choppingblock

800 pages

2012-02-08T22:45:00.000-08:00

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/229432.The_Pickwick_Papers">The Pickwick Papers by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/239579.Charles_Dickens">Charles Dickens

Let 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 the
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."
I 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.
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 which
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.””

You probably need to had read the novel to understand just how absurd and Kafka-esque the words in italics are!
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."

Disappointment is a beautiful woman reading Ann Rand

2012-01-16T18:43:00.000-08:00

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.

"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.

Dark and crazy

2012-01-11T15:42:00.000-08:00

What little I know of life in Romania has been conveyed mainly by films until now. I have seen some splendid films including Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days, and The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, which I thought about a lot when I was reading The Appointment. In the latter film, an old man is carted from hospital to hospital in the course of one night, getting sicker and sicker as doctors keep refusing to treat him and send him away. The plot line of The Appointment is not dissimilar. The main character (unnamed) is on a tram journey across town which lasts the course of the book. She has been “summoned” by the authorities for interrogation; this trip is just one of many already taken. The journey in the story allows for the character to reflect on her life while adding a kind of forward impetus to the narrative. We are keen to find out what will happen to her as we linger in the surreal and muddy waters of life under the Ceaucescu regime.

It’s a hard book to read. There is nothing desirable about her life and awful things happen to most characters. As occurs in toxic regimes (and this applies to workplaces as much as cultures and countries), people behave very badly toward one another when there is fear and scape-goating around. Or they drink to escape or have nihilistic or abusive sex. All of these elements pertain in this novel. I can’t say that I enjoyed reading it but it provides both a sense of truth, and some very fine writing. Take the following for example:

“The water squirted and gathered around the tree trunks in shallow pools, full of drowned ants. The earth drank slowly. Then Grandfather said You go out for a walk and the world opens up for you. And before you've even stretched your legs properly, it closes shut. From here to there it's just the farty splutter of a lantern. And they call that having lived. It's not worth the bother of putting on your shoes.” (p80)

This novel was written by Herta Muller who emigrated to Germany in 1987, two years before the Ceaucescu regime was overthrown. She accurately captures the way in which the individual is made powerless by the state in writing: "there's nothing to think about, because I myself am nothing, apart from being summoned." One reviewer, Costica Bradatan, wrote: “Müller's work is political not in any superficial way, but in the more profound sense of literature as bearing witness. ‘Bearing witness’ is just the right phrase – it doesn’t make it an easy read but it does make the narrative compelling. It reminds me of the novel I read earlier in the year set in Libya (In the Country of Men). In that case, the author made the politics more palatable by telling the story through the perspective of a small boy. I liked that novel a lot but I’m glad that Muller didn’t try to make it easy to read. Like the ride with Mr Lazarescu, you kind of need to endure the awfulness and the craziness. I guess the other obvious comparison is anything by Kafka, but I haven’t been in that territory for a long time.

Bradatan also writes:

"There is a Romantic misconception that terror has always to be impressive, fierce and appropriately Luciferian – in other words, that terror is nothing if it is not spectacular. However, that's rarely the case in real life. As Czeslaw Milosz excellently put it in The Native Realm, “Terror is not … monumental; it is abject, it has a furtive glance, it destroys the fabric of human society and changes the relationships of millions of individuals into channels for blackmail…That's why Herta Müller's work is so important: It maps out, with surgical precision, this mediocre yet sinister face of European totalitarianism, which is something that has been largely unaccounted for."

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Waste

2012-01-10T19:27:00.000-08:00

Hard to get away with a book narrated by a boring man. Brevity helps. But so does the cleverness of the ideas in it. It’s almost a novella and reminded me in so many ways of On Chesil Beach as well as The Getting of Wisdom. It is about memory and ageing – not surprising topics given Barnes’ age. It’s a topic that resonates a lot for me lately – I too am feeling the synapses snapping in the breeze. On the weekend I saw The Iron Lady, which also concerns itself with this topic. In that film we see things partly through the now-demented eyes of Maggie Thatcher. However the perspective in that film aims to be more omnipresent than is the case in The Sense of an Ending.

I love a novel with an explosive letter – it reminds me of letters that have had lingering impact in my own life. It’s divided into two parts which comprise the set-up – youthful Tony Webster – friends, first love relationship and the payoff – when Tony is in his comfortable 60s. He is a man who thinks he has escaped damage, who has got through life by deliberately limiting his horizons. The opposite of “no pain, no gain”. The letter is a trigger for Tony to re-think his understanding of events – it is like the carpet has been pulled out from under his feet. He is forced to recognise that: ‘What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed."

It made me wish I’d kept more diaries, to wonder what has been lost in my head through the vagaries of time and what I have not remembered accurately. To wonder whether I’d limited my horizons too much. Note Websters sad, sad comment "I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was."

One reviewer described it better than I can:

“More important, Barnes makes one look back on one's own life to ponder what parts of it have been fabrications, those necessary fictions created to cast ourselves in a better light, to spare ourselves the knowledge of our own shortcomings, short-sightedness and bad behaviour.The cleverness resides not only in the way he has caught just how second-rate Webster's mind is without driving the reader to tears of boredom but in the way he has effectively doubled the length of the book by giving us a final revelation that obliges us to reread it. Without overstating his case in the slightest, Barnes's story is a meditation on the unreliability and falsity of memory; on not getting it the first time round - and possibly not even the second, either. Barnes's revelation is richly ambiguous.
And this is appropriate, for such a slyly subversive book.”

I also found this in an interview with The Guardian:

"In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his family memoir cum meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes admits that he and his brother disagree about many details of their childhood. His brother, a philosopher, maintains that memories are so often false that they cannot be trusted without independent verification. "I am more trusting, or self-deluding," writes Barnes, "so shall continue as if all my memories are true."

The title is abstract and obscure – I really struggled with what he was alluding to – and then found this in a review by Geordie Williamson:

“The Sense of an Ending: a grey, grim, near-perfect novella whose title,
borrowed from Frank Kermode's 1967 classic of literary criticism, suggests a creative extrapolation of that volume's thesis. Since we are born into the middle of things (and die in much the same place), suggested Kermode, the stories we tell about ourselves serve as consolatory structures, falsifying origins and ends to grant order and meaning to that which has none.”

This is a clever book – it is deceptively simple but caused me to think a lot about my own life. There are some funny bits - he would have had a lot of fun writing the driving scene with the enigmatic ‘Fruitcake’. But in the main, it’s just sad.

PS: Good YouTube clip about the cover design...

When did the Holocaust become The Holocaust?

2012-01-03T19:21:00.000-08:00

I had strong and contrary reactions to the opening of the novel The Street Sweeper. It’s because of how it opens with two story trajectories – of black civil rights in America and of Jews and the Holocaust. The positive reaction was to the opening scene with Lamont, the African American man who has just got out of prison and been able to find a placement in a job – against the odds. He is catching a bus to work and is full of anxiety – compounded by the fact that a Hispanic man gets on the bus angry with the driver who is apparently running late. Lamont is the only other man on the bus and feels under some pressure to try to end the argument between to two men. This is very good writing – full of tension, visually strong, interesting in its exploration of the expectations and values circulating in this busload of low-socio-economic individuals. I immediately started to care about Lamont.

The second reaction was more wary. Adam is an untenured historian at Columbia who is about to lose his job because he hasn’t published anything for a few years. A credible situation. What I initially struggled with was the idea that he would therefore want to end his long-term relationship with his girlfriend Diana. She wanted kids. He felt that he could not provide for a family in the short term and broke up with her. I didn’t quite believe it even though it seemed to connect with an old preoccupation of Perlman’s – that was initially a significant part of his novel Three Dollars – the pressure on the man to provide for the family.

Then I thought of M, a friend of mine. About 22 years ago, he announced that his then girlfriend J was pregnant, that they would get married and that he was renouncing his former life. He sold his record player and extensive record collection (and maybe lots of other things) as a symbol of this new road he was taking. It felt sacrificial (with a tinge of martyr). It seemed like he felt that he needed to be a different kind of person if he was married with a child and a mortgage. I didn’t really understand it then but the strength of the ‘fork in the road’ feeling for him was obvious. At the time I thought that maybe he hadn’t thought of J as being “the one” but they are still together.

So this was Adam – making dramatic gestures because of this sense of what men should offer. The book is only slightly about this of course – it’s about lots of things and I liked it a lot. What it is about is racism – in many forms. Perlman covers a LOT of new ground. Even though this is a book which deals with the seemingly familiar events of the Holocaust, there is a lot of new material that I was unaware of. In an interview with Jane Sullivan, Perlman said he was inspired by a number of key things:

“One was a poetry reading Perlman attended, where he heard poems from
Greetings from Sloan-Kettering, a posthumously published book by Abba Kovner, a
cancer patient who had been a Jewish partisan during World War II. Another was a
radio documentary he chanced to hear about David Boder, a Chicago psychologist
who had gone to Europe just after the war and had done something quite unheard
of at the time: he had recorded interviews with Holocaust survivors. Perlman
listened to the last interview Boder conducted. He broke off speaking in Yiddish
and the woman he was interviewing was in a flood of tears. Perlman says: ''For
the first time, he lost control of his emotions. He said to this woman, 'Who is
going to stand in judgment over all of this and who is going to judge my
work?'''That was another question the author had to answer, Perlman decided.
Only he changed the man's name to Henry Border and the question to, ''Who is
going to judge me?'' because the man's voice ''was dripping in guilt. What was
this guy so guilty about?''

The radio show was This American Life (my favourite podcast) – and the episode Before it had a name. The name of that episode is derived from the idea that the Holocaust is a term of only recent widespread usage and understanding, – before we knew the Holocaust as the Holocaust – before people realised the enormity of what had happened to the Jews (I am not sure here about when that realisation did strike the world – and to what extent people and governments buried knowledge of it – not sure when everyone knew what the Holocaust was – I have grown up with it as a concept in recent history. Wikipedia says this:

The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókauston, an animal sacrifice
offered to a god in which the whole (holos) animal is completely burnt
(kaustos). For hundreds of years, the word "holocaust" was used in English to
denote great massacres, but since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by
scholars and popular writers to refer exclusively to the genocide of Jews. The
mini-series Holocaust is credited with introducing the term into common parlance
after 1978. The biblical word Shoah, meaning "calamity", became the standard
Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially in Europe and
Israel. Shoah is preferred by many Jews for a number of reasons, including the
theologically offensive nature of the word "holocaust", which they take to refer
to the Greek pagan custom.”

I digress. It’s easy with this novel – there are lots of little bypaths that are worthy of exploration. For example, I would like to know heaps more about the civil rights history which we get a glimpse of – the de-segregation of schools, the resulting riots, the intake of African Americans into the union movement, the silence about the roles of black soldiers in WW2, the uprisings in Auschwitz etc etc. I can’t do these justice – read the book. It’s very interesting reading about a period that I know little about. This creates a strain for the writer – he needs to tell us a lot and I sometimes felt that it was a little didactic – “I’m glad you asked” was the kind of tone – especially over the pages to do with black history. Worth putting up with this though – it’s a great story – based on a degree of personal connection. Perlman had relatives who disappeared in the Holocaust – his great-uncle Rafal Gutman had a prestigious job in charge of Jewish education in Warsaw at the outbreak of war. The Nazis said he could stay as long as he provided them with a list of Jews to be transported. Gutman refused and committed suicide.

I felt that Perlman had taken some risks in writing about two uber-politically laden narratives. You can get in a lot of trouble in this terrain. However he is so clearly guided by the desire to put “Tell everybody what happened” (as the brave and doomed Auschwitz prisoners urge). I felt swept up in the merging stories. I will read more about the themes of the novel and I’m sure it will resonate for a long time.

Horror of adolescence

2012-01-02T17:00:00.000-08:00

Little Star – a horror story or a deeper book about adolescence? Or both those things. I first accessed the novelist Lindqvist’s work with the film Let the Right One in - also a horror narrative which is also about adolescence.

In Little Star, Lindqvist traces the lives of two girls – both outsiders in Swedish society. Theres, abandoned as a baby, is a very fine singer with some developmental issues. Theresa is an overweight, lonely, bullied child. The novel explores what they do with their feelings of alienation and to say more about the plot would be wrong. I think the writer is extremely good at getting inside the head of these disaffected girls. He says that he thinks that the main flaw in many horror films is that he can’t identify with the main characters. Lindqvist ensures that we empathise with the character of Theresa, and to a lesser extent Theres, at the same time as being disturbed and alienated by what they do. He said that he tries “to combine both those things, that the child is the protagonist, the one we are following, the one that drives the tale forward, and at the same time being the one that you have to watch out for.”

What he delivers is not new or unique but it is interesting. This novel doesn’t work as well for me as the film of 'Let the Right One in' did, but it was a great thing to read in the bright light of a summer Christmas at the beach. A few brooding teenagers around at Waratah Bay but none with obvious homicidal urges.

It’s worth reading a little of what the writer had to say about his work in an interview on the Constructing Horror website:
“But then I think that many horror films and horror storytellers dig deep into the hole that is their own childhood to reach a more original fear. A fear that is nameless. As an adult we can rationalize out thoughts. This is that, and that scares me where that doesn’t. But as a child the stuff out there in the dark or that strange noise under the bed could be anything. If I want to conjure up something that is really scary, an image of something really horrible, then I almost always have to go back to my early years to find a description of that fear. And I think these are emotions and fears that many who write, or work with horror use in their work.”

Interestingly, what I think he really nails are the real and practical fears of childhood and adolescence (regardless of those that linger under the bed) – the question of fitting in, of friendships and of connection – or lack of it. This is the real horror of that period of life.

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Bad girl, good boy?

2012-01-02T16:10:00.000-08:00

Patti Smith begins Just Kids with a formal old-fashioned kind of language. The voice unsettles – it’s not what I expected. Soon after she departs Chicago for New York, that voice disappears and what replaces it is a frank and honest contemporary feel. Her story is beguiling – she leaves badly paid factory work and the shame of having a child out of wedlock in search of something more akin with who she is – a potential artist of some kind. Her mother – who thinks she will probably end up waitressing, gives her a pristine new waitress uniform and a pair of white waitress shoes which Smith abandons after a couple of hours of this kind of work. She’s not a snob about what she does though – the book has a humble tone.

Smith arrives in New York and almost immediately meets Robert Mapplethorpe. They connect as fellow ingénues and wanna-be artists. Actually Mapplethorpe is probably not an ingénue – but she initially presents him as a gentle beautiful artistic boy. She says: "We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl ¬trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad."

They arrive in New York at a very dynamic time – 1967 (is there not a dynamic time in this city?) and gradually began to move in the same circles as a whole lot of artists and musicians. For the first half of the book, there is no mention of her being a practising musician though she certainly loves music and references artists like Dylan. Staying at the Chelsea Hotel for a while, she mentions contact with Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin and wrote poems/ songs for some of these people. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the relationship that she has with Mapplethorpe - their struggle to make art, the fun they had, and the beginning of a clash in values as Mapplethorpe begins to work his way through the social set in New York.

The writing describing their activities is lovely – aesthetes who value the visual, who try to add beauty to the spartan rooms they inhabit, who express part of their identity through what they choose to wear. The image of the book released in the America is worth looking at (It's the one shown here) – Mapplethorpe and Smith dressed up for an excursion to Coney Island. Also worth looking up the very beautiful image that Mapplethorpe took of Smith for her first album, Horses - speaks for the essence of the book and their relationship - and the times.

One reviewer describes the book at embodying the spirit of Smith’s song Elegie written for Jimi Hendrix and that it was written “in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry.” True. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with her. And him.

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The best handjob in literature...

2011-12-18T18:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9817.Ten_Days_in_the_Hills">Ten Days in the Hills by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1339.Jane_Smiley">Jane Smiley
My rating: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/248716399">3 of 5 stars

Copies of this novel sold out at the Melbourne Writers Festival after a session with Jane Smiley in conversation with David Francis. He described this novel as having the best headjob (or was it hand job) in literature. As it turns out, I think it was hand job. There is a little sex in this large novel - generous easy sex between a range of consenting adults. The opening is lovely - two of the main characters in bed musing on whether they should make a film about being in bed together along the lines of My Dinner with Andre. I felt lulled into something promising in terms of a range of interesting conflicts, some stuff about relationships and a real go at unpacking American reactions to their country's foreign policy.

The story is set against the backdrop of the beginning of the second Gulf War, although the characters are in Hollywood rather than Baghdad. The war is a springboard for debate along with the shifting values and ambitions of people who occupy the large house temporarily (for part of the ten days). Smiley says that she was inspired to write the book by The Decameron, which I have not read. It is described in A O Scotts review of Ten Days in The Hills: "In that book, 10 privileged Florentines — seven women and three men — took refuge from their plague-ravaged city in the accursed year 1348 and passed the time telling stories, a hundred in all." This review, titled 'Kiss Kiss, Talk, Talk' accurately captures the ways in which this large novel runs out of steam - I wanted it to be so much better than it is.

The dimunition of conflict over the course of the novel is in stark contrast to the faint news of the Iraq War that filters occasionally into the lives of these characters, reminding us of how privileged, middle class and languid they (we) are. Ultimately, not the most interesting thing to read about.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5403283-jillwilson">View all my reviews

A crying shame?

2011-12-11T22:02:00.000-08:00

What have these two films got in common – The Burning Man and A Single Man? Two things. The actor Matthew Goode and the theme – grief. (I don’t want to spoil the plot of The Burning Man for you so I will try to avoid saying much more about it here but it may be hard to be totally oblique so don’t read any more if you plan on seeing it.)

About half way through The Burning Man I started to think about the best films about grief and A Single Man was the first film that entered my head. It’s in the acting; Firth manages to convey grief and anger with a look or slow movement of the body or delivery of a sentence and in the degree to which it explores his character and that of the female lead in the film (we care about them, dysfunctional as they are). Both films are also highly stylised but this stylisation works in one film but not in the other. I thought about the reasons for quite a while after watching The Burning Man.

I am the person in the dark in the cinema who reaches first for the hankie. I am often embarrassed at how easily I cry (I find it difficult to watch any of the Olympics without tearing up. The ABC news can be an emotional whirlpool.) So why no tears over this one? The Burning Man opens with a series of fragmented scenes. We see chef Tom (Matthew Goode) in road rage, in his restaurant, running down the corridor of a hospital yelling, being escorted by two men in security uniforms. He is a man filled with rage. (And libido – the opening scene is of his bottom quivering as he masturbates.) The reasons for the rage are not clear – the film moves back and forward in time forcing the viewer to really concentrate.

Rage is an unattractive thing – unless we can empathise with it – (The “I’m Mad as Hell and not going to take it any more” scene, almost any early Jack Nicholson, George Kostanza on a good day). So there’s a man, out of control with anger. When he’s not being angry, the camera gazes soulfully at him. I use that phrase deliberately – the camera person (or maybe the editor) is in love with this actor and the gaze of the camera lingers often and unnecessarily on Goode, who is very good looking in a tragic wild man careful one-day growth kind of way. He’s sad, he’s angry, he’s dysfunctional. Interestingly (for what it says about me), I empathised with the main character Tom only three times in the film – and most strongly when he runs amok at a picnic of strangers and throws their food all over the park. I should have felt more for this character but was unable to.

There was something missing from the film and I think, oddly, that the element is tension. Where a film is an “emotional journey”, as this one is, there is usually an element of tension, of waiting for an outcome or for something to emerge. The first part of the film has this – as we strain to make sense of the fragments. But once the storyline is clear, there is almost nothing there. What happens is predictable. Typing this makes me feel like I’m not doing the film justice but the main character is not interesting or conveyed in enough depth to pull the story along. We don’t see enough of pre-angry Tom and his life to feel the contrast. There are anodyne scenes with his wife/ girlfriend where they go mussel hunting which look a little like Tourism NSW ads, they are not particularly interesting or convincing. His pre-angry life is annoyingly good looking and bland. I would have preferred Goode to be a little more haggard as well; his looks and the lingering gaze of the camera distracted from whatever emotion he was trying to convey. Many shots were very self-conscious, look at me, look at the art kind of shots. This film maker needs to go look at some Kelly Reichart and Koreada films to learn how to tell an emotional story minimally.

A lot of reviews have talked about the initial non-linear mode of story telling (popular this year – Jane Eyre, We Need To Talk About Kevin); Leigh Paatsch, a reviewer said: "It might be an unfair comparison, but another new release this week, We Need to Talk About Kevin, delivers a virtual masterclass in non-linear storytelling." Paatsch is right about this; the Kevin film works very effectively fragmenting the plot to build tension and to delay the ‘money shot’ of that film (which incidently is also about grief and anger and where Tilda Swinton looks completely frumpy and undone by these emotions). The director of The Burning Man Jonathan Teplitzky said that he wanted the fragments to resemble the kind of chaos that might plague someone like Tom. In this way it is effective although Paatsch also says “Burning Man features an audacious structure that makes it seem more interesting than it is.” The director says, in an interview with The Australian, "I wanted the film to be visceral and emotional over a heavily plotted film," he says. "I was very conscious of writing like that because I wanted the structure of the film to tell as much as anything else about the emotional and psychological state of the character." Visceral, this film isn’t, despite the actual offal that plays a bit role in the film.

In summary, I agree with this assessment from FilmInk: "Unfortunately, he's (Goode) undone somewhat by the film itself, which is over directed, too proud of itself, and utterly enamoured with its main character's destructive personality." It's a shame - I wanted to like it more.

What kind of Melbourne would you write about?

2011-12-05T19:10:00.000-08:00

What would any Melbournite wish to write (or read) about Melbourne? What would the reading experience be if you were not from Melbourne? Sophie Cunningham's book is one of a series about different Australian capital cities - Delia Falconer wrote a similar book about Sydney, for example.

It is a beautiful book to handle - a small hardback with rough-cut old style creamy pages and a silky finish to the cover shot of a murky Melbourne laneway. And this book is SO laneway.I felt like I was in a very small club (of people) reading in a very small and hidden Melbourne bar. You will know if you are in the club if you open the book. Its about (and for?) people who live on the map which is printed on the inside cover. Like me - middle class, university educated, inner-city bleeding heart liberal (lower case).

So it was a book of confirmation, rather than surprises. I liked it but found it faintly irritating for that reason. There was nothing new in it for me. So that's why I'm wondering who the predicted audience is for this book. I read a lot of Kristin Otto's book 'Capital' last year and found it a whole lot more interesting - it is a different beast of course as it's about time when Melbourne was the capital of Australia.

If you want to see if you're in the club or not - make a list of the five writers most likely to be referenced in a book about Melbourne, about the top five topics that would be covered (the 'action' of the book takes place over a year in 2009), of ten iconic leisure activities....
I'll start you off - Garner, Tsiolkas, Flanagan, Brunettis, Crystal Ballroom, Skyhooks, MIFF, the G, Paul Kelly - need I go on? (Apropos of nothing I had a taxi driver yesterday who needed directions to the MCG. He shyly confided at the end of the trip that it was his first day. "Yeah, I gathered that mate," I said).

I like Sophie Cunningham's writing - I enjoyed Geography when it came out. I like the club I'm in - but probably don't need to read about it.

The Bad Cunt ambition

2011-12-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

Like Samson and Delilah, Toomelah opens with a “waking up” shot. I’m beginning to feel like it’s a bit of a cliché in these kinds of low socio-economic contexts (also used in Blessed). It enables the cinematographer to pan around the home surroundings and give the viewer quite a lot of additional information before any of the action begins. The camera pans over cheap trophies won by a boxer (Daniel’s father), tracks along the cracked plasterboard and the rumpled bodies sleeping in the house. We see 10 year old Daniel wake up slowly and begin his day searching fruitlessly for money in his mother’s wallet. Toomelah is a real Aboriginal community on the border of NSW and Qld. The mother of the film-maker, Ivan Sen, grew up there so he had good links back into this community and it shows.

I wanted to see this film because I thought it might fit into the neo-neo realism genre. Relevant examples of this genre include Treeless Mountain (Korea) and Nobody Knows (Japan). Both of these films are concerned with the idea of children who have been abandoned by their parents. In both films, the children have a “problem” to solve that ensures that the audience is drawn into the film. A lot of the dramatic tension is in their management of the problem – surviving without appropriate adult support.

There is not the same sense of urgency in Toomelah, though Daniel is at risk because of the remoteness of his mother and the incapacities of his father who is an alcoholic. In almost all ways, he is more at risk than the children in those other films because his immediate environment is filled with trouble. He is disconnected from school, the elder in his family who is capable of providing support (his Gran) has other family business occupying her head space, and the most welcoming ‘family’ in town is a group of small-time drug dealers. Constantly in the film Daniel is asked “Where you goin’ bro?” “Nowhere.” Correct. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. The urgency of those other two films cannot be sustained in this aimless, deprived backwater. (And yet the question of deprivation is problematised – the school is modern and appears caring and other children appear with protective adults.)

As with the other neo-neo realist films, the camera lingers over landscape and character. Nothing happens fast – we can soak up the ennui of the day. Daniel was not a professional actor but manages to fill the screen with his personality – a withdrawn but feisty mix of bravado and deprivation. He wants to be a “bad cunt” but also yearns for contact. Reviewers have compared this to Samson and Delilah (this film is much better in my view because, as this reviewer says, “Toomelah has issues that Sen can tick off, "from deaths in custody to education to cultural extinction, unemployment, substance abuse, stolen generations". But although these are all woven into the fabric of the film, Sen has no interest in setting an agenda. "I wanted to make a film that was truthful to a little boy's experience of his world." (Read more) That lack of an agenda makes this a better film. It has a documentary-like quality that is deepened through the use of many non-professional actors.

Paul Byrnes, writing in The Age, said “The more recent films by Aboriginal filmmakers such as Here I Am (Beck Cole) and Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton) are noticeably internal. They do not look for outsiders to blame. There's a subtle reduction in the politics of victimhood that many black films used to carry as freight, unintentionally or not. There is more humour too, at least some of the time. Toomelah is like that. It offers us glimpses of a world most of us can never enter. That's the kind of thing that only film can do.” The school library has a large pin-up board with photographs of indigenous people through the history of the town and the mission which preceded it. Daniel’s gaze lingers on the men, proud looking men with shields and hunting materials or men loaded into a truck, clearly on the way to work somewhere. It is unclear what the modern context has to offer Daniel, except life as a bad cunt.

There is no sentimentality or manipulation in this film; things are what they are. The outcomes for Daniel are unclear. But for a short time, we’ve lived in his space.

It's tribal

2011-11-29T18:32:00.000-08:00

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6974785-the-children">The Children by http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/342188.Charlotte_Wood">Charlotte Wood
My rating: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/241291991">4 of 5 stars

Last night at my women's group we talked about the impact of being in a tribe - in my case a large and close family. We talked about the sense of security it gives you. There is a layer of confidence that you have in going out to meet the world, beacuse your tribe is strong, you are loved, there are people that will care for you and opportunities for intimacy. It provides a kind of resilient backbone.

The Children is about siblings in a family. It might not be very interesting if it was about a tribe as secure as mine is. This tribe is a little dysfunctional - brought together after an accident and forced to spend unaccustomed time togther. As well as the depiction of these relationships, the novel presents a very fine and accurate picture of life in a NSW country town. It thrusts life in this small town up against the experiences of one of the main characters, Mandy, who has become a foreign correspondent and lived through some extremely traumatic events. Small towns can produce their own forms of trauma hoever, and these play out subtly in the novel. There is one faintly jarring plot line that runs through the novel unnecessarily but the rest of it was just fine and a pleasure to read.

http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/5403283-jillwilson">View all my reviews

The post 'Marriage Plot' world

2011-11-13T18:05:00.000-08:00

I read this novel because of an article I read about the writer and this novel titled 'How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write ‘The Marriage Plot’'. I really liked the article and thought the book sounded good.
The article quotes from the actual text of the book:

"In Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter who Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean anything anymore, and neither did the novel."

Who wouldn't want to read a book playing around with what was possible in a post-marriage plot world? It's set largely in about 1982 in north eastern America and it's about a triangle relationship - Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell. Because I was young then (1982) and just out of uni, the novel draws in aspects of my cultural world - vey nostalgically appealing. It might not work so well with another demographic. As I drew towards the end, I was intrigued to think about how Eugenides would end it - it seemed to me to be VERY difficult to find a satisfying end - but he really manages this part well. I loved reading about the advent of post-structuralism and the impact it made at this time. He also writes well about manic depression. It's made me want to read more of his books.

Tony, Susan, Arnold, Edward and Jill

2011-11-07T17:39:00.000-08:00

Tony and Susan by Austin Wright

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think this is a three and a half starred book. Interesting, but it falls away in the last third. What I did like about it is that this is a book about the porous boundaries of reading. Susan receives an unpublished book in the mail from her first husband, Edward - whom she hasn't seen in 20 years (his second wife sends her an Xmas card each year). Susan had an affair with the man who became her second husband. Things ended badly between Susan and Edward. Things aren't so great with her new husband Arnold, who is away at a conference.

As the reader, we experience Susan reading Edward's narrative - which is a thriller, along with her thoughts about their relationship, her thoughts about her current marriage, and the impending arrival of Edward in her home town. So there's layers on layers here - which is what makes the book interesting. I was reading, being consious of my own life, my readerly reactions, Susan's life, and then the very lively plot within a plot. As the Guardian reviewer says: "Wright, like David Lynch, has the knack of beginning in wrongness then piling on the tension from there." He also said "if Tony & Susan can be said to be about anything other than its exploration of form, it is about the failure to be an agent in your own life."

This review also provides a description of the author, now deceased "He was a professor at the University of Cincinnati for 23 years and was obsessed by the interconnection of real and invented worlds and believing that at least in some sense the reader writes the book. His daughter Katharine told the Daily Telegraph recently that his last words to her were: "You. Are. Invented." "

The book went out of print but was resuscitated by a publisher who thought it had been neglected. It has been billed as "the most astounding lost masterpiece of American fiction since Revolutionary Road" but it's not in the same league as Revolutionary Road in my view. You might be interested in this less than complimentary view of Tony & Susan - in which the reviewer reveals the worst sentence in the book - a funny sentence about Arnold's penis and the trouble it causes.

I liked the layered stories and the sense of anxiety the writer creates as we wait for Susan's current husband to return home, for resolution of the internal story which has a kidnap and revenge as its focus and whether Edward will step beyond his writing into Susan's story. Is his narrative a form of revenge?

View all my reviews

An encounter with my younger self

2011-11-03T18:17:00.000-07:00

I last saw the film 1900 in the late 1970s in Melbourne. My only memories of this experience include stumbling out of the Rivoli late at night after a demanding four hours, and a kind of yearning to be as beautiful as Dominique Sanda. It’s lucky that she was beautiful – because nothing else worked out for her in this film – no children, married to a weak man, an addiction to alcohol and a positively (metaphorically) scarifying wedding day. So it was pretty interesting coming back to a longer (by about an hour) version of this film recently. It brought me into contact with my younger self – as well as a film altered in my perceptions by over thirty years of life. So interesting!

One of the reasons that I wanted to see it was after reading Christos Tsoilkas’essay Encountering Bertolucci in which he nominated 1900 as his favourite film.

But Novecento, once that trigger on the gun is cocked, always finally comes first, because I have seen it so many times now and it never ceases to amaze, to astonish and to thrill. And in part this is from the audacity of Bertolucci's approach: to film a proletariat history of the European twentieth century, conceived, imagined and presented as a great popular communitarian epic.

The film opens with a close up on Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's famous oil painting "Il Quarto Stato," ("The Fourth Estate" - 1901) – it begins with a face and slowly pans out until you see the entire crowd of workers. My brain instantly went to the Anvil Chorus from Il trovatore. That connection set the pattern for my reading of the film – a reading not accessible to me on 1978 as I had seen no opera then. 1900 is an opera. It has epic crowd scenes, quite simple blunt story lines, villains and heroes and little of greater complexity in between. It’s perhaps no accident that the film begins on the day that Verdi dies (his music plays throughout the film). The other art form which came to mind was Bollywood – and I don’t mean to diminish 1900 by this comparison – there is just something about the large group scenes, the stylised images of peasants at work, the politics, the use of colour and the good vs evil tropes that screams Bollywood.

I love the Volpedo painting – the sense of gathered momentum, the unity, the seriousness and somewhere, even though they look serious, a sense of hope – I think this is generated by the colour of the ground. It is the perfect beginning to 1900 which quickly takes us into the last day of World War 2, a pastoral scene of peasants gathering hay, a bloody death and the primal attack on a middle-aged couple who are obviously fleeing the village.

The film follows the lives of two children born a few hours apart: one, Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro), the grandson to landowner and “padrone”, Alfredo (Burt Lancaster); the other, Olmo Dalco (Gerard Depardieu), the bastard grandson of Leo Dalco (Sterling Hayden), patriarch of the peasant family that works Berlinghieri’s land. The pastoral scenes are fantastic, reminding me of a book I read this year called Death in the Mountains (Lisa Clifford). This book explores the murder of Lisa’s husband’s great-grandfather in 1907. The Italian life that she depicts is extraordinarily harsh; the family of the story have very little and the feudal nature of power relations is very evident. It shocked me; that the existence of these peasants was so tenuous and 1900 just confirms this.

The early scenes also have a playful element – Olmo is like Huck Finn – and he and Alfredo have a love-hate relationship. There are two great scenes – where Olmo catches a whole lot of frogs and threads them through his hat band (these frogs later become the food on Alfredo’s family table) and the other one where the two boys play on the railway tracks and Olmo allows the train to travel over his prone body on the tracks. Matthew Turner, a blogger describes his favourite scenes as:

Highlights include: one of the children (Olmo) decorating his hat with live frogs; Alfredo and Ada being presented with what can only be described as a gift horse (called Cocaine) at their wedding; Alfredo’s reactions to trying cocaine for the first time (Alfredo is possibly the happiest character that De Niro has ever portrayed on screen; it’s actually weird to see the young De Niro this joyful); and an astonishing, Brechtian moment in the climactic scene where Depardieu breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the audiences, espousing the virtues of Communism.
Some reviewers write that Bertolucci divided the film into seasons – if this is summer, then autumn is coming – with the rise in the power of the Blackshirts in Italy. The fascist characters now resemble crude villains to me – I think they held more terrible sway over my twenty year old self. I’ve seen many films that depict evil in more interesting ways, starting with Bertolucci’s La Conformista – but this is opera, and therefore entirely admirable.

Aside from Alfredo’s disastrous marriage to the beautiful Ada (Dominique Sanda), there is not much more to the plot than a series of vignettes based in and around the Belinghieri estate and the city of
Parma. Bertolucci is only interested in making the same observation, over and over again, namely that the landowners stood by and allowed the rise of fascism, leaving the fight against fascism to the heroic communists.

(Matthew Turner)
I wondered what extra things I was seeing in the extended version – and spent some time on the web (not available in 1978 when I watched the first version) doing some research.

The differences between the three hour version and the five hour version include a long list of things that would cause outbreaks of apoplexy over at the BBFC. The most famous example is the scene where DeNiro and Depardieu get simultaneous handjobs from the same prostitute (Stefania Casini), with both men lying naked on either side of her.An equally controversial scene involves the two young boys (played by Paolo Pavesi and Roberto Maccanti) comparing their erections. In fact, this cock obsession
turns into something of a theme – even Sterling Hayden gets his cock out at one point (to urinate on THE LAND or something). Thankfully, we are spared a glimpse of Little Burt, but there is a scene where he gets a milkmaid to stick her hand down his pants to prove that he can’t get an erection anymore. According to imdb, the other differences include an extended sequence where Olmo graphically kills and butchers a pig (no cutaways – that pig really gets it) and the crowd rejoicing at Alfredo Snr’s suicide. (Matthew again)

One reviewer writes "Bertolucci mentions following Renoir's advice to, "always leave a door open on the set, to allow reality to enter into the film." The result is a defiant naturalism and erotic candidness that colors the film with bursts of shocking emotional energy." And one of my favourite reviewers, Roger Ebert says:

Bertolucci's camera, always moving, swooping, gliding effortlessly from one stunning composition to another, hardly seems to stop to see these events: It's as if the movie has a beauty apart from its
content, and Bertolucci dazzles us visually as an apology for the narrative mess he's in… Then look at "1900," and reflect that Bertolucci is at his best in scenes with two people in a room (Brando and Maria Schneider in "Last Tango," Alida Valli and Giulio Brogi in "The Spider's Strategem").

I think it is these audacious scenes that also remind me of Bollywood – they are dazzling in composition. I’m thinking here of the scene where they dig up the large communist flag and begin the trial of Alfredo underneath, the flag held up with the points of rifles, then they dance underneath the rippling red of it. Or the arrival of the white stallion at Ada’s wedding or the massed food scene where the peasants are eating at night. He goes for it, Bertolucci and even though it probably doesn’t work in the way he intended, it’s a great bit of chutzpah.

When I first saw the film, socialism was alive and kicking, it was the cold war. The scenes of workers tilling the soil remind me of Chinese propaganda art of the 60s. I had never seen an opera or a Bollywood film. I wanted to be as beautiful as Dominique Sanda. I may have wanted to snort cocaine but am more sure that I would have been a bit alarmed by this opportunity. I was both the same person and a different person – very strange to consider.

2011-10-25T23:41:00.000-07:00

I went to see The Conformist last night – though it was released in 1970, I have never seen it. It follows the story of a man named Clerici who becomes involved with the fascist regime in Italy and has the job of trying to assassinate his old college professor. One of the stand-out things for me was the use of light and colour in the film – this is lush and stagey and dramatic and gorgeous.

Scenes worth a mention just for the way they are filmed include:

- The dance scene between Clerici’s wife and Dominique Sanda in Paris – very sexy

- When Clerici arrives at his fiancee’s flat and has lunch with her and her mother - see the YouTube clip

- The hunting scene (hunting Dominique Sanda) in the forest in France – One critic noted how many film makers had since been inspired by this scene including the makers of the Sopranos

-Clerici visiting his father in the lunatic asylum – a critic described this scene as:

There are excesses in the film, but they are balanced by scenes of such unusual beauty and vitality that I couldn't care less. I think particularly of a scene in which Marcello and his mother
visit his father in the courtyard of a mental hospital that looks very much like
a surreal Greek market- place. It could be Oedipus and Jocasta come to call on a
crazy Laius. Vincent Canby in the New York Times

He nails sensuality – the scenes of Sanda and Clerici’s wife (Stefania Sandrelli), of Clerici and his wife on a train caressing as she tells him about her first sexual experience (the content of which should be shocking but Bertolucci transgressively uses the material, of the women dancing. Lush, lush lush.

The story itself – of a weak man trying to find a place in the world – a fascist world – vaguely interesting – but the way it's told – very seductive.

In 1970 - two years before The Godfather's Oscar validated the approach - Bertolucci took a brave step in making a film where every character is unlikeable and pathetic, even the protagonist. Ben Sillis in Eye for Film

10 reasons for avoiding the Iranian film 'Circumstance'

2011-08-03T00:23:00.000-07:00

Warning – Spoilers contained

The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in bed.
The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in the fantasy Dubai hotel.
The dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scene in bed (again)
The men in the audience who come to see dull and unconvincing lesbian sex scenes.
The gratuitous rape scene followed by the victim’s subsequent and immediate desire for the rapist.
The men in the audience who come to see gratuitous rape scenes followed by the victim’s subsequent and immediate desire for the rapist.
Insertion of one clever scene that plays with the film Milk and gives just one small and incorrect ray of hope that the film might improve towards the end.
The sheer difficulty of walking out of the film when you’re in the middle of the Forum cinema in the dark.
The frustration that attends a 9 pm screening of said film, knowing that escape will not be possible until after 11.
Ok- the last two are self-imposed conditions – I could only come up with 7 good reasons for avoiding this film.

If this doesn’t convince you, the following quote from the Slant website might, although I do not share the writer’s good will regarding the early stages of the film:

These latter acts topple the material full-bore into melodrama, sabotaging the early-going's convincing, compelling feel for youthful insurrection against stifling tradition in favor of more standard, less plausible tensions and conflicts. Casting Iran as a sinister social and political labyrinth designed to ensnare—and thus ensure docile acquiescence from—its female citizenry is no doubt justified, but the twists and turns of Circumstance prove increasingly formulaic and phony, especially once Mehran completes his transition from beaten-down recovering junkie to malevolent monster.

It won the audience prize at Sundance - something to do maybe with the "exotic" tags it has - ticks a lot of boxes...

The syntax of families

2011-08-02T00:30:00.000-07:00

It’s easy to forget, from the vantage point of 53, how constant the issue of normality is when you’re 13 or 14. One psychologist I’ve heard reckons that the key universal refrain for teenagers is “Am I normal?” followed, (in my view) by “How do I fit in?”, “Do I want to fit in” and “What will it cost me?” I was thinking about these things yesterday watching the Israeli film Intimate Grammar, directed by Nir Bergman, which focuses on a teenage boy, Aharon and his struggle with these questions.

The film focuses on one family and their interactions, the bitter, abrasive mother, the hapless father and the two siblings, Aharon and his slightly older sister. The title, which I love, forces us to think about the grammar of relationships – of families. The three of us who saw the film together viewed the family differently – because of our own particular family grammar. For two of us, the mother was a pretty horrible experience, for the third, she was like her own mother and therefore interacting within the norms of behaviour. What are the rules in this Israeli family? How do people customarily display love, anger, the need for space?

The film begins in 1963 with black and white footage of Israel’s Independence Day. The larger political situation sits at the outer extremities of this film. It is referenced by characters and omnipresent only in the ways in which politics touches the lives of individuals; the Holocaust survivor’s appreciation of the importance of food, compulsory military service, active youth on kibbutzes. The immediacy of the film is based on its attention to the small neighbourhood where the family live. This small space is riddled with low-level conflict, and neighbourly abrasions. It’s shot in beautiful early 60’s colours like an old Polaroid. It’s claustrophobic in intention, we are squashed around the kitchen table enduring the squabbles, incipient tension and love that is part and parcel of this family. Like Koreada’s films (especially Still Walking), we are forced to be part of the painfulness and the lovely intimate moments that make up this family’s life.

The film is based on David Grossman’s novel. He was interviewed in the Paris Review about this and other novels and said, in relation to this:

I became a more friendly child in those years, more active socially, yet I remained introverted. In The Book of Intimate Grammar there is Aron, a secluded, lonely child, and his best friend Gideon, the all-Israeli boy, who goes out with girls, is in the Scouts, and wants to be a pilot. I modeled Gideon on a friend I had when I was sixteen—I even interviewed him. When the book came out, I sent a copy to him and anxiously awaited his reaction. He called me after some time and said, I liked it and, of course, I found myself. I am Aron. That was amazing to me. If I had heard him say that when I was sixteen, my entire life would have been different. My sense of solitude, of hopelessness, of being totally excommunicated—all this would have been different.

I love this quote. It really distils the experience of being an adolescent. That no one is as wretched as you, as uncool, as un-whatever it is that you have a yearning for. And, unbeknownst to you, everyone around you is feeling the same. Aharon (the Aron of Grossman’s quote) is small for his age. Bergman deals with this theme subtly in the film; it is a preoccupation but not one that we expect will dominate the boy’s life in quite the way it does. It made me remember a Maltese boy I taught in 1983. John was very short for his age. He was, in the parlance of my adolescence “a late developer”. John, a lively, intelligent boy who practised magic tricks on weekends, hung himself in a shed at the age of 17 and a half. I would’ve been about 24 or 25 then – a young teacher – I remember being really upset that he’d given no inkling that the height thing bothered him. It matters, that stuff about body image, about fitting in, about girls and being cool. So what Bergman gives us is a film about difference (newly emergent Israel, life in the cheek by jowl suburbs) and universality. It’s pretty classy.

Wrapping

2009-10-25T21:37:00.000-07:00

The contenders for the Foreign Language Oscar in 2008 were The Baader Meinhof Complex, Revanche, Waltz With Bashir, The Class and Departures. Departures, which I saw on the weekend, was the winner. It’s a good film but not in the competition when you compare it with Waltz with Bashir and The Class – both films that I loved and which experimented a bit with form. Both a little more interesting.

Having said that, Departures made me think of my mother, it made me cry and only resorted to sentimentality in the last part of the film. It’s about a very good looking musician (Masahiro Motoki) who becomes an “encoffinator”, a "nokanshi", a professional who prepares the recently deceased for their funerals. The most interesting part of the film is the insights into Japanese traditions and also into contemporary culture. In traditional society it seems that one of the rituals is to wash the body of the dead person in front of the family. This is a highly ritualised event taking place in the tatami room with the kneeling members of the family in rows and the nokanshi at the front, slowly and methodically wiping the body, plugging the orifices and dressing the person in a fresh kimono.

It’s likely that this tradition is dying (sorry) away as the Japanese gradually take on the Western habit of whipping the body away quickly to the funeral parlour. I’m guessing about this after spending some time trying to research what is current in Japan. Departures implies that this is the case. (I found a good description of a Japanese funeral on the website Traditions and customs from all over the world. I also discovered that almost all descriptions of Japanese funerals come from the same source and are repeated word for word all over the web – one writer with a lot of clout.)

The lead actor developed the idea for the film while he was in India. Varanasi is a place where dying is front and centre and the rituals have both a spiritual and a pragmatic edge to them that has quite an impact. The bodies of dead people are placed on funeral pyres and burnt and it is not uncommon to see people bearing the wrapped dead body through the alley ways to the funeral ghat. It's often confronting but real. The film made me think about my mother; I didn’t see her after she died (through choice) and always feel ambivalent about that decision. Film director, Yojiro Takita films the nokanshi scenes slowly and beautifully though not everything is romantised; the first corpse that the fledging nokanshi deals with has been dead for two weeks and is not a pretty sight. It reminded me that I also saw Sunshine Cleaning this year, an American film that deals with the ways in which we manage cleaning up after deaths though this is not its central interest.

Writing in an online magazine Curator, Makoto Fujimura says:

“The Japanese have the ability, and the unwritten code of honor, to make all acts, however mundane, beautiful and refined. There’s no reason why they cannot apply the same principle to acting as they do to every other task. When I was coming back to the airport from Tokyo, I saw several elderly workers clean the elevator belts with sanitized towels because of the flu threat. They had developed the “art” of the belt cleaning, each with a distinctive style. Every subway announcer, Koshien (high school baseball) cheerleader, department store elevator operator, and gas station attendant all take pride in what they do and create unique signature to their “art.”
Japan is also a gift culture, where things are wrapped and presented beautifully. It is a country full of artful wax models of dishes served in restaurants (a welcome sight for gaijin visitors), and anything bought in the stores is wrapped carefully and diligently. So it is no surprise that there is such an art form of nokanshi, a delicate ritual of wrapping the dead.”

This is one of the most interesting things I’ve read about Departures. It connects with what I think of as the introverted nature of Japanese society; the way in which emotions are hidden away too. For example, we are given little idea that the nokanshi’s wife is unhappy in her new home until she discovers what her husband is really doing (she thought he worked in travel) and then she lets go with her grief and anger. Emotions are tightly wrapped; as tightly wrapped as the stiff hands of the dead bodies in the film. There is an artificial gloss on many things. Takita depicts this part of Japan as less glossy and more real. The bath-house, which is clearly slowly dying too, is shabby but comforting as is the place where the nokanshi and his wife live.

In an interview with Takita, he is asked about the location.
“The location should be in wild nature, since the theme relates to "death." I especially focused on snow. [Snow] sometimes looks so beautiful, but at other times, it makes life so difficult. Snow can be a symbol of the difficulty of life. Now, Japan is quite tired, both in Tokyo and in other local areas, in terms of the economy and other aspects. In such a situation, people tend to forget about important things that have been there. As you know, the theme [of the film] is "death," but I wanted to portray fragility and beauty that are fading away. So I selected the Shnai area in Yamagata prefecture for the location."
Fragility and beauty are fading away. In an interview with a contemporary nokanshi, Okuyama, some aspects of contemporary life are highlighted.
“The bodies sometimes reflect the social situation of the deceased. Last spring, Okuyama treated the bodies of many deceased people who had committed suicide by inhaling hydrogen sulfide gas they had created by mixing household chemicals. Last winter, meanwhile, the number of bodies of middle-aged men she dealt with increased. The deceased were dispatched workers who apparently had lost hope and killed themselves after being laid off from their companies, Okuyama said.”

Japan is changing rapidly – like all societies – and there are casualties.

Takita, who also made The Yen Family, doesn’t have quite the same touch as my favourite Japanese film maker Koreada. Departures is no match for a film like After Life. At the end, it succumbs to an unnecessary sentimentality and there’s probably one too many lingering glance. But is a film that takes you places and makes you think about important topics. And made me remember and cry over my mother, whose birthday is would have been on the 26th of October.

Blessed?

2009-09-15T19:50:00.000-07:00

Like several films I have seen this year, Blessed begins with images of people sleeping. The faces of the seven teenagers at rest, some in their own beds, one sprawled amongst a few sleeping bodies and two children who are asleep under a bridge. Watching, I thought how rarely I see anyone asleep except the cat. It’s a rare intimacy – the unguarded softened face at rest.

The central theme of this film is the connection between mothers and their children and this plays out in the division of the film. The opening half focuses on the children and is shot in tight close-ups. The latter half is called ‘Mothers’ and the camera angle widens; we see more of each family’s context, both literally and metaphorically.

I wanted to like this film. It’s set in the western suburbs of Melbourne though there are few actual markers of this landscape (Noise, released a couple of years ago, conveyed the physical landscape the west much more potently, as did the film My Year Without Sex, though what these film makers choose to show is quite different). So it’s set in the place I have lived the greater part of my life and focuses on the lives of teenagers. I’ve spent a lot of time with teenagers from the West. I was deeply interested in how filmmaker Ana Kokkinos would represent these things.

The theme is also powerful; Kokkinos talks about ‘that connection between them (mothers and children) is primal, so powerful, and no matter what shit’s going down, at the end of the day there’s that incredible capacity to return to the mother’s embrace.’ And there’s one extended scenes which shows this; involving the Miranda Otto character Bianca and her daughter Stacey. Stacey has been in trouble (I won’t describe what it is) and her mother opens the front door of their house to discover both her daughter and a policewoman. Later, as she shuts the door, she gives Stacey a complicit smile. “I did this once, she says”. It’s a response that should have come after a parental blast about bad behaviour but Bianca is half-pissed and not capable of reacting appropriately. Then later that night, Stacey opens the door of her mother’s bedroom, her mother lifts the doona and Stacey snuggles in next to her mum. Shit goes down, shit is forgiven. It feels real, this scene.

A lot of the film failed to persuade. I think two things were happening. The actors were just a tad too middle class in presentation (teenage girls with perfect skin, neutral middle class accents, delivering lines without the almost essential uplift at the end of each sentence – that badge of teenage girl uncertainty that haunts most kids I know. Drinking bourbon straight. No sign of even getting a bit giggly on it). I wasn’t convinced that they inhabited the same train line as I do. And the other problem with the film is that the large amount of intersecting plot lines means that we never develop a strong sense of any of the personalities. You could sum each character and what happens to them in one or two sentences without omitting much information. Not that this always matters. One of the best films I saw at MIFF this year was Treeless Mountain where there is a similar sparseness of information and plot development. It’s a film about the reverse issue to Blessed; about a mother who effectively abandons her very young children. But in the case of that film, we live through the pain of the young sisters by seeing events at their level, experiencing their attempts to survive and care for each other in a slow and careful script which allows the viewer to spend time with the character. Blessed felt like a gallery of semi-one dimensional “issues”.

The most interesting and believable character in the film is Rhonda (Frances O’Connor). Her young kids leave home and sleep rough for reasons which become obvious in the film. All her scenes are interesting but we find out so little about her that she seems short-changed. If I described what happens to her in the film, it would seem like a paragraph from the Herald Sun about no-hoper mothers and tragedies. Kokkinos is quoted as saying that the screenplay for the film would not hang together until she went back to the core of what attracted her in the first place: a powerful monologue in which single mother Rhonda describes her missing and neglected kids as her “blessings”. “Of all the words in the play, they resonated with me most the first time I saw it,” says Kokkinos. “If you can imagine that, as a filmmaker, there are a couple of key lines in a film that actually continue to hook you in and provide you with an emotional core to keep going, over years, no matter what.” It is a powerful moment in the film but the film goes nowhere with it. We get no further handle on Rhonda. Almost none of her behaviour is in sync with the notion that her children are her blessings yet we get little opportunity to understand why. She’s lost in a kind of film limbo and seems unfair.

I am biased. The films I have come to love emerge from the Neo-Neo Realism school of film-making. In a great article on this genre, writer A O Scott talks about the aftermath of 9/11 and other unsettling global events and what audiences therefore might be been looking for. He/she argues that, rather than necessarily wanting escapism as many pundits thought, "what if, at least some of the time, we feel an urge to escape from escapism? For most of the past decade, magical thinking has been elevated from a diversion to an ideological principle. The benign faith that dreams will come true can be hard to distinguish from the more sinister seduction of believing in lies. To counter the tyranny of fantasy entrenched on Wall Street and in Washington as well as in Hollywood, it seems possible that engagement with the world as it is might reassert itself as an aesthetic strategy. Perhaps it would be worth considering that what we need from movies, in the face of a dismaying and confusing real world, is realism.”
I guess that many people would argue that realism pervades Blessed. But none of the characters got the time they deserved on screen so they melted into a sort of working class pastiche. A O Scott describes a number of films which fall into the category of Neo-Neo Realism and goes on to say that they serve as an antidote to the wish-fulfilment films of Hollywood.

“Not because they offer grim counsels of despair or paint lurid tableaux of desperation but rather because they take what has always seemed seductively easy about moviemaking — the camera can show us the world — and make it look hard. Their characters undergo a painful process of disillusionment, and then keep going. The disappointment they encounter — the grit with which they face it, the grace with which it is conveyed — becomes, for the audience, a kind of exhilaration.”
The ambitious scope of Blessed allows for neither grit or grace to stick around for long.

Still life with scissors

2009-07-05T22:53:00.000-07:00

If I have a reputation for being difficult, it’s because I love the everyday and want to present it. In general people go to the movies precisely to escape the everyday.–Chantal Akerman

1975 was a big year – I finished school and Gough’s government came to an end. At the same time Chantal Akerman was releasing a film called Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles. A feminist film. At that time I owned a copy of The Female Eunuch though it was more for the look on my bookshelf than a well-thumbed text. I got into Greer a bit later than this. But I thought of myself as a feminist – and still do.

I saw Jeanne Dielman for the first time on Saturday night. I might not have gone if I’d realised that it was three and a half hours long but it was fabulous. It tracks the life of a widow over three days, at times seemingly in real time, and with about 15 minutes of dialogue in the entire film. Enticing? Oui. (It was set in Belgium and described as a masterpiece of French minimalist cinema. In fact I think every film maker should see it for the quality it has of being experiential cinema. We are forced to endure the tedium of Jeanne’s life as she is living it. We become attuned to small changes in her domestic routine as harbingers of a kind of breakdown. And even though there is one major dramatic event in the film it does not linger as the talking point or provider of residual images. What does linger are the long takes of Jeanne making meat loaf, endlessly pushing and prodding the pink mince until it resembles a large and horrible visceral thing (If ever something was going to send me into a vegetarian state, it would be that scene), or the scene of her washing, endlessly, compulsively or the scene of her sitting in a chair waiting for nothing. For a long time. For a very long time cinematically. We are used now to relentless action as the mode of telling a story; this film shows another way.

Jeanne is widowed and prostitutes herself by day to make enough money to support herself and her almost grown son. Her life constructed and maintained with immense care and precision; as if a light left on inadvertently or a door left ajar will bring everything undone. It’s a film about a woman trapped in the home; trapped by financial poverty and by a kind of limited horizon that seems to be the fate of many women of that time. It reminded me of the flip side of Mad Men, the TV series now playing. All those wives at home going quietly mad. Some 2009 critics have referenced the film Revolutionary Road as a new print of Jeanne Dielman came out about the same time as Revolutionary Road. It’s not a film I liked much, I found it emotionally cold; I felt nothing for the characters. Jeanne Dielman works in a much stronger way because the film forces the viewer to sit with the tedium and pain, the quiet bleakness, the existential meaninglessness and loneliness of the life of main character. It forces you to be in the film, not to just watch which is what it felt like with the Wheelers in RR. One reviewer contrasts the films really well - (not a fan of Sam Mendez either). Kenji Fujishima describes it as “Akerman’s refusal to present easy explanations for her predicament” in contrast to Sam Mendez (in Revolutionary Road) “predictably pins it all on the suburbs and on stifling social codes regarding marriage.”

It has been described as a ‘still life film”. Scott Foundas, writing in LA Weekly, said
“ It is also about repetition and routine as a justification for existence, and
how such things might drive someone mad without anyone realizing it, least of all the person herself. That it was all told from a woman’s point of view, at a historical moment that was not particularly robust for women either as subjects or makers of films, sealed the movie’s status as a classic — albeit one that has been nearly impossible to see for the past three decades. “There was a lot about Jeanne Dielman that I didn’t understand when I wrote it,” Akerman told me in a 2004 interview. “I had a script that was quite precise, but I didn’t even know before I started the first few shots that it was going to be a long movie. After two or three days, I said to the actress, ‘You know, it’s going to be a very long movie.’ But it was not planned.””

The woman who introduced the film described it as a masterpiece of the French minimalist cinema. I know little about this. And there’s quite a bit on the web about her film making techniques including a long essay, written in the 70s by Jayne Loader. It says (the essay) as much about the concerns and language of the times as it does about the film and is a provocative read. Some of it is about technique:
“The most striking formal technique in JEANNE DIELMAN is Akerman's use of the static camera. We see Jeanne's life as if it were a painting which we have all the time in the world to study. Thus we are not manipulated by dollies in or out of space that force us to focus on some particular point of action, or by changing camera angles which hurtle us up or down emotionally. Akerman has said that she saw no reason to move the camera in her film, and for the most part I agree with her: her character's actions speak for themselves.
Since Jeanne is the heart of the film, this is expressed visually by her placement in the still frame. She is centered precisely within it, and unless she moves from one room to another, Akerman not only holds the camera steady but holds the shot as well. There are no cuts except when absolutely necessary, and Jeanne is almost always on screen. Akerman's cinema focuses our attention on her smallest gestures, gestures that reveal character but would be lost in a more flamboyant film: a knife that almost slips when a potato is peeled, a light turned off unnecessarily, a facial expression of disquiet or of frustration, the curious act of making coffee in a thermos in the morning for drinking at lunchtime. The effect of such details, repeated and ritualized, is cumulative. Slowly the portrait is pieced together.

Amazingly, Akerman was only 25 when she made this film. I am in awe of her achievement and her courage and will finish with this quote about it: “Because Akerman's scenario and her realization of it are so provocatively heterogeneous, and because the interpretations of the film's place in the canon of great cinema are so varied (and also because Akerman's editing rhythms and pacing are as methodical and unhurried as Stanley Kubrick's), some have called it the "domestic 2001."

The burbs

2009-06-25T23:59:00.000-07:00

The burbs – it’s a naff term isn’t it. Been thinking about the nature of suburban living lately – prompted by The Slap and by the film My Year Without Sex. “Suburban” – it’s onomatopoeic, I think. I read The Slap a few months ago and then my bookclub discussed it. It was interesting for what it brought up for most of us – there was common view that the characters were awful, they were indicative of the changing times but did not reflect the characteristics of the people that we hang round with. I sat there feeling middle aged – it’s the kind of spin I would have despised when I was younger but have to watch it coming off my tongue so readily. Is The Slap about generational change or class? Or ethnicity? Or gender? I thought it began with great promise but lost some of the gloss about half way through. The women characters seemed like a pastiche of the glossy women you sometimes see in The Age, women in their late 30s with hair extensions and a permanent diet. Not quite real. The men on the other hand seemed entirely believable. And pretty awful with the exception of Ritchie and the indigenous man who seems to be there to fill up the ethnic diversity numbers in the book. An indigenous Muslim. Tick two boxes.

What I connected with was the setting. These characters come from the middle ring of suburbs: Northcote, Hampton. People who’ve done OK materially and are aiming to hang on to every bit of it. The kind of people that my sister hangs out with. They have pools and undisclosed sources of wealth. We joke about these coming from drugs but the sources are more likely to be more banal. It makes my sister envious. These people are competitive and use their children as shining little examples of their upward mobility. They attend private schools and toddler yoga. There’s a brittleness to this kind of existence. And in Tsiolkas’ book, a meanness of spirit. The text is a hugely energetic rampage through the suburbs and through this meanness. I don’t see it in the circle of people I know and maybe that means that I live in a bubble. One of the bookclub members, a woman who has a lot to do with schools, said she was at a meeting of principals a couple of years ago and their main issue was that students are coming to school “under-parented” (to quote her). Their parents are giving them fewer boundaries , spending more time working, and want to be friend rather than adult. Her take was that they were relying on schools to do the tough love. This isn’t necessarily what I see amongst my friends though the extended independent/dependent relationship that kids have into their 20s might be indicative of this.

I could write more about The Slap (the sex they are having doesn’t sound like the sex that a lot of my married friends are having) but I might go to My Year Without Sex, a film which is also set in Melbourne suburbia; albeit a slightly less middle class suburbia. It’s a quirky little film, a lighter take than Watts’ previous film Look Both Ways. Funny. Light. Unsubstantial.

Three things about it. The best scene happens early. The main character Natalie (Sascha Horler) is in hospital hovering in and out of a coma. While she is likely to live, it’s a tense bedside scene, the whole family around her. Her son is transfixed by the television screen. We see him with the earphones on, his face tense; he’s watching the Western Bulldogs at the 30 minute mark of a tight game. He’s holding his breath. I’ve been there – in that moment, forgetting to breathe, everything hinging round a kick at goal. Life or death. For him, like his mother – both in life or death moments. Nicely done. Ordinary but utterly important.

They have so much stuff. In a more heavy handed way, this film is a critique of suburban materialism. They exist in family squalor; made more pronounced by the crappy quality of everything they own. They are swamped by toys, clothes, furniture, accoutrements of modern life. It contrasts with the minimalism of the more wealthy extended family that they hang out with – if you’re richer, your stuff is not as overwhelming.

There’s a fascinating spiritual question embedded in this film. It’s prompted me to ask all my religious mates whether they expect to see me once we are both dead. Clearly some of them haven’t thought of this before which is interesting in itself. Worth seeing for the gentle conversation about the need (or not) for spirituality in the suburbs.

My Year Without Sex is about decent people trying to have a go. Like the latest film I’ve seen, Sunshine Cleaning. Not a lot to say about that film. I liked it. Quirky. Good characters trying to make a go of it. Unlike any of the characters in The Slap apart from the teenagers and the Muslims. Does it matter if you don’t like any of the people in a text? I don’t think so but it clearly matters to some; for most of the people who’ve hated The Slap, I think this has been their primary reason. They feel infected by the meanness. Maybe that means that it is a successful novel?

Gomorrah and the doings in Ascot Vale

2009-06-24T22:38:00.000-07:00

I am a big Sopranos fan but have long thought it belonged with The West Wing as a study of power and family rather than a focus on organised crime. I think this is because we grow into a kind of affection for Tony Soprano which is at odds with what he really does that is brutal and ugly and evil. Seeing the Italian film Gomorrah has confirmed my thoughts about that. Gomorrah focuses on the ordinary people who willingly or not are caught up in the workings of organised crime in contemporary Naples. It’s about evil, entrapment, poverty and corruption, following five stories of people who, unlike Tony, have little power and authority. One film critic describes it like this: “Gomorrah is the mob movie as postapocalyptic warning, shot with dark precision inside dingy and overcrowded apartment complexes whose crumbling concrete and peeling paint make a mockery of the beautiful landscape outside” and in the New York Times: “no dark jokes; no catchy pop songs; no film allusions; no winking fun; no thrilling violence”. The violence is there all the time in the background, like a horrible sort of tinnitus, not in the forefront of the action.

Gomorrah works on a suburban level. The characters we meet are the kids on the street in Sunshine, the guy who runs the sweated workshop in Maidstone, the collector for the organised crime who operates out of a café in Union Rd Ascot Vale. The café where I buy good home-made tagliatelli to cook at home. In the film, we see the “western suburbs” style housing commission area of Naples. It’s grimy and claustrophobic; everyone seems to know everyone’s business. Unlike Melbourne, these areas of Naples are really run down; people are living in considerable squalor.

The film intertwines the stories of about five sets of characters. My favourite character is the master tailor. He is a middle aged man who has great skills within his trade but, for inexplicable circumstances, is running a sweatshop of workers who are running up designer clothes that will be sold on at very high prices. At one stage, we see a TV shot of Scarlett Johansson wearing one of the gowns. In moonlighting for a Chinese businessman, the tailor’s skills are finally appreciated by the workers he is teaching to make couture clothes but we as an audience are rightly filled with a sense of doom as he goes about his work. He is an ordinary man, attracted by the idea of making more money; the beauty of the film is that we meet him mid story with no idea of how he became involved with the sweatshop business. It is normal.

Two teenage characters help carry the film; they are gangster wannabes who carry out a serious of crimes in defiance of the local crime overlords. They are hapless and stupid boys, full of machismo and adolescence. I’ve taught heaps of them. Some of the kids I taught in the west have ended up in organised crime; some were young apprentices of their older brothers, uncles and dads while they were still at school. A natural kind of trajectory for them, like the kids in Naples. But most of the kids I taught had more options.

Here in Victoria, I think we see organised crime as something that happens to other people; it enables us to follow the stories of the Morans with amusement rather than fear. The Underbelly series has increased the theatricality of what is essentially a world of boguns and lowlifes. In Gomorrah, it seems to overlay life for everyone. Roger Ebert describes it like this:

“You watch with growing dread. This is no life to lead. You have the feeling the men at the top got there laterally, not through climbing the ladder of promotion. The Camorra seems like a form of slavery, with the overlords inheriting their workers. The murder code and its enforcement keep them in line: They enforce their own servitude.Did the book and the movie change things? Not much, I gather. The film offers no hope. I like gangster movies. "

The Godfather" is one of the most popular movies ever made -- most beloved, even. I like them as movies, not as history. We can see here they're fantasies. I'm reminded of mob
bosses like Frank Costello walking into Toots Shor's restaurant in that
fascinating documentary "Toots." Everyone was happy to see him: Jackie Gleason, Joe
DiMaggio, everyone. At least they knew who he was. The men running the Camorra
are unknown even to those who die for them."

I was struck by one thing particularly. Three cultures appear in the film: Italians, Columbians and Chinese. In each case its a bunch of guys sitting around, drinking coffee or smoking drugs (the Columbians). Deals are being done but there is a sense of leisure. Time to talk and chew the fat, eat good food. The women are elsewhere. Not running organsied crime. Occasionally the recipients of the proceeds of organsised crime but more often the widows and mothers worried about their kids. Would the world be different if women were running things? Would there be a Gomorrah? I don't know but I'm grateful I'm not a poor woman in Naples.

In its lack of sensationalism and hype, this is a terrific film.

Despair

2009-05-31T21:20:00.000-07:00

About a quarter of the way into Synecdoche, I had to make a decision. Whether to go with it or not. It makes demands of the viewer in a similar way to the film You, the living. The scene which triggered this feeling is one of the less successful ones; a woman is being shown around a house by a real estate agent as smoke is billowing from its walls. Silly. Surreal. Kaufman, the writer-director on drugs. A lot of people will describe this film as a pretentious wank. And while I think it’s a head – job, it’s way more interesting than the pretensions on the surface. What it is in fact is a journey into the psyche – the psyche of the main character, Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Cotard has been abandoned by his wife who wishes he was dead. (”I wish he was dead; it would be cleaner”, she tells their therapist as he sits there, blank-faced, numb.) Shortly after, she takes their young daughter and goes to live in Germany. Cotard is ill, ageing and filled with despair. He is a play director which gives Kaufman the opportunity to set a fiction within the fictions – or a set of fictions. In reality, what he is exploring is the rubbish which fills our heads. We are privy to Cotard’s paranoias, fantasies and self-talk. It’s done really cleverly through the play within the play construct so Cotard has a set of actors playing himself and other key people in his life. Through them, we see his imaginings, his preferred dialogue, possible scenarios written and re-written. At times too, there is a voice in his ear which helps him decide what to do. It is a film about Everyman and about one man, with despair the prevailing motif. Once again I am watching a film about an ageing man.

I think it’s a really brave film because it’s trying to depict what happens in the brain. Anyone’s brain. The reviewer in The Times describes it well:
“There is some bitter, anguished humour here, but the overriding tone is a deep, aching melancholy. There are numerous possible interpretations of the film, but the constant in all possible readings is the film’s immutable sadness. Does it work? Not always.Kaufman’s ambition occasionally overshoots his skill as a director. But this is a curious and bleakly beautiful piece of work that rewards repeated viewings.”

The title, Synecdoche, is emblematic of the film; hard to say, pretentious, yet trying to say something of real meaning. It means an image in which the part stands for the whole - for example, "head of cattle" meaning cow, or "crown" meaning king. The part is emblematic of the whole. Cotard‘s headspace is symbolic of what is true for all of us, his huge, mad, pasteboard world stands for the real world, is part of it, is superimposed on to it, and finally melts into it.

I also saw Samson and Delilah yesterday. Two films about despair in the one day. They both open in the same way, someone waking up and getting out of bed. In Synecdoche, Hoffman is blearily surrounded by ordinary domesticity, by the demands of the alarm clock and a daughter and telephone. His entry into the day is slow and tired. In the Australian film, we see Samson wake up into the curtain-muted morning light of an outback morning. His bedding is dishevelled and he gropes for a shirt to put on before he gets out of bed. He then gropes for a containner of petrol to sniff. Good morning Samson. Its really hard to watch. Like Hoffman, Samson is slow to start the day. This contrasts with the outdoor waking of Delilah and her nana. Delilah more purposefully and immediately tends to her grandmother’s needs. It’s outback Australia, somewhere on a small remote community surrounded by the beautiful red rock of the area.

Delilah is the one who does the tending in the film which otherwise lacks tenderness. It is bleak in the extreme. After it had finished, my friend Naomi and I talked for a long time about it. The depicted options for indigenous people are few. Down the creek with petrol. On a community with little to do and little (depicted) connection or tenderness. Being exploited by Western art dealers. Getting God. Or getting right away from anyone else. The characters are shown as having little or no agency (with the exception of Delilah, who may get hers from God). I wonder how indigenous people feel about this kind of positioning. The dysfunctionality is the primary motif.

I don’t know what to do with this film. David Stratton gave it 5 stars and described it as “one of the finest films ever made in this country”. It’s definitely about the most important topic that we are likely to see on Australians screens and I think it’s really well made. I especially liked the lack of dialogue though I’ve never known teenagers to say as little as these two. But, and this is not the film’s fault, we are left with the certain knowledge that the film could be a documentary; that it illustrates the reality of life for lots of indigenous kids and that every few people know what to do about this. It’s bleak. Blogger Jane Simpson says:
“David Stratton's review is entitled "A world beyond words" and words are what's absent in the film. Everyday chat, everyday laughter, everyday interaction, doing things together, all the things that make life on outstations much less bleak than the portrayal here. And the family connections are missing - are Delilah and Samson two lost children without parents, sisters, brothers, cousins, who no one looks out for? Or indeed without fellow petrol-sniffers?”

The thing that happened to me as I watched it was a kind of splitting – which often happens when I watch films about other cultures. I’m more tolerant of values that are at odds with mine; I sit there and think “Well that’s their culture”. I’m prepared to tolerate weirdnesses, bad singing (Tulpan) and other little things. In the instance of this film, it played out in this way. The first part of the film begins with Samson’s courtship of Delilah. She is not interested in him. She makes this clear. She’s not playing games; she repeatedly pushes him away. On only one occasion during the initial part of the film (she buys him food) does she show any positive feeling. She knows that he is trouble. But I think we are positioned to want them to be together (even through their names) even though Samson is going to be nothing but trouble for Delilah. Jane Simpson’s blog entry sums up my misgivings about this aspect of the film in this analysis of the ending:
“The end is a fairytale ending, perhaps a fantasy of male hope - that a beautiful young woman would leave her own car and gun to go off with a petrol-sniffer, come back and find the car and gun still working, that she would have her own outstation, and would then dedicate herself to looking after the brain-damaged, wheel-chair-bound petrol-sniffer on her own. Julie Rigg takes this as the commitment demanded by love. I take it as obsession. Good outcome for Samson, lousy for Delilah.”

Having said that, Warwick Thornton is a very talented filmmaker. I loved his short film Nanna. The actors in Samson and Delilah are great. I loved the small surprises in the narrative. It‘s a really important film. I hope it does really well. It‘s more worthy of attention than Synecdoche – one being a cerebral head-job and one almost a documentary. About us. Australians. And both about despair.

Homage to Marilyn

2009-05-21T23:34:00.000-07:00

Not Monroe but French. The writer of The Womens’ Room. Two books had a profound impact on me in the 70s. The World According to Garp and The Women’s Room. It’s a funny combination but they do have some things in common. Marilyn French died recently. I bet she had a significant impact on a lot of women. When my friend Jane and I went walking the other day, she mentioned her death and the impact that she had on her life as well. Her novel made me aware of aspects of my own life, especially the relationship I was then in (in the 70s) and ultimately I broke up with Geoff as a result of this awareness. Marilyn French helped embed the feminism I had; she had a greater impact than Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir on me. I wonder what The Womens’ Room would be like now?

Treacherous ground, the relationship

2009-04-30T20:56:00.000-07:00

“The penis, in the contemporary novel, has been a mighty matter, looming large.” I wish so much that I had written this sentence but it was that mighty writer Colm Toibin, commenting on Ian McEwan’s novel On Chesil Beach. Toibin goes on to say “Who will forget the narrator of The Bell Jar seeing an adult penis for the first time and being both fascinated and repelled? (‘The only thing I could think of was turkey neck and turkey gizzards and I felt very depressed.’)”, This London Review of Books review is well worth a read just for the extended riff about the penis.

It wasn’t the penis that got my attention in the novel (funnily enough). This is a novel which pivots on the first night of a marriage. Set in 1962, it's about Florence and Edward. “They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible. But it is never easy. “ What interested me was Florence’s lack of interest in sex. Not just lack of interest but a feeling of revulsion; when Edward starts to kiss her, she contemplates throwing up.

I know that it’s possible to go for extended times without sex and without thinking of sex. (Only one of these characteristics applies to me.) Libido is a rare topic of conversation with my friends but sometimes we talk about it. Usually in an embarrassed way; no one really knows what is “normal”. Do you like sex? Is it good with your partner? Are there things you’d like to do? Have done to you? Does the other person want it more or less than you do? How do you manage the imbalance? Who do you lust after? What turns you on? For a theme that is explored at such length in the media, it is really hard to talk about. (And hard often to talk about with your lover or partner too but that's probably a whole other piece of writing.)

Florence finds it hard to talk about. She feels abnormal. I found it strange to read about; its not something I can imagine easily – the extreme distaste she has for sex. I wanted to read more, to find out why, and this provides some of the dramatic tension of the novel. At first I thought the writing was a little coy. Mark Mordue, writing in the SMH, reframes the coyness: “Initially, McEwan's writing is restrained and formal, a quintessentially British tone befitting the time in which it is set. One thinks of old BBC radio plays and "hears" the story being told. It would be easy to mistake this as tame fare indeed but for a sly humour and confidence percolating beneath McEwan's voice: “This was not a good moment in the history of English cuisine, but no one much minded at the time except visitors from abroad. The formal meal began, as so many did then, with a slice of melon decorated by a glazed cherry… It would not have crossed Edward’s mind to have ordered a red.”” The coy tone is deliberate; it reflects the times, the characters and the seriousness with which they are about to embark on sex, and on intimacy.

Because this is what I think the book is really about – not so much sex as marriage and what it means to make this commitment. What might be lost in the process as well as gained. There is a really graphic description of being kissed; “With his lips clamped firmly on hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved round inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anaesthesia. This cavity was where her own tongue usually strayed when she was lost in thought. By association, it was more like an idea than a location, a private, imaginary place rather than a hollow in her gum, and it seemed peculiar to her that another tongue should be able to go there too. It was the hard tapering tip of this alien muscle, quiveringly alive, that repelled her.” (p29) Of course this is about sex but I think it’s also about the process of marrying someone and living with them. Florence is a very controlling, independent personality who has not experienced the joys of intimacy (her family has not provided warmth or contact). The idea of intimacy, and perhaps losing something of herself in the process, scares Florence as much as the physicalities of sex. And the ending bears this out; you have to allow people into the hidden gaps to truly make contact. It’s a risk but the consequence of avoiding risk is borne out in what happens to both Edward and Florence.

What makes me think that McEwen wanted to go beyond sex is the title. He is fond of the single, life-changing incident (almost all his novels pivot round a single incident) but this novel has a very deliberate title which I think takes us further than the single failed sexual encounter of E and F. I googled the beach after I’d finished the book; it’s a really striking piece of coastline. A long narrow spit (18 miles?) with a lagoon on the land side and the sea on the other. Rocky. Treacherous. McEwen said that he kept some rocks from the beach on his desk while he was writing it (and protests after he admitted this meant that he took them back!) Chesil Beach is a storm beach developed by gravel ridges being driven onshore. It was described like this by one poet:
“Twern't a sea - not a bit of it -
twer the great sea hisself rose up level like
and come on right over the ridge and all,
like nothing in this world"

I think McEwen is thinking about the beach as a metaphor for being in a relationship. One reviewer described the spit as being the line between post-war, conservative Britain (the land and lagoon) and the tempestuous changes of the 60’s (the sea) and while its true that this is a strong theme in the book, it’s a bit lumpen as a metaphor. (And if I was being really crude, you could read this bit of verse and look at how McEwen describes Edward’s premature ejaculation – a great piece of writing). However, I think he chose the landscape deliberately to make a point; it could have been set in Torquay or a host of less interesting locations.

A lot of the writing is very fine and that makes the book worth reading, whatever you think it's about: “The garden vegetation rose up, sensuous and tropical in its profusion, an effect heightened by the grey, soft light and a delicate mist drifting in from the sea, whose steady motion of advance and withdrawal made sounds of gentle thunder, then sudden hissing against the pebbles.” And finally, worth a comparison – Philip Larkin’s poem, Annus Mirabilus.

Let the right one in

2009-04-19T19:05:00.000-07:00

“The question of what comprises a ‘good childhood’ in current times has generated significant debate and media attention. While there has always been debate about children, today it is especially salient because of the fast pace of change in information and communication technology and because of the perceived pressures of a consumer-based media culture. According to the charity The Children’s Society, which has conducted a major inquiry into childhood, children’s overall well-being is being endangered by excessive individualism in a competitive modern age. It suggests that the increase in the belief that the “prime duty of the individual is to make the most of her own life, rather than contribute to the good of others” has tilted British culture too far “towards the individual pursuit of private interest and success” with several consequences for children:
- high rates of family break-up
- teenage unkindness
- unprincipled advertising
- too much competition in education
- acceptance of income inequality.”

Been reading this today for work. It’s a paper from Futurelab about curriculum and innovation. I’m always a bit suspicious of the good old days argument. Were we or or parents and grandparents more alive to the good of others? I’m not sure. (I think my father’s generation was better at saving, at “doing without”, but that’s another matter). I was thinking about teenage unkindness this week in the context of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In. Luke Davies, in The Monthly, correctly calls this a “gloriously strange and haunted poem of a film”. The screenplay is written by John Lindqvist who also wrote the best selling novel and the film is made by Tomas Alfredson.

Philip French from the Guardian wrote this apropos of the film: "Three of Scandinavia's greatest artists, the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, his friend the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch and the Danish director Carl Dreyer were fascinated by the subject. Virtually all Strindberg heroines are vampires. Munch's most famous painting after The Scream is his Vampyr, while Dreyer's Vampyr is arguably the greatest of all horror films."

I’ve had several encounters with the vampire genre over the years; the sensationally scary Salem’s Lot (Stephen King), the languid and hip, overhyped Anne Rice novels and more recently The Historian ( Elizabeth Kostova). I remember lying in bed in my parents house reading Stephen King scared out of my wits with the dark glass of the night window only inches away and the possibility of vampires just outside. That was 30 years ago – other things scare me more now. What was scary in Let the Right One In was the depiction of adolescence because that is what the film is fundamentally about. Oskar is 12, a lonely bullied boy who is disconnected from his divorced parents. Like most teenagers, he inhabits a little world of his own. He meets Eli, a dishevelled “12 year old” street girl of a vampire.

The vampire riff works fine as a straight narrative but underneath it is a metaphor for the disturbances of adolescence. Blood. Changing bodies. Uncontrollable events and urges. Stuff that you want to do that is forbidden. Desire. Danger. Fitting in or more usually – not fitting in. Loss of innocence – whatever this means in our society. Disconnection and loneliness – the film deals with these threads so well. The violence of adolescence is played out in all sorts of ways in this film including through Oskar who we meet when he is stabbing a tree with a knife (which is handily standing in for one of his classmates).

It’s also beautifully filmed. Luke Davies says it better than I could: “the stillness, - of framing, of pacing – catches us unawares, in the sense that, as in all good ghost stories, we are lulled unsuspecting into that place where the real and the surreal become interchangeable”. The setting is both banal – suburban Sweden, an apartment block, a school, and really beautiful – crisp snow, slender birches, a white dog against the snow. (A white dog against the snow discovering a body hefted upside down from a tree dripping blood – yes it is a vampire film.) That’s the other thing I loved about the film; Eli is by turns kind of fetching street kid and mouth covered in blood, pretty grisly. It looks real and a bit grotesque. And vulnerable. These two, Eli and Oskar, are kind to each other in this world of teenage unkindness and adult neglect. The film has a great ending. It makes you re-think some of the earlier scenes in new ways. The narrative is left open and ambiguous like the character of Eli. Lovely work.

"How am I blest in thus discovering thee!”

2009-04-15T00:27:00.000-07:00

Been thinking about the word Elegy after seeing the film of that name. John Donne was really the Elegy man and this thought sent me googling the connection. The first one I came across was Elegy XX To his mistress going to bed. Like a lot of Donne’s poetry, it’s about making the most of the limited time we have. In his world view, its best spent in bed with a lover (apart from the time taken with wondering what happens after you die). Sex and death weighed heavily on the man. I liked re-discovering him- here's a snippet from that poem.

“Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann'd,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!”

The word elegy is more usually used to mean a song of mourning and perhaps Donne is thinking of the ephemeralness of this relationship and the frailties of the human bodies, both his and his lovers. As the title of the recent film, it is less harsh than the title of the novel it represents “The Dying Animal”. Roth’s book and this film is about David Kupesh, a man in his 60s who falls in love with a much younger woman played by Penelope Cruz.

The opening of the film shows him in his New York apartment quoting from Tolstoy: "The biggest surprise in a man's life is old age." This quote has the kind of truth about it that made me want to agree out loud in the cinema. Age has been much on my mind lately, not just my own but the people around me. I thought about my father who seems constantly bemused by the treachery of his body. On the weekend he said to me “I used to be an athlete; I could run 100 yards in X (I think he said 11 but this cannot be right) seconds.” He can’t understand where this fitness has gone, what has happened to him. It’s unbearably sad. And perhaps that means that what happens to Kupesh in the film is sad but not tragic (in comparison with my father who is 80 and tragically sad.) After all, Kupesh has the beautiful Cruz fall in love with him.

Kupesh is something of a tosser but the universality of the aging process is the compelling part of this film. It’s the third film I‘ve seen about aging men this year which perhaps tells us something about the demographics of current film producers. And audiences. But ultimately I had to agree partly with Monalah Dargis in the New York Times: “There’s not a hair out of place here or an emotion. It’s as if Ms. Coixet (the director) had tried to quiet the howls of a dying animal.” I thought the film would end about 20 minutes before it did; there is a twist in the plot that shifts our perspective somewhat. What the twist raised for me is the question – do we feel more keenly for the really beautiful? Would the impact be the same if the plot twist was applied to Kupesh’s older lover? (A woman who I identified with quite strongly). Would that have made the story more interesting? Made us forget the twee beach love scenes that populate the early part of the film?

Cruz plays the role as a cipher; unknowable in her beauty. This tease of the audience is set up quite early when Kupesh first sees her – she is carrying a copy of Roland Barthes “The Pleasures of the Text”. And Kupesh’s friend says something along the lines of the unknowability of the truly beautiful woman; it is a complete distraction. I don’t think that Mr Donne would have agreed but he was truly a renaissance man. Head and heart. Go John. He was up for it – the howl of a dying animal in a way that this film isn’t quite. Re-reading Donne's words, there's a robustness and energy that is never felt in the film; the Kupesh character is way too restrained and melancholy. at one stage, Kupesh compares the Cruz character to a painting by Goya and the relationship has that element; a woman reclining to be admired, a woman looking lovely on the beach, a man looking sad in a darkened apartment. Somehow the blood has left this film. I'm going back to Donne for a bit more sex and death... And maybe Philip Roth. And definitely John Updike.

Ego integrity and despair

2009-02-22T19:08:00.000-08:00

I like listening to Radiotherapy on RRR on Sunday mornings. It’s a bunch of doctors chewing over medical stuff and sometimes they do film reviews. I don’t know if it’s the same reviewer every time but he often comes at things from a psychoanalytic POV – often quite a different take on films. Yesterday he reviewed Gran Torino which he and I both liked. He talked about Erik Erikson’s work on the 8 stages of man – the last one is Ego Integrity vs. Despair - old age. “Some handle death well. Some can be bitter, unhappy, dissatisfied with what they accomplished or failed to accomplish within their life time. They reflect on the past, and conclude at either satisfaction or despair.” (Wikipedia)

This had huge resonance for me because I think this is where my father is at; reflecting on his life and in his case, I think he fluctuates between the two Erikson categories of despair and ego integrity. In the case of Gran Torino, it’s Clint Eastwood who plays an angry, lonely old bastard, a man who has just lost his wife and who has the slightest of relationships with his family. I’m not going to write at length about the film; I liked it despite the fact that most of the plot is a basic redemption plot - dysfunctional person is led to a better, happier life almost in spite of himself. It is also about the Hmong community in the USA, a community I know a little about because of the book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down. While Gran Torino is not a great film, the baddies (Hmong gangsters) look like total baddies and it is largely though not entirely predictable, it was oddly satisfying seeing this old curmudgeon gradually accept friendship even though he never lost the surface elements of racism. I really enjoyed it. We love seeing bad guys get what they deserve. And Eastwood obviously had a lot of fun with the non-PC aspects of the character he plays - there are some very funny moments. He is great – and brave – he looks his age. Which is old.

I thought of the film gain yesterday after watching The Wrestler which I thought was great. Mickey Rourke was playing a man at the end of his wrestling career, held together by steroids, bandages and headlines from the glory years of his character, “Randy the Ram”. His life is crap: trailer park trash, he’s lonely, broke and damaged. Like Eastwood, he has fucked up relations with the only family he has, his daughter. It’s a stretch applying the Erikson stage to it because Rourke’s character is, I think, meant to be in his fifties but steroid abuse and the damages perpetuated by wrestling have really aged him and one of the events in the film causes him to want to change his life. Rourke is really fabulous. It’s painful watching him try to connect with the lap-dancer character played by Marissa Tomei. He is embarrassingly gauche and shambling with the Tomei character Cassie/Pam, as he also is with his daughter. The Cassie/Pam character has a twofold purpose in the film; she represents new possibilities for Randy and her own life parallels his – they are both struggling with jobs that require a specific and damaging kind of performance that is at odds with the “real” or regular lives that other people live. Both have a performance persona, they frock up (or down in Tomei’s case), they play for the punters and suffer humiliations as a result. (One of the best scenes in the film shows the small cohort of deadbeat wrestlers seated at card tables in a community hall, selling videos (not DVDs) of past glories and signing autographs for the meagre numbers of fans that trawl through this bleak and wintery town)

I can’t do justice to the treatment of wrestling in the film. It is remarkable. The wrestling scenes are violent and theatrical and there were segments in the film which were hard to sit through even though I watched knowing that it was all about performance. Like lap-dancing. The film avoids predictability; I thought it was great. In an interview conducted by James Rocchi, director Aronofsky credited a 1957 Charles Mingus song "The Clown," an instrumental piece with a poem read over the music about a clown who accidentally discovers the bloodlust of the crowds and eventually kills himself in performance, as a major source of inspiration for the movie.

The toy soldiers of our emotional armoury

2009-02-08T21:33:00.000-08:00

I liked this description of childhood by novelist Craig Sherbourne. He was writing about Sonya Hartnett's new book. I once upset her at a Writers Forum by suggesting that she should write for adults; that she was in some way limiting what she was capable of by doing the YA thing. I didn't express myself very well and she took umbrage on behalf of all teenagers. I think she has now found her adult voice – I really like her writing. This is what Craig said.

“If we didn’t have childhoods we’d be much better people. We’d start out as grown-ups innocent as lambs. We wouldn’t have behind us all those early years of practising vices: greed, duplicity, cruelty, bullying, indolence, vandalism, bullshitting, cronyism, hypocrisy, selfishness, violence. Childhood is where we hone these skills. If by age 14 we haven’t learned how to manipulate our loved ones, we’re backward and doomed to live at the mercy of others. Parents, siblings, schoolmates, schoolteachers – there’s always one we’ve got a crush on and torture with flirting – are the toy soldiers with which we practise emotional warfare.”
Bleak hey? You can read more in The Monthly. My friend Jane and I spent part of yesterday talking about how lucky we were to have the childhoods we have. We both reckon we have less baggage than lots of others because we were much loved and quite well parented… Better tell Dad before I kill him – he is tormenting me at present…
Craig said some other interesting things about Sonya - he reckons she is a hedgehog style writer "Many books, same story", every novel is the "unpeeling of every layer of that vision". I think he's right - wonder how Sonya will respond...

All class

2009-02-05T20:54:00.000-08:00

If I landed on Mars in a version of a Martian secondary school I would be able to teach. This is comforting. I’ve kind of known this anyway, since I had to entertain 200 Years 11 and 12 Chinese students for an hour in a hall in Yunnan province but nice to have the confirmation. I went to see the film The Class on the weekend. The French title is better: “Between the walls”. This title references the small, intense, claustrophobic world which is the essence of the teaching experience. As an adult, it can be lonely and frustrating but also intimate. Director Cantet creates the sense of frustration really well, especially in the first half of the film. The teacher, played by the guy who wrote the book which underpins the film, a man who IS a teacher, is trying to teach some grammar. It’s boring, not pitched at where the kids are at and, as the kids point out, seemingly irrelevant. It’s high culture, formal speech. All English teachers have been there at some time; “Why do we need to know this?” As a viewer, it’s incredibly hard to endure. It’s like being in the classroom. All the teachers in the audience (and there were lots – all my age, daggy shorts, ill-fitting T shirts, little white middle aged stick legs and a paunch or three) were aching to shout “Stop! There are better ways of doing this!”

I was thrown back into the tussle that teaching can be; the tussle for control, order, engagement, forward progress. The way momentum can shift so fast to knock you off balance. The callousness of teenagers. The smell of blood. It can be pretty primal. Francois, the teacher, doesn’t have much fun. This film is about as real a narrative about the job as any I’ve seen.

The second half of the film focuses on a student in trouble. It’s more dramatic but no less real. I have seen teachers escalate trouble, intentionally and by accident, about a thousand times in the 19 years I was a teacher. And I’ve done it myself. Probably more than I want to remember. Easy to critique from the back of the room but you try being the one up the front with 25 lounging adolescents ripe for a bit of a struggle. Francois fucks up. He means well but he fucks up. And then it kind of goes pear-shaped for everyone because the school is bound to support the institutional power relationships. Bound in a kind of unstated and complex arrangement of power, authority and support. Bound because there is a tacit agreement with the people who are in the front line doing the intimate and personal thing that is teaching that you will support them in the process. So what the viewer gains is a small taste of the struggle for a school when a student pushes the last boundary. The film conveys a sense of the investment made in the child, the relationship, the sense of loss at the waste of the efforts of all. And a despair at what might happen to the kid. And anger of course and sometimes relief. The common good argument. It’s all there in this classy film – pun intended.

Lots of critics have written about the way the film has been constructed – student volunteers, loose plot. The success of the film is down to its essential truthfulness; the people making it wanted to show what the work of a teacher is – tedium and all. I’ve been talking about the job with people I work with; we were talking about lesson plans and I admitted that I probably hadn’t done one since about my second year of teaching. I wasn’t much of a teacher then but they didn’t suit me as a way of organising myself. What I ended up saying in that conversation is that your success as a teacher partly depends on pretty quickly having a good sense of how you wanted to be in Role, capital “R” role, and the closer that the Capital R role is to your own sense of self, the better. Then your persona is consistent and predictable and genuinely grounded. It‘s not a stretch – you’d be able to feel, as Francois perhaps didn’t – that where he was heading with kids was down a whole lot of alleyways that were dead-ends. Maybe.

The Monthly critic Luke Davis ends his review of this film by saying “Francois is like the character Glory Boughton in the Marilynn Robinson novel Home who comes to understand, of the children she taught for many years, that her role as a teacher had essentially been that of “helping them assume their humanity.” On first reading, this resonated but it’s not the kind of language which Australians could use about themselves. I see it as trying to have kids get a sharper sense of themselves and the wider world; of what makes it all tick and what they think about it. And why. And to be curious about what other people think. That’s about it. And some skills to communicate. That’s it. That’s enough. (and BTW - I think Luke's pushing it a bit with this description of Francois - calling a couple of teenage girls "skanks" might be a natural human reaction to an incident in the film, but this and the ensuing events hardly amount to helping those particular kids "assume their humanity".)

I haven’t written enough here about fun. Those kids looked like they’d be fun. I taught in schools like this for most of my teaching life and there is lots of fun to be had, lots of interest to make you hang around amidst the tedium of perrenial staffroom stuff, government directives, union meetings, students wearing caps in class and the rest. The film triggered one of my ongoing desires – to teach again. It comes and goes and is tempered by the memory of the boot-full of correction that dogged my life. Maybe I’ll go back one day.

How you look at life?

2009-02-04T19:47:00.000-08:00

Been mulling this over in terms of my life - Justice Michael Kirby is reported as saying "You have to look at life as if it's a grand nineteenth century novel. A Joseph Conrad tale. This highway robbery, that love affair, now this time of servitude. And so on." Been wondering if my life is like a 19th century novel or some other form. It's easier to describe others - the guy I work with - his life is like a military handbook; marked by strategy and defensive play. Mine - I'm not so sure...

Life is short and then you die

2009-02-01T18:46:00.000-08:00

The length of a film is not the best grounds for choosing which one to watch but the over 40’s Melbourne temperatures of last week made the decision easy. Find the longest film on offer at the closest cinema. And so I went to see The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I liked it more than I expected even though I have an automatic resistance to these kinds of films. By this I mean extremely polished, expensive, emotionally manipulative films from the Hollywood stable. I don’t like crying over crap or having sentiment front and centre as a device. I don’t much like Brad Pitt as an actor either. Less pretty is good. And this film is all about pretty – in lots of ways. (And on the Brad topic, I loved this critique of him from film critic A O Scott in the New York Times; “Mr. Pitt seems more interested in the nuances of reticence than in the dynamics of expression”. Originally John Travolta was to have had the role; he would have been a better choice.)

So, what‘s to like? Almost every scene looks like a scene from a picture-story book, with the exception of the “modern” scenes which contrast nicely. The historical scenes are filmed in a luminous sort of candlelight which makes then look both rich and mysterious. I’m sure that part of the reason for this would have been the need to cleverly manage the process of ageing Brad backwards; he is born in the guise of a very old man and becomes younger as the film develops. So soft lighting is important; as the Brad character, Benjamin becomes younger, his co-star, Cate Blanchett, playing Daisy, has to age. The scenes are visually striking; lush and dramatic. It's a lovely film to look at.

The picture story book effect provides the film with licence to be melodramatic. A baby is close to being thrown in the river by his father, a tugboat is blown to bits at war, a woman is knocked down by a car, Hurricane Katrina is whirling round the edges of the modern story. It’s a fable. And provided you accept that it’s a fable, it’s quite satisfying.

A lot of critics have rightly criticised the lack of characterisation in the film. Usually this matters to me but I think this is a film about a larger topic; the passage of time and how humans manage it. It’s about the brief ephemeral intersections of contact and about loss. Loss caused by death and loss caused when people move on or move out of your life.

The most poignant scene for me was late in the film. Benjamin and Daisy intersect many times as she ages and he goes in the opposite direction. After a gap of several years, Benjamin walks through the door of her dance studio and stands, looking at her. She doesn’t initially recognise him. Her face is lined, she is a middle-aged woman. He is a young man, glowing with all the gorgeousness of youth. My mind went immediately to my recent meeting with Geoff, a man I lived with a long time ago. We hadn’t seen each other for many years and so meeting again, were confronted by physical change, by memories of the relationship we had shared and by what was left - nothing really. I felt a sense of loss – not that we no longer had a relationship but that there was nothing left now. No yearning, no nothing. I had the “So what’s it all for?” feeling. It made me feel terribly, terribly sad.

The focus on aging also made me think about my father and his own aging process, the pain of it. It’s painful watching my father go through this. Painful, sad and frustrating. The world becomes smaller and more circumscribed. But not necessarily. Geoff is not in my current life and making that decision decades ago was a good decision. What I have now is rich, lively and full of opportunities. Some options have closed down but I don’t feel like my world is getting smaller; if anything it seems more open-ended and full of promise.

The film comes from a short story written by F Scott Fitzgerald, who had an ongoing preoccupation with the ephemerality of things. I haven’t read it yet but you can download it. The screenplay was written by Eric Roth, who also wrote Forrest Gump. I was pleased when I read this – not because I liked Forrest Gump much but I was reminded of that film while I was watching the Benjamin Button film and I couldn’t work out why – something to do with the over-orchestration of effects and emotions, I think. It’s made me want to go and re-read Scott Fitzgerald which is no bad thing…

The Slap

2009-01-21T18:11:00.000-08:00

The empty suburbs
propel them in a fruitless
quest for connection.

Yes, the demon haiku strikes again. Maybe it's better than the "reflection demon" which lurked the other morning - I caught sight of a middle-aged woman with fat arms, wearing my shirt, in the window of the train. Aaargh!

More of The Slap later, but it's definitely part of the zeitgeist. Let if be recorded that I didn't love it but I found the first two thirds quite engrossing...

What if?

2009-01-14T18:21:00.000-08:00

You only had a few minutes to pack your bags and escape some horror. When I went overseas for the first time, I stored my first quilt and some photos with my friend Jane but I've become blase now and don't bother doing this when I travel. However, I would be upset if my jewellery, my photos and Dora's paintings went astray.

I've been thinking that one of the reasons I like reading history is that wondering about how I would've coped. Would I have been one of the first to die in the Holocaust or would I have been one of the SonderKommando? I think I would have been pathetic. I've been thinking about how people surrvive as I start Kokoda, a big fat book about WW11 and what happened just north of us.

It begins with the Reverend Nelson, a Christian missionary who, in the face of the Japanese anchoring just off shore, collects together his watch, tobacco, a notebook, pemcil, some hamkies and a compass. I like the inclusion of the hankies, I go into slight panic attack mode if I have no hanky. He is accompanied by 2 women; one of whom is called Mavis Parkinson who says "Scrummy! A real naval battle and we are here watching it. I do wish we knew if they are our troops." (They weren't!) Her colleague, May May Hayman collected up some cans of food in preparation for escape. Mavis took a change of clothes and Rev Benson also threw in some mosquito nest, old blankets and intriguingly, a square of calico. Mayber he was a closet quilter.

In contrast the Japanese troops had a big bag of rice, some bullets, 2 hand grenades, a steel helmet and a toothbrush. They were instructed that if they were thrown in the water, they were to sing songs until help came!

The locals were best prepared for any contingency. Some of the tribes had only just given up head-hunting but still had traditions of "living food", of keeping people alive and just slicing off a bit of leg or buttock when things got tough. I have no stomach for this sort of survival...

Rabbit

2009-01-14T16:52:00.000-08:00

Returning to the haiku tradition for Rabbit Redux:

"Suck it and see" is what
Rabbit might have thought
If he thought at all.

Just finished Rabbit is Rich which I loved. Will post some more about this novel which is now almost 30 years old.

Wrangling India

2009-01-06T18:07:00.000-08:00

It’s worth seeing Slumdog Millionaire just for the Bombay character which is ever-present. The film begins with a long chase scene through the slums; two small boys followed by a policeman. They have been playing cricket on the tarmac of an airport runway. As you do. It’s a great opening sequence that sets up the whole film; these kids are resilient, cheeky survivors in a city that requires these qualities.

Mumbai/ Bombay was the first Indian city I ever went to. Here is what I wrote back in 2000 about arriving:

“I had been wondering how long it would take for the work 'teeming' to enter the thought process- I had to wait no longer than the Qantas In-flight video where Mumbai was described as "magnificent and teeming" , a "city of contrasts" - great cliché writing. A night journey into Mumbai- hot, heaps of men in the streets, zooming little 3 wheeler auto cabs, no women to be seen anywhere, my driver attempting to keep me awake (4.30 am Melb time) by making a left turn in front of a bus going straight ahead. Buses are invincible in India - just scary in their intent.

A day in Mumbai - caught the train into the 'city' squashed into a carriage full of saris and Jill in her stolid navy! Lovely being with the women and when I finally worked out that I was blocking the way out of the train (10 stops later) they welcomed me and gave me a seat.”

Unlike a lot of my life, I remember this arrival very vividly. I flew in late at night into a world where people careered round in the little mechanised autocabs. I caught one to my hotel in Juhu, a beachside suburb close to the airport which features a bit in Slumdog Millionaire. Juhu was a strange mix of seeming hipness (lots of bars and clubs) and deadset sleaze. Once inside my hotel room I bounced off the walls. I felt frightened and vulnerable. It was my first time overseas by myself.

The next day I planned to go into the “city” to go to the museum. I caught the suburban train. It cost 2 cents. The description above doesn’t do it justice. I missed several trains because they were too full and people sort of waved me off. It took me a while to realise that I was trying to get into the wrong carriage; I should be in the women’s carriages which were at one end of the train. My journey took a long time. It’s no wonder I found India hard going on that trip; there was no cushion of protection from ‘real’ India as I experienced in later trips. It was like being hit over the head with a shovel. I looked at a lot of the scenes in Slumdog Millionaire with a kind of wonderment that I managed it at all. And have been back. And love it.

An English guy, Danny Boyle, made Slumdog Millionaire. I haven’t seen any of his other films. He said that working in India was not like “wrangling India’ as one interviewer suggested; it was like “accumulating India”. It’s a version of “Don’t fight the Ganges”, the very sage advice I learnt on my first trip. The notion of wrangling anything in India is kind of hopeful. Boyle said "I wanted to get (across) the sense of this huge amount of fun, laughter, chat, and sense of community that is in these slums. What you pick up on is this mass of energy." Ironically it's a film about survival when the very process of making the film must have felt about as scary and out of control.

If you accept the film as homage to Bombay, it works about as well as it could. Like being in India you need to go with the heavy melodrama and the obvious villains and innocents. It’s not subtle. The theme of exploitation of slum kids was done a whole lot better by Rohinton Mistry in the novel A Fine Balance and more recently in Animal's People by Indra Sinha. Jamal, the main character in the film, is only interesting for what happens to him and for his doggedness and honesty; he is otherwise without screen exuberance. I probably agree with The New York Times critic Manohla Dargis who says "In the end, what gives me reluctant pause about this bright, cheery, hard-to-resist movie is that its joyfulness feels more like a filmmaker’s calculation than an honest cry from the heart about the human spirit." All true but Boyle gets away with it because of Bombay.

As a postscript, I read Paul Theroux's book The Elephanta Suite recently. I have not loved his writing in the past but I really liked this book which is a collection of three novellas. It's very very self conscious fiction; it's not his comfort zone. It doesn't flow sweetly. But he is wrestling with the encountering of American and Indian cultures and I loved what he was trying to say about the process. Here is a snippet from a review in The Guardian: "Alice, the heroine of the last of these three novellas, 'The Elephant God', a young American woman on a train, feels that Indian novels haven't adequately prepared her for the experience of India. 'Where were the big, fruitful families from these novels, where were the jokes, the love affairs, the lavish marriage ceremonies, the solemn pieties, the virtuous peasants, the environmentalists, the musicians, the magic, the plausible young men?' "That's India for you - big enough for all these stories AND Slumdog and more...

Rabbit again

2008-12-18T18:09:00.000-08:00

I don’t remember reading Rabbit Redux when I was young and there is no copy at home. My 2008 copy has an image of a hand holding a chipped mug of coffee on the cover. The fingers are stained with printer’s ink but they look too small to be the hands of a former successful basketballer, as Harry was. Maybe they are the hands of his father who is a small but important character in the book. The image is kind of at odds with the drama of the book; the comforting domesticity of this working class image gives nothing away in terms of a story about the massive changes happening in American socitey, the shifts in the tectonic plates embodied in Harry's drift into experiments with drugs, new sexual partners and black consciousness. All this in Penn Villas, a new housing development on the edge of Brewer, Pennsylvania. (For some alternative covers, go here, here and here. I particularly like the Hangman cover.)

I stopped half way through the novel for a while. Harry spends much of the middle part of the story in a kind of loose vacuum. Like the first novel he is strikingly without agency; he floats into things without making real conscious decisions. Or if he is decisive, it’s quite short–term; should he have sex with Peggy Fosnacht that night? Actually it's not even that far ahead - it's more like should he have sex with Peggy Fosnacht, she has just unzipped her dress? Anatole Broyard, writing in 1971 when the novel was published says:

“He went back to Rabbit because he knew that it was too easy to have an intellectual or an artist as a hero. There is always a temptation to talk or think things out -- but with a guy like Rabbit, you have to act them out all the way, show what's happening to him, nakedly, without off-stage intellection or interpretation. The thought must be made flesh; the flesh, as in sex, made metaphor; the man in the street tormented into irony. Where Rabbit once ran away, he's now standing his ground, letting the world flow over and around him while he tries to keep his head above water.”

This is a fabulous description of what Updike is about in working with Rabbit.

I think, for a while, I found the drifting hard to read about. And I got sick of the black guy Skeeter. I think Updike wanted this effect but maybe he doesn’t want people to stop reading. I decided to have a break from reading Rabbit then really enjoyed it when I went back to it. Broyard reckons that Harry is climbing out on a limb (any limb, every limb) and swinging – trying to find something in the shifting morass that America is in. and trying to find traction for his own 36 year old self, fast wilting into middle age.

The three defining descriptors of American life in this book are the Vietnam War, the rise of black consciousness and the successful Apollo mission. (Interesting comparison the Space War and the Vietnam War)Other aspects also prevail like the ways in which middle class kids went searching for something different than their parent’s lives. Broyard has a nice way of describing this aspect of the book – Harry hooks up with a barely adult girl for a while: “In Jill, Updike explores the incompleteness -- in them and in ourselves -- that, like a vacuum, draws us toward very young girls.” Aaarrgh so scarily accurate, I think, about men.

I want to include a paragraph about sex so will edit this entry later; he writes so well about this business. What he also does well is the domestic; the fraught ties between Harry and his parents, the guilt and love, the depiction of both his parents is really exquisite. Then at the end, Stage Left: Mim, the sister, living the life not lived. Vivid, in-your-face Updike…

Alone in the world

2008-11-26T15:38:00.000-08:00

I’ve been thinking about therapy and its literary and filmic representations lately. Purely by coincidence, I saw the films One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest and Men’s Group within a 24 hour period. Both films are broadly about men in trouble, though this is perhaps where the similarity ends.
I think I saw One Flew over the Cuckoos Nest last in 1976. It was quite shocking. Literally of course but that’s a pretty lame joke. I remembered the shocking aftermath of Nicholson’s treatment but not the way the film ended. I don’t know how prevalent lobotomies are any more. I saw it at a time when shock treatment was very controversial as was the institutionalisation of people. I saw it in the free-wheeling 70’s where the mood of rebellion against authority was very strong. I am betting that I saw it just as Whitlam had been kicked out of office and we in Australia were battling against the early, nasty impact of the Fraser government, the razor gang and, interestingly, the first incarnation of John Howard.

Filmsite.org describes it as
“one of the greatest American films of all time - a $4.4 million dollar effort directed by Czech Milos Forman. Its allegorical theme is set in the world of an authentic mental hospital (Oregon State Hospital in Salem, Oregon), a place of rebellion exhibited by a energetic, flamboyant, wise-guy anti-hero against the Establishment, institutional authority and status-quo attitudes (personified by the patients' supervisory nurse). [Forman himself noted that the asylum was a metaphor for the Soviet Union (embodied as Nurse Ratched) and the desire to escape.”
The film holds up but looks quite different to me now. I have a greater appreciation of where Milos Forman was coming from. He says in the support material for the film that he felt like he had been living in an asylum for 20 years in the Czech Republic. Most of the filming was done in the mental hospital; the actors would come in the morning and rehearse then just hang around getting themselves into the feel of the institution in the afternoon.

I see Nurse Ratched differently though. In some ways, I think she is treated unfairly – this is a film where the only women are whores or nurses and maybe this is how some of these dysfunctional men perceive women in general but it seems a little unfair that Ratched carries the entire can. The doctor, who is a real psychiatrist, is not demonised in the way that Ratched is, though it’s he who is responsible for what finally happens to Nicholson. A nurse, in reality wouldn’t have had that sort of power, even though Ratched is depicted as conducting the therapy sessions by herself. And in the first instance, the Nicholson character is incarcerated in prison because he has had sex with a 15 year old girl; it’s a construct that a director wouldn’t use now if he was looking for audience sympathy for the main character. There is some unpleasant gender stuff lurking in the dark recesses of this film but it is really about dysfunction, abuse of authority and agency.

Critic, Roger Ebert said it “is a film so good in so many of its parts that there's a temptation to forgive it when it goes wrong. But it does go wrong, insisting on making larger points than its story really should carry, so that at the end, the human qualities of the characters get lost in the significance of it all. And yet there are those moments of brilliance.” He and I both liked the small scenes of rebellion inside the ward and the depictions of the ways in which people collude with authority; the scenes showing just how hard it is to take stock, stand up for yourself.

Following my at-home screening of Cuckoo’s Nest, I went to see Men’s Group. I was very disappointed in this film. I had high hopes of this film representing my personal experiences of a women’s group on the big screen; the value of doing the work and the toughness of the experience. And it began promisingly with the very first meeting of the 5 men. This meeting was filled with the confusion and difficulty of making contact with other people; it felt authentic in the strange embarrassment of the session. Their consultant who says, at the outset ”This is not therapy. It’s simply a space to be safe and talk about things.” And this was the truth of the work that he does and that they are up to doing. The consultant seemed unable to work at any depth with the men in the room. They were there for the regular variety of issues that people (men?) face; loneliness, fathering problems, father problems, relationship issues, just generally being disconnected. And why they turned up again after the futility of that first session, I don’t know.

It gave me plenty of time during the film to think about the kinds of successful renderings of therapy on film. The best one for me is the fractious and flirtatious relationship of Dr Jennifer Melfi and Tony (or Anthony, as she likes to call him) Soprano. It is my favourite part of this series. Other people might reference the Analyse This/That films but they are much more about other things than therapy. Pyschotherapist, Irvin Yalom has done so much to render therapy an accessible and interesting thing in fiction and in his books about his practice. I’ve been profoundly influenced by his work. In Love’s Executioner he talks about 4 fundamental things that we need to come to terms with as humans. The first is obviously death. Another is our fundamental aloneness – not loneliness but aloneness. I can’t remember what the other two are but these two are big for me. Here is a little of an interview with him in Salon:

Q: “Most of us feel we do not want to think about death. But you assert that confronting death is a key to living a full, authentic, happy life. I wonder if you could describe in personal terms what living authentically means to you?”

A: “Certainly as I've grown older, I've been thinking a lot more about the end of my life, which may not be too far away. My father and his brothers all died relatively young because of heart conditions. So I think, Well, life is finite. I don't have unlimited years left, and I want to know what is more central to me and my life right now.
Above all, I don't want to do anything that feels repetitious. And I tell myself that I don't want to belong to any more committees or teach anymore, because the field is becoming drugs, pharmacotherapy. The next generation of therapists isn't going to be trained for psychotherapy because the insurance companies aren't going to be paying for it any longer.
What feels most central for me is being creative and looking at the way in which I have creative talents and gifts that I haven't used. I basically see myself as a storyteller engaged in ideas that have to do with an existential, deeper approach to life. I feel very uncomfortable with the idea of these gifts being unused.”

It reminded me of going to hear David Tacey and John Carroll talk about Jung at Readings. One of them said that in this secular society, we use stories to make meaning out of life. This statement sounds so painfully obvious but when I heard it, it resonated so much - this is the compelling thing about stories, in the absence of that large meta-narrative about God, we need some others. (The blog Thinking Shift has some writing about this topic.)
I think that when it comes down to it, this is why I felt so cross with Men’s Group. The film fluttered across the surface of the stories of these men; all of whom had deep and painful histories. The film-maker, Michael Joy, said “Within my own life I ended up needing some people outside of family and friends to talk to and I found myself going to a men's group this one evening and heard these guys' stories and just realised that there was a story there that had to be told.” Joy needed to hang around and do the stories justice. He needed to attend the men’s group for months to see what deep and painful issues were raised and worked through. If they were worked through. Or to read a little Yalom and see what universal truths can come from the process of therapy whne you stay with the pain of the person you are working with, when you linger.

So out of it all, when I talked about it with Naomi, my FFFF, we decided that there was merit in showing the fact that the 5 men were facing similar issues (as opposed to making a film about any one one of these characters seperately). Loneliness. Disconnection. Inarticulateness. Aggression. How to be a father. How to love a father. How to manage that sense of being alone in the world. These are the stuff of important stories; they make meaning for everyone. But while there is great merit in trying to work with these themes, the film did a pretty crap job of it.
It did, however, spawn this funny piece of dialogue between Margaret and David (At the Movies):
MARGARET: Getting away from that, I mean it’s interesting for me, having that sort of rawness of blokes’ emotions. How do you, as a man, react to that?
DAVID: I found it - I think I’m the sort of person who keeps my emotions in check.
MARGARET: Yeah.
DAVID: And so I don’t entirely recognise that, but I was impressed by the way the actors handled it and the way it developed during the course of the film. I would never go to a group session like the one in the film. Never.
MARGARET: I can imagine. No, but because, you know, I think that’s true of a lot of men. They’re too contained and they are in the beginning of this film.
DAVID: You’re looking...
MARGARET: It’s not easy to expose yourself.
DAVID: You’re looking at a very contained man, Margaret.
MARGARET: Oh, I know that, David.
DAVID: In case you didn’t know after all these years.

Taking no prisoners

2008-11-13T20:35:00.000-08:00

“Visceral: 1: felt in or as if in the viscera, deep, 2: not intellectual : instinctive , unreasoning, 3: dealing with crude or elemental emotions, 4: earthy."

I seem to use the word “visceral” a lot more lately. If someone had asked me what it meant, I think I would have said “bloody, tangible, of the body” with an edge of violence. But maybe this is because it is often used about violent scenarios. Brainyquote has a number of examples of ways that other people have used the word including Penn Jillette who said “When you're watching Psycho, there's that moment when you have a visceral reaction to watching someone being stabbed. And then you have the intellectual revelation that you're not, and that's where the celebration comes in.” Then I was kind of surprised when I looked up the Macquarie and their definition related solely to the biological: “soft interior organs in the cavities of the body, eg the brain, lungs, heart, stomach and intestines”.

The word certainly came to mind a lot when I was watching the film Hunger. Seeing this film is like been run over. In a very sophisticated way. It is very, very violent, as you would expect in a film about a prison. It’s about the decision of IRA prisoner Bobby Sands to go on a hunger strike in 1981 to protest the fact that IRA prisoners were being treated like the criminal class of prisoners by the prison authorities.

I vaguely remember this in the news but little about the story. It is just one large fragment in the very long and fuzzy set of news clips that form my understanding of Northern Ireland’s politics. A 31 year-old colleague had never heard of the IRA. She’s not uneducated; it‘s just that “the troubles” have been sorted to some extent and Northern Ireland is no longer a key part of daily news bulletins. When Bobby Sands was starving himself to death, I was learning to teach in Swan Hill; I had other things on my mind.

The film opens with a set of images and sounds that take the viewer right into the guts of the prison. (Guts- visceral!!!) You hear rather than see a rattling of pots and pans in a protest rally. The noise becomes deafening, nearly unbearable, even as the close-ups of the items being banged look like pieces in a factory assembly line, then we experience some of the daily rituals through a prison officer who soaks his bloody knuckles in water and checks the undercarriage of his car for bombs before leaving for work. This is the almost the only time we experience events outside the prison except for voice-overs by Maggie Thatcher that contextualise the British Government’s position and one other challenging scene that helps to further unsettle us.

The film is very claustrophobic; the action is both internal to the prison and internal to the body. It’s a film which seeks to explore what happened at one historical point in time, to one person, without providing much surrounding context. This is a very interesting strategy. We learn almost nothing about the larger context except that both the IRA and the British authorities were extremely violent in pursuit of their conflicting goals. I like the fact that it is so concentrated but wonder how it might be interpreted by people who know nothing about the politics. In this case it becomes almost solely a film about the decision to use your body as a tool for political activism. Does a man have the right to kill himself and lead others to their own suicides? Will it accomplish anything? Won't this just play into the hands of Margaret Thatcher? The broader range of questions which we might now apply to suicide bombers or to asylum seekers who sew their lips together etc.

The visceral part? The hunger strikers had tried a “no wash” campaign which included smearing their own shit on the walls of the cells and flooding the hallways with urine. They are forcibly washed by guards. There are maggots. The feeling of being in this with them is intensifies by the lack of dialogue which pervades the first third of the film. There is a lot of silence which heightens the impact for other senses.

This is the first film for director Steve McQueen who is apparently an accomplished and well known visual artist. The visuals are really compelling. He pictures the inmates in one scene as a large group of Jesus like figures – they have long hair, beards and bare chest and their gauntness reminds me of the many, many images of Christ on the cross. This image is reinforced towards the end of the film when Bobby Sands collapses in the bathroom and is carried back to bed by a guard, Pieta style. And towards the end of the film, we begin to occupy Sand’s body, maybe devouring it in the way that some organs might be cannibalising other parts of the body in a kind of hideous and desperate attempt to stay alive. We hear and see the world in a fuzzy disconnected way as Sands is dying. His body is covered with suppurating sores. It’s pretty ghastly and hard to sit through.

Many reviewers have commented on the set-up of the film- in 3 acts with an extraordinary dialogue in the middle between Sands and a priest. It’s not necessary for me to describe that here except that it’s brave to expect an audience to stay the distance. This part enables us to understand why Sands has decided to take this course of action. "Putting my life on the line isn't the only thing I can do—it's the right thing." It tells us a little of Sands’ background; from an early age, he has been able to make tough decisions.

This long scene is characteristic of the whole film in that I felt for Sands but not in a deep emotional way- I was horrified by what happened to him, by the choice that he felt he had to make, horrified by the conditions in the prison, by the brutality of life for everyone in the prison (guards and prisoners) but film style is extremely dispassionate. Because of the sort of person I am, I usually like to connect with the characters – this enables me to feel things deeply and I don’t think the film provides this opportunity to any extent. It doesn’t diminish the film but has made me reflect about how film–makers get into your psyche and what the most effective techniques are.

For me, the film Wendy and Lucy, which I saw at the film festival, does this best. That film forced the viewer to experience the same anxieties and tension as the main character, by moving slowly through her emotional landscape, feeling her vulnerability and the strength of character. Maybe in Hunger, we just experience the strength of character and not the vulnerability and this is why I am not as emotionally connected. WE can see that their bodies are vulnerable but they are so tough in the face of the brutality that it's hard to feel the emotional force of the experience.

Despite this, I admire the film and the director. It’s powerful and interesting. It takes no prisoners. It's worth the difficulty of sitting through.

Lemon Tree

2008-10-27T22:42:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in the course of my work, I stopped to think about why the olive branch is a symbol of peace. Fortunately, at least for workplace efficiency, Wikipedia is at hand to respond to idle thoughts like this and it came up with the following; “In Western culture, derived from the customs of Ancient Greece, it (the olive branch) symbolizes peace or goodwill. The original link between olive branches and peace is unknown. Some explanations center on that olive trees take a very long time to bear fruit. Thus the cultivation of olives is something that is generally impossible in time of war.” So there. Not known. And then I thought a bit about Lemon Tree, a film that I saw last week.

The film, made by Israeli director Eran Riklis, explores what happens when the Israeli Minister of Defense and his wife move to a new housing development which is right next to an old grove of lemon trees owned by a Palestinian woman who has inherited the block from her father. The issue becomes one of security – how can a government minister be safe when it is so easy for terrorists to sneak through the grove and lob a grenade into his property? The lemon trees must go. So it’s about property, boundaries, rights, history, fences, large imposing fences, safety and also what happens to the little people in this large historical struggle. Riklis said somewhere that one of his inspirations for making the film was hearing the stories of Palestinian people who had taken their legal issues to the Israeli High Court. The article I read said that he thought that was a tribute to the Israeli justice system. Anyone watching the film will have their own views about that.

The film starts with the domestic. Widowed Salma, played by Hiam Abbass, is making preserved lemons. The camera pans in close as she chops the lemons and adds chilli and liquid. It’s a beautiful, intimate scene. Outside there is the clanking of furniture as two men deliver the furniture belonging to the Minister of Defence, confusingly named Israel, into their new house, overseen by his wife, Mira. By morning, a watchtower has been built, overlooking Salma’s grove and soon after, she receives a letter telling her that the trees must be cut down.

The plot around the receipt of the letter is particularly poignant. The letter is in Hebrew so she can’t read it. She must go to a Palestinian café to have it translated and we see her entering the all-male café, the resultant hush in the room, the offhand treatment from the Palestinian men who are drinking coffee, who let her know that she will lose her trees and also, that she must not accept the compensation offered by Israeli authorities – “We don’t accept their money.” Salma is alone.

Hiam Abbass’ portrayal of this woman is one of the most interesting things about the film. Abbass has a very beautiful strong face and it’s just wonderful seeing an older woman in a really strong role. She conveys strength, hurt, resilience and yearning so so well. I loved watching her. Riklis said that one of the reasons he made this film was his desire to find a good role for this actress – may she be in many more films. Terrible things happen to Abbass but I never felt emotionally manipulated by the film-maker. I felt for her without thinking of her as a victim because she does fight back against the order to lose her lemon grove.

At one stage, in court, she says ”I am a real person” and this is possibly the crux of the larger message; that for too long, people on both sides of this debate have demonised each other. The film also explores the experiences of Mira, the wife of the Minister. Both women are lonely; both have children in the United States and have seemingly little in their lives apart from their respective work. We sympathise with both women who have little power or input in the larger politics of this world.

The ending is particularly dramatic so I won’t give it away. It’s really powerful as a metaphor for what is happening in Israel at present. Maybe it’s naff to think about that Seekers song – “the fruit of the poor lemon – it’s impossible to eat” but somehow that fits with the ending. The fruit of this particular conflict does no one any favours. And is not likely to in the immediate future.

Forget after watching?

2008-10-26T19:55:00.000-07:00

I went to see the latest Coen brothers film, Burn After Reading, with my 16 year old niece. I find it impossible to resist the Coens even after No Country for Old Men which I hated. And had I written this review that Friday night immediately after watching the film, my comments would be a little different.

The film sets up 2 inept employees of a gymnasium, who seek to blackmail an ex-CIA man, John Malkovich, who is having marital problems. It is a kind of black comedy farce with Brad Pitt playing, with a lot of skill, one of the hopeless blackmailers and Frances McDormand, the other. Pitt is really funny; I liked him far more in this film than in anything else I’ve seen him in. And on the surface, that is what it is; a comedy filled with mostly unlikeable characters with the regular sprinkling of surprising violence. The Coens always do good dialogue, like Tarantino, and there are scenes in the film which are very funny.

George Clooney features as a philandering diversion and creator of the most bizarre sex aid I’ve seen in any movie (porn included – in fact it’s the 15 year old boy part of the Coen brothers on display here. They obviously couldn’t help themselves). The Coens said that idiocy was a major central theme of Burn After Reading; Joel Coen said he and his brother have "a long history of writing parts for idiotic characters" and described Clooney and Pitt's characters as "dueling idiots". Pitt said of his role, "After reading the part, which they said was hand-written for myself, I was not sure if I should be flattered or insulted". He also said when he was shown the script, he told the Coens he did not know how to play the part because the character was such an idiot: "There was a pause and then Joel goes...'You'll be fine.'"

Tilda Swinton, who plays the wife of the Malkovich character, described Burn After Reading as a kind of monster caper movie, and said of the characters, "All of us are monsters – like, true monsters. It’s ridiculous." She also said, "I think there is something random at the heart of this one. On the one hand, it really is bleak and scary. On the other, it is really funny. ... It's the whatever-ness of it. You feel that at any minute of any day in any town, this could happen."

I laughed a bit but found the violence abrupt and unexpected. It also took out the only characters with any pretensions to likeability in the film. But I was entertained. And also entertained by the idea of calling the review ‘Forget after watching…”

And then I heard Julie Rigg and others talking about the film on “Australia Talks Movies”. Several callers made points that I wish I’d thought of. “John from Brisbane” provided the most interesting perspective of the conversation. He said that he felt it was a Coen Brother classic, that it was a very serious film. The central character, McDormand, has superficial obsessions about her appearance which ultimately have really horrible consequences for the characters around her. He said that he felt that the film is warning us about what society is coming to, that our feelings of emptiness or uneasiness at the end of the film are because of the self-centredness of the characters, the moral emptiness of their decisions and the fact that no one can find love in the film. We are reminded of this on several occasions in the film as the camera returns to the location in a park where people wait to meet their Internet dates, strung out on park benches as other people wander along wondering if that man on that bench will be the person of their dreams.

"John from Brisbane" went on to talk about how the CIA is positioned; an organisation usually associated with menace seems out of its depth, on the back foot. Ruth Hessey, another contributor to the Radio National program, spoke about the film reflecting “the paranoia of the modern world” that may mean it ages well. In fact, we live in a society where people are more and more accessible - the film opens with a great zooming shot as Google Earth pans down from on high into CIA headquarters, but increasingly people are less and less connected and more fragmented. It suggests that we have lost touch with what is important but hang on desperately to the magic wand of things like cosmetic surgery to change our lives and bring us joy.

I began to see the film differently - the Radio National comments have made it less forgettable and I am grateful for this.

Rabbit, Run

2008-10-22T19:40:00.000-07:00

What comes to mind when you think about the characteristics of a rabbit? For me the quality of timidity is uppermost so when John Updike talks about using the rabbit as a metaphor for his young protagonist in Rabbit Run, it’s not quite what I expected.

Rabbit, AKA Harry Angstrom, is 26. He feels like his life has already peaked. As Updike puts it; “You get the feeling you’re in your coffin before they’ve taken your blood out.” At school Rabbit was a basketball star but now he is a has-been, earning a living demonstrating a kitchen appliance, married to a girl who he feels little for and father of a child who figures little in his thinking.

It’s a brave book because the main protagonist is so rarely likable and we develop sympathy for, but no strong liking for most of the rest of the cast of characters. It’s a book written by a young man, about the life of a young man who is filled with impulse and a yearning for something that he can’t even articulate but it’s something like “Life’s gotta be better than this.”

The first part of the novel is a road movie. It feels like a movie, the camera sliding all over the place under a big starry sky and Rabbit ventures further out beyond his comfort zone although it is clear that the “comfort zone” of the town of Brewer is now a discomfit zone for him. I was scared reading it; I so wanted Harry to go home. He was so adrift in the universe and consequently ungrounded and vulnerable. Eventually he returns to Brewer but not to his wife and child. He hooks up with the first woman he meets, Ruth. He is hapless rather than opportunist but frustrating. I waited for him to begin to miss his little boy but 100 pages go by without a moment’s reflection about his son. John Updike said that he wrote Rabbit, Run in response to Jack Kerouac's On the Road, and tried to depict "what happens when a young American family man goes on the road – the people left behind get hurt.”

The novel is also brave, for the time period, in the way it depicts the character Ruth, who, of course, is the character I most responded to. She struggles to identify what is good for her and to stand up for herself; Updike depicts her internal battles really well even though she gets only a limited amount of time in the book. Harry is dangerous and even though she is pregnant, she does not readily let him back into her life. I found myself desperately wanting them to get together but this would be such a bad deal for Ruth. Harry is a very bad bargain. Why did I want this “happy ending”? The following sentence says it all – Ruth has told Harry that she is pregnant to him and that she thinks he would be bad news back in her life and yet there seems to be a slim opening – and all he can think about is food; “He nervously felt her watching him for some sign of resolution inspired by her speech. In fact he has hardly listened; it is too complicated and, compared to the vision of a sandwich, unreal.”

Updike's novel is noted as being one of several well regarded, early usages of the present tense. Updike stated that "in Rabbit, Run, I liked writing in the present tense. You can move between minds, between thoughts and objects and events with a curious ease not available to the past tense. I don't know if it is clear to the reader as it is to the person writing, but there are kinds of poetry, kinds of music you can strike off in the present tense." He also writes “At one point Rabbit is literally lost, and tears up a map he cannot read; but the present tense, to me as I began to write it, felt not so much ominous as exhilaratingly speedy and free – free of the grammatical bonds of the traditional past tense and of the subtly dead, muffling hand it lays on every action. To write “he says” instead of “he said" rebellious and liberating in 1959.”

I very much like Updike’s prose as well as his exploration of the domestic. American society is undergoing a quiet revolution but Rabbit, Run is preoccupied with the struggle with domesticity, with the familiar, the unsexy, the predictable, the honest, the true, the respectable. And maybe that’s what the larger changes in US society are about too but they don’t impinge on this novel except that we can see, from the contrast in generations, from the aging Springers and Angstroms, from Coach Tothero, that the next generation is yearning for something different.

His prose? Here is another example ”He comes onto the porch to find the boy between his grandmother’s legs, his face buried in her belly. In worming against her warmth he has pulled her dress up from her knees and their repulsive breadth and pallor, laid bare defensively, superimposed upon the tiny gamely gritted teeth the boy exposed for him, this old whiteness strained through this fine mesh, make a milk that feels to Eccles like his own blood.” (p136) David Boroff, in a review written in 1960, described it as “a tender and discerning study of the desperate and the hungering in our midst.” Updike is perhaps a little soft on Rabbit but he was young too when he wrote it.

I read a lot of the "Rabbit" books in my early 20's and it's a great pleasure coming back to them: I am hungry for the next one.

Is 'Towelhead' a wet dream?

2008-10-12T22:49:00.000-07:00

Just lately teenage sexuality has been in the news. Art and teenage sexuality. And it was impossible for me to watch the film Towelhead without being constantly reminded of Bill Henson’s controversial image of a pubescent girl. Both the film-maker and the photographer produced similar images of their respective young girls; backlit with a halo of light framing long dark hair, the face gazing uncertainly and indirectly, the mouth slightly open and moistened in the archetypal porn shot. (I have always thought that people who don’t close their mouths as a matter of course look a little half-witted but idiocy is possibly vaguely erotic for some people too). Henson says that he is interested in examining the awkwardness and awareness of change on the part of adolescents. Film director Alan Ball is interested in the same territory.

It’s difficult territory to negotiate without tripping into the voyeuristic or exploitative zone. There’s a kind of undefined fine line. I love a lot of Henson’s work but the photo which caused all the controversy triggered a memory for me of being invited, along with my father, to visit the house of a man we met at a BBQ. He wanted us to go there to see his paintings; which were of semi-nude women painted on black velvet. They were trashy rather than exploitative but the situation was weird and sleazy and our combined good manners (Dad’s and mine) had trapped us in this social situation which we both knew, in advance, was going to be sleazy and weird. I was angry with Dad that he didn‘t find a way of avoiding it and protecting me from what was an embarrassing but non-traumatic social encounter; I was about 16 at the time. So I think there are times when Henson crosses the line. And so does Towelhead.

I came to this film with a bit of a bias; I am part of the 2 % of the population who did not love American Beauty which was also written, but not directed by Alan Ball. His new film, Towelhead, aims to explore what happens to Jasira, a Lebanese-American teenager, in the first weeks of her stay with her father. I liked this description of it, by Roger Ebert:

"It tells the story of Jasira (Summer Bishil), a 13-year-old Lebanese-American girl with an obsession about her emerging sexuality. Well, all 13-year-olds feel such things. That's why so many of them stop talking to us. They don't know how to feel about themselves."

I thought part of Towelhead was brave. I can’t remember seeing a bloody tampon on screen before. Menstruation, and the embarrassments associated with menstruation, get a fair work-out. We experience this through the main character Jasira, a 13 year old girl, who, in the opening of the film, is sent to live with her father because her mother’s boyfriend is way too interested in her. The other brave part of the film is the scenes of Jasira maturbating. We are much more likely to see teenage boys jerking off than acknowledge the private sexual activity of teenage girls.

This is also the film’s downside because this is the extent of what we discover about Jasira and the other teenagers in the film; they are sexual creatures. I think the problem for the film is two-fold; the range of the actress (Summer Bishil) is quite limited and the script is solidly focussed on sex in a range of permutations. Even when she makes friend with a girl, the plot centres around them playing sexy dress-ups for a photographer. “Enough already!” I wanted to scream. I get it! We are surrounded by soft porn and so are our kids. During the Henson debate, I thought mostly about the large soft porn posters which adorn the DFO outlet in Spencer St; enormous images of young semi-clad girls lounging in poses as if they might just be about to give head. Advertising jeans or shoes. I hate them and hate the idea that my nieces might think that this is how women should be. I get it! Why are we banging on about Henson rather than these horrible advertisements?

However, if Jasira is objectified by the men in the film, I think that she is also objectified by the film maker. She never becomes more than a one dimensional character. We never really get to know what she is like. The film does not engage with her personality (and this is what I think it has in common with American Beauty - the women are one-dimensional). Terrible things happen to Jasira and we are no closer to knowing what she is like except that she is not a victim. Alan Ball describes the sexual assault as “A profound moment in two lives devoid of profound moments”. Calling it profound is just the wrong word and indicates something about his view of women and sex that is astray, even if I agree with his assertion that it’s “so important to see that it was a complicated issue, that as a character, Jasira was curious, that she was experiencing some sensations that were pleasurable, that she was getting the kind of attention where she was feeling intimate with somebody which was sorely lacking in the rest of her life.”

And is it interesting that both artists interested in the exploring the implications of the emerging sexuality of young girls are men? Possibly. Henson photographs pre-pubescent and teenage boys and girls. American Beauty and Towelhead both left me feeling uncomfortable. What would a woman film director make of the theme of emerging adolescent sexuality? I can’t think of any films in this category - some suggestions would be good.

Not everyone agrees with me - this opinion from Paul Byrnes in the SMH is interesting, but I think he misses the limited chracter devlopment of Jasira:

Alan Ball is careful to film the sexual sequences for maximum dramatic effect and minimal exposure of the actress's body - but that isn't going to save him from the stockade. One of his big crimes here is to show Jasira as active, rather than a victim. I suspect her progress towards self-awareness is part of what attracted the likes of Collette to the cast. Jasira becomes stronger through her ordeal; it doesn't destroy her, as it might in a movie-of-the-week. As confronting as the movie is, I saw it as hopeful and a caution, but I admit I'm biased towards freedom of expression.

And finally, plumbing. In a film where a lot of the action seems unconvincing, two parts of the plot hinge on bad plumbing in two houses. It might be a new housing estate but come on!

In deep waters

2008-09-18T03:12:00.000-07:00

Been reading Tim Winton's early novel Shallows. Been wondering about the impact of being a copper's son - how it affects your childhood and how much it has impacted the content of his writing.

In terms of Shallows - I tried this haiku about it:

Tim is deeply suspicious
of small towns, especially
Ones where men hunt whales.

More later.

In Burgess

2008-09-07T22:57:00.000-07:00

“What d’ya reckon ‘In Burgess’ would be like?” In Burgess… I was in the queue at the Sun cinema to go see In Bruges. I looked around to see who it was who was asking the question. I wanted to say “It’s Bruges (pronounced Brooooje) actually” but this isn’t correct either. It’s only pronounced like this in the English speaking world. If you are really “in Bruges”, I think I recall the pronunciation as “Broogger”. It’s a complicated thing. It’s a thing which you can so easily get wrong and something which becomes a marker of who you are and where you’ve been.

Which is sort of what the film is about. The two main characters are trying to lay low in the tourist-filled medieval town of Bruges in Belgium because one of them, Ray, has done something really horrible. They both do horrible things for a living but one character, Ken, is more accustomed to the personal impacts of his chosen career as a hired killer.

We follow Ray and Ken around the medieval churches as Ray tries to come to terms with what he has done. Paintings of medieval views of purgatory and of the last day on earth form the backdrop for both men. Is it possible to find redemption when you have committed an evil act? What’s the place of hell and heaven? What happens if you’re only a little bit bad? The director counter-balances the scenes of medieval Europe with a sort of modern, sometimes comic nastiness. We meet a young drug dealer and her skinhead boyfriend. A guns dealer who works out of a cornucopia of antiques and fine arts. A cocaine sniffing dwarf and his Dutch prostitute. Modern life looks pretty dissolute. There’s a film within a film construct enables the film to include a large number of people dressed in fantasy costumes with animal masks or animal heads; these people appear and reappear at the periphery like a version of a bachannale gone wrong. The only ‘normal’ person we meet is the owner of the hotel where Ray and Kenny stay. She provides a kind of moral pivot for the range of strange activities around her.

And in a funny way, the two bad men do as well. The film explores notions of honour, integrity and loyalty through the two main characters and supporting actor Ralph Fiennes. The difficult choices made by all three characters stem from the strict moral codes which they were born into. It feels strange using the term “moral codes” to describe their thinking but all three have clear ideas about good and evil and about how you treat people which are as much a moral code as mine and maybe not too far away; it’s just that I am not in the habit of killing people. So it’s sort of interesting to position this type of Sopranos thinking in Bruges, with its facade of medieval trappings.

It’s not a great film but not a terrible one either. There is some great, laugh out loud comic dialogue. The shoot-out scenes need work. One reviewer called it “Mr. McDonagh’s modest bag of tricks”. He’s right. The film doesn't quite work because Bruges is not a place of brooding medieval nastiness but a more sterile and tidy tourist town. It needed to be set in a slightly edgier place, maby St Petersburg; a place which combines tourism and a dark Russian underbelly(by all accounts, I haven't been there).

But I liked being back in Bruges. I spent some time in Bruges about 15 years ago. I remembered chocolate shops, extreme tidiness and fruit-flavoured beer. It was a tourist construct; full of shops for the well-heeled and opportunities for culture. I hadn’t remembered any of the churches and so, when I re-read my dairy of the trip last night, I wasn’t surprised to see the phrase “I am sick of churches”. I bet we didn’t go into any of them. We did go into a tower where a lot of the film action takes place; I have written “We climbed lots of stairs because there is supposed to be a great view but the 70-odd people in front of us at the top made it difficult to appreciate.” We went on two excellent tours; one on bikes around the city and out into the countryside and a whole day bus tour to explore World War 1 battle sites which was a highlight of our time in Europe. We stayed in a smelly youth hostel outside of the beautiful old town and bought expensive but divine chocolates. We felt like outsiders because all of the old city felt like a construct. And because it was expensive. Just as the two hit men feel like outsiders. But not my friend in cinema queue who doesn't know what she doesn't know and therefore doesn't know about her outsiderness (if that's a word).

In Bruges, we rested. We had not quite enough money to really enjoy everything. We learnt how to pronounce Bruges…But we might have been in Burgess…

Netherland Part 11

2008-09-01T17:36:00.000-07:00

Spring is coming to Melbourne and with it the great treat it is to sit outside in the sun and read for a few hours. On Friday I finished Netherland in the back garden with the jasmine about to go gangbusters and the cat lurking, a bit scared of the new crop of stray cats that have suddenly appeared with the warmer weather.

As I said in an earlier post, I loved going to bed to read this book. It’s set in the context of 9/11 in New York and a lot of reviewers have fixated on this but it seems to me that the novel is as much or more about the micro – about narrator Hans van den Broek and the wake up call that occurs in his life. In that way, 9/11 is a kind of large metaphor. How it works is this; after 9/11. Hans’ wife Rachel takes herself and their baby back to her country of birth, England. It has freaked her out; she doesn’t feel safe. Hans is left behind, renting an expensive apartment in the famous old Chelsea Hotel. “Over half the rooms were occupied by longterm residents who by their furtiveness and ornamental diversity reminded me of the population of the aquarium I’d kept as a child.” It’s appropriate for him to be living in this sort of zoo; he is totally disconnected from his environment, family and sense of what is important.

I think women love stories about hapless men like this. Hans does futures predictions for the money market so even his job is totally disconnected from any sort of reality. I just wanted him to get himself sorted. In reality, I am not attracted to haplessness at all – I seem to like competent men who can do practical things. Hans would be extremely annoying.

He is the archetypal outsider. He is Dutch but has lived in London and now New York. He has no living family. He plays cricket which has got to be an outsider’s game in the Netherlands as it is America. His presence in the novel is matched by another outsider, Chuck Ramkissoon who is from Trinidad. He is a businessman who dabbles in dodgy deals as well as providing kosher sushi to the residents of Long Island. Chuck subscribes to the American dream – If you build it, they will come. He’s full of schemes. And subscribes to the mythology of cricket – we meet him when he intervenes when a gun is brandished at a cricket match with a lecture about the civilising impact of cricket.

And while the novel spends some time on cricket, it is really about family and identity. One of the most moving scenes in the novel is when Hans stalks his far-away son and wife via Google Earth, tracking down to the roof line of their house, searching for signs of life; signs that he was part of their life and signs of their abandonment of him. We can be increasingly in pixilated contact with anyone but how do we really make contact or have intimacy? Which is the real story of the book. For the greater part of the book, Hans has more contact with Chuck than with anyone else in his life. It’s a novel about a man finding out what is important. Let me give an example of how he writes about this:

“…our dealings, however unusual and close, were the dealings of businessman. My ease with this state of affairs no doubt reveals a shortcoming on my part, but its the same quality that enables me to thrive at work, where so many of the brisk, tough, successful men I meet are secretly sick to their stomachs about their quarterlies, are being eaten alive by bosses and clients and all-seeing wives and judgemental offspring, and are, in sum, desperate to be taken at face value and very happy to reciprocate the courtesy. This chronic and I think, peculiarly male strain of humiliation explains the slight affection which bonds so many of us, but such affection depends on a certain reserve. Chuck observed the code, and so did I; neither pressed the other on delicate subjects.” (p158)

The novel is also about identity. The title reminds us that this area of the United States was originally called New Netherland. Wikipedia says that “New Netherland has left a profoundly enduring legacy on both American cultural and political life. Perhaps most significant was the impact of cultural and religious tolerance which led to a wealth of diversity in New Amsterdam.” The attack on 9/11 is partly about the politics of identity, about demonisation, about marginalisation. About being outsiders. Young disconnected men.

Hans is a global citizen; the anchors of family are gone, he can work anywhere. Information and culture have been globalised. In an interview, the author, who has Irish and Turkish heritage, who grew up in the Netherlands and Britain, who works in New York said that half way through writing it, he realised that the plot is the same as The Great Gatsby. He said that it’s about “...saying goodbye to Gatsby, Gatsby lived in an America which no longer exists”. It pays homage to the great tradition in American novels and political life – the dream. And thinking about the language used around the current US elections, the notion of the American dream is still so potent. If it were a tag cloud, it would be huge. For both Obama and McCain. Its worth looking at the American cover of the book - a pastoral idyll and comparing it with the one I bought. They tell very different stories. On my cover, there is a cropped image of someone, probably male, skating. It may be on thin ice or it may reference the more nostalgic parts of Hans' childhood. It's edgy and energetic in a way that the US cover is not.

Finally the writing. Dwight Garner, writing for the International Herald Tribune says that O’Neill is “incapable of composing a boring sentence or thinking an uninteresting thought,...(e.g.)he's writing about dating ("We courted in the style preferred by the English: alcoholically")”. Like me he really loved the book but O'Neill's style won’t be for everyone. “But here's what "Netherland" surely is: the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”

Another columnist, Sean O'Hagen, has written an interesting article about the novel and its fascination with cricket - it's worth reading it just for his list of great novels which are about sport. He says it recalls "John Updike's paeans to basketball that run like an elegy for lost youth, and lost Americal innocence, through his epic series of Rabbit novels." It made me remember the great passsages in Couples; the Sunday afternoon basketball matches where everything seems to be at stake in a way that it NEVER would be for Hans. Where is his testosterone?

For me, it’s about the desolation of life, of relationship, of work which has no meaning or value. Desolation in Nether nether land…

And finally, to amuse myself before I went to sleep, I made a haiku - seems a bit naff to include it here but hey - it's my blog.

Post 9/11

Hans foolishly substituted

Cricket for marriage.

HEY YOU. The living!

2008-08-31T20:58:00.000-07:00

The lasting legacy of the film festival has been a snobby disdain for ordinary films. So yesterday, I ventured off to see the Swedish film You, the living with my fabulous film festival friend (FFFF). We had to see it because David Stratton described it as a ”must for serious cinema buffs” or words to that effect. We were in search of something different; beyond “nice little films”.

You, the living is a sort of shout of a title. It’s in your face in a way that the film is not. It’s demanding something of us. “Hey you” – it’s saying. “Take some notice. This is important.” Because the opposite is what – we, the dead? It comes from Goethe: “Be pleased then, you, the living, in your delightfully warmed bed, before Lethe's ice-cold wave will lick your escaping foot.” Early in the film a tram pulls up. Its destination is "Lethe". People spill out and the tram moves on. I knew that Lethe meant “forgetfulness” but Wikipedia also says "In Classical Greek, Lethe literally means "forgetfulness" or "concealment". It’s related to the Greek word for "truth", meaning "un-forgetfulness" or "un-concealment". In Greek mythology, Lethe is one of the several rivers of Hades: those who drank from it experienced complete forgetfulness." In the film’s context, I think it means “Don’t forget you are alive, be alive to the ephemeralness of our condition. Get off the tram!” Or maybe that’s just my current take on things.

Certainly the other part of the quote is at odds with much of the activity in the film. There is little in the film to suggest “delightfully warmed bed”. It’s shot in a limey institutional green; the interiors of houses, street scenes, bars and deserted office foyers tinged in a brooding green sepia. I loved the colour; it created a consistent link between the 50 vignettes of the film and added to the impression that I had of floating like a dust mote through the film. There is no grand plot although one reviewer I read quoted film maker Roy Andersson as saying the film is “about the vulnerability of human beings”.

I warmed to the film over time. Early scenes, such as a surreal china-smashing, execution-causing vignette seemed to try too hard; I was reminded of Monty Python but not in a good way. Similarly a singing scene where a son puts the hard word on his father for cash. And yet other much more ordinary scenes seemed filled with the pathos of being alive. The overweight woman with the beautiful mouth feels ugly and depressed. Nothing her partner can do or say will make her feel better. She tells him to piss off; we’ve all been there. The psychiatrist is tired of working with people who can’t be happy; they are mean at heart. The film allowed you thinking space; I floated off thinking about a friend whose middle name is schadenfreude. (I saw her recently and I was struck with how tiring it is to be with her because of her meanness.) The lack of a strong plot line allowed space for a much more significant personal interaction with the film while it was screening.

And the most beautiful scene for me is the wedding dream. A young girl tells the bar crowd “I dreamt that I married Micke” (the lead guitarist in a band). Her dream is the culmination of a series of fantasies about Micke and an actual meeting. Every teenager has had the “meet the rock star” gauche moment or has dreamt of it. Her post wedding fantasy has a lyrical beauty about it, she gorgeous in wedding dress, opening presents, he wedded to guitar, playing lovely, lovely music. The scene morphs into a surreal train journey and they pull into a station to be greeted by an adoring crowd. But also as Naomi, my FFFF pointed out, underneath the lyricism is a reality; he is much more in love with himself, his guitar and the crowd (in that order) than her so the relationship is pretty doomed.

I was reminded of many of the European films I saw in the 70s. I think the connection is the interest in the surreal and in the disturbance of the surburban veneer to uncover both the ordinariness and the vulnerability of the human condition. One wonderful scene illustrates this. A man is on a balcony as night falls. Across from him, through a window, we can see the tail-end of a bizarre silly scene that we, the film watchers have been up close to prior to this scene but the watcher seems largely oblivious to it. From another room, we hear his wife asking ”What are you thinking?” He is smoking. Not thinking, smoking. And probably scratching his balls. Again she pleads “What are you thinking?” We know that he is thinking of nothing, just daydreaming with his cigarette. She is seeking to connect. He is not deliberately evasive; just not on her wavelength. And she not on his. The human condition.

I thought a lot of Bunuel while I was watching the film and was pleased to read a similar thought in a review by Philip French in The Observer: “Some years later, after marrying a Swede, I gave myself a crash course in Scandinavian culture that revealed a conventional wisdom claimed not to exist - the Scandinavian sense of humour. This is a mordant, quirky, melancholic affair, exhibited by that archetypal malcontent Hamlet, and to be found in, among others, Ibsen, Hans Andersen, Strindberg, Bergman, Astrid Lindgren and Frans G Bengtsson's wonderful adventure novel The Long Ships. Both movies (he means this and Andersson’s third film) are tragicomedies. If they belong in an artistic tradition, it would be Surrealism or the theatre of the absurd and their particular affinities are with Buñuel and Ionesco.”

Lovely to see a film, even though I was irritated by parts of it, that let you float in a river of associations and feelings. It’s Andersson’s fourth in four decades; he is 64 and maybe that’s where Lethe’s ice-cold foot finds real bite.

Animating animation?

2008-08-27T18:02:00.000-07:00

Is it a problem if a film, which is about terror and persecution and alienation, is also visually entrancing? When you sit there semi-glued, thinking that almost any scene would look good and/or striking, as a greeting card? I went to see the film Persepolis with my niece Grace. It is the story of a young Iranian girl who grows up in the time of the Shah in Tehran to left wing parents who live with some fear of persecution; relatives are in jail and have been tortured. The main character, Marjane, is bolshie and vulnerable when the revolution comes because of her outspokenness. As a teenager, she is sent to Vienna to school and thus begins a complex time in her life.

Like any outsider, she finds it hard to make friends and this is complicated by the fact that she finds it hard to organise a sympathetic place to live. One review I read said that the writer, Marjane Satrapi, is setting up Europe as hospitable on the surface but, in contrast with Iranians, there is no real sense of community and when the chips are down… Well home is better, whatever the politics. This sentiment is sort of belied by the ending and my sense that the dichotomy is false. An outsider in any society can have a pretty alienating time. And Marjane has an extreme reaction to some of the events, which take place in Europe.

The film provides a brief political history of the last 30 years in Iran, with a particular focus on what happens to women. It is great – really accessible, especially for my 15-year-old niece who is pretty savvy. But you don’t need to be really savvy to get it.

What I struggled with ultimately was the form of the film. It’s animated. It’s incredibly stylish to look at in its black and white simple 60’s style drawings. We see the white jasmine from the bra of Marjane’s wise old grannie tumble out of her clothes as she undresses. The flowers float across the screen like something out of a 60's film in a San Francisco park. A jail appears like the haunted house on the hill. Marjane’s unfaithful Austrian lover morphs from a handsome (in a polo-necked tosser-ish sort of way) to a snaggle-toothed user as she comes to see him more clearly. Lines on lines of men march in protest against the Shah, then we see one mown down by rifle fire. He crumples gracefully and we know that the seeping black is blood but it lacks the emotional impact, which we should feel when we see people being blasted away. Or is this too ubiquitous an image now? I went to see the film Battle for Haditha at the film festival. In this film, many civilians are killed by soldier’s rifle fire as they are in Persepolis. Like the latter film, its based on real events but one is chilling in the extreme and one is not. I think the animation serves to distance us from the events and feelings on screen. I can’t quite rid myself of the sense that this is, after all, a cartoon. Perhaps this is generational but when I asked Grace about it, I think she felt the same way. One of her loves is the films of filmmaker Hiyeo Miyazake – I really like his work as well. But his subject matter is much more playful and suitable for the animation genre. I feel like an old person as I write this. I like The Simpsons; it’s a clever piece of work but I don’t watch it addictively. Something in me finds the genre wanting.

I really enjoyed the film. It’s told from the heart and we are with Marjane every step of the way. I’ve just had to work a bit harder and more consciously to feel the intensity of the events that the director is interested in.

Netherland Part 1

2008-08-24T23:00:00.000-07:00

"It was possible, too, I further speculated, that a father might have done the trick – that is, an active, observable predecessor in experience, one moreover alert to the duty of handing down, whether by example or word of mouth, certain encouragements and caveats; and even now, when I am beginning to understand the limits of the personal advice business, I am led to consider, especially when I stroll in Highbury Fields with Jake, a skateboarding boy of six these days, what I might one day transmit to my son to ensure that he does not grow up like his father, which is to say, without warning." Have a look at this. It's a 106 word sentence. I think it might be the longest one in the book but I selected it almost randomly when I was reading page 87 of Netherland and started to think about Joseph O'Neill's prose.

It has divided people that I know, one woman saying that it the next Gatsby ( and there could be no higher praise than this from her) and another saying that she really disliked it. I look forward to going to bed with Mr O'Neill. I love his character Hans and I think he is deliberately using this very careful circuitous Henry James type prose to set up Hans as a real Dutchman. It may be stereotypical but it works for me. He is a man to whom things happen, perhaps because he is bogged down by semi-colons, dashes, and colons. Actually not colons - no lists, just a lot of phrases that imply a certain predisposition.

On the weekend I also saw a film about a scenario which is the opposite of the one which Hans finds himself in. The film is Margot at the Wedding. Margot is the fraying at the edges older sister who comes to"celebrate" her sister's wedding. At one stage her sister says to her "Margot, when your sense of self hinges on your fuckability and that begins to wane, it's very hard." Margot is having a slightly ungrounded affair with a guy who is pretty horrible. Its a great statement and sort of made the film for me though I liked a lot about it. I also liked watching the interview with the director. He talked about how the film has almost no establishing shots so we are pivoted right into the uncomfortable family situation without much warning. Its a really effective idea. A lot of the action is seen indirectly or a characters head is cut off and we just see his or her body moving round the room like you are sitting on the couch or something. It works in such a different way to Netherland where a lot of the time we live in Hans' head.

Film Word Cloud

2008-08-11T20:20:00.001-07:00

Check out what my musings on film have turned into on Wordle.

Boy A

2008-08-07T23:29:00.000-07:00

What do we do with children who commit horrible crimes? I started thinking about this earlier this week apropos of the court case where 4 young men from Melton belted up a Sudanese boy. They embodied everything that is unseen about the underbelly of this society; racist, largely unrepentant, low levels of schooling and likely to breed way more kids than anyone in my bubble of acquaintance. The barrister representing one of them reckoned that he should be excused a jail term because his poor access to schooling had left him bereft of a value structure! I really don’t know what should happen in cases like this. One writer to The Age suggested that these boys should be sent to the Sudan to experience a community where schooling is really hard to access!

I saw the English film Boy A last night. It’s won some awards and will probably get a commercial release. It follows the experiences of a young man, in his early 20s, who has just been released from jail after committing some sort of horrible crime. We don’t find out immediately, which creates a level of tension and interest that combines with the tension and interest as to whether ‘Jack’ is going to be able to survive with a new identity in a new town.

He is likeable. The actor Andrew Garfield, does a fantastic job of playing this young guy who has missed out on some of the key milestones in a teenager’s life and doesn’t know how to behave. He is shy and gawky and easy to like but all the time, you’re wondering what he did and what will befall him. The film is also about families; ‘Jack’ is supported by a parole officer with a son of about the same age. To some extent, the film is about the old Philip Larkin ‘They fuck you up…’ riff. Fathers and sons. Abuse. To what extent can you use your family (or poor schooling) as an excuse for your behaviour. It’s a well-told story but I am no closer to having any idea what should happen to those Melton boguns…

Slow burn of embarrassment

2008-08-06T23:54:00.001-07:00

“As I get older, I want life to slow down a little. Films move too fast. I want to stay in the moment and, if you wait, things reveal themselves.” The film maker is Joanna Hogg and she is talking about her latest film Unrelated which I really loved despite it being a little too long.

Her film is a real achievement given that the main character Anna (Kathryn Worth) is annoying, embarrassing and dumb. Most of the time, I felt irritated with her. A middle aged English woman, she arrives at an Italian villa near Sienna late at night to be greeted by her friend’s daughter and her friends. They are drinking by the pool; the adults have gone to bed. The early part of the film sets up her unease and the fact that she and her absent husband are going through a rocky patch. Anna has been invited to be part of this holiday for this extended family and friends but she seems incapable of connecting with Verena, her friend and gravitates towards the younger generation who are in their late teens or early twenties. The whole extended generational mix reminded me of being at the beach house and of the sort of tensions which arise when you plonk a whole lot of people in the one place for too long an d fuel it with alcohol.

Hogg said in an interview that she deliberately organised the film shoot so that all the actors had to commit to being in the house for about 7 weeks. She shot it consecutively so that the story could emerge organically. Looking at this house and environment, it would be no real hardship to be forced to spend a couple of months there but tensions arise when you live in close proximity to other people for any length of time.

Anna is attracted to Oakley; there are many scenes where I felt the slow burn of embarrassment for her. It was painful to watch but very real. I am most interested in the questions of allegiances in this film. You can watch a trailer which shows the Gen Y kids buying (mostly) alcohol from the supermarket. Anna is trailing along behind with an uncertain look on her face like she’s not really sure if she fits in. (She’s not really sure if she fits in anywhere.) They hoon out to the car with the shopping trolleys and end up in a field smoking a joint. The kids (I know I should write young adults but this denotes my age) boast about getting pissed and rolling round Sienna in the middle of the night pissing on church doors, while Anna looks sort of embarrassed and sort of complicit. Then a silence falls over the group as they realise that she is “not one of them”. “Hey, don’t tell the olds.” And she agrees and that sets up the dramatic tension for a large amount of the film.

We would have liked to have seen more of the olds in the film. Slightly too much time is taken up trailing round after the kids and apart from Anna, the older generation remains largely one-dimensional. But Naomi and I both loved the tag line between Anna and Verena; an awkward and uncomfortable “Hey, let’s get a couple of tickets to an Iggy Pop concert some time.” Which sort of tells us that Anna is still in a pretty ungrounded space, despite what has happened to her in the close confines of this house.

Vulnerability

2008-08-05T17:51:00.000-07:00

Wendy and Lucy is the second film I have seen this year that explores life on the road. In both Into the Wild and this film, the perspective is that of a young American going north. I hadn’t been much interested in Into the Wild until a friend told me how much he’d loved it. That film followed the real life of Christopher McCandless who left home after graduating, heading towards Alaska, without telling his family of his plans. His plans. He didn’t seem to have plans, more a sort of disgust about the material and pressured life that seemed to be laid out for him as a young lawyer. In contrast, Wendy (Michelle Williams, Brokeback Mountain) has plans. She is also headed for Alaska, seeking work. The film begins with a long shot- we see her playing with her dog Lucy and humming tunelessly. The long shot feels voyeuristic and sets up the ongoing feeling that people with nastier intentions than the film audience will also be watching Wendy who is young and vulnerable. She is on the margins; the next shot takes us to a campfire of people who are passing though a town on Oregon. It’s a little bit scary but she gets some good advice about possible work in Alaska and is able to move on.

McCandless took on the name of ‘Alexander Supertramp' and shrugged off any trappings of comfort pretty quickly. When his car was wrecked in a flood, he burnt the number plate and all his remaining money and started hitchhiking and jumping trains. What he does is sort of shocking. His journey is set against the background of the most fabulous North American scenery; big skies, rivers, bird and animal life. You get a real sense of the attraction for him of being on the road. In Wendy’s case, she gets stuck in a town in Oregon and we linger with her as things get more and more desperate. In contract to the Supertramp character, her shrinking money is a real issue for her. I could describe the plot in about two sentences so the real skill of the film-maker is in taking time to let us feel her vulnerability and strength of character. I’m really interested, in this MIFF, in films which try to stay with the painful moments for characters, in how film makers create the space for us to feel what they are feeling. I’m not so interested in crying when there is a painful moment as in really being forced to sit in the horribleness of whatever is on the screen and feel it.

The director, Kelly Reichardt, does this in a couple of ways. There is no music to distract or artificially build emotion. The film is slow; we experience Wendy’s panic when she discovers her dog is missing in excruciating slow tension. Wendy is never melodramatic; she is tightly contained, like Supertramp, but so so vulnerable. And the film feels like real life because it is just a fragment from Wendy’s life. I loved the director’s willingness to have us sit with the pain and fear and loneliness of Wendy. It was hard to sit through but very real.

Supertramp’s sister provides part of the narrative voice of Into the Wild; through her comments we hear what the family is going through as their boy has effectively disappeared. The film is quite interested in exploring the pain for the family of his decision to disappear and the extent to which he can no longer really connect with anyone that he meets. Some film footage makes us wonder about his relationship with his parents, particular his father, and to think about what you owe you family in terms of communicating with them. When is it OK to say “enough is enough” and to simply drop out of a family? Is it ever OK? Is it OK to punish the whole family for the sins of some? In Wendy’s case we are exposed to a little of her family but it’s clear that there is a disconnect. We’re left to wonder about what has happened in her life. She and the dog are alone on the road and this small lovely, painful film is also a film about the love which Wendy and her dog share. And about vulnerability and choices – or lack of them. And about making brave choices - It’s a difficult film for dog-owners.

Flipping Out

2008-07-28T21:38:00.000-07:00

The director called it “flipping out” but I think of it as post-traumatic stress syndrome. I wonder if there’s a proper and specific term for it in Israel? Yoav Shamir’s documentary is about the experiences of young Israelis post their military service in India. Many go to India to recover from their 3 years of service. When I was in India, they had just decamped in a mass exodus to go south from Dharamsala and other mountain towns and there were huge collective sighs all round from the locals who found them too loud, too miserly and too stoned.

The documentary opens with breakfast scenes around a bong in the northern foothills of India; it explores what happens to those who “flip out” either as a result of prolonged and sustained drug use or because of their experiences of military service or some combination of both. Or maybe neither; one man interviewed spoke of his mother with a mental illness and his fear of inheriting it.

We meet many young Israeli men, some people dedicated to saving lost causes, an Indian woman and an Israeli deputy prime minister. The documentary provoked a long conversation between me and my Israeli-Australian friend. What should be the nature of national service? Can Australians really understand Israel’s plight? Can we understand what it is to need an army? What is the responsibility of government when their citizens are in need abroad? What comparisons could be made with the way that Australians behave in Bali? How should India respond?

We talked at length about the nature of that military service experience. The documentary maker began with a promising through line - footage of young Israeli soldiers on active service. He asked some questions about the nature of their army service but this part of the film petered out after a while. We really don’t know the extent to which young people do “flip out” en masse or whether it’s more isolated. The film made me angry and curious which is a good outcome. What sort of populace do you create when you force your entire cohort of young people through a three year army period. The film alluded to brutalisation and the annihilation of identity without exploring it in any detail. Do you really want to live in a society created in this way? I want to know more about this.

As Naomi reminded me, I have the luxury of thinking this way. She was proud of the Israeli government stepping in to look after these young people through a system of “warm houses”. I can’t imagine feeling anything about an Australian government doing good in this way. I am not very patriotic; maybe because I don‘t have to be but also because I want to live in a society where patriotism and nationalism are not key features.

After the film we walked up the hill towards the Cellar Bar. A couple crossed our path on the way, he in Western clothes and she in a full burka, even with the finest black chiffon across her eyes. I struggle with the fact that gender impacts so much on what some people wear; I’d be fine if he was also swathed in black fabric. The most poignant scene from the film flashed into my head. An Indian woman is being interviewed; really the only time an Indian person is part of the story in any meaningful way. She was the landlady several years prior when a young man called Ran “flipped out”. She describes the impact of the young Israelis in Goa. We see scenes of many, many stoned dancers on the beach against a faint sunrise and pulsing techno music. She recounts a phone call with his parents where he was too stoned to talk to them. Then he shows up. She is clearly nervous but happy to see him but he has changed significantly. He has now found a form of orthodox Judaism that prevents him from touching women so he cannot even shake her hand, even though it's clear that she cared for him when he'd been ill. The scene is stark in the disconnect, he might as well be stoned for all the warmth she receives from him. It’s terribly sad. It adds to my great suspicion of fundamentalist religion.

And so it is a film about nationalism, about caring, about trauma and about young people adrift in another culture with the licence this brings to cut loose. A great film to start the film festival.

Waves

2008-07-28T16:45:00.001-07:00

Is it possible for a dramatic moment to go unnoticed amidst the flesh and press of a crowded Mediterranean beach? Director Adrian Sitaris takes us up close and personal in this short Romanian film. A couple fondle each other as their neighbours watch on in cross envy. A young man in baggy underpants is visibly attracted to a young mother. It’s all lust, bustle and sand up your bathers in 16 minutes. But what can you really get away with on a beach? This is an intriguing little film.

Falling in love again. Properly…

2008-07-27T21:01:00.000-07:00

“Cloud 9: a state of bliss; in a euphoric state…” At various times in my life I have been on Cloud 9 and at various times I have yearned to be in that strange out-of-body but totally in touch with body state of disconnect with the world. Falling in love – it’s a time when the world goes a bit fuzzy, when you can’t concentrate, when its hard to know what you want except to see that special person. It’s dizzying and unsustainable but totally addictive. German film Cloud 9 focuses on the reactions of Inge, a seamstress in her mid 60’s who falls suddenly in lust and love with Karl who is 76. It’s a love triangle film, one which might be fairly prosaic if it were about younger people. But time is running out for all three and it is this, the performances and the utter ordinariness of the woman and her lover that makes this film really special.

We meet Inge (Ursula Werner) in her bedroom / sewing room in the heat of an East Berlin summer. She is sweaty and dishevelled, her eyes small in her middle-aged puffy face. Within minutes, she is in Karl’s flat, their faces in that classic cinema close-up that presages sex. It’s tender and lustful all at once. We’ve all felt that urgency to have sex; so much wanting it that only half the clothes come off and the feeling afterward too of “What have I done? What am I going to do now?”

Inge has a husband of 30 years, Werner (Horst Hehberg) whose hobby is listening to recordings of vintage steam trains. Their relationship seems firm and strong and for a while, Inge resists taking things further with handsome Karl (Horst Westphal). Then she tells her daughter “I always thought I would fall in love again, properly. I just gave up expecting it.” The word “properly” really got to me. There are degrees of love and I feel lucky that I have been in love “properly” a few times in my life. It was timely to watch this film; it’s easy to give up on the possibility of this happening again. Inge was brave and honest as a character; she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as she had been living. Karl re-awakened something for her. In love, her face softened and became young again; in one scene, she looked like a nervous, trangressive teenager.

The positioning of this film, within the ‘Forbidden Pleasures' section of MIFF, seemed exploitative to me. A lot of the publicity for the film globally has been of the “check out these old people having sex” variety. The film is a drama, with the appropriate amount of sex present in any love triangle film, however unusual it is to show explicit sex between people of this age. The film deals with all the anxieties and realities of the body as it ages. The young people next to me were clearly uncomfortable with the sex scenes; they laughed or whispered whenever anything approaching a conventional love or sex scene was shown. I wanted to turn and say “this will be you. If you’re lucky” but I didn’t. Perhaps it was a good thing to watch, two weeks after my 50th birthday. Despite part of the storyline, it is a film about seizing the day in the bravest, most honest way you can. And it bravely depicted ordinary people who looked like me and they filled up the screen.

In search of a better life…

2008-07-22T20:58:00.000-07:00

I’ve been to Chongqing about seven times. It’s the port city in China where all the tourist boats congregate before and after they ‘do’ the Three Gorges. Chongqing is the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet. Its population is already bigger than that of Peru or Iraq, with half a million more arriving every year in search of a better life.

I’ve only been there in winter when it’s a city of dire cold and fog. Or bad smog. I think there is a bad inversion layer over the place even though it sprawls out over steep hills. It’s the first ritzy city that I encountered in China, after the rural intimacy of Yunnan province. Chongqing is full of skyscrapers and department stores, and of huge billboards flogging French cosmetics. I got a shock when I first went there. In Moijiang where I’d come from, I’d been able to buy a Chinese flag and some left over Red Army gear in modest little shops and not much other merchandise. This was in 1999 though and China has rushed ahead since then in its lurch towards modernisation.

Chinese Canadian film-maker Yung Chang has made a film about this area of the world. And this theme. Called Up The Yangste, he began with the idea of “exploring the culture of tourism and the tourism of culture” on the Yangste river tourist boats before figuring out that the story he was telling was really about contemporary China. I’ve been on one of those tourist boats in non-tourist season. One year I was there, we had an evening tour of the cold old river, mists swirling around and the lights of the city off in the distance. The city actually reminds me of a fabled Tolkein-style fantasy but maybe that’s another story. The evening river tour was pretty dismal. It was about everything that is wrong with organised tourism; artificial jokes, bad music, reality out of sync with promise. But I had no expectations that it would be good and wasn’t paying the 200 or 300 yuan fee. Cynical in the extreme.

Yung Chang’s film is not cynical. It’s a documentary made great by the real life characters in the film. While it starts with the very impersonal fortress like lochs which the Yangste boats must pass through, the bulk of the story is intimate. It tracks the experiences of two teenagers who leave school to begin work on the tourist boat. This is absolutely compelling. Yu Shui is the daughter of a very poor family who squat on the edges of the soon-to-be-flooded Yangste growing corn illegally. They are minority people; the lowest of the low in this society. Yu Shui would like to stay at school but they are too poor; she must make a sacrifice for the possibility of one of hers siblings attending high school in the future. Her grief at leaving and the unexpressed pain of her parents fills the screen; Yung Chang is discreet enough to avoid commentary at these specials moments in the film.

The other character we meet is ‘Jerry’, Chen Bo Yu, whose own words set him up for his fate in the film. “ I am successful because I am good looking and good at English,” he says gleefully at the beginning of the film. An only child, he knows he occupies centre-stage in his parent’s lives. I have not met many Jerrys in my times in China but I’ve met a lot of Yu Shui’s. Maybe it reflects where I’ve been – not in wealthy Beijing or Shanghai schools but in rural western China where circumstances are hard.

I loved the scenes of Yu Shui and her family. Her father carrying their huge wardrobe on his back up the newly made shoulder of the road. The road built with shovels, chisels and wheelbarrows, just as I have seen them building the great highway into Burma. The chiselled cheekbones of Yu Shui’s father and his gaunt worker’s body. The family visiting their daughter on the boat, her Dad still in the soiled clothes of a road worker shuffling into the tacky lounge where tourists are subjected to songs like “How Easy it is to Learn Chinese-sy.” This made me cringe, as did the scene where the mostly Western tourists are taken to inspect the new home of Chinese families whose previous homes have been submerged by the new dam. The Westerners make arch comments about the politics and the Chinese bat these away like slow-pitched balls. It’s painful for me to watch these scenes; it reminds me of many similar experiences in China and of just how hard it is to plough below the surface in another country and to really connect with the people and the issues. Even with the best will in the world.

Up the Yangste does just as the film-maker wanted – it is a real insight into many of the issues in modern China, seen through the very private lens of Yu Shui and other family and other ordinary people, some who cry with anger about what has happened to them. It’s real and raw; as opposed to the cheesy experiences that the Western tourists have as they are transported up one of the longest and most important rivers in the world. (Note that if this whets your appetite for reading about change in China, you can do no better than Peter Hessler’s River Town, an outstanding Westerner’s account of life in a town on the Yangste, or Mr China by Tim Clissold (about doing business in China or Simon Winchester’s great book about the Yangste itself, The River at the Centre of the World.

There is no culture here…

2008-07-21T22:15:00.000-07:00

There’s a moment in The Band’s Visit which is painful to sit through; it’s what gives this film traction and lifts it above the general run of the mill cross cultural films. Three Egyptian men in blue uniform are jammed around a dining table with four Israelis. They have gate-crashed a birthday and they are definitely not welcome. In a less interesting film the discussion of music would establish a connection between these disparate individuals. Instead, the conversation goes nowhere. We become aware that the connection even between band members is at best tenuous, let alone the possibilities of connecting across cultures with long-standing issues. The connection between the Israeli couple is fraught and angry; it hints at the despair of long-term unemployment. Their happy wedding photo belies the present loneliness of both individuals. And yet the film is only momentarily about their story. Much of the dialogue takes place in English; a second language for both cultures which creates a further level of stilted alienation.

The film maker, Eran Korilin, said in an interview on At the Movies, "I wanted also the film to have these aesthetics where you would have a very strict and disciplined shooting and cutting but maybe you would feel underneath that there is something pounding, you know, beneath." Something pounding beneath - what an ambition and a phrase.

The band is stranded in the wrong small town in Israel. Their intended destination is Petah Tikwa. My friend Jindra says that this translates as ‘Opening of Hope’. Instead, they are in a fictional town called Beit Hativka; which might well be called “Departure of Hope’ or “Hopelessness”. It is a town perched in the middle of a white sandy desert, its new sparseness accentuated by the empty roads and colonnade of light poles stretching out to nowhere. The director, Korilin, emphasises the surreal nature of the landscape by positioning the band in tight geometric formation, their uniforms very blue against the overexposed grey of the sky. Life there is dismal; as Dina, the café owner points out ”Culture, there is no culture here, no Arab, no Israeli, no culture at all…” It is a town entirely at odds with my experience of the Middle East though the spare desert scenes were like many I saw in Jordan and some in Syria. The setting conveys the same sort of desolation that I feel in new outer-suburban parts of Melbourne. Part of it is the lack of life on the streets and the sense of disconnection that people have from each other.

There is much more to say about this film. It is a fragment of a story but I was engrossed in it. The director avoided both predictability and sentimentality, with the exception of the concerto sub-theme. In its exploration of the loneliness of many of the individuals, it is touching without being sentimental. I could write much more about the two main characters, Dina and Tawfiq, created by actors who both know how to fill a screen.

Wikipedia says that The Band's Visit was Israel's original Foreign Language Film submission for the 80th Academy Awards but was rejected by the Academy because it contained over 50% English dialogue. Thus, Israel sent Beaufort instead; Beaufort was finally included in the five final nominees. I saw Beaufort last year at MIFF; it is a very good film which is also about loneliness and despair against a fairly bleak backdrop. It was rumored, according to Wikipedia, that it was the filmmakers of Beaufort who brought to the Academy's attention the ineligibility, on language grounds, of The Band's Visit. Beaufort's makers denied this rumor. Is it better than The Band’s Visit? Different beasts!

Light but not fluffy

2008-07-21T20:59:00.000-07:00

It’s risky calling a film Tiramisu. It’s a bit like calling something ‘trifle’ or ‘sweet mush’. A free kick to reviewers. The texture is important in a really good tiramisu. It’s all in the savoiardi biscuits and really good quality mascarpone cheese. Tiramisu could have gone either way – sweet mush or something a bit more satisfying. While it teetered for a while, director Paula van der Oest avoided the most predictable narratives to produce a satisfying light drama. It’s billed as a comedy by MIFF; perhaps the Dutch language made it funnier than I could see.

The film is a two hander; ageing actress and straight-laced accountant. The most predictable of line-ups. Two characters come to appreciate each others strengths and become different, fuller, happier people as a result. These films are a dime a dozen. What made a difference was Anneke Blok, who played the actress. She gave the role dignity, nuance and a mix of vulnerability and resilience that took the film beyond the expected. The film played lightly with the theme of damage. Blok’s character, her skin damaged through age and sun, her life damaged through bad decisions. Her daughter physically damaged. Jacob Derwig, who plays the accountant Jacob, whose marriage has been blighted by caution; the film delicately explores the ideas of risk and passion.

Van der Oest’s willingness to upset the traditional narrative also added the requisite amount of texture. An added bonus was the setting; a canal boat in Amsterdam; lovely to see aspects of a country seldom seen in films viewed here. Its not a great film but not fluffy either.

June reading

2008-07-10T18:10:00.006-07:00

11 July

I've decided to try to distil what I am reading into haiku. Yes, it could be seen as a sign of being a wanker but I think its a good way of trying to work out what the writer was really on about.

I re-read Marry Me by John Updike after reading Couples again. I last read these books in the 70's/80's when I was at uni and before I'd had affairs with men. I think I just thought about it then. I needed Esther Parel (Mating in Captivity) in my life but she only wrote it last year. I liked Couples - it was sexy, redolent of the 60's but still real. Marry Me was disappointing.

Flip-Flopping Jerry
Loves Ruth. Or Sally. Or Ruth.
Or? How will it end?

If I had more room, I'd write "And who cares?" I didn't like Jerry or Sally much. I liked Ruth and Richard. I wondered whether I liked any of them when I read it in 1980. I wish I'd written in the margins. This blog is a way of writing in the margins...

I also read The Road by Mr Cormac McCarthy who writes about men. This book is less obviously a book about men and more a book about the relationship between the anonymous father and the anonymous son in the face of a post-apocalypse world. It was absolutely gripping; both the unfolding of the story and the depiction of the tragic doomed relationship they shared. I loved the way that he avoided telling us what had caused the apocalyspe and that, contrary to the way the genre usually unfolds, the story is set several years after disaster has struck.

A world full of ashes.
Doomed father and young son lurch
onwards. World without hope.

The love story (if you can describe it thus) is what enables you to read this grim story. It's beautiful sparse prose. A wonderful book.

Life's Looking Good

2008-07-09T22:37:00.000-07:00

"Life's looking good, like a chopping block should." This blog name is drawn from some graffitti I encountered on the toilet wall of the women's toilets in the Union building at Melbourne Uni. Amidst the calls to the sisterhood, political statements and sexual confessions was this small piece of black philosophy. I liked it and it's one of the few things that has stuck from my time at Uni. I want to write a blog which is about what I am reading, looking at and doing. This is my first entry on the day after I have turned 50.

I am a little inspired at the moment by the writer Amy Hempel who I heard on Radio National yesterday (9/7). I haven't read any of her writing. She was talking about brevity and cited Gertrude Stein who once wrote a 4 word short story titled Longer:

She stayed away longer.

Given what I have read of Gertude Stein, I can hardly believe this economy. And then Amy read one of her own short short stories (a one sentence story) Just Once In My Life:

Oh, when have I ever wanted something just once in my life?

They are like little haiku. My friend Julie shared this great haiku with me:

Writing a haiku

With seventeen syllables

Is very diffic

Amy can be found here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2008/2294505.htm.

So just to finish, the mention of Gertrude Stein reminded me of this all time funny threat. In an episode of The X-Files called "Bad Blood", the character Fox Mulder warns his partner, Dana Scully, that if she goes to prison, "your cellmate's nickname is gonna be Large Marge, she's gonna read a lot of Gertrude Stein."