el desfile del amor/ the love parade (sergio pitol, tr. george henson)

Pitol’s rangy whodunit offers a vivid portrait of DF from both 1942 and twenty years later. The narrative is constructed around the enquiries of a historian into a murder at a house split into apartments in a fashionable barrio, during the war. The historian was a child living in the house at the time. Now married with two children, he has been living in the UK, but plans to return to his roots. The premise allows the writer to introduce a medley of colourful characters from the Mexican capital’s arts and social scene, highlighting its cosmopolitan nature. The narrative is slightly stop-start, and something of a shaggy dog story, but it gives an insight into the feverish atmosphere of wartime Mexico City.

la maison sous les arbres (d. rené clément,, w. sidney buchman, eleanor perry, arthur cavanaugh)

A star vehicle for Faye Dunaway, this is a curious mash-up of US actors in Paris stuck in a ludicrous plot. The setting lends a glamorous quality to a narrative in which a shadowy, very seventies, ‘organisation’ is controlling Dunaway’s husband, for reasons that are never particularly clear. In general the film seems to have been set up to permit Dunaway a few set-piece scenes. You can’t help but laugh when she has to make a getaway from her neighbour’s flat in a nightie and the neighbour hands her some thigh length red leather boots and an exotic coat, which just happen to be on-hand. In a similar vein, the film opens, with a hint of Atalante, with a long sequence of Dunaway drifting through Paris’ canals looking moody on a barge. As such it becomes an intriguing study of how the star system both permits and limits the making of movies, in France as in the USA. 

ugetsu (d. kenji mizoguchi, w. hisakazu tsuji, akinari ueda, matsutarô kawaguchi, yoshikata yoda, isamu yoshii)

Mizoguchi’s fable is far darker than one might expect. It’s a long way from Disney, in spite of its fantastical nature. The film shifts through the gears as it narrates the story of an ambitious potter, caught up in the wars of medieval Japan. Moving between comic and tragic registers, it finally settles in a fantasy world of spirits, incorporating a spiritual embodiment of death and what death might mean. The director delights in the spectral, the ghost ship that drifts through the mist to find us all, sooner or later.

london and the south east (david szalay)

Seeing the author awarded the Booker, and investigating his back catalogue, this seemed like a good entry point. A novel set in London in the world of telephone sales, and, as the title suggests, the South East. It’s a world I once had some knowledge of. My first “job” in London was in an institution very similar to the one where the protagonist, Paul Rainey, works, selling advertising space in spurious magazines. Unlike Paul’s world, which is white and predominantly masculine, based in Holborn, my workplace was in Cricklewood, and my most notable companions were from Ghana and Nigeria, as well as Meli Rome, an Italian former model who had a bedsit in Knightsbridge and had fallen on hard times. It was a world shadowed by the cynicism of the world Szalay depicts, but also a gateway to the more cosmopolitan universe of London, which also included IRA pubs and old colonels.

I only lasted a month, and was rubbish at it. Rainey has lasted 15 years, even if he too appears to be rubbish at sales. Something he recognises and wants to escape from. The novel follows his descent into a tepid midlife crisis. Paul, like his colleagues, his partner Heather, and anyone else he meets, is not a sympathetic figure. It feels as though we’re skirting the edges of the land knowns as Amis-country, a jaundiced trek through the sufferings of the lower middle class, men who spend their lives in pubs, women who are decidedly secondary figures. The book rolls along efficiently, and Paul’s misadventures boil up towards a comic denouement. Nevertheless, this feels like the kind of novel that the British literary establishment adores, a somewhat patronising peregrination leading to a foreseeable resolution. 

die my love (w&d lynne ramsay, w. alice birch, enda walsh)

It turns out that Scorsese, who sent Ariana Harwicz’s novel to Jennifer Lawrence, and I have similar taste. The complexity of translating first person prose to all-seeing-eye cinema was always going to be challenging, and the film has a hit-and-miss approach, with moments of visceral Ramsay-esque filmmaking and other moments where the story just seems to rumble along. Lawrence loves being a fucked-up mother, something she has a real flair for, but in some ways the star turn is Sissy Spacek’s. She retains a luminosity which seems made for the screen, a counterpoint to the film’s emotional extravagance. 

mirrors no. 3 (w&d christian petzold)

Petzold paints his films as much as he writes them. The value of a scene without dialogue, or a scene boxed in music, an actor’s look, a raised eyebrow, all these things are part of an understanding of the subtle power of the image. Language only serves to join the dots, and sometimes the story is richer for the dots not being joined. His films tend to be chamber pieces. Mirrors no.3 is a four hander. The premise is simple. A mother whose daughter recently died meets a woman who is lost. The equation works until it doesn’t. Whilst Paula Beer and Barbara Auer fulfil their roles beautifully, the film is notable for the performances of the two secondary male leads. With less to work with, Matthias Brandt and Enno Trebs conjure concise, astute portraits of men not necessarily cut out for emotional complexity facing up to a situation where their masculine virtues serve little purpose. The quiet desperation is captured by actors and director with the skill of a great portrait painter. Mirrors No.3 is an elliptical, cryptic, obvious, and quietly brilliant study of grief.

war and war (lászló krasznahorkai, tr. george szirtes)

László Krasznahorkai looks in his younger photos a bit like Thom Yorke. There’s something of the recondite, complex musicianship of Radiohead in the prose of Krasznahorkai, which drives around in circles looking for an exit that never opens up. So the driver starts talking about how he’s been driving in circles for hours, spinning plates, and how the way things are going petrol consumption is going to be the end of the world, but he can’t help it, he still needs to find a way out and if he stops the car that’s never going to happen, so he has to keep going and if he does ever find a way out he knows it’s going to lead to the great revelation of why the world is neither round nor shaped in a manner that anyone could ever possibly imagine. A secret some people have known at various times in history which keeps getting misplaced or forgotten, because the world is an amnesiac structure, but if he can ever find a way out of this circular motion, these circular structures, then he might just let us in on the secret, if the narcos don’t narcolepse us first, because they too want the secret or the money or the car or your soul. And the narcos usually get what they want, because that is the way of history.

In short, a hypnotic read. 

lights in the dusk (w&d kaurismäki)

The film opens with a group of Russians discussing Russian literature, naming Gorky, Pushkin and Tolstoy. This sets up the most Dosteyevskian of the director’s films. The narrative follows the grim fate of Koistinen, a night watchman who is targeted by a femme fatale in a honey trap, setting him up as the fall guy when the people she works for steal jewels from the site he is supposed to be guarding. Things keep going from bad to worse for Koistinen. He encounters fate’s barbs with a stoicism that seems almost perverse. The Helsinki which Kaurismäki shows is one that has become ‘modernised’. Neon and new builds dominate. But the space for human kindness has shrunk. Whilst retaining Kaurismäki’s deadpan humour, this film feels closer to his nordic neighbour Bergman in tone and mournfulness. 

i hired a contract killer (w&d kaurismäki, w. peter von bagh)

There is an economy to everything that occurs in a Kaurismäki movie. Behind the simplicity, the naive dialogue, there is a carefully curated colour palette, sound design, camera angle. The storytelling feels simple, but engrossing. As though the director’s roots stretch back to the silent era, when movies had to narrate without the assistance of language. The medium was contingent on the image. In a sense the greater the absurdity of the tale (in this instance Jean-Pierre Leaud hiring a contract killer to kill himself, a job he can’t do on on his own), the more it plays into Kaurismäki’s cinematic ethos. This is cinema beyond naturalism. The careful staging, the artful repetition of specific shots, the emphasis on the falseness of cinema, its constructive tendencies, allows the director to reveal there are other ways of telling film stories, reminding us that film is a hieroglyphic language all of its own, not so far removed from the glyphs found in Egyptian tombs.

The other striking aspect of this particular film is its depiction of a lost London, the London before the nineties blew up. When bomb sites might still pepper the urban terrain, when flats which would later be worth a million pounds were fleapits, before Docklands became Canary Wharf. (Which once again strangely makes me think of the Long Good Friday.) Leaud’s Henri loses his job of fifteen years due to privatisation and he is tarred as a foreigner and signed off with a Five Pound fake gold watch. Margi Clarke says that the working class has no homeland. The denouement takes place in the cemetery where Marx is buried. The film depicts a world lost to turbo-capitalism and property speculation, a world I fleetingly knew before it was redeveloped beyond recognition, even if the Warwick Castle still serves pints on Portobello Road. 

hamlet goes business (w&d aki kaurismäki, w. shakespeare)

On Friday we were lucky enough to attend a talk by the Argentine philosopher, Eduardo Rinesi on Shakespeare. Much of the talk focussed on Hamlet as a bridge between the renaissance world of machiavelli, and the coming world of the enlightenment, signalled by the work of Hobbes. Hamlet acts as a hinge between these two worlds, which saw the evolution of the idea of the contract, both legal and social, as society moved away from the blood feud, the revenge tragedy. The talk was engrossing and entertaining, and suggested echoes in the evolution of Latin American society, in a world where clowns roost on the political stage and seize power.

All of which set up perfectly Kaurismäki’s take on the tale. Aside from a twist at the conclusion, which could be said to lend a more Marxist take to the narrative, Kaurismäki stays faithful to Shakespeare. The originality comes from two elements: positing the story in the world of business (similarly to Kurosowa), where contemporary figures squabble to control a business empire; and the ingenuity required to relocate the play in a cinematic near-present. The former allows Claudius the priceless moment of suggesting he is sending Hamlet to London to negotiate with ‘Murdoch’, testament to the omnipresence of the Australian in the shaping of modern culture. As the writers of Succession realised, the modern globalised business world is fertile territory for Shakespearian drama. It would be interesting to learn if Jesse Armstrong is a fan of Kaurismäki.

As for the ingenuity, the director employs his now accustomed blend of deadpan humour and simplicity. If a gun is useful, he uses a gun. If poison works best, he poisons a drink or a chicken. The film flirts with realism, (notably during the titles and credits) whilst constructing its own logic, permitting characters to do whatever is needed to advance the plot. There are few exterior shots, but when Hamlet appears framed against a shipyard he has saved, it has a real impact. (And strangely makes me think of the Long Good Friday.) Kaurismäki is seeding ideas here about manufacturing, trade, globalisation and capitalism. Ideas which are often explored in his work, but tend to go under the radar, as audiences revel in his downtrodden characters, punkish sensibility and smiley Nordic misanthropy.