joker (w&d todd phillips, w. scott silver)

So, just to follow the thread. The Joker came out, was lauded, was a box office smash, then came the backlash. Bradshaw in the Guardian really has it in for it: “a shallow, ugly, boorish film”. I missed it when it came out, and sometimes it’s better not to catch a movie until the froth of the hype is over and done with. Given its box office success (apparently close to breaking $1billon) and given the backlash, I went out of a sense of duty more than anything else. I am firmly in the Scorsese camp when it comes to the Superhero franchises, a genre which holds about as much appeal as a Brazilian soap opera. So I wasn’t expecting much. The film started and there was some neat retro footage of New York, an understated chase sequence, some evocative titles. Sad protagonist with sick mother was kind of predictable and for a while it felt like I was watching You Were Never Really There all over again. Then came the implausible romance, which was curious, and all the time this slow, increasingly compelling narrative build. Who is the Joker? Is he hero or anti-hero? When the Bruce Wayne character appears the answer to that question still wasn’t clear, to the script’s credit. This character, sure he’s got a bit of De Niro in him, but more than that, he’s got a lot of Mersault, or someone out of Cannetti’s Auto da Fe, and gradually the power of Phoenix’s performance began to crystallise into something extraordinary, something that isn’t De Niro at all, it’s far closer to Dean or Zbigniew Cybulski or Kinski. And it began to dawn on me that this director, Todd Phillips, whose credits include The Hangover (parts 1,2&3) and, get this - Starsky and Hutch, the 2004 movie - was making what in the good old days they called an “art movie”. Not only was he making an art movie, he has also somehow convinced $1billion worth of audience to pay up to see his art movie.  

And yes, it’s also completely zeitgeist. It flips the tedious Batman narrative on its head. The ersatz strong guy is in fact a bastard. This is a movie about a country that can elect Trump, (or Johnson), one that can be manipulated by the media like zombies. It’s Jungle of the Cities or Drums in the Night, as we wait for the sheeple to finally be snapped out of it by some masked anarchic joker.  That’s the reason the film has resonated. It’s not the narrative beats. This is a slow, lumbering film, which glories in a cello score (kudos to Hildur Guðnadóttir) and a downbeat grade. The violence is actually restrained (three incidents), it’s earned and it’s cathartic. Above all it’s a film that creates a platform for the finest actor of his generation to remind us that great screen acting is something that should be dredged up from the depths, from a place deep inside, the darklands of the mad, the vain and the brilliant.  

chacabuco (d roberto suárez)

Suárez is the maverick genio of the Rio Platense stage. Roberto Arlt meets David Lynch. HIs characters are oddballs, wackos, weirdos, but bizarrely loveable. They’re loveable because they all belong to the same family. Literally, in so far as all the characters in Chacabuco are related, metaphorically, in so far as they are all off the spectrum somewhere, and theatrically, in that Suárez takes several years to develop, rehearse and produce his shows, meaning his band of actors become as tight and incestuous as a family unit. Sometimes this kind of process might not pay off, but in Chacabuco it does so, spectacularly. The players interact like a finely honed machine, aware of every look, every nuance of their companions' behaviour. It’s a play where it’s just as compelling observing those who aren’t speaking as those who are. The word is shared around between the company, something to be usurped or exchanged or held on to sometimes, as a character makes a bid for the attention they believe they, as a character in this unlikely tale, deserve. However, above and beyond the word, the feature which defines Chacabuco is the quality of the silences. A silence speaks as much if not more than words. Silence is that moment of strange uncertainty on stage, as though the characters and the audience are given pause to think: where are we going? Are we on the right course or are we completely fucked? The spectators, like the characters, are never really sure. In fact we’re not even sure if we’re living in the present or some other, parallel Borgesian time. There are about fifteen endings to Chacabuco, which is normally not a good sign. But when you’ve worked on a play for several centuries, you can get away with it. The wonder is that each ending is an advance or improvement on the last one, until we finally get to the last delirious end, which blows the mind and then comes back to stroke the mind with a send-off full of strange tenderness.  

nightmare abbey (thomas love peacock)

It’s curious the way in which some novels from the many novels written are selected to be put aside for posterity. Not being a scholar of early nineteenth century British literature, I don’t know how many other novelists there were out there when Nightmare Abbey was published but I’d wager there were several that were as worthy of immortality as Peacock’s flighty tome. Which is not not to say it’s terrible, it’s just not particularly good either. Its longevity hinges on the author’s links to the romantic poets, and the fact that the novel is a gentle satire on Shelley and Byron. What little plot there is revolves around the book’s protagonist, Scythrop, the heir to a gloomy East Anglian pile, Nightmare Abbey, getting caught up in romantic misadventures with two different women, Marionetta O’Carroll and Celinda Toobad. As the names suggest, the novel doesn’t take itself too  seriously. The author has a lot of fun reproducing the pretentious conversations had by Scythrop and his various visitors, another manifestation of the way in which the British adore anti-intellectualism. And fair enough, one might think, because the book has a certain wry charm. In the 21st century it might have made for a 2 series Netflix comedy, à la Addams Family, one of those whose first series is an unexpected success but then fizzles out by the time it gets to second series, with the realisation that there wasn’t that much meat on the bone in the first place. 

the third bank of the river: power and survival in the twenty-first century amazon (w chris feliciano arnold)

Feliciano Arnold’s book is the result of various trips to the Amazon, during the period between the 2014 World Cup and the Rio Olympics of 2016. Using Manaus as a base, the book is composed of several strands. The fate of the indigenous peoples is a central plank, but this is incorporated into a concise understanding of the forces at work in the Amazon, much of them finding their focal point in Manaus. Illegal deforestation, drug smuggling, dam building, mining, and the never-ending conflict between ‘virgin territory’ and the pressing demands of modernity. One of the most effective aspects of Feliciano’s book is the way in which he begins to establish the back story behind the myth of the ‘primitive’ tribe, explaining how tribes located in what is now Brazil have used the jungle as a safe haven to retreat to, a haven which has always been eroded but even more so now, when mining concessions and drug smuggling routes mean that the non-native people are penetrating deeper and deeper into the jungle. The book is also very effective on the debate over whether ‘unconctacted’ tribes should be left to their own devices or whether there’s a moral obligation to try and protect them before danger strikes. It’s a discursive read, with some engaging personal touches. Feliciano, (with his Brazilian blood), isn’t scared to go into the bars where the gringos wouldn’t normally go, and knock on doors which few gringo journalists would be interested or willing to approach. It’s this capacity to go deep not just into the jungle, but into more ‘Brazilian’ world which is parasitically feeding off the jungle which lends the book an added dimension. The line between the “virgin” Amazon and encroaching “civilisation” is one of the most urgent pressure points on the planet, but this can’t be studied from above. The forces which determine where this line is drawn (and it’s being constantly redrawn) can only be understood on the ground, talking as far as is possible to the ones who are pushing that line further and further into territory that was previously the preserve of the indigenous peoples. 

an elephant sitting still (w&d hu bo)

Film and context. I’ve just read the wiki entry for Hu Bo, the film’s director, writer and editor. One paragraph instantly throws the four hours of film I watched yesterday into a different light, a prism through which this film is bound to be seen forever more. 

The film itself takes place over the course of a single day. Á la Magnolia or Amores Perros,  it interweaves the stories of four characters in a backwater Chinese city, one which has yet to reap the full benefits of China’s economic transformation. The city is post-industrial, cold, filmed with a washed-out grade, as though colour itself struggles to thrive in this environment. Over the course of four hours we participate in this fateful day, when Wei Bu accidentally kills the brother of a local gangster, Yu Cheng, who himself has witnessed a man committing suicide at the start of the film, after discovering that the gangster has slept with his partner. Death stalks the screen; sooner of later it seems its going to catch up with at least one of the protagonists. 

Four hours is a lot of screen time. The pace is wilfully slow. There are myriad shots of the back of people’s heads as they walk towards the next point in their day’s journey. The director compels us to experience the same lassitude, the same sense of creeping, omniscient despair, that his characters face. Secondary characters, parents or school staff, live in a vortex of rage or petty corruption. When the hunter Yu Cheng and hunted, Wei Bu finally meet, this despair gives way to a Beckettian humour. Both laugh bleakly together at the absurdity of the game they have been caught up in. The poetic motif of a motionless elephant, which is part of a travelling circus in another city, nearby, unites them. For both, life is like the elephant, a vast, useless alien which just sits around, provoking curiosity by the mere fact of its existence. And, of course, the film itself is also the elephant, this extended, unwieldy body of time, which seeks to be so vast that it encapsulates every aspect of these characters’ harsh lives, but does so going nowhere. It too has provoked curiosity by the mere fact of its presence, an unwieldy suicide note.

Because, I learn from Wiki, Hu Bo himself is no longer with us. He committed suicide after the film was completed. A startling fact which seems to warp the density of this movie, giving it an immortal element. The director might not walk the earth anymore, but he lives on through his art. As though it is sending a sign that the sitting elephant can and will move at some point. And when it does, be careful, because it will tread on you.

the years (annie ernaux, tr. alison l strayer)

Ernaux’s text is the kind that one would love to be paid to write. Fragments of a life, bottled up in some kind of a chronological order, and served up on the plate. It’s a rambling, sub-Proustian voyage which captures the rapid scale of change post-war, the loss of innocence that came with the digital age, the sexual revolution and the highs of May ’68, the anti-climax that followed May ’68, and haunting of post-68. Ernaux’s personal experience is mapped onto the changing position of women within her society, one which allows her to break with the model inherited from her parents, and essentially relive her twenties in her forties. Everything is in there, from philosophers to politicians, from Concorde to 911. Small details like a solar eclipse unexpectedly resonate, “Blind faces raised to the sky seemed to await the coming of god or the pale rider of the Apocalypse. The sun reappeared and people clapped. There wouldn’t be another solar eclipse until 2081 and we would be long gone.” She’s also unafraid to address the rise of identity politics: “One no longer heard the words “goodness” or “good people”. Pride in what one did was substituted for pride in what one was - female, gay, provincial, Arab, Jew, etc.” There’s a laconic quality to much of her writing which allows Ernaux to flirt at the edges of her themes, never quite disclosing her personal take on them, letting them ride on the froth of her prose, leaving the reader never quite knowing where the wave will fall. 

the irishman (d scorsese, w steven zaillian)

What a strange experience it watching The Irishman. A bloated film, in keeping with late Scorsese, that has its high points and its low points. Which is woefully self-indulgent, but has moments of quiet genius. It was said that The Joker, which I have yet to see, was a homage/ pastiche of early Scorsese, but the same might be said of The Irishman. Much of the film is like watching someone doing Scorsese well enough to feel as thought they truly studied at the feet of the master, knowing that they could never quite attain to the standards he set. The same could be said for the acting; De Niro is too old to really carry the menace he once did, (although Pesci pulls it off), and Pacino has long since moved beyond being capable of being directed, treating acting like a party piece, which perhaps it is. We go not to watch great performances, but to watch the ghost of great performances. It’s not all that different from going to see the Stones or Dylan in concert. Perhaps the strongest acting comes from De Niro right at the end, when he’s confronting his weakness, and imminent death.

Indeed, this is an old man’s film. It makes one sorry in a way that the director didn’t follow the example of one of his idols, Kurosawa, and do a version of Lear. In the final half hour, when all the deeds have been done, De Niro is alone with his frailty and all of a sudden a tenderness, totally out of keeping with the rest of the film, creeps in. Something more honest, more homespun. Beyond the gratuitous budget-busting explosions and the ham-fisted violence. The scene with the nurse, whom he asks if she knows who Hoffa is, has a surprising pathos. De Niro finally laughs at himself, the wannabe who history has outrun. All his enemies and allies (who are all potential enemies) are dead, and he’s left isolated, philosophical. There’s a jarring scene with a daughter who has barely appeared in the script, the counterweight to the under-developed storyline of his relationship with another daughter, Peggy, who banishes him for his wicked ways. There’s a great scene with a coffin-salesman. Everything feels as though it doesn’t quite hang together, as though Scorsese wants to tell a hundred stories and he’s only got space for three or four, which is one or two too many. 

However, this sequence is the film’s coda, which comes 200 minutes in. After a potted history of the mob with De Niro & co trying to act down their ages. Kennedy’s come and go. The same old story is played on the old joanna. If anything it makes one wonder why no-one has ever tried to film the political novels of James Elroy, who did all of this so much more convincingly. Maybe the novels defy the scripting process. The mobsters progress is ramshackle, predictable, melodramatic. Again, this seems more like decoration, a giant arena wherein the old timers can strut their stuff. We come for the Pacino grandstanding, the De Niro bum-rush or his little-man-caught-in-a-big-man’s-game-face. We come for Pesci’s squeaky well-dressed psychopath. We come for Keitel’s suave arrogant charm, but that is merely hinted at, as it feels as though his part must have been written out in the edit. People haven’t swooned over The Irishman because it’s a great film. They’ve swooned over the Irishman because it allows them to remember what a great film felt like, back in the day. 

chico: artista brasileiro (w&d miguel faria jr., w. diana vasconcellos)

One of the pleasures of having a local cinema is that you get to see films on the big screen you otherwise might not. I’m not a particular fan of Chico Barque, but it was a Monday night after football, there was nothing to eat in the house, so we moseyed out to Cinemateca in the middle of a rainstorm, enjoying the privilege of being able to take in a film without having to make any real effort. If I lived in London I wouldn’t have made it. It’s not the most extravagant of privileges, but let’s name it for what it is. The idea of privilege feels relevant to Chico Barque, a golden boy blessed with charm and looks who hit the big time at the age of 22, coming from a well-connected upper-middle class background. There’s not much regarding this in the film, but you can feel it behind the singer’s eyes, a sense of ‘how did I get to live such a charmed life?’ Of course, there’s no such thing as a charmed life, and his time in exile and participation in the struggle against the dictatorship becomes a key element in his story. The documentary functions on three levels. Firstly there’s an extended interview with the subject which is played out over the film’s near two hours. Then there are recurring versions of his songs, sung somewhat ironically in the Teatro Poiera, by celebrated Brazilian singers. All of this is broken up with archive footage. Then, towards the end, a sub-plot appears, perhaps, which is the remarkable story of Barque’s lost German brother. The camera crew follows him to Berlin for a fascinating if slightly tacked-on postscript where he discovers footage of the lost, now-dead brother. It feels as though there’s a whole other film here which the filmmakers have glimpsed, aware that it wasn’t going to fit into their film’s structure, but one with such an added poetic dimension that they felt the need to shoe-horn it in anyhow.

All of which is not to say that Chico: Artista Brasileiro isn’t a thoroughly competent and effective piece of documentary making. Above all for the way it recounts, perhaps even more than Barque’s musical genius, the history of a vast country and culture which exists, to a certain extent, at the margins. Barque himself relates a couple of self-effacing anecdotes about how little known he is in much of the world, in contrast to his iconic status in his homeland. The film offers an insight into the transformation of the country over the course of fifty years, from the post-war period to the fall of the dictatorship, revealing how much Barque’s art was formed and influenced by politics, in spite of the fact that by the end the singer says he’s seeking to retreat from engaging in any kind of political discourse. The film was initially released in 2015: it would be fascinating to know whether that position has changed now that politics have so rudely come back to haunt Brazil.

middle england (jonathan coe)

Coe’s novel unashamedly addresses the issue of Brexit. A married couple split up over the vote; the central character falls out with his father; families are divided. The toxic racist element that felt liberated by the vote is also represented, as a Lithuanian family feel forced to leave the country. The narrative is multi-character: at the centre is Benjamin, a listless part-time novelist whose initial attitude is strictly apolitical, but finds himself summoning up a toast of “Fuck Brexit” by the end. Around him are spun the stories of his family and his old school friends, one of whom is a political journalist with an inside take on the Cameron government. The sharpest conflict comes in the story of Sophie, Benjamin’s niece, whose marriage to Ian falters on the rocks of the referendum vote. All of this is told in an eminently readable, breezy prose. The fact that the novel is situated so adroitly within the context of recent British history makes it addictive. Do we even remember the Clegg-Cameron coalition anymore? It feels like it belongs to another century, although it’s less than a decade ago. The novel is peppered with references to the stuff of yesterday’s papers, from the Olympics opening ceremony to the murder of Jo Cox. For a British reader it’s like re-living history all over again. 

However, whilst the novel is addictive, one can’t help wondering if this is a useful lens through which to look at the issue which has rent the country in two. There’s something relentlessly convivial about Coe’s prose, one could even call it smug. As the novel flowed forwards towards a feel good finale, it made me question whether the words I was reading weren’t part of the problem the novel appears to be trying to identify and address. At the end of the book, the reader is off the hook. If he or she had ever questioned what was going on in the country over the past decade, those questions could be conveniently shelved by the most anodyne of endings, where Benjamin gets to wallow in the middle class bliss of opening a B&B in an ancient French farmhouse, which he can afford because he’s cashed in on the London property market boom. There’s not a hint of self-awareness on the part of the writer about the irony of his protagonist being able to drift through life and emerge in some kind of liberal Eden merely as a result of the historical accident of his birthplace and his willingness to play a system that has rewarded shrewd property investors. Even the warring party, Sophie and Ian, are offered an upbeat conclusion. There’s no price paid by any of the characters for the chaos which has been unleashed on the country. This is no Swiftian assault; it’s more like the Archers does Brexit. Entertaining in its way, but never as thought-provoking as it sets out to be. 

leto (w&d kirill serebrennikov, w. lily idov, michael idov, ivan kapitonov, natalya naumenko)

Leto means Summer in Russian. I picked this detail up from the subtitles. In the first twenty minutes of the film, there’s an exquisitely filmed beach sequence, when the youthful musician Victor is introduced to Maik, the world-weary Soviet rock star. The sequence is filmed with a diffuse, black and white grain which feels both nostalgic and like it could be happening tomorrow. The work of the DOP, Vladislav Opelyants, throughout the film is electric, achieving that rare quality, when you’re happy to watch the screen for the images alone. During the beach sequence, Maik sings a song  called Leto; a lazy, going-nowhere verse which drips with an insouciant cool. As though these people knew, back then in Leningrad, that you could listen to Lou Reed singing Walk on the Wild Side, but nothing could match the outlandish dream of being a rock and roll rebel in the USSR. 

There’s something very beautiful about the idea of Soviet rebellion (which reminded me of Limonov who I read thirty years ago). The film is set in the Leningrad punk and post-punk scene. Samizdat copies of Reed, Bowie, T-Rex, the Velvets, even Echo and the Bunnymen, are the currency of independent thought. Rock music is rigidly controlled by the authorities, who have to give their approval to lyrics and control the gigs. In this context, subversion is survival, smuggling the counter-culture in though sly lyrics and a deadpan gaze which hides the beating pulse. The songs are steeped in a Baudelaireian celebration of rock and roll, the home of the lazy, the degenerate, the drunkard. In the latter days of the Soviet empire, they get away with it, and Victor will go on to front Kino, one of the most successful Russian bands ever.

Indeed, if you’re Russian, this movie will have other resonances, reminiscent of Corbijn’s Control. Both Victor and Maik were stars who died young. Leto is loosely based around Maiik’s wife, Natasha’s attraction to Victor, making for a Jules et Jim narrative.  Serebrennikov’s film has a punky vitality which extends to several reworkings of classic favourites. Some of these interventions, adorned with graphic design touches, are more effective than others. A rumbustious fantasy sequence set to the Heads’ Psychokiller comes brilliantly out of the blue, taking the viewer by surprise. But more than these western songs, it’s the subtitled Russian tunes that quicken the pulse. The poetic roots of rock and roll reverberate. Pushkin was a rock star. So was John Clare. César Vallejo. All the young dudes carry the news.