Ajami

Ajami
Directed by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani
Germany & Israel, 2009
Cornerhouse, 25 July 2010

Still from Ajami

There is a gloomy sense of virtue being squandered needlessly in this rather excellent crime film.

The virtues of loyalty and trust – all that makes for a good family or a close-knit community – are perverted by gang warfare into something corrupt and malign.

As a crime drama, Ajami compels one’s attention throughout, and as a diagnosis of what’s rotten in the state of Israel – tribalism, xenophobia, distrust of the other – the film scores quite highly too.

In using the device of relating some of the same events from different perspectives, the directors and writers add depth to their work.  But there is no smouldering doubt, no uncertainty and no unreliable narrator, as in Akutagawa’s famous story.  Only a few riddles solved.

24 City

24 City
Directed by Zhang Ke Jia
China & Hong Kong & Japan, 2008
Cornerhouse, 25 July 2010

Still from 24 City

‘Well,’ said a protagonist in a projected novel by a certain ‘Pataphysician, ‘the jig is up. I’ll go back to Shanghai alone.’

And what would he or she find, if they made that journey now?  A city in transition, according to Zhang Ke Jia’s film, but also a nation where family ties and a sense of filial obligation reign still.

This superb documentary provides a fascinating snapshot of contemporary China, and it does so by looking at the workers – and the workers’ children – at one particular factory.  The factory is being dismantled and luxury flats are being built in its place.  The world is changing fast and the future, as ever, is uncertain.

There are many poignant and not a few tragic stories here.  We live, supposedly, at the beginning of China’s century and this moving, beautifully crafted film should be viewed also as a valuable document of record.

And the ‘Pataphysician alluded to above?  Good old Jean Ferry.

Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott

Happy Baby
By Stephen Elliott
MacAdam/Cage, February 19 2004
ISBN: 1-931561-62-1 

Elliott’s story of a life lived without love is sad and desolate, excoriating in its telling, but there is no denying the beauty of the writing.  A great novel.

In the introduction to a later collection of ‘stories’ (My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, which came out in 2006), Stephen Elliott writes:

This could have been a memoir.  It isn’t.  Most of it is true…  Ultimately, I made the poor marketing choice of calling this a book of stories because there were too many things in it I knowingly made up.

It is tempting also to regard this novel as a memoir and to identify Elliott with Theo, his protagonist; not least because chapter two of Happy Baby appears as a story (entitled ‘Other Desires’) in the aforementioned collection.  There are other ways of reading the book, mind, and here I’ll try naively to treat it as a novel, a work of fiction, wholly made-up.

The novel opens with Theo returning to Chicago after some six years to see Maria, someone who he’d first met when both were children.  He feels some vague obligation towards her – an insistent worry or a need to protect her – but when he discovers that she herself has a child we are told that that ‘changes everything’.

Later chapters spiral back in time, as though to explain this statement.  They treat Theo’s life in other American cities, some curious period spent in Amsterdam, and end in Chicago – the bulk of it in the juvenile care system.  That was where Theo and Maria had first met.

This is a novel about growing up in care, surviving sexual abuse (Theo’s paedophile abuser was one Mr. Gracie) and making whatever adjustments or reckonings you need to survive.  Outside of the system, of course, because the system cannot be trusted, it has made you what you are.  For Theo (and for Maria too, though perhaps for her this is in the past) it involves the embrace of a life of masochism and controlled self-harm.  In his emotional life, role is more important than intimacy, the other person being simply a stand-in for a fantasy figure or stuff that’s happened in his past.  And violence is a medium used to express need.

We all of us choose what we do with our lives from a finite set of alternatives; and for Theo, in his darkest moments at any rate, love is not on the menu: ‘If I could love I would have loved by now.’  Happy Baby is about a person for whom love, as a possibility, has been taken away.  It isn’t any kind of answer, it cannot be.  And it is only ‘people that don’t know any better’ who ‘are always optimistic’.

Eight by Ella Hickson

Eight
By Ella Hickson
The Lowry, 22 July 2010

For the lion’s share of the evening, these eight monologues made for engrossing theatre.

True, it was hardly possible to discern an overarching theme, but each person was someone you would recognise or could know.  Andre spoke of the suicide of his boyfriend, Astrid reflected on her infidelity, while some others spoke of their lives more generally.

Along with poignancy, there were wry observations and bittersweet humour, courtesy of Ella Hickson’s excellent writing.

A difficulty for the reviewer (for this one, anyway) lies in choosing which particular performance to highlight, as all were at least good, so it’s really just a matter of taste.

Peter Hunt’s intense, and intensely catty, Andre appealed, as did Wendy Patterson’s Millie (a very English prostitute); and so too did Ryan Greaves as Jude, an innocent youth abroad.

Eight portraits rendered perfectly, each one enticingly different.

Eight is playing at The Lowry until 25 July.  Details here.

The Concert

The Concert
Directed by Radu Mihaileanu
France & Italy & Romania & Belgium & Russia, 2009
Cornerhouse, 18 July 2010

Still from The Concert

That Russian phrase for ‘If you don’t laugh, you cry’ – remind me what it is again.

It is fairly obvious where this film is taking you from about a quarter of an hour in.  But that’s alright, because it is a journey you will want to take.

There is a down-at-heels and disgraced conductor, one Andrei Filipov (played by Aleksei Guskov), who wants to get his old orchestra together again so they can play a gig in Paris and realise his vision of perfect harmony.

We get all the kerfuffle and jovial commotion associated with putting a good team together and, in a sense, the film is The Magnificent Seven, although there are more than seven in an orchestra (clearly) and the objective is to play Tchaikovsky rather than to defend a Mexican village.  Along with this there’s another and a darker storyline, a real tear jerker, which I won’t mention.

A film wherein the Russian soul is tempered with irony and a sense of the absurd, which is most likely also of a Russian provenance (consider Ilf and Petrov, Bulgakov, etc.).  A good one, and I especially enjoyed the performance of Victor Vikitch as Sasha.

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort by Jacques Demy

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort
(The Young Girls of Rochefort )
Directed by Jacques Demy
France, 1967
Cornerhouse, 18 July 2010

Still from Les Demoiselles de Rochefort

As much as this musical delights, it disconcerts; and it is at its height when it manages to do both at once.

Even the clothes that the people wear have this effect, the twin sisters, Delphine (Catherine Deneuve) and Solange (Françoise Dorléac), dressed most of the time in colours that evoke boiled sweets and seaside rock.

Love triumphs in the end, of course it does, but there is no doubting the definite undertow of hostility, much of it directed towards women.  Consider the gallery owner/artist who composes his canvases by using a gun to pierce plastic bags of paint.  Somehow, the act of shooting is more virulent when his advances have been spurned by Delphine.  Or take the charming old gentleman who, off-stage as it were, chops up dear Lola into myriad pieces.  More generally, there is the display of masculine power represented by the marching army (in contrast to the joyous dance), and the shadow of war.

There’s no doubting the delight of the singing and dancing in the town square, mind, and the use of real locations – as singers surrender to their song, you’ll often see a bus trundling along on the fair streets of Rochefort – adds another dimension of incongruity to an already strange film.  The dependence on coincidence and the close-knit, almost incestuous relationships create a kind of dreamlike logic.  Most likely there’s a ‘family romance’ aspect to it all if you look deeply enough.

Yet even superficially it is a weird film, but sunlit and not at all ‘dark’ – unless, that is, you count the troupe of tenebrous temptresses in seamed stockings who fairly frolic as one.  They are one of the fair’s finest attractions.

And as the fair leaves the seaside town, where yet the military are stationed, you cannot help thinking of the events in Paris in May 1968, just a year away.

Leaving by Catherine Corsini

Leaving
Directed by Catherine Corsini
France, 2009
Cornerhouse, 18 July 2010

Still from Leaving

A film that could almost be described as a bourgeois version of I am Love.

As in that film, love appears as a thunderbolt.  It is unsought for, unwelcome and unwanted, and not entirely a good thing.  Kristin Scott Thomas gives a spellbinding turn as Suzanne, an apparently content wife whose life is turned suddenly upside down.  She deserts her husband and children, relinquishing a comfortable and affluent lifestyle, in order to be with an ex-con.  Her new life is, in so many different ways, an impoverishment of her old – and the path towards it is messy, disruptive, humiliating and painful.

In a curious kind of a way, this is a religious and even a pagan film.  Love is a divine madness, unworldly in its disregard of law, morality and raw economic power.  Yet love, too, is a power in the world: it effects behaviour, changes people, makes things happen for good or ill.

Leaving is a fine film.

Bodyguards and Assassins

Bodyguards and Assassins
Directed by Teddy Chan
Hong Kong & China, 2009
Cornerhouse, 14 July 2010

While based around an actual visit to Hong Kong by Dr. Sun Yat-Sen, the Chinese revolutionary leader, about a century ago, few would claim this film was historically accurate.

In fact, it is really a classic ‘Us versus Them’ film.  Those guys over there are assassins, and they are bad, and we’re bodyguards and are good.  They’re trying to kill Dr. Sun, and to do that they will first have to kill us, and we want to kill them to remove any and all danger.

Such a simple premise, yet it leads to some spectacular kung-fu and sword-fighting sequences.  Balletic, choreographed to perfection.  It is all very exciting and even entertaining, as long as you realise that all that blood isn’t real.

The interesting aspect to this film, and quite a few others originating from China (such as City of Life and Death), is that they often carry a double meaning.  They speak not only of actual historical events, but also of China’s hopes now and for the forthcoming century.

Skeletons by Nick Whitfield

Skeletons
Directed and written by Nick Whitfield
UK, 2009
Cornerhouse, 12 July 2010

Only an English imagination could dream up such a fantastic film as this.

Nick Whitfield’s film follows the fortunes of a couple of dodgy peripatetic, paranormal types whose job is to expunge skeletons from people’s closets, both literal and – you know – metaphorical.  A messy affair usually, as it turns out, but someone’s got to do it.

There’s a kinship to Wells, Chesterton, de la Mare and the rest of the classic English fabulists.  And it could be that Whitfield and certain contemporary ‘slipstream’ fiction-makers (I’m thinking in particular of Tim Nickels, undiscovered genius) share a common gene or possess the same blood group.  Whatever the reason, this is a wonderfully creepy comedy with a genuine heart.  And the two leads, Ed Gaughan and Andrew Buckley, are terrific.

Skeletons is showing again at the Cornerhouse from 17-19 August, when it goes on general release.  Details here.

What Would Helen Mirren Do?

What Would Helen Mirren Do?
By Josie Melia
The Lowry, 10 July 2010

The play, a monologue of many voices, was outstanding entertainment.

Principally, Anita Parry took on the role of one Susan Butterworth, a supermarket supervisor whose life changes for the better when she adopts Helen Mirren as a role model.

Parry began well and got better, and naturally she took on other voices as well.  Here are your three samples: Slimy Steve, Susan’s Irish mother and disabled son.  She was versatile, hard-working and vibrant.  And she got Mirren’s gorgeous, neo-Heseltine, stray curl moment down to a T.

There was a lot of humour in this bright drama, and a lot of different kinds of humour to boot, eliciting belly laughs, chuckles and smiles of recognition.

We were content at the end.  Our applause was sincere tribute.

What Would Helen Mirren Do? is playing next at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August.  Details here.