General

Once upon a time in Anatolia Nuri Ceylan (2011 Turkey) Muhammet Uzunur; Yilmaz Erdogan; Taner Birsel; Firat Tanis

Viewed Tyneside Cinema 27 March 2012 Ticket: £6.95

The Lady with the Lamp

In the opening lengthy post title shot (there is a pre-title twilight shot that I didn’t understand) we see, in long shot, three cars snaking through the night along the winding roads across the hilly mountainous Anatolian terrain. Outlined in the thin beams of their headlights, the small cars move slowly forward. This shot is the first of the night sequences of the film and it is this long opening nocturnal section that defines NC’s intention in realising his script.

This part of the film is a long endless spiralling into and through night as space and night as time. The men, the public prosecutor, the policeman and forensic doctor accompany two suspected murderers who have said they will reveal the whereabouts of the body of the man they have killed. The immense darkness of the storm blasted country swallows everything. The blind lead the blind in a quest of futility. They are lost in the space. They are lost in time. The men, characterised by an everyday physical awkwardness are all claimed by forces from other places other times. Unending internal dialogues. A parallel metaphysical journey lays claim to their psyches, engendering states of mind that abstract them from the present. There is darkness in the soul.

This is a culture where, outside of the very large cities, women are absent from the public domain. And each of the significant male officials in the car, is accompanied by an absent woman. A female shadow being whose absence haunts and overwhelms. The film is characterised by what is not present to the senses. This metaphysical proposition is made real, given body in the pivotal sequence of NC’s film. During the visit to a village where the party is dined by the mayor there is a power cut. The mayor orders his youngest daughter to bring an oil lamp and serve tea. As the girl stands before the men and hands to each their glass of tea, they look up into her face which appears like a revelation of a Platonic form: the actualisation of the feminine. The appearance of her visage is a psychic force that transforms. (Like the image of Florence Nightingale with her lamp in the wards of Soutari – was this NC’s starting point?) After the scene with the lady with the lamp the psychic darkness momentarily disperses. Night becomes day. The body is found. But the fleeting apparition cannot heal the mental wounds of phantom women moving through the disturbed consciousness of the men. They continue trapped in double lives in which outer symbolism of gesture and inner thought process become ever more detached. No one is ever where they seem to be. The men are all some place else.

Nuri Ceylan’s (NC) Once upon a time in Anatolia (OTA) called to mind the recent output of films from Romania, in particular Porumboui’s movies. The characteristic feature that OTA shares with Cristiu Porumboiu’s Police, Adjective is a clear sense of purpose and a sure grasp of the filmic means employed to achieve intended goals. And their intended goals are not embedded in simple narrative deployment; but are metaphysical journeys into and through cultural darkness. Both NC and Porumboiu foster states of mind in which fleetingly intense moments of clarity are attained. Porumboiu is politically attuned (though the scenes of the cop with his wife have an intense symbolic personal resonance); NC in OTA attunes to social and personal dimensions of his characters. An awareness of the defining features of Turkish social life, as the country in its crazy unplanned way lurches towards Westernisation as a subjectivity.

NC’s title points up the irony he sees within modern story telling. In traditional fairy tales giants beasts and fabulous creatures roamed the land as externalised phantasms that enabled man to gauge his own measure. Today monsters and the fears they engender, are internalised taking on their forms within our minds. Once in residence they become states of being forces that slowly inexorably consume us from within.

States of mind may be the concern of OTA but the base upon which NC interweaves the actions and thoughts of his protagonists, is a slate of dark black humour. The dark humour is the medium that links the internalised reverberating internal dialogues of the men to the external business of driving through the Anatolian night, digging the earth, exhuming and dissecting corpses. It is a humour of that insinuates itself into the gap between the actual and the mental, the logical consequence of disassociation of mind and body.

The other linking between current Romanian films and NC is the way in which are actors are used. Contemporary Iranian films also share this quality of acting. The outwardly exaggerated expressive use of face and body to create a gestural syntax of emotion using mouth teeth eyes and eyebrows, characterises most Western films. Most of the acting is done to fill out roles, and it is if the actors trapped in their roles are required to indulge in a sort of desperate signage of appropriate approved response. In OTA there is a trusting of the actors, and by extension, a trusting by NC of the audience, that through the direction, through the scenario, through the dialogue everything that needs to be stated about their characters will become evident. The powerful emotions are the more powerful for being understated, with the control of feelings being expressively more powerful than their exhibition. In the West with the circuitry of amplification that drives feedback loops between expressive modes in soap opera drama and real life, the outcome is that expression is cheapened, subject to fabrication and manipulation. To this extent NC and the other film makers from this region are giving their Western audience a chance to understand and reclaim dignity of feeling. adrin neatrour adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room to room.

Henry Longfellow

Adrin Neatrour writes: The English title of the film points to a marketing idea. The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really: situation – the train that does not move.

California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania:  Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu
Viewed Tyneside Cinema July 31 08 Ticket price £6-80 

The English title of the film points to a marketing idea.  The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really:  situation – the train that does not move.

California Dreaming (CD) opens with a black and white time shift sequence that takes us back more than 50 years to the end of the WWll.  We witness the effects of a bombing raid on Bucharest from the interior of a tenement bock where the inhabitants flee in panic as the bombs are dropping. On its own terms it’s a stunning opening series of shots characterised by choreographed craning camera movement.   The awful reality of falling ordinance presents through an almost animation like realisation of the action, with its visual representation of an unexploded bomb, the menacing dull metallic sheen of its casing transfixing the eye,  smashing through the roof of the building and tumbling down the  building’s stairs in pursuit of a young boy.   It’s a helter-skelter sequence in which the bomb finally settles in its resting place without exploding.  Like a fat unfertilised egg the device sets up the idea of history as a time bomb:  an archaeologically layered event waiting to be dug up.   By something or some one.  This opening sequence sits in the film as an interwoven metaphor pervading the unravelling situation. As the film progresses its purpose is to interconnect the represented present to the past from which it has flowed. It is not just the waiting of the train that is endless; so too are the consequences of history: Endless.

Only it doesn’t work.  The metaphorical device of the bomb, stylishly realised though it is, is not meshed into the structure of the film.  In effect the body of the film comprises a situation that has as its mainspring its own powerful logic: immobility. The  insertion of  primal historical dimension adds nothing to this situation.  If any thing the time element undermines the integrity of the film by adding an irrelevant plane of immanence. In CD the time element is otiose.  The historical sequences are good looking cinema, a demonstration of set piece choreographic competence.  But layered  into the action it only serves as an exemplifier, a fashionable nod or acknowledgement of the workings of history, particularly in Eastern Europe.

The situation in CD is a simple proposition: in 1999 a military train in transit to Serbia as part of the NATO  engagement in the Balkan regional conflict, is refused passage through a section of the track by a relatively minor but powerful railway official who says that the train does not have the correct authorisation. Lacking the right clearance and stymied by the local bureaucrat, the train is shunted into a siding and decoupled from its locomotive.  With its complement of US and Roumanian guards the train waits in the sweltering heat for the necessary clearance from uninterested ministers in Bucharest who shuffle the papers from one office to another.  

CD posits a situation where a number of expressive oppositions are brought into play.  The moving and the still; the organic and the inorganic, the peasant and the urban, the military machine and the social matrix, male and female, power and powerlessness.  The interest in the situation lies in how the film exploits and develops the machinations latent in its oppositions and brings into play expressive exemplars of the forces that it has created.  I think CD is compromised by its overarching use of film clichés to express resolve and dissolve its prime elements. The consequence is that it is no more than a rehash and retread of familiar material. 

Nemescu’s script celebrates the infectious parochial pomposity of local politicians against the utilitarian outlook of the military; the obstinacy of the peasant opposing centralised bureaucracy.  But Nemescu is unable to do more than draw on a population of stock characters already well plumbed by directors of an earlier generation such as Milos Forman.  Nemescu’s failure is that he is unable to add any real further development to these oppositions.  He is content to set up narrative dynamics in which simple juxtapostioning of stereotypes types automatically releases tensions and milks the possibilities of  the humour of juxtaposition.  I think it is Nemescu’s inability to ring changes in stereotypes that comprises the film’s failure.  The US major in charge of the train squad, the mayor, the young girls, the US soldiers,  the striking workers amount to nothing more than stock characters.  The situation as it was set up has the potential for moving into veins of subjectivity that could have explored wilder counter intuitive veins of character. But these furrows have been left fallow.

They may have been left fallow because of the two key oppositions are selected to  dominate the film.  Firstly the love story.   The male and the female characters: the  opposition of the aspirations of the small town girl and the boredom of the foreign soldier, is milked for its evident commercial weight.  This short relationship instigated by Monica the local 17 year old beauty between herself and the soldier, comes out of a long line of East European films that celebrate the seductive power of dream relationships.  The subplot adds little if nothing to this genre of relationship, except that, shot in 2007 the sex scene leaves little to the imagination.  Otherwise it’s the tired story of: country girl seduces foreign soldier boy in pursuit of her desire to escape.   They fuck then go their separate ways: he returns to his real girl and she a little wiser and eventually back to the guy who really cares for her (as a person).  Wresting something new from this tired scenario requires special skills that are not evident here.

The other key opposition is between the railway official and the US major.  Which is where the time/historical factor rears up and interpenetrates the  film’s situational narrative.   The film, in this opposition invokes history as a causative device. CD wants to connect the minor official’s action in stopping the train to his hatred of Americans.  Because his father was killed in an American bombing raid on Bucharest at the end of WWll.  This mark on  the warp of history leads 50 years later to an act of revenge.  I think that as an a narrative idea this overdetermines history as a driving force.  After so much ‘history’ in Roumania the Communist coup,  the dictatorship of Ceausescu  the hardships of  the restoration of capitalism, to select for purposes of revenge, a Nato train half of whose guards are American, and  to delay it , feels ike weak linkage.   A limp wrested attempt to implicate history.  As a character it also demeans the role of the railway official, lessening his interest as an agent and reducing him to a pawn of psychological mechanisms. The implication of history doesn’t necessarily deepen character: it can render character the more opaque. If for instance the railway official had harboured a rage and a fury at NATO intervention in geographic zones where they understood nothing of history, then the character comes alive.  Screwing him into a reactive act of revenge deadens him and does little service to actual historical memory.

Lastly the film is laboriously overlong.  One of the reasons it felt so long was what starts in CD as a joke, the ritual of translation carried out with intentional misrepresentation, becomes a pedantic need of Nemescu’s to repeat ad infinitum. In the end it is an idea that only serves to extend the film long beyond its situational premise. In itself California Dreaming becomes: Endless.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

    

 

California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania:  Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu
Viewed Tyneside Cinema July 31 08 Ticket price £6-80 

The English title of the film points to a marketing idea.  The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really:  situation – the train that does not move.

California Dreaming (CD) opens with a black and white time shift sequence that takes us back more than 50 years to the end of the WWll.  We witness the effects of a bombing raid on Bucharest from the interior of a tenement bock where the inhabitants flee in panic as the bombs are dropping. On its own terms it’s a stunning opening series of shots characterised by choreographed craning camera movement.   The awful reality of falling ordinance presents through an almost animation like realisation of the action, with its visual representation of an unexploded bomb, the menacing dull metallic sheen of its casing transfixing the eye,  smashing through the roof of the building and tumbling down the  building’s stairs in pursuit of a young boy.   It’s a helter-skelter sequence in which the bomb finally settles in its resting place without exploding.  Like a fat unfertilised egg the device sets up the idea of history as a time bomb:  an archaeologically layered event waiting to be dug up.   By something or some one.  This opening sequence sits in the film as an interwoven metaphor pervading the unravelling situation. As the film progresses its purpose is to interconnect the represented present to the past from which it has flowed. It is not just the waiting of the train that is endless; so too are the consequences of history: Endless.

Only it doesn’t work.  The metaphorical device of the bomb, stylishly realised though it is, is not meshed into the structure of the film.  In effect the body of the film comprises a situation that has as its mainspring its own powerful logic: immobility. The  insertion of  primal historical dimension adds nothing to this situation.  If any thing the time element undermines the integrity of the film by adding an irrelevant plane of immanence. In CD the time element is otiose.  The historical sequences are good looking cinema, a demonstration of set piece choreographic competence.  But layered  into the action it only serves as an exemplifier, a fashionable nod or acknowledgement of the workings of history, particularly in Eastern Europe.

The situation in CD is a simple proposition: in 1999 a military train in transit to Serbia as part of the NATO  engagement in the Balkan regional conflict, is refused passage through a section of the track by a relatively minor but powerful railway official who says that the train does not have the correct authorisation. Lacking the right clearance and stymied by the local bureaucrat, the train is shunted into a siding and decoupled from its locomotive.  With its complement of US and Roumanian guards the train waits in the sweltering heat for the necessary clearance from uninterested ministers in Bucharest who shuffle the papers from one office to another.  

CD posits a situation where a number of expressive oppositions are brought into play.  The moving and the still; the organic and the inorganic, the peasant and the urban, the military machine and the social matrix, male and female, power and powerlessness.  The interest in the situation lies in how the film exploits and develops the machinations latent in its oppositions and brings into play expressive exemplars of the forces that it has created.  I think CD is compromised by its overarching use of film clichés to express resolve and dissolve its prime elements. The consequence is that it is no more than a rehash and retread of familiar material. 

Nemescu’s script celebrates the infectious parochial pomposity of local politicians against the utilitarian outlook of the military; the obstinacy of the peasant opposing centralised bureaucracy.  But Nemescu is unable to do more than draw on a population of stock characters already well plumbed by directors of an earlier generation such as Milos Forman.  Nemescu’s failure is that he is unable to add any real further development to these oppositions.  He is content to set up narrative dynamics in which simple juxtapostioning of stereotypes types automatically releases tensions and milks the possibilities of  the humour of juxtaposition.  I think it is Nemescu’s inability to ring changes in stereotypes that comprises the film’s failure.  The US major in charge of the train squad, the mayor, the young girls, the US soldiers,  the striking workers amount to nothing more than stock characters.  The situation as it was set up has the potential for moving into veins of subjectivity that could have explored wilder counter intuitive veins of character. But these furrows have been left fallow.

They may have been left fallow because of the two key oppositions are selected to  dominate the film.  Firstly the love story.   The male and the female characters: the  opposition of the aspirations of the small town girl and the boredom of the foreign soldier, is milked for its evident commercial weight.  This short relationship instigated by Monica the local 17 year old beauty between herself and the soldier, comes out of a long line of East European films that celebrate the seductive power of dream relationships.  The subplot adds little if nothing to this genre of relationship, except that, shot in 2007 the sex scene leaves little to the imagination.  Otherwise it’s the tired story of: country girl seduces foreign soldier boy in pursuit of her desire to escape.   They fuck then go their separate ways: he returns to his real girl and she a little wiser and eventually back to the guy who really cares for her (as a person).  Wresting something new from this tired scenario requires special skills that are not evident here.

The other key opposition is between the railway official and the US major.  Which is where the time/historical factor rears up and interpenetrates the  film’s situational narrative.   The film, in this opposition invokes history as a causative device. CD wants to connect the minor official’s action in stopping the train to his hatred of Americans.  Because his father was killed in an American bombing raid on Bucharest at the end of WWll.  This mark on  the warp of history leads 50 years later to an act of revenge.  I think that as an a narrative idea this overdetermines history as a driving force.  After so much ‘history’ in Roumania the Communist coup,  the dictatorship of Ceausescu  the hardships of  the restoration of capitalism, to select for purposes of revenge, a Nato train half of whose guards are American, and  to delay it , feels ike weak linkage.   A limp wrested attempt to implicate history.  As a character it also demeans the role of the railway official, lessening his interest as an agent and reducing him to a pawn of psychological mechanisms. The implication of history doesn’t necessarily deepen character: it can render character the more opaque. If for instance the railway official had harboured a rage and a fury at NATO intervention in geographic zones where they understood nothing of history, then the character comes alive.  Screwing him into a reactive act of revenge deadens him and does little service to actual historical memory.

Lastly the film is laboriously overlong.  One of the reasons it felt so long was what starts in CD as a joke, the ritual of translation carried out with intentional misrepresentation, becomes a pedantic need of Nemescu’s to repeat ad infinitum. In the end it is an idea that only serves to extend the film long beyond its situational premise. In itself California Dreaming becomes: Endless.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

    

 

California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania:  Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu
Viewed Tyneside Cinema July 31 08 Ticket price £6-80 

The English title of the film points to a marketing idea.  The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really:  situation – the train that does not move.

California Dreaming (CD) opens with a black and white time shift sequence that takes us back more than 50 years to the end of the WWll.  We witness the effects of a bombing raid on Bucharest from the interior of a tenement bock where the inhabitants flee in panic as the bombs are dropping. On its own terms it’s a stunning opening series of shots characterised by choreographed craning camera movement.   The awful reality of falling ordinance presents through an almost animation like realisation of the action, with its visual representation of an unexploded bomb, the menacing dull metallic sheen of its casing transfixing the eye,  smashing through the roof of the building and tumbling down the  building’s stairs in pursuit of a young boy.   It’s a helter-skelter sequence in which the bomb finally settles in its resting place without exploding.  Like a fat unfertilised egg the device sets up the idea of history as a time bomb:  an archaeologically layered event waiting to be dug up.   By something or some one.  This opening sequence sits in the film as an interwoven metaphor pervading the unravelling situation. As the film progresses its purpose is to interconnect the represented present to the past from which it has flowed. It is not just the waiting of the train that is endless; so too are the consequences of history: Endless.

Only it doesn’t work.  The metaphorical device of the bomb, stylishly realised though it is, is not meshed into the structure of the film.  In effect the body of the film comprises a situation that has as its mainspring its own powerful logic: immobility. The  insertion of  primal historical dimension adds nothing to this situation.  If any thing the time element undermines the integrity of the film by adding an irrelevant plane of immanence. In CD the time element is otiose.  The historical sequences are good looking cinema, a demonstration of set piece choreographic competence.  But layered  into the action it only serves as an exemplifier, a fashionable nod or acknowledgement of the workings of history, particularly in Eastern Europe.

The situation in CD is a simple proposition: in 1999 a military train in transit to Serbia as part of the NATO  engagement in the Balkan regional conflict, is refused passage through a section of the track by a relatively minor but powerful railway official who says that the train does not have the correct authorisation. Lacking the right clearance and stymied by the local bureaucrat, the train is shunted into a siding and decoupled from its locomotive.  With its complement of US and Roumanian guards the train waits in the sweltering heat for the necessary clearance from uninterested ministers in Bucharest who shuffle the papers from one office to another.  

CD posits a situation where a number of expressive oppositions are brought into play.  The moving and the still; the organic and the inorganic, the peasant and the urban, the military machine and the social matrix, male and female, power and powerlessness.  The interest in the situation lies in how the film exploits and develops the machinations latent in its oppositions and brings into play expressive exemplars of the forces that it has created.  I think CD is compromised by its overarching use of film clichés to express resolve and dissolve its prime elements. The consequence is that it is no more than a rehash and retread of familiar material. 

Nemescu’s script celebrates the infectious parochial pomposity of local politicians against the utilitarian outlook of the military; the obstinacy of the peasant opposing centralised bureaucracy.  But Nemescu is unable to do more than draw on a population of stock characters already well plumbed by directors of an earlier generation such as Milos Forman.  Nemescu’s failure is that he is unable to add any real further development to these oppositions.  He is content to set up narrative dynamics in which simple juxtapostioning of stereotypes types automatically releases tensions and milks the possibilities of  the humour of juxtaposition.  I think it is Nemescu’s inability to ring changes in stereotypes that comprises the film’s failure.  The US major in charge of the train squad, the mayor, the young girls, the US soldiers,  the striking workers amount to nothing more than stock characters.  The situation as it was set up has the potential for moving into veins of subjectivity that could have explored wilder counter intuitive veins of character. But these furrows have been left fallow.

They may have been left fallow because of the two key oppositions are selected to  dominate the film.  Firstly the love story.   The male and the female characters: the  opposition of the aspirations of the small town girl and the boredom of the foreign soldier, is milked for its evident commercial weight.  This short relationship instigated by Monica the local 17 year old beauty between herself and the soldier, comes out of a long line of East European films that celebrate the seductive power of dream relationships.  The subplot adds little if nothing to this genre of relationship, except that, shot in 2007 the sex scene leaves little to the imagination.  Otherwise it’s the tired story of: country girl seduces foreign soldier boy in pursuit of her desire to escape.   They fuck then go their separate ways: he returns to his real girl and she a little wiser and eventually back to the guy who really cares for her (as a person).  Wresting something new from this tired scenario requires special skills that are not evident here.

The other key opposition is between the railway official and the US major.  Which is where the time/historical factor rears up and interpenetrates the  film’s situational narrative.   The film, in this opposition invokes history as a causative device. CD wants to connect the minor official’s action in stopping the train to his hatred of Americans.  Because his father was killed in an American bombing raid on Bucharest at the end of WWll.  This mark on  the warp of history leads 50 years later to an act of revenge.  I think that as an a narrative idea this overdetermines history as a driving force.  After so much ‘history’ in Roumania the Communist coup,  the dictatorship of Ceausescu  the hardships of  the restoration of capitalism, to select for purposes of revenge, a Nato train half of whose guards are American, and  to delay it , feels ike weak linkage.   A limp wrested attempt to implicate history.  As a character it also demeans the role of the railway official, lessening his interest as an agent and reducing him to a pawn of psychological mechanisms. The implication of history doesn’t necessarily deepen character: it can render character the more opaque. If for instance the railway official had harboured a rage and a fury at NATO intervention in geographic zones where they understood nothing of history, then the character comes alive.  Screwing him into a reactive act of revenge deadens him and does little service to actual historical memory.

Lastly the film is laboriously overlong.  One of the reasons it felt so long was what starts in CD as a joke, the ritual of translation carried out with intentional misrepresentation, becomes a pedantic need of Nemescu’s to repeat ad infinitum. In the end it is an idea that only serves to extend the film long beyond its situational premise. In itself California Dreaming becomes: Endless.
adrin neatrour
adrinuk@yahoo.co.uk

    

 

California Dreaming (Nesfarsit) – Cristian Nemescu – 2007 Romania:  Jamie Elman; Maria Dimilescu
Viewed Tyneside Cinema July 31 08 Ticket price £6-80 

The English title of the film points to a marketing idea.  The Romanian title of the film points to the idea of time: but the film’s natural ambit is really:  situation – the train that does not move.

California Dreaming (CD) opens with a black and white time shift sequence that takes us back more than 50 years to the end of the WWll.  We witness the effects of a bombing raid on Bucharest from the interior of a tenement bock where the inhabitants flee in panic as the bombs are dropping. On its own terms it’s a stunning opening series of shots characterised by choreographed craning camera movement.   The awful reality of falling ordinance presents through an almost animation like realisation of the action, with its visual representation of an unexploded bomb, the menacing dull metallic sheen of its casing transfixing the eye,  smashing through the roof of the building and tumbling down the  building’s stairs in pursuit of a young boy.   It’s a helter-skelter sequence in which the bomb finally settles in its resting place without exploding.  Like a fat unfertilised egg the device sets up the idea of history as a time bomb:  an archaeologically layered event waiting to be dug up.   By something or some one.  This opening sequence sits in the film as an interwoven metaphor pervading the unravelling situation. As the film progresses its purpose is to interconnect the represented present to the past from which it has flowed. It is not just the waiting of the train that is endless; so too are the consequences of history: Endless.

Only it doesn’t work.  The metaphorical device of the bomb, stylishly realised though it is, is not meshed into the structure of the film.  In effect the body of the film comprises a situation that has as its mainspring its own powerful logic: immobility. The  insertion of  primal historical dimension adds nothing to this situation.  If any thing the time element undermines the integrity of the film by adding an irrelevant plane of immanence. In CD the time element is otiose.  The historical sequences are good looking cinema, a demonstration of set piece choreographic competence.  But layered  into the action it only serves as an exemplifier, a fashionable nod or acknowledgement of the workings of history, particularly in Eastern Europe.

The situation in CD is a simple proposition: in 1999 a military train in transit to Serbia as part of the NATO  engagement in the Balkan regional conflict, is refused passage through a section of the track by a relatively minor but powerful railway official who says that the train does not have the correct authorisation. Lacking the right clearance and stymied by the local bureaucrat, the train is shunted into a siding and decoupled from its locomotive.  With its complement of US and Roumanian guards the train waits in the sweltering heat for the necessary clearance from uninterested ministers in Bucharest who shuffle the papers from one office to another.  

CD posits a situation where a number of expressive oppositions are brought into play.  The moving and the still; the organic and the inorganic, the peasant and the urban, the military machine and the social matrix, male and female, power and powerlessness.  The interest in the situation lies in how the film exploits and develops the machinations latent in its oppositions and brings into play expressive exemplars of the forces that it has created.  I think CD is compromised by its overarching use of film clichés to express resolve and dissolve its prime elements. The consequence is that it is no more than a rehash and retread of familiar material. 

Nemescu’s script celebrates the infectious parochial pomposity of local politicians against the utilitarian outlook of the military; the obstinacy of the peasant opposing centralised bureaucracy.  But Nemescu is unable to do more than draw on a population of stock characters already well plumbed by directors of an earlier generation such as Milos Forman.  Nemescu’s failure is that he is unable to add any real further development to these oppositions.  He is content to set up narrative dynamics in which simple juxtapostioning of stereotypes types automatically releases tensions and milks the possibilities of  the humour of juxtaposition.  I think it is Nemescu’s inability to ring changes in stereotypes that comprises the film’s failure.  The US major in charge of the train squad, the mayor, the young girls, the US soldiers,  the striking workers amount to nothing more than stock characters.  The situation as it was set up has the potential for moving into veins of subjectivity that could have explored wilder counter intuitive veins of character. But these furrows have been left fallow.

They may have been left fallow because of the two key oppositions are selected to  dominate the film.  Firstly the love story.   The male and the female characters: the  opposition of the aspirations of the small town girl and the boredom of the foreign soldier, is milked for its evident commercial weight.  This short relationship instigated by Monica the local 17 year old beauty between herself and the soldier, comes out of a long line of East European films that celebrate the seductive power of dream relationships.  The subplot adds little if nothing to this genre of relationship, except that, shot in 2007 the sex scene leaves little to the imagination.  Otherwise it’s the tired story of: country girl seduces foreign soldier boy in pursuit of her desire to escape.   They fuck then go their separate ways: he returns to his real girl and she a little wiser and eventually back to the guy who really cares for her (as a person).  Wresting something new from this tired scenario requires special skills that are not evident here.

The other key opposition is between the railway official and the US major.  Which is where the time/historical factor rears up and interpenetrates the  film’s situational narrative.   The film, in this opposition invokes history as a causative device. CD wants to connect the minor official’s action in stopping the train to his hatred of Americans.  Because his father was killed in an American bombing raid on Bucharest at the end of WWll.  This mark on  the warp of history leads 50 years later to an act of revenge.  I think that as an a narrative idea this overdetermines history as a driving force.  After so much ‘history’ in Roumania the Communist coup,  the dictatorship of Ceausescu  the hardships of  the restoration of capitalism, to select for purposes of revenge, a Nato train half of whose guards are American, and  to delay it , feels ike weak linkage.   A limp wrested attempt to implicate history.  As a character it also demeans the role of the railway official, lessening his interest as an agent and reducing him to a pawn of psychological mechanisms. The implication of history doesn’t necessarily deepen character: it can render character the more opaque. If for instance the railway official had harboured a rage and a fury at NATO intervention in geographic zones where they understood nothing of history, then the character comes alive.  Screwing him into a reactive act of revenge deadens him and does little service to actual historical memory.

Lastly the film is laboriously overlong.  One of the reasons it felt so long was what starts in CD as a joke, the ritual of translation carried out with intentional misrepresentation, becomes a pedantic need of Nemescu’s to repeat ad infinitum. In the end it is an idea that only serves to extend the film long beyond its situational premise. In itself California Dreaming becomes: Endless.
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A Groupie’s Revenge. Book review by Tom Jennings, published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 12, July 2008.
A Groupie’s Revenge, by Tom Jennings

The Ghost, by Robert Harris

This bestselling novelist’s latest interrupts his blockbusting broad-brush historical revisionism, from Fatherland (1993; what if Germany had won WWII?) through Imperium (2006; ancient Roman skullduggery). The Ghost is contemporary; considerably less ‘thrilling’; and narrower in scope, following a worldweary ghostwriter for recently-retired UK Prime Minister Adam Lang to a posh New England resort to hack together hagiographic memoirs. Harris does, however, persist in fictionalising pivotal periods in terms of corruption, conspiracy and complicity among the Great and Good hitherto hidden from mainstream accounts meekly swallowing their platitudinous rationalisations. Here there’s also the obvious hook of Blair’s ‘legacy’ and a spate of superficial political autobiographies trading on present difficulties – although, of course, any resemblance to this novel’s characters is purely coincidental …
The portrayal of the vapid narcissism of power is decidedly deliberate, nonetheless, as is the murderous conjuncture of corporate unaccountability, elite greed, institutional arrogance and cynical media dishonesty. So the protagonist appropriately proposes to “put some heart” into his spin; whereupon he’s hard-pressed to find any. Skeletons and closets, conversely, proliferate. Not only did the ghost’s predecessor expire in suspicious circumstances, but government support for Bush involved a whole swathe of betrayals – personal, ideological, national – stretching back decades. Maintaining their secrecy threatens our hero too, and the enjoyably daft romp accelerates after he gets a shag with Cherie (sorry, Ruth Lang) and support from a dashing, charismatic ex-Foreign Secretary (who could that be?) clamouring to nobble his former boss as International War Criminal. Finally the dastardly CIA plot is revealed (and covered up) – New Labour was a dirty trick all along.

… Or, if not that, an exceedingly big bad apple infecting an otherwise noble enterprise. But wait! Wasn’t the writer cheerleader-in-chief embedded in the Third Way offensive? The Sunday Times political journo by Blair’s side during that heady 1997 election night? Who got in a strop when his chum Mandelson sunk (oh yes, and over the Iraq invasion)? Methinks something’s rotten in the isle of Harris, too – strong whiffs of bad faith permeating this extraordinary rendition of chattering-class tabloid malice; its solipsistic tone of action unravelling inside spiteful fantasies; the vanity of self-justifying hindsight paralleling the delusions of paranoia, where the world really is out to get you but not for the reasons your hubris assumes. Beneath the manifest content, the real conspiracy is neoliberal capitalism’s continuity since Thatcher, nurtured and hawked by lickspittle think-tanks and academics pimping economic sophistry to highest bidders both sides of the pond. Labour ‘modernisers’ partook of this poisoned font from the get-go,* learning the codependence of business prosperity on authoritarian states and the art of selling voters out – whereas evil spooks absolve both professional suckers and the entire discursive architecture which insists ‘there is no alternative’.

* see meticulous research by Lobster editor Robin Ramsay published, for example, in Variant magazine and books including Prawn Cocktail Party (Vision, 1998), The Rise of New Labour (Pocket Essentials, 2002), and new collection Politics and Paranoia (Picnic, 2008).

The Ghost, published by Hutchinson, is out now in paperback.

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The Fine-Grain of Community. Film review by Tom Jennings, published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 15, August 2008
The Fine-Grain of Community, by Tom Jennings

Tom Jennings is captivated by Couscous and its sympathetic but unflinchingly honest portrait of an extended family struggling to make various ends meet.

Writer-director Abdellatif Kechiche’s new film details the bonds and fissures within a French-Tunisian clan and social network beset by sundry economic, cultural and institutional pressures in the Mediterranean port of Sête, where the fishing and shipbuilding industries are rapidly declining. The film’s title (originally Le Graine et le Mulet – semolina grain and mullet; couscous’ contrasting main ingredients) emphasises the patterns and texture of daily existence, and its central set-piece mealtime scenes directly echo classic French family melodrama – though in a socio-economic milieu alien to the familiar upper-middle-class complacency. Superficially resembling Robert Guedigian’s downbeat Marseille-based social realism, here the manipulation of script, structure and pacing interconnects multiple levels of reference and significance to give an epic, novelistic feel. Fortunately this doesn’t detract from the specificity of characters and situations – Kechiche and the largely non-professional (but completely convincing) cast hailing from the background portrayed and intimate with the trials and tribulations tackled.
Facing redundacy after refusing to sacrifice craftsmanship to ‘flexibility’, world-weary 60 year-old ship’s carpenter Slimane (an impressively restrained Habib Boufares) collects fish from trawlermen mates and distributes them to his ex-wife Souad and their children’s families – whose responses (to him, his news and the fish) reflect their own diverse dilemmas and difficulties. The mullet eventually surface in Souad’s renowned Sunday-lunch – Slimane is not invited, but sons Hamid (unemployed) and Majid (an inveterate womaniser) deliver some to the low-rent hotel owned by his new partner Latifa. They suggest he return to the Tunisia he left as a young man, but instead he spends his severance renovating a rotting hulk into a floating restaurant showcasing Souad’s couscous. Latifa’s teenage daughter Rym (the superb Hafsia Herzi) helps negotiate the patronising, prejudicial, dismissive town bureaucracy, and everyone pitches in preparing for an opening night to seal official licensing. But Majid disappears for an assignation with the centrepiece semolina still in his car-boot, and the film ends with Slimane running round in circles in pursuit while Rym and his Tunisian friends entertain those gathered with traditional music and bellydance …

Couscous skilfully deploys, and undermines, prevailing multiculturalist discourses which misrepresent the immigrant experience as exotically (and dangerously) distinct from a supposedly indigenous mainstream – emphasising many interacting dimensions of difference which only translate into ‘otherness’ from a wilfully separate perspective. This family is thoroughly integrated in terms of local employment, neighbourhood and marriage, embodying a range of relationships with ‘native’ French and people from other backgrounds. Cross-cultural contrasts may result in enrichment and/or conflict, with outcomes impossible to simplistically attribute to tribal cliches – compare, for example, Majid’s betrayed Russian wife, bereft in isolation, with Slimane and Souad’s fully embedded estrangement. Furthermore, drawing on roots and customs can reinforce collective memory, practice and orientation; but may also represent defensive constraint – the illusory allure of looking backward when Slimane considers giving up, or the compulsion towards kin cohesion effectively colluding in Majid’s destructive philandering while keeping Latifa and Rym at arm’s length.
Crucially, issues of race and racism, while not denied, are only decisive when modulated by class division and hierarchy. Thrown on the modern economy’s scrapheap, Slimane rescues its rejected flotsam – not just the boat, but himself and what social and cultural capital he can muster – and gambles on his own account. Ironically, self-commodification in the post-industrial service sector entails artificially singling out, objectifying and amplifying those very markers of special identity that hitherto nourished everyday life in concert with all the other influences. Now, providing a niche-market ‘ethnic’ product means simultaneously appealing to, competing with, and satisfying the disciplinary gazes of the middle-class establishment. The business community leaders, local government functionaries, hangers-on and tourists are thus conflated here in the restaurant’s homogeneously grotesque, increasingly drunken patrons seeking suitably aestheticised touristic experience while remaining oblivious to the underpinning mundane human dramas reminiscent of working-class struggles to survive and thrive the world over.
The film’s bravest risk is to suspend this climax on an unbearably drawn-out knife-edge, with no way to predict the result. Confronting his desire to leave an enduring legacy after a disappointed life, our scarcely authoritative patriarch sets events in motion with his secular ‘loaves and fishes’, but heroic individualism is decidedly beside the point as he flails helplessly at the mercy of others. The kids stealing his moped crystallise his waning agency, leaving younger generations to work it out for themselves – with prospects hinging on the balance of internal forces as much as external limits. Nevertheless, the strengths and shortcomings of the elders appear uncannily reflected in their descendants, though recomposing in very different circumstances. If the daughters’ invocation of engagement, perseverance and solidarity can overcome pride and resentment and help galvanise the sons from their reluctance to act responsibly, the cultural matrix inherited from the past – whether concerning music, food or love – could clinch the blending of capabilities in fruitful directions. Devised partly as Kechiche’s tribute to his own father (a friend of the lead actor who died shortly before filming), Couscous succeeds well beyond his aim “to show all the complexities of this Franco-Arabic family … looking to a future which does not necessarily mean the denial of their own identity”.*

* Abdellatif Kechiche, in Ginette Vincendeau, ‘Southern Discomfort’, Sight & Sound, July 2008, p.47.

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The Great White Hopeless, by Tom Jennings.
Television review of Immigration, the Inconvenient Truth, Channel 4, and the White season, BBC 2
A rash of TV documentaries explain away tense British resident-immigrant relations with typical middle-class prejudice in reproducing forty years of media and state-managed mystifications of the ravages of capitalism, according to Tom Jennings.

Great White Hopeless

Shock, horror! Television bosses recently made the surprise discovery of defensive, backward-looking racism among the depressed, so-called ‘indigenous white working class’. Purporting to explore this phenomenon, BBC 2’s White Season (screened in March) and Channel 4’s Dispatches, Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth (April) focussed on recent UK population trends. Each resurrected Enoch Powell’s infamous 1968 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech as the most appropriate interpretive prism through which to understand hardening attitudes towards immigrants and the electoral gains of the BNP (who vocally applauded the series). So although countless interesting and enlightening aspects of the subject crop up in passing throughout all nine programmes, many important issues are ignored altogether. The clear editorial direction imposed on the material – neglected poor white natives blame migrants for their woes, and that Powell was (kind of) right – is legitimised and reinforced despite being repeatedly undercut even by much of the partial and selective evidence gathered.

The Beeb’s hotch-potch started with the classic observational elegy of Last Orders. The ex-Labour committee members of Wibsey Working Men’s Club bemoan its decline, with support having haemorrhaged for decades – yet regretfully cite the overweening problem of Bradford’s growing Asian population. No one’s quite clear on cause and effect, or why mainstream politicians are uninterested in the impoverishment and social breakdown of their community of “forgotten people”. Meanwhile the destruction of local industries which depended on Asian labour, or the blatant manipulation of the race card by all municipal parties and media ever since, are hardly mentioned – let alone countervailing voices with a less jaundiced and prejudiced and more critical awareness of the situation. With the pattern set, complexity is obliterated completely in Denys Blakeway’s putrid glossing of Rivers of Blood with contemporary allusion – ‘forgetting’ that the whole analysis, its assumptions and predictions, were completely wrong for 1968 (never mind now) despite Powell’s best efforts kickstarting the poisonous national chauvinism that Griffin etc inherit [1]. The disavowed subtext? If middle-class white people wish-fulfil themselves as “last bastions of civilisation”, alliance with boneheads becomes respectable.
The following programmes more or less subtly put the boot into the white underclass. White Girl fictionalises a Northern teenager (from a 2006 Channel 4 documentary) finding refuge in Islam from a dysfunctional home – whereas such narratives could apply to any class, race or creed. The Primary’s Birmingham school with kids of 17 different nationalities just about copes despite inevitable difficulties – by implication, in this context, thanks to the utter absence of white working class people. The Poles Are Coming! then looks at Eastern Europeans in Peterborough working more diligently in worse conditions than locals tolerate in construction and agriculture. Though focussing on infrastructural and planning chaos and the fracturing of community by the buy-to-let slum-landlord epidemic, migrants themselves are squarely positioned as the problem’s cause – with anti-social workshy white youth in the background making it a crisis. Finally, All White in Barking gestures towards ‘balance’ in comparing old-school Essex responses to the global influx – one pensioner glaring hatefully at African residents and organising BNP stalls, apparently without registering that his kids and grandkids are colour-blind and/or mixed-race; while another couple transcend similar hostility and suspicion by befriending Nigerian and Albanian neighbours, and an elderly Auschwitz survivor squires his Ugandan carer at a local Jewish community dinner.

A better title for the Dispatches trilogy, fronted by son of Somali immigrants Rageh Omaar, would have been ‘Immigration, the Convenient Scapegoats’. Relentlessly suppressing evidence to the contrary, the narrative consistently asserted that we all subscribe to ‘swamping’ logic, using a specially-commissioned YouGov public opinion survey which bore all the hallmarks of such spurious, tendentious pseudo-science.
Trusting viewers to swallow outrageous extrapolations from flimsy ‘proof’, even cursory attention revealed confusion about who counted as Britons or ‘settled migrants’ or their descendants, and what difference this made to assertions of immigration being “a problem” or “in crisis”.
The clumsy Yes/No questions disallowed considered responses and virtually ensured inaccurate results, whereas many of the empirical findings were clearly far more ambiguous than the simplistic editorial agenda permitted. So, by the third episode, the apocalyptic tone had subsided somewhat. But instead of the obvious need to question the whole basis of official nationalist and multiculturalist discourses, the tangible awareness that global economics had something to do with it prompted a retreat to the favoured culprit – the inflexibly hopeless white working class unable to compete in the New World Order. But the visible desperation and hardship twisted into resentment in many places is only part of that story, which the BBC and Channel 4 had neither the bottle, desire, nor wit to follow up [2].
To conclude, then, as I argue elsewhere [3], this current affairs coverage disingenuously maintains “distinctions between those whose survival is most imminently threatened and the comfort zones of aspirational experience – just when the economic and structural conditions which underwrote the flight from drudgery for the twentieth century’s new middle-classes unravel before our eyes … [P]rofessional media tourists avoid the countless people making horizontal links, conducting joint operations, productive relationships, cultural exchanges and social interactions at the base. Thus a view of society is reproduced as no more than interlocking networks of exclusion zones, where the only negotiation between dimensions of difference – whether biological, social or economic – occurs on the state’s terms at its own designated, tightly-policed sites, carried out by the market’s credentialled experts. In which case converging material situations, interests, expressions and struggles among foreigners, natives, underclasses and the new nearly-destitute simply disappear from view”. Furthermore the best corrective can be found where rivers of blood literally flow from the vicious intersection of capitalist structural adjustment and national state ideology – yet South African militant shantydwellers counter xenophobic violence insisting: “Don’t turn your suffering neighbours into enemies” [4].

Notes
1. see Institute of Race Relations, ‘Rehabilitating Enoch Powell’ (www.irr.org.uk/2008/march/ha000018.html).
2. … on this occasion, anyway. In less threatening contexts the fortunes of the ‘white tribe’ have, for example, been cheerfully charted by Michael Collins – though scrupulously avoiding the politically conscious and active – in The Likes Of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class (Granta, 2004) and The British Working Class (Channel 4, 2005).
3. in ‘Craven New World’, Variant 32, pp.9-12 (www.variant.randomstate.org/32texts/issue32.html). See also ‘The End of Tolerance’, Daniel Jewesbury’s useful discussion of UK racism in the same issue.
4. in a statement by Durban-based Abahlali baseMjondolo, ‘No One Is Illegal’ (www.abahlali.org/node/3582).
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Prozac Attitude. Film review by Tom Jennings, published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 14, August 2008.
Prozac Attitude, by Tom Jennings

Belying his miserabilist reputation, Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky celebrates incorrigible optimism – but with the usual twists, finds Tom Jennings

After virtually unremitting gloom in Mike Leigh’s family dramas All Or Nothing (2002) and Vera Drake (2005) [1], it’s telling that Happy-Go-Lucky’s refreshingly light tone most strongly parallels Johnny’s cynical nihilism in Naked (1993) railing at Thatcherism’s social wasteland. Here, Sally Hawkins’ pitch-perfect portrayal of thirty-year-old primary-schoolteacher Poppy anchors a loose, patchwork narrative also set in North London bedsitland, whereas this single-character study (with superb supporting performances) wards off hopelessness with an insistently positive outlook on adversity – the catchphrase “It makes me laugh!” echoing many of the writer-director’s previous protagonists. Risking sinking under the weight of her own cliches, Poppy nevertheless conveys sufficient complexity and subtle depth to convince – whose intelligible strategy to cope with an apparently fast-deteriorating world moreover retains a motivation to cultivate in everyone around her a sense that life is worth living. The film’s tensions and dynamism then emerge from various manifestations of negativity testing the considerable effort required to sustain this philosophy.
However, this is no superficial, conservative, feelgood ‘chick-flick’ – despite bright and breezy, colourful lighting, design and widescreen cinematography mirroring Poppy’s garish grunge, wide-eyed sunny non-conformism and all-round Prozac attitude. Straightaway, her joking, self-deprecating banter falters when a sullen shop-assistant won’t cooperate – pretending things aren’t so bad sometimes being simply insulting. Likewise, an ostensibly carefree lifestyle of aimless diversions – particularly with fellow-teacher, flatmate and best friend since college, Zoe (wryly commenting that being grown-up is hard) – palls as pressures to transcend extended adolescence are palpable for all concerned. Inspirational teaching can’t single-handedly ameliorate the damaging domestic environments of the kids, older colleagues are patently unfulfilled by work, and the spin on regular Leigh themes of inter-generational relations and the demands of adulthood is reinforced by the unhappy hostility of Poppy’s two sisters (self-pitying student; straitlaced suburban housewife) counterpointing her zany complacency.
Happy-Go-Lucky’s women persevere with each other loyally, differences notwithstanding, but three dysfunctional male incarnations interrupt Poppy’s gaiety more decisively. Patience and concerned curiosity uncover the abusive source of a little boy’s bullying, which may still be preempted, while genuine feeling in a night-time encounter with an angrily incoherent homeless man hints at deeper empathy with the anguish of life falling apart. And rejecting the judgmentalism of others is no narcissistic defence because, in the sequence of driving lessons forming the film’s core, even her bitter, paranoid, utterly reactionary instructor isn’t written off. Scott’s conception of education as rigid hidebound rule-systems obviously contradicts her intuitive expressivity but, while rejecting his authoritarian excess, she persists in trying to understand where he’s coming from – which he mistakes for mocking and flirtation, responding even more obsessively and inappropriately. Then, in yet another structural balancing act, her new, rather drippy, social-worker boyfriend allows gentle caring, good humour and the possibility of passionate commitment to coexist – before the camera finally draws back as Poppy and Zoe muse on what the future holds …

It’s hard to convey the full richness of a Mike Leigh film in a few short paragraphs. Refusing Hollywood’s cardboard cut-out conventions and heroic individual transcendences, he plays with and undermines the generic expectations of melodrama, satire, tragedy and farce in favour of minor crises or tipping points accompanying the slow accretion of painful and pleasurable experience bounded by the intransigence of a heartless world. His preference for characters from lower-class backgrounds originated in a middle-class childhood in a downmarket district of Salford where a keen sociability was fed by encounters with less privileged folk trumping the stultifying conformity of his own household and others like it [2], leading to a lifelong distrust of pretension and pomposity. From this, the strength of his ensemble pieces often lies in the generosity and goodwill found within social networks, but such phenomena are never glibly asserted and frequently overshadowed by the depression and petty malice arising from frustrated needs. Thus points of identification, alienation, sadness, hilarity and antipathy oscillate as viewers recognise themselves and others in characters simultaneously lamented and applauded, but whose integrity is always respected. The work then “aspires to the conditions of documentary” in accurate depictions of real life at specific times in identifiable places, while simultaneously representing ambitious artistic contrivance in building believable human mosaics from scratch [3].
Exhaustive individual backstories are built in close collaboration with the cast, gradually extending into collective improvisations and rehearsals from which the script is developed. The vast bulk of detail developed in this process subsequently echoes in the final product only in informing behaviour and interaction, where the actors don’t know what will happen before the characters would. Arriving at similar preoccupations to those of cinematic naturalism or social realism, the use of these entirely different means and methods gives the films their direct intensity of impact and honest, sympathetic ambivalence concerning the tragicomedies of ordinary life where relatively unexceptional situations conspire to close down or open up anyone’s potential. Happy-Go-Lucky’s central concern, indeed, is finding a suitable orientation to contemporary tragicomedies and potentials in a context where such widespread political pessimism inclines many to give up altogether. Embodying a vulnerable struggle for maturity while determined not to lose the childlike enchantment with the world that can imagine and provoke renewal, Poppy perhaps tentatively reflects – in typically sly, understated fashion – Leigh’s own ‘socialistic’ and ‘anarchistic’ impulses and hopes [4], since he takes such great pains to acknowledge the uncomfortable texture of mundane daily life precisely in order to “reveal the transformative potential that is continually being generated within it” [5].

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Notes
1. see my review of the latter in Freedom, 5th February 2005.
2. see Amy Raphael (ed), Mike Leigh On Mike Leigh, Faber, 2008.
3. discussed in detail in Raymond Carney & Leonard Quart, The Films of Mike Leigh: Embracing the World, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
4. see, for example: Michael Coveney, The World According to Mike Leigh, Harper Collins, 1996; and Howie Movshovitz (ed), Mike Leigh: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
5. Garry Watson, The Cinema of Mike Leigh: A Sense of the Real, Wallflower, 2004, p.23.
Happy-Go-Lucky is released on DVD on 18th August.

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In the Best Interests of the Child. Film review by Tom Jennings, published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 12, July 2008.
Tom Jennings is relieved that Ben Affleck’s first film as director, the thought-provoking Gone, Baby, Gone, avoids the ham sentimentality of much of his acting

Its UK release delayed in sensitivity to the Madeleine McCann case, Gone, Baby, Gone’s child abduction scenario bears scant resemblance but probably boosted box-office by association. Here, news-team vultures descend on Dorchester, South Boston, Massachussetts, as single-mother Helene McCready (a magnificent Amy Ryan) laments her disappeared four-year-old, Amanda, shepherded by steely-eyed police and neighbours and family rallying supportively. Director Ben Affleck and the story’s creator Dennis Lehane hail from these parts, while protagonist PIs Patrick Kenzie (Casey Affleck) and Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan) have lived there all their lives. Passionate attachment to the ‘hood is reflected in the latters’ conduct and the camera’s naturalistic pans around inner-city blight, alighting on variously battered and beleaguered, resigned and/or residually energetic residents – many also cast in minor caricatures complementing consistently fine acting by star-turns.
Despite high-minded pronouncements by cop supremo Doyle – who lost his own child to kidnappers – and ace detective Bressant (Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris lending grizzled gravitas to proceedings), official inquiries falter. Specialist skip-tracers tracking down debtors and errant spouses, the reluctant Kenzie and Gennaro are hired by Amanda’s aunt. Local confidence in their discretion immediately yields clues – the involvement of notorious gangster Cheese and missing drug-money; Helene’s substance-abuse and corresponding suspicious unreliability; her boyfriend’s sudden violent death clinching the link. No longer patronised by the police for naïve amateurism, the investigators uncover the cash and broker its exchange for the girl at a remote flooded quarry – but she’s believed drowned when the botch-up leaves Cheese shot dead. Doyle is sacked for tragic incompetence and retires to the sticks; everyone sees closure achieved. Only Kenzie’s not so sure, and a subsequent spiralling descent into the violent degradations of paedophilia and addiction eventually reveal depths of duplicity at all levels even he’d never dreamed.
These last unlikely plot twists serve to undermine our assumptions as cultivated so far – and Kenzie and Gennaro’s, leaving them disagreeing over a final dilemma so fundamental as to terminate their professional and romantic relationship. Nevertheless, ultimate judgements and justifications concerning rights, wrongs and likely consequences remain suspended. Not only are heroic rescue, reassuring redemption, and cautionary tragedy refused, but the conservative grounds upon which viewers might expect such outcomes – from banal Hollywood crime-action pulp to the parallel (but no less fantasy-ridden) morbid tabloid shock-horror over current affairs – are comprehensively undercut. Such disquieting limbo was obviously deliberate, and scriptwriting decisions altering and cutting the source novel wholesale pass the buck to us even more starkly. This is the film’s unusual strength, but discussing its effectiveness necessitates spoiling the suspense – so anyone not wishing to know the score should look away now …

In The Best Interests of the Child

Unbelievably enough, the entire saga constituted a conspiracy choreographed by Doyle in connivance with his lieutenants down to Helene’s disapproving relatives, with varying material, malicious and purportedly altruistic interests and moral righteousnesses interweaving, spiriting the lass to ‘safety’ while her mam drank in the bar. The ensuing host of casualties, whether dead or bereft – unmourned criminals, Bessant and his partner, written-off lower-class dupes – were blithely sacrificed, pawns for the patriarch’s peace of mind retiring from burdensome power. Out the window also went all pretensions of institutional credibility as, crucially (and, predictably, eluding the critics), the scheme’s success hinged on accepting at face value the normal scripts, cliches and homilies of governance, public welfare and basic decency among higher- and lower-order model citizens obeying the law. Nonetheless – although the film sadly loses Lehane’s meticulous characterisations (particularly of Kenzie and Gennaro) and dialogue conveying the full convincing texture of attitudes in action – viewers were given several hints among the red herrings that things weren’t as they seemed.
Two especially stand out. Encouraged to perceive Helene harshly through circumstantial implication and the harsh glare of unforgiving attention, we never once glimpse her actual everyday relationship with her daughter. Comversely, Doyle’s parental fitness is unchallenged, despite his known trauma and willingness to wreck lives to heal it. Who is the child, to him, beyond a substitute salving private pain? Do his influence and affluence – displaced from urban hell to rustic idyll – guarantee saintly credentials in arrogating to himself godlike choice? Then shouldn’t all the suffering children be saved from the vicious agony of the ghetto and the evils impoverishment produces? Even if the manner of its accomplishment adds to the oppression and injustice nourishing desperation in the first place, simultaneously precluding youthful renewal? While, irrespective of increments of positivity which might (arguably) transpire, serving the selfish desires of those in positions to exploit the system to advantage? … Anything for a happy ending?
No. The relentless message from media and politicians is to abandon the irredeemable poor, demonising any deviation from passively respectable defeatism. The innocent purity to be protected here, then, is the lingering quasi-religious illusion that things might turn out right by trusting the benevolence of those in charge and believing their rationalisations. Whereas, surely, if a single soul spared is the best to hope for, this betrays an utmost cynicism – the complete collapse of legitimacy of the status quo to match its guardians’ insincerity. But Kenzie won’t give up on his people (or himself), following simple ethics, fulfilling his promise – returning Amanda to her mother – when others see Greater Good colluding with thoroughgoing corruption in a broken society. Even he suspects he chose wrong, in the final babysitting scene mournfully contemplating prospects, Helene again out on the razzle. Yet with no individual correct answer to a collective quandary, maintaining honesty and integrity and nourishing it around you may represent a pragmatic faith preferable to fairytale wish-fulfilment making token exceptions to busted-flush rules. Credit is due to Gone, Baby, Gone for going against the grain, rendering such thorny issues even conceivable on mainstream screens.

Gone, Baby, Gone is released on DVD in September.

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Essay review of dystopian visions in contemporary film, television and art, including Taking Liberties, Faceless, Children Of Men, The Last Enemy, Exodus and Polly II: A Plan For Revolution in Docklands.

Craven New World by Tom Jennings

[Essay review of dystopian visions in contemporary film, television and art, including Taking Liberties, Faceless, Children Of Men, The Last Enemy, Exodus and Polly II: A Plan For Revolution in Docklands.]

Documenting attacks on civil freedoms in Britain the film Taking Liberties (2007) was made for cinema because such a “one-sided” (read honest) appraisal of the Blair regime’s record was thought unlikely to survive the requirements of “balance” (read censorship) on television [1]. Supported by Fahrenheit 9/11’s producers, Taking Liberties apes Michael Moore’s populist combo of comic buffoonery and acid commentary and romps through New Labour’s neurotic erosion of rights to privacy, protest and freedom of speech, its tacit embrace of imprisonment without trial, unaccountable extradition and torture. Recounting the personal experiences of a swathe of victims, from peace protesters to those persecuted in the War on Terror, a convincing picture of escalating totalitarianism is then sketched against a background of animated vignettes showing centuries’ worth of legal ‘checks and balances’ on state power. This is all set to a jaunty Britpop soundtrack. Unfortunately, the potential of mocking the powerful is undermined by a tone veering from flippant to hysterical, before being ultimately ruined by dissolving into overstatements of incipient Nazi-ness among parliamentary leaders and an astounding cluelessness about the prospects of influencing them [2].

Worse, the film’s broad-brush, knee-jerk jingoism cripples any political understanding of past or present. Ancient constitutional antecedents are all very well for patronising children with, but the routine reality of peremptory injustice in recent decades has shaped the patterns of close interference now being ratcheted up; from Northern Ireland policy, racist policing and the internment of immigrants; to Tory anti-union and criminal justice legislation and the penalisation of ‘antisocial’ behaviour. Kowtowing to globalising capitalism necessitates welfare suffering, while lower-class community, collectivity and autonomy is hammered to shortcircuit resistance. But Taking Liberties ignores the structural and economic frameworks within which governments discipline their subjects, let alone how they achieve apparent consent for it. Instead we’re asked to sympathise with rich US bankers suspected of corporate fraud – after all, ‘we’re all in this together’, a supposedly ‘freedom-loving’ people. This lack of analysis leaves the film wallowing in middle-class moral superiority and outrage, urging self-righteous symbolic protest. Is this more a recipe for apathy than active opposition?

The UK government legitimises the increasing regulation of the populace in terms of administrative efficiency rather than historical precedence or legal niceties. Even a cursory questioning sees the pragmatic justifications for the National Identity Register and attendant technologies collapse like a house of (identity) cards, yet the debate stubbornly clings to nationalist sentiment [3]. The latest edition of Mute magazine helps make the stakes clearer. As Josephine Berry Slater points out, “The basic survival of the poor, undocumented or ‘illegalised’ often depends on the ability to operate [in a] … grey zone of anonymity [which] is constantly squeezed in the interests of population management, border enforcement, welfare clamp-downs, technocratic convenience and, of course, the economy” [4]. In fact, precisely those realms of experience which Taking Liberties ignores.

Meanwhile, mainstream political discourse brooks no argument that only the free movement of capital allows society to survive and prosper, thanks to the expert, rational-market disposition of resources. But accelerating human and environmental degradation resulting from the application of neoliberal ideology generates inevitable crises, the intransigence of which is disavowed when they are treated merely as management conundrums. Thus the incipient panopticon society obsessively maximises data collection, in the pretence that mass bureaucratisation allows the competent administration of otherwise insoluble problems. In the resulting climate of increasingly routinised emergencies and attendant moral panics, and the overall prospect of multiple impending catastrophes, everyone excluded from polite society can be blamed and targeted while those fortunate enough to temporarily reap the dubious benefits of consumerism look the other way and defend ‘civilisation’ [5]. With each burning issue merely grist to media headline-mills, ordinary current affairs paradigms plainly lack the imagination to make sense of such extraordinary circumstances. Conversely, the mysteries of the future are science-fiction’s stock-in-trade, and so what follows seeks signs of hope in recently screened dystopian visions that reflect prevailing trends in biopolitical divide and rule [6].

Unpleasantville
The Data Protection Act supposedly safeguards against abuse by making transparent what information, about us, private and state agencies collect. In recognition of the epidemic of CCTV systems across the UK (now the internal surveillance capital of the world) its scope was widened in 1998 to include visual imaging. Crime prevention budgets are increasingly syphoned off into an expanding surveillance manufacturing industry’s profits, despite failing to have any significant impact in the reduction of offences. Meanwhile, the sinister centrality of surveillance technology in New Labour’s plans for an integrated database and ID card seems threatened only by the bungling of IT entrepreneurs and bureaucrats. But, apart from the usual suspects, the wider British public seem remarkably acquiescent to intrusion. So, is the public really bewitched by anti-social crime and terror hype, hypnotised by spectacular media, wrong-footed by seductive virtuality, and domesticated by reality TV? Given that no less a figure than the government’s Information Commissioner Richard Thomas deems us to have already “sleepwalked” into dystopia, it seems pertinent to ask – riffing on Dr Strangelove – whether we have ‘learned to stop worrying and love Big Brother’ [7].

Media art collective Ambient TV share the concern, and decided to extend their Spy School (2002) dramatisations of hitherto hidden assemblages of data held on citizens into a “science-fiction fairytale” patchwork comprised of visual material plucked from this matrix, with a storyline fitting the philosophical framework used to justify and regulate official omniscience. The result is Manu Luksch’s surprisingly beguiling Faceless (2007) – helped in part by Ballet Boyz choreography, Mukul Patel’s haunting soundtrack and Tilda Swinton’s austere voiceover – which emphasises the DPA stricture that individuals deemed uninteresting have their features obliterated, with those remaining targeted for action [8]. The tragic protagonist (necessarily played by Luksch herself) lacks reflexivity or emotion beyond the narcotising flow of interaction with the ubiquitous New Machine. Then, a sudden discovery: she has a face! In her job as data monitor this signifies a disturbance to the status quo, destined to be corrected in the interests of stability and safety. But with personal identity come fragments of memory and fantasy, prompting awareness of possible pasts and futures along with uncertainty and fear. Exploiting newly incipient agency, her quest to evade oblivion is enlivened by encounters with mysterious Spectral Children, whose joyful unpredictability confounds the control apparatus. Sadly, they give disastrous advice to trust her instincts, but with no opportunity to develop such skills she soon succumbs to re-zombification.

This apparently conclusive fatalism is misleading, however, since the pivotal social engineering here occurs in reprogramming centres which brainwash people into numb passivity – not the global data-web itself (policed for deviation as administrative corollary). But how these function – or not, permitting escape – is withheld, thereby disabling viewers’ suspension of disbelief. Fittingly, the logistical nightmare of planning a coherent storyboard against the vagaries of CCTV operators complying with legislation (exposing the fiction of state-dispensed ‘rights’) mirrors the impossibility of sketching dystopian citizens with subjectivities echoing digital representations. The fairytale fails precisely because the principles behind Faceless were too rigorous, taking at ‘face value’ the viewpoint of power. The government’s fantasy of comprehensive knowledge of the population likewise makes scant human sense, whereas its implacable thirst for control will be far more pragmatically baleful. The film’s major artistic weakness therefore signals crucial (though unacknowledged) political potential. As its makers conclude: “The panopticon is not complete, yet. Regardless, could its one-way gaze ever assure an enabling conception of security?” Clearly, neither that nor a secure ability to conceive – and although beyond this film’s ambition, the relationships between the excluded and included (Spectral Children, and adults, and the erstwhile organic robots) would be key to dismantling the rigid walls of regimented otherness.

Apocalypse Soon

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children Of Men (2006) paints a contrasting but equally ominous picture of a near future where dystopian ghosts in machines are exorcised by default – with global environmental collapse, mass starvation and a global pandemic leaving humanity infertile. Nevertheless, Bulldog Britain soldiers on, demonising tidal waves of illegal immigrants escaping societal meltdown elsewhere, its increasingly totalitarian government trumping the public’s despair at impending extinction with ‘homeland security’ repression while benevolently distributing ‘Quietus’ self-euthanasia kits for those not succumbing to day-of-judgement fundamentalisms. A rag-tag resistance dodges the rampant militarised police around an exceedingly grubby and battered London in which death squads, random bombings and cages full of foreigners on their way to incarceration litter rubbish-filled streets. Woken from drunken disillusionment by an old flame’s quest, Clive Owen’s civil servant, Theo, then flip-flops around saving the world’s only pregnant woman – fetching up in Bexhill-on-Sea dressed as monstrous concentration camp – their flight captured in superb action sequences with bravura handheld single-takes, modulated with poignant moments of stillness amidst the bloodbath as the unexpected sight and sound of infancy resurrect temporary empathy.

However, the narrative is less daring than the award-winning cinematography and set design, which achieve an effectively estranged familiarity throughout. Whereas a previous UK-set dystopia V For Vendetta scuppered every ounce of political nous in its literary source [9], crime writer P.D. James’ novel here had little anyway. So the rainbow coalition of urban guerilla ‘Fishes’ (a symbol used by clandestine early Christians, signposting the messianic underbelly of moral politics) opposes the fascist state only by demanding human rights for refugees. Yet these former anti-war, civil rights and green activists launch armed insurrection! The film’s naff nativity fable subsequently crumbles into faith in scientific progress (the mythical ‘Human Project’ run by ‘the best brains in the world’ on the good ship ‘Tomorrow’), as, in an echo of John Wyndham or J.G. Ballard’s bleakly bilious postwar sci-fi critiques of bourgeois English anomie, Cuarón twists James’ high-church, high-Tory spiritual self-flagellation. The elites barricade themselves in to brazen out armageddon while Theo’s death, delivering (Black refugee) madonna and (female) child to sanctuary, finesses the conclusion that middle-class heroism (physical or philosophical) offers no solution.

Cuaron’s first feature, Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001), cleverly seasoned its road-trip sex tragicomedy with a voiceover insistently detailing the contemporaneous Mexican socio-economic convulsions that the upper-class protagonists remained oblivious to. Children of Men’s more starkly visual disjunction contrasts the immediacy of the suffering excludeds with the incapacity of the comfortable to recognise the culpability of their enlightened positions in the mess surrounding them. Slavoj Zizek interprets this philosophical infertility as the ideological despair of late capitalism, with no sense of history or agency possible in a liberal-democratic worldview which actively fosters disaster while precluding political renewal [10]. Nevertheless the film’s lack of engagement with the dispossessed themselves rather works against Zizek’s conclusion – citing the recurrent motif of crossing water – that overcoming the present impasse requires an acceptance of rootlessness, cutting emotive ties just as the migrants have done with their physical ones. After all, a baptism into fresh solidarity chosen by cosmopolitan intellectuals – already arguable as useful strategy – scarcely compares to the nourishment of collective memory amid desperate necessity.

Mission Implausible

The conspiracy thriller The Last Enemy, which occupied five primetime Sunday night slots on BBC1 in February-March 2008, extrapolates more narrowly in projecting only several years hence, albeit with decisive technological advances considerably enhancing identity-paranoia. Returning to terror-struck Britain for his twin’s funeral after working abroad, renowned mathematician Stephen (Benedict Cumberbatch) witnesses first-hand the downside of fully integrated monitoring with pre-emptive policing. Biometric ID cards are scanned in all mundane movements or transactions, and any anomaly automatically prompts armed intervention; card use being prohibited forthwith. Recruited by the Home Office’s latest PR drive for computerised security, he tests the new system to discover the fate of his NGO sibling supposedly killed helping Afghan refugees afflicted with a mystery illness. Unwittingly opening sundry cans of political, corporate, diplomatic, and academic science worms, Stephen becomes a target of officialdom. With informal subsistence all but impossible, he falls in with an unlikely band of aid-workers, illegal immigrants, renegade intelligence officers … and his brother, now also underground having faked his own death.

With timely scenario and entertainingly helter-skeleter pacing making for effective hokum – despite unconvincing personal ties among excessively narcissistic characters – the drama is infinitely less subversive than claimed [11]. At least, though, the refugees and migrants are given independent human texture, agency and social milieux, even while still depending on salvation by criminalised professionals and professional criminals – fake IDs, naturally, abound; but welfare and charity staff, only able to fulfil their remits by acting illegally is both original and suggestive. And while the national and international dimensions of skullduggery and cynicism also ring true, in classic parapolitical vein, they deflect attention from the nitty gritty of life for the majority in favour of the privileged significance of shallow heroes and villains acting outside of the deep structuring logics of institutions. As in Children of Men, we only get glimpses of the indigenous excluded, kept safely at arms length from all other social fractions – here a mere handful of hopeless homeless abjectly selling their blood and robbing each other for peanuts in a disappointing conservative echo of ASBO rhetoric.

Even more disastrously for present relevance, problems associated with the technology are restricted to its misuse – partly through function-creep, but mainly by corrupt careerists furthering agendas unerringly encouraged by business amoralism. In itself this is doubtless accurate, but New Labour’s shambolic PFI roll-outs also prove the utter incapacity of the systems to deliver on processing or fit-for-purpose promises. The Last Enemy’s effortlessly smooth operation of Total Information Awareness is, however, taken for granted. Even the supremely sinister nanotech radio-frequency tags, secretly injected into bloodstreams, appear neutral in principle – apart from their racially-specific, medical side-effects. The latter contrivance simultaneously kills both the narrative’s victims and its pretensions to sharp critique of the surveillance state. Tolerably workable, hard-, soft-, and live-ware is, after all, the crux of government spin. But their likelihood is contradicted by all the available evidence [12] – making stolen identity a risk; victimised identity a probability; and mistaken identity, via faulty data and erroneous interpretation, a commonplace. Yet countless personally disastrous bungles and stitch-ups – which ordinary folk would have least chance of sorting – would inevitably entail disproportionately lower-class effects, which are rendered irrelevant and invisible here compared to those of noble philanthropists selflessly serving helpless clients.

Minority Retort

More promisingly, the marginalised and repressed return with a vengeance in Exodus, written and directed by Penny Woolcock and screened by Channel 4 in November 2007. The film attenuates the Old Testament saga down to a parochial parable set in Margate, with local non-actors – for many of whom issues of migration and exclusion were immediate personal concerns – cast in all but a few leading roles [13]. In this new testament, charismatic mayor Pharoah Mann (Bernard Hill with suitably ridiculous barnet) has turned a formerly depressed borough – re-christened the Promised Land – into something of a BNP fantasy of a municipal fiefdom, where the respectable WASP majority have expelled from their midst a veritable anti-shopping list of undesirables. So members of ethnic minorities, asylum seekers and immigrants, homosexuals, the jobless and feckless, drunks, junkies, psychiatric cases and petty criminals have all been dumped in Dreamland – a shanty settlement nestling in the ruins of a funfair on the outskirts – and abandoned to fend for themselves. Of course, someone still has to undertake the menial and shit-work, but scrupulous surveillance and ruthless movement restrictions ensure that the lower ranks, minutely checked-in and out, barely subsist while being unable to extricate themselves from apartheid imprisonment.

When Pharoah’s adoptive son Moses turns eighteen, he learns from liberal-minded Mrs Mann that his real Romany mother gave him up at birth hoping he might thrive among history’s favoured. He resolves to search her out, having long been hurt by the condescending treatment given the family maid (another maternal substitute), but immediately witnesses the arbitrary brutal dehumanisation perpetrated by the ‘Pest Control’ police in Dreamland’s nightmare. He feels compelled to intervene violently and becomes a fugitive there, meeting his family distaff and marrying into the riff-raff. Increasingly appreciative of the unbelievably embattled community’s fortitude, spirit and potential, his tentative suggestions of unity go largely derided until his father-in-law, a gentle ghetto pedagogue, is murdered while protecting a pupil. Kickstarting feverish activity with the defiant affirmative gesture of a gigantic funeral pyre, escalating organisation and public confrontations demanding deliverance develop into outright guerilla sabotage, taking advantage of sophisticated knowhow honed individually in bonded servitude and now wielded for collective purpose. Modern biological, chemical and electronic versions of old Egypt’s plagues (thus translating divine intervention from hegemonic theological support into the practical weaponry of the weak – a brave and potent, if troubling, rhetorical manoeuvre in the present conjuncture) wreak mortal havoc in the Promised Land, and finally, the defeated fuhrer caves in and strikes down the gates. The longed-for exodus, however, heralds hand-to-hand slaughter on the beach …

There’s no doubting the integrity of Woolcock’s commitment, giving voice and expression to society’s outcasts and fashioning working practices which flout routine mainstream pretensions and hierarchies so as to respect, celebrate and empower hidden and suppressed storytelling [14]. But mortal wounds to this narrative’s body-politic are inflicted by its construction and focus – with a quite unwarranted mirroring of Pharoah and Moses and their respective spheres of influence. Dominated by high-bourgeois oedipal dynamics, the latter’s sullen adolescent demeanour hamstrings any convincing capacity to engage or energise others, and (presumably unintentionally) the uprising ends up resembling a miserable vanguardist farce with scant sign of genuine grass-roots engines. Rather than cod-psychohistory, the mythos of prophecy would surely better emerge from the fine-grain of the internal conflicts and specific material circumstances of the Dreamlanders – where the awakening sense of mission fed on their own cultural fecundity rather than a resentful leader’s personality deficiencies which yield predictably reactionary results. Despite its welcome attention to processes transforming suffering into struggle, then, the admittedly well-shot Exodus is sunk right from botched conception – with clunky structure and contrived script marooning some decent individual performances (especially from the amateurs) which appear to belong in completely separate dramatic universes [15].

Alienated: Resurrection
Worlds past, present and future eerily co-exist in a specific parallel universe in Polly II: Plan for a Revolution in Docklands (2006), Anja Kirschner’s marvellous carnivalesque allegory of an underground underwater London after global warming leads to breached tidal barriers. The bibles drawn on here are of impeccable rabble-rousing provenance: John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera (plus its lesser-known sequel Polly) whose staging was deconstructed in The Threepenny Opera. The project –

“part satirical sci-fi, part soap opera and Brechtian ‘Lehrstueck’ – portrays the lives of pirates and outcasts surviving in the flooded ruins of East London, a lawless zone set to become the latest in luxury waterside living according to government plans and venturing developers’ wet dreams. The film imagines a future insurrection coloured by the legacy of dispossessed peasants, political radicals, whores, sailors … and former slaves who once inhabited East London and fought a daily battle against their subjection to poverty,
displacement and judicial terror” [16].

The story’s thrust follows perceptive questioning by the narrator of a welter of contradictory discourses competing to structure her understanding of, and hence action within, the mayhem falteringly presided over by the feudal elite. Engaging in bitter struggle to survive, Polly and her cohorts adopt stances which mobilise them in various barely official or frankly criminal enterprises undermining the monopolisation of resources by vested interests. With traditional certainties turned upside down, the disoriented and impoverished populace is fractured by any number of crippling hostilities and rivalries but liable to see through the morass in the difficult forging of common cause.

The resonance of an essentially pre-proletarian Polly II with prospects in contemporary neoliberal urban blight (euphemised as renewal, gentrification or sterilisation, depending on outlook) is tempered considerably by the iron grip of spatial mastery now pursued by the state and its corporate speculator clientele in regulating an inconvenient lower-class presence [17]. Moreover, the unfolding strategy to cybernetically discipline the lifeworlds of previously upwardly-mobile strata is acompanied by the proletarianisation of precarious informational sectors of the middle classes, at the same time as state welfare functions are being downsized, privatised and degraded. Of course, the explicit logic and efficacy of these tactics are themselves supremely doubtful. In addition, the mass squeezing of all manner of petty-bourgeois, lumpen and working-class fractions into collective exclusion, with diverse degrees and levels of psychic and economic desperation, is unlikely to be affordable and manageable: either by the carceral containment of plantation slavery (e.g. in the US and China; possibly coming soon to Britain) or by neo-Stalinist social democracy (Latin America, South Africa). And that’s before considering the ravages of ecological disaster that international capital is learning to reckon into its insane calculations. But blueprints weren’t in any case Kirschner’s intention:

“To some extent the plot of Polly II was based on actual events from the 18th century […]. But I’m not depicting or referencing these moments so they can be measured against so many subsequent defeats or presented as easily digestible celebrations of ‘heritage’ or downright nostalgia (and I have little sympathy for re-enactments on that level); rather, I use them because they penetrate the present like so many callings and loopholes whose explosive potential still speaks to us” [18].
Such mobile constellations of class, culture, power and practical capacity have characterised previous cycles of grass-roots responses to tectonic shifts in economic exploitation and instrumental governmentality, as revealed in many recent radical histories [19]. Even within the activities of the industrial proletariat as understood in more familiar Marxist terms, class composition, conciousness and praxis have been thoroughly and complexly woven through community and cultural biography in ways that elude the programmatic socialist or Leninist grasp. Paul Mason’s inspirational Live Working Or Die Fighting: How the Working Class Went Global (Vintage, 2008) indicates how patterns of solidarity, refusal, mutual aid and autonomy have persisted across otherwise alien centuries. Fresh modes of orientation to the state’s New Public Management are also emerging within structurally-adjusted societies in First, Second and Third Worlds – as discussed, for example, in Michael Neocosmos’ innovative South African analysis which highlights the magnificent Durban shackdwellers movement Abahlali baseMjondolo [20]. And, despite the vicious megalomania of New Labour and the Tories’ common ground – competing to punish anyone and everyone on suspicion of anything and everything – it would seem the height of arrogance to assume some unique divergence from these epochal trends in this benighted land …

… Or perhaps not arrogance, so much as escapism – and that’s the purpose of juxtaposing documentary realism and frivolous futurist entertainment here. The contemporary cultural artefacts examined work hardest of all to maintain distinctions between those whose survival is most imminently threatened and the comfort zones of aspirational experience – just when the economic and structural conditions which underwrote the flight from drudgery for the twentieth century’s new middle-classes unravel before our eyes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the surprise discovery by TV bosses of defensive, backward-looking ignorance among the depressed, so-called ‘indigenous white working class’. BBC 2’s White season and Channel 4’s Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth [21] legitimise the racism and antagonism found as intelligible responses to economic restructuring, while new migrants attempt to forge a future from starvation wages, casual hostility and official contempt. However, great care is taken for the professional media tourists to avoid the countless people and places making horizontal links, conducting joint operations, productive relationships, cultural exchanges and social interactions at the base. Thus a view of society is reproduced as no more than interlocking networks of exclusion zones, where the only negotiation between dimensions of difference – whether biological, social or economic – occurs on the state’s terms at its own designated, tightly-policed sites, carried out by the market’s credentialled experts. In which case converging material situations, interests, expressions and struggles among foreigners, natives, underclasses and the new nearly-destitute simply disappear from view.
Writer Margaret Atwood called recently for a re-assessment of the respective merits of Brave New World and 1984, seeing a need to measure the travails of consumer capitalism and globalisation against Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’s contrasting anti-utopias [22]. Of course the question is misplaced, since neither hangover from Victorian middle-class moral conservatism could predict how the tortured and/or noble proles would fare in the New World Orders of their time. So these authors’ best efforts to twist the enlightened (or not) liberal consciences of their milieux, thereby masquerading as ordinary folk, hardly succeed even in articulating the presence of the bulk of humanity whose quite different agendas and actions would be decisive. Irrespective of any of their strengths, Taking Liberties and the other fictions cited here (with the exception of Polly II) fail for comparable reasons – whereas tackling themes of unholy unruly otherness directly, honestly and empathetically is central, as it happens, to the most useful prognostications of sci-fi’s genuinely critical dystopias [23]. Finally, therefore, and to reverse the point – as well as travestying Giorgio Agamben’s famous notion of ‘Homo sacer’, the abject human object of pity [24] : Is it instead the achievement of Faceless to suggest that an empty, static, sterile existence is actually what is planned for the fortunate included?

Notes
1. perhaps symptomatic of writer-director Chris Atkins’ self-important naivete. Taking Liberties was screened on More 4 on May 6th, 2008.
2. To Atkins: “Our only hope is that Brown is desperate to claw back some of the popularity that Blair has lost, so if it becomes a big political issue then he might turn back the authoritarian tide to try and win votes” (Socialist Review); and “If several thousand people go to mass lone demos the Metropolitan Police will beg Gordon Brown to repeal the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act” (www.eyeforfilm.co.uk).
3. Journalist Henry Porter’s assiduous reporting of the ID card plans regrettably fits this template, e.g. in: ‘Blair Laid Bare: the article that may get you arrested’, The Independent, 29th June 2006. The No2ID campaign’s otherwise excellent coverage flirts too with civil liberties particularism (but see Martin Twomey, ‘State of Denial’, 2007, www.metamute.org/en/State-of-Denial); whereas the Anarchist Federation widen the argument decisively towards class-consciousness – in, for example, ‘The Panopticon Society’, at http://libcom.org – regular updates also appearing in the Resistance bulletin (www.afed.org.uk/res/index.html). Recourse to the imagined community of nation is a persistent problem with Michael Moore’s work too – see, on Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), my ‘Extracting the Michael’, Variant 21, September 2004; and on Sicko (2007), ‘Body Politics’, Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 2, February 2008 (www.starandshadow.org.uk).
4. ‘Editorial’, Mute magazine, Vol. 2, No. 7, 2008: ‘Show Invisibles? Migration, Data Work’ (www.metamute.org). Other excellent contributions discuss aspects of the relationships between surveillance and subjection to state control, rights and visibility, informality, legality and the enforcement of work discipline, among various segments of populations here and abroad.
5. These issues are tackled with great intelligence in Adam Curtis’ groundbreaking BBC 2 documentary series, The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom (2007); see my critique in ‘Paradise Mislaid’, Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 10, May 2007 (www.starandshadow.org.uk).
6. Space here prohibits consideration of otherwise relevant US titles such as A Scanner Darkly (dir. Richard Linklater, 2006; a Slackers’ version of the Philip K. Dick novel), Look (dir. Adam Rifkin, 2007; pretending to use CCTV footage), and Southland Tales (2007, dir. Richard Kelly; previously renowned for Donnie Darko). However for discussions of Strange Days (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1995) and Fight Club (dir. David Fincher, 1999), among others, see my ‘Rose Coloured Spectacles’, Variant, 27, 2006). For comprehensive popular-literary studies of utopian and science fiction subgenres, see: Tom Moylan, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, Westview Press, 2000; Raffaella Baccolini & Tom Moylan (eds), Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, Routledge, 2003; and Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso, 2005.
7. One of the themes of my ‘Closed Circuit Tunnel Vision’, Variant, 29, 2007; discussing Andrea Arnold’s Glasgow-set CCTV suspense drama Red Road (2006). See also, for example, Twomey, note 3; and Henry Porter, ‘Blair’s Big Brother Legacy’, Vanity Fair, July 2006.
8. Manu Luksch & Mukul Patel’s ‘Faceless: Chasing the Data Shadow’, Variant, 31, 2008, tells the fascinating story of its production (see also www.ambienttv.net).
9. Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel; the film produced by The Matrix series’ Andy & Larry Wachowski and directed by James McTeague (2005) – see my review, ‘V Signs and Simulations’, Freedom, 67, No. 7, April 2006 (at www.starandshadow.org.uk).
10. Slavoj Zizek, 2007, www.childrenofmen.net/slavoj.html (video clip at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE). Extras on the Children Of Men DVD (Universal Pictures, 2007) include a ‘Possibility of Hope’ featurette with contributions from Fabrizio Eva, John Gray, Naomi Klein, James Lovelock, Saskia Sassen, Tzvetan Todorov and Zizek, as well as a separate ‘Comments by Slavoj Zizek’.
11. see, for example: www.bbc.co.uk/drama/lastenemy; Benji Wilson, The Telegraph, 16th February 2008; Peter Tatchell, The Guardian, 3rd March 2008; James Rampton, ‘Caught Off Camera’, The Scotsman, 18th February 2008. Writer Peter Berry’s major headache in sustaining the sci-fi element was keeping ahead of the government’s actual surveillance intentions – a problem also noted by Judge Dredd comic writer Alan Grant (Sunday Herald, 27th January 2008).
12. Meanwhile the IT providers whose promotional optimism helped translate these particular authoritarian wet-dreams into policy are now jumping ship as the bubble threatens to burst – see, for example, the Corporate Watch report ‘Corporate Identity’ (2006, and subsequent updates at www.corporatewatch.org); and, more recently, BAe and Accenture pulling out of ID card systems tendering (after the latter’s boss moved to the Identity & Passport Service), leaving only more shamelessly incompetent profiteers still in the frame (e.g. reported in February this year at www.silicon.com/publicsector/0,3800010403,39169811,00.htm).
13. In addition to this film, corporate art commissioners Artangel’s Margate Exodus 2006 blockbuster (see www.themargateexodus.org.uk) included Wendy Ewald’s Towards A Promised Land photographic project, with banners showing children relocated to the area from near and far due to war, poverty, repression or family crisis; a Plague Songs music CD with performances by fashionable (so I’m told) artistes Scott Walker, Rufus Wainwright, Laurie Anderson, Cody Chesnutt, Martyn Jaques, Imogen Heap, Brian Eno and Robert Wyatt; the ‘Exodus Day’ itself on 30th September 2006, held on Margate seafront with various events and performances culminating in a spectacular bonfire consuming Anthony Gormley’s 80-odd foot tall Waste Man sculpture – built from the vicinity’s rubbish, flotsam and jetsam with the help of many local folk of diverse origins – in front of thousands of Thanet residents and visitors; with Caroline Deeds’ Waste Man documentary (broadcast on Channel 4 on 2nd December 2006) charting its production and destruction.
14. related to but very distinct from others in European cinema’s social realist and naturalist traditions – see her interview about the making of Exodus at www.channel4.com/fourdocs/articles/penny_int.html; and another by Stella Papamichael from 28th June 2007 at www.bbc.co.uk/dna/filmnetwork/A24168585. Her refreshing views on the political role of art are summarised in ‘Art Has No Real Power’, 7th May 2007 (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/arts/author/penny_woolcock/).
15. Perhaps this reflects the gulf between a turncoat toff as beloved leader and the grimy multitude (or between privileged creator and the objects of her vision, for that matter …) which the entire enterprise of Exodus seems to want to disavow. If so, that would be completely uncharacteristic of the best of this filmmaker’s previous work, crafted from meticulous research leading to grass-roots accounts, experiences, anecdotes, characters and perspectives being central – as in the Bradford underclass trilogy Tina Goes Shopping (1999), Tina Takes A Break (2001), and the culture clash comedy Mischief Night (2006; see my appreciation in ‘A Midautumn Night’s Dream’, Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 1, January 2007 – also at www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk). Other highly original (though variously flawed) films by Penny Woolcock include The Principles of Lust and The Death of Klinghoffer (both 2003).
16. at www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/film/9891.htm.
17. see the thoughtful review of Polly II by Anthony Iles (2006, available at www.metamute.org/en/Polly-II).
18. from an interview with William Fowler in Vertigo Magazine, January 2007 (www.vertigomagazine.co.uk). Note that the prescience of this vision, as well as the acclaim the film has received from many quarters, have not been accompanied by the wide distribution its quality certainly deserves and therefore the enthusiastic audiences it would doubtless receive.
19. for example, among many pathbreaking analyses, see those by Ted Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Verso, 1997); Sylvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004); Peter Linebaugh, ‘Charters of Liberty in Black Face and White Face: Race, Slavery and the Commons’ (www.metamute.org, 2005); and Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age (Beacon Press, 2004).
20. ‘Civil Society, Citizenship and the Politics of the (Im)possible: Rethinking Militancy in Africa Today’ (2007), at http://libcom.org/library. Libcom also has a useful array of articles on Abahlali baseMjondolo (which has its own website at www.abahlali.org). For the wider context here, see the excellent collection of essays: ‘Naked Cities: Struggle in the Global Slums’, Mute magazine, Vol. 2, No. 3, 2006 (www.metamute.org); and my review of the Favela Rising documentary (covering Rio De Janeira’s Afro Reggae movement) in ‘Riodemption Songs’, Freedom, Vol. 68, No. 3, February 2007 (also at libcom.org).
21. The White season, BBC 2, March 2008, included documentaries on a Bradford workingmen’s club, Polish migrants in East Anglia, the BNP in East London, and the relevance of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ provocation three decades on; the latter also a touchstone for the three-part Immigration: The Inconvenient Truth, Dispatches, Channel 4, April 2008. Covering related ground, in ‘Same Difference?’ and ‘Breaking Cover’ (Variant, Nos. 23 and 24, 2005) I hinted at some of the implications of such inherently false multicultural dichotomies in the context of prejudicial characterisations of European Asians and Muslims.
22. in ‘Everybody Is Happy Now’, The Guardian, 17 November, 2007. Atwood herself wrote one of the many excellent post-1960s dystopias, The Handmaid’s Tale (1986; with a film version directed by Volker Schlondorff, 1990).
23. My personal favourites being Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed (1974) and Samuel R. Delany’s response Trouble On Triton (1976) through to Marge Piercy’s Body Of Glass (1992), Kim Stanley Robinson’s California (1984-90) and Mars (1992-96) trilogies, and Octavia Butler’s Parables (1993/98).
24. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998).

Further essays and reviews by Tom Jennings can be found at:
www.variant.org.uk
www.libcom.org
www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

Sex, War by Tom Jennings.
Film review published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 8, May 2008

Lust Caution, directed by Ang Lee, 2007

[film review published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 8, May 2008]

Sex, War by Tom Jennings

Chinese genre chameleon Lee follows gay cowboy tragedy Brokeback Mountain (2005) with another epic of transgressive desire in the espionage thriller Lust, Caution – both expanded from short stories by strong women (E. Annie Proulx, Eileen Chang) struggling against convention. Trumping the former’s contrast of the constraints of cultural rootedness and middle-class mobility in shaping sensual expression,* the doomed romance here resonates with epochal historical significance – referencing ideological, cultural, and national conflict inextricably complicating individual vicissitudes of gender role, performance and identity. Again, universal themes are conjured from highly specific contexts (the Second World War Japanese occupation of China) and characters (newcomer Tang Wei as student Wong Chia Chi erotically ensnaring for assassination purposes collaborationist secret police chief, veteran Tony Leung’s Mr Yee) through immaculate structure, design, acting and cinematography.
So, our Hong Kong college theatre ensemble graduates from patriotic productions to plotting a strike at the puppet state in the person of its chief enforcer. As bait, Wong insinuates herself into Mrs Yee’s circle, honing the simulation of upper-class mores and inching closer to intimacy with the quarry while her most dissolute comrade initiates her in the sexual athleticism necessary to complete her task. Despite the amateurism they nearly succeed but the set-up fails, and three years later Wong is aimlessly ensconced in her impoverished Shanghai family. Yee’s glittering career is also established there, and the rest of her troupe – now under Maoist direction – make contact to continue the plan. However, the ensuing passionate affair develops a life of its own as the group’s cadre commander defers the payoff in favour of gathering further intelligence. When the crunch finally comes, Wong’s attachment leads her to warn Yee, who escapes and has the conspirators executed.

This lustfully cautionary tale escalates from the traditional Chinese scandal of private yearnings disrupting the public cultivation of respectable decorum. Yet whereas suffocating strictures of conformism bolster the status quo, the unruly desire exemplified by sexuality and its discontents may be deployed subversively in the gaps between the minutiae of custom and surface appearance. But with seductive tension mounting towards ecstatic release, Wong’s initial motivation to play a part in liberating her social world from oppression is undone by the exquisite bodily intensity experienced in the liaison – having subsumed her entire existence in perfecting its foreplay and consummation. Lee underscores the contradictions with magnificent explicit sex scenes, convincingly depicting both protagonists’ anguished, aggressive, will-to-connect forcefully overflowing other agendas. Foregrounding the fundamental obstinacy of bodily urgency to socialisation, Lust, Caution’s melodramatic sublation of sex and death illustrates the fatal naiveté of instrumentally linking libidinal logic to conscious, rational projects – whether mundanely personal, cynically self-interested, or those their adherents imagine to be wholly collectively worthy.

* see my comments on Brokeback Mountain in ‘Cowboys and Injuries’ (www.starandshadow.org.uk).

www.variant.org.uk

www.freedompress.org.uk

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

That Kitchen Sinking Feeling, by Tom Jennings

[television review of The Street, by Jimmy McGovern, BBC 1, November-December 2007, published in Freedom, Vol. 69, No. 5, March 2008].

That Kitchen Sinking Feeling by Tom Jennings

Jimmy McGovern (writer of early Brookside, Cracker, Priest, The Lakes, Hillsborough, [Bloody] Sunday, etc) shuns primetime television drama as lazy cliché: “I’d never tune in to it because I know it’s going to be crap”. The Street, made for BBC 1’s 9pm slot, was instead inspired by 1950s US serial The Naked City – “behind every door, there’s a story to be told”. 2006’s first run featured A-list actors and new writers, scripts duly polished and tweaked by McGovern, tackling themes of love and its hazards. Series 2 continues the gritty Northern melodrama, focusing on individual redemption in six powerfully characterised narratives – benefits clerk impersonating dead twin (pictured); cabbie rekindling old flame; sisters divided by son’s violence; building worker’s awakening bisexuality; postie stealing middle-class mail (written by ex-Chumbawumba Alice Nutter); and a young man emerging from incarceration after a Jamie Bulger-style murder. So many tragedies on one terrace? It’s enough to give you that kitchen sinking feeling …

Sure enough, a depressive pall suffuses variously unlikely or unbelievable plot contrivances, reinforced by hopeless, hapless white working-class responses. The dodgy decisions, minor lies and evasions, and blustering overreactions invariably make things worse – like soap opera with the ebb and flow of drudgery removed and mundane pleasures compromised. That the characters somehow find strength in themselves and their loved ones to envision a future is testament to The Street’s barbed humour, undeniably sharp scripts, and wonderful acting – such that empathy is possible at all for its fatally flawed fools. And despite favouring male perspectives, these emphasise the repercussions of botched efforts to sustain a traditional respectability otherwise abandoned on the scrapheap of cultural history. Likewise, the bitter economics of everyday life in precarious postmodern society always dominate proceedings and psyches – as in most people’s real lives – and that’s rare indeed in popular media.
However, there are no connections between the standalone stories and their characters – beyond neighbours passing in the background – and, other than pulling together in times of adversity, scarcely a hint of collective strength. Seeing ‘ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances’ surely illuminates our own dramas – viewers from working-class backgrounds doubtless repeatedly glimpsing their own reflections here – but extraordinary ways of coping with ordinary hardship, in imaginative, collective ways that ring true, might transcend the backward-looking, objectifying, guilt-tripping, breast-beating that UK social realism is regrettably renowned for. McGovern himself always stresses “there’s no problem with working-class communities that money wouldn’t solve”, but here the protagonists are undoubtedly their own worst enemies. Nonetheless, from conception in solidarity and humility to execution with such immense warmth and storytelling craft, The Street triumphantly bucks trivial TV trends – just as its creator intended.

www.variant.org.uk

www.freedompress.org.uk

www.tomjennings.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk