Marie Antoinette's Soup Tureen

 

"There was a silence, as if the fountain felt embarrassed or rebuffed. Then the fountain was suddenly a porcelain soup tureen, with frilled and ruffled edges. It just metamorphosed, even while she was continuously staring at it, the way an animation might transform - and Celine realised as she stared at it in amazement how disturbing she always thought soup was. Perhaps, she wondered, it was the way soup has no edges, or the way the elements which are contained in it are unprovable and undefined."

The legendary film director, Andrei Tarkovsky was obsessed by pools of water, particularly the almost limitless movement that is possible within them. 'Nothing is more beautiful than water.' 'It transmits movement, depth, changes'. The most thoroughgoing treatment of this observation may be in his film Nostalgia. With extraordinary composition of shot, Tarkovsky's obsession with water in buildings and confined spaces - particularly the sulphur pool - is plumbed to profound depths. Even if not formally symbolic it conveys the sense of the ineffable within limits. 

It may seem bathetic to compare Tarkovsky's pool and a soup tureen (which also happens to be on the moon) but there is a similar struggle with the ineffable at the heart of Adam Thirwell's The Future Future a phantasmagoric portrayal of a late 18th century that is heavily informed by 21st century tropes and mores and is fixated on the nature of language and communication and the cultural norms of a networked society.

The novel has a tricksy, evanescent quality and an aphoristic style which can feel deliberately frustrating, providing a fractured approach to the narrative and a strange alienation from the characters and the action giving them a strongly symbolic feel. However, the parallels between our time and that of the protagonist Celine and her compatriots are pretty clear given effect, in largely ludic manner, through abundant anachronism.

Language is crucial; writing and reading are the fulcrum for success or catastrophe. People in the novel can at times hardly comprehend the 'influence of words on a solid world'. We can take this as a reference to the significance of appearance and perception and who is saying what about which things. An influencer perhaps. 

The main mode of discourse is gossip. Gossip conveys ‘a world of neither appearance nor reality but something shimmering and melting’. Being talked about is the harbinger of death. Being talked about is the curse for Celine and her circle. Female notoriety, whether of the Queen herself or other figures, is paraded in the news sheets. We might describe these people as the main character. 

Whether by coincidence or design some of the central themes of the novel mirror recent historiography of the period before the French Revolution, specifically cultural history concerned with how the French in the second half of the 18th century sought to make sense of their world:

"If an explanation of the revolution emerges from Darnton’s sketches, it is rooted in the development of a vast, complex and multifaceted ‘information system’ that spread news but also emotions across Paris. A great deal of Darnton’s work has consisted in unravelling the various components of the Ancien Régime’s information system, from the circulation of censored books by librarians and peddlers to the communication of news by nouvellistes de bouche in the public space or by authors of popular nouvelles à la main."

This is the mental world in which the Revolution occurred. 

In the novel, the future is simultaneously vertiginous but also strangely flattened. The continuous present is constituted of 'museums and shopping'.  The future future by contrast is very different - well beyond the ordered present and reflective of a form of language characterised by transplantation and translation reaching for different ways to describe the world, for breaking out of the continuous present, for seeking greater honesty through a merging of the thing itself and the language which is used to describe it. That honesty being a critical component of a more fluid, disordered future. Indeed of the future future.

"André said he didn't exactly understand how this movement between different levels worked. But of course not, said Celine. The way of seeing the world that he liked, where he observed a world outside him, everything ordered and in categories, made it impossible to do the kinds of things that Catherine could do when she was thinking or talking. Catherine had metamorphosis. Whereas they just had literature."

It is metamorphosis that replaces literature and the old forms of language. 

So Celine's trip to the moon - which has clear references to the fabulist tales of the 17th and 18th centuries - is to a new world. In the real world, America is the new world and the novel suggests that translation from the indigenous inhabitants of the vast forests of that continent provide an indication of what is needed to mediate the unfolding of the future future; the more disordered future of the forest not the city; the forest into which true escape is possible; the location for metamorphosis. 

More generally though, even after a robust stand off with Napoleon himself as the embodiment of the ordered patriarchy, Celine observes an inability to think that wildly. 

We probably should not be surprised.

Best (and Worst) Films of 2023

 

One of the most joyful rediscoveries this year was Percy Adlon's Bagdad Cafe which in a wonderfully surreal manner captures the magic, literal and figurative, that a most unlikely outsider brings to the moribund, allowing them to realise what they have been missing through their obsessive introspection and to grow through the recognition of the value in difference. Could there possibly be a message in there?

In the 'they do still make'em like that' category the outstanding example was the The Three Musketeers: D'Artagnan which was pure pleasure from the tip of its épée to the handle of its poignard, running full tilt with the ridiculousness of the plot half way round France and back across the Channel without pausing for breath. Hats are worn with an angle of jaunt worthy of an Expressionist noir, swords are barely ever in a scabbard, panelling is chewed liberally and Eva Green's use of her belle poitrine auditions it for separate billing in the cast list. Critically though the film is never knowing; rather it knows the source material and takes both it and the audience for a seriously good time.

However, onto the serious stuff because 2023 proved to be a very strong year with several favourites just missing out on the top ten including The Zone Of Interest, Afire, Fallen Leaves, Killers Of The Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Alcarras, A Human Position,  The Eight Mountains and Earth Mama.

The following films made the cut. In reverse order ...

10. Other People's Children : Piquant but extremely enjoyable romantic drama in which Virginie Efira once again excels providing a nuanced and captivating central performance in a sophisticated look at the ties that bind us not just to partners but to their children. 

Anyone who has had to leave a relationship unwillingly knows the tangible feeling of loss for everything that has gone with it, including friends, relations and children. We do, however, remain a meaningful part of their lives even if we are not as central as we may wish. 

One of the rather marvellous aspects of this film is an understated acquiescence and recognition that time moves on inexorably and whilst we may fight it and scheme away to make good on our biological clocks we ultimately have to make the best of it. And making the best of it means both self care and care for others including those with whom we would wish to remain closer. 

The milieu of the comfortable, urban bourgeoisie may seem hermetic and a rather safe place in which to act as an adult and to be seen and to be comfortable and desired in your (alright early) middle aged body. But goodness me it is refreshing to have a film that is unashamedly adult in approach and in which the tone and register is far removed from gushing emotionalism and a requirement to express innermost feelings in as dramatic a manner as possible.

9. Amanda : A touch of Greek Weird Wave in well heeled Italy. Questioning, aching sadness and loneliness are gradually resolved through the playing out of mutual antagonisms which are by turns hilarious and deeply melancholic. If you are tuned to the same wavelength it's a wonderful ride. "One day you’re nobody. And the next day you wake up, you have a best friend, a boyfriend, and almost an electric fan and a horse." Fabulous.

8. All The Beauty And The Bloodshed : Wonderfully constructed documentary which embodies the notion that the personal is political by developing the story of the pain felt by Goldin alongside the huge societal pain felt from public health crises which have been ignored (wilfully or otherwise) and the impunity and apparent imperviousness of the powerful in the face of that pain. Those come together in a moment of sheer horror when the recording of a 911 call is played in court: a wailing shriek of despair with the pitch and intensity of a dentist's drill.

7. Babylon : A film about the human consequences of industrial change. I heard Babylon described as 'pummelling maximalism'. Generally that would see me heading for the exits but on this occasion it found me completely absorbed by what's on screen. Adjectives like brio, gusto and just sheer vim can all be applied liberally to the surface freneticism but these have to be balanced against a profound underlying melancholy about the effects of the shift from the unhinged energy and unthinking liberality of the silent era to the talkies and the early rumblings of the Code in which who you were mattered far more. For some retraining was never realistic. 

Some have found the juxtaposition of the final sequences which laud the silver screen as problematic. In fact it seems entirely in keeping with the idea that the work lives on when the people have long gone; that shared stories meet a basic human need which we satisfy in part by sitting together to watch those who are long dead speak to the living.

6. Past Lives : Has an exquisite delicacy in delineating the different life stages of a relationship that is restrained by circumstance and reflects a longing for something that, actually, you never had and the wistful sense of possibilities unfulfilled. The opening and closing sequences are in themselves minor marvels.

5. Totem : A near miraculous piece of film making which elicits remarkable naturalistic performances, particularly from the young actress playing Sol, conveys a sense of true familial bonds permeated by both tensions and deep warmth and imbues the scenario with an aching sadness about impending loss. 

The culminating rendition of an aria from Lucia di Lammermoor is so perfect as an encapsulation of all that has gone before that the urge to both laugh and simultaneously burst into tears is near overwhelming. 

This is a very odd comparison to make but in terms of depth of feeling that sequence put me in mind of the swoon inducing rendition by Harriet Andersson of The Princess of Castile in the theatricals in Through A Glass Darkly. The world of art and theatre intersecting with the quotidian, illuminating it and prefiguring what is to come.

4. Tar : Engrossing, cerebral, chilly and chilling with a powerhouse Cate Blanchett performance as a star conductor who conducts far more than just music: she directs, manipulates, bullies and charms everyone in her orbit curating herself as a spectacle of success whose whole aesthetic contributes to her image of impervious perfection. 

Unsurprisingly below the surface there are cracks which are quite overtly repressed, particularly her family background and her relationships. The film largely represents the world as she sees it which means huge swathes of what has happened are missing. We see some of the consequences for her but the others are signified largely by their absence. They literally disappear. 

But we do start to see representations of her as seen by others. These develop during the course of the film and present a completely different view of her which at times borders on the ridiculous. Some of that framing is deliberately manipulated to the extent that it is fake. That doesn’t matter until it does. And it does when the transactions on which Tar has based her whole career start to falter. 

Is it important that Tar is a gay woman and not, say, a man? Yes it is because she is good at her job but unsympathetic. She’s not what women are still often supposed to be: likeable. And for a long time that doesn’t matter. But then it does and her fall is all the more sudden and all the more profound as a result. She glissades right down the icy mountain of her own creation. But her gradual disintegration also plays into one sense in which the expectation of women may have some actual resonance: she does feel (manifested as sounds) some uncertainty, some dread. She may actually feel less impervious, less entitled than a man in the same position.

So Art or Rat or both? It is both. She is a predator. But it’s predominantly Art. What we see is someone who is giving effect to art. The intriguing point is that Art can be performed in both senses: it is a performance of who you are or how you want to be seen as well as conveying the substance of the material. Arguably it is when Tar is moved more by the latter than the former that some of her misjudgements start to really matter. 

Tar is a quite wonderful film which makes us actively reflect. The character is conflicted: a genius and a manipulative bully. A pedestal is a precarious place to be. When your foot slips and you stumble there may be few to pick you back up and many cheering silently, and indeed not so silently. 

When the ’s’ drops from ‘star’ where do you end up?

3. Return to Seoul : Stunningly good: bracing, visceral, completely engrossing and constantly surprising with an astounding central performance.

Freddie is in effect living as a protean version of herself: nuanced, complex. challenging, dislikable, self destructive, constantly dissatisfied and constantly evolving, trying out different versions of how to live to see how they work for her and for others.

That constant evolution is a search for connection and the result of experiencing how it develops and how it is lost. If we want to understand ourselves can we ever do so if we don’t really know where we have come from and the role of our parents and how their feelings for us have determined our lives (even if that means putting someone up for adoption in the hope of a better life for them)?

Lack of connection feels like a constant sense of rejection. This is reflected in some astonishing moments particularly when Freddie simply announces to a boyfriend “I could erase you from my life with a snap of my finger”. 

She could - and does.

But she is doing this to herself as well. 

There is also a profound role for music: listening, dancing and performing. Music is universal but also specific. It can help to situate someone (hence the extraordinary opening scene in which Freddie borrows headphones in order to hear better what someone else has been playing); it can be total release (hence the wild dancing) and it can be complete expression.

In the latter context how better to sum up the film than playing Bach variations on a battered piano in an empty hotel in an unidentified place. Music is connection but it is also manifold, indeed endless, layers of complexity.

2. Poor Things : Extraordinary, careening, kinked, Art Nouveau inspired fantasia about female self-invention which is laugh out loud funny, grotesque, bawdy, mordant and moving. Emma Stone’s performance from a stiff limbed, mischievous infant to a refined, self confident woman via a suite of interactions with various manifestations of arrogant, wheedling male hypocrisy is utterly magnificent and deserves to win all of the awards. The only disappointment: dropping the original Glaswegian setting.

1. Do Not Expect Too Much From The End Of The World : Astounding. Scabrously hilarious culminating in a sequence informed by an iconic Bob Dylan video which - as a commentary on corporate business culture and its sheer contempt for the people it employs - achieves a level of bathetic humour that might lead the viewer either to levitate or simply expire on the spot. 

Angela is such a fiercely intelligent, caustic, chaotic but deeply human character that this viewer could happily spend days just sitting in her car. The potty mouthed videos that that she produces cosplaying andrew tate are priceless. An autodidact she's a demotic modern day Proust (for eagle eyed viewers of her bedside table) and pretty much a Renaissance woman. 

Add to this a magnificent Nina Hoss extended cameo as an Austrian corporate princess who conveys a truly stunning level of bemused superiority and amoral indifference.

Do Not Expect Too Much ... may be long but it is so rewarding in showing the experience of the worker in the era of late stage capitalism and so fabulously contemptuous of a world dominated by rampant on line culture.

So, onto the worst. And the worst were truly terrible. In reverse order five to avoid:

5. The Adults : If spending time with people acting out their childhood selves in adulthood as a means of coping with unresolved trauma - complete with cartoon voices, dance routines and choreographed playlets - is your thing, knock yourself out. Otherwise you may find yourself stuffing your fist into your mouth to try to deal with mounting irritation and to guard against a desire to commit physical violence.

4. The Nature Of Love : Had to walk out of the cinema to escape this irritating dramedy complete with some very well travelled character tropes - the intellectual bourgeoise, the rustic, the ineffectual husband, the slightly wacky friends - harnessed to a hackneyed scenario of cod philosophising amidst the off piste passions. Rather than a penetrating examination of mid life choices it comes across as excruciatingly complacent.

3. Elvis : On the upside, Austin Butler is great, particularly in the performance sequences. On the downside ... pretty much everything else: it's turgid; massively too long; has an absolutely atrocious, gurning Tom Hanks performance; trowels on some important points about influences which lose impact simply through repetition and ends up a mawkish mess.

2. Amsterdam : Love the city; hate the film. Woefully overextended, beset by overacting and overcome by exhaustion as it staggers to a conclusion having wasted a tolerably intriguing set up in a series of decreasingly interesting, deliberately farcical, set pieces. A waste of a worthwhile scenario - a reminder of a previous attempt to usurp the government and introduce fascism in America - and a stellar cast.

1. Saltburn : Wildly misjudged mash up of Brideshead Revisited and Theorem which amply proves that Emerald Fennel ain’t no Waugh and she certainly ain’t no Pasolini. Instead we have a ridiculously over long trudge of stultifying tedium through a whole series of class based aggressions which, whilst certainly worthy of dissection, require a scalpel not a mile wide shillelagh. And on it goes seemingly to eternity finally culminating in a sequence of such resounding embarrassment that it might dislodge the planet from its axis. Pride And Prejudice With Zombies - all is forgiven.

Nor does it help that the protagonist, from Liverpool which is 'up North', sounds like a distant relative of Julie Walters' character in Educating Rita and has a haircut resembling something from the cover of an early album by The Beatles.

Do Not Genuflect!

 

Expecting a gore fest of violence, degradation and societal breakdown? Instead we have a completely immersive social realist drama with rounded, fully recognisable people. Just people from 250 years ago.

The Gallows Poll pulls off the extraordinarily hard trick of meshing (rather than mashing) language which conveys both a sense of the period but also the feeling that these are people like us.  

The result is unique in achieving a kind of demotic drama that is true to experience but does not fetishise authenticity or worry about mixing modern and period language and terminology. Somehow it’s both of the time and universal to the experience of common people. 

And it's vivid and funny (so very, very funny), and touching and ridiculous. A world which we enter in media res with no guardrails and just a requirement to pick up the cadence and the rhythm of what is happening. To just listen to these people talk.

And how they talk. The dialogue and the delivery are amazing. The verbal sparring between David and Grace is utterly hilarious, deeply moving and entirely believable. The mardy, mouthy, spurned girl nursing a deep hurt but armed with an instinctive intelligence and the rough, taciturn, confused and contrite man who left her and has done very bad things in the meantime and now returns looking for all the world like an embarrassed teenager in her presence.

This is set against massive proto-industrial change; the end of the era of 'putting out' textile manufacture and the centralisation of production in factories with all of the attendant fracturing and damage to a society with no safety net other than that created by the members of that society.

So what we have is a co-operative movement by people harnessing their disparate skills and experience to respond to exploitation; artisans who can apply themselves to solve new problems.

The moral economy of the crowd in operation. 

The psych or trippy tinge to proceedings adds a frisson of the weirdness of the folk tale but the stag men are more creatures of the imagination than manifestations of the supernatural. It's all happening within David's head and the dialogue between them magnificently undercuts the portentousness which usually attends minatory words from the other dimension. 

One suspects that a follow on series will inevitably be a tougher watch given that we know where this is headed once the authorities start to become aware that quiet part of Yorkshire is suddenly awash with newly minted guineas.

However, in the meantime celebrate the success of collective endeavour in the 18th century equivalent of a rave. 

Even the stag men are let off the leash in the closing credits which has them throwing some shapes worthy, if that is the word, of Bez in a 90s music video. 

Would these people genuflect?

Do me a favour.

Best Films of 2022

 

Cinema going returned. 

My love for French cinema was confirmed.

My appreciation of the serious, austere and not necessarily ultimately uplifting was present and correct.

Vicky Krieps continued to suggest that she is one of the most astounding actors at work at the moment (Corsage, Hold Me Tight and Bergman Island to add to other stellar outings).

Also confirmed was the urgent need to correct weaponised nostalgia and simple stories in favour of complexity, criticism and a warning that the siren voices of creeping social and political authoritarianism have to be confronted. 

The usual 10 - 1 ranking follows but there are several films which only just missed the cut which deserve a mention particularly Corsage; Il Buco; Bergman Island; Flux Gourmet and The Quiet Girl.

10. Parallel Mothers : A tremendous performance from Penelope Cruz who is on screen for almost the entire running time anchors this film which is a stonking great melodrama of the kind that Almodovar can carry off with aplomb and of which Douglas Sirk would have been proud. The dignity of the grieving, the need to know the truth and not to inflict loss on others is the deeply poignant thread with the disappeared of the Civil War.

9. Lost Illusions : So very, very good. It may be a straight up period drama but it feels as much 2020s as 1820s: an attention economy in which controversy sells, mobs rule, true sentiment is dangerous, social class counts and enemies are inexorable and vicious. Great performances all round and a fully immersive experience amidst the hurly burly.

8. One Fine Morning : Yet again Mia Hansen-Love finds an unexplored angle in human relationships, this time a wonderfully rendered account of experiencing simultaneous grief and love which is grounded rather than elevated in style making it all the more moving. Aided by some truly great performances, particularly from Lea Seydoux who conveys both an aching sadness and deep stoicism in the face of a father who is forgetting her but better remembers his sometime partner and a married lover for whom she feels like a mistress. In both cases she is deeply hurt by giving love but only partially receiving it. But then perhaps there will be one fine morning when her love is returned fully.

7. Memoria : A film that demands to be seen and, even more significantly, heard in the cinema since the immersive state of being in a black box provides the requisite sensitivity to sound and motion to allow the full strangeness of the experience to be savoured.

In essence this film is about the immanence of sound in the environment. 

There will be numerous takes on the sound, but a relatively straightforward reading is that it represents the accumulated experience of a place resonating over time. It is there for those who choose to hear and have been sensitised to do so. That acclimatisation may well be the result of individual trauma which then allows the echo of the past, perhaps heard most readily in relation to past trauma, to be accessed. 

What might slightly facetiously be considered a Terrence Malick moment towards the very end of the film was both beautiful and wholly unnecessary. The subsequent sequence of clouds moving through the mountains as they have for thousands of years is a much better representation of the timelessness of the echo that can be transmitted to those who are willing to hear. 

And perhaps more of us need to be attuned to the echo of the past as the present threatens it more than ever before.

6. The Souvenir Part II : Instantly demands a second viewing not least to work out how the many layers intersect. Strangely for a film that is about coming to terms with grief and trauma and trying to understand what actually happened, the tone is light, optimistic and often very amusing. The fabulous final sequence might be described as an honest fantasy. The very end demonstrates that Julie has now truly taken over direction of her own life by making a film which reflects on her previous attempts to make a film about the trauma of the relationship which was the focus of ... The Souvenir.

5. Decision To Leave : Between the mountain and the sea lie the mists of longing and obsession clouding judgement, offering glimpses of insight but also more tendrils snaking their way to further confusion and obfuscation. The sheer density of the material immediately suggests a second viewing but on a first encounter it is a gorgeous, enveloping masterpiece of editing and cinematography with stellar performances and, for this viewer at least, a magnificent and deeply satisfying closing sequence.

4. The Banshees of Inisherin : Tragi-comedy is the hardest of genres to pull off sucessfully but, as here, the results can be breathtaking. A brilliantly acted drama about the choice between sociability or solipsism as a means to happiness. That such a binary can never be the means of truly achieving personal or artistic fulfilment other than in narrow and self-defeating terms is the source of both the comedy and the tragedy. That purported choice is also rooted in despair about the human condition and how insularity can entrench myopic hatreds which just find more reasons to fester. The civil war heard and occasionally glimpsed on the mainland is far more than a distant echo.

3. Aftersun : Desperately sad and beautifully acted with some bravura sequences, not the least of which are the final few minutes which achingly entwine the past and the present. The father - daughter relationship is illuminated with wonderful restraint and often in a light that is lambent rather than effulgent.

2. Saint Omer : Austere, rigorous, beautifully framed and completely enthralling examination of motherhood with the wonderful notion of the chimera at its heart: mothers and children fused through organic tissue from each which persists in the body of the other.

1. Happening : Cannot ever remember gripping the seat quite so hard as at times during this unflinching and sadly utterly necessary description of the desperate situation that results from criminalisation of reproductive choice. The central performance is simply outstanding. To anyone with even a vague grip on sanity the scenario is frankly terrifying. This should be required viewing in Texas, the US Supreme Court and other sloughs of zealotry who would take us back to such awful days.

Waiting

 

"Everybody’s crazy

What’s your excuse baby?

Standing in the middle waiting for something to happen."

Ah, the lost and greatly lamented Veronica Falls one of my favourite jangly, indie, bubblegum, breathy, Sixties crossed with a Noughties take on Britpop inflected New Wave, covertly energetic, bands. A niche category but a good one.

The song is about indecision and prevarication; everyone is as uncertain as everyone else. But perhaps it is also about paralysis in the face of things that are just too big. 

In the case of the song, approaching someone you kinda like. 

In the case of many humans in the early 2020s, the sense that perhaps everyone really is crazy makes one feel that actually standing in the middle isn't the worst place. The trouble is that the crazies might catch up with you anyway.

Waiting no longer feels like just waiting for the weekend, for something to turn up or even to improve. The notion that things might actually get better seems fanciful in itself.

Waiting now has the sense that no news is actually very, very far from the worst news.  Slow news days are not just to be welcomed but absolutely treasured. Culling of notifications from news sites is a prudent way of avoiding being presented with something truly dreadful before being properly prepared. Just making it through a week  feels like a minor triumph. 

Yet the waiting goes on subliminally. 

A classic coping strategy for worry and uncertainty is to discount. To imagine the worst so that you have as a mental exercise gone through it and come out on the other side at least in some order. 

Discounting is however hard when the worry is about things which simply do not feel susceptible to such techniques. Things from which we do not come out the other side in some kind of recognisable order: climate change, warfare, fascism corrupting liberal democracies, economies that malfunction to such an extent that they do not provide a decent life for millions; global famine; endemic diseases for which the boffins have no answers. 

Yet the waiting is even stranger since on the surface not that much has changed. Not yet anyway. The striving is for normality by which we mean how it has been up to now. We celebrate rain in the summer as properly British after heatwaves that leave everyone shaken because the sky was a shade of blue more commonly associated with the Sahel than Surbiton. 

Whilst not that much may have changed there is an ineluctable sense that it will. Our rational minds tell us so. Not to listen would be crazy. To give up in favour of the fantasy and the stupidity that characterise so much of what passes for politics in places like Britain and the US.

So here we are waiting for something to happen, knowing that at least some of it will, knowing that it is only rational to accept and prepare and adapt and make the case for the Enlightenment and the dangers of demagogues and standing up to fascists and to try to do things that could make a difference but also desperate to know how bad is bad because that way we can try to cope. But bad is likely to be very bad. And we don't really want to know what it would be like because we are really not sure we can cope with knowing.

And so we end up "standing in the middle waiting for something to happen" and wishing it was just that a pretty girl (or your chosen preference) might smile. 

Because then we'd know what to do. 

Fugue

 

A book set in the past which speaks so loudly to our present times as to be shouting in our faces. Except that it would do so in the most understated and droll manner behind a distinct partina of politeness and perhaps just a little condescension at our inability to appreciate the true architectonics of our financialised economy and society. One in which transactions are all ultimately mediated through money.

It would be unforgivable to say too much about the plot because there are so many delights to be savoured from the gradual unfolding of a series of ventriloquised perspectives on nominally the same events in which who is saying what and why is constantly in play.

There is also much joy to be had in considering who might be the model for some of the people at the heart of the novel, notably Andrew Bevel whose ambition to 'bend and align' reality so that he is always shown to have been, well, right is so reminiscent of so many powerful men and their equally powerful sense of entitlement. 

Men moreover who constantly refuse to accept that their success is a product of privilege or inheritance. All is down to their own genius. Unearned and unwarranted success is an anathema. Government intervention to prevent the great men from carrying out their vision is the great sin. 

Underpinning all of this is some spectacular gaslighting of the role of women and expressions of truly fundamental sexism. 

Yet the delicious irony of the book is that for all of the emphasis on mathematics and hard numbers it is art as much as science that underpins success.

One could almost say the music of mathematics. Bach would certainly have known that concept albeit with a side helping of the divine order and perhaps even numerology.

What an appreciation of the modernist novel and the music being written by the avant garde in the first decades of the 20th century provides is a sense that reality is just as much about what happens in the mind. 

Modernism was very concerned with technological progress. The outside world was changing but also how humans work inside, their psychology, the way that they thought about the world.

Modernists also rejected the omniscient narrator and 'character' as a nexus of social change. Interiority is much more important.

In the context of the novel there is a magnificent irony that the patterns of musical notation and the insights of the modernists which are concerned with understanding the dynamics of how things work in practice come to be considerably more significant than the assertion that genius, character and force of will are supreme.

The fugue is the perfect expression of the variations, the changes in order of the notes, the changes of rhythm. If you understand what causes the variations you understand the dynamics and you understand the world in practice, rather than in theory. 

In a nice parallel fugue is also a dissociative state of mind; in effect an amnesia for your own personality and identity resulting from long term trauma. 

For my money, so to speak, there is also a deliberate reference to Thales of Miletus; a pre-Socratic Greek philosophy who aimed to explain natural phenomena through hypotheses that referenced natural processes themselves. He might have based his system on water. What if, instead, the world is actually based on money?

Best Films of 2021

 

At the end of a year in which we all felt rather at the mercy of things much bigger than ourselves, here is my list of the ten best new films that I saw in 2021 (including some at festivals which have yet to be released in the UK) which provided some comfort that humans at their best (and goodness knows we've seen plenty of humans at their worst particularly in what seems to be an ongoing death spiral for liberal democracy in one of the homes of cinema at the behest of a pathetic narcissist who just can't accept that he lost) can entrance each other with empathetic appreciation and aesthetic wonders. In other words the genius of cinema at its best lies in its recognition of the plurality of experience - the very thing that the know nothing reactionaries and authoritarians around the world want to deny us. 

Generally, a very strong year probably at least in part because of titles being held up by the pandemic (or more precisely, and sadly, the early waves of the ongoing pandemic) and there were a lot of films that narrowly missed out such as: Azor, Malmkrog, Promising Young Woman, I Never Cry, The Mad Women's Ball, Rose Plays Julie, The Green Knight, After Love, Quo Vadis Aida? and Nomadland.

I also have yet to see some others that have scored highly elsewhere such as The Lost Daughter and Minari and I haven't yet steeled myself sufficiently to watch Titane.

Then there are some films which have figured prominently in listings which left me somewhat cold notably The French Dispatch, The Father and Drive My Car which just seemed far too long (although it was seen quite late in a very warm cinema which probably did not aid the experience, notable also for someone deciding to bring their dog into the screening). 

So, here is my list starting with ...

10. The Power Of The Dog : The less said about the Cumberbatchian accent the better but for the rest this is wonderfully rendered, subtle film making, particularly the final 45 minutes which are a masterpiece of understatement. Kodi Smit-McPhee (above) looks as though he has wandered in from a David Lynch film which actually is entirely appropriate. 

9. Compartment No.6 : Film as the ‘machine that generates empathy’ in full operation. Magnificently done, this is a paean to people finding themselves through others and to throwing snowballs at someone for whom you have feelings as being more significant than finding prehistoric petroglyphs on an icy promontory in the Russian Arctic.

8. First Cow : Bread is a staple and a luxury and therein lies the rub. Quietly melancholic but resonant account of natural sympathy and intimacy on the frontier amidst capitalist dynamics evolving out of the Oregon mud. Another gem from Kelly Reichardt.

7. Shiva Baby : A horror comedy watched partly though the fingers in excruciating embarrassment, partly almost asphyxiated with laughter. It has a claustrophobic intensity redolent of a panic attack with the plangent off kilter music and the actual baby adding to the tension and tipping sections over into outright absurdist terror. Some fabulous dialogue too: Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps is quite the description.

6. Dear Comrades! : The Big Lie is a depressingly familiar concept. Dear Comrades! examines the moral and mental contortions required to continue to believe in the face not just of atrocity but of a requirement to deny what you have seen and heard and your own deepest anxieties. It exposes the inherent craziness of existing under a regime that requires unblinking acquiescence in all things but in which hope comes from the small chance that there are still people left with a smidgeon of humanity. It also plays on the irony and inherent comedy in a society in which everyone is drilled to know nothing or know only what they are meant to know. 

The result at times resembles something from the Czech New Wave, shot in absolutely sparkling black and white, particularly in the earlier stages when the focus is on the hypocrisy, laziness and dogmatic certainties of everyday life. The massacre itself manages to convey the sheer capriciousness of who lives and who dies. The subsequent cover up and asphalting over of what happened is then contrasted with a very human search for at least some resolution. 

The very end rather brilliantly captures and expresses the contortions: there will always be new uplands for the workers.

5. Ninjababy : Rather magnificently this manages to be extremely funny, very serious, dramatic, ridiculous - and fabulously, fabulously entertaining. 

Should be required viewing in Texas although, as ever, I fear the people who most need to see it never would.

Oh, and if anyone happens to have flatmate Ingrid's number ...

4. Petite Maman : Absolutely lovely. Tender and profound memories foretold amongst the autumn leaves of childhood. Celine Sciamma is incapable of making anything which is less than stellar. 

3. Limbo : A profoundly humanist film with much of the gentle, deadpan absurdism of Kaurismaki and deep emotional resonance about refugees awaiting asylum decisions and undergoing ‘cultural acclimatisation’ in the Outer Hebrides. They converse through the universal language of American sit coms and music but with an underlying sadness about being parted from their homelands. 

There are marvellous grace notes such as the post van that delivers decision letters which arrives playing opera at concert volume. 

The focus is, however, resolutely on the identity of the refugee. There are no saviours. There is just the wind and the rain, the sun and the snow and the old fashioned phone box on the moors which is the fulcrum for conversations with family and all of the associated guilt, hope and longing.

It is a fabulous conceit, magnificently realised.

2. What Do We See When We look At The Sky? : Well the answer to the question in the title is something quite magical, droll, a quotidian world in which the uncanny is also immanent, portrayed with a wonderful guilelessness but also the awareness that these rhapsodic moments in their golden light occur as the world burns. 

Rivette would have made an 8 hour version. 

That question though. 

One answer is that we see what we wish to see. And that can provide some hope amidst the chaos. There are genuine moments of magic like the existence of Lionel Messi (I’d suggest Mo Salah but then I’m an LFC supporter) able to do things with a football that few others would even attempt. Like what happens to the main characters in this film. 

Football is also a near universal language. For heaven’s sake even the dogs are obsessed and have their own specific viewing positions. In this film there’s the dog ‘Vardy’ who is a big England fan. They have as much right to enjoy it as the humans. 

But then we choose to watch the football whilst everything else goes to hell. And what will we tell future generations about that choice?

But then again football can provide genuinely communal feeling like few others things. Their film contains perhaps the most rhapsodic football sequence ever. 

So perhaps the answer that we should give about staring at the sky is to acknowledge that it is not just us humans who see it.

1. The Worst Person In The World : Exquisite from the start, surprising, funny, touching - all that one might hope - the film then hits you with a rhapsodic freeze frame set piece from which it accelerates towards a finale of jaw dropping low key magnificence, sad and hopeful in equal measure. 

There is a sequence (episode 11 if you must know) which is perhaps the best ever encapsulation of the fragility and profundity of true intimacy when Julie and Aksel observe that when they are both gone all that passed between them will then be unknown to the world. I admit I wept at that point.