A Thousand Kisses Deep

A Thousand Kisses Deep

Directed by Dana Lustig

UK, 2011

Cornerhouse, 24 July 2012

Holding one’s attention throughout is an achievement in itself for a film, and you can chalk that point up here, no worries.

But baseline coherence, or simply making sense, that’s important too.  It’s a little bit wobbly in that regard.

A young woman, Mia (Emilia Fox), makes a reckoning with her recently deceased mother – a woman she’d never been especially close to, whose love she’d never felt – by travelling back in time and killing her father.  She’d had this man as a lover too, but of course she hadn’t known that he was her father then.

The film is really a reworking or skewering of the Electra myth or complex, and as such it’s an intriguing if rather perplexing work, a treacherous foray into dark fantasy.

When David Warner is in a film, it is always worth a watch, and so it proves here.  He plays Max, a venerable gatekeeper, an alchemist of the soul’s journey.  Of course the only true philosopher’s stone is found upon a tomb.

Swandown

Swandown

Directed by Andrew Kötting

UK, 2012

Cornerhouse, 21 July 2012

Or Two Men in a Swan Pedalo, that title would work quite as well.

Several rivers and canals are traversed as Andrew Kötting and Iain Sinclair boat it from Hastings to Hackney, encroaching there upon an Olympic site.  Perhaps it is intended as some kind of protest film?  Sinclair spews out various literary quotes and reference points along the way (to The Ancient Mariner, Hope Hodgson’s fantasy, The Odyssey) but he is absent for the very last part of the journey.

They swap the swan with some people: Alan Moore and Stewart Lee have a go riding it for a while, during which they rabbit on about this and that, whatever takes their fancy.  Or another guy will join Kötting in the swan.  So, for example, there’s an academic attempting to explain Popper’s philosophy of science: hypothetico-deductive reasoning and the importance of the disconfirming instance.   And they chat to people in other boats and along the riverbank.

It’s a nice idea for a film: ride a white swan to the London Olympics.  Not nice, grand; it’s a grand idea and no mistake.  Yes, but that’s about all.

Jaws

Jaws

Directed by Steven Spielberg

USA, 1975

Cornerhouse, 22 July 2012

What I realised about Jaws this time around is that – like Psycho, a similar offering - it’s in a sense two distinct films.

The first is set on the island, where a shark attack, a threat from outside, puts a small-town community under stress.  It’s apparent that this community is not quite as unified as it seems, the mayor placing economic interests above public safety with fatal consequences.  When these conflicts are finally resolved, we are at sea and the hunt for the shark begins in earnest.

This second film is pure Howard Hawks territory: you have a mismatched trio working together to bring down a fearsome foe.  At the start there’s a mutual disregard, then a grudging respect develops, and finally it transpires that they’d gladly die for each other.  All according to formula.

Everything is well done and works well, but it is John Williams’ score that raises a well-crafted film to classic status.  It’s exceptional, not only the mesmerising theme but also the way it sometimes subtly echoes Quint’s sea shanty.

Jaws is showing again on Wednesday as part of the Matinee Classics season, further details can be found here.

Never Any End To Paris

Never Any End To Paris

By Enrique Vila-Matas

Translated by Anne McLean

New Directions, 2011

ISBN: 9780811218139

What is the nature of this wondrous book?

Let us get a few bearings to start with.  Although ostensibly a novel, it is presented in the form of a  series of lectures, liberally laden with irony, which take place over three days.  Their subject, the subject of these lectures that is, are the couple of years that the author spent in Paris in the ‘70s, being poor and unhappy and writing his first novel, The Lettered Assassin.  During this time he was also Marguerite Duras’s tenant.

Perhaps, then, this book could best be described as a kind of memoir, an account of how the erstwhile author discovered his vocation as a writer?  As an approximate description this is acceptable, and throughout there are a lot of thoughts and reflections on writing and the writer’s life, and on particular writers as well (Hemingway and Duras above all, since they were in a sense Enrique Vila-Matas’s mentors, but also Beckett, Borges, Perec…) thrown in for good measure.  Yet one should also bear in mind that the author states at one point that he ‘can’t think of a greater way of stating truth than being ironic about our own identity’; so as a memoir it certainly shouldn’t be taken at face value.

Picturesque allusions, literary and arty and cultural (e.g. to rock ‘n’ roll and film) proliferate, and on that score it is a fulsome, extremely entertaining read.  Moreover, it becomes a moving testament when Vila-Matas writes of Marguerite Duras’s last days.  If Hemingway was Vila-Matas’s first literary hero – and reading A Moveable Feast  the inspiration for getting digs in Paris and writing a novel in the first place – then Duras was his unobtrusive supporter, as well as being an accommodating landlady.  And it was she who shoved a sort of laundry list concerned with writing a novel into his innocent hands when he needed it.

Clearly not – and by a long chalk – a conventional novel, Never Any End To Paris is, equally clearly, a novel literary creation, a sparkling gem.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

 

In Your Hands

In Your Hands

Contre Toi

Directed by Lola Doillon

France, 2010

Cornerhouse, 21 July 2012

As a thriller, the film feels rather slight.

And it’s surprising that there is little sense of peril: a woman is abducted and held prisoner, after all.  However, what’s interesting here is the relationship between Anna (played by the ever watchable Kristin Scott Thomas) and her captor.  It has a curious dynamic, and even an element of tenderness and trust, which persists even after she has been released.

Anna’s ambivalence towards her experience and the way it exposes the barren terrain of her personal life is what holds your attention – and it’s what is remarkable about the film.  She is never quite able to trust another or to be content on her own.

On the other hand, you could argue that a film where a woman is abducted and imprisoned should primarily be about a woman who is abducted and imprisoned.  Not, let’s say, about the difficulty of trust and commitment in contemporary relationships between men and women.

Strawberry Fields

Strawberry Fields

Directed by Frances Lea

UK, 2011

Cornerhouse, 18 July 2012

Frances Lea’s film feels already like a classic; it’s an edgy pastoral with a timeless parable-like quality.

The setting is an industrial-scale farm where the fields are full of strawberries; naturally everyone is there for the seasonal work, to pick fruit, but they’re also there to escape, to put the real world on hold for the summer.  For Gillian (Anna Madeley) there’s a budding romance, then she’s joined by her sister Emily (Christine Bottomley)…

Just as it is best to take a good look at a strawberry before biting into it, as a worm may have wheedled its way inside, so there can be a worm in paradise, as here.

In essence Strawberry Fields is a film about self-care, about knowing when finally to let go.  You’re kept captivated and not a little anxious throughout, due to the copacetic storytelling and the excellent performances.  Christine Bottomley as the flighty sister is especially fine.

Lea’s accomplished directorial debut was shown as part of the New British Cinema Quarterly programme, and details of  future screenings of Strawberry Fields can be seen on their website.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

By William Shakespeare

Filter

Royal Exchange Theatre, 9 July 2012

Jonathan Broadbent as Oberon. Photo – Jonathan Keenan

There is an immense amount of comedy and fun to be had in this boisterous version of the Bard’s whimsical romance.

We are given a fair portion of stand-up to start, as a tease towards the main event.  The almighty (supposedly so, at any rate) Oberon strides on stage dressed as a bespectacled superhero: Jonathan Broadbent takes this role, and he was born to play the part.  And there’s an all-in scrap, involving even some members of the audience, where sausage rolls serve as slingshots.  Not your average William Shakespeare production, not by a long chalk.

Golden language it remains, however, and the central thrust of the play – all about how love and sexual attraction is a perverse business at the best of times – holds true.  Or, more simply: there’s no accounting for taste.

It would be an interesting exercise, certainly, to compare Oberon here with Wagner’s Wotan.  How do these respective immortals rate?  They are both fallible but Shakespeare’s immortal is more chilled out, more reconciled to his blunderbuss shortcomings.  Perhaps Wotan lacks a sense of humour?

About 18 months ago I saw Filter’s terrific take on Twelfth Night and, before that, their version of Three Sisters.  This production is as inventive and as good.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream is at the Royal Exchange Theatre until 12 August, further details can be found here.

7 Days in Havana

7 Days in Havana

Directed by Benicio del Toro, Gaspar Noe and five others 

Spain, 2012

Cornerhouse, 15 July 2012

You have seven short films, each made by a different director, altogether covering a week in the Cuban capital.

They’re pretty much all engaging, the predominant cinematic register being wry, slightly quirky, open-ended…

An exception is Gaspar Noe’s Ritual, a mesmerising, dialogue-free film with a pounding beat.  It is about a father’s attempt to purge his wayward daughter’s heart of a forbidden desire: she loves girls.  There is a transvestite (or an actor playing a transvestite) in the first film, Benicio del Toro’s offering, and he appears on a later day too; there’s an occasional connection between the films, a few characters recur.  Anyway, it reminded me that the film with the most transvestites ever is supposed to be Tam Tam by Adolfo Arrieta.

7 Days in Havana is OK and sometimes somewhat better than that, but it’s a pity that Almodovar didn’t contribute to it.

Nostalgia for the Light

Nostalgia for the Light

Directed by Patricio Guzmán

Chile, 2010

Cornerhouse, 15 July 2012

It is at once haunting and thought-provoking, a very fine documentary indeed.

We are confronted with the human animal in all its manifold contradiction: its angelic highs and diabolical lows, its quest for knowledge and its capacity for evil.

Telescopes range across the heavens, gathering information about the origins of the universe, the beginnings of life.  The Atacama Desert, where these telescopes are based, is itself an invaluable archaeological record containing clues to our distant past, right back to prehistoric times.  More recently, political prisoners, those tortured and executed, and other victims of Pinochet’s regime also lay there; it was apparently a favourite dumping ground, for there are many such mass burial sites.  Some brave women scour the desert each day looking for their loved ones, the disappeared, victims of that Thatcher-supported dictatorship.

In essence, what we have is a film about the search for truth, about attempts to make a reckoning with or understand the past.  One is heartrending and traumatic and always skirting despair, while the other is scientific and objective and edifying.

When the film is over, and long after, you find yourself reflecting on the kind of creature we are and can be.

Opera North’s Die Walkure

Die Walkure

By Richard Wagner

Opera North

The Lowry, 14 July 2012

Another year, another Richard Wagner offering from Opera North: we had the preamble Das Rheingold last year, and now we are into the first day proper of Der Ring des Nibelung.

As before, the orchestra took centrestage, the singers afore them, a video backdrop supplying images for the music and taking the place of a set.  Most (85% or so) of the drama of the opera comes from Wagner’s music, so it is just that it should be foregrounded in this way.  An added bonus is that the opera has become a more immediate, intimate experience: the singers seem somehow closer to you than they in actual fact are.

The great virtue of Wagner’s opera (and of the cycle as a whole, come to that) is that the gods – and above all Wotan - are not omnipotent and all-knowing.  They are compromised, corruptible, fallible, imperiled.  They are hunted and fallen.  Though Wotan may intend to do good, it is not certain that he can or will.  It makes for situations where anything can happen, everything is up in the air.

Golden storytelling, that’s it in a shellcasing.

Opera North will be staging Siegfried next year, that’s another delight to look forward to.