faces in the crowd [valeria luiselli]

Faces in the Crowd is a sly, engaging short novel. It’s set in at least three timelines, possibly more. In one, the narrator relates how, working for a small NY press, she convinced her editor to publish the poems of obscure Mexican poet, Gilberto Owen. Mainly by deceiving him as to the origin of the translations. In another timeline, the same narrator, writing the book we are reading, offers details of a marriage which appears to be falling apart, in spite of the fact the couple have two young children. In the third timeline, we step into the world of Owen himself, as he hangs out in a New York of speakeasies and deluded foreign poets.

The three timelines snuggle up alongside one another in a neat, poetic fashion. Images flip from one timeline to another (an orange tree in a pot plays an important narrative role in all three strands). The book has a staccato quality, frequently constructed from tiny fragments of life whose potency comes from their juxtaposition with other tiny fragments of another life. There’s a reference to Bolaño at one point, with the narrator’s editor asking her if she knew him. She feigns disinterest, but her novel, with its quest to discover and corporealise a lost Latin poet is eminently Bolañesque, whilst at the same time being all its own thing. Luiselli’s voice rings through, if not loud and clear, then dextrously. This feels like a book which has been woven as much as written, a patchwork quilt which wraps its readers up, sheltering them from their cold, Southern Hemisphere nights. 

the door (w&d istván szabó, w. andrea vészits)

Szabó's film is a curio. It seems to be keeping with Cinemateca's penchant for screening the new films of old masters, preferably with a famous name attached. This may reflect a laudable ethos or it may be slightly cynical. What it does ensure is a succession of strangely off-key offerings which have the faintly tarnished feel of visiting an elderly relation whose best days are clearly behind them. There may be flashes of what once might have been, but on the whole it makes for an unsatisfactory experience, like being offered stale biscuits and weak coffee. 

Szabó's film is constructed around an engaging story, as Hungarian writer, Magda, befriends the curmudgeonly Emerenc, played with full frontal acerbicness by Helen Mirren. Emerenc has secrets. Her waspishness appeals to Magda, and there's the suggestion that it helps the younger woman come to terms with herself, as wife, woman and writer. However, there's no real sense of dramatic tension. The film is set in 60s Budapest but all the characters speak a clearly-dubbed English. The camera work is conservative, straight out of a TV drama. Perhaps most gallingly of all, given the director's former achievements, we don't really get any sense of the world of 60s Budapest. Everything feels so tightly budgeted that it's reduced to relative anonymity. A chamber piece which lacks the intensity required to make a chamber piece feel either relevant or compelling.

1599 [james shapiro]

Shapiro's text achieves several objectives.

It reveals how the writer's work was shaped by his interaction with society. Thereby revealing a figure fully engaged with the complications, complicities and dangers of his age. A political figure, with a small p. It sets out to demystify the reputation of the writer as a romantic, mysterious figure and to a certain extent succeeds. At the very least it  contextualises him.

It also offers a telling vision of Elizabethan society. Just as in today's Britain, it shows a political body which had few qualms in manipulating its people with scare stories. Apocalypse was always around the corner. The intrigues of power like something out of House of Cards. With Shakespeare participating in the debate through his plays. 

This book, which is not a biography, rather a portrait of an era seen through the lens of four of the writer's plays, is already considered a classic and with good reason. The writer, according to Shapiro's vision, becomes a weather vane or tuning fork, plugged in to the nuances of his society's agenda, an agenda which will always possess its metaphysical or spiritual values, alongside base ambition and earthly glory. 

One finishes the book longing for him to write the sequel, and the sequel that comes after that, and those that would follow. 1066 and all that. 

blue is the warmest colour/ la vie d'adele 1&2 (w&d abdellatif kechiche, w. ghalia lacroix)

Klimt and Schiele

In the party scene, there's a brief, insubstantial discussion of the difference between Klimt and Schiele. Adele, perhaps surprisingly, claims not to know who they are, something that annoys Emma. However, one might say that in this day and age, when the two Austrian artists have been co-opted and cannibalised by a graphic design world, why should you want to know much about them? Fifty years ago, their art might still have retained a transgressive air. Now, it has been absorbed by the mainstream. Which is not to say that someone couldn't come along and liberate them, but Kechiche is not your man for this. Rather, they are located within Emma's banal, bourgeois art world: both the gallery scene she hangs out with and the art itself. It's always a risk portraying "fictional" art in a work of fiction. Because the values of the art represented reflect something or other. In this case the art tells us that Emma is a minor talent making work for what would appear to be a bourgeois market. There's nothing radical about her work and the struggle to define herself she tells Adele about on the park bench (cf Sartre) doesn't appear to have affected her evolution as an artist. One of the clunkiest exchanges happens when Adele is asked her opinion of Emma's art. She mutters some platitudes. It seems as though living with Emma has neither generated any enthusiasm for art nor any discernible capacity to evolve her own opinions. 

Sartre

The first half of the film has a clear journey and conveys this journey with charm and humour. Adele, still at school, begins to realise she's gay. We follow her journey as she comes to terms with this and begins her affair with the seemingly dangerous, blue-haired Emma. At one point, Emma starts talking to Adele about Sartre. There's a trope throughout the film that Adele doesn't know all that much about anything intellectual. She's Dionysius to Emma's more considered Apollo. (Although her interest in literature at the film's opening seems like a genuine engagement, so much so that the shoe is on the other foot as her would-be lover reads up on Marivaux). Emma tells Adele how reading Sartre helped her to understand who she was as a person, implicitly suggesting that his work assisted her in the process of coming to terms with her sexuality. The exchange is in keeping with much of the film's dialogue: airy conversations which are given space to breathe. There's more than Sartre at play here, but all the same the script succeeds in paying homage to the king of the existentialists whilst developing its narrative at the same time. Later, in the same park, Adele will kiss Emma, initiating the relationship. Adele makes contact with her existentialist soul. For a while she's a kind of stepsister to Sandrine Bonnaire's character in Varda's Vagabonde. Prepared to put everything at stake for the development of that soul. A true Romantic, which is also to say a true conservative, because this is exactly the message young people are repeatedly encouraged to confront now: you have a duty to "find" yourself, to "become" yourself. Do it whilst you are young, before you settle down. Adele accepts the challenge and her life stands on the brink of vast, inspirational change.


Domestics

Only it doesn't change. Time passes. The two women are living together. They don't know each other's friends or anything much about each other's lives. Adele is Emma's "muse". She cooks and cleans for Emma in Emma's spacious flat. In some ways she's become little more than a drudge. But she doesn't mind. Although Emma does. Unsurprisingly she wants Adele to want more from her life. In short, this is a terrible, flawed relationship, only Adele is young and naive and has no way of knowing. The romantic dream has turned into a mundane bourgeois marking of the days. The jump forward in time takes us almost immediately to the point where the two women break up. We don't see the slow calcification of their relationship. We don't discover how this has affected their sex life. The nitty gritty of the story is not something which interests the filmmaker. Which, given the fact that Blue has made its reputation on the basis of Exarchopoulos's snot and Seydoux's tears might seem like a ridiculous thing to say. But at the end of the day this is the showtime part of the break-up. The fireworks. Which is well enough told, if somewhat deceitful. Because the real pain is elsewhere, hidden, unrevealed. And the real damage caused to Adele is not through the fact she and Emma split up, something they clearly need to do, but through the fact that rather than expanding Adele's horizons, the relationship appears to have curtailed them.


Novel

The film opens with a long sequence which discusses Pierre de Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne. Adele's boyfriend also talks about Les Liaisons Dangereuses. As with the discussion of art, there's something almost cheeky about Kechiche's conceit. We know we're in for a three hour movie, which is about as long as cinema can get away with. However, we also know that even the longest movie doesn't offer its creator(s) the space or scope which a novel offers its author to expound on themes and generate a sense of development over time. Kechiche almost seems to be saying: I'm aware of this, but let's give it a bash anyway. Blue is the Warmest Colour could be said to have a lot in common with Madame Bovray, for example. A woman follows her instincts in the face of society's unease, embarking on a journey which ends in tears. The result is constantly fascinating as well as being inevitably flawed. Kechiche's ambition in his storytelling repeatedly comes up against the limitations the medium imposes on the type of story he wants to tell. 


Apollo & Dionysius

In spite of encountering a certain resistance to Kechiche's film, I wouldn't disagree with anyone who suggested it's a terrific piece of filmmaking. You could argue that it's deceitful in its suggestion of being transgressive, when in fact, like Emma's art, it's safe and stoutly bourgeois in its outlook. You could further argue that its use of lesbianism could well be said to be exploitative, not so much for the sex scenes (which reminded me of Andrew Haigh's Weekend) but because the characters' sexuality is presented as being transgressive or dangerous when in fact this is a tale about relatively conservative youth and/or bohemia. The scene in front of the school when Adele is confronted by her schoolmates implies an outsider status for the characters, which the narrative then backs away from. It's a great scene, typical of the way in which Kechiche skilfully inveighs his film with a trenchant naturalism. But having set itself up as an investigation of how an Apollonian world appropriates and subsumes our Dionysian instincts, Blue seems to shy away from the complexity of this set-up, veering towards something more banal, more soapy. 

Bar Room Brawl

No matter the caveats, the chutzpah and flair of Blue, its capacity to capture the fiddly details of life and conversation and turn them into something compelling, is sometimes breathtaking. Kechiche's willingness to let his camera linger, as though it too is part of this relationship, waiting with a lover's anticipation for a secret sign that everything is going to be alright, (either when it will be or when it palpably will not), makes for some of the most vibrant, unconstructed scenes you could come across. His film offers a polished sheen to the guerrilla ethic, appropriating the strengths of low-budget filmmaking (basic set-ups, no stunts, no extravagant camerawork, insistent naturalism) in order to create a film that follows in the footsteps of Zola or Flaubert.

la jaula de oro (d. diego quemada-díez; w. quemada-díez; gibrán portela; lucia carreras)

A few years ago there was a film called Sin Nombre, which did very well for its director Cary Fukunaga. La Jaula is essentially the same film, following the path of three Guatemalan kids as they try to make their way across Mexico towards the promised land. The difference is that, whereas Sin Nombre offered a sentimental variation on the tale, La Jaula de Oro makes no bones about the cruelty and hardship involved in a journey which ultimately leads not to Los Angeles, as Juan, one of the trio hopes, but a desolate job in a snow-ridden corner of a troubled land. 

Guatemala and Mexico are perhaps even further away from Montevideo than Moscow, (say) might be from London. The barbarity revealed in the story feels as distant here as it would in London. There are those at the Montevideo Film Festival, where Jaula screened, who are perhaps sceptical of its vision of the downtrodden 3rd world being presented yet again for the voyeuristic delights of a 1st world audience. (It’s interesting quite how unpopular Ciudade de Dios is here, in spite of the involvement of Charlone). Nevertheless, Jaula possesses an undeniable integrity, refusing to let its audience off the hook. The three child actors whose journey we follow are as beguiling as we might expect, but their fates are not, and there’s no attempt made to sanitise the story.

In contrast to Sin Nombre, the film has a quasi-documentary feel, with the kids' fellow-travellers feeling like real people rather than extras. In addition Jaula mixes moments of great visual beauty with a roughness around the edges which ensures the viewer doesn’t become seduced by the picturesque nature of the journey across country. A paradox of the “immigrant road movie" (see also Winterbottom’s In This World) is that, in spite of the cinematic joys of witnessing landscapes and vistas we will probably never know, when telling the immigrant’s bleak story there’s little scope for the pleasures of aesthetics. Quemada-Díez treads this fine line with care. His movie might occupy familiar territory, but, as the gruelling last scenes emphasise, this is no fairground ride. Rather, it’s a film which seeks to take its place within the great abattoir of our tiny globe’s modernity. 

the past (w&d asghar farhadi)

The Past is such a portentous title that it almost threatens to scupper the titled project before it has got off the ground. The opening of Asghar Farhadi’s film has a laboured feel, as though its straining every sinew to convey everything that’s going on beneath the surface between Bejo’s Marie and Mosaffa’s Ahmad as they make the trip from the airport to Marie’s suburban home. Two people who were in a relationship but have lived apart for many years. It’s a rich sequence, but overly so, the weight of their back story threatening to overwhelm the present moment.

Fortunately, the narrative then abruptly plunges into the problems of the present. In particular, Marie’s relationships with her two girls as well as the son of her new lover, Samir. Elyes Aguis, gives a remarkable performance as Fouad, the confused child whose mother has recently tried to kill herself. His acting is all the more potent as a result of his character being kept on the margin of the narrative, where he acts as a mirror reflecting the anxiety and hurt which the actions of the adults has provoked. The adults are given a lot to deal with. Attempted suicide, separation, unhappy offspring. In the manner of a Hardy novel, the film painstakingly unravels the threads which bind the three protagonists together. This inevitably leads to a flirtation with melodrama, but Farhadi succeeds in steering a course away from the sharks of sentimentalism which circle his narrative.

This might be because, as well as being a relationship film, this is also a story about what it’s like to be an immigrant, first or second generation. Two of his actors are non-natives and the third is second generation French. Each takes on a character which feels in some way disconnected. Both Marie and Samir struggle to offer their children any sense of solidity, leaving them feeling rootless and confused. Ahmad’s arrival only serves to muddle the waters. Where the oldest daughter, Lucie, initially sees him as an ally, his presence ultimately resolves nothing. Whilst there is a potential pain inherent to any relationship, the film seems to suggest that this is exacerbated within a modern world which allows people to cross borders and distances with seeming ease, leaving them feeling isolated and helpless when things start to go wrong.

The Past possesses a dense narrative whose focus shifts from one character to another, concluding appropriately enough with the figure whose presence has been instrumental throughout but upto the very end has never been seen. Farhadi knows his key dramatic moments and plays them out for all they are worth. It is a reminder of what a well-worked screenplay really looks like: nothing flashy, just layer upon layer of subtle revelations, built up to create a compelling portrait of a few people who have been thrown together by fate and have to learn to make do, no matter how unsuited to life and relationships they feel themselves to be. 

open door [iosi havilio]

Iosi Havilio’s curious book is straight out of the enigmatic Argentine post-Borges/ Cortazar school. This school thrives off an air of unresolved mystery, taking the frayed edges of the maestro’s stories and teasing them out as far as they’ll go. The novel as a semiotic playground, full of signifiers and blind alleys. Open Door is narrated by a woman vet who drops out and starts living in a small rural society which is probably populated by lunatics. Unsurprisingly she herself becomes somewhat unhinged, descending, Repulsion-style, into a debauched lifestyle of sex and ketamine, which comes across as oddly cold and unenjoyable. Indeed, the phrase “sex and ketamine” perhaps suggests a text which is delirious and transgressive, but the truth is that Open Door feels slightly tame, the sex scenes having a similar journeyman quality to Houlebecq’s. Similarly, the relentless quest for the unexpected has the effect of becoming somewhat predictable in itself: we never know what’s going to happen next but we know that whatever it is, it’s not going to affect anything to any startling degree. The novel has been lauded extensively, but it has the feel of a sketch, which might be typical of a first novel, and perhaps it would be wiser to judge Havilio on the basis of his subsequent works rather than this cold fish of a book. 

grand budapest hotel (w&d wes anderson)

By the end the desired effect is inverted. Instead of a frothy, innocuous piece of fluff lulling you into a pleasing stupor, which would be appear to be the director’s goal, you find yourself on the point of screaming at the screen. Grand Budapest might kick off as a promisingly leftfield foray into Mitteleuropa (based on the works of Stefan Zweig, we are told) but it ends up becoming a flimsical, whimsical jazz-profaned, Benny Profaned, noodle into Mitteleuropa. This is a Mitteleuropa for people who don’t want to have to think about Freud or Musil or Kafka or even Zweig. It’s a Mitteleuropa for banal Manhattanites who assume a Mitteleuropa is a brand of designer coffee they have yet to come across and will be Pleasantly Surprised to discover it’s actually just a playground for heplish indie-nish US actors to hang out and Do Their Thing. In short, the director succeeds in taking the very thing he claims to be celebrating and bastardising it to such an extent that already execs are drawing up plans to rebuild the Grand Budapest Hotel, supposedly demolished, and turn it into the Must-Go venue for any aspiring uber-tech firm's 2016 bonding weekend. There will be Ustase themed nights, with obligatory schnapps chasers and post-prandial machine gun sessions. There will be the Communist themed nights, muted colours only, where no-one is allowed to laugh and that’s the biggest joke of all. They will invite Zizek to give by-invite-only seminars that will end with naked wrestling sessions in the candlelit mountain snow. 

Which part of the world will be the next to get the Anderson makeover? Where can he parachute in as many feckless, gilt-edged cameos for his mates? The post-war Left Bank? A romcom inspired by the Battle of Algiers? The Cultural Revolution with Phillip Seymour Hoff guesting as Mao? (Note to ed/ Wes - nice idea but the horse has bolted from that particular stable.) Why is this man allowed to splurge so much talent to such little effect? Why is he given such luxurious budgets to churn out this nonsense? Why does anyone ever give him the critical time of day? 

Answers on a postcard. 

The prettiest picture will be forwarded to the appropriate scouting team.

starred up (d. david mackenzie, w. jonathan asser)

This being London, I found myself having two conversations about the director of the film, David Mackenzie, in a single day. The first, within the hallowed portals of Working Title’s London office, discussed the way he has suddenly become hot property, with Universal flying him out to LA in order to throw projects at him. The second was with someone who has known him, via his brother, for many years. Describing how his first film was shot in Spain and was supposed to have Bardem, before Bardem became famous, but didn't. (I can find no trace of this film in IMDB). In between the two points in Mackenzie’s life related there are a host of other films he has made, including his latest, and most apparently successful, Starred Up.

I say apparently because I’ve never seen another film of his. There have been, one notes, at least 8. In short, although Mackenzie is still relatively young, Starred Up is not the work of wunderkind. It’s the offering of a director who has been around the block and learned the ropes. Something which is evident in the way he pulls off what might have been a hackneyed prison tale and turns into a visceral, roller coaster journey. Above all, this is a film which is well-paced. For all that the lead, O’Connell, delivers a bravura performance, one can’t help thinking that if the editing and the camerawork weren’t in synch with this performance, his acting would appear overblown, and the full extent of the film’s melodramatic premise would reveal itself. This is not the greatest cinema script ever written: the ending feels contrived and the role of the the autobiographical figure, Ol, is underdeveloped. There’s no doubt there’s another film to be made which explores the writer, Jonathan Asser’s methodology in greater depth, where Starred Up only skates over the surface. (This in a week when we learn that books are to be banned in prison.) However, although under-developed, the film employs the Ol scenes to great effect. We are in the room with the prisoners as they grapple with and confront their fear of being ridiculous or losing status, a fear which can easily lead to violence in a testosterone fuelled society. These scenes are brilliantly composed and help to lend the film the sense of visceral energy it requires to convince us that this is what prison is really like. The whole place is a throbbing vein of overheated masculinity, embodied in O’Connell’s splendidly narcissistic performance. No-one can relax in this world and the assured direction means that the audience cannot either.

Where this could become frenetic in the hands of a less assured director, in Starred Up it feels like a convincing depiction of prison life. The highly regulated tone comes from the way in which the direction harmonises the various elements of the filmmaking process, from sound-design to acting, from editing to the muted grade. The film has the hallmark of someone at the helm who knows what they’re doing, reminding us that directors don’t fall out of trees, they are formed.

under the skin (w&d jonathan glazer, w. walter campbell)

Some points referring to Under The Skin:

Confused Narratives

Films don't have to make sense. They’re often more enjoyable if they don’t. As long as they’re not trying to make sense. The enigmatic can be the best cinema game in town. (cf Kubrick; Resnais; Antonioni) Albeit something that the British are rarely aware of. (Honourable exception Roeg, whose The Man Who Fell to Earth might be the godfather of UTS.)

Is this the most expensive low budget movie ever made?

One of the various clever things Glazer does in his film is appropriate a low-budget sensibility. By which it is meant: low budget filmmaking uses little-known actors or even non-actors. Low budget filmmaking doesn’t have the budget to try and “create” an ‘alternative’ world. So it focuses on the actual world. Which is what frequently gives low-budget filmmaking a sense of immediacy and relevance which a more, arch, “created” world does not. The first half of Under the Skin has the feel of an ob-doc about Glasgow street life. Which a glamorous alien/ hollywood star happens to be passing through. This juxtaposition sets off all kinds of sparks and gives the film a freshness which a more honed product lacks. Kudos to director and star for having the nerve to go down this route.

A little bit of humour goes a long way.

This is a film that’s laced with a mischievous sense of humour. Which helps to buy it space for the more esoteric angles it adopts. Humour gets the audience on board; the moments of humour are like way-stations on the film’s cryptic path. This is what Malick’s po-faced Tree of Life patently lacked, for example.

Is this a feminist movie?

Version 1: Men try to pick up chick thinking (correctly) she looks like a Hollywood star only to find she’s an alien luring them to their oily fate. Moral: men are fools who cannot see under the skin.

Version 2: Men try to pick up chick but in the process reveal their fundamental decency, to such an extent that the alien ends up taking pity on her victims and trying to discover her own humanity. She (it) only meets a truly malicious soul at the very end of the movie whose misguided attempt at rape preempts the finale. 

Whilst Glazer’s film clearly pokes fun at the masculine, there’s a warmth to its tone which belies the probable reading which the film will receive on Cinema & Gender courses in the 2020s.