nakba, rather than the event itself. Desperate refugees, having lost everything, doing what they can to make ends meet. The celebrated opening story recounts the tragic journey of three men seeking to cross the desert from Basra to Kuwait, a land of supposed opportunities. (Following the same path that Saddam fatefully took years later.) It is a mission that ends in absolute disaster, of a similar vein to the disasters that occur at borders across Europe and between Mexico and the USA, among others. Desperation is the driver, a desperation far removed from the kind of problems these characters’ ancestors might have faced. Ancestors who lived quiet lives near the orange and olive groves, in villages which no longer bear the names they did then, or don’t even so much as exist. To think that Kanafani’s tales are even more prescient today than when he wrote them is just another factor in the indictment of the Israeli state’s crimes against the Palestinian peoples.

crime and punishment (dostoyevksy, tr. david mcduff)

What brought my reading back to this strange, savage novel? In part it has been inspired by working on Rambert’s Repetition, in which a character at one point talks about how ‘everything was written, the truth was to be found in the fiction’, which chimes with the idea of the writer as amanuensis and prophet. In part it was to explore a thought in my head that the world of St Petersburg described in my memory was akin to the worlds that lie just down the road, or even sometimes across the road, in the Americas I now inhabit.

Crime and punishment is a tale from the underworld. An anti-murder mystery, where we know who did it from the very start. Here is the paradox, because we know the criminal is not the image of the desperate criminal, but rather the sensitive student, Raskolnikov, almost likeable, forever intriguing, cursed by his very hand as it enacts the murder he has intellectually decided to commit. In another world, he might have become the muddied intellectual with a career in academia or ‘the media’. But in the impoverished conditions he lives in, his intellect and imagination prove to be the road to hell, or at least Siberia, rather than a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle in Ealing, to pick a name out of the hat. All of which goes to show that the problems of an impoverished society don’t just impinge on the underclass. They also lead to a deformation of the idea of education, or, to put it another way, a Nietszchean re-evaluation of the idea of education: not as a means of furthering the health of society, but as a means of advancing the individual.

Raskolnikov crumbles under the weight of the moral bind he has placed himself in. He would be a superman, but he can’t sustain the illusion. But in his endeavour, as described by the author, we can indeed see the future written, the future which would lead to the Russian revolution, but would also lead to fascism and the love of the figure of the all-powerful leader. The fragile cat’s cradle of society only needs to lose a few threads for the whole thing to unravel. In these Americas, there will be Raskolnikovs aplenty. Driven to desperate acts in the name of their own higher purpose. Nothing much has changed, the great cities and the less-great cities continue to be the site of desperate, unheeded struggles, hidden behind the shop windows of fashion stores and car dealerships.