river of smoke [amitav ghosh]

River of Smoke is a curious book. At once vast, full of fascinating detail, engaging; but at the same time the storytelling is flawed and the book’s structure means it sags somewhat as it homes in on the finishing line.

In my (perhaps) former job, a script was defined by character, narrative, (dialogue) and ‘world’. The last being the most relevant here and frequently the hardest for a scriptwriter to master. A novelist has more scope to conjure an unknown world, and Ghosh takes full advantage. He appears to know mid c19^th Canton like the back of his hand. His prose leads us through the alleyways, across the Maidan, weaving in and out of the 13 factories. It’s a world as brilliantly realised as Dickens’ London and the depth and breath of the author’s scholarship is never in doubt.

However, his fascination with the intricacies of Canton’s geo-political structure is at the expense of his plot. Ghosh treats his characters with the irreverence of a historian, rather than the reverence of a novelist. Paulette and Penrose, two of the principle characters in the book’s opening section are rudely removed from the plot, left to dawdle about in Hong Kong, offstage. Similarly, Bahram’s son, perhaps the most fascinating character in the book, a true product of Canton’s miscegenation, is introduced and then expunged. There are other figures who flicker into life only to fade out before they are allowed to catch fire. Instead, the author’s focus turns to the historical detail of the lead-up to the opium wars and the actions of the British and US merchants as they strive to resist the Chinese emperor’s will. Whilst Modi’s fate remains of interest, the novel increasingly feels as though it’s marking time before it can knit up its plot, with the day-by-day account of the last days of Canton’s foreign enclave overstated.

Having said which, River of Smoke is still an absorbing read. Ghosh displays an authoritative, over-arching take on the way the modern world has been shaped. Furthermore, he does the European the grand favour of removing their continent from the epicentre, shifting history’s focus further Eastwards, revealing the centuries-old mercantile structures that Europe’s military might took advantage of. Furthermore, River of Smoke contains a vigorous commentary on the nature of the drugs trade. It’s a strong critique of European double standards, one with echoes of today’s world, proving there’s little new under the rising sun.

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[Some of the characters named above, I realise after a cursory glance at Wikipedia, feature in the first part of the trilogy, Sea of Poppies. Which might mean that I am being unjust in my criticism. Nevertheless, it still feels to me as though the book lacks balance as a result of the way the author manipulates his characters.]

elena (w&d andrei zvyagintsev; w. oleg negin)

Andrei Zvyagintsev manages to pull off the remarkable trick of creating in Elena a film which is both slight and magisterial at the same time. The film has the gravity of a 500 page novel, although the narrative itself is little more than a fable.

This tells us something about the way in which cinema works. Zvyagintsev’s attention to detail is meticulous. We seem to know every inch of the apartment Elena shares with her wealthy but dispassionate husband, Vladimir. The polished surfaces are contrasted with the bleakness of the estate where her son lives with his family. It’s the accumulation of detail which lends the film its power. The opening shot shows Vladimir’s flat through the branches of a tree. Peering more closely at the twilight frame, we notice a bird in the bottom left hand corner. The shot is repeated at the end. The metaphor is clear: this is cinema as ornithology. The filmmaker brings the same attributes of patience and a sheer appetite to watch as the bird-watcher, attributes his audience are obliged to share. There are sporadic moments of action, all the more intense for the way in which they suddenly flicker to life from a canvas which is so passive for so much of the time.

Whilst this runs the risk of sounding dull, it is in fact compelling. In the process Zvyagintsev reminds us that more than mere story-telling, cinema is also an exercise in perception. As such he gets away with the slight narrative, a cuckoo-in-the-nest tale which is tied up with all the neatness of a Chekhov short story in the film’s closing moments. One suspects there is an allegorical power to the story which resonates more in Moscow, perhaps, land of the newly minted super-rich, than it does here.

This is Zvyagintsev’s third film. I saw The Return on tv one night, chez Mr P. We had been channel hopping and came across it and found ourselves hooked, against all expectations. This is a director, in the model of his countryman, Sokurov, who knows the weight of the cinematic hammer he wields. His films have substance; the substance of life observed and related with a painstaking yet exhilarating precision. 

mobile home (d francois pirot, w. pirot, marteen loix, jean-benoit ugeux)

This pliant comedy is my second Belgian film in a month. Like Meisjes it is a bittersweet comedy. Two friends, Simon and Julien decide to buy a mobile home and go travelling in order to escape their small town lives. But the mobile home breaks down before they can get away. Trapped, having invested all their savings in the vehicle, they are forced to work in order to raise funds to fix it. But the longer they stay the harder it becomes to leave.

The film is leavened by the acting of the two leads, Arthur Dupont and Guillaume Gouix. The journey they go on in the film is not the intended one. Unable to flee their flaws, they discover things about themselves they hadn’t expected or wanted to. It’s a neat narrative device and the film works well on its own terms. It manages to change gears and unearth some real pathos as Julien realises the importance of his relationship with his father. There’s nothing groundbreaking about Mobile Home, but there’s an assurance to the direction and it does what it says on the tin. 

brideshead revisted (evelyn waugh)

Reading this book is a journey through the wardrobe. A journey back in time. To being a teenager. To belonging to one of the most privileged, renowned schools in the world. A place marked by medieval craftsmen, Christopher Wren, Gibbons, Mallory, Victorian gothic, the first world war, the second, the wars to come. A place steeped in the history and nature of England and being British. A place I turned my back on, rejecting the roots I had been assigned, seeking to retain only the most catholic aspects of an education that offered existentialism, Colin Wilson, drugs, deviance, depression, repression and, for some, the birthright of privilege.

In the midst of the years I spent there, Waugh’s panegyric appeared as a luscious television series. Touched by old and new generations of British acting aristocracy. Geilgud, Olivier, Irons and more. Someone somewhere screened the episodes for us, and no matter how large the distance which might have been supposed to exist between the twenties and the eighties, the television in fact reflected our lives. The fey Sebastian and the louche Anthony Blanche were characters we knew well, fossils that had survived. And along with their feyness we also recognised their romanticism. A doomed hedonism, gilded with a hint of religious transcendence. The curse of entitlement. The mysteries of the elite.

I went away and sought to leave it all behind. Cut my ties and sought to enter into something more akin to the “real” world, as subsequent friends and partners might have put it. And these characters, both the fictional ones and the ones who echoed their fictional forefathers, came to seem egoistical, blinkered, narrow-minded. Crass. Indeed, some of their likes can now be found flitting around the current government, my contemporaries, shallow souls whose lives have been lead within this insulated bubble of privilege.

I left Waugh’s world behind and I never read the book. Indeed, I struggled with British literature per se, especially from the 20^th C. So much of it filtered through the sieve of inured Oxbridge privilege, so far from the pulse of the world. But now, in Montevideo, I felt a yearning, a good Waughian word, to reconnect. Because, I suppose, there’s a danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are aspects of England, Britain, the England of which Winchester, with all its mordant beauty, was a part, which will always have a hold. With the sense or ironic detachment which accompanies knowing the value and the absence-of-value attached to this culture, so apparently ancient, beseeching so much respect.

Waugh’s Ryder, the book’s narrator, ends up becoming a cynic, cursed by his association with Brideshead. He cannot bring himself to love his own family, even his children, The very notion of love is so lost in the Arcadian fields of Sebastian’s youth that he never recovers it. His relationship with Sebastian’s sister is a pale imitation, sacrificed on the altar of this agnostic cynicism. Conventional values and desires pass him by. He yearns for the transcendent, to live in a Poussin pastoral, the world kept at bay by beauty. Realising this is something he cannot have (and those who do have it don’t want it) reduces him, stymies his ambition, leaves him in middle age as nothing more than the husk of his youth.

Ryder is a model for many who have the fortune to attend the Winchesters of the world, which keep on trucking, Oxbridge and its ilk. Real life is a disappointment in the wake of the romanticism of youth. The drive to do things, to make the world in your image rather than pursue a forlorn image of Englishness, is missing. They find a way to make society accommodate them, carving out their anointed niches, but everything is hollow. Life becomes a perpetual hangover. It’s no surprise that Blanche declaims TS Eliot through a megaphone. This is the danger of history: it consumes the muscles from within, a silent malevolent host.

All of which helps to explain why I should turn to this book now. On the one hand, it is a symptom of homesickness, or nostalgia (albeit a nostalgia for a life which has nothing to do with the one I lead when in London). And on the other, if I read this book in the UK, it would quite possibly make me ill. 

meisjes (d. geoffrey enthoven, w. chris craps, jean-claude van rijckeghem)

This is the kind of film which they make in the UK starring Bill Nighy, Judi Dench or Geraldine McEwan. An unabashed, formulaic crowd pleaser. It's set in an obscure Belgian town and tells the story of three elderly women who reform the trio they used to have forty years ago. This is part of Claire’s mission to reconnect with her wayward son, Sid, who used to be something in music but is now going nowhere. Sid’s music is not the kind of music which elderly women are supposed to like. Some tracks are a kind of grinding R&B, others more trip-hoppy, perhaps. But somehow he and the singers manage to find some kind of middle ground. The action builds towards the climactic concert where the film subverts itself neatly. Rather than a triumphant finale, Claire collapses and her incipient alzheimers emerges full-blown. The concert does take place, but it does so in her mind.

This twist saves the film from drifting into a sea of sentimentality. This isn’t a film I would ever have been likely to watch, were it not for the blind tasting of Cinemateca. How it arrived here I have no idea. The plotting is as obvious as a game of tic tac toe, and the act of creating a film based on the three glamorous grannies reeks of a calculated marketing technique. However, within the confines of its ambition, the film works, more or less. It’s effective, efficient and shows that the judicious application of the disciplines of cinema should be enough to create a functional 90 minutes of celluloid.

amor idiota (w&d ventura pons)

Pons’ film opens in madcap, playful style. The camera crash-zooms, pans, runs around with its trousers at half mast. Amor Idiota tells the story of a self-confessed idiot, Pere-Luc who threatens to impale his penis with a fork at his birthday party. His mordant voiceover contrasts with the kamikaze edit style. Mr Pons appears to be throwing the kitchen sink at us and seeing if it will stick.

It does, more or less. Despite the reference to Dostoyevsky’s Idiot at some point, this is more rom-com than deep psychological study. Pere-Luc finds the woman of his dreams and pursues her in a suitably idiotic fashion, stalking her at her house, refusing to take no for an answer, perusing her with a manic intensity. There’s one brilliant scene where the lovers kiss for the first time in a restaurant in front of a group of gawping cyclists. However, whilst the film seems to work best when it captures this comic energy, it also succeeds in inveigling the audience into an understanding of the lunacy of love, the way it is capable of tearing down the boundaries of standard social practice. There’s something akin to the craziness of Shakespeare’s lovers, lost in the forest of Arden or a midsummer night’s dream in the way Pere-Luc whizzes around his hometown on his desperate quest. Or like Rohmer drunk on Cava.

NB: I assumed this film, showing in rep at Cinemateca 18 was recent. In the process of watching it I gradually became aware of the absence of the accoutrements of modern urban life/ love. No mobile phones. No email. No Skype. Only later did I twig that the film was from 2004. Was life really simpler a decade ago? Or is it that just a trick of the light which Pons pulls off. 

hors satan (w&d dumont)

Hors Satan was the final instalment of my month's subscription to Cinemateca. Life here is somewhat roller coaster. Periods of not-a-lot followed by periods of extreme activity. At least the process of going to the cinema got a look-in. Where it's a staple part of life in London, in Montevideo it is less so. People I know tend to go to the theatre more. The theatre is a place to meet and catch up. The fact I'm working in the theatre here probably influences this. But the London habit of catching an early afternoon matinee doesn't exist. Subtract that and social outings and its clear that there's going to be less cinema in your life.

In Jan/ Feb, however, when I was still relatively idle, I took out a monthly subscription to Cinemateca, the four screen film club. The screens themselves are not of the greatest quality, but the range of films is catholic. Hors Satan cropped up in rep, after Marley. It's the second film of Dumont's I've seen. Apparently his latest is less low-fi. This is a film with a seemingly minimal budget, dependent on a high concept and some intense acting. A young man arrives in town, the northern French coast which always reminds me of Sartre's Nausea. (A book whose cult reputation seems to have ebbed in my lifetime.) People lead sparse, spiritually impoverished lives. They take walks on the sand dunes and become possessed. The young man fucks the devil out of them. The women have an exorcism moment during sex and then they recover. Or is he actually the devil? It's not entirely clear.

The premise is schlocky and Catholic (capital C). However, Dumont's narrative style remains as sparse as the film's surroundings. The long takes and snail-like progress of the plot help to counteract the salaciousness. Dumont immerses us in the tedium of this world, where nothing happens and if something does happen it has to be extreme in order to break the surface of this ennui. Rape, murder, possession. There's an element of a conjurer's trick to the film (as is the case with almost all dramas which deal with the theme of Mephistopheles, from Marlowe to Potter). Is this a subtle treatise on good versus evil, or is it merely a pretentious, exploitative dirge? I tended towards the former, but then I've always enjoyed a bit of painstaking Gallic existentialism. 

eversmile new jersey (d. carlos sorin, w. sorin, goldenberg & scheuer)

This is a curio. It features the most acclaimed Hollywood actor of our times. It's made in Patagonia. With everyone speaking English. Directed by someone who would wait 13 years to make his next film, but who would then go on to become one of the most acclaimed Argentine directors.

Watching Eversmile, you can undertand why Sorin hit a career lull in its wake. Perhaps conceived as a Wendersesque road movie, it feels like a collection of parts and ideas that add up to a film that never gets going. The fact that all its Patagonian characters speak dubbed English in strange accents doesn't help. The actors seem unsure of themselves and the script doesn't seem to know where it's going. In some ways its like a palimpsest for what would come later. A road movie built around the unlikely premise of a travelling Irish dentist, you can detect the crossover points where quirky new wave Argentine cinema and US indie cinema would later meet. (It's worth noting that one of the biggest Indie crossover hints of recent years, the schmaltzy Little Miss Sunshine, is a rip-off of Trapero's Familia Rodante.) Day-Lewis is allowed a few grandstand moments as the luckless dentist, including some trademark hollering scenes. On these occasions he seems to be enjoying himself but at other times his performance is as lost as those of the dubbed Argentines. 

It's hard to say whether the film's quality is a reflection of the state of Argentine cinema in the late eighites or the result of the fact that it's a botch-job caused by the fact this as international co-pro. (All the post was done in the UK). Whatever, the story has a happy ending, even if the film doesn't really have any ending at all. Day-Lewis became Day-Lewis. And Sorin set about the task of working out what it meant to be an Argentine director. In a way Bon-Bon El Perro is the same story as Eversmile, only with a dog instead of a girl as a travelling companion, everyone speaking Spanish, and much better made. The lesson would appear to be that you have to be prepared to have a few fracasos in order to find out what works and what doesn't work. Also, that the wheels of the film industry grind slow, and it pays to hang on in there.

marley (d kevin macdonald)

The Ubiquitous Troubadour

Is there any music which has become more ubiquitous around the world than Marley's? You could make an argument for Lennon. But Marley manages to cross boundaries, infiltrate himself into cultures like no-one else. With Marley, there's the added rider that it's not only the man but also the style of music. For the vast, vast majority, reggae and Marley are one and the same. Somehow, an impoverished child from Jamaica managed to conquer the world and he did it in a style which was all his own. All this was achieved by the age of 37, at which point he departed, Christ-like, his music posthumously furthering his global domination. In his review in the Guardian, Bradshaw said that the documentary portrayed him as a Napoleonic figure. Perhaps a truer comparison is with Alexander the Great.

Macdonald's lengthy doc pays its dues to the Marley story and the Marley myth. It's a measured piece of filmmaking which is prepared to note the more controversial aspects of his life and career. Including the way the star ruthlessly split with his teenage companions, Peter Tosh and the incredibly charismatic Bunny Wailer. It mentions the contradictions in his attitude to marriage and fidelity, including some telling footage of his wife on a tour bus. However, whilst it touches on these and other issues, it never probes, instead retaining a respectful distance. 

Even if Macdonald seems slightly bolder than Kapadia was prepared to be in his hagiographic Senna, the truth is we don't really get to know the man, leaving the viewer with the feeling that perhaps Marley himself was less interesting than his myth. He loved football and working out and women. Only his ambition truly marked him apart. It almost feels as though his capacity to retain his ordinariness, or perhaps his simplicity,  was the secret of his success. HIs lyrics in particular, heavily influenced by the bible, have a neutrality that allows anyone to engage with them, even if they don't speak English. The film closes with a sequence showing people round the world singing along to his music. In death, he has become a one man, one music UN peace mission. 

The film pays due tribute to this music, which remains almost uncannily powerful. At one point, a member of his band, explaining how they "invented" reggae, talks about the ghostly fourth beat which is never played. Suggesting that the power of reggae and Marley lies in the sound which is not heard, as much as the sounds we do hear. Likewise, Marley's power resides in the things (or roots) this film, for all its skill, never manages to track down. We await a Rosebud moment, a glimpse of the thing that really made him tick, but Marley takes his secrets with him, unwilling or unable to reveal what it was that turned him into the mythic figure whose influence and range, like all the best mythic figures, continues to expand long after the flesh lies dormant. 

shoeshine (d. de sica, w. amidei, franci, zavattini, viola)

De Sica’s film occupies a place alongside Bicycle Thieves and Los Olvidados. It would be easy to say that in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War European intellectuals suddenly discovered a conscience and began to recognise society’s underclass, but the truth is that this is no more than a continuation of C19^th Realism. The presence of the poor was nothing new in Western European thought; but it might be that the neo-realists were the first to use the magnifying glass of cinema to tell their story.

Although dated, obviously, Shoeshine is in its way as harrowing a journey as anything portrayed by Loach or Clarke. Two engaging shoeshine boys, Pasquale and Giuseppe, make a parlous living. Some of the clients are American GIs, who are shown as being poor payers. The two kids dream of owning a horse (shades of Kes). When Giuseppe’s brother gets them in on a scheme to sell black market US blankets, they suddenly find themselves rich. They buy the horse. This pre-empts a remarkable sequence when the pair ride the horse through the streets of Rome, cheered on by their fellow shoeshiners. This is cinema at its most visceral and the method in which it’s filmed, clearly on the hoof, only adds to the impact.

However, the kids are busted by the police and the action then moves to a juvenile prison. What started off seeming like a sentimental tale dealing with charming scamps gradually turns into something darker, ending in conflict and tragedy. There’s vast skill in the way the narrative is constructed to gradually lure its audience with what initially appear to be harmless childish adventures, only for them to later realise that what’s really at stake for these lovable kids is not only their future role within society but also a struggle for survival. The image of the horse becomes representative of the natural life these children will never be allowed to lead. As such, Shoeshine feels as though it still contains a disconcerting relevance, sixty years on, not only in the ‘third’ world but also in the ‘first’.