linha de passe (d. walter salles & daniela thomas; w. thomas & george moura)

What no flip flops? Salles' latest, co-directed film stakes out its intentions to buck the Brazil cliches by setting itself firstly in Sao Paulo, and secondly, in the Winter. The film is composed of four chapters, straightforwardly named after the months June to September, when, in the lower latitudes of Brazil, it gets cold. The film itself appears to have been graded with a muted wash, permeated with whites and greys, deliberately creating an antidote to notions of Brazil as a colour-filled, sun splashed playground. The dourness extends to the casting: the mother of the four boys whose story the film tells, Cleuza, played with fag-smoking chutzpah by Sandra Corveloni, has a hard, masculine face and wears plain clothes. The only real colour in the piece appears to be the bright orange football boots that are given to her eldest son by her employer's kid in exchange for him appearing as a ringer in the rich boys' team.

The films of Salles' I've seen, including Central Station and The Motorcycle Diaries, tend to flavour their portrayals of poverty with a dash of sentimentalism. Personally, I could have lived without Ernesto making his heroic swim across the river at the end of Motorcycle Diaries, and the outrageous beauty of that film's cinematography sometimes seemed to be at odds with the issues it claimed to be addressing. In the end, Salles' Guevara seemed more than suitable for Western consumption, too close to the image that sells everything from bars to T-shirts for comfort. There was an anodyne purity in the portrayal, a far cry from the asthmatic terrorist he was perceived as when alive.

With Linha de Passe it feels as though Salles is doing everything he can to rein his sentimentalism in, (perhaps aided by the input of Thomas?). In a simple but effective piece of storytelling, the narrative follows the fortunes of Cleuza's four sons over the Winter. Without laying on the drama, it tries to show how people living in Sao Paulo's sprawling favelas survive. When Dario goes to register for his football trial and says where he's from, he's asked where that is, to which he replies 'Sao Paulo'. It as though the film is seeking to chart the invisible towns that lurk within the megalopolis. Of the four stories, one ends optimistically, two in crime, and the last with the youngest son driving into an undetermined future. If the narrative is somewhat schematic, with the brothers' fates never overlapping, the film succeeds in immersing itself so thoroughly in their respective stories that it's never in danger of being predictable. The only certainty in the brothers' lives is that, at the end of the night, they will find their way back to the home their mother singlehandly maintains.

Sao Paulo is famous for not being beautiful. Salles and Thomas extract every ounce of this lack of beauty. When Dinho goes to the river to participate in the baptism, it feels like its the first time we've seen a tree in the whole film. The series of random bus fires which fascinate Reginaldo, the youngest brother, contribute to the sense of a perilous man-made environment which the brothers have been born to inhabit. Linha de Passe succeeds in illustrating how people survive in this world, and how they break in it too. It's a doggedly anti-glamorous piece of film-making, and all the more effective for it.

unrelated (w&d joanna hogg)

Whilst a glowing review from The Guardian might have been expected for Hogg's lucid tale of a middle aged woman attempting to re-discover herself on a Tuscan family (not her own) holiday, it was slightly more surprising to flick through a copy of The Sun on the tube to Finchley and see that paper give it five thumbs-up as well. Less of a surprise was seeing Alan Rickman, doyen of UK crossover, in the loos at the Apollo afterwards, his Habitat shopping (a couple of tasteful pillows for those who might be interested) left outside. All these little signs suggest a film that has astutely located a previously unoccupied niche within the British cinematic culture.

Although set in Italy, Hogg's film is a succinct portrayal of Blair/Cameroon Britishness. The Italians in the cast, credited as playing themselves, drift around the edge of the picture, appearing primarily to lay tables or make breakfast or lend their cars to the holidaying Brits. The tourists' involvement with the local environment is marginal: they attend the Palio in Siena, but largely see it as an excuse to get wasted; they visit a church where Anna develops her flirtation with Oakley; and finally the two families and Anna walk to the home of a neighbour, where the English husband of an Italian woman explains how the sofa he's sitting on used to belong to Mussolini, and was presumably used by the dictator for his serial shagging. A literal encapsulation of the the film's implication that the passions which the Latin climate causes to bubble in the British breast lie just beneath the surface.

Aside from Oakley's attraction to the daughter of the Italian neighbour, something which is never developed, these English lead a solipsistic existence, entirely wrapped up in their own drama. Which suits the lost Anna, getting away from her husband, Alex, frustrated with her childless marriage. Her crush on Oakley seems as much maternal as sexual; when she breaks down and tells Vee, her friend, about her spectral pregnancy, she observes that Vee will always be at the centre of her world, which is her family, whereas she, Anna, will always be on the margin of other people's worlds. Unrelated's examination of Anna's menopausal crisis is effective; her aimlessness gradually starts to make sense, as does her subsequent recovery, as she goes through the lowest ebb and emerges, more alive, on the other side.

This portrayal is aided by the care shown in the film's composition and its unhurried takes. The camera frequently rests on Anna's face as the world bustles around her. In contrast to the way she feels about herself, she is at the very heart of the drama, her ever-changing thoughts traced with precision. Hogg is never afraid to let the camera rest on a scene to extract every ounce of significance from her compositions. In the first hour of the film, this contributes to a brooding tension, as Anna puts herself at risk by stepping out and entering the teenage world; a tension which dissipates as the film draws to a close, with the piece slipping towards a warmer, less dramatic denouement.

In a sense, there seem to be two films lurking within Unrelated: the story of Anna's reconciliation to her fate; and the story of what happens to the transgressor, the individual who finds themselves driven by circumstances to step outside the security of their social nexus. The former narrative wins through, although it is in the development of the foregone latter that Hogg perhaps reveals how powerful a film maker she might become. To my eyes, it felt as though, the impressive shouting scene notwithstanding, the characters in Unrelated were let off the hook, though this of course is in part a reflection of my own reaction to the well-observed social milieu the film captures so effectively. However, in its telling of Anna's narrative, (assisted by a beautiful performance from Kathryn Worth), Hogg demonstrates an eye for nuance and subtlety, both cinematic and psychological, rarely witnessed in a British film.

kensington gardens [w. rodrigo fresán]

Sometimes at this point, the critic stares at his screen knowing there's a whole torrent of words waiting to reveal themselves, but he or she doesn't know how to access them. Every review is a little ballet of its own, a dance between the creator(s) of the piece reviewed and the reviewer. It's often when the piece is most affecting that the reviewer most wants to remain as a mere consumer, least wants to get on stage themselves. He or she needs kicking, they can't find the motivation, they're like a sulky child going, do I have to?

Children is as good a link as any. Fresán, an Argentinian, (this will be significant for reasons you would least expect) has written a book, called Kensington Gardens, which is about two childrens' writers. One is J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, inhabitant of West London, a late Victorian and a real person. The other is Peter Hook, creator of Jim Yang, a boy who possesses a chronocycle which allows him to move backwards and forwards through time. Peter Hook is also a resident of West London, a child of the sixties, but Peter Hook is a fictional character. Both authors make a fortune by inventing stories about a boy who will never grow old. Both lost a brother in their youth, and both feel that they were most at home in childhood, and spend their adulthood trying to return to that state through the act of writing.

I am conscious of the fact I am only scratching the surface. I may be on stage but I'm not exactly singing my heart out. Or whatever you do in a ballet. That's because I want to say.... and I'm not too sure how to get there.

Kensington Gardens is a book about childhood. It's also a book about writing. It's also a book about London. It's a book about fact and fiction. It's such a surprising book that in many ways it feels like the best way to describe its properties is just to list them. It tells the story of Barrie's life, in rapidfire, detailed, urgent prose, narrated by the book's other author, Peter Hook. Of course, one of the ways to make a book compelling is to find a compelling story to tell, and in Barrie's curious life, Fresán finds just that. At times the novel seems like a biography, a work of non-fiction, as it takes the reader from point to point in Barrie's career, and the way his doomed attempt to escape adulthood impacted on the lives of the five brothers he used as inspiration for his most famous creation. However, Fresán recognises that there are things that only fiction can reveal. He hunts down Barrie's touching yet ludicrous project, pursuing it to its bitter end, getting under the skin of a man who never adjusted to being a man. Though I should note that I only know Fresán's Barrie - and I'm sure Fresán would caution me not to believe everything he writes. The point, consolidated by the secondary fictional narrative of Peter Hook and Jim Yang is that Fresán isn't really writing about Barrie. He's writing about what it means to be a child; to cease to be a child; to grow older; to see our childhood dreams fade; to live with the meaning of that; unto the end.

The secondary story reaffirms this. Peter Hook (a pseudonym) is the son of a more-or-less forgotten sixties English rock star and his cut-glass wife, who died in a plane crash shortly after the death of their younger son, Baco. They are participants in that nostalgically venerated time, the swinging sixties, associates of Dylan and the Beatles and Julie Christie and Robert Fraser and everyone else you could care to mention who contributed to making London the kind of Neverland it briefly was. Fresán writes, in his notes, that he is a child of the sixties. In writing about that time, he's writing about the dreams that seeped across the Atlantic, found some underground stream to propagate themselves, conjuring a world which was always both real and fictional at the same time.

This is the stuff of Fresán's childhood dreams, or at least a part of them. In writing the story of Peter Hook and his bohemian parents, Fresán gives life to those dreams, just as Barrie, an extremist childhoodian, invented Peter Pan in order to give life to childhood dreams which otherwise, of biological neccessity, would wither on the vine.

Kensington Gardens is one of those books that takes a while to get into, but when you do it seizes you, refusing to let you put it down. In part this is down to the simple effectiveness of Fresán's storytelling, much of it in the present tense. In part it's because he conjures Barrie's world so effectively; and indeed London as a whole. It's a sweeping, convincing depiction of a city and its society. Remarkably, in the postscript notes, Fresán reveals that he's only once been to London. When he stayed for a few days in a cheap hotel on the edge of town. He knows London best as an airport (the airport where Hook is snatched as a child) he passes through. His meticulous depiction of my city is, in fact, a description of an imaginary city; the whole of London becomes his Neverland, and of course, it is all the more convincing as a result. We don't read books to see the world we can see with our own eyes, we read them to see what it looks like through someone else's imagination.

Fresán's notes at the end of the book mention his friend Alan Pauls, as well as Roberto Bolano, "with us forever". Kensington Gardens is not his first novel, but is the first to be translated (with supreme fluency by Natasha Wimmer) into English. It feels odd that he writes with such brilliance about the past, describing for example the way that Barrie (and Hook) always sat facing backwards in trains, as their fascination was in what lay behind them, not ahead. Reading Fresán, as well as his noted companions, I feel a little as though I'm reading the future. Or rather, to be more precise, I'm reading the books that shall be read in the future, that the future is waiting to catch up with. Perhaps it will happen sooner that I anticipate. There's a quotation on the back of Kensington Gardens written by Jonathan Lethem (who I've never read) praising the book and saying at last 'we pathetic English-only readers' can get a taste of Fresán's genius. I am glad it's him saying that, and not me. It feels odd that London, and Britishness (Barrie was after all a Scot) should be captured so much more vividly by an Argentinian than I've seen it captured by most of our own writers, an Argentine who's barely visited these shores. And then again, of course, it isn't odd, because what's required to capture these things (if capture is the right word) is not local knowledge, but a sense of vision, which is also known as imagination. A commodity which Fresán, Pauls, Bolano and co possess in frightening abundance.

There, I'll step back. The dance is over and I've finished my singing for now. Until the next time. I've succeeded in not mentioning Harry Potter (which I haven't read). I've also not explained, Patricia, why this book is also about you, and then, and all the rest. The only thing I'm left wondering is when we here shall start to assemble our childhood dreams, or at least a part of them, from over there. (Rather than over there.)

le beau serge (chabrol) & les mistons (truffaut)

The NFT notes inform that Chabrol mostly financed the making of his first film himself, and that it did not get an immediate release. They don't say whether he felt this was a disaster or not, but note that he immediately got on with the making the next.

Chabrol's film showed at Cannes with Trauffaut's 20 minute short Les Mistons two years after they were both made. You can see why distributors and the like would have been wary. Le Beau Serge is psychologically hard hitting. The eponymous anti-hero is an alcoholic waster, treated with an even-handed sympathy. The narrative describes what happens when his childhood friend, Francois, returns to the village they grew up in. Francois is a well-dressed young man, who's been to university, whereas Serge is a scruffy drunk who never got close to realising his dream of becoming an architect. Francois' ostensible reason for returning to the village is to recuperate following a TB attack, but it becomes increasingly clear that he wants to save his old friend, something Serge, of course, resents.

In a sense, this is the kind of narrative that might have been groundbreaking at the time, but now has become commonplace, the stuff of TV mini-series set in rural backwaters. (In the UK McGovern's The Lakes comes to mind.) But it's not hard to grasp how, at the time, the superficially unsympathetic characterisation and harsh psychological realism would have seemed like a hard sell to distributors. Furthermore, there's no gloss on Chabrol's shire horse. In grimy black and white he captures the mud and rain and dourness of the rural environment. In the final sequence, as snow falls, he succeeds in convincing that this isn't pretty - it's cold and threatening. He pulls this off in part through the minimal, powerful lighting. The outdoor scenes where Francois goes searching for Serge are lit by nothing more than a flashlight, throwing stark, disorientating images onto the screen; conveying the genuine chaos of the night.

The comparison with Truffaut's twenty minute short is intriguing. Les Mistons is all bright Summer memories of youth, as a pack of brats pursue the beautiful Bernadette, who's awakened their adolescent curiosity and fear. This is a gentle, elegiac film, with a clear crowd-pleasing premise. On the surface it would be seem to be the complete opposite to Chabrol's harsh examination of rural life. What knits them together is something which could only be described as 'style'. Which is to say, the straightforward camerawork, the lack of any great emphasis on design, and the use of natural lighting as far as possible. Both films have a freshness to their approach, the sense of cobwebs being brushed away as a result of a wilful lack of artifice.

Cinema is always exploring the duality that exists between its desire to explore technological frontiers, and a corresponding desire to strip the technology back and let the stories speak for themselves. Hollywood, a cultural-technological adjunct of the world's most powerful economy, makes 'em bigger and brasher than anyone else, because technology has always driven cinematic expression. However, whenever a group of directors come together and step back from technology's tyranny, like the Neo-Realists or the Danish Dogmatics or the Nouvelle Vague, the audience feels as though it's learning to see what's in front of its eyes all over again. Like 19th century audiences who stared at the very first screenings of people walking through city streets, or horses running, we're reminded of the most simple cinematic miracle of all: the ability to capture life, once, and play it back again forever.

man on wire (d. james marsh)

This is another film that I hadn't really wanted to see. But Tuesday afternoons at the Coronet cost a princely £3.50, so I made the effort and crossed the tracks. So many people had recommended the film that I was wary of it, fearing my perverse streak would mean I therefore wouldn't like it.

It's good to be proved wrong. Marsh's film is a minor masterpiece. It's a strangely moving documentary, based on a quite remarkable story. Not for the first time this year I sat in the Coronet and wiped the odd tear out of my eye.

The film is an account of Phillipe Petit's quixotic mission to walk on a tightrope between the twin towers of the World Trade Centre. Straightaway, this gives it a poignancy, and the detailed account of how Petit and his team planned and executed the stunt has strange echoes of both terrorist attacks on the building, as though it was made to be the object of subversive attack. Petit's relationship with the building is almost mystical - from the way he describes it, it was the building itself which prompted him to take up his eccentric vocation. In a way his tightrope walking stunts are reminiscent of the Situationists, or even the work of an artist like Christo. Because, what is clear from the account of the three missions he accomplished, these events were works of art, and Petit was an artist, who used the wire as his canvas. (There's remarkable footage of the NY cop who apprehended Petit, saying that he was 'a tightrope dancer, you couldn't call him a walker'.)

The absurd uselessness of Petit's stunts, and the dedication with which his team helped him to accomplish them, feels like an exploration of man's potential. The image of a man, walking a tightrope in the clouds, is angelic, reminiscent of Hamlet's lines about form and infinite faculty. Another contrasting image, from a similar time, would be Armstrong walking on the moon, and Petit's achievement seems no less remarkable than NASA's. However, unlike NASA, the Frenchman had the back-up of a comical bunch of amateurs to facilitate his mission, something that makes it all the more poignant: it is possible to achieve your dreams, with next to nothing, if you are only willing to believe.

Marsh's film knits the narrative together beautifully. The interviews with Petit and his former companions, guardians of the secret of their achievement, help to keep the narrative flowing, and ground the astral story in its human context. When Petit's friend and the project manager, Albert, breaks down on camera, it's a moment which reveals the immensity of what they achieved, as well as the tragedy of this then placing everything that will follow in its shadow.

Marsh is blessed by some remarkable archive footage of Petit, his girlfriend Annie, and his accomplices, suggesting that Petit knew full well he was readying himself for some kind of immortality. Yet it's fascinating to see that when the walk between the towers takes place, there's no video of it, only stills of a man in his flared black trousers, carrying the white balancing stick, framed against the clouds. It feels better this way. Film could never have done justice to the wonder of the moment; for this was an event that is, and of course now always shall be, unreproducible.

times and winds (d. reha erdem)

Mr Blue recommended we go and see this of a Friday night. At first he said it was Russian, which threw me (I have been hoping to catch The Banishment, which it looks like I've missed, in part because I was in Russia the week it came out.) In fact Times and Winds is a Turkish film, and its title, Bes Vakit, sounds rather more alluring in the original. Mr Blue observed that we've done well with Turkish cinema this year, so, despite the fact I find myself in a soporific late Summer torpor, I geared up for a couple of hours of what most reviews have described as a beautiful but very slow moving film.

Times and Winds is beautiful, and it doesn't hurry along at a great pace. Which is exactly as it should be. Although, inevitably, it takes a while to get into its rhythm, in the end the film is compelling. It tells the story of two boys, and a girl and another boy, who live in a small Turkish village with views of a sea which we never visit, and I would have been reasonably happy to remain in their world, the world of the film, all night.

It always seems to me that if the director makes a film which uses kids well, he or she is onto a winner. From Truffaut to Lynn Ramsey to Rob Reiner to Spielberg to... The list can go on and on. Erdem can add himself to this list, perhaps at the top of it, because his film pulls off something remarkable. Which is that he returns the viewer to child-time, and child-significance. How much do you remember being eleven, twelve or thirteen? Probably a hell of a lot, if you put your mind to it, or if your mind is lead that way. In Erdem's film, time seems to float. The seasons change but we never really know how much time has passed between incidents. It's as though time is not a sequential project, as it becomes with adulthood, but a deep pool, changing all the time and also threatening never to change at all. 'Child-significance', to coin a phrase, is that strange period before responsibility is foisted upon us, a time when even the smallest of moments can have a terrible power. It's easy to forget the restlessness and anxiety of childhood, the extremism of the world's beauty and cruelty at that age. Erdem, in his portrayal of Yakup, Yildiz and Omer, recreates that way of thinking which we adults have now lost, and will never return to.

Erdem's film captures all this with a lilting wistfulness. The film is punctuated by moments where the children it features are framed in artificial poses, caught up in nature or a decayed house, looking as though they could be dead. These moments have nothing to do with the narrative; perhaps they are an indication of the proximity and fear of death, or perhaps they are a small paean to the childhood that the characters will soon be losing. There is one moment, where the young girl, Yildiz, faints after thinking she might have inadvertently injured or killed her baby sibling, which echoes these stills, and all the vulnerability of childhood rises up to confront us. But for every moment of fear or anger, there follows a scene of comedy, reflecting the extremes of childhood, where life feels either catastrophic or a delirious blessing.

The director was, as it happens, present at the Renoir to give a Q&A after the screening. He revealed that the film had been shot on HD, and that part of its remarkable beauty was down to the way in which the footage was manipulated in post-production. He struggled gamely with his English, but his quiet-spoken meandering seemed in sharp contrast to the clear-sightedness of his film. Asked how long Times and Winds took to film, he came up with no comprehensible answer. Perhaps this was appropriate, and there should be no way of knowing. Times and Winds feels like it belongs to a netherland, a lost vision of a world where children grow up without the paraphernalia of modern life, and all the richer for it.

omon ra [w. pelevin]

Omon Ra tells the story of a young man, Omon, who finds himself realising his dream of being recruited into the Soviet space program. However, he discovers, during training, that the mission he's been sent on is a suicidal one-way journey to the dark side of the Moon, a fate he is obliged to embrace for the greater good of the Republic. Omon is the callow narrator, who talks us through his trials and tribulations with a flat, underwhelmed tone, one shared by his fellow kamikaze astranouts, with the exception of a brief discussion about the best songs of Pink Floyd.

This is Pelevin's first novel. Whilst the scale and ambition is evident, the piece lacks the assurance of The Sacred Book of the Werewolf, and Pelevin's prose style is, at times, as tentative as his narrator's disposition. Even at a mere 150 pages, it feels as though Omon is crawling towards his demise, rather than hurtling through space.

Nevertheless, the ideas on display are rich, not least the remarkable sequence which describes a hunting trip undertaken by Kissinger when in Russia on a diplomatic mission. Pelevin's imagination seems to be bursting to break through the confines of the Soviet-era setting, something it perhaps achieves in the book's closing sequences, when the narrative accelerates into the unexpected, with a detour via Zabriskie Point.

It would be interesting to know what Pelevin considers to be his influences. The narrative of the book, dealing with an innocent being sent to his probable death in a rocket, resembles that of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Like Pynchon, Pelevin draws on an esoteric frame of reference, his erudition distilled through the perspective of a simple hero trying to do the right thing in difficult times. Whether Pelevin has come across Pynchon or not, he shares the other's sense of ambition, the notion that a novel needs to challenge the boundaries of realism in order to be able to discover a perspective from which any kind of originality can be articulated. Likewise, both have dwelt on the fact that nothing shows up the hubris of our era more than our pitiful ventures into space. Adventures which show how unadaptable man is as a species; and whose grandiose ambition only serves to reveal how parochial the systems which fuel these ambitions are, within a universe we can barely dip our toes in.

elite squad (d. jose padilha, w. andre batista, braulio mantovani)

Elite Squad deals with the way in which the police attempt to tackle the drugs war in Rio's favelas. The film was created out of Padilha's original project, which was to create a documentary about BOPA, the elite Brazilian anti-narcotic squad, which some see as a paramilitary unit. Elite Squad was the most expensive feature ever made in Brazil. It has provoked national debate, commercial success and international acclaim.

Padilha has quite a few axes to grind. He wants his audience to understand who the officers of BOPA are, how they work, and why they might be necessary. He also wants middle class Brazilian drug users to take stock of the part they play in their country's drug war, which is by and large concealed in the no-go favelas. Finally he wants, and succeeds, in making these issues accessible and cinematic.

Elite Squad, in spite of its acknowledged intellectual perspective, is a high octane piece of cinema making. On the one hand, Padilha and his team capture the vivid, restless energy of the favelas; the comical corruption of the Rio police force, and the violent excesses of the drug war. On the other hand, he succeeds in slipping in a sequence where one of his three principle protagonists, the nerdish, black law student, Matias, gives a succinct appraisal of Foucault's position on the mechanisms of power within society.

Padilha's film suggests that you can have it all. It is possible to make intelligent, 'socially conscious', commercial, dramatic cinema. All that's required is the verve and ambition to pull it off. The fact that the film caused such a stir within Brazil would no doubt appeal to Foucault himself. For so long the holy grail of politically minded artists has been the creation of a work of art which might have some influence on society. Illegally downloaded copies of Padilha's film were doing the rounds long before it opened. The director found himself accused of making a fascist film, hero-worshipping BOPA, whilst being sued by BOPA for defamation at the same time.

One of the fascinating aspects of the movie is the way in which it finds the line that exists between documentary and fiction. Padilha realised that there was no way he was going to be allowed to film the things he'd been told occurred in real life. BOPA's habit of torturing suspects and summarily executing others was never going to be captured in a documentary. Neither were the antics of the drugs lords, nor, in all likelihood, the extent to which psychological stress affected BOPA's members. For all the film's violence, the scene where Captain Nascimiento walks into his home and, out of the blue, shouts at his wife that he runs the show, remains one of the most powerful. Wagner Moura, who plays Nascimiento, has a passing resemblance to Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. His narration, which holds the film together as it tells the story of how he came to select one of Matias or his friend Neto to succeed him in his job, giving him a get-out clause to spend more time with his family, also echoes Liotta's in Scorcese's film.

Elite Squad is one of the rare films that succeeds in emulating Scorcese's sinuous, energetic style of film-making. It gives evidence of a director who's brazen enough to believe he can seize hold of the big issues affecting his society, then describe them in a way that's so gripping, people will want to go and see the film. Thereby having to face issues they would usually run a mile from. This is anti-escapism cinema, executed with remarkable, compelling flair.

the year of magical thinking (w. didion, d. hare)

The stage adaptation of The Year of Magical Thinking is a one-woman show, mostly played out against a succession of muted (dare one say Fahriesque?) painted backdrops. It is a faithful adaptation of Didion's recent book about her double bereavement, both her husband and daughter dying within a short space of time.

Vanessa Redgrave plays Didion, bringing to life a languid, intellectually pre-possessed soul, on the point of having her life torn to pieces. The piece is a hundred minutes of Redgrave talking, and it never flags.

There's something unlikely about great stage acting. Whereas screen acting hides the illusion - the audience swallows the actor as character from the word go - stage acting cannot and great stage actors don't try to. Rather, they let the illusion gradually creep up and then smother the audience, like a magician walking on stage and announcing what they're going to do in advance of doing it. The opening moments of Redgrave's performance don't make any attempt to shy away from the obvious questions. Where does Redgrave end and Didion begin? Is that accent believable? Will she be able to pull off 'being an American' for a hundred minutes with nothing but a chair and some lights to sustain her? However, these opening skirmishes are over almost before they've begun, and from then on Redgrave and Didion not only appear to have fused into a single entity, she/ they also hold the audience in the palm of their hands. Having established her mastery, she can play with the audience at will.

This is reflected in a secondary aspect of the performance. Redgrave's masterclass in acting is instructive. She uses all the tricks in the book. There are points when you might almost be inclined to call her performance hammy. Her fierce eye picks out and hones in on audience members, never scared to vault the fourth wall. She drops her head into her hands, shaking, then cackles at her own joke. In screen acting terms, this would be seen as mannered. But on stage, the actress uses these techniques to widen the demonstrative power of her emotional range. So when she needs to howl lines of raw grief, and then surf those lines back to some connective, humorous or insightful note, to reconnect with the audience, the extremities she can access not only seem convincing, they seem absolutely accurate. In life, humans are self-indulgent, mannered, demonstrative, passionate, furious, eye-rolling and all the rest. The trick is to allow art to represent this life without appearing to be milking it for effect, a trick which only the bravest of actors can achieve without resorting to under-playing.

The audience rose to applause Redgrave at the show's curtain call, and for once it felt warranted. This is a now elderly woman tearing her heart and soul out on stage as she wrestles with the cruelty of the gods; but doing so with humour and grace. Of course, this is where the Redgrave/ Didion fusion owes as much to the writer as the actress. Didion's lucid prose stood out from amongst the welter of essayists who tried to depict the chaotic energy of that brief Prague Spring when the USA's counter-culture managed to ask real questions about the direction in which its society was heading. Didion displayed a childlike, exteriorised perspective, married to a fierce and evident intelligence, that allowed her not merely to observe in muted wonder, terror, or awe, but also to convey to an audience how her observations came to be formed.

Forty years later, she brings the same detached, personal eye to the death of both husband and daughter, and the process and working of grief itself. Grief, she constantly reminds her audience, is not something you can ever fully understand, until you are within its possession. This is a letter from that side of the fence. However, as much as its a letter to us, it is, like all great writing, also a letter to its author, a bridge across time. Towards the end of the piece, Redgrave/ Didion notes that there comes a time when you have to let the dead go; when they cease to be a living presence and begin to become a picture on a mantelpiece. The period of grief is both a time of fighting this process, and also a time of coming to terms with an acceptance of this process. In writing about this period of her life, before she's let her dead go, Didion clings to the time when the dead were not dead, when they were alive and safe; with her presence a guarantee of that safety.

Finally, The Year of Magical Thinking reveals, oncemore, that secret of theatre which is so often forgotten by performers, producers and audiences. The word entertainment is bandied around as though it meant something. In its quest to entertain, theatre all to often condescends, squeals, wriggles, jumps, shouts, turns tricks which should be never be seen on a stage. When, in fact, people don't go to the theatre to be entertained. They go there to discover something, to be told something. Entertainment is secondary. A process that was once known as storytelling. Redgrave on stage at the National might as well be Redgrave, or Didion, sitting with you round a fire, illuminated by flame and star, with no more action than her lips moving. Which is plenty to keep us occupied for an hour and a half of our brief lives, to leave us walking away feeling like we have achieved something ourselves, through the understanding which the speaker has communicated to our privileged ear.

the sacred book of the werewolf [w. victor pelevin]

The heroine of this book is called A Hu-Li, a Chinese name for a Russian teenage prostitute who left China for Moscow at some point in the last thousand years. Translated into Russian, her name means, 'What the fuck'. A Hu-Li tells her this herself, as she is the book's narrator, and the text charts her journey, via a love affair with a werewolf, towards enlightenment, when she uses a BMX bike in a remote Moscow park to help propel her into the Nirvanic Rainbow Stream.

Pelevin's text is esoteric. Apart from being a treatise on the attainment of post-material enlightenment, (in the Zen Buddhist sense of that phrase), it also references, among other nodes in the contemporary zeitgeist, Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time, The Matrix, and Wong Kar Wai’s In The Mood for Love. The narrator claims to have slept with Dostoyevsky and been an associate of Tolstoy. Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kant and Bishop Berkeley are all name-checked, and the book also offers a comprehensive interpretation of recent Russian history.

All of which might make The Sacred Book of the Werewolf sound like a worthy, academic read, which couldn’t be further from the truth. (Although the Zen Buddhism gets intense at certain points.) A Hu-Li, clearly some kind of a cover for the book’s maverick author, is witty, irreverent and ultimately kind-hearted. She kept me great company as I travelled through old Russia, never afraid of putting the world in front of my eyes into a context that made sense to someone who’d never been there before.

Pelevin’s agendas range all over the place. He critiques the evolution of the new Russian oligarchy, with its thirst for oil, whilst offering his readers simple readings of Buddhist aphorisms (eg What’s the difference between a dog and a lion watching a stick being thrown – the dog looks at the stick, the lion at the stick’s thrower.) It’s a blend that shouldn’t really work, yet its very unlikeliness allows Pelevin to pull it off, in much the same way that his narrator conjures men into believing they have enacted their wildest fantasies with her, when she’s actually been reading Hawking the whole time. Reading Pelevin is an, at times, dazzling experience. In the face of his and his narrator’s sardonic wit and eclectic intelligence, it might be expected that the book had traded in emotional power for intellectual mind-games. However, there’s a strong (ahuman) emotional narrative at work in A Hu-Li’s story. Attaining Buddhist enlightenment might not sound like a moving endgame for a novel, but by instituting this as the finale of A Hu-Li’s narrative, Pelevin manages to make it so. When you reach the end of the book and see how it connects with the beginning, something almost magical occurs. As if all this wasn’t enough, it also offers the most intriguing account of werewolf sex you’re ever likely to find.