A man wandered to the front before the screening of Les Amants at NFT2 and mentioned that the cut we were about to see was the censored British version, not the uncensored French. He then said he was sure that this wouldn't affect our enjoyment, and assured us that the film would be as pleasurable as the wonderful weather outside. This was probably not a polite dig at the kind of lunatics who choose to watch a black and white subtitled fifties film on the first truly beautiful day of the year, but if it had been it would have been justifiable. I had my own reasons for retreating to the sanctuary of the cinema: when the world is on your shoulders, there's nowhere better to escape to, beyond the range of mobile phones or the diversions of one's own brain.
Truffaut liked Les Amants, but said it wasn't a masterpiece. I'd heard of the film but as I watched it I didn't really get it. The beautiful Jeanne Moreau is bored with her husband, a Dijon newspaper man. She makes regular trips to Paris where she stays with her socialite friend, Maggie, and conducts an affair with the blandly elegant Spanish polo player, Raoul Flores. Her husband grows suspicious and insists she invites Maggie and Raoul to Dijon for supper. Driving back home, she breaks down, and is picked up by a humorous young man, Bernard, played with a hint of modernity by Jean-Marc Bory. Bernard drives her home, her husband insists on him joining the quartet for supper, which is a desultory affair, everyone goes to bed, planning to wake at four to go fishing. Moreau escapes the attentions of firstly her husband then Raoul, before wandering out into the night air where Bernard jumps her. They have passionate sex, declare eternal love, and drive off just as the others are getting ready for the dawn fishing expedition.
It's only worth summarising the plot in such detail to demonstrate that there isn't that much of a plot. There's clearly something Flaubertian about Moreau's character (named, funnily enough, Jeanne), on whom no moral judgement is passed at any point. However, there's not enough there to explain why, as I later learnt, people queued round the block to see the film when it first came out in Paris, or indeed why the film had been censored by the British to such an extent that it was worth mentioning before the film screened.
Its at times like these that the NFT notes come in handy. The missing scene was one which, whilst not quite showing it, implied that Bernand had had the good grace to perform cunnilingus on Jeanne, which helps to explain why she was quite so ready to hop into his 2CV and drive off to start a new life with him. It also explains why the British Board of Film Censors had little option but to save the British public from the side-effects of this French perversion, as well as explaining the film's attraction to French men, and women, when it first came out. However, without this revelatory moment, the first time, apparently, it had been performed on a cinema screen (or implied, because, so the notes tell us, Bertrand glided down Jeanne's body before disappearing from shot), the full effect of the film is kind of lost. Obviously the main point for Malle and Moreau (who were lovers at the time the film was made) was to push the boundaries, and embrace realism in all its erotic as well as psychological possibilities. Once the British censor reached for his scissors, (let's assume they're a he), the full potency of their endeavour was somewhat undermined.
I'm not sure if, even had the relevant scene been present, it would have altered my perception of the film. Its quest for realism has been left behind in the decades that have passed. It may well be that Les Amants helped open the door to the sixties, but once the door was open the horse well and truly bolted. Nevertheless, it's worth watching to see Moreau give her remarkable performance as a woman in search of meaning in a life which appears to have bequeathed her none. The echoes of Madame Bovray are strong, and although the film's narrative does not do her character's story justice, her performance undoubtably does.
Sunday, 8 June 2008
Saturday, 7 June 2008
five years of my life [w. murat kurnaz] & the flight [w. horacio verbitsky]
Whilst writing about literature I have steered away from non-fiction. Non-fiction has a different agenda to fiction, requiring divergent skills. With non-fiction, the way in which the piece is written is less important than what is being written about; whereas with fiction, this is the other way round. This is not to say that there are works of non-fiction which will be far more carefully composed than works of fiction; just that the reasons for reading the two may not be the same, meaning that, in the interests of clarity, I have resisted reviewing the non-fiction I've read this year.
However, I've just finished two books which demand to be made an exception of. The Flight, also known as Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, is a book of acknowledged significance. It's author, Horacio Verbitsky, conducted a series of interviews with a navy officer, Adolfo Scilingo, wherein Scilingo came clean about his part in what the navy had been doing during the dirty war. He spoke to the journalist about the way in which the military regime would drug prisoners and then fly them above the South Atlantic, before throwing them, drugged but alive, into the ocean. Over the course of several years there were weekly flights, which members of the Argentine navy were obliged to participate in. Scilingo said he had been on two of them.
Scilingo's confession was not, in fact, the first time news of these crimes had been officially acknowledged. They had been mentioned in a judicial review conducted in the wake of the end of the dictatorship, and if anyone had wanted to know, the information was out there. However, it was the first time a member of the navy had confessed and broken the code of silence concerning events that had happened almost twenty years previously. The book caused a storm when originally published in Argentina, as for the first time, the nation really began to take stock of the crimes that had been committed in its name by the armed forces during the dictatorship.
Verbitsky's story deals with issues from the recent past. As noted elsewhere, there's a fine line to be trod between moving on from what happened and taking account of what happened. However, the story's potency is heightened by the human role within it of Scilingo himself, who Verbitsky does not give an easy ride. Scilingo's motivations for talking turn from annoyance with his superiors and a hypocritical code of silence, to a genuine realisation of the horror of what he has participated in, to a desperate quest for personal survival. His story is the tragedy, which has a redemptive edge to it, of a man caught up in the wider scheme of political history, unable to sever himself at any point from the circumstances he finds himself trapped in, yet who nevertheless at least has the courage to confront his demons, which is more than could be said for anyone else who emerged from the dehumanised culture he belonged to.
Murat Kurnaz's book tells the other side of the story. Kurnaz was arrested in Pakistan, spent several months being tortured by the Americans in Kandahar, and was then transferred to Guantanamo. A Turkish citizen who'd lived all his life in Germany, who had worked as a bouncer at discos before he discovered Islam, Kurnaz describes with a dispassionate candour the torture he underwent whilst in American custody. We have watched our TV screens over the past six years and glimpsed images of something we know is unethical but about which details have remained sparse. Kurnaz strips clear the TV veneer, offering detail after detail about a shockingly inhumane system which was, and presumably still is, far worse than anything we have been lead to believe.
It is hard to know why Kurnaz's book has not been on the bestseller lists, has not received more attention here. It reads like a thriller, in so far as it's almost impossible to put down. Murnaz writes without embitterment, in spite of everything. The book also gives as telling an insight into the positive properties of Islam as anything I've read. In the face of all that he is forced to suffer, his faith keeps him alive, as well as those around him. At one point a guard who has a modicum of humanity comments on the way that he would have gone mad if couped up in the kind of living conditions the prisoners have to suffer, and notes that only their faith has kept the prisoners sane.
On the other side of the chain link fence are the guards. The damnation of the US system comes about as much through the empty headed savagery of the men and women who run the prison as the prison itself. When Kurnaz comments on those few guards who act with some kind of decency, something the prisoners always note, there is relief that not everyone in this place is corrupt. An inhumane system relies for its efficiency on the inhumanity of its operators. Kurnaz finds greater fellowship with the iguanas, spiders and hummingbirds who visit him in his cell than with the humans who patrol on the outside.
Verbitsky's account of Scilingo's self-confessed crimes is shocking. Yet that shockingness is dulled, no matter what, by time, which dulls all things. Kurnaz's account of events in Kandahar and Cuba is also shocking. Yet that describes a prison which is still active, and many of the men mentioned in his account will still be living in conditions whose barbarity has nothing to do with a world we would like to believe is civilised, even as I write.
However, I've just finished two books which demand to be made an exception of. The Flight, also known as Confessions of an Argentine Dirty Warrior, is a book of acknowledged significance. It's author, Horacio Verbitsky, conducted a series of interviews with a navy officer, Adolfo Scilingo, wherein Scilingo came clean about his part in what the navy had been doing during the dirty war. He spoke to the journalist about the way in which the military regime would drug prisoners and then fly them above the South Atlantic, before throwing them, drugged but alive, into the ocean. Over the course of several years there were weekly flights, which members of the Argentine navy were obliged to participate in. Scilingo said he had been on two of them.
Scilingo's confession was not, in fact, the first time news of these crimes had been officially acknowledged. They had been mentioned in a judicial review conducted in the wake of the end of the dictatorship, and if anyone had wanted to know, the information was out there. However, it was the first time a member of the navy had confessed and broken the code of silence concerning events that had happened almost twenty years previously. The book caused a storm when originally published in Argentina, as for the first time, the nation really began to take stock of the crimes that had been committed in its name by the armed forces during the dictatorship.
Verbitsky's story deals with issues from the recent past. As noted elsewhere, there's a fine line to be trod between moving on from what happened and taking account of what happened. However, the story's potency is heightened by the human role within it of Scilingo himself, who Verbitsky does not give an easy ride. Scilingo's motivations for talking turn from annoyance with his superiors and a hypocritical code of silence, to a genuine realisation of the horror of what he has participated in, to a desperate quest for personal survival. His story is the tragedy, which has a redemptive edge to it, of a man caught up in the wider scheme of political history, unable to sever himself at any point from the circumstances he finds himself trapped in, yet who nevertheless at least has the courage to confront his demons, which is more than could be said for anyone else who emerged from the dehumanised culture he belonged to.
Murat Kurnaz's book tells the other side of the story. Kurnaz was arrested in Pakistan, spent several months being tortured by the Americans in Kandahar, and was then transferred to Guantanamo. A Turkish citizen who'd lived all his life in Germany, who had worked as a bouncer at discos before he discovered Islam, Kurnaz describes with a dispassionate candour the torture he underwent whilst in American custody. We have watched our TV screens over the past six years and glimpsed images of something we know is unethical but about which details have remained sparse. Kurnaz strips clear the TV veneer, offering detail after detail about a shockingly inhumane system which was, and presumably still is, far worse than anything we have been lead to believe.
It is hard to know why Kurnaz's book has not been on the bestseller lists, has not received more attention here. It reads like a thriller, in so far as it's almost impossible to put down. Murnaz writes without embitterment, in spite of everything. The book also gives as telling an insight into the positive properties of Islam as anything I've read. In the face of all that he is forced to suffer, his faith keeps him alive, as well as those around him. At one point a guard who has a modicum of humanity comments on the way that he would have gone mad if couped up in the kind of living conditions the prisoners have to suffer, and notes that only their faith has kept the prisoners sane.
On the other side of the chain link fence are the guards. The damnation of the US system comes about as much through the empty headed savagery of the men and women who run the prison as the prison itself. When Kurnaz comments on those few guards who act with some kind of decency, something the prisoners always note, there is relief that not everyone in this place is corrupt. An inhumane system relies for its efficiency on the inhumanity of its operators. Kurnaz finds greater fellowship with the iguanas, spiders and hummingbirds who visit him in his cell than with the humans who patrol on the outside.
Verbitsky's account of Scilingo's self-confessed crimes is shocking. Yet that shockingness is dulled, no matter what, by time, which dulls all things. Kurnaz's account of events in Kandahar and Cuba is also shocking. Yet that describes a prison which is still active, and many of the men mentioned in his account will still be living in conditions whose barbarity has nothing to do with a world we would like to believe is civilised, even as I write.
Monday, 2 June 2008
a grain of wheat [w. ngũgĩ wa thiong'o]
Before beginning a brief account of this book, it seems right to ask a simple question. Why had I never heard of it, or its author before? A Grain of Wheat was originally published in 1967, so it's not like it should be waiting to be discovered. The author has published a host of books and been imprisoned for his literary activity. And whilst I'm a long way from the epicentre of English-language literature, wherever that might be, it's also not as though I'm on some dim distant shore, picking up bottles hoping they contain a message written in my language.
A Grain of Wheat is a remarkable piece of writing. Based around four central characters, each with differing perspectives on the history they've lived through, it gives an account of how the Mau Mau insurrection leading up to Kenyan independence in 1963 affected a single village and its inhabitants. Ngũgĩ's prose style has the straightforward power of someone who knows they're recounting difficult issues to a large audience. It never dallies or gets bogged down in its mission. The narrative is sufficiently complex to keep the reader wondering how it's going to unfold, and the structure of the book has a limpid cleverness, shifting backwards and forwards through time, filling in gaps the reader had forgotten existed, constantly illustrating the way an action made at a given time lives on in the years that will follow it. Technically, A Grain of Wheat is an extremely compact, skillful piece of writing. But above and beyond this it also has an irresistible humanity to it, never afraid to show a good man in a bad light or a bad man in a good one. Ngũgĩ captures the sense of moral dislocation that inevitably accompanies living under a repressive regime, the way in which all aspects of life are tainted by fear and an overriding desire to return to some kind of normality.
The book's depiction of British rule is scathing. It's not afraid to call a detention centre a concentration camp, where men are held without trial for year after year. Guantanamo is nothing new under the sun. The last blighted years of British colonial rule are rarely thought about now, (we tend to perceive ourselves as a faintly benign influence in comparison to the perfidious Latins or Belgians) but Ngũgĩ illustrates both the savagery of that epoch, and the scarred imprint it left on the Kenyans who had to begin reconstructing their country after the British had finally left. In the course of this description he articulates a brilliant exposition of the rationale and objectives of a terrorist campaign.
All of which brings me back to my opening question. Ngũgĩ wrote this book in English (he later started to write in Gikuyu, his local language). The book fulfills the brief of literature in so many ways, in particular as understood within an Anglo-Saxon tradition. It brings together complex ideas from a definable political period and conveys those ideas through its subtle, psychologically perceptive characterisation. It tells a powerful story with economy and humanity. Apparently (I learn from the introduction) Ngũgĩ acknowledged the influence of Conrad. The book itself was actually written in Leeds, where the author was working on his MA, and I doubt there were many better books written in Leeds in 1967. In spite of all this, Ngũgĩ is unknown in this country, and he certainly never got near my syllabus back at York.
Is Ngũgĩ the victim of prejudice? Has A Grain of Wheat not been acknowledged because the book scratches at a sore the UK would rather forget? Somehow I suspect that this isn't what's happened. Rather, he's a victim of something more mundane, which is an introspective ignorance, an ostrich like reluctance to look beyond the circumference of the acknowledged Anglo-Saxon world. Which might be indicative of a hidebound arrogance, which might in turn be a cultural extension of the earlier colonial policy.
A Grain of Wheat is a remarkable piece of writing. Based around four central characters, each with differing perspectives on the history they've lived through, it gives an account of how the Mau Mau insurrection leading up to Kenyan independence in 1963 affected a single village and its inhabitants. Ngũgĩ's prose style has the straightforward power of someone who knows they're recounting difficult issues to a large audience. It never dallies or gets bogged down in its mission. The narrative is sufficiently complex to keep the reader wondering how it's going to unfold, and the structure of the book has a limpid cleverness, shifting backwards and forwards through time, filling in gaps the reader had forgotten existed, constantly illustrating the way an action made at a given time lives on in the years that will follow it. Technically, A Grain of Wheat is an extremely compact, skillful piece of writing. But above and beyond this it also has an irresistible humanity to it, never afraid to show a good man in a bad light or a bad man in a good one. Ngũgĩ captures the sense of moral dislocation that inevitably accompanies living under a repressive regime, the way in which all aspects of life are tainted by fear and an overriding desire to return to some kind of normality.
The book's depiction of British rule is scathing. It's not afraid to call a detention centre a concentration camp, where men are held without trial for year after year. Guantanamo is nothing new under the sun. The last blighted years of British colonial rule are rarely thought about now, (we tend to perceive ourselves as a faintly benign influence in comparison to the perfidious Latins or Belgians) but Ngũgĩ illustrates both the savagery of that epoch, and the scarred imprint it left on the Kenyans who had to begin reconstructing their country after the British had finally left. In the course of this description he articulates a brilliant exposition of the rationale and objectives of a terrorist campaign.
All of which brings me back to my opening question. Ngũgĩ wrote this book in English (he later started to write in Gikuyu, his local language). The book fulfills the brief of literature in so many ways, in particular as understood within an Anglo-Saxon tradition. It brings together complex ideas from a definable political period and conveys those ideas through its subtle, psychologically perceptive characterisation. It tells a powerful story with economy and humanity. Apparently (I learn from the introduction) Ngũgĩ acknowledged the influence of Conrad. The book itself was actually written in Leeds, where the author was working on his MA, and I doubt there were many better books written in Leeds in 1967. In spite of all this, Ngũgĩ is unknown in this country, and he certainly never got near my syllabus back at York.
Is Ngũgĩ the victim of prejudice? Has A Grain of Wheat not been acknowledged because the book scratches at a sore the UK would rather forget? Somehow I suspect that this isn't what's happened. Rather, he's a victim of something more mundane, which is an introspective ignorance, an ostrich like reluctance to look beyond the circumference of the acknowledged Anglo-Saxon world. Which might be indicative of a hidebound arrogance, which might in turn be a cultural extension of the earlier colonial policy.
the colour of pomegranates (d. sergei parajanov)
The film buff suggested we go. He and I both thought we'd seen it twenty years ago. I thought it was 4 hours long and he said it was 72 minutes. He was almost right, it would have been, if it wasn't for the fact the print kept going into meltdown, the lights coming up and down, the washed colours dissolving into the orange glow of a blank screen.
The scratchiness of the print and its state of imminent collapse contributed to the sense of watching a relic, discovered perhaps in one of the ruined churches the film shows. The film has the feel of a tone poem. It is a succession of mise-en-scenes, artfully put together, with no dialogue and little narrative. Every image is a thing of beauty, from the carpets flapping in the wind to the sheep bleating in a church. Like looking at a Renaissance fresco that's faded through the centuries, it's hard to tell what the original colours would have looked like, but in this print they had a subdued grandeur, hinting at the richness of the colours that underpin the images shown on the screen, without quite giving them away.
Parajanov's film is meditative. It felt to this viewer like a cross between a sixties acid movie and a nineties fashion spread in a glossy magazine for people with so much money they needed to prove it through the quality of their austerity. The only people in the audience who looked like this was their reason for watching it left after the second projector meltdown. Maybe 7 minutes was enough for them to get a feel. No matter how beautiful, Pomegranates is not an easy thing to watch, stripped away as it is of assumed dramatic ingredients. Towards the end the poet's voice says - I'm so tired, I'm even tired of writing poems - and the audience knows where he's coming from. We too couldn't go on for much longer staring at this alien beauty, not without pharmaceutical assistance.
The film buff noted that there was a surprising amount of religious imagery for a film made in the Soviet Union. I felt as though there may well have been a thousand messages contained within the images that I had missed, which perhaps all save a few now-elderly Armenians would miss. However, to go and see this film expecting to make sense of it would appear to be missing the point, for it's a film that deals with the limits of intellectual understanding, provoking a sensory response instead. It's as close to an experience of other-worldly asceticism as you can get without spending a year sitting on a pillar in the middle of the desert.
The scratchiness of the print and its state of imminent collapse contributed to the sense of watching a relic, discovered perhaps in one of the ruined churches the film shows. The film has the feel of a tone poem. It is a succession of mise-en-scenes, artfully put together, with no dialogue and little narrative. Every image is a thing of beauty, from the carpets flapping in the wind to the sheep bleating in a church. Like looking at a Renaissance fresco that's faded through the centuries, it's hard to tell what the original colours would have looked like, but in this print they had a subdued grandeur, hinting at the richness of the colours that underpin the images shown on the screen, without quite giving them away.
Parajanov's film is meditative. It felt to this viewer like a cross between a sixties acid movie and a nineties fashion spread in a glossy magazine for people with so much money they needed to prove it through the quality of their austerity. The only people in the audience who looked like this was their reason for watching it left after the second projector meltdown. Maybe 7 minutes was enough for them to get a feel. No matter how beautiful, Pomegranates is not an easy thing to watch, stripped away as it is of assumed dramatic ingredients. Towards the end the poet's voice says - I'm so tired, I'm even tired of writing poems - and the audience knows where he's coming from. We too couldn't go on for much longer staring at this alien beauty, not without pharmaceutical assistance.
The film buff noted that there was a surprising amount of religious imagery for a film made in the Soviet Union. I felt as though there may well have been a thousand messages contained within the images that I had missed, which perhaps all save a few now-elderly Armenians would miss. However, to go and see this film expecting to make sense of it would appear to be missing the point, for it's a film that deals with the limits of intellectual understanding, provoking a sensory response instead. It's as close to an experience of other-worldly asceticism as you can get without spending a year sitting on a pillar in the middle of the desert.
Friday, 30 May 2008
california dreamin' (d. christian nemescu, w. nemescu & catherine linstrum)
There seems to have been a dearth of movies that demand to be seen in London this month. Perhaps I've missed some gems, perhaps it's just the start of a slack Summer season, or perhaps distributors are becoming ever more cautious and nothing that doesn't feature a ludicrous premise (in the case of British flicks) or a Hollywood star will ever be released again.
California Dreamin' features a Hollywood star, although not one who many producers would want to hang their coat on. Armand Assante's performance as the US military captain Doug Jones, whose company becomes stranded in a Roumanian village, hostage to the local honcho, is a peculiar one. He mumbles much of his dialogue, and whilst it seemed a little strange to see the US soldiers subtitled along with the Roumanian peasants, it did help to make sense of some of his more unlikely lines. Whether he was mouthing a strange translation from Roumanian into American-military speak, or just doing free-jazz improvisation, was impossible to tell. There was more than a hint of the Strangelove George C Scott to Assante's performance, all wild-eyed pent-up aggression with no outlet, but his oddness merely reflected an occasionally baffling movie.
The premise is straightforward and prepossessing. At the tail end of the Kosovan war a US communications team is effectively hijacked by Doiaru, the corrupt stationmaster, who has been waiting fifty years for the Americans to arrive. In a key speech, he says that he was expecting them to appear and get rid of the Nazis, then the Russians, then Ceausescu, and now when they do show up it's in order to go and bomb Serbs. The film makes play on the nature of Roumanian bureaucracy: nothing Jones barks into the telephone effects any change, and the company are stranded for four days. During which Doiaru's daughter, Monica, (the convincing Maria Dinulescu) has a fling with a fetching young US soldier; the company's discipline goes to pieces; and their presence finally provokes an insurrection against Doiaru which results in quasi-tragedy.
Nemescu splits the action up into four chapters, reflecting the four days the soldiers are stranded there. As a director his approach appeared to be to take the kitchen sink, throw it in, then see what else was lying around. Besides an inevitable Dracula-fest, which Assante sits through with a petulant/ comatose look on his face, there are various sub-plots involving Monica and the men who fancy her; an unexploded second world war bomb; the Roumanian government's attempts to displace Doiaru (played with an oxen belligerence by Razvan Vasilescu); a factory strike; and the remaining village politicking. The action is almost all rural, then all of a sudden Monica and her American soldier find themselves at a party in an unnamed town with a bomb going off beneath the bed. At one point the soldiers are taken to a replica of the Eiffel Tower, for no obvious reason save it makes for a pleasant frame. At another a Roumanian Elvis appears and sings Love Me Tender. It is a movie about the nature of being trapped and waiting, and at 155 minutes running time, it succeeds in conveying both the frustrations and delights of this experience.
In short, referring to a film which always prefers to go the long way round, it's a bit of a mess, containing about five movies in one. Its erratic structure is matched by its erratic tone - like a shapeless Kustirica movie, which is clearly going to be one of the baggier filmic structures you're likely to come across. And yet, California Dreamin' for all its longeurs, reminded me why I like movies and what I've been missing these past few weeks. It takes the viewer right into its peculiar world. The set-up of the clashing cultures was awkward (with some of the least soldierly US soldiers you're ever likely to see) but always fascinating, and the idea of having two people who cannot talk to one another but fancy the pants off each other was one of the more effective ideas in the pot-pourri. Nothing really hangs together, but all the same it's there, it's happening on the screen in front of you, and if you didn't see it you would have had no idea what it was you'd missed out on, for better or for worse.
That peculiar conflation of geography, economy, and a personal vision laid before your eyes in a dark room of a 'London' 'afternoon', (insert as appropriate), also known as cinema.
California Dreamin' features a Hollywood star, although not one who many producers would want to hang their coat on. Armand Assante's performance as the US military captain Doug Jones, whose company becomes stranded in a Roumanian village, hostage to the local honcho, is a peculiar one. He mumbles much of his dialogue, and whilst it seemed a little strange to see the US soldiers subtitled along with the Roumanian peasants, it did help to make sense of some of his more unlikely lines. Whether he was mouthing a strange translation from Roumanian into American-military speak, or just doing free-jazz improvisation, was impossible to tell. There was more than a hint of the Strangelove George C Scott to Assante's performance, all wild-eyed pent-up aggression with no outlet, but his oddness merely reflected an occasionally baffling movie.
The premise is straightforward and prepossessing. At the tail end of the Kosovan war a US communications team is effectively hijacked by Doiaru, the corrupt stationmaster, who has been waiting fifty years for the Americans to arrive. In a key speech, he says that he was expecting them to appear and get rid of the Nazis, then the Russians, then Ceausescu, and now when they do show up it's in order to go and bomb Serbs. The film makes play on the nature of Roumanian bureaucracy: nothing Jones barks into the telephone effects any change, and the company are stranded for four days. During which Doiaru's daughter, Monica, (the convincing Maria Dinulescu) has a fling with a fetching young US soldier; the company's discipline goes to pieces; and their presence finally provokes an insurrection against Doiaru which results in quasi-tragedy.
Nemescu splits the action up into four chapters, reflecting the four days the soldiers are stranded there. As a director his approach appeared to be to take the kitchen sink, throw it in, then see what else was lying around. Besides an inevitable Dracula-fest, which Assante sits through with a petulant/ comatose look on his face, there are various sub-plots involving Monica and the men who fancy her; an unexploded second world war bomb; the Roumanian government's attempts to displace Doiaru (played with an oxen belligerence by Razvan Vasilescu); a factory strike; and the remaining village politicking. The action is almost all rural, then all of a sudden Monica and her American soldier find themselves at a party in an unnamed town with a bomb going off beneath the bed. At one point the soldiers are taken to a replica of the Eiffel Tower, for no obvious reason save it makes for a pleasant frame. At another a Roumanian Elvis appears and sings Love Me Tender. It is a movie about the nature of being trapped and waiting, and at 155 minutes running time, it succeeds in conveying both the frustrations and delights of this experience.
In short, referring to a film which always prefers to go the long way round, it's a bit of a mess, containing about five movies in one. Its erratic structure is matched by its erratic tone - like a shapeless Kustirica movie, which is clearly going to be one of the baggier filmic structures you're likely to come across. And yet, California Dreamin' for all its longeurs, reminded me why I like movies and what I've been missing these past few weeks. It takes the viewer right into its peculiar world. The set-up of the clashing cultures was awkward (with some of the least soldierly US soldiers you're ever likely to see) but always fascinating, and the idea of having two people who cannot talk to one another but fancy the pants off each other was one of the more effective ideas in the pot-pourri. Nothing really hangs together, but all the same it's there, it's happening on the screen in front of you, and if you didn't see it you would have had no idea what it was you'd missed out on, for better or for worse.
That peculiar conflation of geography, economy, and a personal vision laid before your eyes in a dark room of a 'London' 'afternoon', (insert as appropriate), also known as cinema.
Tuesday, 27 May 2008
creole [w. jose eduardo agualusa]
Another novel from the Angolan, this time an epistolary, historical mini-epic, spanning three continents, thirty two years and no more than a hundred and fifty pages.
Most of the letters are written by the Portuguese adventurer, Fradique Mendes, who reports back on his findings to a variety of correspondents. Part of the fun of the book is realising that there are sometimes large temporal gaps between letters which don't at first appear obvious. However, it's hard not to feel at times when reading the always-entertaining Agualusa that there's a great big epic novel screaming to be let out of the book's thin pages. As though the author is dipping his toes in the river rather than diving right in. All the links between the slave trade, Brazil, Europe and Africa are in place and explored, and Fradique's voyage through the murky waters of late 19th century colonialism are fascinating. However, Agualusa resists the lure of narrative, preferring to cast shards of light on the occasional place and time (early Rio, downtown Luanda, the bush) before brushing the shards under the table and skipping forward.
Agualusa has an eye for an image and a nose for a story. I look forward to reading The Rainy Season, about the more recent Angolan struggles. It feels as though the writer wants to tread a delicate line between commenting on his country's history, without wishing that history to become a burden to either his narrative or the reader. So the love of Fradique's life may be seized and thrown into slavery, but this only becomes the cause of the hero's next adventure, and results in a happy ending where Fradique finally gets his girl. Fradique's jaunty tone works wonderfully for relating the curiosities of the expanding world he explores, but is rather less effective in capturing the growing pains of the new countries whose development he participates in with such gusto.
Most of the letters are written by the Portuguese adventurer, Fradique Mendes, who reports back on his findings to a variety of correspondents. Part of the fun of the book is realising that there are sometimes large temporal gaps between letters which don't at first appear obvious. However, it's hard not to feel at times when reading the always-entertaining Agualusa that there's a great big epic novel screaming to be let out of the book's thin pages. As though the author is dipping his toes in the river rather than diving right in. All the links between the slave trade, Brazil, Europe and Africa are in place and explored, and Fradique's voyage through the murky waters of late 19th century colonialism are fascinating. However, Agualusa resists the lure of narrative, preferring to cast shards of light on the occasional place and time (early Rio, downtown Luanda, the bush) before brushing the shards under the table and skipping forward.
Agualusa has an eye for an image and a nose for a story. I look forward to reading The Rainy Season, about the more recent Angolan struggles. It feels as though the writer wants to tread a delicate line between commenting on his country's history, without wishing that history to become a burden to either his narrative or the reader. So the love of Fradique's life may be seized and thrown into slavery, but this only becomes the cause of the hero's next adventure, and results in a happy ending where Fradique finally gets his girl. Fradique's jaunty tone works wonderfully for relating the curiosities of the expanding world he explores, but is rather less effective in capturing the growing pains of the new countries whose development he participates in with such gusto.
Wednesday, 14 May 2008
the book of chameleons [w. josé eduardo agualusa]
This is a book written from the point of a view of a lizard. This put me off. I picked the book up wearily. Lizards, Africa... it sounded too saccharine for my tastes. Sacchirine and dry, with a hint of tragedy. Like a slightly stale digestive. Anyway, I picked the book up, and prepared myself for whatever was coming. And within a page I realised I was wrong, and remembered that prejudice is pointless.
The lizard, or gecko, is christened Eulalio. It makes a pointed remark at one stage about another Angolan writer who builds his career selling national horrors to the West. The Book of Chameleons hints at the history that has shaped the perceptions of the book's characters, but it does so elliptically. Felix, who owns the house the lizard inhabits, makes his living as a genealogist who invents family trees for people. The suggestion being that history can be overruled, at least on a temporary basis. However, the main narrative of the book concerns a man who comes to Felix, is re-christened as José Buchmann, embraces his new self to such an extent he begins a quest for his lost 'new' mother, and yet in the end comes face to face with the daughter he believed he had lost in the civil war which ravaged Angola for so many years.
In a way Agualuca's delicate prose, detailing a woman who travels the world collecting different experiences of light, an albino who communes with the gecko, and a gentle, pastoral setting, seems to be acting in wilful opposition to all that history has thrown at the writer's country. Structured in a succession of fleeting chapters, it has the kind of lightness of touch which is in danger of being described as charming; and yet there lurks just below the surface a notion of another history. Just as the gecko doesn't live in an idyll, threatened as it is by the predatory scorpion which would kill it for no apparent reason at all. The lightness and humour of the book have a precision which keeps the reader on their toes, never knowing in which direction the narrative will turn, when the sting will come.
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
XXY (d&w lucia puenzo)
The coast of Uruguay is, as has been noted elsewhere by this writer, a beautiful place. And to come there on holiday as a teenager, to swim in the sea, get lost amongst the pines, have bonfires on the beach, discover alcohol, fall in love... there can be few better places to do all these things, so I've been told. XXY is the story of two teenagers, exploring the world, falling for one another, as teenagers do. There's only one catch. One of them, Alex, is a hermaphrodite. Which confuses things somewhat for Alvaro, the other.
Lucia Puenzo's story is a tightly told tale, a variation on a Rohmer theme, with a significant twist. Like Rohmer's adolescent holiday movies, its success depends on the performance of the two leads, Ines Efron and Martin Piroyansky. Efron has an emaciated, baffled teenage anger. Not sure if she's a boy or a girl, the reality of her condition is heightened by Alvaro's appearance in her life. In XXY there's both the love story and the hermaphrodite story working concurrently, and Efron's performance has all the angst of an adolescent discovering both love and sex for the first time, coupled with her attempts to come to terms with the cards nature has dealt her. Piroyansky's nerdish performance matches his partner's. He's closed in, uncertain, thinks he looks like a fool but doesn't want to be one. A firelit scene with his vain father is both funny and touching, with the director resisting any temptation towards sentimentality.
This is one of the strongest features of Puenzo's unfussy direction. The sex scene which lies at the epicentre of the piece is discreetly shocking. It starts with the music of a radio playing, creating what seems like an appropriate atmosphere. But as it gets going, Alex switches the music off. There's no soundtrack for what happens next. First love is rarely like they show it in the movies, and XXY ensures that it won't add to the misguided mystique.
The subject matter of the film, as the title indicates, is freakish, in so far as (as the old fisherman notes, and the young lads also know) a hermaphrodite is a rare exception to the natural order of things. Puenzo's direction assiduously works against the freakishness of her material, grounding Alex's exceptionality in the everyday. Furthermore, it highlights the fact that, at the age when we are on the cusp of sex and love and all that jazz... we all feel like freaks; we all feel exceptional in the face of so much complexity.
Lucia Puenzo's story is a tightly told tale, a variation on a Rohmer theme, with a significant twist. Like Rohmer's adolescent holiday movies, its success depends on the performance of the two leads, Ines Efron and Martin Piroyansky. Efron has an emaciated, baffled teenage anger. Not sure if she's a boy or a girl, the reality of her condition is heightened by Alvaro's appearance in her life. In XXY there's both the love story and the hermaphrodite story working concurrently, and Efron's performance has all the angst of an adolescent discovering both love and sex for the first time, coupled with her attempts to come to terms with the cards nature has dealt her. Piroyansky's nerdish performance matches his partner's. He's closed in, uncertain, thinks he looks like a fool but doesn't want to be one. A firelit scene with his vain father is both funny and touching, with the director resisting any temptation towards sentimentality.
This is one of the strongest features of Puenzo's unfussy direction. The sex scene which lies at the epicentre of the piece is discreetly shocking. It starts with the music of a radio playing, creating what seems like an appropriate atmosphere. But as it gets going, Alex switches the music off. There's no soundtrack for what happens next. First love is rarely like they show it in the movies, and XXY ensures that it won't add to the misguided mystique.
The subject matter of the film, as the title indicates, is freakish, in so far as (as the old fisherman notes, and the young lads also know) a hermaphrodite is a rare exception to the natural order of things. Puenzo's direction assiduously works against the freakishness of her material, grounding Alex's exceptionality in the everyday. Furthermore, it highlights the fact that, at the age when we are on the cusp of sex and love and all that jazz... we all feel like freaks; we all feel exceptional in the face of so much complexity.
Friday, 9 May 2008
the beautyful ones are not yet born [w. ayi kwei armah]
There's a lot of shit in Armah's visceral novel, set in Accra. Shit in the literal sense. The issues of shit-stained shared lavatories. The smell of shit on the air. The stench of sweat and fear and hunger. This isn't an easy place to live. The never-ending contaminating heat seeps through the pages as the writer's unnamed hero goes about the business of trying to live in a society where there appears to be little reason to continue.
There is more than a hint of La Nausée in the book, the first half of which examines the minutiae of the hero's life as he goes to work, refuses to take bribes, is patronised by his wife, Oyo, for his attitude and struggles to continue when even the most basic of human functions has become an odious chore. The man's virtue is the product not of a saintly disposition but of a cussed determination not to follow the crowd, to attempt to remain an individual when everyone else is playing the game. His existentialist disposition sustains him, even when the corrupt government minister, Koomson, pays a condescending visit with his wife to the man's home, so that Oyo and her mother can buy into a loss-making scheme to own a fishing boat.
Armah peppers his book with memories of more optimistic times, when the overthrow of colonialism seemed like an opportunity to create a new society. The most damning critique of the corrupt oligarchy that take power in the name of the people is that they end up behaving like white people - they even end up speaking like white people, mouthing African names as though they were essentially inferior. The hero's memories of white rule are instructive: the novel makes it clear that the only relationship any ordinary Ghanaian would have had with the colonial rulers was one of fear and exploitation. But the book is just as scathing about the Nkrumah government, so riddled with corruption that it seems to be part of the stench that attacks the hero's nerves.
The second part of the book is set in the 48 hours or so which followed the 1966 coup that ended the Nkrumah regime. The hero's nemesis, Koomson, comes to him begging for help. In a memorable scene, the novel describes the fetid smell of fear clinging to Koomson's skin. The protagonist is almost suffocated by it, trying to think of any excuse to get himself out of the fallen politician's presence so he can breathe clean air again.
This dense, sensory examination of a national malaise makes, initially, for something of a daunting read (in much the same way as Sartre's novel takes a while to get into.) However, as the novel unfolds, the reader beings to find his or her way through the hothouse streets in the company of the stubborn man whose story is being told. Published in 1968, its individualistic message seems in keeping with a year which saw a questioning of the state and its accoutrements being articulated from Paris to Mexico City.
From media accounts of African politics in the decades since the book was written, it would appear that the man's struggle must have been repeated by countless other men and women. Somehow, for no good reason, people stubbornly go on doing what they do, fighting against a seemingly inexhaustible tide of shit. The book is careful not to present the man as heroic: he is a stubborn stoic who believes that resistance is not futile, neither will it normally be written about in the pages of history books. Resistance is just what you do, in order to prove to yourself that there's a reason to go on living.
There is more than a hint of La Nausée in the book, the first half of which examines the minutiae of the hero's life as he goes to work, refuses to take bribes, is patronised by his wife, Oyo, for his attitude and struggles to continue when even the most basic of human functions has become an odious chore. The man's virtue is the product not of a saintly disposition but of a cussed determination not to follow the crowd, to attempt to remain an individual when everyone else is playing the game. His existentialist disposition sustains him, even when the corrupt government minister, Koomson, pays a condescending visit with his wife to the man's home, so that Oyo and her mother can buy into a loss-making scheme to own a fishing boat.
Armah peppers his book with memories of more optimistic times, when the overthrow of colonialism seemed like an opportunity to create a new society. The most damning critique of the corrupt oligarchy that take power in the name of the people is that they end up behaving like white people - they even end up speaking like white people, mouthing African names as though they were essentially inferior. The hero's memories of white rule are instructive: the novel makes it clear that the only relationship any ordinary Ghanaian would have had with the colonial rulers was one of fear and exploitation. But the book is just as scathing about the Nkrumah government, so riddled with corruption that it seems to be part of the stench that attacks the hero's nerves.
The second part of the book is set in the 48 hours or so which followed the 1966 coup that ended the Nkrumah regime. The hero's nemesis, Koomson, comes to him begging for help. In a memorable scene, the novel describes the fetid smell of fear clinging to Koomson's skin. The protagonist is almost suffocated by it, trying to think of any excuse to get himself out of the fallen politician's presence so he can breathe clean air again.
This dense, sensory examination of a national malaise makes, initially, for something of a daunting read (in much the same way as Sartre's novel takes a while to get into.) However, as the novel unfolds, the reader beings to find his or her way through the hothouse streets in the company of the stubborn man whose story is being told. Published in 1968, its individualistic message seems in keeping with a year which saw a questioning of the state and its accoutrements being articulated from Paris to Mexico City.
From media accounts of African politics in the decades since the book was written, it would appear that the man's struggle must have been repeated by countless other men and women. Somehow, for no good reason, people stubbornly go on doing what they do, fighting against a seemingly inexhaustible tide of shit. The book is careful not to present the man as heroic: he is a stubborn stoic who believes that resistance is not futile, neither will it normally be written about in the pages of history books. Resistance is just what you do, in order to prove to yourself that there's a reason to go on living.
Saturday, 3 May 2008
in bruges (w&d martin mcdonagh)
Two hitmen who don't seem like hitmen, trapped together in a hotel room. The implicit allusion to The Dumb Waiter is made explicit by their surnames or pseudonyms: Cranham and Blakey, surnames of the actors who played Pinter's hapless assassins in a TV version of his play.
The Dumb Waiter isn't the only reference point for the literate McDonagh. The other is, of course, Godot. Bruges, the hitmen's hideaway, is in fact a purgatory, a waiting room between life and death. Ray and Ken stare at a painting by Bosch, openly discussing the likelihood of heaven, hell or the other place. In keeping with Pinter's play, these apparent hitmen don't seem come across as violent killers. Ray is raddled with doubt following the accidental killing of a boy, and Ken is coming to the end of his inglorious career.
They may not be regular hitmen, but they are, to the bone, Irishmen. McDonagh made a successful career out of presenting the lugubrious downhome wit of the Irish on the London stage (joining the vast list of Irish dramatists who have been adopted by the British). The film takes his mordant dialogue out of its Irish setting, locating it in the peculiar gothic beauty of Bruges (yet another reference is to Don't Look Now, also a fatalistic drama set in a city of canals). Liberated from its normal context, the humour is an extravagant success, not least in the scenes where the Irishmen come into contact with the various Russians, Canadians and Americans (not to mention the occasional Belgian) who people the city. McDonagh is a writer of wit and panache, and on top of this, he also directs his lead actors with a superb level of understatement, never forcing the joke, letting it tell itself. This is an art honed in the pubs, kitchens, street corners of his homeland. In a sense McDonagh is just a student of an oral tradition, but when he pulls it off, as he does so emphatically in the first hour of the movie, something fresh, funny and alive occurs. Within the straightjacketed world of genre and budgets, it's rare for a writer to be given enough rope to potentially hang himself, something McDonagh seems to have no fear of doing, to wonderful effect.
The serious stuff is perhaps more problematic. In a sense, In Bruges feels like an exercise in tension between plot and character. I would have quite happily watched Gleeson and Farrell wandering around Bruges having their misadventures, without any of the neat plotting that brings Fiennes's Harry to the city and their collective downfall. Whether Gleeson really needs to fly like a fallen angel through the Belgian night, or Farrell demands to be hunted by a psychotic is perhaps questionable, and the closing pursuit seemed like the one moment when the film retreated into banal genre, the soundtrack suddenly intruding and the denouement feeling a little bit too neat.
In Bruges never acquires the menace with which Pinter imbued The Dumb Waiter, (or Don't Look Now) and when it pushes itself towards achieving it, it comes up short. But that doesn't mean to say that McDonagh hasn't conjured something magical out of the fairy tale city, making a remarkably successful transition from stage to screen in a way that few of his contemporaries have managed. The likes of Macpherson, Penhall, Nielson, even Mendes must have watched the film through clenched teeth. Once again an idea of overwhelming simplicity works a treat. In Bruges is an indefatigably entertaining film which also gets away with a meditation on the existence of purgatory. The fact that the director nicks from the likes of Pinter, Beckett and Roeg only leads one to think: more power to his elbow. The pity of it is that more people will not be stealing from them, the old masters, on a more regular basis.
The Dumb Waiter isn't the only reference point for the literate McDonagh. The other is, of course, Godot. Bruges, the hitmen's hideaway, is in fact a purgatory, a waiting room between life and death. Ray and Ken stare at a painting by Bosch, openly discussing the likelihood of heaven, hell or the other place. In keeping with Pinter's play, these apparent hitmen don't seem come across as violent killers. Ray is raddled with doubt following the accidental killing of a boy, and Ken is coming to the end of his inglorious career.
They may not be regular hitmen, but they are, to the bone, Irishmen. McDonagh made a successful career out of presenting the lugubrious downhome wit of the Irish on the London stage (joining the vast list of Irish dramatists who have been adopted by the British). The film takes his mordant dialogue out of its Irish setting, locating it in the peculiar gothic beauty of Bruges (yet another reference is to Don't Look Now, also a fatalistic drama set in a city of canals). Liberated from its normal context, the humour is an extravagant success, not least in the scenes where the Irishmen come into contact with the various Russians, Canadians and Americans (not to mention the occasional Belgian) who people the city. McDonagh is a writer of wit and panache, and on top of this, he also directs his lead actors with a superb level of understatement, never forcing the joke, letting it tell itself. This is an art honed in the pubs, kitchens, street corners of his homeland. In a sense McDonagh is just a student of an oral tradition, but when he pulls it off, as he does so emphatically in the first hour of the movie, something fresh, funny and alive occurs. Within the straightjacketed world of genre and budgets, it's rare for a writer to be given enough rope to potentially hang himself, something McDonagh seems to have no fear of doing, to wonderful effect.
The serious stuff is perhaps more problematic. In a sense, In Bruges feels like an exercise in tension between plot and character. I would have quite happily watched Gleeson and Farrell wandering around Bruges having their misadventures, without any of the neat plotting that brings Fiennes's Harry to the city and their collective downfall. Whether Gleeson really needs to fly like a fallen angel through the Belgian night, or Farrell demands to be hunted by a psychotic is perhaps questionable, and the closing pursuit seemed like the one moment when the film retreated into banal genre, the soundtrack suddenly intruding and the denouement feeling a little bit too neat.
In Bruges never acquires the menace with which Pinter imbued The Dumb Waiter, (or Don't Look Now) and when it pushes itself towards achieving it, it comes up short. But that doesn't mean to say that McDonagh hasn't conjured something magical out of the fairy tale city, making a remarkably successful transition from stage to screen in a way that few of his contemporaries have managed. The likes of Macpherson, Penhall, Nielson, even Mendes must have watched the film through clenched teeth. Once again an idea of overwhelming simplicity works a treat. In Bruges is an indefatigably entertaining film which also gets away with a meditation on the existence of purgatory. The fact that the director nicks from the likes of Pinter, Beckett and Roeg only leads one to think: more power to his elbow. The pity of it is that more people will not be stealing from them, the old masters, on a more regular basis.
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