Love in the Shadows

I didn’t watch this year’s Oscar ceremony; I very rarely watch it any other year; the hype and the razzmatazz is just too much for me, no matter how much I love cinema.  I knew that Daniel Day-Lewis had won best actor for his performance in Lincoln, but that’s really about it.  So far as the general field is concerned, I had seen Brave, Anna Karenina and Django Unchained.  I also saw The Beasts of the Southern Wild recently, though I can’t say I was hugely impressed by this confused and misdirected piece of cinematic hype.  What I had not seen - what I had not even heard of - was a French movie called Amour, which won the Academy Award for the best foreign film. 

Thanks to another blogger I finally caught up with this movie.  I am so glad that I did.  It’s a marvel, an intelligent, thoughtful, perceptive and well-crafted piece of cinema.  It’s a movie for grown-ups, different in every way from the usual hyperactive adolescent nonsense that English-language producers largely prefer.  I was on the point of writing that I don’t think a movie like Amour could ever have been made in the Anglo-Saxon orbit – it simply would not have attracted sufficient commercial support – when it occurred to me that in some ways it resembles Iris, the 2001 biopic about the novelist Irish Murdoch.  Amour deals with the same themes of love and loss as Iris, though in a far less glossy manner.

Written and directed by the Austrian film-maker Michael Haneke, Amour, by coincidence, is the second movie of his that I’ve seen within a fairly short space of time.  The first was Das weiße Band – The White Ribbon – a German language film shown recently on the BBC’s catch up service.  This concerns a rural community in Germany on the eve of the First World War, a place beset by a growing sense of menace.  The menace is also present in Amour; the menace here is death, an opponent that wins every battle, though often victory is claimed slowly, claimed, moreover, with sadistic relish. 

Amour – Love – is a story of disentanglement, of a relationship being slowly unwoven after a life-time; it’s about the disintegration, if anything, of love and of life.  It’s a story set in the twilight days of Anne and Georges Laurent, two elderly former music teachers, wonderfully played by Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant.  The action takes place mostly in their well-appointed Parisian apartment, which here serves the purpose of a theatre. 

The movie begins, pre-credits, with the police breaking in to the apartment, there to discover the body of an elderly woman, her head surrounded with flowers.  Then it’s a journey back into the recent past, starting, post credits, with an elderly couple attending a piano recital.  Afterwards they return to their apartment, a sanctuary replete with objects and haunted by memories, only to discover that the door has been damaged in an attempted break-in by some unknown stranger.  Puzzled and unsettled, they arrange to have the door fixed, but the stranger, in a sense, never really goes away.  Something cold and unsympathetic has entered their lives and made a home.

It’s almost impossible to review this film without writing one big spoiler.  But what is important is not so much the story of Anne’s descent into debilitating dementia, the outcome of successive strokes, and Georges’ attempts to cope – a simple enough tale in itself – as the sparkling personal interplay between the two characters.  Everyone else seems like an intruder, even their own daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert).  The old couple now live in the midst of lengthening shadows.  Is love enough?  No, it is not.  For Georges it is replaced by fear, as he sees Anne slip through his fingers like sand, with nothing substantial to hang on to.  This is a chamber piece with no music, only the sounds of silence, sounds arising from the shadows. 

In the dead of night Georges hears the doorbell.  He opens but there is nobody there.  Walking down the hall, he finds that he is wadding ever deeper in water.  A hand clamps over his mouth from behind; his eyes fill with panic and fear.  He is drowning.  Then he wakes.  It’s only a nightmare.  But it’s not.  He is being suffocated by Anne’s decline.  

The suffocation serves as a metaphor, but it also prefigures Anne’s final demise - Georges smothers her with a pillow.  But this is no mercy killing; there is nothing premeditated about it; he kills her in a rush of passion, angered by her refusal to eat.  We are left to assume that Georges own death follows, but with the mystery now complete we simply do not know; he is just no longer there.  The apartment and its shadows are left to Eva

I read an article by one Peter Saunders describing Amour as a “dangerously seductive piece of pro-euthanasia propaganda.”  He goes on to compare it to Ich Klage An – I Accuse -, a movie made in 1941 under the auspices of Josef Goebbels, intended to make the public more supportive of the Nazi state’s euthanasia programme.  There is even a hint at the end that Amour deserves to be banned, just as Ich Klage An was by the Allies after the War.

I find it difficult to cope with this kind of fearful stupidity, the assumption that movies must inevitably carry some message or other, some generalised desiderata that we are all meant to absorb uncritically, that our emotions, childlike in their innocence, can be corrupted and manipulated by ‘propaganda’. 

Amour is no more an argument for euthanasia than it is an advertisement for book-lined Parisian apartments.  It’s a story, that’s all; a story of two particular people and their particular existential anguish.  Other people could have produced another story, another director might have told the tale differently, with less poignancy and less restraint than Haneke.  He does it so well, asking some of the hardest questions of all, chiefly what is the right way to behave when faced with huge and personal changes in one’s life?  I certainly do not know the answer.  More than that, I do not think there is an answer.  We come to life’s dilemmas, each and everyone of us, in our own unique ways; we find our own paths, even in the midst of loneliness and despair.  In the end love may not be enough but at least it makes life worth living, even in the lengthening shadows. 

Time has transfigures them into 
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Unconquered

Invictus is an astonishing movie, not at all what I expected. Directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela and Matt Damon as François Pienaar, the captain of the South African rugby team it purports to tell the story of the events culminating in South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. But it is so much more.

It’s the story, in microcosm, of South Africa in the immediate post-apartheid era, a nation where some of the deeper wounds have not yet healed. And for the black majority the Springboks, the national rugby team of South Africa, is not about sport; its very existence is a symbol of past injustice and oppression. The club might have vanished altogether, the majority in the African National Congress, the ruling party, wanted it to vanish. But it stayed, thanks to the vision of Nelson Mandela.

Based on John Cook’s Playing the Enemy: Nelson Mandela and the Game that Changed the Nation, the movie begins just after Mandela became president in 1994. I know that America has some incredibly talented black actors, particularly when it comes to taking on unfamiliar roles. Forest Whitaker was tremendous as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, but, my goodness, Freeman seems to have got right inside the skin of Nelson Mandela; he even sounds like him!

Anyway, Mandela has to walk a fine and dangerous line, somehow reconciling the hopes of the black majority with the fears of the white minority. The divisions of the country, the hostility and the mistrust, are well shown in Mandela’s own security team, when he insists on blending both black and white officers.

Now while tackling all of the major issues the country has to face the president also finds time for rugby, looking ahead to the world championships which South Africa is scheduled to host the following year. Having persuaded the South African Rugby Board to retain the name and colours of the national team, he then has a private meeting with Pienaar, convincingly played by Matt Damon, also with a good South African accent!

The team has been playing badly; the president hopes for a recovery in time for the World Cup, but he hopes for more: he hopes that sport will bring the people of South Africa together, all of the people, black and white. It’s during this meeting that he mentions in passing Invictus-Unconquered-a poem by William Ernest Henley, which comforted and encouraged him while he was a prisoner on Robben Island. Pienaar later sees the tiny cell where Mandela was imprisoned and himself takes encouragement from the poem.

Bit by bit under the captain’s guidance the Springboks begin to emerge from the dead so to speak. Black South Africans, who at one time would cheer for any team but the Springboks, begin to mellow. Chester Williams, played by McNeil Hendriks, the one black player in the team, becomes a popular hero. In the end there is an absolutely thrilling climax when South Africa plays the New Zealand All Blacks in the finals. It was at this point I was willing South Africa on with all of my heart. They won, of course, we know that; it’s history. What was important was not the winning it was the way of winning. By this point even the white and black security men have warmed to each other. When Pienaar receives the cup President Mandela says “Thank you for what you have done for the country,” to which he replies, “No, Mr President, thank you for what you have done.” Amen to that.

Even if one does not happen to like rugger-and I’m no great fan-this is a tremendous, uplifting and exciting story, wonderful orchestrated by Eastwood, a truly excellent maker of movies.

Road to Nowhere

We live in an age of dread, the age of the coming apocalypse. We live in the age of global warming, of the banking crisis, of the coming end to the Mayan calendar, of Gordon Brown as Prime Minister and Barak Obama as President. :-))

At least some of these fears are reflected in popular culture, in the growing popularity of chaos and apocalypse movies. The zombie genre thrives. The modish obsession with the supposed Mayan end of days was reflected in the madly exuberant 2012, which I personally found overstated to the point of self-parody.

Now we have The Road, a bleak post-apocalypse movie set in a dying world. It’s a dog eat dog world; well, actually, no, it’s a human eat human world, because in the absence of agriculture, wild animals and even birds, human flesh is the only obvious source of protein. Not for everyone, though: the ‘bad guys’ gather in gangs and hunt down other people for sustenance. And the ‘good guys, what do they eat? I’m actually not sure other than scraps gained from some rather dubious foraging, of things in tins that must be well past their use-by date!

I’m getting ahead of myself. Directed by John Hillcoat and based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, The Road focuses on the ‘journey south’ of an unnamed father, played by Viggo Mortensen, and his son, played by Kodi Smit-MacPhee, through a devastated landscape and ruined settlements all against a background of unremittingly grey weather. The only real colour or sunlight is supplied by the occasional dream-like flashbacks to the pre-apocalyptic world. Just why they are on a ‘journey south’ I’m not exactly sure because the world is no better there than it was ‘in the north.’

This is a morality tale of a kind, a journey of self-discovery, an attempt to represent standards of goodness in a world where good and bad, morality of any kind, really has no meaning at all. But if the Man represents ‘good’ the Boy represents ‘do-gooder’; and my, oh, my, how he irritates, insisting on sharing their meagre food supply with every indigent they meet on the way, including one who for a time robs them of all they have. There were points, I have to confess, that I actively wanted the tiresome sprog to fall into the hands of the roving cannibals!

There is no real rapport between the two actors, no real chemistry. There is a story of a kind here but it is thin, as thin as the inhabitants of this bleak world. In the end the Man dies, of tuberculosis, I think, leaving the boy alone on a barren coastline after the ‘journey south.’

Now, while the message here, the bleak and unremitting message, is far from the usual Hollywood fare the movie has the usual unbelievable Hollywood ending! After all how could one possibly close with the Boy facing certain death, from starvation, from exposure, or being killed by cannibals? No, instead he is suddenly ‘gifted’ a new family, coming from goodness knows where. There they are: dad and mom and brother and sister. There is even a dog. If the humans have barely enough to eat one has to wonder where on the barren earth the dog’s food supply comes from!

So, that’s it; a hair-shirt movie for the age of trepidation. It’s worthy, it’s ponderous and it’s ultimately contrived and rather pointless; the perfect ‘feel bad’ movie.

Englishman

Over thirty years ago John Hurt played the young Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, a television drama. Now he has reprised the role in An Englishman in New York, a movie about Crisp’s later days in American exile.

Hurt is a consummate performer and he managed to capture something of both the exuberance and the loneliness of a man who had the misfortune to turn into a gay icon. There may be nothing wrong in being gay; there is everything wrong in being an icon! I offer that purely as a personal opinion, of course; the real Crisp seems to have made a profession out of it. His was an existence of affectation and gesture. It seems to me-and I have to be honest-that there was a terrible emptiness, a pointlessness to a life constantly well-presented rather than well-lived. Crisp lived not for others but through the eyes of others. I wear silk therefore I am.

He almost lost his halo, though, when, in one of his question and answer shows in the 1980s he described aids as a ‘gay fad’, a statement he refused to retract despite the negative impact it had on his career as a performer. He certainly came to regret this glib dismissal of one of the great modern crises of the gay community, later making donations to an aids charity.

The essential point here is really quite interesting. For all of his popularity, New York Crisp was really an anachronism, a man from a former age. Gay politics and gay living had moved beyond what he had to offer; himself and only himself. Indeed, the only hostility shown towards him, hostility with potential overtones of violence, was in a gay bar in Manhattan, full of odd pseudo-construction types known as ‘clones’, where he was desperately out of place.

Made for TV, this is far from being a great movie though it does give an enjoyable insight into the later life of a skilled showman and aphorist, a kind of second-class Oscar Wilde, at once glibly clever and patently shallow. John Hurt was excellent in the part, a straight actor who seems to capture his gay model perfectly, in manner and appearance!

Frustrated Citizen

I saw Law Abiding Citizen over the weekend, a movie directed by F. Gary Gray. It tells the story of one Clyde Shelton, played by Gerard Butler, whose home is invaded by a couple of thugs who wound him and gratuitously murder his wife and infant daughter.

Although caught and put on trail one of the killers subsequently cheats the death penalty by giving evidence against the other, in a self-serving deal cut by Nick Rice, the prosecutor, played by Jamie Foxx. Shocked by this perceived betrayal, by this mockery of justice, Shelton pleads with Foxx to pursue the case against Clarence Darby, the informer, played by Christian Stolte, who is in fact the principal killer.

Rice, who remains emotionally unengaged in his professionalism, says that it does not matter what is right; it only matters what can be proved in court and that’s how the criminal justice system works. Shelton later sees Rice shake hands with Darby, convicted of third-degree murder, an action which compounds his sense of betrayal. This is a key scene and, in a sense, the beginning of the absurdity. I simply cannot conceive of Rice who, while coolly detached and methodical, is an essentially decent man, shaking hands with a character as loathsome as Darby, no matter the circumstances.

What follows, though ten years after, is a campaign of revenge, not just against the killers, but against the whole justice system, increasingly gothic, and increasingly ludicrous, in its intensity. The premise is good: that an ordinary citizen can be frustrated by the cynicism and compromises of the law. The conclusion is ridiculous: that this same citizen has the capacity and the expertise to turn the system inside out, hitting out at targets without proportion or discrimination.

The point of the movie was simply lost in an orgy of violence, some of it truly laughable in the total absence of verisimilitude. Shelton, in his desire for justice and revenge, becomes just as bad in his own way as Darby, the psychopath he captures and dissects alive.

It’s torture porn, violence for the sake of violence. All the sympathy I had for Shelton at the beginning was exhausted by the end. Still, it’s as well to see this movie as a kind of symptom, perhaps like the earlier Death Wish, a sign that the law is often perceived to be serving its own ends, not the ends of justice. The law was built to replace more primitive forms of revenge and vendetta. If it turns into a something else, a means by which people often escape the consequences of their actions through procedural loopholes and shabby compromises, then the urge for revenge and vendetta will once again take its place.

Precious Movie

Precious is the kind of movie that leaves one almost lost in finding the right kind of words. Directed by Lee Daniels and based on a novel by Sapphire, a writer and performance poet, it tells the story of Claireece ‘Precious’ Jones, an obese New York teenager, played by Gabourney Sidibe, living in a home where the curtains are always drawn and the TV always playing; a kind of hell where she is subject to repeated sexual, physical and mental abuse at the hands of her father and her mother. Twice impregnated by her father, she is forced to leave school on the second occasion.

Through this misery Precious creates an alternate reality for herself, a dream world where she matters, where she is cared for, where she is the centre of attention, the only escape available. Precious finally leaves her awful home and bit by bit manages to recover her life, discovering her inner worth for the first time in attending an alternate school, where she learns to read and write properly, where she learns to give shape to her thoughts, give shape to herself. Precious is a raw, uncompromising and honest movie, altogether quite moving.

Sidibe was good in the title role, though I have to say that I found some of her dialogue difficult to follow at points. Mo’Nique was superb as Mary Lee Johnston, the abusive mother, and there were some very good supporting roles from Paula Patton as Miss Blu Rain, the teacher who helps Precious to read as well as find a home, and from Mariah Carey, who plays Miss Weiss, a social worker.

I Would Rather be Bitten by a Vampire!

I love vampire movies, I always have, anything from Twilight right back to Nosferatu, F. W. Mornau’s silent expressionist classic. Zombie movies, in contrast leave me cold, even comedy spoofs like Shaun of the Dead. I assumed that it was just a question of personal preference, but now I know better. For, you see, vampires are aristocrats and zombies are proles, a revelation that I owe to Sam Leith writing in the latest issue of Prospect.

In an amusing reflection inspired by Zombieland, the latest in the genre that gave us I Am Legend and Dawn of the Dead, he argues that vampire and zombie movies are not just there for mindless entertainment, oh no, they reflect certain cultural anxieties, the anxieties of the middle-classes, under attack from above and below. Vampires and zombies, you see, are the Scylla and Charybidis of the bourgeoisie: either exploitation by the aristocrats or overthrow by the masses!

The vampires, dear things, are the monsters of the right, zombies of the left. Vampires are individuals; zombies are a mindless mass. The vampires are all about lineage, breeding and ancient traditions. They live in castles, dress well and have impeccable manners. Deep down every decent girl wants to be seduced by the bite of the knights of the night; I know I do. The generality both fears the vampire as the lord of the manor and is slightly titillated in their prurient way by what he might get up to in his castle with those hot dead chicks. :-)

So, yes, vampires are sexy; zombies most assuredly are not. The bite of the vampire is voluptuous; the zombie just chomps into whatever he can get, be it leg, or arm, or even baser parts of the anatomy. They want to eat one’s brains, Leith says, not to make themselves brainier but to make one stupider! The intention is to bring you down to their level.

Vampires, lacking in democratic legitimacy, use guile to conceal themselves. Zombies are everywhere, day and night; kill one of the nameless mass and a dozen more come in their place. Vampires, conscious of etiquette, only ever enter one’s home if invited; zombies just batter the door down. Once the vampire is in he bleeds one dry, the echo of the Ancien Régime. The zombies are the sans-culottes; once they are in it’s over; the new order rises along with the blade of the guillotine. The vampire raises up, a degree of social climbing, as a select few are chosen to join his company in eternity. The zombie just levels down, forcing one to join the mass in the rampage through the streets.

Interestingly zombies and vampires never appear in the same movie, which Leith puts down to the fact that they represent the two opposites in an incompatible social crisis. It’s a sign of how anxious the culture is at present, he concludes, that we are fixated on both.

Great stuff! Yes, in answer to your question, Sam, I would far rather be bitten by a vampire than munched by a zombie. That is indeed why the great socialist experiment failed; for the best would always want to be blood-sucking kulaks!

A Good Nazi

I saw Good earlier this year, a movie directed by Vicente Amorim and starring Vigo Mortensen as one John Halder, a professor of literature in a German university in the 1930s. It's based on the play of the same name by Cecil Philip Taylor.

Before proceeding let me just say that I have a particular interest in the process of moral corruption, the manner in which people are compromised by association with evil though not in themselves necessarily evil. It's not that long since I finished reading Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, in which the author tries to determine by what process an ordinary man becomes part of an apparatus of murder. I have to say that I thought this book was grossly over-praised for what it offered, particularly in the way of literary skill, but the idea behind it was intriguing and sound. It rests, perhaps, on one key question: what would you, yes, you, have done if you had lived in Nazi Germany? Would you be the one in a hundred thousand who had the courage to say no or, would you have drifted along, like so many others, for the sake of your family, your friends, your colleagues, or simply for the sake of your career? It's not a question that I personally can answer with any true certainty.

So back to Good which tells the story of a 'good' German, an unassuming man, a family man, a teacher of literature and a lover of Proust, shocked by the barbarism of the new Reich. He refuses to join the Party despite the urging of his Nazi father-in-law. He has a Jewish friend, a psycho-analyst, with whom he served in the same regiment during the First World War. Taking nothing seriously, the good professor believes that the nightmare will pass, as he assures Maurice, his Jewish friend, played by Jason Isaacs.

Halder undergoes, I suppose, what was referred to at the time as 'internal emigration', namely he retreats into himself, into his personal world. During this period he happens to write a novel, a romance, which touches at the end on the subject of assisted suicide, the supreme act of love. That's it, he doesn't think any more on the subject until some years later he is summoned to the Reich Chancellery, there to meet none other than Philipp Bouhler, played by Mark Strong in one of the movie's better performances, who tells him that the Fuhrer himself has been impressed by the message offered by the novel he wrote all those years before.

So, Halder, essentially a man with little strength of character or moral resolution, at first frightened by the invitation and unsure of what was wanted of him, is flattered, showing no reluctance to prepare a paper on the subject of 'mercy death.' He even receives rank in the SS, shocking Maurice as much as it pleased his Nazi-sympathising mistress. From this point forward his career takes off and his novel is turned into a movie, with the final scene showing a loving husband holding his dying wife in his arms.

The compromises continue from this point forward. Halder preserves something of his old 'decency' in continuing attempts to help Maurice, though his efforts are never very forceful. Maurice finally disappears during the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938. Years later, on a visit to what I take to be Auschwitz, Halder, now resplendent in his black SS uniform, comes across Maurice in a kind of tableaux from hell. He observes and he drifts with the same bewilderment that has pursued him throughout.

As a movie Good is not that good. It most definitely suffers in comparison with The Reader: it's anaemic where that latter was full-blooded. But the moral dilemmas explored are interesting, as Halder remains 'good', if perplexed, right to the end. The essential problem with Nazism, of the whole Nazi experience, was not evil in itself; for few people are truly evil. No, it was moral cowardice.

A Bite at Twilight

Last month the Vatican condemned Halloween as a festival of ‘terror and death; this month it has condemned vampires, specifically those coming in the movie, Twilight: New Moon. What larks! Monsignor Franco Perazollo, of the Pontifical Council for Culture, pontificated that the movie’s occult imagery was a “moral vacuum with a deviant message.” With a recommendation like that how could I possibly miss this latest instalment of the franchise? Besides I happen to like vampires and vampire movies and I could eat Robert Pattinson, who plays Edward Cullen in the movie, without doubt the tastiest vampire that I have ever seen. :-))

So, off I trotted into the moral vacuum hoping for a nice deviant message. Did I get one? No, of course I didn’t. I liked the first Twilight movie; not great cinema, by any measure, but a nice escapist fantasy and a love story between the human and the not so human. I love love stories but, as much as I like dishy vampires, I prefer mine a little higher on the scary scale. Besides Twilight: New Moon is really pitched at teeny-boppers and, well, I’m just a tad beyond that stage. :-)

The plot is simple enough, the same kind of romance across the divide that people who saw the original Twilight last year-or readers of Stephanie Myer’s novel-will be familiar with. In this latest version Bella Swan, played by Kirsten Stewart, Edward’s human and mortal girlfriend, wants to join him in immortality, wants to become a vampire herself. But Edward won’t have that; he loves her soul too much, so he dumps her! OMG, OMG, OMG :-))

Cast adrift by Edward, Bella eventually falls for one Jacob Black, played by Taylor Lautner, who turns out to be a werewolf belonging to a gang of werewolves. The fun simply goes on and on, with Bella caught in the middle in a kind of Montague and Capulet style romp. Well, the fun goes on up to a point, that is; I found my attention flagging towards the middle, as the plot started to flounder around somewhat. And the acting? Let me just say that Pattison and Stewart remembered their lines very well. This is a movie for diehard fans and there are enough of them, I know, to make it a huge success.

Twilight: New Moon is simply a rather shallow love story with some supernatural overtones. To insist that it conveys some sinister message is, quite frankly, ludicrous. What with fatuous interdicts embracing anything from Halloween to Harry Potter the Church establishment simply makes itself look out of touch and more than usually ridiculous, not, I think, the message that it wants to send out to young Catholics.

Operation Barbarossa

When Barbarossa begins the world will hold its breath and…yawn!

It has begun, though I suspect it’s not the Barbarossa that you are thinking of, the Barbarossa invoked by my opening sentence. It is, rather, an all Italian production, a cinematic epic released under the title of Barbarossa (Red Beard), the name once given to Frederick I of Hohenstaufen, king of Germany, king of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor, who reigned in the twelfth century. But the real hero of the movie is one Alberto de Giussano, the Milanese blacksmith who, according to legend helped defeat the Imperial forces at the Battle of Legnano. Alberto is the hero because he just happens to be the symbolic figure favoured by the Northern League and by its leader, Umberto Bossi. And hereby hangs a tale.

The Northern League is best envisaged, if you can picture such a thing, as a kind of combination of the British and Scottish National Parties. Bossi and his followers, who dream of an independent state in Northern Italy to be called Pandania, have a racist antipathy to the peoples of the south, so much so that they recently threatened to form a human chain along the line of the River Po to keep out further migration northwards. But this does not stop Bossi being a chum of Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, and it does not stop him from having a seat in the Italian cabinet.

Having Berlusconi as one’s Padre padrone carries other rewards, not least of which is access to funding for favoured cultural projects; and the one project most favoured by Bossi was Barbarossa: he even managed to get a bit-part. However, this celebration of ‘northern pride’ which features such international stars as Rutger Hauer as Frederick, and Céline Cassel, a French actress, as the Empress Beatrice, is turning into a cinematic disaster, the occasion for a fresh political storm. Only in Italy!

The problem is, you see, there are simply not enough ‘Pandonians’ to make Barbarossa a going venture, and those there are clearly prefer other things. In the opening weekend it took only 441,000 Euros at the box office compared with 1.8 million for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Last week L’Espresso was suggesting that Bossi’s baby might turn out to be the biggest flop in the history of Italian cinema. Even in Erba in Lombardy, a stronghold of the Northern League, only a handful of members showed up for the opening night, prompting the local paper to say, “If the Lombards don’t go and see it, who will?”

Rai, the state television network, which partially funded the project, is also committed to showing it as a two-hundred minute mini-series. Here Berlusconi was the decisive influence in securing funding and support, telling a Rai manager, whose phone had been tapped in a corruption investigation, that “Bossi is really on at me…about this Barbarossa.” Yes, Prime Minister!

Would you like to know something about the movie itself? Well, The Observer reports that when one Roman cinema-goer was asked about his impressions he replied;

With the swirling violins, the fighting and the constant cries for liberty, it’s like spending two hours inside Bossi’s brain.

It may be that, in the light of past usage, the very name Barbarossa may now be said to carry the same curse of misfortune as…the Scottish Play. :-))

Monkey Trial

Most people are probably familiar with the Scopes Trial from the old Spencer Tracy movie Inherit the Wind. But the play on which it was based, written by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (not that Robert E. Lee!) was not even about creationism, but the dangers of McCarthyism. Also, the movie seriously misrepresents the truth surrounding the whole affair. Dayton itself is depicted as stereotypical southern town, full of red-necked reactionaries, when it was anything but.

There were many people for whom the great fear was not the challenge to the literal truth of the Bible, but the advance of a particularly invidious form of Social Darwinism. The Tennessee law against the teaching of evolution theories in public schools was signed by Governor Austin Peay, who needed the support of the Christian vote for his re-election, but never thought the measure would be enforced. But there were various individuals and interest groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, who wanted to push the matter in a test case, and John T. Scopes agreed to be cast in the role of the martyred teacher, in a highly contrived breach of the law. The text he used was A Civic Biology by one G. W. Hunter, which, amongst other things, puts forward the contention that the Caucasian race was 'the highest type of all.'

Perhaps the worst aspect of the movie is the misrepresentation of William Jennings Bryant-the 'Great Commoner'-who appeared for the prosecution. In truth, it was he who was the true progressive, not his opponent, Clarence Darrow, who appeared for Scopes. Amongst other things, Bryant, a three-time candidate for the Presidency of the United States, had supported votes for women, improved factory conditions, a minimum wage, the eight hour working day and a variety of other radical measures. His support for the Creationist cause was not as straightforward as imagined. He believed that Social Darwinism was being used to justify poor working conditions.

Darrow, in contrast, an enthusiast for Nietzsche, as well as Darwin, had the full backing of H L Mencken, a leading journalist, and also an advocate for Nietzsche and Darwin-The strong must grow stronger and that they may do so, they must waste no strength in the vain task of trying to lift up the weak.

Given these views, he hated both Bryant and his 'social conscience' style of politics. For him the whole trial an opportunity to humiliate Bryant and ridicule the South, telling Darrow that 'Nobody gives a damn about that yap schoolteacher.' Against such a background the actual outcome of the trial, which was a foregone conclusion, was irrelevant. It was, in the words of Garry Wills "...a nontrail over a nonlaw, with a nondefendant backed by nonsupporters. Its most famous moment involved nontestimony by a nonexpert which was followed by a nondefeat." (Under God: Religion and American Politics, 1990)

For the Love of Elin and Agnes

I find it difficult to describe just how much the Swedish movie Fucking Amal has moved me, how much this simple and beautiful love story has moved me. A friend gave me the DVD last Christmas and I watched it for the first time earlier this year. I’ve already written both a blog and a review, but I keep coming back to it. The ending is the best ‘coming out’ scene ever; even thinking about it, as I write these words, brings tears to my eyes. Yes, I’m serious.

I watched all the way through positively willing Elin to go to the sweet and beautiful Agnes, all through the moments of despair, all through the downs. I love these girls so so much. I love the music in the movie, especially Underground by Broder Daniel, played as the two walk out of the school hand in hand in the face of collective astonishment. We look so good , we look so good. Yes, darlings, you do.

The Army of Crime

I always make a point of keeping up with the latest productions of the French cinema industry, seeing what I can, when I can, where I can. I have a particular interest in anything to do with life in France during the German occupation, movies like The Army of Shadows and Lacombe Lucien, the first about resistance, the second about collaboration. So, off I trotted at the weekend to see The Army of Crime (L'armée du crime), directed by Robert Guédiguian, now on limited release in this country.

The story centers around a resistance cell in Paris, later depicted after their execution in the infamous Affiche Rouge (Red Poster), a widely distributed poster in which the Vichy authorities tried to show resisters not as liberators but as criminals. The cell itself was largely made up of foreigners, headed by Missak Manouchian (played by Simon Abkarian), an Armenian poet who lost his family in the Turkish genocide. Although some limited success is obtained in hit and run attacks on the Germans, the cell is finally destroyed after the assassination of a senior officer.

What might surprise people who know little of the historical background is that the worst persecutors of the resistance-and the worst torturers-were not the Germans but the French themselves, in the shape of the police force. Though the active pro-German faction, the fascists among the so-called Paris collaborators, was of no great significance, the Germans were greatly aided, both in combating resisters and in rounding up Jews, by the agencies of the French state. The director makes no concessions to any residual national sensitivity here: the police are shown bussing Jews to Drancy and the notorious Vel d’Hiv, transit points for Auschwitz. There are also shown torturing suspected partisans in the most hideous manner, which I take to be a truthful account. The moral corruption and venality of the police is well-captured in the character of Inspector Pujol, played by Jean-Pierre Darroussin

The movie itself is, well, worthy but largely unfocused. It rambles slightly and there are too many overlapping plots, overlapping lives. It’s certainly interesting though, given the subject matter, I found it surprisingly unengaging. It’s simply too ambitious, too broadly conceived to serve the purpose that Guédiguian intends. I don’t think The Army of Crime could ever have been a great movie, but with a little more discipline, fewer characters, a little more structure, and a firmer story-line it might have been more than simply a good one. Even so, I much preferred it to the inane Inglourious Basterds.

La Guerre d'un Seul Homme

I’m a member of the film society at my university. Last term we screened La Guerre d'un Seul Homme-One Man's War-directed by Edgardo Cozarinsky, an Argentinean in writer and film-maker. It’s a remarkable dissertation in what the director calls ‘documentary fiction.’ He’s taken a lot of war-time footage, most from occupied France, Paris, in particular, and some from the Eastern Front, to create a visual essay. Some of the footage is light-hearted, to the point of outright banality, some of it darker and altogether more serious. Much of it contains commentary of the day, particularly on aspects of Parisian life or more generally the politics of France during the occupation.

The whole thing is punctuated by readings from the Paris Journals of Ernst Jünger, who served as an officer in the occupation force for much of the war. Jünger is probably best known for In Stahlgewittern-Storm of Steel-, his account of life on the Western Front during the First World War. He had an international reputation, which give him easy access to French intellectual salons in Paris, where he met with people like Cocteau and Picasso. Jünger was an anti-Nazi, involved in the fringes of the 1944 Plot against Hitler, but he always seems to maintain a sense of Olympian detachment, disapproving of much of what he sees, but never quite prepared to take that final step. It was of particular interest for me because I know Paris so well, wandered the same streets, parks and embankments as Jünger, and had the same kinds of encounter. There is a deep poignancy to the whole thing; there was for me, anyway.

Days of Glory, no, Indigènes!

Days of Glory is a French-language film directed by Rachid Bouchareb. Released in 2006, it won the best actor award that year at the Cannes Film Festival. It was also nominated for the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film, but lost out on the day to The Lives of Others, a worthy opponent. It was broadcast on BBC 4 a few days ago, when I saw it for the first time.

The focus is on four men in particular: Said, Yassir, Messaoud and Abdelkader. They fight through campaigns in Italy, southern France and on to Alsace. They fight with courage and bravery but they are treated shabbily; they are discriminated against by the nation and the army they serve, forms of discrimination both petty and grand, from denying them tomatoes to refusing leave and promotion. It upset me. I can imagine how those men must have felt, risking their lives when their lives had such little apparent value.

The first thing I have to say is that the English title in retrospect made me angry, a vacuous cliché so lacking in imagination, one that says little or nothing about the movie itself, about what the director was trying to say. Who decides these things, I wonder? Do the film makers themselves have any input? I saw the movie advertised when it first came out but decided not to go because I thought it was just another ‘war movie’, another Saving Private Ryan, and I’m not all that keen on war movies as such. It’s not; oh no, it is not. The original French title is Indigènes, meaning Natives, more appropriate in every sense, as I will explain below.

Indigènes tells the story of the men of North Africa, the ‘natives’, who were recruited in the Second World War by the Free French to fight against the Germans in Europe. They volunteer for all sorts of reasons; because they believe in the cause, because they want to escape poverty, because the want to come to a ‘homeland’ they have never seen, because they are looking for a better life; all sorts of reasons.


The discrimination did not end when the war ended. When the nations of North Africa and the other French colonial territories became independent the French government discontinued payment of war pensions. A long legal battle ensued but it was only after the release of Indigènes that this was reversed and veterans paid what they were due. What a powerful medium for justice cinema continues to be, when it chooses to be.

Hell and the Lamia

I saw Drag me to Hell recently, directed by Sam Rami, the guiding hand behind the Spider Man movies and, still earlier, The Evil Dead. I loved this movie, I love Rami's black sense of humour but then I love the whole horror movie genre. I also love discovering something new. Rami’s movie introduced me to the Lamia, who appears as a devil-like demon in the movie. I looked into this, discovering that the Lamia has deep mythological roots…and that she is female, one with a tragic history, a plaything of the selfish passions of the gods.

In Classical mythology Lamia was a Queen of Libya. Beloved by Zeus, she incurred the wrath of Hera, who, in an act of revenge, killed her children. Either cursed by the jealous goddess, or consumed by grief, Lamia turned a monster. Taking on the partial shape of a serpent, she began to devour other people’s children in furious envy. In Greek folklore Lamia has the same basic form-and purpose- as the witch Baba Yaga in that of Russia, a monster who combines a taste for human flesh with the gift of prophecy; a monster who serves as a warning. Philostratus, in The Life of Apollonius, says that she took on the shape of a beautiful woman at will to entice young men prior to devouring them. Something of the tragedy of Lamia was later captured in a romantic form by John Keats, who describes her thus;

She was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
Vermilion-spotted, golden, green, and blue;
Striped like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
Eyed like a peacock, and all crimson barr'd;
And full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
Dissolv'd, or brighter shone, or interwreathed
Their lustres with the gloomier tapestries-
So rainbow-sided, touch'd with miseries,
She seem'd, at once, some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self.
Upon her crest she wore a wannish fire
Sprinkled with stars, like Ariadne's tiar:
Her head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
She had a woman's mouth with all its pearls complete:
And for her eyes: what could such eyes do there
But weep, and weep, that they were born so fair?

As far as the movie is concerned I thought that Christine’s fate was rather hard. If anyone deserved to be dragged to hell it was the board of directors of the bank she worked for, not a lowly employee. The old gypsy’s curse was misdirected; we can all understand that much!

Body Heat

I love film noir and Body Heat, starring William Hurt and Kathleen Turner, is one of the best movies in this genre. Made as long ago as 1981, Turner plays Matty Walker, a ruthlessly ambitious woman, a femme fatale in the most complete sense.

A married woman, she becomes sexually involved with Hurt, who plays Ned Racine, a small-time lawyer. Their original meeting seems entirely coincidental but, bit by bit, as the story unravels, it becomes clear that Matty has deliberately chosen Racine in an elaborate plot to murder her wealthy husband, played by Richard Crenna. Matty behaves with complete ruthlessness, ensuring the murder is carried out and ensuring that Racine alone will stand blame. In the end she is seemingly killed in an explosion in a boat house, and Racine is arrested for the murder of her husband. But, you see, Matty is not Matty after all! Oh, to be rich and live in a faraway land!

Young Victoria

Yes, I admit it; I like a good story and a spot of romance. Special effects are all very well, but when a film is carried by that and that alone it gets so tiresome; it does for me anyway. So, Young Victoria really hit the spot, a strong story-line that I could really relate to, the story of a girl becoming not just a queen but a woman in the process, growing and maturing in all sorts of ways, casting off the shadows of a restrictive and claustrophobic past. Emily Blunt was so good in the title role, but she was ably supported by a strong cast of first-rate English actors, including Miranda Richardson as the Duchess of Kent, Victoria’s mother, and Jim Broadbent as William IV, with a barnet straight out of Alice in Wonderland!