Note – Spoiler alert
I’ve seen three films in the last little while with children in lead roles. I Wish, Moonrise Kingdom and Monsieur Lazhar have seemingly little in common apart from this fact – but in each case, the presence of the children invests the film with charm and a fable-like quality that made me put away adult ways (scepticism, hard-heartedness, cynicism).
The Girl’s Own Annual overlay of Moonrise Kingdom was especially appealing. It was beautiful to look at, like a faded Polaroid, or the pages of a picture story book from the 1960s (it was set in 1965). Situated on an island off the coast of New England, two 12 year olds run away from home. This is not a gritty urban runaway story, despite the fact that the boy, Sam, is an orphan living in a foster home, and the girl, Suzy, is unhappy at school and feels misunderstood at home. Each starts out on the adventure with a lot of equipment (she takes a cat in a basket, a portable record player and several hardback books, he carries a pipe and enough camping equipment for a scout troop. The film is highly stylized – reminiscent in look and feel to the new app The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Less more.
Critic Roger Ebert describes it thus: “Anderson always fills his films with colors, never garish but usually definite and active. In "Moonrise Kingdom," the palette tends toward the green of new grass, and the Scout's khaki brown. Also the right amount of red. It is a comfortable canvas to look at, so pretty that it helps establish the feeling of magical realism” and Peter Bradshaw from the Guardian says: “Where David Lynch finds a dark horror beneath the wholesome exterior, Anderson sees something else — something exotic but practical and self-possessed, a world that ticks along like an antique toy, much treasured by a precocious child. The homes and buildings often look like giant dolls' houses.”
The adult world depicted in all three films is fraught – by relationship issues, war, suicide, loneliness, displacement. And so each film-maker is able to generate a contrast between the adult world and the children’s world – of perspective, of capacity to respond to the world, of tone. Monsieur Lazhar is the bleakest, dealing as it does with suicide, war and refugees. In this film, the children cannot escape these issues and the film is potentially quite dark. We watch it knowing that it can’t (and shouldn’t) end well. What makes it bearable is the relationships created in the classroom between the children and their teacher and his determination to acknowledge and work with the pain they’ve experienced as a group. In this he shows great respect for what children are capable of both feeling and working through.
Koreada, who directed I Wish, showed this kind of respect in Nobody Knows, his 2004 film that focussed on a family of children abandoned by their parents trying to survive in the Tokyo suburbs without adult support. He is a director who is very skilled at working with children. In I Wish, the lead characters are played by two real-life brothers who play brothers separated when their parent’s marriage breaks up. Living in different cities, they miss each other and what the family was and the plot to get the parents back together (the “I wish” of the title). The film is about the wishes and fantasies of children, as all three films are to some extent. There is a sweetness in the story, a humanism and charm in the kids that made me put aside things that I would normally criticise. I liked being in the optimism of the kids’ zone – they thought they could do things, change things. All three films give children a degree of agency, inventiveness and care for each other that is often missing in films about children.
It’s maybe no accident that I’ve connected I Wish and Moonrise Kingdom. Roger Ebert says, of Wes Anderson “In Anderson's films, there is a sort of resignation to the underlying melancholy of the world; he is the only American director I can think of whose work reflects the Japanese concept mono no aware, which describes a wistfulness about the transience of things. Even Sam and Suzy, sharing the experience of a lifetime, seem aware that this will be their last summer for such an adventure. Next year they will be too old for such irresponsibility.”
I could write more, as others have, about the symbolism inherent in Moonrise Kingdom (the coming of the flood, America in a time of innocence (early 60s – innocent – really?) etc etc) but these things weren’t strong factors in the charm of this film for me. Bradshaw says it better than I can: “Anderson's movies are vulnerable to the charge of being supercilious oddities, but there is elegance and formal brilliance in Moonrise Kingdom as well as a lot of gentle, winning comedy. His homemade aesthetic is placed at the service of a counter-digital, almost hand-drawn cinema, and he has an extraordinary ability to conjure a complete, distinctive universe, entire of itself. To some, Moonrise Kingdom may be nothing more than a soufflé of strangeness, but it rises superbly.”
Thursday, October 11, 2012
Friday, June 22, 2012
Great Expectations
“It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window as a pocket handkerchief. Now, I saw the damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of spider's webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On every rail and gate, wet lay clammy; and the marsh-mist was so thick, that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village — a direction which they never accepted, for they never came there — was invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a phantom devoting me to the Hulks.”
This passage is near the beginning of Great Expectations. Isn’t it fabulous! I don’t normally think of Dickens as a landscape artist but this novel is full of vivid descriptions of both the outer and the inner world. Here’s another one much later in the novel:
“We got ashore among some slippery stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about. It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed stranded and still. For, now, the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.” It’s J.M.W Turner in print isn’t it. Turner died about ten years prior to the publication of Great Expectations – but you can see that both men had been in the same terrain.
I first read this novel in 1963 when I was fourteen. It’s fair to say that I did not like it. At all. So it was with unexpected pleasure that I came to read it again many years later. I think the reason I found it going when I was 14 was because of the main character, the first person narrator, Pip. In an era that predates Freud and Jung, Pip really seems, for much of the novel, to embody our shadow side (and given the physical shadows and mists on the marshes, this seems appropriate). All our shame and guilt is writ large in his behaviour and feelings about himself. Written by an older man as a reflection of his younger self, it is unsparing and merciless. I think I found Pip’s false ideas, his desire for social mobility, his churlish treatment of Joe Gargery, and his hopeless unrequited love for Estella almost unbearable. It’s very hard for the main character to bear this kind of burden; he behaves very badly for at least half the novel. G K Chesterton, who wrote a lot about Dickens, described this novel as “A novel without a hero … it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.” He also said: “It is a study in human weakness and the slow human surrender.”
A lot of it is about shame. Here’s Pip reflecting on this: “It is a most miserable thing to be ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude on the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but, that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.”
It’s also about unrequited love. Here’s a lovely, evocative piece: “I said to Biddy that we would walk a little further and we did so, and the summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbor by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick to it and make the best if it.
I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself "Pip, what a fool you are!" As Pip says at one stage - "so throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of people that we most despise." I think my teenage self knew this to be true but wanted to run a mile from its grim view of human behaviour.
As with all Dickens, there is a thousand small phrases that add colour and vigour to the writing. “I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been until Mr Wopsle's great aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of living.” You have to love this. Dickens described this novel as atragi-comedy and it’s easy to let the dark side dominate but there are many great comic touches: the unctuous and ingratiating Pumblechook, Mr Wemmick with his postbox of a mouth and his castle and drawbridge and the Aged P, and the slipperiness of Trabb’s boy.
Chesterton again: “Great Expectations, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth.”
The most recent edition of the novel that I’ve seen has an image of convict leg-irons on the cover. In some ways I think that is the most apt metaphor for the whole novel. Most of the characters are imprisoned by something or someone. All the women are literally almost house-bound (Ms Havisham through madness, Mrs Joe after her accident, Estella growing up in a lonely house captive to a delusional woman), Pip sees his life as circumscribed by his social class and education, until his fate changes, Jaggers is a lonely workaholic who sees emotions as having the potential to derail him.
The great joy in the novel is as Pip finds his moral centre and begins to appreciate the qualities that we see in Herbert Pocket, in Joe, in Magwich and in Wemmick. It’s ultimately a story of redemption; that it is possible to live differently; to live a good and kind life. I think it’s a great book.
This passage is near the beginning of Great Expectations. Isn’t it fabulous! I don’t normally think of Dickens as a landscape artist but this novel is full of vivid descriptions of both the outer and the inner world. Here’s another one much later in the novel:
“We got ashore among some slippery stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about. It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed stranded and still. For, now, the last of the fleet of ships was round the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden, with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles, stood crippled in the mud on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.” It’s J.M.W Turner in print isn’t it. Turner died about ten years prior to the publication of Great Expectations – but you can see that both men had been in the same terrain.
I first read this novel in 1963 when I was fourteen. It’s fair to say that I did not like it. At all. So it was with unexpected pleasure that I came to read it again many years later. I think the reason I found it going when I was 14 was because of the main character, the first person narrator, Pip. In an era that predates Freud and Jung, Pip really seems, for much of the novel, to embody our shadow side (and given the physical shadows and mists on the marshes, this seems appropriate). All our shame and guilt is writ large in his behaviour and feelings about himself. Written by an older man as a reflection of his younger self, it is unsparing and merciless. I think I found Pip’s false ideas, his desire for social mobility, his churlish treatment of Joe Gargery, and his hopeless unrequited love for Estella almost unbearable. It’s very hard for the main character to bear this kind of burden; he behaves very badly for at least half the novel. G K Chesterton, who wrote a lot about Dickens, described this novel as “A novel without a hero … it is a novel which aims chiefly at showing that the hero is unheroic.” He also said: “It is a study in human weakness and the slow human surrender.”
A lot of it is about shame. Here’s Pip reflecting on this: “It is a most miserable thing to be ashamed of home. There may be black ingratitude on the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well deserved; but, that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.”
It’s also about unrequited love. Here’s a lovely, evocative piece: “I said to Biddy that we would walk a little further and we did so, and the summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing beggar my neighbor by candlelight in the room with the stopped clocks, and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do, and stick to it and make the best if it.
I asked myself the question whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself "Pip, what a fool you are!" As Pip says at one stage - "so throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are usually committed for the sake of people that we most despise." I think my teenage self knew this to be true but wanted to run a mile from its grim view of human behaviour.
As with all Dickens, there is a thousand small phrases that add colour and vigour to the writing. “I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been until Mr Wopsle's great aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of living.” You have to love this. Dickens described this novel as atragi-comedy and it’s easy to let the dark side dominate but there are many great comic touches: the unctuous and ingratiating Pumblechook, Mr Wemmick with his postbox of a mouth and his castle and drawbridge and the Aged P, and the slipperiness of Trabb’s boy.
Chesterton again: “Great Expectations, which was written in the afternoon of Dickens's life and fame, has a quality of serene irony and even sadness, which puts it quite alone among his other works. At no time could Dickens possibly be called cynical, he had too much vitality; but relatively to the other books this book is cynical; but it has the soft and gentle cynicism of old age, not the hard cynicism of youth.”
The most recent edition of the novel that I’ve seen has an image of convict leg-irons on the cover. In some ways I think that is the most apt metaphor for the whole novel. Most of the characters are imprisoned by something or someone. All the women are literally almost house-bound (Ms Havisham through madness, Mrs Joe after her accident, Estella growing up in a lonely house captive to a delusional woman), Pip sees his life as circumscribed by his social class and education, until his fate changes, Jaggers is a lonely workaholic who sees emotions as having the potential to derail him.
The great joy in the novel is as Pip finds his moral centre and begins to appreciate the qualities that we see in Herbert Pocket, in Joe, in Magwich and in Wemmick. It’s ultimately a story of redemption; that it is possible to live differently; to live a good and kind life. I think it’s a great book.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
One hundred and fifty minutes in the dark
I haven’t seen much Turkish film but the one I saw last week reminded me of an incident that happened to us when I was in Cappadocia with my friend Barb. We were dropped off an overnight bus into a darkened town at about 4.30 in the morning. We were expecting to be picked up and taken to our B&B but no one turned up. This is from my journal:
While this is on the surface a police procedural, it is really just about life – about the awful and the beautiful. There’s not much on the beautiful side but one scene, using candlelight and the face of a young woman contrasting with the aging faces of the men to whom she minsters, is beautiful and restorative.
The film invites intimacy through its very close portrayal of these ordinary men over the course of a night and a morning - their movemnets, their conversations, their interactions. The last part of the film provides a moral dilemma that made me think about the film long after – but I suspect that it is the cinematography and ‘feel’ of the film that will linger longest.
Critic Roger Ebert wrote:
Last week I saw two films of 150 minutes duration. The other one was titled Margaret. (The diector of this film was new to me, as was Nuri Bilge Ceylan who made the Turkish film.) Made by Kenneth Lonergan, it has taken seven years to release as a result of internal issues around the edit. This is obvious in the film which has many more small sidetracks in plot that it needs. I think the director must have been unable to let these go; they impede the actual emotional arc of the film and made me irritated. I was irritated very early though because an essential part of the main character’s experience seemed to be withheld from the audience and the narrative – for the purposes of creating tension. I felt manipulated. Various aspects of the plot were less credible given this withholding. I can’t wrote easily about this without giving away the plot. I don’t want to do this. The film is based on a great idea. Three people are involved in a traffic accident; two pedestrians and a driver. The significant impact of this momentary event has long-reaching consequences, especially on the teenage girl, Lisa, who is played extremely well by Anna Paquin.
A Guardian reviewer writes:
“Then a car sort of jerks its way into the square. An old beaten up sort of vehicle. The call to prayer booms out over the square - but nothing in the town moves. A man emerges from the car. He is waving a half empty Efes bottle (local beer) and inviting us into his car. A big ugly mongrel of a dog emerges from the back seat and runs around. Barb and I do a quick 'What do you reckon - how drunk is he?' and negotiate a fee with him. We have to get to a town called Urgup - about 8 kms down the road. He is likely to be a tout from one of the local pensiones but he is equally likely just to be a drunk out looking for a light. A moth. We struggle to fit all our stuff in the car and he - let's call him Mehmet - there are only 6 million Mehmets in Turkey - struggles to coax the dog (Which looks like it had some bull terrier and other people-friendly breeds) into the back seat with me. We set off.I felt like I was in this territory in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Part of the reason for this is that the film (almost) opens with a focus on landscape – rolling treeless hills, the gathering dusk, a road and some headlights. It is mesmerising. Slowly, slowly three vehicles emerge into view. They are old vehicles – like Mehmet’s - and stuffed full of Turkish men. Their size within the claustrophobic confines of the car is comedic – it reminds us that this is not a wealthy country, These men are on an unpleasant mission; they are in search of a corpse, a murder victim who has been disposed of by two men who are part of this strange band of people. The rest of the cast are those in authority: policemen, a prosecutor, a doctor, a soldier. A collegiality is established; the men talk of domestic things during this more morbid task. The texture of buffalo mozzarella, the need for a prescription for a chronically ill son. They exude authenticity.
The road to Urgup is through one of the most surreal landscapes I have ever been in. The whole area is formed out of some sort of volcanic leftovers - so that there are thousands of giant cone shaped outbreaks of rock. People build homes in them - that's what the area is famous for. It looks like something from a science fiction film. The effect is enlivened by our particular mode of travel - the small truckload of empty stubbies rolling around on the floor of the car, the dogs breath on my leg, Mehmet's drunken attempts to engage in conversation with Barbara - I’m sure he mentioned Steve Irwin at one stage. He would speed up and slow down in some deep-seated drunken rhythm that bore no relation to the road conditions at all. His back door wouldn't close properly so I was more in fear of falling out. Dawn was beginning to appear.
In Urgup it became obvious that he had no idea where our hotel was (not a surprise in the long run as it wasn't actually in this town). Fortuitously, his car stalled outside the police station (It wouldn't start in first gear) so we were able to enlist the aid of the local cops. We paid Mehmet for bringing us to the wrong location - he kept muttering 'I a good man' and threw ourselves on the mercy of the cops who took us inside, located our hotel - in another town close to the original one and called a taxi for us. They were very entertained by our journey - the crime wave in Urdup has been on the wane and they were pleased to have something to do.”
While this is on the surface a police procedural, it is really just about life – about the awful and the beautiful. There’s not much on the beautiful side but one scene, using candlelight and the face of a young woman contrasting with the aging faces of the men to whom she minsters, is beautiful and restorative.
The film invites intimacy through its very close portrayal of these ordinary men over the course of a night and a morning - their movemnets, their conversations, their interactions. The last part of the film provides a moral dilemma that made me think about the film long after – but I suspect that it is the cinematography and ‘feel’ of the film that will linger longest.
Critic Roger Ebert wrote:
(It is)150 minutes long, and its story unfolds slowly and obliquely. I tell you now so you won't complain later. It needs to be long, and it needs to be indirect, because the film is about how sad truths can be revealed during the slow process of doing a job. The Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan doesn't slap us with big dramatic moments, but allows us to live along with his characters as things occur to them.Some lovely phrases there – I hope they teach them in film school: “film is about how sad truths can be revealed during the slow process of doing a job” and the director “doesn't slap us with big dramatic moments, but allows us to live along with his characters…”
Last week I saw two films of 150 minutes duration. The other one was titled Margaret. (The diector of this film was new to me, as was Nuri Bilge Ceylan who made the Turkish film.) Made by Kenneth Lonergan, it has taken seven years to release as a result of internal issues around the edit. This is obvious in the film which has many more small sidetracks in plot that it needs. I think the director must have been unable to let these go; they impede the actual emotional arc of the film and made me irritated. I was irritated very early though because an essential part of the main character’s experience seemed to be withheld from the audience and the narrative – for the purposes of creating tension. I felt manipulated. Various aspects of the plot were less credible given this withholding. I can’t wrote easily about this without giving away the plot. I don’t want to do this. The film is based on a great idea. Three people are involved in a traffic accident; two pedestrians and a driver. The significant impact of this momentary event has long-reaching consequences, especially on the teenage girl, Lisa, who is played extremely well by Anna Paquin.
A Guardian reviewer writes:
Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup, and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. But is that emotion guilt or righteousness? Or a sociopathic convulsion, a need to create a huge redemptive drama with herself at the centre, to lash out against her mother and the entire adult world; or to enact vengeance against a man who, without trying, has placed her in a position of weakness – at the very point at which she considers she should be attaining her adult, queen-bee status? Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically compelling to watch.Another reviewer also comments:
As the heroine of his story of life in conflicting times, Lonergan casts a character in the grips of emotions she can feel but not process. Paquin plays a young woman filled with passion she can’t quite articulate and frustration she can only translate into anger. Alternately endearing and enraging, Paquin’s work might be remembered as one of the great depictions of what it feels like to be a teen if the film around her had worked out better. But, despite a wrenching opening that saddles Paquin’s character with more guilt than most anyone could bear, much less a less-than-steady-on-her-feet teen, the film lets some great performances and compelling moments drift in a sea of shapelessness.Holden Caulfield is the person who comes to mind in watching this performance. And an early version of my own righteous self in full and ugly flight. ‘Margaret’ (the title of which derives from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem called Spring and Fall) got lots of very good reviews as well as some mixed ones. For me, the girl’s performance was authentic and the relationship with her mother real and honest. However, the director saddled the girl with a histrionic mess. I felt manipulated and bored despite the excellent acting of the two lead actresses. Some of the quietness and the pared-back narrative of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia would have served this film well. Both of these films turn on the value of knowing the truth – but one rendition is melodramatic; one full of existential ambiguity. Nothing is black and white - or is it?
Monday, May 14, 2012
Emotional glaciation
OK, am going to write about a film with a SPOILER ALERT. It’s The Seventh Continent which was made in 1989 by Michael Haneke who also made Hidden and The White Ribbon. The film hasn’t dated at all. It’s theme of alienation and disconnection is, if anything, more resonant today. (READ NO FURTHER IF YOU WANT TO SEE THE FILM WITHOUT KNOWING THE PLOT.)
*****
In an interview on the DVD, Haneke said that the film is based on an article he read about a family who committed suicide in a very deliberate and considered way. One of the things they did prior to dying was to tear up their money and flush it down the toilet. The article said the police discovered that the money was flushed because they found little bits of currency stuck in the plumbing. He said that he knew that that audiences would be upset with that scene, and also said that in today's society the idea of destroying money is more taboo than parents killing their child and themselves.
The film opens inside a mechanical carwash. One reviewer described the first 15 minutes very well: “But Haneke’s stroke of brilliance in The Seventh Continent is his visual “angle” on the Schobers. A good quarter-of-an-hour passes before he reveals their faces to us. Instead, we are given a series of tight close-ups on the objects of the Schobers’ everyday routine: alarm clock, door handle, the breakfast table, interior of the car, the supermarket till; and fragmented views of their bodies: a hand, an arm, the nape of a neck, the back of a head, a shoulder. It’s a strikingly effective way of enunciating the film’s theme, of emphasising the loneliness, isolation, sense of disjunction, and alienation of each family member.”
It’s intriguing trying to make sense of the images as they provide glimpses into a very routine mundane family life. Occasionally small events provide an unsettling disconnect. It was like watching Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Both of these films linger on the domestic and the mundane. (I still can’t make my bed without being reminded of Jeanne Dielmann.) For me, the decision that the family made came as a surprise but not a great one. They seem worn down by the drudgery of ordinary life and there is no joy. Joy is an important thing for me. About fifteen years ago, I was in a university program about organisational change. I had to identify seven moments of joy in my life. I had trouble with this task. Not enough moments. I could get to seven but it seemed like a bit of a struggle. I decided then that I needed more joy in my life more often and I think I am in a much better space. Throughout The Seventh Continent, a poster appears and reappears like a fantasy. It is a beach scene (apparently of an Australian beach – the Seventh Continent of the title). It’s weirdly unsettling – it’s not until you look at it closely that you realise that it’s geographically impossible. It is actually a fantasy; it will not deliver what this family is looking for.
Not everyone will like this film – it is troubling – but I agree with this reviewer:
*****
In an interview on the DVD, Haneke said that the film is based on an article he read about a family who committed suicide in a very deliberate and considered way. One of the things they did prior to dying was to tear up their money and flush it down the toilet. The article said the police discovered that the money was flushed because they found little bits of currency stuck in the plumbing. He said that he knew that that audiences would be upset with that scene, and also said that in today's society the idea of destroying money is more taboo than parents killing their child and themselves.
The film opens inside a mechanical carwash. One reviewer described the first 15 minutes very well: “But Haneke’s stroke of brilliance in The Seventh Continent is his visual “angle” on the Schobers. A good quarter-of-an-hour passes before he reveals their faces to us. Instead, we are given a series of tight close-ups on the objects of the Schobers’ everyday routine: alarm clock, door handle, the breakfast table, interior of the car, the supermarket till; and fragmented views of their bodies: a hand, an arm, the nape of a neck, the back of a head, a shoulder. It’s a strikingly effective way of enunciating the film’s theme, of emphasising the loneliness, isolation, sense of disjunction, and alienation of each family member.”
It’s intriguing trying to make sense of the images as they provide glimpses into a very routine mundane family life. Occasionally small events provide an unsettling disconnect. It was like watching Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. Both of these films linger on the domestic and the mundane. (I still can’t make my bed without being reminded of Jeanne Dielmann.) For me, the decision that the family made came as a surprise but not a great one. They seem worn down by the drudgery of ordinary life and there is no joy. Joy is an important thing for me. About fifteen years ago, I was in a university program about organisational change. I had to identify seven moments of joy in my life. I had trouble with this task. Not enough moments. I could get to seven but it seemed like a bit of a struggle. I decided then that I needed more joy in my life more often and I think I am in a much better space. Throughout The Seventh Continent, a poster appears and reappears like a fantasy. It is a beach scene (apparently of an Australian beach – the Seventh Continent of the title). It’s weirdly unsettling – it’s not until you look at it closely that you realise that it’s geographically impossible. It is actually a fantasy; it will not deliver what this family is looking for.
Not everyone will like this film – it is troubling – but I agree with this reviewer:
"Arguably, no greater cinematic interpreter of alienation exists in the world today than Austrian director Michael Haneke. Haneke shows us characters whose response to the world around them has deadened, people who have forgotten how to feel, how to love, how to care. The Seventh Continent, the first film of the trilogy that, with Benny's Video (1992) and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (1994), depicts what Haneke has called "my country's emotional glaciation."
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Intimate and gruelling
Most films about people undergoing a slow death have an inevitable sentimentality about them. It’s a feeling I resist and then fall for – like eating too much chocolate. Not so Stopped on Track, a new German film. It’s about a man, Frank, who is diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumour. It's gruelling and true. It combines all the wretchedness, tedium and sadness that accompanies a slow death. And I think the audience feels these three qualities in equal measure, with a couple of light moments thrown in. Very powerful. Great acting. I did not feel emotionally manipulated, just very sad. And a bit bored at times – which felt appropriate.
I felt there was some irony at the expense of the health profession. Their capacity to do anything in the face of his dying and the terrible burden this placed on his family seemed limited in the extreme, and their words felt kind but hollow. I doubt that this was the intention of the director, Andreas Dresen, who also made Cloud Nine – a film I really liked at MIFF a couple of years ago. In this film, he used a mix of professional actors and these real-life health professionals, and much of the dialogue was improvised as the filming took place.
The Eye for Film critic said: “It's seamlessly delivered; it just doesn't seem to have much to say.” I felt that this was missing the point – it is about a journey – the most universal of journeys and one that we often resist seeing up close and slow. The Telegraph critic got it:
I felt there was some irony at the expense of the health profession. Their capacity to do anything in the face of his dying and the terrible burden this placed on his family seemed limited in the extreme, and their words felt kind but hollow. I doubt that this was the intention of the director, Andreas Dresen, who also made Cloud Nine – a film I really liked at MIFF a couple of years ago. In this film, he used a mix of professional actors and these real-life health professionals, and much of the dialogue was improvised as the filming took place.
The Eye for Film critic said: “It's seamlessly delivered; it just doesn't seem to have much to say.” I felt that this was missing the point – it is about a journey – the most universal of journeys and one that we often resist seeing up close and slow. The Telegraph critic got it:
”For this is a film about adaptation and coping. It’s a record of a journey as difficult as any polar expedition; counselors offer Simone and her husband’s family sketchy maps of the new, fraught world in which they now find themselves, but essentially they have to draw on their deepest reserves of love, pity and resourcefulness."The film begins in a hospital waiting room. Frank ans his wife Simone are called into the doctor's surgery where he shows them slides of Frank's brain and tells them what has been found. The scene is quiet and sparse. They are shocked. Simone cries silently and Frank looks like he has been run over by a bus ('stopped in track, in fact). There is a lengthy silence, eventually filled by the doctor with information about potential life span. It is very well handled - no music, no embellishment - just sparse and empty. One other aspect that I liked was that over the course of the film, Frank used a mobile phone to records short bursts about himself and to capture his family reacting to him. This mini film within a film not only gave us insights into how he was feeling but mimicked, for me, the fragments of memory that you retain of someone who has died. This is an intimate and authentic film.
Monday, April 9, 2012
Crime fiction: creating order out of chaos - or disrupting order
I wouldn’t usually use the word “hegemonic” in conversation but I feel the need to up the ante on my crime fiction spree (which has come to a temporary end). I have been mulling over the genre after finishing The Phantom and wandering around the Internet looking at theories.
Now to go back to Schmid’s original questions, I think the appeal of Nesbo’s novels is that there is limited closure; the criminal is usually brought to some kind of justice but the underlying issues in the novels; police corruption, drug usage in the community, homelessness, continue largely unabated. The individual efforts of Hole and his diminishing band of friends make a small dent but the status quo continues. There is an ongoing critique of society (not dissimilar to the work of Stieg Larsson) but little changes; power is entrenched. We are given a picture of a society which on the surface looks orderly and managed but one where crime flourishes in bubbles underneath. As readers, I think the appeal is in the failure of the individual to do more than bring another individual to some kind of rough justice. We recognize this failure as being authentic but commend the doggedness of the individual (in this case Hole) for persisting. It is his defining quality. As he says at one stage “I am a policeman.” (In this case the sentence is ironic; he is no longer works in this role and has returned reluctantly to Oslo.) The hero’s journey is flawed and likely to end with a degree of ambiguity. Some loose ends.
At the Adelaide Writers Festival, Nesbo said that his writing relates strongly to the American tradition of crime writing – which came in part from the history of pioneers, the Western and the archetype of the outsider. Often the protagonists have been cast out of an organisation or marginalised within it but they refuse to bow down, they are heroic to us for that reason, despite the their anarchic tendencies. Harry is emblematic of this tradition; he is still a believer in the system but ambivalent about the way in which it was operating. Nesbo said that he is working within the tradition of James Ellroy: something is rotten in the state of Norway, despite the truth of its stereotype (“as a happy socialist democracy”). He went on to say one more interesting thing. He said that money, as a motivation for crime, was almost unbelievable in Norway. Before the advent of the oil industry, Norway was very poor – so crime novels focused on money as a motivator. Contemporary novels focus more heavily on the quirks of human nature. He gave Ibsen’s interest in secrets in families and concealed emotions as an example of what he is interested in exploring, using crime as a vehicle.
Writing about the genre of crime fiction, Regis Behe quotes William Edwards, an associate professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco. Edwards uses crime novels in his classes. Behe also quotes Sarah Weinman, a crime fiction writer who says: So perhaps the crime fiction that we are happiest with is that which gives us enough of a resolution to feel safe within a general context of authentic and credible disorder. The state has been preserved – but to what extent is it worth preserving? I think this is where the Hole character has got to in his thinking – which might explain the very interesting treatment he receives in this novel.
So perhaps the crime fiction that we are happiest with is that which gives us enough of a resolution to feel safe within a general context of authentic and credible disorder. The state has been preserved – but to what extent is it worth preserving? I think this is where the Hole character has got to in his thinking – which might explain the very interesting treatment he receives in this novel.
David Schmid, writing about the ways in which space (usually city space) is used in crime fiction, has developed some interesting questions: His essay is worth reading. We come to know some cities intimately through crime fiction. Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh. Shane Maloney’s inner-city Melbourne. Peter Temple’s depiction of the same space. Michael Connelly’s Los Angeles. James Ellroy’s LA. Sarah Paretsky’s Chicago. The fictional town of Santa Teresa, (aka Santa Barbara) California created by Sue Grafton. And Jo Nesbo’s Oslo. In The Phantom, I felt that I needed to Google images of that city and of a new development in that city on the waterfront called Tjuvholmen which gets a brief mention in the novel (what propelled me to Google the latter is that he described it as resembling a nipple on the waterfront).
“is the genre characterized primarily by closure, the neat tying up of loose ends, or by open-endedness and ambiguity? Is crime fiction best described as being characterized by individualized approaches to both the causes and solutions to crime, or does it imagine and put into play more collective, structural analyses of these issues? Finally, does crime fiction have the potential to produce radical, counter-hegemonic critiques of the ways in which power is mobilized in capitalist, racist, and patriarchal social formations, or is it instead an essentially conservative, bourgeois genre that supports the status quo?”
Most of the detective fiction I read is set in urban inner city landscapes – I think this is true of most contemporary detective fiction (the honourable exception is Temple’s wonderful book about country life The Broken Shore). The Harry Hole character has so thoroughly possessed Oslo that I find it impossible to imagine without him. I’m sure that if I visited, I would be searching for the Plata where drugs are sold (not for the drugs), the Salvation Army hostel, Hotel Leon and looking for the large ski ramp which features prominently in The Snowman. The very new opera house that merges into the harbour would be another place to visit. He’s no foodie, Nesbo, so cafes and restaurants would not be part of my walking tour. And I’d want to get behind the immediate city up into the area that overlooks the harbour, where wealthy people live. Speaking at the Adelaide Writers Festival, Nesbo said he wanted to create a “Gotham City version of Oslo – a little bit darker, a little bit larger”. He said that Oslo used to be a kind of “innocent village” but drugs, which are the central theme of The Phantom, have always been bad. It is a changed city in the last fifteen years with the advent of human trafficking and increasingly obvious drug problems.
Now to go back to Schmid’s original questions, I think the appeal of Nesbo’s novels is that there is limited closure; the criminal is usually brought to some kind of justice but the underlying issues in the novels; police corruption, drug usage in the community, homelessness, continue largely unabated. The individual efforts of Hole and his diminishing band of friends make a small dent but the status quo continues. There is an ongoing critique of society (not dissimilar to the work of Stieg Larsson) but little changes; power is entrenched. We are given a picture of a society which on the surface looks orderly and managed but one where crime flourishes in bubbles underneath. As readers, I think the appeal is in the failure of the individual to do more than bring another individual to some kind of rough justice. We recognize this failure as being authentic but commend the doggedness of the individual (in this case Hole) for persisting. It is his defining quality. As he says at one stage “I am a policeman.” (In this case the sentence is ironic; he is no longer works in this role and has returned reluctantly to Oslo.) The hero’s journey is flawed and likely to end with a degree of ambiguity. Some loose ends.
At the Adelaide Writers Festival, Nesbo said that his writing relates strongly to the American tradition of crime writing – which came in part from the history of pioneers, the Western and the archetype of the outsider. Often the protagonists have been cast out of an organisation or marginalised within it but they refuse to bow down, they are heroic to us for that reason, despite the their anarchic tendencies. Harry is emblematic of this tradition; he is still a believer in the system but ambivalent about the way in which it was operating. Nesbo said that he is working within the tradition of James Ellroy: something is rotten in the state of Norway, despite the truth of its stereotype (“as a happy socialist democracy”). He went on to say one more interesting thing. He said that money, as a motivation for crime, was almost unbelievable in Norway. Before the advent of the oil industry, Norway was very poor – so crime novels focused on money as a motivator. Contemporary novels focus more heavily on the quirks of human nature. He gave Ibsen’s interest in secrets in families and concealed emotions as an example of what he is interested in exploring, using crime as a vehicle.
Writing about the genre of crime fiction, Regis Behe quotes William Edwards, an associate professor of sociology at the University of San Francisco. Edwards uses crime novels in his classes. Behe also quotes Sarah Weinman, a crime fiction writer who says: So perhaps the crime fiction that we are happiest with is that which gives us enough of a resolution to feel safe within a general context of authentic and credible disorder. The state has been preserved – but to what extent is it worth preserving? I think this is where the Hole character has got to in his thinking – which might explain the very interesting treatment he receives in this novel.
"Heroes are symbols of how a nation wishes others to see it. The hero represents triumph and affirms the goodness in the nation… But crime novels seem to more easily tap into the current angst. In a post-9/11 world, the crime novel reminds us of our vulnerabilities in an uncertain world… In the post-9/11 world, Edwards says, the crime novel simultaneously reminds us of our shortcomings while positioning "heroes" as defenders, "the nation's counterbalance force."Behe also quotes Sarah Weinman, a crime fiction writer who says:
“the genre's appeal stems from the primal urge to "create order out of chaos, to find a resolution in the face of violent situations. This doesn't mean that crime novels have to follow conventional patterns -- and many of the best in recent years certainly do not -- but whatever conflicts are presented are, for the most part, resolved”.
So perhaps the crime fiction that we are happiest with is that which gives us enough of a resolution to feel safe within a general context of authentic and credible disorder. The state has been preserved – but to what extent is it worth preserving? I think this is where the Hole character has got to in his thinking – which might explain the very interesting treatment he receives in this novel.
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
The common archetypes of human existence
In 1979, I was completing a Diploma in Education. The Method Lecturer for English bounced into the room about a month into the year and wrote “common archetypes of human existence” on the board. He asked us to suggest what these were. My memory is that we all kind of looked around the room hopelessly but I may be projecting my own ignorance onto everyone. He went on to talk about Jung and of the place of archetypes in literature.
Now I think of this kind of ignorance as startling – so much of my world view is informed through a psychoanalytic lens and way of operating. I was thinking this as I was watching A Dangerous Method – how different the perspective on life might be without the work of Freud and Jung. A small part of this film alerts us to the revolutionary nature of their work. As reviewer Julie Rigg says “The idea that sexuality was at the core of many psychiatric disorders was like a bombshell in this conventional society: intellectually exciting but also risky.”
So the director Cronenberg explores the birth of psychoanalysis through the intellectual and personal relationships of Jung and his patient, and lover Sabina Spielrein and through the relationship between Freud and Jung – which began with great promise and curdled in less than a decade. Like this relationship, the film begins with much promise but doesn’t quite work. I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, the film tries to cover too much territory. Is it about the personal or about the ideas behind psychotherapy? If about the personal – what is the focus: fidelity, sex, adultery, Freud’s father/son relationship with Jung, competition, anti-Semitism, free love, betrayal – what? It touches on all these things. If it’s about the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, is it about the role of sex, the theory of the unconscious, the place of mythology, the collective unconscious or how to progress these understandings into broader society? We get a smattering of all these things but not enough of any to be satisfied.
Secondly, I found it hard to see inside the façade of Jung to get a sense of what he was really like. Perhaps this is historically accurate; maybe he was a closed book. The only time we see him in an unguarded moment is when he is so excited at meeting Freud that he forgets all social graces. It makes hard to really understand the gist of his relationship with Spielrein which forms a key part of the film and to make any kind of judgement about the changing relationship with Freud. For example, does he spank Spielrein as her doctor or her lover? (And why do I use the word “spank” instead of “hit” or “smack”?)
I’m not sure if this opaqueness of character stems from the way that he is played by Fassbinder, an excellent actor usually, or by some uncertainty on Cronenberg’s part about Jung’s actual character and motivations, or by a very historically real repressed public persona.
I found the final scenes poignant and moving. They showed what the film could have been about.
Now I think of this kind of ignorance as startling – so much of my world view is informed through a psychoanalytic lens and way of operating. I was thinking this as I was watching A Dangerous Method – how different the perspective on life might be without the work of Freud and Jung. A small part of this film alerts us to the revolutionary nature of their work. As reviewer Julie Rigg says “The idea that sexuality was at the core of many psychiatric disorders was like a bombshell in this conventional society: intellectually exciting but also risky.”
So the director Cronenberg explores the birth of psychoanalysis through the intellectual and personal relationships of Jung and his patient, and lover Sabina Spielrein and through the relationship between Freud and Jung – which began with great promise and curdled in less than a decade. Like this relationship, the film begins with much promise but doesn’t quite work. I think this is for two reasons. Firstly, the film tries to cover too much territory. Is it about the personal or about the ideas behind psychotherapy? If about the personal – what is the focus: fidelity, sex, adultery, Freud’s father/son relationship with Jung, competition, anti-Semitism, free love, betrayal – what? It touches on all these things. If it’s about the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, is it about the role of sex, the theory of the unconscious, the place of mythology, the collective unconscious or how to progress these understandings into broader society? We get a smattering of all these things but not enough of any to be satisfied.
Secondly, I found it hard to see inside the façade of Jung to get a sense of what he was really like. Perhaps this is historically accurate; maybe he was a closed book. The only time we see him in an unguarded moment is when he is so excited at meeting Freud that he forgets all social graces. It makes hard to really understand the gist of his relationship with Spielrein which forms a key part of the film and to make any kind of judgement about the changing relationship with Freud. For example, does he spank Spielrein as her doctor or her lover? (And why do I use the word “spank” instead of “hit” or “smack”?)
I’m not sure if this opaqueness of character stems from the way that he is played by Fassbinder, an excellent actor usually, or by some uncertainty on Cronenberg’s part about Jung’s actual character and motivations, or by a very historically real repressed public persona.
I found the final scenes poignant and moving. They showed what the film could have been about.
Thursday, March 29, 2012
Elles
Elles is the second film I’ve seen this month that focuses, in part, on prostitution. It would be misleading to see this as the sole focus. It’s a subject that’s always going to grab attention but I think the film is really about something else. The main character (Anne) is wonderfully played by Juliette Binoche – I can’t imagine anyone else doing it so well. A middle class journalist, she is writing an article about students who turn to prostitution as a means of getting through uni. The two women that she meets in the course of interviewing for the article present an unexpected view of their work. The Juliet Binoche character is intrigued by both their perspectives and what it throws up about her own life.
There are few reviews of this film yet but mostly I think the reviewers have got it wrong. Read these two snippets:
“While Szumowska and her co-writer, Tine Byrckel, hammer home their arguably offensive theory that well-to-do femmes are acting as hookers in the kitchen and at the keyboard, they seem far less clear on what they want to say about actual harlotry. Scenes of the journalist's collegiate interview subjects satisfying male clients to earn tuition money are lit and shot like perfume commercials, even as the sex in some cases turns disturbingly brutal.” (from Variety)
and (from The Guardian):
“Juliette Binoche gives it her considerable all in this otherwise dubious film, which purports to investigate the moral and emotional price of teenage prostitution…Presumably the idea is to explore the emotional disconnect required to function as one of those can't-be-too-thin French bourgeoises.I think what the film is about is not the metaphor of prostitution, but of compromise. The Anne character is not economically reliant on anyone. She does not need to prostitute herself, as the students feel they need to do (One compares the work favourably with working in a fastfood restaurant). She could have a viable and interesting life as a working journalist living by herself. The compromise comes in wanting a relationship, in having children, in wanting to work, in being a daughter, in being part of a middle–class mileau. Parts of herself are suppressed in this process – just as parts might also blossom. (A friend of mine said recently of her time as the mother of two very young children: “I feel like I lost myself for about five years.”) I think that’s where the film maker, Malgoska Szumowska is heading. Much of what we see of Anne’s life is unpleasant; her sons are providing little joy and her husband is disconnected and angry. She is frustrated. Not a pretty picture. One effective scene is when she visits her ailing father in hospital. She picks up his foot to give him a foot massage. Lots of feelings went through my head. What a loving thing this is to do. How horrible old men’s feet can be. How difficult it would be for me to massage my own fathers feet. The importance of touch. Its disappearance in life as you age.
You might think that the prostitution would not be pretty either. Szumowska tries to upset expectations here; the two women present their work as one that provides them with choices and as mostly benign. I was reminded very powerfully of Kate Holden’s account of her life as a prostitute Under my skin. I never quite believed that the things she described in that book did not have a substantial impact on her and I felt that with the accounts of the two girls in the film. I think Szumowska intends us to be sceptical observers; there are small cracks in the façade presented by the two girls.
Binoche is authentic and believable – it’s a very powerful film about being a woman.
Black & White & Sex is the other film I’ve seen recently that features sex workers. It’s a new Australian film by John Winter. This film is much more explicitly about the way we view prostitution though, like Elle, it wants to mess with our preconceptions about it. Winter said that he was inspired to make the film after going for a round of institutional funding in relation to another film script which featured a prostitute. The film fund reps were concerned that the portrayal of the sex worker was too upbeat – not “victim” enough. This inspired him to write the script for this, a film in which the sex worker character is played by eight different women (not dissimilar to the portrayal of Bob Dylan in the film I’m not there).
It begins with the feel of a play. Two characters on stage, almost entirely dialogue driven. I wasn’t sure it was going to work for a while, then the character of Angie got going. She reminded me of kids I’ve taught – like half-loved dogs, never quite reliable but yearning for contact. The film covers some great topics: intimacy, censorship, power, gender dynamics, love, control and trust. What happens is unexpected and interesting. It also looks good – shot in black and white, and using split screens where necessary to fragment the focus and force the viewer to make choices about what to look at. The use of eight actresses was clever; giving life to the idea that there are many facets and perceptions within the world of the sex worker; and that that person can embody universal desires and feelings but simultaneously be uniquely individual.
Need to conclude with this snippet from a review – just because I liked the imagery.
“The film industry, so the common wisdom goes, is chocked to the gills with carbon copy cinema, stuffed like a poisoned piñata with the bile and fluid of a zillion regurgitated ideas. Here is a bold, audacious and throbbingly original Australian film, particularly palatable for viewers partial to edgy, intimate and explorative interpersonal dramas.”Julie Rigg, in commenting on this film, said: “My colleague Jason Di Rosso reckons that Australian directors are not very good at directing sex scenes. We lack a true erotic cinema. What do you think?”
He might be on to something, though I don’t think anyone would argue that the scenes in Black & White & Sex are meant to be sex scenes per se. I can’t think of any Australian films that have the kind of sensuality I’ve seen in some French films or some of Ang Lee’s work for example. The sex scenes in Elles looked real. Real doesn’t always mean erotic but it can. I think what Australians are good at is the flirty Diver Dan kind of schtick – but this is not erotic. There's something in the image of Australian men that refuses the erotic - it might be that you have to take women seriously and risk intimacy. This is at odds with the ways in which masculinity in Australia is traditionally presented on the screen. Maybe I will stop there.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Reading crime. Norway v Australia
I’m an erratic reader of crime fiction. Mostly, I like to read it at Christmas – where I suspect it works at sublimating my desire to murder my family. Right now I’m in the middle of a Norwegian crime spree courtesy of Jo Nesbo. What I like about his books is what I like about most detective novels – the character of the sleuth or anti-hero detective. In many ways, the plot is less relevant though I like things to make sense, to add up. I like to think about “whodunit” but this is secondary to the anti-hero’s journey.
In The Leopard, Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’), the detective, is holed up in Hong Kong at the beginning of the story. He’s in a bad way; bashed up by a triad over gambling debts and a cosy little relationship with an opium pipe. In a way, I wanted him to stay there. Kowloon is vivid in my head, after my recent visit there and it seemed like the perfect destination for a man like Hole – so rife with possibilities. But he is bundled onto a plane by a young Norwegian female detective who inevitably provides some other ‘rife with possibilities’ moments.
The novel actually begins with a torture scene. I was thinking quite a lot of things while reading it. How often this genre starts with this kind of scene – the reader is placed immediately in a scene of great danger – portrayed either exclusively through the panicked eyes of the victim, or the paranoid nastiness of the killer. The scene is often so strange and disconnected from the subsequent narrative, which usually defaults to something way more domestic, that I usually forget that I have read it. It’s never my favourite part of the book, even though I suspect that the writer will have laboured over making it gripping. The opening scene of this novel is graphic and horrible. I felt voyeuristic reading it (as I did with a couple of other violent scenes in the novel). In searching for a novel kind of torture, I think that Nesbo has stretched too far. It’s likely that the whole thriller/detective genre has run out of realistically gruesome new ways to die. One reviewer, Patrick Anderson, wrote of this scene:
The reviewer in The Independent, Paul Binding, writes about the ways in which family genes and upbringing become a theme in ‘The Leopard’.
Finally, the other thing that the opening scene made me think about was the absence of torture from Australian detective novels. I need to say that I have not read really widely of the entire genre but within my experience, we kill quite quickly and efficiently for reasons other than straight-out sadism (I’m recalling a quite bizarre and stupid scene from Peter Temple’s otherwise very fine novel The Broken Shore as an exception.) Perhaps I am wrong – happy to be corrected. Our sadistic murderers tend to be more of the Wolf Creek mode – their place is in the outback or Bangalo State Forest. Our detectives are slightly less anti-hero – Cliff Hardy, Murray Whelan, Jack Irish – more Diver Dan than Harry Hole. If Paul Binding is right, that Nesbo is preoccupied with ‘division’ in the individual; that is a trait less obvious in Australian protagonists – who tend to be outsiders, but intact outsiders without the self-destructive aspects of a character like Hole. I will keep thinking about this.
In The Leopard, Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’), the detective, is holed up in Hong Kong at the beginning of the story. He’s in a bad way; bashed up by a triad over gambling debts and a cosy little relationship with an opium pipe. In a way, I wanted him to stay there. Kowloon is vivid in my head, after my recent visit there and it seemed like the perfect destination for a man like Hole – so rife with possibilities. But he is bundled onto a plane by a young Norwegian female detective who inevitably provides some other ‘rife with possibilities’ moments.
The novel actually begins with a torture scene. I was thinking quite a lot of things while reading it. How often this genre starts with this kind of scene – the reader is placed immediately in a scene of great danger – portrayed either exclusively through the panicked eyes of the victim, or the paranoid nastiness of the killer. The scene is often so strange and disconnected from the subsequent narrative, which usually defaults to something way more domestic, that I usually forget that I have read it. It’s never my favourite part of the book, even though I suspect that the writer will have laboured over making it gripping. The opening scene of this novel is graphic and horrible. I felt voyeuristic reading it (as I did with a couple of other violent scenes in the novel). In searching for a novel kind of torture, I think that Nesbo has stretched too far. It’s likely that the whole thriller/detective genre has run out of realistically gruesome new ways to die. One reviewer, Patrick Anderson, wrote of this scene:
“The novel opens with a four-page exercise in horror. A young woman — captive, confused, desperate — is in the grip of a fiendish instrument of torture. As we watch, this device inflicts a terrible death on her. This is a brilliant scene, in its way, but it’s also stunningly sadistic, both in terms of what the killer is doing to the woman and what the author is doing to the reader.”However much of the novel is devoted to Harry and his struggle with officialdom, with the politics operating between two institutions fighting for jurisdiction over murders in Norway. These, for me, are the most satisfying parts of the novel, just as, in a drama series like The Wire, the political machinations, treachery and power plays provide the gripping underpinning of the drama. The parts that I don’t like are the most dramatic: an avalanche, a volcano, a trip into Colonel Kurtz territory in the darkest Congo. I just don’t buy the melodrama of these events. But I’ll wear them because I’m a Harry fan and I do like a good murder. Anderson, the aforementioned reviewer, was not as kind, but I did enjoy the way he described The Leopard:
“Now, alas, I must report that ‘The Leopard’ is a bloated, near-total disaster. Reading it, I came to imagine myself trapped in a vast, fetid swamp from which I might never emerge."
The reviewer in The Independent, Paul Binding, writes about the ways in which family genes and upbringing become a theme in ‘The Leopard’.
“Nesbø's insight into inherited conflict – of which this novel affords a disturbing double instance – must emanate from his own declared family background. His father fought for the Germans in the Second World War, his mother for the Resistance, this duality being the emotional foundation of The Redbreast.
Nesbø's imaginative preoccupation with division, above all in the individual, makes him a distinctively Norwegian writer. His mentors – Ibsen, Hamsun - have magisterially contrasted the wild with the harmonious, the lover or explorer with the conscientious citizen, the stern moralist with the easy-going hedonist. This distinguishes him from the Swedes Mankell and Larsson, to whom he is so often compared.”
Finally, the other thing that the opening scene made me think about was the absence of torture from Australian detective novels. I need to say that I have not read really widely of the entire genre but within my experience, we kill quite quickly and efficiently for reasons other than straight-out sadism (I’m recalling a quite bizarre and stupid scene from Peter Temple’s otherwise very fine novel The Broken Shore as an exception.) Perhaps I am wrong – happy to be corrected. Our sadistic murderers tend to be more of the Wolf Creek mode – their place is in the outback or Bangalo State Forest. Our detectives are slightly less anti-hero – Cliff Hardy, Murray Whelan, Jack Irish – more Diver Dan than Harry Hole. If Paul Binding is right, that Nesbo is preoccupied with ‘division’ in the individual; that is a trait less obvious in Australian protagonists – who tend to be outsiders, but intact outsiders without the self-destructive aspects of a character like Hole. I will keep thinking about this.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Who is on the margins?
In the last year, the total in my superannuation has decreased by $10,000, despite the fact that both myself and my employer regularly make deposits. It’s a bit disheartening. I’m looking forward to my gruel-led retirement. It’s probably due to the Greek debt crisis or the volatility on Wall Street or to something happening in one of Alan Kohler’s little graphs. I write this in the context of having seen the film Margin Call on the weekend. In the style of a thriller, it follows the events over 24 hours in the life of a large Wall Street trading firm. Their whizz kid rocket scientist (literally) discovers that they are way over-exposed on some assets that are dodgy. (Think back to the sub-prime mortgages that almost brought down most of the financial system in 2007/08).
The film takes place almost entirely in the plush office block which houses this firm. Our exposure to the outside world is predominantly sexy New York at night – again and again we are treated the views of the Manhattan skyline. Therein lies my problem with this much acclaimed film. The inhabitants live in a bubble. An expensive bubble. They operate with NO reference to the ordinary world and the impact of their actions on my superannuation account. It lacks a moral perspective – and while this is related to the point the film is making, that the protagonists lack a moral centre – the concept of morality is only discussed in relation to their trading relationships. What will happen if they adopt a particular course of action – will anyone ever do business with them again? This is the only concern expressed by any of the participants.
I expect that the film maker thought that people would apply their own knowledge of the global financial meltdown and the wider context. I’m not sure that this is good enough. The Time Out reviewer said it well:
The film takes place almost entirely in the plush office block which houses this firm. Our exposure to the outside world is predominantly sexy New York at night – again and again we are treated the views of the Manhattan skyline. Therein lies my problem with this much acclaimed film. The inhabitants live in a bubble. An expensive bubble. They operate with NO reference to the ordinary world and the impact of their actions on my superannuation account. It lacks a moral perspective – and while this is related to the point the film is making, that the protagonists lack a moral centre – the concept of morality is only discussed in relation to their trading relationships. What will happen if they adopt a particular course of action – will anyone ever do business with them again? This is the only concern expressed by any of the participants.
I expect that the film maker thought that people would apply their own knowledge of the global financial meltdown and the wider context. I’m not sure that this is good enough. The Time Out reviewer said it well:
”Missing, however, are the outsider eye and moral perspective of, for example, John Lanchester’s writing about the crisis. 'Margin Call’ presents Wall Street on its own terms even in meltdown – not uncritically but claustrophobically, like a Mob movie indifferent to victims of crime. It’s unclear whether the picture realises how bitter a taste this leaves.”I loved that metaphor of The Mob film, though even in The Sopranos, a narrative layer deals with Tony’s grumbling conscience via the psychotherapist’s chair. This film uses the device of a dying dog as a humanising plot feature but it doesn’t give the Kevin Spacey character a lot to work with. Phillippa Hawker picks up the same issue, that of morality, but has a different view of it:
“The film takes place within a bubble; we have to contemplate the consequences of the company's actions for ourselves - and that's actually the most unnerving aspect of all.”What we now know though, post GFC, is that this unethical and greedy sector has the world by the balls and they will be bailed out again and again because they are too big to fail. I loved The Big Short, a book about the GFC by Michael Lewis, because of the slow burn of anger and because of the breadth of it. This film is a bit too much in love with the accoutrements of power and influence. The scenes of New York, the smooth silent expensive offices and cars, the fact that no one has a rumpled suit or shirt, even at 5 in the morning. Maybe I wanted at least one person to talk about the roll-on effect – for the average punter, for the global markets, for Greek pensioners and battlers in Detroit and Jill Wilson’s superannuation fund…
Tuesday, March 13, 2012
Known and unknown territory
OK – he’s a recovering alcoholic with an ex-partner and an indifferent relationship with authority. He likes to do things his way, often without telling anyone else. He goes on his instincts. He is not good looking but always ends up in bed with someone attractive. Cop story – you bet.
It’s a cop story set in Norway. What do I know about Norway? Fjords and a massacre in 2011 of 69 young people from the left side of politics by a lone gunman. That’s about all. Since reading Jo Nesbo’s book The Snowman, I’ve learnt a little more.
Wikipedia says of Norway: “Key domestic issues include immigration and integration of ethnic minorities, maintaining the country's extensive social safety net with an aging population, and preserving economic competitiveness. … Although having rejected European Union membership in two referenda, Norway maintains close ties with the union and its member countries, as well as with the United States. Norway remains one of the biggest financial contributors to the United Nations, and participates with UN forces in international missions, notably in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sudan and Libya. … Norway has extensive reserves of petroleum, natural gas, minerals, lumber, seafood, fresh water, and hydropower. … The country maintains a Nordic welfare model with universal health care, subsidized higher education, and a comprehensive social security system. From 2001 to 2006, and then again from 2009 through 2011, Norway has had the highest human development index ranking in the world.”
We find out a little of the larger Norwegian context in The Snowman but not a lot. It’s mainly a story of cop after serial killer. It’s well written and gripping but doesn’t quite have the scale of societal focus that Stieg Larrsen has in his books, for example. One reviewer wrote “Like all great cop plots, the Harry Hole series depends on an expectation that the enemy will as likely come from within, and above, as he will from the world outside.” I liked the slight glimpse into the politics of the police department. I also liked Nesbo’s ruminations on relationships and sex – which percolate through the character of Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’).
One reviewer, Wendy Lesser, speculated as to why Scandinavian thrillers are “so much better than anyone else”? I’m not sure this is true – there are a few LA based writers who could give this region a run for their money – but it is intriguing reading about this area of the world.
Lesser says:
I like reading about this little-known (to me) country that is played out within the generic global formula of a thriller. Unknown territory within the known.
It’s a cop story set in Norway. What do I know about Norway? Fjords and a massacre in 2011 of 69 young people from the left side of politics by a lone gunman. That’s about all. Since reading Jo Nesbo’s book The Snowman, I’ve learnt a little more.
Wikipedia says of Norway: “Key domestic issues include immigration and integration of ethnic minorities, maintaining the country's extensive social safety net with an aging population, and preserving economic competitiveness. … Although having rejected European Union membership in two referenda, Norway maintains close ties with the union and its member countries, as well as with the United States. Norway remains one of the biggest financial contributors to the United Nations, and participates with UN forces in international missions, notably in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Sudan and Libya. … Norway has extensive reserves of petroleum, natural gas, minerals, lumber, seafood, fresh water, and hydropower. … The country maintains a Nordic welfare model with universal health care, subsidized higher education, and a comprehensive social security system. From 2001 to 2006, and then again from 2009 through 2011, Norway has had the highest human development index ranking in the world.”
We find out a little of the larger Norwegian context in The Snowman but not a lot. It’s mainly a story of cop after serial killer. It’s well written and gripping but doesn’t quite have the scale of societal focus that Stieg Larrsen has in his books, for example. One reviewer wrote “Like all great cop plots, the Harry Hole series depends on an expectation that the enemy will as likely come from within, and above, as he will from the world outside.” I liked the slight glimpse into the politics of the police department. I also liked Nesbo’s ruminations on relationships and sex – which percolate through the character of Harry Hole (pronounced ‘Hooler’).
One reviewer, Wendy Lesser, speculated as to why Scandinavian thrillers are “so much better than anyone else”? I’m not sure this is true – there are a few LA based writers who could give this region a run for their money – but it is intriguing reading about this area of the world.
Lesser says:
“In the right hands, the mystery novel becomes not only a thrilling cat-and-mouse game between a fiendishly clever murderer and a doggedly persistent detective, but also a commentary on the wider society that spawns, polices, and punishes murder. It is this wider view—the social view—at which the Scandinavians excel.”Then she says
“Perhaps we can attribute this in part to the small size of these far northern countries, their relatively homogenous populations, their stable cultural traditions—a setting, in short, in which murders (and especially serial murders) stand out starkly and beg for analysis.”She speculates on the place of the long, dark winter in the attraction – though this to me seems more a reason for Scandinavians to read than to be read. The most interesting thing she writes is about the politics of these countries – that just possibly
“this wider focus is connected to the firmly if mildly socialist perspective of even the most conservative Scandinavian governments, a view in which individual behavior contributes to or detracts from the public welfare.”
I like reading about this little-known (to me) country that is played out within the generic global formula of a thriller. Unknown territory within the known.
Monday, March 12, 2012
What is right?
Joseph Kony is flavour of the Twittergeist at present along with controversy about how we manage bad things in Africa. And who is “we” and what should be the extent of “our” influence. And is it OK to buy wristbands for moral causes when you’re not sure just how moral they might be? Or is it OK to buy wristbands (assuming that the bulk of the money goes to a good cause) just because it’s trendy if you don’t actually care about the cause. And are we seeing the rise of “Slacktavism” as opposed to “slacktivity”? Weighty questions for a Tuesday.
They fit well with the latest “novel” I’ve read titled What is the What. Written by Dave Eggers, it states that it is “a soulful account of my life” – the life of a young Sudanese man variously named Achak, Valentino, Dominic or Gone Far. There are two things of interest in respect of this novel. The content, and the politics of the way it is written. Let me start with the content.
Achak is about six when Muslin murahaleen sweep into his village, destroy houses, kill some of the inhabitants and carry off children, women and livestock. He survives this attack and eventually sets out to walk to a safer location in Ethiopia. It is an epic walk of young boys who become known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Horrible things happen to Achak and those around him. I can’t do them justice here but am glad I read the book – I know more about this period of recent history now and that’s a good thing. Death, hunger, abuse, the ambiguities and cruelties of the liberation soldiers (SPLA), the loss of family – these are just a few of the elements of the book. He spends many years in two refugee camps, the one in Ethiopia and then one in Kenya. No plot spoilers here – we first meet Achak in the United States so we know he survives.
Survives is a good word for what happens to him in America as well. This is the part of the book which worked best for me. I kept thinking of the Sudanese who live in my local neighbourhood of Footscray. (See the Footscray Food Blog for a taste of this.) It must be radically different living here. From 2001, 3,800 Sudanese were allowed to settle in the USA. Most of these were young men. Achak ends up in Atlanta in the States. He arrives just after 9/11. He has high expectations of his ability to prosper quickly; to go to college and emerge with a good job and good prospects. It does not play that way despite his determination and clear intelligence. He is looked after by some people and harassed by others. At one stage he is working for $8.50 an hour as a storeman. It takes him three changes of bus to get to his workplace. Some young Americans stop him, harass him and tell him to go back to Africa. He says:
Through Eggers we experience the increasing cynicism and disconnection of Achak in his new home. It’s a powerful thing to read about, falling as it does on top of the truly horrible experiences of his previous time as a lost boy. Actually he is a lost boy in both countries…
Lee Seigel’s review, titled The Niceness Racket says:
Seigel goes on:
I like Eggers – he is a good man. You can read about the things that he and Achak do in Sudan after the book is written, to try to improve the lives of the villagers where Achak is born. (See the article in The Guardian.) He wants to make a difference. He, like Eliot Perlman in The Street Sweeper, is driven by the need to have the story heard. I think this justifies what he does in telling it.
They fit well with the latest “novel” I’ve read titled What is the What. Written by Dave Eggers, it states that it is “a soulful account of my life” – the life of a young Sudanese man variously named Achak, Valentino, Dominic or Gone Far. There are two things of interest in respect of this novel. The content, and the politics of the way it is written. Let me start with the content.
Achak is about six when Muslin murahaleen sweep into his village, destroy houses, kill some of the inhabitants and carry off children, women and livestock. He survives this attack and eventually sets out to walk to a safer location in Ethiopia. It is an epic walk of young boys who become known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Horrible things happen to Achak and those around him. I can’t do them justice here but am glad I read the book – I know more about this period of recent history now and that’s a good thing. Death, hunger, abuse, the ambiguities and cruelties of the liberation soldiers (SPLA), the loss of family – these are just a few of the elements of the book. He spends many years in two refugee camps, the one in Ethiopia and then one in Kenya. No plot spoilers here – we first meet Achak in the United States so we know he survives.
Survives is a good word for what happens to him in America as well. This is the part of the book which worked best for me. I kept thinking of the Sudanese who live in my local neighbourhood of Footscray. (See the Footscray Food Blog for a taste of this.) It must be radically different living here. From 2001, 3,800 Sudanese were allowed to settle in the USA. Most of these were young men. Achak ends up in Atlanta in the States. He arrives just after 9/11. He has high expectations of his ability to prosper quickly; to go to college and emerge with a good job and good prospects. It does not play that way despite his determination and clear intelligence. He is looked after by some people and harassed by others. At one stage he is working for $8.50 an hour as a storeman. It takes him three changes of bus to get to his workplace. Some young Americans stop him, harass him and tell him to go back to Africa. He says:
Through Eggers we experience the increasing cynicism and disconnection of Achak in his new home. It’s a powerful thing to read about, falling as it does on top of the truly horrible experiences of his previous time as a lost boy. Actually he is a lost boy in both countries…
“When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me, or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen.”A little of the comparison.
“Some sociologists, liberal ones, might take issue with the notion that one society is behind another, that there is a first world, a third. But southern Sudan is not of any of these worlds. Sudan is something else, and I cannot find apt comparisons. There are few cars in southern Sudan. You can travel for hundreds of miles without seeing a vehicle of any kind. There are only a handful of paved roads; I saw none while I lived there. One could fly a straight east-west line across the country and never pass over a home built of anything but grass and dirt. It is a primitive land and I say that without any sense of shame. I suspect that within the next ten years, if the peace holds, the region will make the sort of progress that might bring us to the standards of other East African nations. I do not know anyone who wishes southern Sudan to remain the way it is.”The title? Achak is from the Dinka people of southern Sudan. Dave Eggers is quoted in The Guardian as saying: gifts, and were using this What to inflict unending pain upon the southern Sudanese.”
“We had agreed that we would include in the book an ancient creation myth known in southern Sudan. In the story, God, pleased with his greatest creation, offers the first Dinka man a choice of gifts: on the one hand, the cattle, visible and known, an animal that can feed and clothe him and last forever; on the other hand, the What. The man asks God, "What is the What?", but God will not reveal the answer. The What was unknown; the What could be everything or nothing. The Dinka man does not hesitate for long. He chooses the cattle, and for thousands of years Dinka lore held that he had chosen correctly; the cow is thus sacred in southern Sudanese culture, the measure of a family's wealth and the giver of life. It was not until the torment of the southern Sudanese in the 20th century that the Dinka began to question this choice. What was the What, they wondered, and speculation about the answer abounded: was it technology? Education? Sophisticated weapons? Whatever the answer, it was assumed that the Arabs of the north - who, legend had it, had received the What - might have got the greatest of God'sThe controversy? Eggers was asked to help Achak write the book and recorded many interviews with him. At first I think they intended some kind of factual account of the style of ‘They poured fire on us from the sky’ but that book emerged first and Eggers felt that they could not add to that narrative. He also ran into some issues with recreating the story using just the fragments of Achak’s memory. It’s the usual issue – how do you recreate conversations with people where someone may only remember the intent or outcome, not the actual words. So he eventually decided to tell it as a novel but to use the first person voice of Achak as the narrator. IN doing this, he has got himself into trouble. I wasn’t too bothered by it because I think the story itself is really important – but here’s some of the criticism:
Lee Seigel’s review, titled The Niceness Racket says:
“The generation of people who survived the Holocaust and Stalin's vast network of camps is disappearing, but the number of novels about modern genocide has increased, and most of them are written by people who have no firsthand experience of their subject on which to draw. This presents a curious problem. Bearing witness, even in fictionalizing form, to extreme historical events that you have experienced is one thing. It is quite a different thing to try to recreate extreme historical events that you have not experienced, and then to try to imagine what it would be like to think and feel your way through them. This is hardly an illegitimate endeavor -- the imagination has an obligation to wrestle with even the most unimaginable experiences; but it is an intensely demanding endeavor, with moral and aesthetic pitfalls all around.”Interesting, this connection with The Holocaust. Having just read The Street Sweeper, I had thought about this a lot. Seigel goes on to say:
“Deng's attitudes are tyrannically refracted through Eggers's reshaping of them. Deng does not represent himself. Eggers represents him. You never know whether the startling self-pity that Deng occasionally displays -- when two other boys are eaten by lions, Deng laments his unluckiness -- is his own or not. In Deng's own voice, these flashes from the underside of his ego might have been extenuated by irony or self-awareness. The same goes for Deng's hostile, suspicious, sometimes contemptuous attitudes toward American blacks. They might have been somehow vindicated in the full-throated revelation of his personality. Or maybe not. We will never know. In Eggers's hands, the survivor's voice does not survive.”To some extent, I think Seigel is right but Achak has read and endorsed the book – he labels it his “soulful account” so do we take his own words at face value? Does it undermine his power and agency as a person to say that he is not capable of judging and addressing the ways in which Eggers has represented him? Is this just as patronising? I’m not sure.
Seigel goes on:
“And Eggers's book is also another unsettling thing. I never thought I would reach for this vocabulary, but What Is the What's innocent expropriation of another man's identity is a post-colonial arrogance -- the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter. Perhaps this is the next stage of American memoir. Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people's stories the way we need other people's oil.”I selected What is the What to read because I’d read Eggers’ Zeitoun and thought it very impressive. It’s a later book – about a Muslim man and his family who are victims of some truly appalling events post-Hurricane Katrina. It’s written in the third person – it’s very clear that the author is not the person experiencing the events. But vivid and compelling all the same.
I like Eggers – he is a good man. You can read about the things that he and Achak do in Sudan after the book is written, to try to improve the lives of the villagers where Achak is born. (See the article in The Guardian.) He wants to make a difference. He, like Eliot Perlman in The Street Sweeper, is driven by the need to have the story heard. I think this justifies what he does in telling it.
Monday, February 13, 2012
Shame about Shame
I loved Hunger, the last collaboration between Steve McQueen and Michael Fassbender. Shame is a different kettle of fish. Fassbender plays Brandon, a sex addict – which seems to be the major point of the film. He does a bloody good job, reducing sex to the hard yards of any kind of addiction. Not pretty. There is one pretty scene – Brandon eyeing off a young woman on the subway. She is dressed in purple with a perky little hat and the camera rolls around her body in a kind of alluring and erotic fantasy. Everyone has done this – looked over at a perfect stranger and contemplated sex. Focused not on their face but on their body and what it (and yours ) might do. The scene is real, and authentic, and in the end a bit scary.
My hero film reviewer Roger Ebert said this about Shame: “This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.” I wish I could agree. He is right about one thing – the acting is sensational. Ebert says :
My hero film reviewer Roger Ebert said this about Shame: “This is a great act of filmmaking and acting. I don't believe I would be able to see it twice.” I wish I could agree. He is right about one thing – the acting is sensational. Ebert says :
“There's a close-up in "Shame" of Michael Fassbender's face showing pain, grief and anger. His character, Brandon, is having an orgasm. For the movie's writer-director, Steve McQueen, that could be the film's master shot. There is no concern about the movement of Brandon's lower body. No concern about his partner. The close-up limits our view to his suffering. He is enduring a sexual function that has long since stopped giving him any pleasure and is self-abuse in the most profound way.”Shame is about Brandon, some kind of well-paid tertiary sector employee, and his dysfunctional sister, a nightclub sister. He is tightly bounded – she is all over the shop. They have had a difficult childhood. Part of the tension in the film is watching them clash within the tight confines of his expensive but sparsely furnished apartment. I think that what is happening in this film is a kind of parallel process. Just as Brandon uses people for sex in a relentless and joyless way, he too is used by the director. His acting makes this film; if it were plot-line alone, people would leave in drives. So I think people rate this film despite the fact that it leave you feeling kind of ripped off. The New York Times critic says it better than me:
“Is “Shame” the name of something Brandon does feel, or of something the filmmakers think he should feel? The movie, for all its displays of honesty (which is to say nudity), is also curiously coy. It presents Brandon for our titillation, our disapproval and perhaps our envy, but denies him access to our sympathy. I know, that’s the point, that Mr. McQueen wants to show how the intensity of Brandon’s need shuts him off from real intimacy, but this seems to be a foregone conclusion, the result of an elegant experiment that was rigged from the start.”
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Bleak...
Past the Shallows by Favel ParrettMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I started this novel because I’ve just been to Tasmania where it’s set but was immediately filled with a sense of bleakness and found it hard to come to the novel willingly. You know, from the very first pages, that what the characters face is grim and that there may be no redemption or hope. And I won’t spoil the plot to say more about this. What I want to stress about the novel is how good it is.
It’s a debut novel, it’s slight in length and sparingly told. It reminded me of the outset of Cormac McCarthy, because it is about men and boys, but more importantly because it takes no prisoners. Ultimately I couldn’t put it down though I wanted to look away at times. The story revolves around three brothers and their dysfunctional father, a fisherman in the southernmost part of Tassie. In my recent travels there we went on a boat eco tour along the coast – from Adventure Bay down to the seals at the base of the south island. If you go south from there, there’s very little between you and the Antarctic. The water is deep and wild, with big kelp forests, mile long swells, seals and as many albatross as I have ever seen. Bruny Island, along with the Tasmanian mainland, is the setting for this novel and very beautifully described too. We were lucky enough to see it when it was calm, and when it was angry.
The environment is significant to the novel but so are hidden secrets of this small community that emerge during the narrative. I was scared reading it – the father is violent and it reminded me of things that have happened in my own extended family. Of how scary men can be when they drink and are out of control. The writer manages to build our connection with the two young boys who live with their father, even though the prose is sparse. (A minor quibble; I thought the surfing scenes were a little gushy and over lyrical, but I am not a surfer and the writer is. I preferred the way that Malcolm Know wrote about surfing in his recent novel ‘The Life’.) I hope to read more from her.
View all my reviews
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
800 pages
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/229432.The_Pickwick_Papers">The Pickwick Papers by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/239579.Charles_Dickens">Charles DickensLet me quote you just a taste from The Pickwick Papers (which at the height of its popularity sold 40,000 copies a month and catapulted the 24 year old Dickens to fame):
"Down they sat to breakfast, but it was evident, notwithstanding theI came to this novel reluctantly – it’s 800 pages and if my calculations are correct I think I only have capacity in my life (all things going well) to read another 1,000 books. Should the first novel of Dickens be one of these? Well, I came to enjoy him very much. It’s a footy trip novel. Four blokes go away on jaunts. They fit into some neat stereotypes that never quite get exploded. There’s the old benign fat guy, the young romantic, the failed hapless sportsman and the poet. About a quarter of the way through, he introduces The Fixer, Sam Weller, who gets the boys out of trouble – in a charming and understated way. The novel is full of quirky incidents and odd encounters, peppered with these strange tales (they are the kind of tall stories or ghost stories that people tell when they are sitting around drinking) that interrupt the main narrative and give it a dark undertone.
boasting of Mr. Peter Magnus, that he laboured under a very considerable degree
of nervousness [he was about to propose], of which loss of appetite, a
propensity to upset the tea-things, a spectral attempt at drollery, and an
irresistible inclination to look at the clock, every other second, were among
the principal symptoms."
The other thing that gives the novel a serious and dark underpinning is Pickwick’s encounters with the legal system. When Dickens was about 12, his father went to debtor’s prison and he, Dickens, had to go out to work to support the family. This gave him a deep cynicism about the justice system as well as direct insights into the prison environment – both of these themes are explored in this novel.
At first glance, it seems a slight affair – if you could say that about a novel of such length, but a couple of reviewers have cast it in an interesting light. One reviewer writes of how marriages are perceived (mostly unhappy or unwanted) – the writing was commenced the year that Dickens married. He writes of how the book is “characterized by a kind of largesse” embodied by the significant number of overweight characters. He describes how the law is accompanied by images of dirt and filth and that the pivotal trial scene prefigures the later work of Kafka, Hitchcock and Camus. I had never thought of Dickens and Kafka in the same space but it’s a very appropriate connection – the absurdist, black machinations of the justice systems in each writer’s work. It’s worth my including this quote from his review:
“The humour aside, the situation takes on the character of a nightmare in whichYou probably need to had read the novel to understand just how absurd and Kafka-esque the words in italics are!
every insignificant detail of daily life is presented as evidence for a crime
Pickwick doesn’t even know he has committed: not only is the breach of promise
unproved, but the promise itself has never even been made or intended. The
texture of everyday life is on trial, and the innocence of the quotidian is
turned around and made sinister by the law:
…letters that must be
viewed with a cautious and suspicious eye—letters that were evidently intended
at the time, by Pickwick, to mislead and delude any third parties into whose
hands they might fall. Let me read the first: “Garraways, twelve o’clock. Dear
Mrs. B.—Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.””
Another keen Dickens man is http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka...G K Chesterton who wrote a biography of Dickens. His chapter on Pickwick is really interesting. I will not be able to stop quoting him:
“In Pickwick, and, indeed, in Dickens, generally it is in the details that the author is creative, it is in the details that he is vast. The power of the book lies in the perpetual torrent of ingenious and inventive treatment; the theme (at least at the beginning) simply does not exist.”
He describes Dickens as a river, pouring out things in an unstoppable torrent. He goes on to say:
“But as a whole, this should be firmly grasped, that the units of Dickens, the primary elements, are not the stories, but the characters who affect the stories -- or, more often still, the characters who do not affect the stories. This is a plain matter; but, unless it be stated and felt, Dickens may be greatly misunderstood and greatly underrated. For not only is his whole machinery directed to facilitating the self-display of certain characters, but something more deep and more unmodern still is also true of him. It is also true that all the moving machinery exists only to display entirely static character. Things in the Dickens story shift and change only in order to give us glimpses of great characters that do not change at all.”I haven’t read enough Dickens recently to respond to this claim – I’m now determined to go back and read something else – a much later novel to see if this is true.
Chesterton goes on to say that Dickens is not so much a novelist as a mythologist. He says that the characters live in a “perpetual summer of being themselves’ just as gods do. Of Pickwick himself, he writes:
“Dickens has caught, in a manner at once wild and convincing, this queer innocence of the afternoon of life. The round, moonlike face, the round, moon-like spectacles of Samuel Pickwick move through the tale as emblems of a certain spherical simplicity. They are fixed in that grave surprise that may be seen in babies; that grave surprise which is the only real happiness that is possible to man. Pickwick's round face is like a round and honourable mirror, in which are reflected all the fantasies of earthly existence; for surprise is, strictly speaking, the only kind of reflection” I love the phrase “this queer innocence of the afternoon of life”.
It’s an interesting interpretation because we think of Dickens as a realist, a man anxious to catch the social and political calumnies of the day and bring them to public light but The Pickwick Papers is more of a jaunt despite the chapters that land Pickwick in contact with the legal system. I need to include a long quote to help the argument along:
“As our world advances through history towards its present epoch, it becomes more specialist, less democratic, and folklore turns gradually into fiction. But it is only slowly that the old elfin fire fades into the light of common realism. For ages after our characters have dressed up in the clothes of mortals they betray the blood of the gods. Even our phraseology is full of relics of this. When a modern novel is devoted to the bewilderments of a weak young clerk who cannot decide which woman he wants to marry, or which new religion he believes in, we still give this knock-kneed cad the name of "the hero" -- the name which is the crown of Achilles. The popular preference for a story with "a happy ending" is not, or at least was not, a mere sweet-stuff optimism; it is the remains of the old idea of the triumph of the dragon-slayer, the ultimate apotheosis of the man beloved of heaven.
But there is another and more intangible trace of this fading supernaturalism -- a trace very vivid to the reader, but very elusive to the critic. It is a certain air of endlessness in the episodes, even in the shortest episodes -- a sense that, although we leave them, they still go on. Our modern attraction to short stories is not an accident of form; it is the sign of a real sense of fleetingness and fragility; it means that existence is only an impression, and, perhaps, only an illusion. A short story of to-day has the air of a dream; it has the irrevocable beauty of a falsehood; we get a glimpse of grey streets of London or red plains of India, as in an opium vision; we see people -- arresting people with fiery and appealing faces. But when the story is ended, the people are ended. We have
no instinct of anything ultimate and enduring behind the episodes. The moderns, in a word, describe life in short stories because they are possessed with the sentiment that life itself is an uncommonly short story, and perhaps not a true one. But in this elder literature, even in the comic literature (indeed, especially in the comic literature), the reverse is true. The characters are felt to be fixed things of which we have fleeting glimpses; that is, they are felt to be divine.”The last thing I want to discuss is the place of the odd little tales that intersperse the main narrative. Here are some of the titles: ‘A Tale told by a Bagman’, ‘The Story of Goblins who Stole a Sexton’, ‘Version of the legend of Prince Bladud’ and ‘The Bagman’s Uncle’. They touch on the grotesque, violent domestic abuse, the supernatural and wickedness. While I was reading I thought that he’d put them in to spice up the narrative – that because episodes were going out in instalments, they were a way of generating a different kind of interest in the narrative. But reviewer http://www.compulsivereader.com/html/ind...'>Frenkl had another perspective. He aligns it with Freudian thinking (though Dickens was writing ahead of this) and says:
“Rather, "day" is normal life -- the ongoing story, as rendered by CD's comic sensibility. "Night" refers to the interpolated tales which, though they can be humorous, are usually anything but; they feature poverty, disease, murder, horrific deaths....
Why does this "day/night" approach have such a powerful effect? First of all, the tales are wonderful in their own right. And then, these tales give a "rhythm" to the book that heightens interest. (This rhythm is lost in the long Debtor's-Prison section where the tales are suspended.) But most of all, "day/night" is powerful because it captures a vision of life that I think corresponds to how we see things in our present-day, Freud-influenced world. To the "day" belongs rational, ongoing life ... but a life in which we often see people and events in a humorous, shallow, even cartoonish way. The "night" is the world of dreams and nightmares, of irrationality, disconnectedness ... where violence and horror can abound ... where the aspects of life we gloss over in our daytime existence comes back to haunt us.”I’m not sure what a younger audience would make of this novel or on what grounds I could recommend it. I thoroughly enjoyed it – but also had large swathes of time to lose myself in it. Not for everyone I think. Maybe Jane Smiley, a writer whose work I have enjoyed recently says it better than me:
"The Pickwick Papers is not a book that holds much appeal for the modern reader. Episodic sporting adventures, however, were quite popular at the time, and a large part of their appeal was in the accompanying illustrations. The "novel" has the looseness and digressiveness of many eighteenth-century works like Tom
Jones and Tristram Shandy, both of which Dickens admired. Dickens had not at that point developed his particular social vision, especially the darker, angrier parts of it, and his style, though already distinct, does not have the incandescent and concentrated ironic power that he achieved in later works. What he does have, full grown, and what readers noticed almost at once, is that facility in drawing characters that are not only entertaining but unique."
Monday, January 16, 2012
Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ann Rand
The title of this blog post comes from one of the stories I have just finished reading. It's The Best American Short Stories 2011. One of my favourite reading events for the year – time-out with a 20 page short story that almost always leaves you transported in time and place and most importantly, wanting more. It’s like a perfect little entrée. I try to use it as a guide to new authors – to read more widely in the coming year. In this case I’d happily read any of the people featured in this anthology though I don’t think it was quite as startlingly good as the 2010 collection. And a quibble – last year’s edition featured a story from Jennifer Egan’s book A Visit from the Goon Squad which is arguably a novel. I felt a bit cheated encountering another piece from the same book, even though this is a classy bit of writing. It either falls into publication in 2010 or 2011, not both. My favourite stories were ‘Foster’ by Claire Keegan (you can read it as first published in the New Yorker, A Bridge Under Water by Tom Bissell, The Sleep by Caitlin Horrocks, Housewifely Arts by Megan Mayhew Bergman and another story by the fabulous Rebecca Makkai who has been anthologised in this series four times.
Series Editor Heidi Pitlor makes some general comments about the kind of short stories that American writers are producing. She says that each of the 2011 stories sustains its own momentum through “premise or language, character or even perfectly placed silence.” Geraldine Brooks, who was the guest editor of the 2011 collection, is forthright about what she encountered(or did not encounter) in whittling down 20 stories from 100.
Series Editor Heidi Pitlor makes some general comments about the kind of short stories that American writers are producing. She says that each of the 2011 stories sustains its own momentum through “premise or language, character or even perfectly placed silence.” Geraldine Brooks, who was the guest editor of the 2011 collection, is forthright about what she encountered(or did not encounter) in whittling down 20 stories from 100.
"Enuf adultery!" "Foreign countries exist." "Consider the following: Caravaggio's Conversion of Saint Paul, Handel's Messiah, Martin Luther King. Why, if religion turns up in a story, is it generally only there as a foil for humor?" and on said humor: "There's so little. Why, writers, so haggard and so woebegone?"I can’t really do each story justice here but there is a blogger who can. She is working her way through each story with a detailed review – very interesting and entertaining reading. Go to Claire Guyton’s Sideways Reviews. If this is too much info, there is a shorter but detailed review which discusses each story in some detail.
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