la región salvaje (the untamed) (w&d. amat escalante, w. gibrán portela)

I had the good fortune to watch Escalante’s film in Mexico City, with an attentive local audience. I say this because, although cinema is such a private event, there is clearly a communal aspect to the act of attending a film in the company of others, something which lends the viewing another dimension. The only films I watch that I discuss here are ones I have seen in a cinema, or at a public screening. Whilst for many cinema is increasingly something to be experienced at home, there is still a distinction to seeing it in a cinema, and the instance of watching La Región Salvaje only emphasised this.

La Región Salvaje is quite off the wall. In Europe, were it to be released it would probably be marketed as an art film. Escalante’s Cannes hit, Heli, was seen in this light, and well received because, one suspects, it could be treated as such a serious dissertation on the state of narco-Mexico. In spite of the fact that it’s very much a film about real people living real lives. La Región Salvaje might be said to be even more so. Its high concept premise is based around the existence of a creature which landed on the earth, dedicated to pleasure, which is kept by some old hippies in the countryside. However, it needs feeding, (or pleasuring), so the hippies use a beautiful girl, Veronica, as bait to lure a young doctor, who’s bisexual. His experience with the creature proves too much and leaves him in a coma. The doctor had been having an affair with his sister’s husband, something she finds about. Through Veronica, the sister learns about the creature and visits it, which in her case does her no harm at all. But when her estranged husband tries to come back into her life, she offers him up to the creature, which kills him. 

The plot then is complicated, perverse, pretentious, daft. It’s really hard to place La Región Salvaje: is it a horror film? Is it social realism? Is it a sex comedy? Of course, the answer is that it all of these things, as well as being, no doubt, a metaphor for the current state of the nation. (Is the creature that can only deliver pleasure but also kills an analogy for the drugs/ narco world?). At the same time, as the audience reaction made clear, it’s also extremely entertaining. The laughter of the local audience was a corrective to any pretension. And perhaps goes to show, as does Escalante’s film, how cinema has found itself so entrapped in a high/ low culture divide. La Región Salvaje seems to mock the very notion of an “art” film. The director and writer steer a narrative course which belongs to neither camp, or both camps, at the same time. It defies categorisation, something that might be tricky for the marketing men, but is more reflective of cinema’s capacity to tackle issues of import (politically/ aesthetically) whilst at the same time engaging with an audience on a visceral level. 

this little art [kate briggs]

This Little Art is an extended essay about the art of translation. It looks at the author’s process as she translates a series of lectures made by Roland Barthes towards the end of his life. It also examines the complex relationships between Gide and his translator, Dorothy Bussey and Thomas Mann and his translator, Helen Lowe-Porter, whose versions of his novels helped establish Mann’s reputation in the Anglo-Saxon world.

And straight away I’ve walked into the first trap, which is the kind of trap Brigg’s book sets out to explain and elucidate. I used the word “version”. Is a translation a “version’ or is it a re-presentation of the thing itself, which is the work in its original language? When we read a translated novel, to what extent could it be said that we’re reading the work of the author, and to what extent are we reading the work of the translator? 

Briggs’ book takes on all these questions and a thousand more, all questions that arise from the practice of her ‘little art’. At all times, her writing exhibits a fascination and love for the very business of writing (which dovetails neatly with Barthes’ similar passion). How words are put together, how the order that words are strung together matters, resonates, fails or succeeds. How meaning and language play on one another, sometimes tripping each other up. How the writer’s mind works, no matter whether the writing is ‘original’ or not. 

Briggs also exhibits much of the playfulness that Barthes so enjoyed. Her book is a dance, of words and ideas. This is true down to the very way in which the text is presented on the page, (hat-tip once again to the publisher for not selecting the cheaper option). This Little Art manages to pull of the trick of being thought-provoking and entertaining, as well as both scholarly and moving. Translation is an undervalued art, and Briggs’ book goes some way towards giving it the credit it is due. 

in the forests of siberia (w&d safy nebbou; w. sylvain tesson, david oelhoffen)

The Romantic tradition has long had a strong hold over French sensibility. Rimbaud and Gauguin are just the tip of the iceberg. This film taps right into it. It’s based on the book written by Sylvain Tesson (Consolations of the Forest) which told the story of the author’s six months in Siberia. A desire to get away from it all, armed with nothing much more than vodka and literature. Not having read the book, I can’t comment on how faithful the film is to Tesson’s story. The lead character isn’t called Sylvain, he’s called Teddy, and the curious thing about the film is that it ends up not being about solitude, but companionship. The film hinges on Teddy’s meeting and getting to know Aleksei, a Russian who fled to the wilderness after he killed a man, many years ago. 

The first act of the film traces Teddy’s journey towards his solitude as he arrives in his cosy hut by the banks of a frozen Lake Baikal. He has an interesting visit from a bear. He seems quietly content on his own, although he does make a cross-lake skiing trip to the nearest settlement to get provisions. When he comes back he ignores the advice he’s been given and heads out into a snowstorm, an action which might have been the death of him if it wasn’t for the intervention of the mysterious stranger, who turns out to be Aleksei. 

The film from there on in feels faintly formulaic as the two men bond over the course of various adventures. What keeps the movie ticking over is some agile editing by Anna Riche. There must have been a temptation to linger on the ravishing scenery. The natural world Teddy inhabits is the third character in the film, sometimes antagonist, sometimes consolation, sometimes philosophical partner. However, in a movie of an hour and a half, there’s always a danger of overkill, something the rhythm of the film manages to avoid. Nevertheless it feels a pity that the Aleksei-Teddy storyline takes quite such a predictable course; the more profound learning that Teddy might have encountered in his sojourn in the wilderness never quite comes across. In the hands of Herzog, Teddy’s journey might have been more unsettling (and there are moments when one is reminded of Grizzly Man), or more spiritual; instead Safy Nebbou chooses to veer towards a more sentimental, (romantic?), vision of life in the Siberian wilds. 

red sparrow (d. francis lawrence; w. justin haythe)

Heathrow, waiting to catch a plane to Houston, where I will not leave the airport. 

Mr Curry decided we should go and see Red Sparrow rather than A Fantastic Woman for reasons which were never entirely clear and the truth is that the movie offers less to get excited about than its ‘hot-under-the-collar’ press would hope. Within ten minutes Mr C had murmured to me “This is an airline movie, right?’ And he was. Any film which has a plot point revolve around floppy disks feels unlikely, introducing a degree of contrivance which undermines even the most far-fetched of narratives. At some point, even though we know we’re watching a Bond-esque fantasy, we need to feel there’s some kind of underpinning in at least a hypothetical truth, and a detail like this seems is so unwieldy that even the most tenuous connection to that hypothetical reality is ruptured and we start to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Which may or may not annoy the filmmakers, who knows. Maybe they don’t care and they’re just laughing all the way to the bank.

What is interesting, however, about Red Sparrow, is its representation of the the American other, in the shape of the Russians. These Russians, are ruthless. They have a devotion to the nebulous idea of the state/ motherland. And, in Red Sparrow, above all else, they are obsessed by sex and its power dynamics, rather than its pleasure dynamics. One can’t help thinking that this is no more than a mirror to the state of US society: that the portrayal offered within the film of the Russians is a way of exploring the concerns and values of the filmmakers themselves. None of which reflects their country in a particularly flattering light. 

strong island (d yance ford)

Strong Island is a meditative, deeply felt and personal documentary, made be Yance Ford about the death of his/her brother, William. William was shot after a petty dispute. His killer was never brought to trial. The documentary analyses the impact of the death on what had been an aspirational family. Her mother was a successful teacher and William himself had just qualified as a correctional officer at the time of his death. Following his murder, their close-knit family was devastated by the way that the state refused to bring his killer to trial. Had the tables been turned, had William been white and his killer black, they had no doubt that justice would have been pursued. There are other aspects of the case which the film touches on, albeit in fleeting detail, such as the unmarked car that sat outside the family home in the days after William’s death and the calls in the middle of the night. But, more than anything else, it feels as though the making of this film is a cathartic, necessary journey for the filmmaker, whose face is captured in vivid close-up, wrestling with the duty bequeathed to ensure that a brother’s death would not be forgotten; that the art of the director’s cinema would offer at least a hint of justice, where the processes of the state have offered none. 

trust (w. falk richter, tr. maja zade, d. jude christian)

There’s a lot that might be said about the Gate’s production of Trust, a German play with a strong directorial input provided by Jude Christian, an English director, who also acts in the play. You could talk about the success or otherwise of its critique of modern society, which might be astute, or might be a case of wanting to have your cake and eat it. Or you could comment on the play’s influences, a dash of Crimp, a soupçon of Fosse, a flavouring of Ostermeier. You could start to talk about the way in which the staging explores notions of presentation; with the elongated stage itself turned into an evolving installation. Just as Richter’s text explores the way in which narrative ‘presents’ or ‘represents’ its themes, characters, story. Then there’s the whole issue of the fourth wall, the way the writing and the direction plays with it, sometimes putting it up, sometimes taking it down. There’s a whole Hare-ian debate possible about the relationship between the text and the staging.  Even if the text would appear to be willing the director into an appropriation of its words, something Christian has no hesitation in doing, throwing in a whole section on Brexit which can’t have been there in the original German production.

You could talk about all these things, when you talk about Trust, but more than anything i think it’s worth pointing out what a barmily enjoyable show it is. In a world where notions of pleasure, in the theatre and elsewhere, are up for grabs, Trust offers a new way to please old masters. The Barthesian delight in never knowing what’s going to come next: whether the play, with its tenuous narrative, is going to evolve or atrophy, and if it does so, (either), what form will this take and how do we get to the end? Trust reminds us that theatre is an experience which employs a text, rather than being contingent on a text; that theatre has so much more to offer than words (without in any way negating the value of words). 

One suspects that in Germany this kind of production would have none of the novelty that it possesses on a British stage. Which just goes to show the theatrical pleasures we’re missing out on, and emphasises how welcome Trust is, a play that encourages its audience to think about love, society, the importance of dramaturgy, whilst re-calibrating notions of theatrical enjoyment.

earthly signs: moscow diaries 1917-1922 [marina tsvetaeva]

Over lunch, I spoke with a writer about the process of writing. He mentioned that he had started using notebooks. We talked about the whether of the writing process. For whom is the writing written, and does it matter if it has no public. Which also reminded me of the commentary I recall reading somewhere, don’t know if it was by Barthes or Nietzsche, that everything a writer writes, down to their shopping lists, is part of their oeuvre.

Forgive a slightly high-falutin opening to reflection on Earthly Signs, Moscow Diaries 1917-22, as the book is titled. The above thoughts occur because one wonders, at the time of writing, whether Marina Tsvetaeva intended all the observations or notes that make up this book to be published. Or rather, one might wonder whether there were other observations or notes which, when the time came to put the book together, she decided to omit. The book is an account, as the title suggests, of the poet’s experiences in Moscow in the aftermath of the revolution, (as well as a brief aside about her time in Germany). It consists of eleven sections, which recount different moments and present different aspects of the harsh life she was leading. Sometimes there are repetitions, word for word, from one section to another. It’s a collage as much as a coherent narrative. What it does is open up the writer’s mind, presenting her political, emotional, maternal and psychological state of being.

Tsvetaeva is not a fan of the revolution. Her sympathies remain with the Whites. In one telling phrase she mentions the “new soulless communist soul forcibly imposed on Russ”. a phrase that sums up her attitude to a revolution which, more than anything else, she distrusts poetically. A long closing section brilliantly dissects her relationship with the poet Briusov, who briefly thrived in the new Soviet republic, because, as she explains, he had a machine-like addiction to power. (She damns Briusov with the following phrase: “Blok’s death was a thunderbolt to the heart; Briusov’s death was the silence that falls when a machine suddenly stops.”) Tsvetaeva seems to see the mechanisation of the soul and day-to-day life as the eventual outcome of the Bolshevik impulse, which in retrospect doesn’t seem to have been too wrong. 

However, her tone remains ironic and distanced. Here’s a writer who knows she’s fallen out of step with the direction her nation is taking, but also knows that through the act of capturing her thoughts, distilling her voice, on the page, she retains her individuality, her capacity to be herself. Time after time she comes up with a striking, eminently human thought, or disarms the reader with a sly or witty remark. Writing transcends politics and history; a century later, Tsvetaeva lives on as she knew she would, merely through the act of having captured herself on the page, even had no-one ever got round to publishing or reading what she’d written. 

The result is a brilliant, lucid account of what it was like to live through those days, with no particular axe to grind, with just children to protect and survival on your mind. Some sequences, such as the description of the women’s poetry reading night, are extended and wonderfully entertaining; at times other entries are little more than stray thoughts, captured against the will of time or memory. The net result is a wonderful, slim book which reveals more than could ever be hoped for about that remarkable moment in history and the remarkable poet who writes about it: “I can be bought, but only by all the heaven inside of you! By that heaven in which there may not even be room for me.”

lady bird (w&d greta gerwig)

I realise I’m not the captive audience for Gerwig’s coming of age story, nevertheless I can’t quite get around the feeling that it’s an inordinately twee, safe piece of filmmaking. Rohmer seems to be cropping up a lot this week, and there are indeed strong links between Lady Bird and Call Me by My Name, both featuring somewhat bland but supposedly likeable protoganists going about the business of growing up, losing their virginity, etc. But again, if the reference to Rohmer is permitted, there’s not a great deal of angst (which I confess was one of the predominant emotions of my late adolescence so I might have a skewed perspective), or self-doubt. Soarise Ronan’s Lady Bird is a brittley self-confident character, who fends off the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune without ever looking like she’s in any danger of being derailed by them. Maybe it’s unfair to compare an account of a Sacramento childhood to a post-war European one, but even Sofia Coppola’s films have considerably more edge than Lady Bird. Again, I recognise that I might be perceived as being curmudgeonly in my response. This is just a crowd-pleaser, you might say. The fact that the heroine’s home on the “wrong side of the tracks” looks like one 90% of the world’s population might sacrifice a family member to obtain, despite having only one bathroom (how did they survive?!), despite the fact that a series of young male leads seem more than happy to throw themselves at Lady Bird’s feet, this isn’t supposed to be taken all that seriously. Only, taken seriously it has been, with the film lauded and the director garlanded. Sure, it’s not a bad film, slightly less engaging than Submarine, for example, but the heavyweight response to this lightweight fare says a lot about the weird cul-de-sac that Anglo-Saxon cinematic culture has managed to find itself driving down. 

(nb - I was far more interested in discovering Ladybird’s brother Miguel’s story, but this ended up feeling like a narrative footnote more than anything else, designed to lend colour rather than depth. How come she has a (presumably adopted) Latino brother? What does this say about her family and values in modern day USA? Or was it just thrown in as a bone to keep the liberal demographic happy? Am quite surprised not to have come across even the slightest commentary regarding the convenient existence of the marginalised Miguel in any of the reviews.)

call me by your name (d. luca guadagnino; w. james ivory)

Guadagnino’s biggest hit to date is a film which many people I’ve met have told me moved them inordinately, but which left me strangely cold. It’s a coming of age tale, as the adolescent Elio explores his sexuality during a long hot Italian Summer. The film, employing a James Ivory script, takes its time to play itself out, with the rhythms matching those of the long Summer days that the script inhabits. Guadagnino adopts his trademark lush cinematography and lavish music, but the narrative itself is slimmed down, homing in on the comings and goings of Elio and the older American he falls in love with, Oliver.

Towards the end of A Bigger Splash, there’s a slightly uncomfortable storyline relating to African immigrants arriving in South Italy. Guadagnino is a sybarite, one can’t help thinking, and politics, or at least ‘social realism’ politics, isn’t really his bag. Call Me By Your Name makes no bones about being a primarily bourgeois piece of art. Elio’s archeologist father gets his kicks from discovering aristocratic Roman treasures which are salvaged from the sea floor. In this sense, Call Me By Your Name, an eminently apolitical work of art, might be said to be completely honest in its intentions. However, as a result, I found myself engaging less and less with the dreamy protagonist. Sure, the flowering of late adolescence is driven by a sexual impulse, but it’s also an age when other impulses flower: the idealistic or the political urge. It’s easy to understand why Call Me By Your Name, which captures Elio’s sexual anxiety with a surgical precision, has seduced an audience that identifies with Elio’s angst. We all went through that stage at one point or another. (And, given this, it’s also easy to understand how the story is far more than a “gay” story, as might be said to be the case with Haigh’s Weekend, for example). But the net effect is that Elio ends up feeling like a hollow character, sheltered and indulged by his almost creepily empathetic parents. 

Of course, no film can have it all and it might seem churlish to quibble about a lack of political perspective in what is essentially a glorified love story. But Elio’s self-absorption ultimately seemed to this viewer to make him a banal one-dimensional hero. The film is, to all intents and purposes, a Rohmerian fable, but the characters lack the self-doubt which Rohmer’s characters evince, which is what gives Rohmer’s characters their charm, the way in which they achieve their epiphany in spite of their doubts as to whether they really deserve it. Another recent film which could be a point of reference is Santiago Mitre’s El Estudiante, a film which boldly embraces its protagonist’s shallowness in way Call Me By Your Name shies away from. 

the lost honour of katharina blum [heinrich böll]

Böll’s novel seems redolent of a lost era. When the GDR and the DDR were still separate entities, when the Wall still stood. It’s the prerogative of the present to assume that the past was more innocent, unless, perhaps, one was born in wartime. Boll’s novel would seem to argue against the thesis that those more innocent days. The slight tale recounts the very modern trend of character assassination by the press, with Katharina seeking revenge for the way in which her life is traduced by the newspapers after she becomes involved with a suspected gangster. 

Of as much interest as the subject matter of the novel is the dry, even terse narration, with the authorial voice regularly filtering through. The book’s avowed aim is to offer a dispassionate account of the events surrounding Blum’s arrest and subsequent crime as they occurred, but the author’s sympathies are revealed via a sarcastic tone, which takes aim primarily at the authorities who are investigating Blum. The narrator’s irreverence keeps the story moving, via a series of short, sharp chapters. Ultimately, perhaps, The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum doesn’t quite live up to its reputation; it has the feel of a minor, satirical work which touched a major nerve within its society at the time of writing. Having said which, satire is always trapped within the confines of the society it critiques; what shines through is the relish with which the author goes about lancing the boils.