los olvidados (dir. buñuel)

Sitting in the NFT, watching a fifties film about Mexican City street kids, the last thing you anticipate is a shot of the South Bank, filmed from just outside. It's just one of the touches Bunuel throws in to deconstruct what might otherwise have been a regulation docu-drama, the forerunner of so many. The opening shots show Paris, New York and London, before arriving at Mexico City, as the film maker declares a global perspective to this local tale. To watch it in this destabilised era of gun crime is to witness a point made: until the underlying causes of poverty are tackled, the things we are about to witness will continue. Bunuel furthers his perspectivisation with surreal additions. A child rises up out of his own dream to observe on his future. Hens and cocks feature rather more than you'd expect. According to the notes, his plan to feature a full orchestra on an abandoned construction site were shelved, but these touches all help to give Los Olvidados something that lifts it out of the ordinary, in spite of the fact it is so rooted in the ordinary. The old man in Amores Perros crossed my mind. His cinematic ancestor might be the blind folk singer, carting his drum across the wasteland, as cruel as he is kind as he is desperate. Like everyone else in the film. Urban living in Mexico City is probably no easier now than it was then.

notes on a scandal (dir richard eyre)

For some reason which doubtless is more obvious than it feels at this moment, it's hard to write about British films. The level of expectation is perhaps higher than one might expect for a Tunisian or a Hungarian opus. The need for the cinema to some way represent at least a fraction of the culture it shares with you. Or attempt to. There is an inclination to become extremely critical (what else should a critic be?); indigenous cinema faces a in-built handicap.

If part of the beauty of cinema-watching is the sense of anonymity it conveys on the watcher, that seems compromised when you watch a film set in your country, above all your city. You look at it with half an eye open to spot somewhere you know (Was that the Shepherdess Cafe near Amnesty where I once had a lasagna for lunch?); the images seem to belong to you more than they ordinarily would. You become, perhaps, a part of the film, and that's not what cinema, the least Brechtian of mediums, seems to be about.

There were bits of London I thought I recognised in Notes On A Scandal. Luckily I'm more South than North, so they were fewer and further between. I've taught in schools in North London, and the depicted environment seemed authentic. This attention to detail was reassuring. Perhaps wisely, the film resisted any impulse to explore the real social ramifications of it's narrative, in spite of the apparent class consciousness. One of the few notes that rung hollow was when the boy-lover's family barged into the affluent household, a sudden welter of stereotypical Oirishness, fists flying.

By and large this is a film that plays to its strengths, foremost amongst which is Dench's unselfish performance. It takes art to find drama in the humdrum, the small passions which flare in every soul, the apparently undramatic. Dench does it with her eyes and her aura, depicting someone who believes, as so many do, that the world is not on our side, that we have been handicapped for no ostensible reason, that intelligence is a burden rather than a blessing.

The film is also smart enough to over-ride the problematics of its plot (Is the teacher-pupil relationship as convincing as it should be?) It is the story not of a love affair but of a co-joined downfall, the one who has everything brought low just as readily as the one who has nothing. Hubris is not class-conscious, it can come to us all.

I've never, I confess, seen a Chabrol movie. Always wanted to. However, I felt as though this might be what watching one would have been like. If I'd been born French and writing in the sixties.

the last king of scotland (dir. macdonald; w. morgan)

The first time the young Scottish doctor meets the dictator is a moment of high drama. The dictator, whose speech the feckless Scot has admired already, has an accident – his car has hit a cow, and he’s suffered a minor injury. The doctor is summoned, the cow lies wailing in misery on the side of the road. The doctor tends to the president whilst the cow wails. His humanitarian instincts working in overdrive, the doctor seizes the President’s pistol, lying on the car bonnet, and puts the cow out of its misery. The sudden action leads the soldiers to prime their rifles. The dictator looks like he might order anything. The doctor realises he’s out of his depth. The dictator learns he’s Scottish and embraces him. The woman the doctor fancies admires his reckless heroism.

It’s a beautifully structured and executed scene which sets a standard that The Last King of Scotland can never top. Unfortunately it comes at the end of the ‘first act’: the moment when Idi meets Doctor Garrigan.

Forest Whitaker proceeds to deliver a bravura performance as the mercurial Amin. However a trope has been set: he will swing from overbearing to jocular in the space of a moment. His very unpredictability becomes predictable. The Scottish doctor, played by James McAvoy, is a harder part to pull off. Here is a man who is complicit in the mechanisms of a dictatorship. His ignorance is hardly excused by his callowness. Yet at the same time he is also the romantic lead, a dashing model of globalised youth. The contradictions within the character are pertinent. McAvoy’s performance has flashes where it captures these contradictions, yet the film is reluctant to undercut its hero with too severe an examination, and his eventual sadistic torture operates as a kind of atonement. His Scottish charm lets him off the hook, and those who he could turn to for advice or support are caricatures, none more so than McBurney’s villainous-seeming Englishman, whose two-dimensional role in the film seems to be entirely to act as a foil for McAvoy’s boyish charm.

The Last King of Scotland has all the ingredients of an exhilarating film. One of the most ruthless rites of passage narratives you could ever come across. Charismatic characters, moral contradiction, sex, exoticism, violence and ‘based on a true story’. For all this, it remains something of a haggis of a movie; flavoursome but stodgy, spicy but safe. Nowhere is this more evident than in the climactic party scene, where Garrigan sleeps with Amin’s wife. The action is ‘heightened’ by a montage scene of topless African nubiles, dreamlike images of Amin entering the doctor’s consciousness, burning flames. Perhaps this is a wilful homage to seventies Bond movies, but if so, one wonders, why?

At the end of the movie, Amin berates Garrigan for playing the white tourist in exotic Africa. It’s a valid point which has been waiting to be made. There does seem a danger that a Western film set in Africa will echo this voyeurism. The Last King of Scotland tries to steer clear of the worst excesses of Amin’s rule, but it is still trading on the notion of the dark continent, where unspeakable things will inevitably happen, to be re-presented for Western consumption and entertainment. At the end of the movie the chastened Garrigan flies out on a plane; we go with him, little the wiser about the continent we’ve been invited to visit in his company for an hour or so.

babel (dir. Inarritu)

They’re at it again, Inarritu and Arriaga. Replicating the formula. Only the formula’s getting bigger and the canvas broader.

So it’s not a surprise that a certain amount of bagginess is creeping in. Amores Perros was set within a single city. 21 Grams was set within a single country. Babel is set within a single globe.

The title itself seems to recognise the risk of hubris. On a thematic level, the word 'Babel' acts as an indicator of the perils of miscommunication. A child is mistaken for a terrorist. A kindly nanny is mistaken for a child-snatcher. A deaf girl is mistaken in all kinds of ways. Language holds the key to enlightenment, but also confusion and alienation. However, Babel was also a tower, a structural edifice, and this film’s sense of ambition incurs the risk of the thing collapsing, the ideas outpacing the content, the semiotic meaning drowning out the narrative.

To what extent this occurs remains a subjective judgement. It seemed to me as though the film didn’t quite manage to juggle all the balls in the air. There’s the basic unlikelihood of lightening striking twice at the core of the movie, with Blanchett and Pitt’s children being subjected to a tragedy which is completely independent of the one the parents are undergoing. Despite the neatness of the chronological rupture (the tragedies do not occur simultaneously, in spite of the fact they have to within screen time), this seemed too much like the vagaries of Greek tragedy for such a realistic (use of the) medium. Had they gone the whole way and the third strand of the storyline compounded this, it may have worked better. But as it was, this strand was only tenuously linked to the other two stories. The Japanese material – a teenage virgin desperate to get laid – seemed out of keeping with the measured psychology of the Calexican and Morrocan tales.

The movie flared and then faded. The first third of the movie – the promise of what kind of a movie this might become – was the strongest section. A movie which might encompass so much of this turbulent, globalised village. It set out its ambition, and then, like the tower, failed to fulfil it. It might be that the Japanese daughter killed her mother with the same gun that shot Blanchett, but this seemed too arbitrary a pillar on which to build a film that spans the world.

It’s impossible not to admire Inarritu and Arriaga’s ambition. Babel is aspiring to things that other movies have never even heard of, let alone dreamt of. The influence of Amores Perros on cinema has been substantial. It may be that it’s time for its creators to step out of their masterpiece’s shadow. Babel seems to follow the architecture of that movie to a logical, grandiose end. Perhaps it had to be done, but it would be interesting to see how the filmmakers’ cinematic dexterity might now work on a more intimate, humane scale.

zemastan/ in winter (dir. rafi pitts)

As a teenager I was shown Ashes and Diamonds, by Wajda. I don't remember much of it now. A scene set in a sea of sheets, subsequently stolen. But I do remember the lead performer. I was told he was like a Polish James Dean. I didn't know too much about James Dean, and what I had see didn't quite work for me, a mewling middle-american pretty boy, but I could sense that somehow what these actors did was maybe less important than who they knew they were. The actor as zeitgeist definer.

I raise all this because it crossed my mind that Hashem Abdi's performance as Mahrab might be doing something similar for a contemporary Iranian audience. The storyline of In Winter is simple, and bleak. A man leaves his wife to look for work abroad. Another man arrives in town. He's a bit of a chancer, good looking. He gets a job, takes a shine to the wife, The wife is told her husband's dead. The chancer marries the widow, then loses his job, and a few weeks later decides that he too has to go abroad to find work.

The film is beatifully constructed, with succinct cinematography capturing the hinterland of an Iranian town. The music is sparsely compelling. But the thing that lifts the film out of the ordinary is Abdi's enigmatic performance. He seems like a drifter and a waster, and yet he has a compelling charisma. When the boss wants to sack him, Marhab doesn't go meekly, he answers back and vandalises the car plant. He brings smiles to his wife's face and makes his friend laugh. This in a society where laughter seems as precious as money. In the face of the unremitting austerity of contemporary Iran, Abdi's laconic, amoral performance looks like it might be one that touches a nerve. With a bleak flair, Zemastan gets under the skin of this edgy, precarious world.

manhattan [dir. Woody Allen]

At the end of the showing in the ICA, an elderly man asked if they’d changed the film in any way, in the re-release. It's only a new print, but his reaction shows the freshness the film retains.

Most great US movies of the 70s were created on an epic scale – Coppola, Cimino et al. A few weeks ago I met someone who had been smuggled into Studio 54 when she was a teenager. She described an excess and a hedonism that has left anything else she’s seen in the shade.

There’s barely a hint of this in Allen’s Big Apple. He might appear drunk once, but that’s all. Instead, the film harks back to the twenties, thirties, forties. The dramatic use of the Manhattan skyline, which dominates the first five minutes, escorted by Gershwin, is as epic as it gets.

Which is a relief, and might explain why the film has aged so well. Men and women will always create drama in their lives, no matter what’s going on in the big wide world. The film’s keynote scene, with Allen having a showdown with his friend Yale in the presence of a Neanderthal- seeming skeleton drives this point home. It’s also the only scene where Allen seems prepared to accept that there is such a thing as a ‘wrong’ way of waging the battle of the sexes. He is genuinely aggrieved that Yale can twist and turn so recklessly, ruining at least two and perhaps three relationships at the turn of a Porsche ignition key.

Allen being Allen he retreats from any inclination to moralise. In his New York it may be as big a sin to criticise Bergman as it is to sleep with another man’s wife or another woman’s husband. The one guarantee of relationships is that they will cause pain, something he recognises by claiming the August Strindberg award for himself. And in a way, the movie seems to suggest, there’s nothing too wrong with this, because that pain lends meaning to life, which keeps us going.

And these things will carry on, no matter how the streets of the city might alter, no matter the prevailing trends in facial hair. Mistakes will be made and people will have to learn to live with them. Allen’s recognition of this is what lends his film a timelessness that revived me as much of a dull wintery London afternoon in 2006 as it might have done on a similar dull afternoon thirty years ago.

casino royale [dir martin campbell]

Bond is an institution. How do institutions grow old gracefully? Through re-invention? Or acceptance of senility? How old is Bond anyway?

If Casino Royale seems to be anything to go by, he's just got to the mid-life crisis, so there's more to come, but diminishing returns should be expected. The film opens with a recap - Bond makes his first kills and acquires 00 status. It suggests the Bond team, whoever they are, want to make a fresh start - new Bond, new broom. Mid-life crises can take on various forms. Bond has no need of more gadgets, so these are pared back. He's worried about being unfit, so the new Bond is buffed up, shows off his chest, gets his hands dirty. All of which is par for the course. Trouble really comes when Bond, the character within this movie, genuinely does have a mid-life crisis, falls in love with a woman, runs away on a boat with her, hands in his notice.

This development occurs in hour 7 of a nine hour epic, after Bond has re-affirmed his masculinity and proved he can both win and lose at cards. Bond's crisis is squeezed into the tail end of the movie, neccessitating some cramped and unlikely dialogue. Revealing something we knew all along: we don't go to a Bond movie in order to see a psychological drama. His relationship with Vespa is deeply unconvincing, not least because she looks like she's about 17, and Bond has never been the paternal type.

A loss of direction is common in mid-life crises, and it's not surprising Casino Royale doesn't seem to know where it's going, slipping from 'action-packed' into static card games. There's also a curious homo-erotic element, with Bond and his advesary, Le Chiffre, indulging in some sado-masochistic horseplay. The buff Craig slipping out of the ocean seems to be targeted towards the pink pound rather than the lad's pound.

The real problem with Casino Royale is that it fails to develop this intruiging villain. He's good at playing cards, but since when is card-playing a danger to the world as we know it? There's nothing at stake save Bond's ego, and Bond's ego should never be at stake. There's nothing wrong with Mads Mikkelson, it's just his character doesn't actually do very much. Without a malevolent alter-ego on a mission, Bond doesn't know what his mission is. Perhaps it's no surprise he wants to retire and grow pot-plants. By the end of the nine hours he's been running around the world getting nowhere, and it's to the film's mimetic credit that we know how he feels.

london to brighton [dir paul andrew williams]

London to Brighton is a well-made film. It features commendable performances from unknowns, taut direction, and one fine scene where the gangster’s son meets his father’s killer. The technical proficiency is impressive, a masterly handling of a limited budget. However, I do have a couple of caveats.

These are: at points it seemed to me as though this film was an A grade in the British film-making A-level. With its nod to the british gangster genre (Long Good Friday etc) and vague Loach-ish hints in the characterisation of the runaway. Getting an A in any system cannot be criticised – unless you don’t rate the system. Another British gangster flick which seems less likely to have been in the director’s or producers’ mind would be Performance, a demented film that does its damndest to break narrative conventions rather than re-affirm them, thus breaking character conventions and filmic conventions. What grade would Performance have got?

Whilst some do not hold Performance in high regard, most rate Taxi Driver, that doyen of Anglo American film culture. Like London To Brighton, Taxi Driver manipulates the audience’s relationship with a pubescent girl at risk, knowing that an audience would want her to come to no harm. It’s an effective semiotic device – the innocent abroad in the big bad world. Scorsese’s unstinting exploration of Bickle’s personality, forcing the audience to side with the psychopath’s tender side, was a bold, devastating treatment of this theme. It took the audience to the same dark place Jodie Foster had found herself entering, the sewer of the city. (‘The sewer’ being a word the psychopathic son likes to use to describe the London world the UK runaway finds herself lost in.) London to Brighton lets its audience off Scorsese’s hook. It lacks passion: the runaway becomes a cog in a plot, a final hug from her grandmother seems perfunctory; the audience ambles out stirred but barely shaken.

The point of all this is that cinema has both a Pavlovian and a Brechtian effect on its audience. Film which makes us think twice, which makes us marvel or despair, will manipulate our Pavlovian instincts and then make us reflect as we participate – (perhaps by our just going – how can I watch this?). London to Brighton is a functional film which generates functional responses effectively. Whilst it’s churlish to criticise competence, it may be reasonable to long for ambition.

rampage [dir george gittoes]

Rampage tells the story of three brothers. One dies. Another’s in Iraq. The third, whom the film finally concentrates on, goes looking for a recording contract.

All three brothers are rappers. The film is created around the notion that it’s as dangerous to live on the wrong side of the tracks in Miami as it is to live in Baghdad. Whilst shootings are clearly rife in Dade County, it still seems to be pushing it to say it’s worse than Iraq. A soldier says at one point that he’s safer in Baghdad, which may be the case for a US soldier but not, in would seem, for many. However, the film seems to realise that the comparison is tenuous if not odious, and the focus shifts away from the elder brother in Baghdad after the middle brother Marcus is shot in a gang incident at a party.

As the director/ narrator says, the younger 14 year old brother speaks like Shakespeare. Rap, rhyme, words, are part of all the brothers’ metabolisms. The younger brother says he started rapping when he was five. The violence that thrives around them seems to fuel their literacy. The rappers write down lyrics, have debates in rap, are more than ready to spontaneously rap about anything, anywhere.

Maybe the violence of their environment fuels this, maybe not. It’s a telling moment when the head of ‘Sony Rap’ or whatever he is, tells the kid that he’s the future of Rap, but that he can’t sing about what he wants to. He needs to become more audience friendly. Parents don’t want their children listening to a 14 year old rapping about AK 47s. You sense that if you try to stop the kid singing about what he has to sing about, he’ll never become the future of Rap. And what he knows about is shootings and drive-bys and his brother being killed.

In the end Rampage seems to skirt around issues. It won’t criticise the suits who tell the younger brother to change his tune. It doesn’t comment on fellow members of the soldier’s ghetto who criticise him for fighting Bush’s war. The film makes the strange choice of flying two of the brothers to Australia for no particular reason. The only time Gittoes comes out with a take on what he is doing as a filmmaker is when he leaves an Australian radio journalist’s query about his actions in the film, replying with an acknowledgement that the media interest he brought to the family might have precipitated Marcus’ killing. There’s probably another movie to be made about the macho documentary maker’s relationship to his subject matter, but we don’t get that here. What we do get is a snapshot of a remarkable community, which oozes poetry like blood; whose children are as proud of the epithet ‘poet’ as they are of being warriors.

It’s the people on the wrong side of the Miami bridge who truly treasure the language we speak.

tosca's kiss (il bacio di tosca) [dir daniel schmid 1984]

The Goethe institute on Exhibition Street is a small venue. You get neither trailers nor adverts. There's a homely air to the red seats. It feels not unlike a school hall.

The films they show are not mainstream. My friend recommended Tosca's Kiss. I knew nothing about it. The film is a documentary, made over twenty years ago. In it's company the audience visits the Verdi home for retired musicians in Milan. The opening and closing shots of the building are the only exteriors in the whole film. The rest is captured in people's rooms, in the dining room, in an old storage room, on the stairwell.

The featured characters are all over seventy, and most will be dead by now. Some sung with Callas. Others refer to Caruso as though they knew him, as they may have done. Many performed in New York, Rio, Buenas Aires or Montevideo. All have opera in their bones. The caretaker and the cleaner appear. The cleaner sings with one of the former sopranos. The small audience in the Goethe Institute burst into applause. The staff say that no-one lives in the present in this place; everyone exists in a golden past.

Schmid captures these characters with a disarming charm. It would not be hard to make the film seem like an exercise in nostalgia, but the film resists. Instead, it is a study of ageing. The characters sing with enthusiasm. They play around. They are arrogant or self-obsessed, they are kindly or lovable. Age doesn't seem to have induced wisdom, neither has it dulled their appetite for life.

I don't care for opera. By the end of the film I was happily swimming in it. Within the film, opera feels like the folk music of Italy. There's only the one shot of the outside world, but few films have ever transported me to the country of their filming so effectively. Revealing that a country is made up of the personages who live, age, and will die there. As the film began I feared that ninety minutes in this world would be stretching it. When the credits rolled it felt like the viewer was being forcibly removed from a quirky corner of musical heaven.