the devil of the provinces (juan cárdenas, tr. lizzie davis)

There is a certain style of Latin American novel which Cárdenas’ book maps onto. An elliptical narrative with a semi-alienated protagonist. A sense of quest, to discover something which the reader realises by the midpoint of the book will never be found. A distancing device, perhaps, hinting at a post-political vacio. In this case the protagonist, a biologist, returns to a small Colombian town after fifteen years abroad. He hooks up with old friends and an ex and his former dealer. He has a job in a girls’ school which is mysterious and possibly nefarious.  His brother was a gay politician who was murdered. The novel also incorporates observations on biology, palm weevils and avocados. There’s no shortage of thought-provoking material, but as noted everything is processed through the deadpan attitude of the biologist, for whom nothing seems to matter an enormous amount. 

set my heart on fire (w. izumi suzuki, tr helen o’horan)

The protagonist of the novel goes by the same name as the author. Izumi is a model who hangs out with rock stars and makes no bones about the fact she likes getting laid. Then, half way through the book, she meets the darkly controlling Jun, a jazz guitarist. Jun is a manipulative controlling personality. Izumi is a drifter, a wil-o-the-wisp, who gets caught in his slipstream. He is abusive and ends up going insane. The first half of the novel feels as though it takes place in a limited timeframe: the second half unfolds rapidly over the course of a decade. Izumi’s descent, tied to Jun’s lunacy, is vertiginous.

It’s not hard to see why Izumi Suzuki’s writing struck a chord in the Japanese psyche. She writes with a candour that pierces the codified society. Sex, violence, drugs: nothing is held back. It’s particularly surprising to see Izumi’s wilful licentiousness and the detail the author provides, without ever seeming salacious. This is how this young woman, representative of a certain zeitgeist, lives. Japan’s social codes have perhaps always concealed a more sexualised undercurrent, the world of geishas and arrangements. Suzuki smashes through any kind of hypocrisy, offering a convincing vision of an alternative slacker society. 

los divinos (laura restrepo, tr. carolina de robertis)

It’s 17 years since I read Delirium by Restrepo, although it feels like yesterday. Our relationship to the books we read is atemporal. They function on a different plane. It’s nearly forty years since I first read Foucault, but my relationship with him hasn’t aged in the slightest. Almost everyone I knew from that era has gone, save family. But he sticks around, with his bald head and his laconic questions. Restrepo’s Delirium has always stuck in my mind as a window into Colombian culture. It’s a country I have never visited, but it forms part of the Latino universe and I have come across many Colombians in Montevideo. Post civil war, post the era of the edge-lords, Colombia might have appeared to settle down. Los Divinos offers a sclerotic take on the social divides which exist in the country, and indeed across the Latino world, where those who belong to or associate with the wealthy elite act as though they only have a passing relationship with the law. Los Divinos - the divine ones - are five over-privileged friends who are due a dose of hubris. Narrated by one of them, with not so much as a single sympathetic character, the novel has a harsh, acerbic flavour. We don’t want any of these characters to emerge unscathed and perhaps for this reason it’s a less engaging read than Delirium.

 

the trial (d. orson welles)

Welles’ version is both expressionist and baroque. Expressionist in the way it uses its Zagreb locations, its off-beam photography, its heightened acting by a stellar cast. This is in keeping with a perceived conception of how Kafka’s world might have looked (not so far removed from Soderbergh’s version of The Castle). Welles does it in style and there are many moments where the set eclipses the action. In the days before CGI, the scenes of mass typists have a demented glory, and the gargoyles and brickwork of the high nineteenth century architecture speak of the Hapsburg world Kafka was born into. Baroque, because of the mannered use of text and ponderous nature of the edit. There are no short cuts on show here, no matter how much Welles’ script has edited down the novel. Scenes play out with a papal solemnity. Welles himself, as the advocate, feels like he might be a cardinal. Women are demented and lascivious. Men are doomed to a warped, frustrated middle age. Antony Perkins strides around through all this like a lost high jumper being asked to take part in a marathon. His demise at the end, as Welles tinkers with the novel, comes as a kindly release. The spirit of Welles hangs over the film just as much as the spirit of Kafka, a monomaniacal presence which challenges the viewer to stick with his vision as the dialogue unfurls at its stately pace and the illogical narrative keeps going round in circles. 

this is not propaganda - adventures in the war against reality (peter pomerantsev)

Pomerantsev’s book is an investigation into the world which shaped the world we live in. Even though it was published less than a decade ago, it already feels as though history is running away from those pre-pandemic times when the reality of what was about to confront us was something that people were warning about, rather than living through. Pomerantsev investigates on a global basis the evolution of the post-truth world, fuelled by social media and its bot farms, by individuals like Nix for whom ethics are an offshoot of capitalism, entirely beholden to the idea of profit. In the process of which are facilitated sense-deranging attacks on reality, allowing the wanton killing of women and children, the elderly and the innocent, to be reframed as actions taken in self-defence, and promoted as such to the point that anyone who questions this logic is in danger of being excommunicated. This is the world Pomerantsev saw coming, and now it has arrived. The dangerous edges of democracy, a system beholden to the manipulation of the masses, are laid bare. The author of the book outlines his personal journey from Soviet Ukraine to the UK. His family fled from a repressive totalitarian regime towards the hope of something called ‘the west’. But the west is not an ethical construction. It is a market driven society. And now the fusion of vast wealth which the technocrats of the internet have succeeded in generating and seek to preserve, with the autocratic ambitions of wealthy men and women driven by nothing more than personal ambition, threatens to decimate the planet with an uncontrollable ferocity. Anything that stands in the way of this behemoth will be levelled. Pomerantsev sees the writing on the wall and traces the way that this is a global epidemic. But there’s a sense that his concerns have been overtaken by the actuality of the present. 

miller’s crossing (w&d the coen brothers)

Did we know, way back when, that we were witnessing the birth of a dynasty? In a world where so many filmmakers come and go, have their moment of glory and then are moved on, to TV or being a gun for hire, or obscurity, the Coen Brothers have stood out over the course of thirty years as a team that gets films made and occasionally strike gold. Miller’s Crossing, their third feature, is an assured piece of filmmaking. The Coen Brothers thrive on big casting, a heightened sense of reality and some tastefully excessive violence. It’s noticeable how Gabriel Byrne keeps bouncing back from repeated beatings, as though he was made of rubber. Then again, this feels like part of the Coen bros schtick - rubbery faces which contort, distort and then come back into some kind of regular shape, a rubbery plot that wobbles around but gets there in the end. It’s a kind of playmobile filmmaking; straining the boundaries of emotional plausibility whilst the actors charm pants off the viewers. So good to see Albert Finney in there doing his thing, one of that great generation of British/ Irish film actors that stalked the movie world and exuded charisma. (On which note and completely tangentially, RIP Terrence Stamp.)

the last seduction (d. john dahl, w. steve barancik)

Dahl’s film feels like it belongs to another era. The narrative dénouement is hinged on a deliberately provoked rape. Whilst Bridget, the femme fatale, is the agent of this rape and is using Mike’s action to her own advantage, one can’t see a film treating the dramatic action of rape in this manner now. Likewise, whilst we live in the era of the sassy female lead, it feels unlikely that a female protagonist’s strengths would be pinned on her sexuality and powers of seduction, as the title suggests. Which is not to say that seduction has ceased to exist, or that women, and men, are still likely to use their sexual attractiveness as a means to get ahead in the world. Just that this is no longer material around which a narrative might be structured. As Bridget, the femme fatale, Linda Fiorentino gives a barnstorming performance, loving the limelight and unafraid to hog it, delivering Barancik’s one-liners with a deep-fanged venom. Small town boy Mike (Peter Berg) doesn’t know what he’s got himself into. Bridget’s ingenuity is tied to the cynicism that goes with knowing how easily men can be manipulated by a stockinged leg. She knows how the world works, even when the world doesn’t want to be seen to work that way. She also knows that whether or not she triumphs in the end it can only be a pyrrhic victory: age will defeat her finally no matter what, and she needs to make the most of the time she has before that oldest enemy of all catches up with her.  

the funeral (d. abel ferrara w. nicholas st john)

Ferrara's The Funeral feels like a riposte to Coppola's Godfather. Socialist mafia battles with capital. Socialist mafia goes anti-catholic in speakeasies and whorehouses. But mafia is mafia and no matter your politics or your licentiousness, family is going to family and the villains are going to do the dirty. In truth, at a hundred minutes, it feels as though Ferrara needed at least twice the running time to tease out all the angles his story opens up. Three brothers all have their stories to be told, the narrative has to skip backwards and forwards in time, and the female characters, played by Sciorra, Rosselini and Mol are given greater protagonism than any, apart from Keaton, in Coppola's version. This is all great, and  Gallo shows what a star he might have been, but ultimately the film is always chasing the narrative's tail. Nevertheless, it's an absorbing piece of filmmaking, a worthy and undervalued addendum to the Italo-American lexicon of mafia movie making.

7 días de enero (w&d juan antonio bardem, w. gregorio morán)

Madrid, January 1977. Shortly following the death of Franco, Spain stands at a crossroads between continued autocracy (military dictatorship) and democracy. In the era when democracy meant something. Bardem’s film looks at events in the city that took place over the course of a week, when the military killed protesting students and committed a massacre of trade union activists and lawyers in Calle Atocha. Who will prevail? We know the answer to this question now. Democracy returned to Spain, and the events of the film played a part in that process. It seems astonishing that for nearly forty years, Spain was under the rule of Franco. The film is at its strongest when it shows the far right as they come together in antiseptic social surroundings or at masculine military gatherings which terminate with ‘patriotic’ singing. At other moments the film feels overlong and lacking the focus of the other film of Bardem I watched not so long ago. It feels as though the filmmaker is seeking to cram in as much information as he can. However, the importance of the film on a political level transcends its aesthetic limitations. At a time when the USA seems to be encouraging its own neo-fascist secret police to do whatever they want, it’s important to be reminded why the extreme right is so dangerous. Because it believes it has an entitlement to take the law into its own hands. One suspects the likes of Vance would have got on very well in Franco’s Spain. 

caught stealing (d. darren aronofsky, w. charlie huston)

Aronofsky has always been a visceral director, the one constant on his complex, bumpy filmmaking ride. He’s made several movies which are in their way seminal. Pi was a masterclass in low-budget first film making. Requiem for a Dream genuinely pushed at boundaries of taste and cruelty in a way few US movies ever do. Mother! Was one of those authorial ventures (like The Fountain) that few filmmakers are ever given budget to go for, and Black Swan has emerged as a low-key classic and regular touchstone for alt-pysch drama, referenced mucho in industry script development labs. Caught Stealing doesn’t lack for the director’s visceral verve. The recreating of nineties NY, pre-Guiliani, with plenty of CGI images of the twin towers laced in, adds to the vibe. Sadly, around the point where Zoe Kravitz is killed off, the narrative begins to flag. The last half or so is a case of going through the motions, kicking and screaming. Caught Stealing feels like an assemblage, with some lovely cameos (Bad Bunny! Doctor Who!) and plenty of colour, but it can’t quite leap through the hoops of a third act whose denouement feels as though it might have been generated by AI.