close up (w&d abbas kiarostami)

The playful intellectualism of Iranian cinema seems to have echoes in the mind games of Rio Plantense cinema. This is what happens when you yoke cerebral educated filmmakers who don’t have a capitalist imperative to the artform. See also Communist era Poland.  There’s something Borgesian about Close-Up, with its imagined film within a film and its impersonating director. But there’s also a tragic social history there, as the impersonator, Hossain Sabzian, a film lover with no hope of ever making a film, indulges his Walter Mitty life for a while. Sabzian is so disarmingly charming and unassuming, playing himself in the movie, that you cannot help but root for him. The humanism that underpins Kiarostami’s vision is also indicative of Iranian cinema’s progressive agenda, which seems so little in keeping with the country’s official or apparent politics over the course of the last thirty years. In addition, the very fact that Sabzian’s fraud is constructed around the fame of a director speaks of a society that  values cinema in a way that the West does not. Even our most famous directors, the likes of Nolan, Mendes or Macqueen, are unlikely to be recognised in the improbable event they decided to go rogue and travel on public transport. 

the woman in the dunes (d. hiroshi teshigahara, w. kôbô abe, eiko yoshida)

Curry and I went to see this at the NFT all those years ago. No idea why we chose to go, a blind whim, or perhaps he had done his research. It was, in its way, a revelatory viewing experience which shaped our thinking on The Boat People just as much as Cortazar & co. Little did we realise, cinema ingenues that we were back then, that no-one in the UK was either going to be interested or impressed by a film referencing Teshigahara. As ever, it was a trip returning to see a film that has lingered in the memory over the course of twenty years. The near sadistic brilliance hasn’t waned a bit. I couldn’t help thinking about what the cast and crew must have gone through to film in this relentless jungle of sand. An almost Herzogian process. In many ways this is a classic horror movie. Man who is hoodwinked by callous locals, held captive against his will, starved and brought to the edge of sanity through thirst, flees only to get caught in quicksand. And yet, as the title suggests, it is also a warped love story, of the kind that appears to recur so frequently in Japanese culture. 

the man without a past (w&d kaurismaki)

Kaurismaki’s cinema really doesn’t feel as though it ought to work in the 21st century. It feels like the lost child of the silent era. The photography is beautifully crude. The colour palette is unashamedly contrived. The dialogue lacks any obvious subtext. The stories are simple, without any of the derivations or complications so beloved of modern scriptwriting. It feels like the anti-Nolan, if you like, whose bombastic cinema is the apotheosis of what the movies, even ‘serious’ movies have become. And yet, Kaurismaki’s cinema is always an unadorned delight. Simplicity, as his fellow Nordic savant, Fosse, also understands, has a power that all the machinations of the world struggle to compete with. The Man without a Past is yet another example of this, a fable which feels timeless, which nevertheless succeeds in communicating so much about the nature of identity, and its construction, a sly peaen to the IG generation, all of them deadset on creating themselves from scratch. It can be done, but it helps if someone smashes you over the head with a baseball bat first.  

perfect days (w&d wenders, w. takuma takasaki)

Daily life is a repetitive strain syndrome. Sometimes it feels ok, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes, just maybe, it feels great. The beauty of Wenders’ film is the way, in telling the story of Hirayama, a toilet cleaner in Tokyo, he captures this so perfectly. Film is generally about dramatic action. Plot points. Development. Whenever these threaten to appear in Perfect Days, Wenders and co-writer Takaski rein them in. What matters about this film, what makes it special, isn’t what happens. It’s what doesn’t happen. Not many filmmakers get to the point where they’re permitted to explore this kind of vibe. I for one am thankful that in this instance, someone has given Wenders money to do just that. I could watch this film a hundred times and never get bored.

Ps I got a counterpoint to this on my first night back in the UK from Mr Curry, who said that the more he thought about the film the more it got on his nerves. In is view, a film about a toilet cleaner  who just happens to have a wealthy background and drives around playing their favourite songs was the kind of project overprivileged males dream up in fancy hotel rooms… and he might have a point…

swimming underground (mary woronov)

Watching Wenders’ Perfect Days, with its nods to the VU, Lou Reed et al, one can’t help thinking about how influential that music and that time has become. There is something about the dirty nihilism of New York in the Warhol era, an era of washed out art-as-capital, that has coloured the way we in the West perceive the world. The maw of the great superpower, where a perverse, sado-masochisitic consciousness flowered in filthy needle-strewn rooms, driving the engine that makes the rich richer, turning a soup can into a million bucks, laughing in the face of honest toil. In a way this is also the world of Trump, the fast buck, the cheap con. Or rather, this was the environment in which the Trumps of this world could flourish. A few of these rich Nuyoricans drift around the edge of Woronov’s captivating description of her time as part of the Warhol inner circle. They hang out with Andy, knowing that the more the works of art they buy from him are inflated, the richer they, the owners, will become. She has little time for them. From a suburban background, Woronov is fascinated by the decadence and strangeness of the characters she comes across, hating them as much as she loves them. She shows the world as dirty and degrading, with little of the glamour that has subsequently been bestowed on it. The lives of impoverished artists and drug addicts are always more glamorous in the movie than IRL. Woronov describes how she herself fell into a drug addled purgatory which neutered her moral compass (in one notable chapter she tries and fails to kill her groupie) and lead her to tread the fine line between survival and its opposite. She later moved from NY to LA, where at least she wasn’t constantly on the verge of killing herself. Through all this, Warhol glides like a grey ghost, the shrewdest of operators in a world whose true value he alone grasped. 

los colonos (w&d felipe gálvez, w. antonia girardi, mariano llinas)

The story of Red Pig, the Scottish mercenary and Indian killer Alex MacLennan, is one we came across when we visited Punta Arenas. The savage war that was waged against the Selk’nam in Tierra del Fuego, on both sides of the border, is the central pillar of Gálvez’ curious film, which follows in the footsteps trodden by Théo Court’s poetic Blanco en Blanco, also featuring Alfredo Castro. Los Colonos is split into two parts, the first describing one of Maclennan’s savage trips, the second reflecting on this seven years later. Camilo Arancibia’s wistful mestizo, Segundo Molino is the connecting link between the two parts, when a Santiago politician arrives to question him about Maclennan’s terrible crimes, provoking in Camilo and his wife the question of what it means to be Chilean as the nation celebrates its centenary. There’s a sense at times that the film doesn’t quite know what it wants to be: a mixture of Western, social commentary, historical testament. There’s even an apocalyptic sequence featuring a Scottish soldier who appears to have gone full Kurtz, (played by old acquaintance Sam Spruell). Perhaps it’s the presence of Mariano Llinas in the screenwriting team that leads to the inclusion of so many fascinating detours and side avenues: the sequence at the end of the world felt like it could quite happily have made for a whole film on its own. Maclennan, the central figure, drops out of the narrative before the final act; the conflict between him, the Texan and Segundo is arbitrarily curtailed. This final act feels relatively disconnected from the aesthetic and tone of all that has gone before, at once more assured now that the dialogue is not in English, but more stately, consisting essentially of two long set piece scenes. It might also be relevant to the film’s unevenness that its financing has come from so many different territories, many of them a long way away from the land of the Selk’nam. In spite of this unevenness, Los Colonos is always watchable, even if it feels as though, in the shadow of the overwhelming scenery, it sometimes pulls its punches. 

the straight story (d. lynch, w. john roach, mary sweeney)

The Straight Story, which the director interestingly doesn’t claim a writing credit for, is a homespun tale of americana, the apple pie version of Lynch. It’s the flip side of his dark America, something that the imagery of the sprinkler early on, that keynote of Blue Velvet, reminds us of. It seems fair enough that Lynch, the great dissector of the dark underbelly of his country, should also honour it in this fashion, and Alvin Strait’s journey towards reunion with his estranged brother is genuinely moving, as evinced by the round of applause at the film’s conclusion from a packed Cinemateca audience. However, there were times when it felt as though what we were witnessing was the US brand of Soviet social realism. The tractor itself feels like a signifier that could come from either side of the Cold War divide, and it encapsulates those things the two superpowers had in common. Vast lands that look inwards more comfortably than outwards. Countries whose values are defined by their rural heartlands, whose great cities are outliers rather than cornerstones of empire. The endless plains of central russia map on to the endless great plains. Alvin’s journey pays homage to the more homely values of the USA - this is a world without villains, drug taking, or Indians to kill. The sentimentality of Lynch’s vision here pays tribute to the soft power of these supposed US values, and if it wasn’t for all the times he has defrocked those values, this film might have felt like propaganda. 

wild at heart (w&d lynch, w. barry gifford)

Lynch lets his hair down. One of Lynch’s greatest talents is the use of dramatic tension. Constructing a scenario where you expect terrible things to happen, and holding off and holding off until, finally, they do, or they don’t. He is a master of mood, knowing that the audience is trapped in the cinema, they can’t escape, and he can persecute them as much as he wants. There is something sadistic about horror, and Lynch, genial figure though he is, knows how to exploit his dark side. Yet, in Wild at Heart, the director chooses to forego this. From the opening sequence, where Sailor kills his would-be assassin in brutal fashion, it’s all blowsy surface action, dialled up to twelve. The Cape Fear reference, which Scorsese would later echo, tells us we’re headed on a wild ride, which isn’t going to have any great subtlety. Cage and Dern have a ball, overacting to their heart’s content, full on Dennis Hopper mode from the word go. It’s an end-of-the-eighties movie, big shoulder pads, Duran Duran, that kind of aesthetic. Post the politics of the seventies, that brief spell between the Cold War and 911 when mindless violence could still somehow be portrayed as more innocent. Something Lynch revels in here, not least in the decapitation of Bobby Peru, an iconic moment for a director giving himself free ride to go over the top. In some ways it feels like the work of an auteur who has temporarily lost their way, but nonetheless is happy to be lost, to go out on a limb in some faraway Texas holdout. We tend to look back at a director’s career and impose a pattern of conscious and coherent decision-making on it, but the film industry doesn’t work that way, and Wild at Heart feels like an outrider. 

the elephant man (w&d lynch, w. christopher de vore, eric bergren)

Lynch’s adaptation of the Victorian tale is a surprisingly tender one. It is underpinned by Hurt’s performance as the sensitive monster, who never raises his voice. In a sense this is the anti-monster film, where the monsters are those who would take advantage of John Merrick, and the society itself. The film becomes a beautifully realised Victorian fever dream, full of dissolves to black and vignettes. Lynch takes great care over these set pieces. The cinematography feels like an extension of the fierce monochrome of Eraserhead, fleshed out with a glorious array of tremulously sensitive British actors. Gielgud, Freddie Jones, Hannah Gordon, etc all complementing Hopkins’ beautifully restrained performance as the doctor who discovers the humanity of the elephant man and saves him. In a way the film seems to signpost a path that Lynch chose to forego, using a more classical narrative structure and leaving the surreal on the surface, as a kind of false lead. Because this isn’t so much a film about deformity as it is a film about humanity, its kindnesses and its cruelty.

Interesting IMDB note: The actor Frederick Treves  appears in The Elephant Man (1980) and shares the same name as the doctor who took John Merrick into the hospital (Frederick Treves 1853-1923). Dr. Treves was actor Frederick Treves' great uncle in real life.

voyager (nona fernández tr. natasha wimmer)

Another Chilean tome which mines the alignment of the Atacama and the stargazers with the dark history of the dictatorship. In this case Fernandez participates in an Amnesty project to rename distant stars after a group of activists who were disappeared by the Pinochet regime. In the book, she mediates on the arbitrary nature of star signs; the process of growing up under the influence of the dictatorship; her mother’s sickness; how we might want the world to be perceived by extra terrestrials. Particularly fascinating is the way the writer investigates the notion that our genetic make up is connected to the very foundation of the universe itself, something successive generations of creatures, leading to humans, all share, once again reminding ourselves of what a mess we have made of this planet, where every individual has so much in common with every other individual, neighbours all of us within our tiny barrio in the giant megalopolis which is the universe. In spite of which man’s cruelty towards fellow man continues to flourish.