One hundred and fifty minutes in the dark

I haven’t seen much Turkish film but the one I saw last week reminded me of an incident that happened to us when I was in Cappadocia with my friend Barb. We were dropped off an overnight bus into a darkened town at about 4.30 in the morning. We were expecting to be picked up and taken to our B&B but no one turned up. This is from my journal:

“Then a car sort of jerks its way into the square. An old beaten up sort of vehicle. The call to prayer booms out over the square - but nothing in the town moves. A man emerges from the car. He is waving a half empty Efes bottle (local beer) and inviting us into his car. A big ugly mongrel of a dog emerges from the back seat and runs around. Barb and I do a quick 'What do you reckon - how drunk is he?' and negotiate a fee with him. We have to get to a town called Urgup - about 8 kms down the road. He is likely to be a tout from one of the local pensiones but he is equally likely just to be a drunk out looking for a light. A moth. We struggle to fit all our stuff in the car and he - let's call him Mehmet - there are only 6 million Mehmets in Turkey - struggles to coax the dog (Which looks like it had some bull terrier and other people-friendly breeds) into the back seat with me. We set off.
The road to Urgup is through one of the most surreal landscapes I have ever been in. The whole area is formed out of some sort of volcanic leftovers - so that there are thousands of giant cone shaped outbreaks of rock. People build homes in them - that's what the area is famous for. It looks like something from a science fiction film. The effect is enlivened by our particular mode of travel - the small truckload of empty stubbies rolling around on the floor of the car, the dogs breath on my leg, Mehmet's drunken attempts to engage in conversation with Barbara - I’m sure he mentioned Steve Irwin at one stage. He would speed up and slow down in some deep-seated drunken rhythm that bore no relation to the road conditions at all. His back door wouldn't close properly so I was more in fear of falling out. Dawn was beginning to appear.
In Urgup it became obvious that he had no idea where our hotel was (not a surprise in the long run as it wasn't actually in this town). Fortuitously, his car stalled outside the police station (It wouldn't start in first gear) so we were able to enlist the aid of the local cops. We paid Mehmet for bringing us to the wrong location - he kept muttering 'I a good man' and threw ourselves on the mercy of the cops who took us inside, located our hotel - in another town close to the original one and called a taxi for us. They were very entertained by our journey - the crime wave in Urdup has been on the wane and they were pleased to have something to do.”

I felt like I was in this territory in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Part of the reason for this is that the film (almost) opens with a focus on landscape – rolling treeless hills, the gathering dusk, a road and some headlights. It is mesmerising. Slowly, slowly three vehicles emerge into view. They are old vehicles – like Mehmet’s - and stuffed full of Turkish men. Their size within the claustrophobic confines of the car is comedic – it reminds us that this is not a wealthy country, These men are on an unpleasant mission; they are in search of a corpse, a murder victim who has been disposed of by two men who are part of this strange band of people. The rest of the cast are those in authority: policemen, a prosecutor, a doctor, a soldier. A collegiality is established; the men talk of domestic things during this more morbid task. The texture of buffalo mozzarella, the need for a prescription for a chronically ill son. They exude authenticity.

While this is on the surface a police procedural, it is really just about life – about the awful and the beautiful. There’s not much on the beautiful side but one scene, using candlelight and the face of a young woman contrasting with the aging faces of the men to whom she minsters, is beautiful and restorative.

The film invites intimacy through its very close portrayal of these ordinary men over the course of a night and a morning - their movemnets, their conversations, their interactions. The last part of the film provides a moral dilemma that made me think about the film long after – but I suspect that it is the cinematography and ‘feel’ of the film that will linger longest.

Critic Roger Ebert wrote:

(It is)150 minutes long, and its story unfolds slowly and obliquely. I tell you now so you won't complain later. It needs to be long, and it needs to be indirect, because the film is about how sad truths can be revealed during the slow process of doing a job. The Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan doesn't slap us with big dramatic moments, but allows us to live along with his characters as things occur to them.

Some lovely phrases there – I hope they teach them in film school: “film is about how sad truths can be revealed during the slow process of doing a job” and the director “doesn't slap us with big dramatic moments, but allows us to live along with his characters…”

Last week I saw two films of 150 minutes duration. The other one was titled Margaret. (The diector of this film was new to me, as was Nuri Bilge Ceylan who made the Turkish film.) Made by Kenneth Lonergan, it has taken seven years to release as a result of internal issues around the edit. This is obvious in the film which has many more small sidetracks in plot that it needs. I think the director must have been unable to let these go; they impede the actual emotional arc of the film and made me irritated. I was irritated very early though because an essential part of the main character’s experience seemed to be withheld from the audience and the narrative – for the purposes of creating tension. I felt manipulated. Various aspects of the plot were less credible given this withholding. I can’t wrote easily about this without giving away the plot. I don’t want to do this. The film is based on a great idea. Three people are involved in a traffic accident; two pedestrians and a driver. The significant impact of this momentary event has long-reaching consequences, especially on the teenage girl, Lisa, who is played extremely well by Anna Paquin.

A Guardian reviewer writes:

Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup, and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. But is that emotion guilt or righteousness? Or a sociopathic convulsion, a need to create a huge redemptive drama with herself at the centre, to lash out against her mother and the entire adult world; or to enact vengeance against a man who, without trying, has placed her in a position of weakness – at the very point at which she considers she should be attaining her adult, queen-bee status? Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically compelling to watch.

Another reviewer also comments:

As the heroine of his story of life in conflicting times, Lonergan casts a character in the grips of emotions she can feel but not process. Paquin plays a young woman filled with passion she can’t quite articulate and frustration she can only translate into anger. Alternately endearing and enraging, Paquin’s work might be remembered as one of the great depictions of what it feels like to be a teen if the film around her had worked out better. But, despite a wrenching opening that saddles Paquin’s character with more guilt than most anyone could bear, much less a less-than-steady-on-her-feet teen, the film lets some great performances and compelling moments drift in a sea of shapelessness.

Holden Caulfield is the person who comes to mind in watching this performance. And an early version of my own righteous self in full and ugly flight. ‘Margaret’ (the title of which derives from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem called Spring and Fall) got lots of very good reviews as well as some mixed ones. For me, the girl’s performance was authentic and the relationship with her mother real and honest. However, the director saddled the girl with a histrionic mess. I felt manipulated and bored despite the excellent acting of the two lead actresses. Some of the quietness and the pared-back narrative of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia would have served this film well. Both of these films turn on the value of knowing the truth – but one rendition is melodramatic; one full of existential ambiguity. Nothing is black and white - or is it?

Horror of adolescence

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.



all my reviews

The syntax of families

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.

Let the right one in

“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.

All class

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.