parallel mothers (w&d almodóvar)

About a year ago, in one of the occasional semi-official quarantines which have peppered our lives to a lesser extent in Montevideo than in other parts of the world, we went on a mini Almodóvar spree, watching four of five of his back catalogue in a row. Some were strong, but others felt as though they were Almodóvar by numbers. Take a man or a woman on the edge of a crisis, introduce a charismatic co-star, see what happens. The very early work is perhaps as notable for the zest and energy that was present in the representation of a Spain emerging from the shadow of dictatorship as for the narratives themselves. Almodóvar was a coordinator of colour and high jinks who loved to be an agent provocateur.

I note all this, which is not to say that there have not been many a classic in the midst of his earlier and middle years, but because what is apparent is that this is a director who is just getting stronger with age. His stories become more humane and are touched by more subtlety as he has gone on. Parallel Mothers is the apotheosis of this. A film which looks at the issues of motherhood, relationships and history, blending them all together in a mezcla which probably shouldn’t work, but actually triumphs.

From a narrative point of view, one of the most interesting elements is what happens in the last twenty minutes. There are moments when Parallel Mothers is pure melodrama, as Cruz works out which partner she’s going to end up with. Just when you think that this decision will be the key dramatic resolution of the film, Almodóvar sidesteps it completely. The key dramatic resolution of this film is of the past with the present. The connection that needs to be resolved between the generations. There is something both subtle, crude and profound about the way in which Janis, Cruz’s character, can have an adulterous affair, then get involved with the real mother of her own child, then go back to the lover, and all this is, in the end, fine. Because there are greater wounds to be healed, and greater tragedies that need coming to terms with. In this, Almodóvar seems akin to the novelists Cercas or Marias, and one understands how profoundly the Spanish Civil War, the children of whose victims are still alive, still exerts its influence over the Spanish psyche.

All of this in a drama which is at once frothy and tragic, which has that Almodóvar flair, but also succeeds in talking about cot death and sexual abuse without ever turning the film into something didactic or heavy handed. His actresses and actors excel, but this cannot help but be because they are representing characters with an indisputable humanity. I read somewhere the other day that the film is on the verge of grossing a million pounds in the UK alone. Almodóvar’s art gets both more complex and more affecting, and the curious thing is that, even in the Anglo Saxon world, this makes for commercial success as well. The film is also testament to the virtues of a less commercial aspect of art, that of permitting the artist to evolve over decades, permitting us to watch how they refine their palette and expand their horizons. 

hangsaman (shirley jackson)

Hangsaman is one of those books that reward in the reflection as much as the reading. It’s a quasi-surreal tome which tells a story from the POV of a late teen woman-girl, Natalie, which veers between comic description of college life to nightmarish passages which intimate rape and psychological breakdown. The novel takes place at Natalie’s home, dominated by her rarefied, pseudo-intellectual father, and at the college where she is sent to. In the college she is both the odd one out but also the observer, whose ability to describe the absurdities and cruelties of college life permits Natalie the breathing space she needs to survive. This is a weird book, coming out of the suburban backwoods of post-war USA, hanging the strange Lynchian dirty washing on the line for the reader to gawp at. It’s Lolita told from the other side, where the psychological damage of people’s actions and the world’s hypocrisy flowers on the protagonist’s strange skin. 

vida de familia. (w&d josé luis font, w. enric ortenbach, arnau olivar)

Another in the list of lost films from the Franco era, I stumbled across Font’s family drama having a few free hours to spare on a passing visit to Madrid. It is an intriguing film, which looks at the way that the unit of the family served to stifle Spain with both its conservatism and its decadence. Eduardo is a doctor from a wealthy family who wants to open a clinic in an old house which has been left to go to ruins by a family who can’t think of anything to do with it. He and his forthright wife, Elisa, launch a campaign to get the family to permit this development, but his aunts and uncles are intransigent. The issue goes, in Dickensian style, to the courts, but no resolution seems imminent. The film is both an intimate portrayal of an upper class family, but also a sweeping portrait of late sixties Barcelona. A fascinating B story reveals the social divisions, as Eduardo’s dissolute cousin has an affair with the landlady of a bar, a relationship he’s terrified to reveal to his mother, the patrician Aurelia. The film is in black and white, which feels appropriate, but there’s one quietly astonishing sequence when Eduardo & Elisa visit the old house they want to recover. All of a sudden, Font switches to colour, the camera panning around the stately home and gardens which are in ruins, a compelling metaphor for a suffocating society letting past glories go to seed. 

el sicario (charles bowden & molly molloy)

Sicario is the story told in his own words of a Mexican man who worked for a major Cartel in the nineties before finding god and fleeing, aware that his life would be in constant jeopardy. The writers Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy met with the man along with filmmaker, Gianfranco Rosi, who recorded the interviews and later released a documentary. To those with a passing knowledge of the Mexican cartel world, which is also, as the book makes clear, the Mexican political world, the book’s material will be depressingly familiar. The account goes a long way towards confirming the way in which the police, military and political structures are effectively owned by the Cartels, each of which is a shark in shark filled waters, constantly in danger of being attacked itself.

Bowden writes an introduction to the book which gives a description of the man, commenting on his very ordinariness, his invisibility. This introduction suggests how easy it is for elements of this narco-terror to assimilate into society. It also provokes the frightening thought that these people, this violence, might already by present in your society or mine. Just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. The book also brought back memories of the insidious suggestion of the infiltration of this violence into daily life which we encountered in Michoacan. Both from the exaggerated police presence and also from the anecdotal evidence which constantly came our way, even though we were only there for ten days.

Ps: this is the other side of the coin to Don Winslow’s Power of the Dog, the more downbeat, working version of that writer’s more glamorised account of similar territory. 

la peste (camus)

Camus’ novels were mandatory reading when I was a teenager. La Peste possessed a mythic resonance, a book which talked about a past our grandparents knew, one which we were so lucky not to have experienced. The received idea that this is a novel about the war, and that the plague is a metaphor. Clearly, today, the metaphorical elements fade as we contemplate how Camus’ vision of the plague compares to our own version. In so many ways, it feels incredibly accurate in its depiction of the various stages of an epidemic, as well as the way in which it charts the psychological cost of the experience. Two things perhaps stand out. One is the way in which the internet has altered the experience. In comparison to the absolute isolation and claustrophobia of Oran’s plague, the internet has permitted us to experience our plague as a testing ground for what some would call the metaverse. Our world shrunk, in so far as planes and boats stopped moving, but the internet permitted a semblance of normality to be maintained, or even a new normality to be constructed. The second is that La Peste offers a heavily masculine view of the world that renders it, today, feeling as though it’s only offering a partial story. I recall, as that teenager, consuming the novel avariciously. Re-reading it I found much of the story, the detail and the characters, had stayed with me. But on a second read, it feels perhaps more limited in scope. The existential quest for meaning, or rather a reason to get out of bed in the morning, remains, but Camus’ philosophising feels less urgent now than it did then. Perhaps this is because I was only at the beginning then, I was grateful to find a writer willing to engage with these issues, guiding me towards the relevance of the everyday. Now that I have inhabited so many everydays, the novel’s Sisyphean defence of the value of a constant engagement with the banal demands of the daily struggle feels less inspiring. Furthermore, this is now an account of a life we have all lived over the course of these past two years, and Camus’s veneration of the small heroes, whilst apposite, feels tired. We want to move on, we want to start dreaming again. 

last night in soho (w&d edgar wright, w. krysty wilson-cairns)

There are obvious pleasures to be gleaned from spending time in Soho and Fitzrovia whilst sitting in a cinema in Montevideo. Wright does a decent job of bringing the barrio to life, revealing both its erstwhile glamour and seediness. He’s a director whose visual flair more than compensates for the occasional lumpiness of the plot, which feels like a vehicle for him to show off its dazzling set piece scenes. This doesn’t really feel like a horror movie and the CGI effects of massed banks of grey faceless men are perhaps one of the film’s weaker elements, but the tale of the ingenue in Soho has a timeless feel and is handled with more charm and less schmaltz than might have been expected. 

happy hour (marlowe granados)

Granados’ chirpy novel, another roman a clef, is the most recent addition to the NY tip I have been of late. It’s set in the mid-teens, and describes the adventures of Isa and Gala, two 21 year old friends who are living the high life on a zero budget, scraping by as they hang out with a kind of second-tier NY jetset. The book recounts one Summer in diary form. It is anecdotal and sub-Fitzgeraldian. In the acknowledgements there is a thanks to “Gay Gatsby for the inspiration, elegance, and cocktails”, and the world depicted is very much a Gatsbyesque demi-monde, which doesn’t appear to have changed that much in the course of a century. It’s a world populated by feckless wealth; selfish people with little generosity. The warmest character in the book is the Salvadorean restaurant owner who appears in the penultimate chapter, encouraging Isa to dance with her husband, who feels like a counterweight to all the book’s vain socialites, many of them the worst kind of posh British.

The book is anecdotal and doesn’t really go anywhere, beyond this scratching of the surface of wealth. All the same, it is an enjoyable read, and reminded me of life in my twenties in London. Cities feed off youth, they need it to reassure them that there is a future beyond the money. Isa and Gala’s splendid ligging brought back memories of desperately trying to scrape pennies together for the night out, and stories of characters who would move from private view to private view in order to eat and drink. Walking home with no money in one’s pockets for the nightbus, constantly walking the high wire of poverty, even as you tiptoe around the city’s circles of disgusting wealth. 

responsabilidad empresarial (corporate responsibility). (d. jonathan perel)

Jonathan Perel’s austere documentary is an exercise in cinematic minimalism. A series of single shot takes, clearly filmed from within a car, of Argentine factories or workplaces. Each  shot is accompanied by a voiceover giving details of the way in which the owners of the particular factory, (some of which are now abandoned or in disuse, others still operating), collaborated with the Argentine military dictatorship. The unseen voice lists the crimes associated with the factory, from laying off workers for their militancy to participating in the disappearance of workers, as well as the pay-off that the businesses received for having collaborated.

As mentioned it is an austere watch, cinema pared down to the bone, which almost seems to invite a debate as to whether this is the best way to address this subject matter or not. The great debate surrounding political or activist filmmaking is the question of how much it chooses to preach to the converted and how much it seeks to reach out to a wider audience. Perel’s film, which premiered at Berlin, is very much a niche watching experience. It is a document(ary), in the purest sense of that idea. It documents, with no attempt made to entertain or seduce. As such it’s doubtful it will convince anyone who does not have a vested interest in watching the film about the iniquities of dictatorships. But it will also linger in my mind far longer than many a soft-soap drama about the subject matter might have done. 

andy warhol a biography (wayne koestenbaum)

Wayne Koestenbaum’s biography of Warhol is an incisive account which blends fact and theory. As well as recounting the Warhol story from childhood though to untimely death, the author also explores the logic and inspiration behind the creative work of an artist almost as famous for being famous as he was for his art. The art was received in his lifetime as something between genius and kitsch, with no-one all that certain which was which. I wonder if Warhol’s fame is quite what it was when I was growing up. Warhol, both the name and the work, was an omnipresent point of reference in the late twentieth century, in part because of his association with some of the most cultish pop stars in the universe, in part because his art had an iconoclastic freshness. It feels as though the likes of Koons, Hirst, Emin and Holzer have to a certain extent displaced his position within the zeitgeist, just as they are waiting to be replaced now.

Koestenbaum’s biography is so telling because it takes the reader back to the work itself, both pinpointing why it was so radical and also offering an artistic vindication of the pieces. He notes how Warhol’s sensibility reflected the gay NY world he inhabited as a young man when homosexuality was still a crime, a locus where “rigorous conceptual artists, (were) pioneers in understanding how perverse sexuality interrupts the distinction between public and private space.” Warhol’s private/public working space, The Factory, emerged from this consciousness, a place where the outrageous could flower in private, where societal norms and aesthetic criteria could be reinvented. Koestenbaum is also great on the way that Warhol’s fascination with fame was paradoxical: “His goal was to make everyone famous—the creed of “Commonism”; a Foucaultian recognition of the previously repressed role of narcissism in the human psyche which now blooms in the world of Instagram. These days anyone can put a filter on their portraits, following in the footsteps of Warhol, the first person to really grasp the iconic power of distortion, reframing and idealisation in the age of mechanical (later digital) reproduction.

One can’t help thinking there ought to be a play about Warhol and Foucault hanging out together in a NY sauna, because Koestenbaum’s text highlights the way in which the artist was a visionary whose sexuality was fundamental to his ability to reimagine the world, as was perhaps the case with Foucault. There’s also a lovely moment where the book notes a connection between Warhol and George Grosz, who voted to include the young artist’s work in an exhibition. The links between Warhol’s portraits and Grosz’s caricatures seem retrospectively obvious, both using human features to comment on the socially determined vanity of the human species. 

dune (w&d villeneuve, w. jon spaihts, eric roth)

Villeneuve has always shown Wagnerian tendencies and Dune allows him to indulge these to his heart’s content. Sweeping battle formations, caricaturesque villains, titanic scale, finely moulded body armour, sacred swords. All these boxes and many more are ticked. I realise that this is an adaptation of a novel, but the directorial thumbprint is all over it.

A few random thoughts:

Iraq

Villeneuve has turned Dune into an allegory for the US imperial adventures in the Middle East. The references are not subtle, down to the interpolation of the Mahdi myth into the narrative. This world with its palm trees, its shifting sands, its veiled women, feels like it could be one of those slightly abortive Iraq films from a decade ago. Having said this, the message surrounding these signifiers remains confused. Who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? Because Chalamet’s princely Paul has a definite gringo feel, but he’s also the heroic epicentre of this narrative. In fact all the heroic characters have a gringo air to them, with Bardem’s maverick rebel commander being the strangely accented exception. Meanwhile, the lead villain is resurrected as a pool of oil. The point of this is that the film offers no clarity on its take on late imperial USA: it just throws a few semiotic signifiers into the mix and lets them stew.

Global Warming

There’s much made in the film about the way in which the Dune planet might have been a paradise but has been turned into a desert hell by the quest for spices (ie oil - the actual process of extracting oil along with the demonic worms seem redolent of fracking). Sous la pavee la plage, or, under the sand, the green. Chalamet and famille live in a verdant, Atlantic land, which they give up in order to pursue the riches inherent in the spice trade. What all this means is anyone’s guess and it there is an eco-parable lurking here, it’s also buried beneath the sands of its Wagnerian hero-worship narrative.

Desert

One of the strongest aspects of Dune is its realisation of the desert, with some remarkable cinematography by Greig Fraser. However, the one thing that I felt on emerging from the air-conditioned Cinemateca into the hottest day of the year, was that the film never succeeded in conveying the claustrophobic, stifling sensation of pure heat, which is fundamental to the idea of the desert and the narrative itself. There’s too much going on for this sensation to ever emerge and seize the audience in its grip. Again this speaks of the use of image and signifier over any real immersion in the film’s professed themes. We can see that we’re in the desert, but it never really feels like a desert, because on the whole this film feels more like walking through a tastefully designed shopping mall full of beautiful customers.

Infantilisation

“I’m all lost in the supermarket”, they sang once upon a time. That song, it seems now, feels like a lament for the way that the commodification of life seeks to strip it of meaning. Dune is a well executed piece of cinema, with some splendid design work and 3D effects. The post production budget must have made the execs’ eyeballs swim with the kind of fear the film never really conveys, for all of Zimmer’s intent to ramp up the tension with his score. However, in the end, what does all this money and glitz actually buy? The reference to Wagner made me think of the finest use of that composer’s music in modern US cinema, in a film that was also about US imperial adventures, but one which actually sought to comment on the reality of the Vietnam war, a gruesome, absurd reality that reflected the dark side of modern USA. Dune just uses these notions as wallpaper to cover the empty cinema wall. Content has been Baudrillarded, it has been stripped of any intent at meaning. We are all children, waiting for the next thrill. Personally I blame George Lucas.