going native (w stephen wright)

It's New Year's Eve. Thoughts turn to friends, family, the diaspora both national, international and temporal. None of which has much to do with Going Native. Save perhaps for the fact it's deeply rooted in the States and was read in India by an Englishman. In this instance.

As a book it befuddled me. This may have been because I was befuddled by the sub-continent. But I'd like to think it's because I assumed it was a novel, reached the second chapter, found no connection with the first, and it then took me about two more to realise that it was in fact a collection of short stories. The fact that you can move from one chapter into another and not realise that is not a novel has something to do with an abrupt switch in styles, as Wright moves from a fairly regulation sub-Updike register into something altogether more hallucinogenic. His versatility would appear to be both a strength and a weakness, as Going Native darts between various tonal frequencies, never allowing the reader to settle, constantly searching for patterns. Perhaps it might be said that he appears on occasion to be trying a little too hard. From Updike to Burroughs via Pynchon and who knows what else proves skill, but doesn't make for an unbefuddling read. Or maybe it was just the sub-continent.

Happy New Year, both to readers and non-readers, those who are real, those who might be ghosts, and those who are ghosts.

the red shoes (powell & pressburger)

Powell and Pressburger. The alliterative combination itself seems to conjure up some kind of lost golden age of British cinema. When their curious, quixotic talents were allowed to flower, producing unconventional gems, against the odds, quintessentially British, both for their charm, and their peculiarity.

It's the end of a decade, and there all sorts of lists drifting around quoting the finest films of the last ten years. As ever, this prompts reflection on what makes for a great film, what are the magic ingredients that enable a filmmaker to achieve something with the medium which lends a distinction to their work which others can only hope to emulate. Of course there are a hundred and one analyses available. However, The Red Shoes, it all its curious glory, brought to mind the idea that for a film to rise above its peers, to shine, it requires a boldness of vision, a kind of majesty, which is quite likely to be at odds with given diktats of genre and form, but which the filmmaker(s)' chutzpah somehow pulls off. These are films which aren't afraid of boredom or loose narrative threads, which are prepared to test their audience's patience, but which reward them in the end.

The Red Shoes is a film about ballet. So perhaps it's not surprising that about two thirds of the way in, the film abandons its narrative to enter into a twenty minute sequence (at a guess) which is pure ballet, a ballet conceived and executed for the screen. Only, of course, it is surprising. Because what rule book allows a narrative to cut itself off for this length of time, suspending character development and narrative action? Yet, without the ballet sequence, the Red Shoes would not have pulled of its strange, fairy tale alchemy. Whilst there are characters, and a narrative to speak of, in fact the filmmakers are consciously creating an exploration of what it means to create art, the tension between life and art, the irresistibility of the will to create. It's Nietzche wrapped up in technicolour. However, it's also dazzling entertainment, a son y lumiere show underpinned with philosophical intrigue.

These are (some of) the reasons why it works. Whilst the acting is engaging, and the quirky humour engaging, and the louche charm of this itinerant ballet world is engaging, ultimately it's the film's near absurdly grandiose ambitions which lift it out of melodrama onto another plane altogether. Ambitions which demand a cinematic verve; it's hard to think of any other film of any other era which has captured the process of dance so compellingly, something which its lofty ambitions absolutely require. Powell and Pressburger do indeed reach for the stars, and in the act of reaching, take their audience with them, offering a perspective which the everyday or the banal or the rulebook cannot permit.

unmade beds (w&d alexis dos santos)

Once upon a time, a long long time ago, on another website entirely, before the doe-eyed days had been born, I found myself writing a somewhat critical piece about Winterbottom's Wonderland, a film I didn't enjoy, in spite of the fact his more recent work proves him to be one of our more creative and intriguing filmmakers. One of the few in fact. Anyhow, at this point in dim distant history, this ancient website was in fact the communal property of a group called The Focus Group, which is another story altogether. It so happened that one of the members of that group was independently in discussions with Revolver, Winterbottom's production company, and when he saw the somewhat critical review, (which probably took about six months, as it was not a website which was consulted with any great regularity), he wasn't best pleased.

For understandable reasons. At the end of the day, the UK film industry is a small business, more of a cottage industry than an international finance industry. The players are known to one another, and the same names will regularly feature in production credits. These are the gatekeepers, who control production capital, green lights, and most of all, our cinematic sensibilities. If you want to get anywhere in cinema in this country, at some point you're going to have to convince them of your worth. And presumably not offend them by criticising their recent output.

Which brings us to Dos Santos' movie, Unmade Beds. The premise of a movie directed by a young Argentine, set in London, for reasons which regular readers of this blog will understand, was highly inviting, not least because I'm currently on the hunt for films appropriate for 'non-native speakers' to use a well-honed TEFL phrase. The film had received a bit of buzz on the grapevine, and I happily handed over my money to the Curzon chain for the second day in a row. The first fifteen minutes seemed promising. Potentially beguiling figures speaking in a subtitled polyglot mooched through a highly recognisable Hoxton context, threatening to have minor crises, drink too much, suffer a little, and laugh. In theory this could be New Wave Latin American cinema meeting Nouvelle Vague meeting New British Waving not Drowning.

Then, before it had even emerged from the first act, a terrible dawning began to shroud the cinema. The film seemed to decelerate. The apparent premise of the title, (the various beds in which the film's hero finds himself waking up), was abruptly jettisoned. Much of the film became dedicated to a narcissistic, post-Linklater love story. The plot atrophied. Hours passed. Beguiling moments were lost in the fog. The pie had been left in the oven for twelve years. This was a film which would never cook, and seemingly, never end.

It did, of course. All things end. Even websites. It ended in a sudden flurry of post-dated plot, the final half hour suddenly knitting everything into place, like the neatest of Richard Curtis scripts. 'I took that photo' the French girl says as she stands outside the club where her flatmates hang out every night, flatmates she seems to have no knowledge of, and perhaps has never met. The photo lures her into a club she was going to anyway, where she meets the man she'd thought she's lost who's singing a song which might have been written... for her! It's too beautiful to be true, and indeed, truthfulness has been abandoned in favour of animal heads and the odd breathy orgy, approximately three hours ago.

The credits rolled. There were the names. There were the script editors. Two of them. It's impossible not to imagine the interminable script meetings Unmade Beds must have been through. Because if there's one thing the British film (cottage) industry prides itself on, it's script development. I have a sneaky feeling that sometime long long ago, when the director first presented his premise, and original script, it might have been the quirky, counter-culture vehicle it seemed to be aspiring towards. However, after a million regurgitations, Unmade Beds has been shorn of its inventiveness and charm.

It might be shooting myself in the foot to make these (subjective) observations. Biting the hand which could theoretically feed were the writer to crampon his way up the food chain. However, the experience of Unmade Beds was just too disheartening. Anyone who's watched a film by Sorin or Trapero, Rebella & Stoll, Linklater or Payne or etc knows it's possible to make a winsome and effective slacker movie. However, if you try and script edit in nuts and bolts, the whole house of cards is likely to collapse. All over again.

the white ribbon (d. haneke)

My mind is a little blunted by the return of insomnia, and perhaps also the crunching, megalithic nature of Haneke's latest offering.

As a result of which I have only one observation of any note about The White Ribbon. First, however, the observations of little note. Which include the fact that, in spite of hints of narrative, the film in fact appears to be another impressively gruelling example of Haneke's slightly obsessive reluctance to favour an audience with anything in the way of what they expect or (so he might argue) have been lead to subliminally desire. As in Funny Games (and perhaps Hidden), the evil kids walk away unpunished, most of them implicitly destined to become successful members of the National Socialist party. As well as its reluctance to bestow any kind of Grecian notions of justice, the film is also a whodunnit whose detective, the engagingly buffoonish teacher, spends a year putting clues together and then fails to act on them. The unnamed school teacher is no Poirot, and in spite of an implicit decency, it seems unlikely that, having survived the first world war, he will put up much resistance to the rise of Hitler. Brecht wrote, unlucky the land in need of heroes, but Haneke appears to offer a bleak counterpoint: cursed is the land lacking in heroes. Firstly it will suffer the persecution of the evil children, then it will run the risk of fascism; finally it will fall prey to the moral vacuum of modern consumerism.

Having noted all of Haneke's usual barbed contrariness and general cassandrism, my one point of real note relates to his aesthetics. With The White Ribbon the director has followed up on his success d'estime with Hidden (and ridden the strange hurdle of his misjudged US remake of Funny Games), with a film that, in spite of its inherent audience antagonism, has been hailed as a masterpiece, and lauded with the Palme D'Or. Part of the film's success is probably attributable to its inordinately beautiful cinematography, composed on a stark black and white print. Haneke has always been a secret stylist, and here he gives this vice free rein. Given this, no matter how stringent he is in his adherence to his narrative principles, there's something about The White Ribbon's production values that gives it the feel of a weighty classic, redolent of a great European literary tradition, something enhanced by the unusually wordy narration. Perhaps this is part of another game within a game, but it's not hard to see how the lofty aesthetics allow critics to drool; and have helped The White Ribbon to have generated a contrarily eulogistic response, which somehow doesn't seem in keeping with Haneke's aspirations. As ever, with cinema, the production values themselves contribute and in some way seem to impose their own set of values, irrespective of the filmmakers' own intentions.

home (d. yann arthus-bertrand)

The Tibetan Environmental Society’s showing of the documentary Home takes place at 5.30 pm in an unheated hall 2000 metres above sea level. The majority of the audience are gringos of one description or another. The film is projected onto a large screen, with an introduction given by the society’s Tibetan head.

You might think that this location, not so far from the roof of the world, would be the ideal place to take in the film’s abstract narrative about the fate of the world and the environmental mess homo sapiens has made of it. The movie is made up of edited sequences, filmed from the air. Volcanoes. Elephants on the charge. Fisherman on an African beach. Vast lorries in a hyper-mine. However, in practice, the venue in no way alters the unfortunate juxtaposition the film presents between the terror of its message and the beauty of its images.

When you’re actually within the exploited, impoverished world which the rich 20% is abusing to both fund its lifestyle and abuse the planet, the lush power of cinematic technology can feel faintly offensive. Your mind can’t help but speculate on the costs of hiring helicopters, exec producers salaries, and expense accounts. And even if everyone involved was working for 500 rupees a day, there’s still something jarring about the way in which its expensively graded images are employed, as though the film’s beauty is somehow necessary for its message to be put across to the Western world.

A somewhat preachy American voice, which I later learn belongs to Glen Close, narrates the film’s loose narrative from Genesis to imminent Apocalypse. Perhaps I’d have felt more comfortable if the accent was Malaysian, (say), or had gone for subtitles. However, ultimately, no matter what it was saying, I wanted it to get off its helicopter plinth, go to ground, and actually speak to people.

Travelling opens your eyes to the harshness from which the Western world is so often inured. Pigs rooting through burnt rubbish on the streets, affirming the conjoined crimes of poverty and environmental degradation. Whilst we know its out there, we don’t want to face up to it. Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s beautiful but banal movie seems symptomatic of this attitude.

Outside in the cold air of McLeod Ganj, itself something of an island within India’s teeming sea, the real fight continues on the millions of frontlines which the West is only aware of through news reports and sanitised, graded images on its TV screens.

johnny mad dog (d. jean-stéphane sauvaire)

It's been nearly a week since I saw Johnny Mad Dog. He's a blurred memory, strolling through a Liberian hinterland, wreaking havoc and waiting for havoc to catch up with him.

There's nothing sympathetic about him, and in a way that's the film's redeeming feature. Johnny Mad Dog occupies similar territory to Sin Nombre. The woes of the underdeveloped world brought to a screen near you. However, unlike Sin Nombre, Sauvaire's film has no cute storyline to alleviate Johnny and his crew's relentless violence. This is senseless violence, which goes on and on, and if the director was seeking to portray something of the life of a Liberian child soldier, this might be the only way of doing it with any kind of authenticity.

Except that this is art, not a documentary. Which can make a bear out of a cloud or a pearl from a clod. In its relentless search to convey a kind of reality, Johnny Mad Dog perhaps tries too hard, stringently resisting the transformative potential of art/ cinema to let its audience get inside the mind of the child who's been brainwashed into becoming a killer. In which sense the movie ultimately feels trapped between two stools, wanting to engage with subject matter the world would rather not know about, yet fearful of seeming to be exploitative in its bid to bring the child soldiers to a wider audience, working as hard as it can to ensure they're never loveable, that the heart strings of pop superstars shall not be tugged.

It's a hard balance to pull off. I don't see it as wrong that Sauvaire should have had a go, but as fireworks pepper the London skyline in a Guy Fawkes frenzy, I'm not sure if Johnny Mad Dog has left me much the wiser as to what it would be like if feral children patrolled the streets playing with the real firecrackers, the ones that aren't just for show.

terra amata (w j.m.g le clezio)

Strange the things you can come across in an airport bookshop. I discovered Le Clezio's book at Stanstead, and read it on the way to Jerez and back. Apart from the fact I'd never seen anything of the mysterious Franco-Anglo Nobel prizewinner in print in the UK (turns out there's quite a few available), I was also seduced by the introductory note, which playfully introduces the book to reader in an offbeat, disarmingly intimate style.

The book recounts the life of a man, Chancelade, from cradle to grave. It does so in a succession of poetic sketches, patched together like a quilt. Some passages seem normal enough, a meeting on a beach, or a funeral described; others are esoteric in the extreme. A meeting in a cafe described entirely in terms of hand signals, or a scrawled child's picture, and the list goes on. Le Clezio likes to tease and torment his readers; in many ways this is whimsical nouvelle vague Frenchiness, Godard at his least political playing strip poker with Michaux, whilst Baudrillard, Lyotard & co discuss whether it's all really happening and even if it is, what it therefore means isn't happening.

So, if you like that kind of thing, you'll relish Terra Amata. For my part, I found myself surfing the book more than ever; although written in the sixties it feels more like a blog than a novel. Some parts engaged, others less so. However, the literary ingenuity was constantly in evidence, and the writer's ability to create passages of poetic power indisputable. At the same time, within a sometimes parochial British culture, I am occasionally mocked for a tendency to read 'intense' or 'heavy' texts, (which are primarily described so because the original language in which they were written was not English). Most of the books I read seem far more approachable than people would ever suspect, but Terra Amata definitely slots into the more esoteric side of the bookshelf.

It was also somewhat disconcerting to discover the following announcement on page 23, written in such a way that it stands out from the text:

JUNE 11, 1966

I AM ALIVE

+++

the event [saer]

The Event opens in gripping fashion. After a virtuoso description of a wild flock of horses, careering across the Pampas, the narrative shifts to mid 19th century Europe, recounting the adventures of Bianco, a Maltese anti-matter wizard. Bianco can not only bend spoons, he can also read minds and see beneath the surface of the stuff the world knows as matter. Bianco, the novel assures us, is no charlatan. So powerful is he that the mysterious but reactionary positivists gang up on him in Paris, arranging an event where they ridicule him, eventually forcing him to flee Europe for the quieter waters of Argentina.

All of which is narrated at a lick, with the text proving to be both metaphysical speculation and gripping yarn. However, the pace changes as Bianco settles in Argentina, as he abandons his experiments, flirts with becoming an entrepeneur, and grows suspicious of his young, pregnant wife.

The narrative becomes increasingly enigmatic, or hermetic, as it traces Bianco's journey, a journey that appears to be leading him towards a loss of his gifts as well as a loss of faith in the world. There's something a little frustrating about the way Saer lets his story drift away, ending on an abrupt note, the author taking care to construct a narrative which is wilfully anti-dramatic. Perhaps Saer, like his leading character, suspected that his novel possessed hints of greatness, but shied away from fully grappling with the consequences of what this greatness might really mean, or even what form it might have taken.

ajami (w&d scandar copti, yaron shani)

Ajami has apparently been nominated for the best foreign film at next year's Oscars. Already. Something of a curse, by and large, as it signals a worthy if uninspiring piece that has done enough to suggest its importance without in any way shaking up Hollywood's great and good.

As it opens, Ajami, a crime drama, has more than a touch of that perennial non-Oscar winner Scorcese about it. It promises to be gritty, high-octane film making, with a swaggering but loveable gangster as its lead. The film's structure then moves in a sideways direction. The narrative is broken up into chapters, which float in time as they describe a drugs deal gone wrong in black humoured fashion.

Ajami is named after a suburb of Jaffa, a predominantly Arabic part of Israel. The film is co-directed by an Arab and a Jewish Israeli, and the narrative shifts between the country's religious communities (a key character is also Christian). Probably more than its adept and subtle aesthetics, this multi-faith approach explains the Oscar nomination. But the way in which the film reveals the complexities of modern Israel, a state more sectarian than anyone realises (with the constant focus on the Palestinian territories) is impressive. A Jewish man engages in what seems like an amiable debate about his neighbour's animals, which keep him awake, and the debate ends in bloodshed. Another man (played by one of the directors) is a Palestinian with a Jewish girlfriend, spending half his life dancing in Tel Aviv nightclubs and the other half hanging out in his Palestinian hood. Language creates a constant faultline, and the problems the country faces come across as, in many ways, even more complex than they are portrayed in the media.

Ajami is a slow burner, and the fractured narrative is sometimes challenging, but in the end its both a film which succeeds in being both politically and cinematically powerful, and perhaps deserves better than to be honoured by the elite of a Hollywood Academy.

gigante (d&w adrian biniez)

So, I was asked as we left the cinema by Mssrs W&P, was that a Montevideo you recognised?

To which the answer is in many ways no; in some ways yes; and as we all know, at the end of the day its irrelevant.

The no is easiest. One of the temptations of filming your hometown is to almost take ownership of it through the choice of what you show and what you don't show. Biniez resists this temptation. This is a neutral Montevideo, which doesn't attempt to capture the city's beauty and doesn't feature the city as a character. Even the two scenes on the Rambla are framed so that the rolling beach within the city is underplayed, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the sly significance the city's beaches are given within the narrative.

The yes is harder. Gigante is in essence a character study. The lumbering Jara, played with flashes of surprising humanity by Horacio Camandule, dominates. He's present in every scene, and the film obeys one of the diktats which states that movies should have a clear protagonist partaking of an understandable journey. In amongst this, there are a few glimpses of la vida cotidiana in Montevideo. Waiting for a bus; walking over cracked pavements; perhaps having too much time on your hands. But by and large, this is what they call a universal story, one that could be taking place almost anywhere.

Which is why any search to glimpse Montevideo through its lens is irrelevant. As well as being part of its artfulness. Gigante comes from the Stoll/ Rebella stable. Their art is to create small films, which glorify the common man or woman. Gigante shares Whisky's understated tone, and does what it does effectively. One is inclined to hanker for bigger themes, addressing wider material, but perhaps, in an evolving film industry, these will have to wait.