Star & Shadow

Petrov’s Flu     Kiril Serebrennikov (2021; Russia) Semyon Serzin, Chulpan Khamatova

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 28 Feb 22; ticket: £10.75

the country’s at war

Kiril Serebrennikov’s ‘Petrov’s Flu’ is a graphic depiction of the collective state of mind that fuelled the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February ‘22.

With colourisation that soaks the film in a sick liverish yellow hue, life in Russia is depicted through the filter of an alcohol induced jaundiced haze. Kiril Serebrennikov’s scenario (based on a novel by Alexey Salnikov, which I haven’t read) is a dispatch from the front line of the Russian psyche: all is derangement. Reality is an hallucinogenic spectre, experienced as a constant state of fear characterised by paranoiac acts of violence. Everything is as it seems: a collective death trip.

Serebrennikov’s movie is divided into two parts: the first part shot in colour; the second section in black and white. My opening paragraphs describe the first part of ‘Petrov’s Flu’ which calls up the subconscious forces abroad in Russia evoking visceral brutal fantasies projected onto life. The second section, as befits its black and white patina more or less indulges the flip side of Russian violence: sentimentality – with the action centring on and around a ‘Snow Queen’ New Year children’s party from long ago.

It’s the first 90 bilious minutes of ‘Petrov’s Flu’ that enthralled me as Serebrennikov reveals his Russia, the Russia that had finally taken action against the propagation of Serebrennikov’s terrifying vision and sentenced him to 18 months of house arrest. It was immediately after this sentence was served that Serebrennikov made this film: a response.

‘Petrov’s Flu’ – the first section – links together albeit ambiguously a series of violence splattered sequences – opening the film with the local bus service, set on a bus from hell. The bus is crowded, sulpherously lit, and dominated by a monstrous woman conductor presiding over a set of passengers whose unprovoked utterances in foul language comprise streams of pure malice. As Petrov stands coughing his guts up on one side of the vehicle we hear the intermittent warped banter, expressing hatred of foreigners, cursing liberalism and the state of Russia, which echo across in perfect resonance with Putin’s resentments and obsessions. Then the cut: the bus stops, the doors open, Petrov gets off at a small square where suspects – Jews Uzbeks foreigners etc have been rounded up. Handed a submachine gun, Petrov fires at the group killing them all. Coughing hacking he climbs back into the bus which lurches forward into the night.

Central to Serebrennikov’s concept is life in Russia as delirium: all is hallucination all is real. This delirium has a literary precursor: it is certainly Dostoevsky. With strong pointers in particular to: Raskolnikov (coughing sickness permeates ‘Crime and Punishment’), the atmosphere that suffuses ‘The Demons’ (both ‘Petrov’s Flu’ and ‘The Demons’ take on suicide: Kirillov in ‘The Demons’ to prove man is God’s equal, the seer in ‘Petrov’s Flu’ sees suicide as proving there is no God) as well as his blistering assault on rationality, ‘Notes from the Underground’. Dostoevsky of course was a vehement opponent of nihilism and the metaphysical cynicism which he saw as destructive forces, dangerous and destroying the Russia he loved. In his works the strength of Dostoevsky’s writing was that he was able to draw empathic psychologically accurate pictures of the states of mind and purposes of his desperately motivated characters, giving credibility to their actions.

Serebrennikov (and presumably Salnikov) draws on precisely that same Russian propensity towards nihilistic delirium as Dostoevsky. But whereas Dostoevsky placed his faith in the mystical salvational essence of the Slav people, and under the terror of Stalin, the Russian soul was nurtured and protected by the teleological ideals of egalitarian communism. Post 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the idealistic belief system that sustained it, the people have been caste into a psychic pit of self destruction bringing perdition both to themselves and to their world. In this abject state of delirious nihilism, Putin rises up as the anti-Christ, the Lord of Misrule and harbinger of Death without hope. Through ‘Petrov’s Flu’ Russia’s fall from grace her descent into a world without meaning rings like a prophecy come true, the final living out of a nightmare future long foreseen.

Petrov’s visions during his visit to the drunker ‘seer’, the ride with the corpse in the back of the station wagon, the violent episode kicked off by his librarian ex-wife in the library itself, the sci –fi out of body experiences of Petrov and his son all meld into one delusional experiental reality. A reality to which the Russian psyche no longer has the resources with which to cope; only response left is either cynicism and violence or complete passivity.

Serebrennikov points us to Russia as it is in this time of Putin, with the implicit warning that this Russian sickness, like all psycho-social sickness, is a virus that has riddled through the body social. In many respects this Russian virus is the mirror image of the American virus.   With its output of Hollywood ‘Superhero’ movies many of which end in cataclysmic violence signifying the apocalyptic end of the world, American is also a society unhinged, detached from any sustaining belief system. Buoyed by technological arrogance, deluded America too is only capable of unleashing the forces of destructive nihilistic omnipotence, in order to sustain itself.

As these twin viruses spread unchecked throughout the world, we move inexorably towards some sort of final reckoning, either as war or as destruction of the planet’s environment.  

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

Eyes Wide Shut     Stanley Kubrick (UK/USA; 1999;) Nicole Kidman; Tom Cruise

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 3^rd March 2022; ticket: £7

Titillation

 

My thoughts after viewing Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ were that this movie represented the aging director’s personal search for the elixir of youth in the form of placing himself in proximity to hundreds of nubile semi-naked young women. This is the mother of all ‘bare tit’ movies outscorring any putative rivals by a factorial amount: ‘tits’ at the beginning, the middle and the end, in long shot and close up. ‘Eye’s Wide Shut’ looks like an old man’s attempt to command vicarious exposure to the delights of the flesh by virtue of his elevated status as a ‘famous’ film director.

The film opens with a series of domestic shots set to the soundtrack of a Shostakovich waltz. Perhaps Kubrick thought that using this waltz, he could emulate, albeit on an intimate scale, something of the impact of the Strauss music he used with effect in 2001. But what works with the epic doesn’t necessarily synch up in the same way to the intimate. In fact Kubrick is not a film director who is able to handle the intimate, it is a domain that is alien to his nature. Kubrick’s best films are about power relations, thinking in terms of Paths of Glory, Strangelove and certainly the Hal / Dave subplot in 2001. But intimacy seems a foreign language to him cinematically. His successful characters for the most part are developed along the lines of one emotional dimension, though it is a dimension that is examined in some depth. But in Eyes Wide Shut, Bill and Alice, as played by Kidman and Cruise, seem to have slipped off a Times Sq electronic billboard. Having nothing more to offer than the expected complexity of characters in a ad, they do not so much act rather they perform as sales agents. Kubrick is to Relationship Movies as Eric Rohmer is to Hollywood Westerns.

And Kubrick’s script for ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ lays bare his inadequacy as a writer of dialogue for the sort of film he’s directing. The stilted nature of the writing is heard in the early party scene where Alice is aggressively propositioned by an old Hungarian roué. The overtly theatrical dialogue, in particular that which is put into the mouth the old Count (who does a stentorian job in keeping a straight face) is toe nail curling, comprising the sort of cod lines one might hear in a bad European play of the 1930’s. In fact most of the dialogue is written and delivered in a sort of mock theatrical style that does little for the concept of film intimacy. The idea may have been to compose the sort of lines for the main characters that a playwright such as Edward Albee might pen, lines that would stand up to this style of delivery. But Kubrick and co-writer Frederic Raphael are not in Albee’s league, and instead of incision and intuitive psychic insight, there is mainly banality and trite riposte. The exception is perhaps Alice’s early monologue to Bill, in which she talks to him about herself as a woman and her desire.

And then we come to the film’s centre piece: the in-calling ritual, the invocation orgy. This scene is probably based on the reasonably well known and documented rituals devised by occultist high priest Alistair Crowley. But all that can be said of Kubrick’s attempt to create a believable representation of such a spectacle is that he should have left this sort of stuff to Hammer Films, or even the British Carry On series. They did this sort of thing much better. They did it better because in particular, in the case of the House of  Hammer, these sort of ritual/orgy scenes were always composed stylistically to create a distance between the shot and the audience. Such sequences were ‘hammed’ up to a certain extent, which enabled the audience avoid any sort of investment in the putative meaning of what they were seeing. Hammer knew how handle these things – not too seriously.  Kubrick in comparison seems clueless: he has no filmic recourse other than replication. Replication may have served him well artistically in some of his movies (as well as perhaps feeding serving his own dictatorial nature) but it doesn’t wash well with Black Magick stuff. The reason of course is that with mere replication you cannot embed the meaning for the participants of what is happening for them. It is those very subjective elements that collectively fill out the the psychic space of ceremonial practice and lend it power. Kubrick fails to fill out this set piece with anything other than Bill’s uncomprehending gaze, and the long scene, filled out only with titillation, drained of significance, elides into tedium.  The scenes look what they are a bunch of people doing what the director tells them.  We are pleased when Bill finally leaves or rather is kicked out, and we no longer have to watch Kubrick’s empty spectacle.

‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Kubrick’s final movie was 400 days in production and after a protracted edit, he delivered his ‘cut’ to Warner Bros on 1^st March 1999, five days before his death. On the face of it, it looks like a chronicle of time wasted.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Freaks     Tod Browning   (USA; 1932;) Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams,Henry Victor, Daisy and Violter Hilton, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles

viewed Tyneside Cinema 17 Feb 22; ticket: £10.75

Fallen Angels – Wong Kar-wai (HK; 1995) Leon Lai; Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charlie Yeung

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema 20 Feb 22; ticket: £7.00

 

worlds apart

Browning and Kar-wai’s movies are both projections of worlds but very different worlds. ‘Freaks’ is set in and revolves about the moral imperative of the world of the Circus Freaks; ‘Fallen Angels’ is set in Hong Kong and revolves about the amoral world of a people detached from their environment.   Freaks is about the ties that bind the people together into a socially cohesive society; ‘Fallen Angels’ is about the way the HK world breaks the bonds that unite people and castes them adrift in a world of individuated alienation.

‘Freaks’ is defined by its warmth; ‘Fallen Angels’ is defined by its coldness.

‘Freaks’ is about how love and hate stream through the body. Physicality features prominently in Browning’s film: the shared Loving Cup at the Wedding Feast, touch is the way in which the people relate to one another. The body in whatever form it takes, is celebrated by Browning as a vibrant channel for: nurturing pleasure love compassion but also for betrayal and deceit. Both the straights and the freaks accept their bodies as they are. There is no shame, there is a simple openness of the body to the hazards of life.

In Wong Kar-wai’s world there is no love no hate. Life is reduced to the bare functionality of living – survival. The body itself is almost an abstraction; the people who populate his film are fallen angels and angels have no bodies. There is little physical contact between people, and when there is contact it takes the form of brief solace, that is quickly disengaged. The physicality most intensely portrayed is that of the Killer’s Agent who is filmed in two long sequences masturbating, sequences which encapsulate the painful loneliness of this world’s isolation. All that is left to the Killer’s Agent is to subject her body to a tedious desperate futile ritual in order to affirm her physical existence.

‘Freaks’ is a world of contrasts: day and night. love and hate, normal and abnormal. ‘Fallen Angels’ is a world without contrast: there is only darkness; there is only isolation, there is only alienated space. Lack of meaning defines existence, the characters are people in existential crisis.

‘Freaks’ is set on the fairground, in the trailer homes of the circus folk and the intimate space of the ground between them. In ‘Freaks’ the people belong. Their homes speak of: domesticity, preparation of food and drink, intimacy.

‘Fallen Angels’ is all: hard ass fluorescent lighting, long labyrinthine corridors, impersonality. The characters occupy cells rather than living in rooms, cells that are appropriate for fast food, masturbation and the oblivion of sleep.

‘Freaks’ of has a underlying narrative but it’s as a statement of affirmation of life that it is characterised.

‘Fallen Angels’ is structured about the loose intertwining of the lives of its four main characters. It is a statement of the emptyness of existence in a city dedicated to all that defines modernism – its industrialised food poverty of relations impersonality of architecture and design. Accompanied by an upbeat sound track designed to emotionally offset the images, ‘Fallen Angels’ has the feeling of a prolonged extended pop video using the music track as an ironic counterpoint to the bleakness of the visuals and the scenario. Set to music HK as a proving house for loveless worlds to come.

And yet: ‘Freaks’ is of course an idealisation of what was a very harsh world. But even as a movie model, it communicates to its audience something precious about life and social ties.

And yet: ‘Fallen Angels’ however self destructive the environment typified by HK may be, this is the same city which saw in 2019 the brave idealistic protests against Carrie Lam and the imposition of the mainland China mandate. This revolt by predominantly young people was unsuccessful but no one who followed the course of events over two years could deny the commitment bravery and determination of those who were prepared to take on the full might of the state.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

Lingui, The Sacred Bonds   Mahamat-Saleh Haroun (2021; Chad – International finance)   Achouackh Abakar Souleymane, Rihane Khalil Alio

viewed Tyneside Cinema 8th Feb 22; ticket: £10.75

subterfuge – artifice device or practice adopted to escape or avoid force

 

Me excluded there were four other people in the cinema to see Haroun’s ‘Lingui, The Sacred Bonds’ (LSB). I was glad I’d decided to go see the film this night as it obviously would not be held over and this was my last chance to see it on a big screen. The audience size indicated that in general given the usual run of things, there is little interest in the UK in viewing films that originate outside the bounds of what is familiar. Films have many different functions of attraction: distraction, confirmation of world view, empathic analogy, polemics etc, but exposure to the unfamiliar does not usually count amongst them.

‘LSB’ shot by Haroun in Chad and telling of Chad, is of another order of existence, another order of perception. another world.  It is a fundamental human story telling of oppositions and oppression, a quest that resolves in resistance subterfuge and undermining.

‘LSB’ belongs to the type of film making that is rare now in the West but still used by some film makers from Africa and Asia: namely the incorporation of film making into the oral story telling tradition. In this respect Sissoko’s films come to mind as do the films of Ousmane Sembene. Haroun follows the moral code of the story teller: he simply shows the characters; he shows what befalls them and how they respond to each situation. He does not allow us to be enveloped or have our re-actions over determined by his characters psycho-emotional states of mind.   In LSB the actors act out their roles without simulation of the emotional. There is no exploitation, using faked states of mind to manipulate the audience response as a fake identity check with the characters. LSB is grounded in the simple logic of the unfolding of the story, the folding over of the developing situations and dilemmas that engages the audience’s imagination; as the story is told they travel with the characters: we the audience become at one with them in their quest.

The opening sequence establishes a state of being. In a series of close ups shots, we see a car tyre being slit open with a work knife. It’s a tough job getting through the sidewall and tread, taxing the control and strength of the woman as she patiently cuts through the unforgiving material. Eventually she splits the body of the rubber tyre and is able to pull out the ‘prize’: its interior re-inforcing wire.   Amina uses this wire to make lamps and stoves which she sells to make her living. She lives on the scraps of life recycling the otherwise useless spent and discarded junk of Western industry. Amina herself is something of a discard. In this traditional Islamic society as a woman she is already a second class citizen which status is compounded by her being single and her having a child (Maria) out of wedlock. Consequently as an outcaste she is shunned by her family and experiences some social ostracism. This is her life. There is nothing more to be said. She cuts open tyres for the wire; she is not dependent on anyone, earning enough to keep herself and her daughter Maria.

Amina is a nobody, of scant regard except as an object of the desire of others: her neighbour Brahim offers her marriage, which she declines; the Imam keeps an eye on her religious observance, using his high status to make demands on her to attend the Mosque for prayers. Then everything changes. The pregnancy of her daughter Maria turns her world upside down. After initial anger at Maria, Amina realises that her daughter must have an abortion. Maria must not be condemned to the same ignominy hardship and low esteem that she has suffered. Amina is activated. The woman in her moves, the germ of female agency once latent is energised. In a culture where women are invisible where religion and society preach shibboleths about the sanctity of life as a prop to hypocritical male morality, Amina will get Maria her abortion.

And she does. Moving through a recessed parallel world that exists in Chad, Amina is able to negotiate with the hidden network that exists to take care of women’s needs in the face of men’s opposition. It is a world that exists to undermine men’s suppression of women, but it is not a world in open resistance to men. The men are too powerful. They are too ready to resort to brute force in order to crush open resistance. What the women do is to work the shadows: sabotage and subterfuge. This is the path Amina takes to negotiate the abortion for her daughter.

Some might argue that the underground female network of agency that takes care of women’s needs is just a prop to the male dominated social system; but as this shadow world expands, the patriarchal structure can come under the sort of pressure that causes it to implode. And there is also empowerment. Amina at the end of the movie is a different woman: they don’t know it, but on her own terms she has taken on the establishment and won. Perhaps now emboldened after learning that Maria is pregnant through being raped, Amina takes and carries out her revenge – on her own terms.

In LSB, Haroun’s scenario and cinematography binds us into his script. His pace is deliberate, allowing us to assimilate to understand. The camera depicts the world for the audience to see as it is: ochre walls, dark dimly lit interiors, crumbling structures. It is a simple world interpenetrated by a simple patriarchal authority in family and religion. What we do see through Haroun’s camera is the immobility of the male: whether it is the imam or the pater familias: they are stone. In contrast when during Amina’s peregrinations we see the town in full swing, we see the young men, no women, darting about on their motorbikes, interweaving, swerving, speeding never still, suggesting a world that is experiencing a new order of change.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Nightmare Alley   Guillermo del Toro           (2021; USA) Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchette; Toni Collette; William Dafoe

viewed Tyneside Cinema 1st Feb 2022; ticket £10.75

 

Bring on the clowns

rococo – an exceptionally ornamental and theatrical style of architecture and decoration, combining asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, sculpted moulding and trompe d’oeil frescos. (Wikipedia)

Del Toro’s movie is pure filmic rococo, the abandonment of content to the visual allure of hyper ornamentation in which form replaces meaning. From Gresham’s novel of the same name, del Toro has fashioned a scenario that is slow dull plodding, in which the sets replace action and the cardboard cut-out one dimensional performances replace characterisation.

‘Nightmare Alley’ makes me think that David Lynch has a lot to answer for in relation to the type of scripting and the style of dialogue adopted by del Toro – there is in fact a David Lynch ‘moment’ or ‘homage’ (perhaps), in the scenario, when Stanton comes upon a little white ‘rabbit’ sitting inexplicably still and alone in the middle of a hotel corridor. Del Toro seems to rival Lynch, in writing for his actors the sort of lines, which they are instructed (in parentheses) to deliver (with deliberation), as if they had some sort of cosmic resonance if not actual meaning: “Who are you?” These sort of lines come 6 a penny in del Toro’s movie as he tries to inject something akin to significance into the emptiness of the proceedings.

Like a comatose body ‘Nightmare Alley’ is pumped full of fairground hype and psycho-babble to give it semblance of life. The fairground sets and attractions, and the later New York interiors raise a flicker of interest before fading out as the flaccid play out of the action overtakes the film. The action can only be described as enabling clunky pre-empted outcomes. The mechanics of the script work inexorably towards the laboured moral message of the end sequence, in which Stanton Carlisle, now a helpless wino ends up employed as the ‘the fairground geek’, completing his circuitous journey from A to B and back again.

As a Mentalist Stanton’s recourse to a sort of robust stand-by cod psychology, employed on the hoof works Ok – “It’s always the father…”. But when the same hack clichés are transferred to the part of Cate Blanchette’s shrink, Lilith (sic) the vacuous longeur of the therapeutic interaction works only to prolong the duration of the film (which is well overlong) with endless proto Lynchian observational babble – “You hesitated when I asked you why you never drink.”  The problem is that the characters have no depth they are simply used by del Toro for their value in driving of the mechanics of the script. As pawns Stanton and Lilith’s underlying psychological drives, motivational attributions are uninteresting except as a pretext for their being in the same room together as prelude to the next sequence.

If there is one terrifying thing in ‘Nightmare Alley’ it is Cate Blanchette’s lipstick. It’s slapped on like a clown’s and is reminiscent of the clown character’s lips in Victor Hugo’s ‘L’Homme qui Rit’.   In the Hugo novel his clown hero’s cheeks have been savagely slit open to increase the width of his mouth. This mutilation both heightens his clown persona and and simultaneously makes him an object of horror. Cait’s application of the red stick has a similar effect: with those lips dominating her presence she almost becomes a clown but at the same time her lips also transmit a warning of danger. Overall ‘Nightmare Alley’ might have been better produced as a quasi-clown film rather than a dull drama. Had this been the case the kiss between Stanton and Lilith could have been handled with due cinematic aplomb rather than as an anti-climax. To kiss Cate’s lips has to be a particular type of decision on the part of Stanton; the decision to be a warrior or a clown, to go down onto those red red lips guarding her mouth, with attitude. To take and conquer (or their illusions) or to ‘clown’ it, meaning perhaps the sort of playfulness that ends up with you being in the shit (which is the Clown’s natural home). Likewise Lilith has to have an attitude.

And of course with all that red gunk on the line we want to see the aftermath of their mouth business. Instead predictably del Toro steers the middle course to nowhere. The kiss is shot to vacuous affect, the kiss is a nothing, a pressing together from which the two parties extricate themselves, and which is simply a moment before inevitably moving on to the next scene.

‘Nightmare Alley’ looks like a typical failure of directorial nerve. Instead of making the original novel a starting point for his own ideas, del Toro has opted to take the safe course of a literal adaptation. He has decided to invest his production money in the sets and come up with a script and scenario that are no more than a fileted version of the plot. The film ends up looking like it is: a failure of vision.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk  

Balloon   Pema Tsedenb (2019; Ch;) Sonam Wangmo, Jimpa, Yangshik Tso 

viewed Star and Shadow Cinema, 27 Jan 22:   ticket: £7

Saying: “No!” to “Sorry!”

Thinking about films with significant balloon content two movies come to mind which will be familiar to anyone with a knowledge of Cinema history.   Albert Morisse’s ‘The Red Balloon’ and the balloon shots in Fritz Lang’s ‘M’. The former film follows the flight of the eponymous balloon across Paris. Despite the balloon getting pricked and bursting, the film ends on an optimistic note with the balloons of Paris floating together in solidarity, emanating a feeling of hope. By contrast the shot in ‘M’ of the little girl’s balloon flying away over the tenements of Berlin denotes her murder, her death: it is a shot of sadness.

In the final section of Pema Tsedenb’s ‘Balloon’ the camera, in a series of takes, follows the career of a single red balloon in the sky across the Tibetan landscape. As it travels each of the key players, in separate shots, turn to look up and follow it. The look on their faces, searching fearlessly upwards, is reminiscent of the looks on the faces of the people in those 1930’s Russian socialist realism films made by directors such as Dovzhenko. Dovzhenko’s characters also have the same look of mannered intensity as they look up into the middle distance towards a future where there will be socialism. This image of the resolute upward staring face became a trope for the shaping of the new man by socialism; it was of course also picked up and exploited by the propaganda posters and films representing the Chinese Communist Party.

‘Balloon’ is an extraordinary film with an unexpected ending. The remarkable aspect of Tsedenb’s balloon shot end sequence is that it has little to do with the narrative of Tsedenb’s film, whose scenario ends on a downbeat uncertain note. But then tagged on the storyline is the above final sequence comprising a series of metaphysical shots symbolising….what? Does Tsedenb want to point to Lang’s bleakness or Morisse’s vision of hope? Given the Chinese communist party’s recent interest in endings (they recently insisted on ‘Fight Club’s’ ending being changed to make it more optimistic), perhaps Tsedenb edited this final montage with the intention of rending the film acceptable to the Party censors? The use of the ‘heroic socialist look’ in his final sequence buying him protection against the Party’s perception of the film as promoting negativity, something particularly important in relation to the sensitive subject of Thibet.

‘Balloon’s’ grounding is in the life of pastoral herders in Thibet; we are set down amidst these people seeing their way of life, their religious culture their family and intimate relations. The underlying theme of Tsedenb’s movie is reproduction and its close relational concepts of fertility and replication. ‘Balloon’ is set at the time when Chinese ‘one child’ policy was enforceable law in Thibet. The narrative line binds together sexual relations, animal husbandry, re-incarnation, women’s choices and perspectives on modernity. It’s a script that feels overall positive about traditional Thibetan life and beliefs, that has an implicit sympathy with the people, in a manner that’s not expected in a Chinese produced and financed movie.

Digression: Interesting that in the sphere of the filmmaking which is regarded by totalitarian regimes (at least until the advent of social media) as a key propaganda means for reaching and speaking to the ‘masses’, there is often some space for renegade non orthodox directors to make their mark: Tarkovsky, Parajanov, Wayda, and the Czech new wave film makers of the early ‘60’s whose films collectively moved way beyond the bounds of the regime’s political orthodoxy. In China, besides Tsedenb, there is also Bi Gan – though he hasn’t recently made a film. All these countries have film schools regarded as centres of prime excellence, and there seems to be within these centres a core of integrity and influence, that afford the protection that allows some film makers to develop their own filmic path, both political and aesthetic. The films of these directors don’t usually get wide distribution in the home land (if at all), but they are exported and distributed worldwide.

‘Balloon’ has one decisive moment. A event that changes everything in the play out of the script. It’s a moment in which everything stops, which has consequences that determine the courses of the lives of Tsedenb’s characters. Dargye, the herder, violently slaps his wife Drolkar across the face as they sit up talking on their bed.

This action is visceral: the sound as much as the picture, the flat of his hand striking against the side of her face, the crack of a whip, she crumples.  

Drolkar has just told him, that against his wishes she hasn’t ruled out having an abortion. An abortion will prevent Dargye’s hope that the soul of his recently deceased father will reincarnate in her growing foetus. This sudden violence of the husband on his wife has the effect of collapsing her world, concentrating her essence into a zen moment of realisation where everything is seen clearly seen anew. 

From the script we see there is strength and integrity in the way Drolkar lives her life. She does what she has to do, her duty, as there is no other way to survive. Violence, intimidation, the imposition of Dargye’s will has no part in her way of living. Her husband’s blow ends everything: the foetus the marriage the relationship with her children. And Dargye also knows that this is so; that he has brought everything to a close, that after hitting Drolkar there is no going back. No apology no words of contrition can take back what he has done. It has finality. After the blow from her husband there remains only for Drolkar to arrange her affairs and quit the farm. Dargye saying: “Sorry!” changes nothing. Drolkar has had a moment of realisation.

Tsedemb films with intent and integrity. Shooting in Thibet doesn’t prompt him to do a lot of landscape – meaningless drone shots – filling out the scenario with fake metaphore. In fact the landscape is shot sparsely, mainly featuring as a grey scrubby background to the story. What Tsedemb does do with the camera is striking. Much of the film has a documentary feel. His camera is chained to the ground, operating in the midst of life: the sheep, the meals, the bedroom, the clinic. Interspersed are different types of shots that work through reflections: action seen through windows, pools, hazy indistinct images that suggest parallel worlds, perhaps the worlds of the souls waiting on the fringes to be re-incarnated.

Before the Uyghur’s in Xinjiang, the Thibets too were subjected to Han-isation. I don’t know if it was as brutal as the current situation, but Balloon does give some substance to a people now all but forgotten in the West – and perhaps in China too. 

adrin neatrour   adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Happiness (le Bonheure) Agnes Varda (1965; Fr;) Jean-Claude Drouot, Claire Drouot, Marie-France Boyer

If music be the food of love….

I had a look at the Wikipedia entry for Varda’s film Happiness and got a surprise!

In Varda’s ‘Happiness’ the core family about whom the film hinges was played by lead Jean-Claude Drouot’s actual family: his wife and kids. As far as I can see this was the only acting role Claire Drouot ever played, but it is noticeable that amongst the cast there were a number of other non-actors. So Happiness is a strange and special film: a fictitious family narrative wrapped up within the folds of an actual family narrative. “Happiness’ is Varda’s savage satire/ parody on the family and the woman’s role in the happy family. But you’d think that with all those Drouot’s on set there must have been a lot of humour in the shoot, as reality and fiction kept bumping up against each other.

Varda’s movie is the slow play out of a script grounded in a comedic drama that is geared to deepest black humour.

The glory of Happiness is that it is pitched at the same emotionally dead level throughout its duration. As it is at the beginning so it is at the end, it’s Mozart all the way, though more of that later. One sometimes sees references in historical accounts to the ‘actors’ sleepwalking their way towards disaster. ‘Happiness’ is the sleepwalking but without any awakening after the disaster: there’s somnambulation before, somnambulation after.

In the new consumerist wonderland everyone walks on air with nothing under their feet.

The key to Varda’s characterisation is not narcissism, but rather the oblivion that has overtaken and shapes the people in her movie. The setting is a modern working class suburb of new conveniently built domiciles. This location is detached from the old working class areas of Paris, with their communal solidarity and tradition of resistance. In this suburb the car the fridge the other appliances have taken over, everything is designed to make the living easy. Life has become disconnected. Varda’s characters are oblivious to the past oblivious to all the interconnecting threads, social political economic that make up the world that exists outside their dream existence. The dream existence comprises an ‘eternal now’ which is the space time metric in which Varda has chosen to film. As the social and communal have collapsed the family is the source of identity and life revolves around satisfying individual needs in particular those of dominant male individuals.

At one point Francois, Varda’s protagonist defines ‘Happiness’. He says:

“Happiness is submission to the natural order.”

Who’s natural order? The natural order of Francois.

Varda’s is the feminist perspective. The key to the films cinematography is the manner in which Francois is observed. The nature of observation of his actions reactions his off guard moments could only stem from a female sensibility.   In this cinematic scrutiny of the male there in nothing hostile. Indeed any hostility or anything unreasonable or unpleasant in relation to Francois’ actions or words would undermine Varda’s key proposition: that it is definitions of women’s ‘normality’ and the cultural expectations of feminine passivity, that drive the presumptions underlying male attitudes to women. These male states of mind when interacting with women are the key factors supressing women’s ability to control their own development.  

The ingenuity of Varda’s script is realised in that there is no climax (sic) proper. There is only anti-climax. When Therese drowns herself on discovering Francois is also in love with Emilie (whom he describes as: “…the apple tree outside the orchard.”).   But it is not the climax of the film; there is no climax there is only anti-climax as life continues as normal for Francois in his bubble of ‘love’ and ‘happiness’.  Emilie moves seamlessly into his life to take over Therese’s place. A body for a body; a love for a love; a mother for a mother. As Francois says: “Happiness works by addition.” The apple tree moves into the orchard, and Francois is happy. A happiness dependent on the malleability of the woman in the world of the man.

Le Bonheure is wondrously shot. Cleverly set up camera pans, intercut signage and subversive shots, and use of colour screens as interstitial chapter cards. But it Varda’s use of music that is stunning and unforgettable. Varda opens ‘Happiness’ with an idyllic pic-nic sequence as the François family pic-nic and relax in the woods. Laid over the picture is Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Major.

Varda has understood this piece of music as synonomous with grace, happiness, and escape. It is almost impossible to listen to this music without experiencing a direct physiological effect coursing through the body, transposing one’s life away from the troubles of this world (written just two months before his death it is Mozart’s last completed major work). In one sense it is the ultimate Bourgeois antidote to the problems of life, carrying the listener off their feet into a parallel trouble free domain. Varda’s use of this music is brutal. As a dominant piece of the West’s audio cultural furniture Varda has aligned this music with the same traditional forces holding women in their place. Varda unhinges the Mozart Concerto from the high firmament of music and casts it down into Dante’s third ring of Hell. Her response in ‘Le Bonheure’ is to relentlessly exploit the Concerto as a destructive force, introducing it over and over again on the sound track, cueing it at unforgiving volume whenever Francois lifts his head. The Concerto is a defining presence in the movie. It directs and shapes the audience’s response to the development of the scenario. Repeated time and again, the familiar beloved passages, the rising chord sequences of the music are deranging and inverted in affect. This so familiar music instead of affirming mocks parodies haunts and taunts the state of mind represented and exemplified by: happiness.

Final word: Varda has worked with her cast, both amateur and professional to draw out ensemble acting style completely at one with her theme. The acting is monopaced, monosybilic and self effacing. Totally at one with the script.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Licorice Pizza         Paul Anderson (USA; 2021) Alana Haim; Cooper Hoffman

viewed Tyneside Cinema 18 Jan 22; ticket £10.75

 

job lot

Like the waterbeds Gary sells in ‘Licorice Pizza’ (without mentioning their tendency to leak), the movie itself is a constant stream of leakage about the narcissistic culture of which it is both product and beneficiary.

With its setting in an idealised world of ‘70’s California, Anderson’s movie promotes the simple Panglossian message to the target audience: that all is well with the world in the best of all possible worlds. In this care-free rollover society of shifting suburban mores, entitlement and narcissism have taken the place of Bougainvillea as the new source of life’s colourisation.

Anderson’s ‘Licorice Pizza’ (LP) is simply an advert. What’s it selling? Like all ads it’s selling wish fulfilment; the possibility of a state of mind enabled by a product. Anderson uses every trick in the Madison Avenue handbook to legitimise adolescent desire by associating it with the positive vibes of American socio-cultural imperatives: music and success. LP’s message is: Buy the Californian Dream.

The core of the film lies in the character of Gary. He’s a 15 year old actor come businessman come lover-boy, who through the film remains in hot pursuit of Alana, a 25 year old woman – but in the contemporary coin is just about going on 16. Gary like millions of boys before him is infatuated by an older woman; he craves the imputed maturity of her presence grace and favour. It’s what’s usually called a ‘crush’: a state that is often but not always, left wisely undeclared. Not in Gary’s case or we’d have another sort of film. Anderson, because Licorice Pizza is set in LaLaLand which is premised on a fervent quasi-ideological belief in overcoming all obstacles, indulges a script line of adolescent wish fulfilment and of the legitimacy of adolescent male desire. A celebration of narcissism vindicated.  

The film is made up of a series of interconnected but more or less discrete sequences, chronicling the ebb and flow of Gary’s pursuit of Alana. It’s an exposition of the American Dream, most recently given an outing in Disney’s ‘Minari’: work hard = succeed = get what you want. The success of Gary’s pursuit of Alana is never in doubt – she’s not going to be able to escape, as Anderson has stacked all the cards in favour of a Calilalafornian play out.

The devices and manipulations Anderson employs in his scenario, not only to bring about the desired union but to sell it to the audience are drawn from the basic primers of the advertising industry: Distract and Associate.

LP is pitching a sleazy boy-child wish fulfilment masturbation fantasy that has to be decked out as a legitimate love story.   The first page of the ad play book is: listen to the music; exploit the sounds. Every significant event in Licorice Pizza is scored, garlanded full volume, with a feel-good track. The soundtrack is designed into the scenario to subliminally affirm Gary and Alana’s relationship by associating it with the good vibes of the music. It’s a cheap trick designed to overwhelm any of the viewers’ reflective reservations by triggering in them a conditioned emotional response to the familiar songs. Of course it’s effective.

Anderson’s second main legitimation of Gary’s pursuit, is the plotting out of his career as an entrepreneur. Success in business denotes the ultimate American achievement.   By rights and by implication such success gives you the right to anything you want: including most importantly, women. Gary’s business acumen legitimises his hots for Alana, the more so as at one point he literally buys her by employing her. Individual business success, because it is the ultimate pinnacle of self achievement in this society, brings with it the assumption of other positive character traits such as: maturity self discipline and intelligence The point of Anderson’s scripting is to stack up Gary as an entrepreneur thereby allowing his character to be credited with adult traits that legitimise his ardent desire for a relationship with Alana.

Dishonesty lies at the core of LP. It feels like a story of faked achievement driven by narcissistic self love and delusion, is being sold as a remedial for the dark atmosphere of the times . Looked at dispassionately, Gary is little more than a self satisfied little prick, perhaps excusable because of his age; Alana a typical retarded adrift child-woman whose judgement is scattered by the first snort of money or success. Clamped together by the overweening music the movie celebrates them in the final sequence as they hurl themselves into each others arms. The final clinch; the kiss that resolves.

What is disturbing is that LP has struck a chord exactly where it was pitched: at the under 40 demographic. For whom it seems to have sounded all the notes they craved. LP comprises cultural arrogance festering a narcissism that thrives in an economy of conspicuous consumption.   The attraction of Anderson’s movie bodes ill for the future of the planet whose problems are exactly exacerbated by these phenomena.

adrin neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

 

 

 

A Hero                        Ashgar Farhadi (2021;Iran) Amir Jadidi, Mohsen Tanabandeh, Sahar Godoost

viewed Tyneside Cinema 11 Jan 2022; ticket: £10.75

 

What’s in a look?

There is one moment in Farhadi’s ‘A Hero’ that transfixed me. Protagonist Rahim goes to the bazaar to see the shopkeeper (who runs a photocopying business) to whom he is in debt. He is trying unsuccessfully to sort out the deteriorating situation between them. The man is not there, but his daughter is. In wide shot she spies Rahim lurking outside the shop, turns her head to stare him straight in the face; her eyes fix upon him a look of contemptuous venom, pure refined hatred. As target of this withering assault Rahim psychically crumples, his knees buckle, broken he stumbles off removes himself from the line of fire. He gets the message.

Farhadi’s film like his previous movies produced in Iran, ‘The Salesman’ and ‘A Separation’ sets the viewer down within a series of densely crosshatched relationships: personal relations, family relations, business and community relations. As in these other films, the core of the scenario of ‘A Hero’ is a particular event: Rahim’s opportunistic attempt to con people into seeing him as ‘a hero’. But Rahim both underestimates the malice felt towards him and the fact that he is not able to control all of the information. Consequently his cover ‘hero story’ ripples outwards in an instable state: some elements have a basis in truth, but his elaboration is fabrication. Rahim’s credibility is slowly undermined, shaping and provoking reactions through the various intimate and social matrices, colouring and recolouring the response to and understanding of his situation by the involved parties.

The strength of Farhadi’s film is that though the developments in ‘A Hero’ may be complex, though we move between different worlds – prison – home – work – community – the bazaar – there is one fixated line of development: Farhadi ’s script holds focus on Rahim’s actual situation tightly following its erratic course. In ‘A Hero’, though lacking the classic denouement of the plot lines in traditional Hollywood Studio products, Farhadi sustains the fixity of purpose of the classic directors: Huston, Curtiz, Wilder, Ford. There are no sub-plots, digressions; no cuts to mountains, sky or other contemporary digressive psychic tropes.

There is a critical Brechtian quality to Farhadi’s writing and in the way he films, making strategic use of wide shots rather than close-ups. In classic Brechtian mode Farhadi’s script does not open up Rahim’s interiority. Rahim and the other characters act in relational terms; it is through other people that the audience see what he does and that Rahim actions make sense. It is through situations that the drama is able to reveal something to us about the social matrix and the ways in which people choose to navigate the world.

In ‘A Hero’ Farhadi films so that we are meant to see what is happening, understand something and draw our own conclusions. As audience we are implicated just by being observers. We cannot view ‘A Hero’ without arriving at some judgement about the complicity of the characters in the play out of the decisions they make. Most relevantly Rahim, who is in prison for the debt he owes to copy shop owner. Rahim is played as likeable chancer, with little awareness of anything outside his own needs. In the opening shot, we see him leave prison on temporary release; in the final shot we see him return to prison. The film covers what happens between these two points in time. Between the going and the coming.

In this ‘between’ we witness his attempt (along with his girlfriend) to exploit the return of some lost gold coins to their rightful owner. After trying dishonest options, Rahim chooses a course of action that’s calculated to enhance his reputational standing, and giving him leverage to cut his prison sentence. The act is to some extent honest, but it’s an honesty grounded in duplicity, which Rahim either overlooks or is unable to appreciate. The unrelenting hostility of his creditor and others eventually leads to his action being caste as even worse than it was, leading to a deep moral discrediting of his reputation. As the relational ties expand, the creditor’s point of view and his determination not to cut Rahim any slack in his manipulative exploitation, are increasingly vindicated. The copy shop owner may be an unpleasant character, but he has seen right through his enemy. And so have we.

But there is a coda. Hope. When Rahim’s ally, one of the prison administrators tries to rope Rahim’s young son (who suffers from a debilitating stutter) into the circus of increasingly desperate attempts to save Rahim, Rahim says: “Enough”. He makes the choice to intervene and put a stop, a complete stop to the cycle of lies and deceit. An honest decision that it’s better to return to prison than to implicate the innocent in his own guilt.

In the opening shot, we see Rahim leave prison on temporary release; in the final shot we see him return to prison.   What has happened between these two events is that Rahim for the first time has made a moral choice.

Farhadi has been criticised for being an apolitical director avoiding any confrontation with the politico-religious regime. I don’t accept this. Both ‘A Separation’ and ‘The Salesman’ are in a sense satires, playing out the consequences in small scale of the large controlling macro-environment. Incorporated as key elements in the scripting of both these films are probing questions in relation to the Shi’ite theocracy. In both movies a key issue is the destructive and unequal nature of the traditional relationship between the sexes and the power allocated to men over women in key areas of life. In addition ‘A Separation’s’ play out hinged on the putative authority of the pater familias who was in an advanced stage of dementia, an allusion to the old Mullah’s and Ayatollah’s who control the country.

Likewise it seems to me that ‘A Hero’ is also a loosely drawn analogy pointing up what is going on in Iran today. For Rahim, the likeable urbane non religious protagonist, read the Iranian middle classes and their disastrous pact with the late Shah. In this pact they accepted an easy going urban Western life style as the price they were prepared to pay for living under a corrupt regime that most Iranians felt betrayed and belittled them. Understand the copy-shop creditor (in the business of ‘replication’) as representative of those who felt betrayed by the Shah and his comfortable middle class clients, and there is an analogous notion of debt: a debt of honour. Farhadi is saying that the middle classes have never understood the seriousness of this ‘debt’. They have never understood the root feeling of betrayal that the Shah years represented to the majority, the poor rural and religious Iranians. Farhadi is suggesting that it is not enough for the urban middle classes just to want the Western life style. If some sort of secular change is to come about in Iran, then it has to be accompanied by moral choices. The Middle Classes of Iran, however admirable their intentions, whatever the justness of the causes they espouse, if they comprise of nothing more than an ultimate desire to imitate Western lives, then they are no more than dishonest conmen. Until they understand this they will not succeed.

 

Central to ‘A Hero’ as an allegorically contextualised satire, is the nature and quality of the acting. The acting takes its cue from the situation not from the emotionally charged imputed feelings of individuals in their situations.   In ‘A Hero’ the actors’ first duty is to their situation, as in the Brechtian understanding of the demands of drama.   The work of the actor is not to indulge emotive feelings (vide: soap opera) but to work through process. The intensity of the processes set in play by Farhadi requires a disciplined approach to the material by the actors for the issues in the film to retain their clarity and dignity. Within this paradigm the performances are finely tuned to this end, filled out with situational intensity but not bloated and distorted by the emotive overloading of affect.

 

To return to that ‘look’: that look of deeply nurtured hatred trained on Rahim by the daughter of the copy-shop owner. It is a pure a intensity of affect. What’s remarkable about it is that it fuses in one moment the personal and the analagous social. The personal hatred of the woman for the man who has swindled her; the hatred of the ordinary poor and religious Iranians for the hypocritical machinations of the middle classes, whose driving concern is to be like the West.

 

Adrin Neatrour

adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk