Everybody's lyin' and skivin' and dyin'

Around Shepherd Market, down Curzon Street and several other places on my way home, some attractive new varieties of outdoor heater. Rather than the orange glow reminiscent of an early January morning in a station waiting room, a gas flame leaping yellow. The first I thought was an installation with that silk-like material that represents fire, but encountered closer it was real and beautiful and warm.

There is a part of England for which there is no positional reference point, being neither North, nor Midlands, nor East. A flat land awaiting rightful return to its proper status of seabed. A few days ago it was the epicentre of a small earth tremor: locally numerous acts of habitual incest were disrupted, and habitations damaged to the cost of literally dozens of pounds.

I'm due to fly from Heathrow's T5 just a week after its opening. Of course it will all fall apart in a farce of faulty software and things getting stuck or breaking off, so that by the time I arrive the accumulated passengers will form a vast refugee camp surrounding the terminal building, huddled around burning stacks of mis-sorted luggage in the freezing Spring rain. The first cases of typhoid and cholera should just be breaking out.

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'On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn't have inhabited his ideal landscape, however nurturing he found the idea of it. Everything about him was urban. He wanted opera, libraries, restaurants, rent boys - all the appurtenances of civilisation. You don't find them in Penrith.'
From Alan Bennett's 2007 diary, published in the London Review of Books, 3 January 2008.

'Alan Bennett may be right about the dearth of rent boys in Penrith, but he's wrong about libraries: there's a good one right by the church.'
Reader's letter printed in the London Review of Books, 24 January 2008

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), dandy and editor of 'Elle' magazine, suffers a stroke and is almost entirely paralysed as a result, his doctor using the English term: 'locked-in syndrome' to describe the condition. We first, and often thereafter, see the world from the patient's perspective, blurred and confusing. One of his eyelids is sewn shut and we see that too. It's a long time before we properly see his twisted face.

Jean-Do's only available means of expression is by blinking his left eye. But we also hear his internal monologue, with a dry wit that's a relief to the viewer. Occasionally his over-avuncular doctor appears to diagnose his condition, but for the most part he is in the hands of women: Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) who teaches him to communicate, Marie (Olatz Lopez Garmendia) his physiotherapist, Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner) his former partner and mother of his children, and Claude (Anne Consigny) to whom he dictates his account of the experience.

Using a list of letters and eye blinks, Henriette teaches Jean-Do to 'speak', it isn't an easy task and to begin with he isn't an easy pupil. Even when both parties are adept, it's a slow process, more tortuous than composing a text message if that's possible.

Throughout there's a real sense of his incapacity: the television in his room left on overnight emitting the monotone high-pitched tone that accompanies the test card and prevents sleep, the fly on his nose that causes him to move his head for the first time. In his helplessness, Jean-Do is at the mercy of women, and occasionally there's a hint of his fear - yet they are generally very good to him, including Céline, who may have some cause to be vengeful. The worst he experiences at their hands is a visit to church conducted by the devout Marie - Jean-Do recalls a visit to Lourdes with a girlfriend who installed a performance-thwarting illuminated Madonna in their hotel room.

As well as his paralysis there is the awkwardness others feel, but they quickly adjust: his children recognise him as their father, his friend Laurent (Isaach De Bankolé) reads to him from The Count of Monte Cristo. People find ways to connect.

The scenes of conversation with characters who are elsewhere, via telephone and an interpreter, are the most painful. Jean-Do found it difficult enough to communicate with his elderly father (Max von Sydow) before, but now it's near impossible, frustrating them both. The scene in which Céline has to translate for a call from Jean-Do's mistress, is agonising.

It's a film about communication, and about what people can do to people and what people can do for people.

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' (Le Scaphandre et le papillon) Dir: Julien Schnabel (2007)
http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=119032.html


Marie and Henriette


Claude


Céline


Jean-Dominique Bauby (in flashback)

Bratislava

Crossing the border, the countryside didn't change. Terrifying bleak forest, mistletoe clumps in the trees like nests of some big malignant bird, grey vegetation, frozen ditches. The landscape was the same, but the use of it altered: shacks and knackered livestock compounds. I'm not much for the sticks, it's in the username, but this was something worse. It was all broken down, and horribly thriving. On the outskirts of the city there was a Tesco.

Walking down the approach from the Hlavná station reminded me of arriving in a northern town on a Saturday lunchtime in the dead hour before the football special and the police escort. Remains of benches with the wooden slats missing, cow shed shelters, wheezing buses almost as old as me. Like Barnsley not long after the miners' strike.

Obchodná was like a street my subconscious had invented in a dream, nothing especially surreal about it, but the mix was all off. I can't explain how. Walking down it I got slight tingles, the buzzy-dizzy feeling that deja vu causes, but I'd never been there before.

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What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?"
"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best?" and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, "What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying 'What about a little something?' and Me saying,' Well, I shouldn't mind a little something, should you, Piglet,' and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing."
"I like that too," said Christopher Robin, "but what I like doing best is Nothing."
"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say 'Oh, nothing,' and then you go and do it."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh.
"This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing now."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh again.
"It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
"Oh!" said Pooh.

[...]

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was Still looking at the world with his chin in his hands, called out "Pooh!"
"Yes?" said Pooh.
"When I'm--when-- Pooh!"
"Yes, Christopher Robin?"
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."

A.A. Milne, 'The House at Pooh Corner' (1928)

'Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days'

Romania, 1987. Two young women living in a student hostel are arranging for one of them to have an abortion. Over the course of a day, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) takes the lead on behalf of her terrified and abject friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), while at the same time reaching a point of crisis with her boyfriend. When Bebe the abortionist (Vlad Ivanov) arrives Otilia finds that more will be expected of her and her friend than money.

Marinca's resourceful Otilia, rather than her unfortunate friend, is the focus of this film, negotiating through the shortage, corruption, and individual bloodymindedness of Romania shortly before the fall of Ceauscescu, taking great personal risk in a country where all terminations are illegal and the penalties severe. The settings are evocative - the crowded student hostel where the residents barter black market cigarettes and soap, the hotels with malignant wallpaper and vindictive receptionists, the rutted streets, the stunted Dacia cara, and the queues outside the shuttered alimentară.

On the face of it, Otilia runs a series of errands, but they are variously awful, from her tours through the ill-light suburbs and residential blocks to her uncomfortable attendance at her boyfriend's mother's birthday party. She displays a resilience pushed close to breaking point, giving a great deal for her friend without any pantomime of saintliness. Bebe, who may or may not be a trained doctor, is shown to have some depth as he shepherds his mother indoors from outside her flat, but is nevertheless a credibly repulsive character, a very ordinary nightmare of a man. It's Gabita who is least prominent, for the most part turned in on herself, a hapless passenger to her own plight, yet for all that this impacts on others it doesn't feel like culpability. There are moments, when she is trying to decide whether to bring her revision notes to the hotel, or her hair dryer, and forgetting the plastic table cloth to be spread on the bed, that are absolutely heartbreaking, and you just want to look away.

This isn't an angry film, nor is it didactic, but in showing the sordid danger of informal terminations it tackles the issue explicitly. The director, Christian Mungiu, is of the 'Little Decree' generation, the Romanian equivalent of the baby boom, following Ceausescu's late sixties ban on contraception and abortion. In interview he has said:

"4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days is essentially a story of personal choices. It is also about the subtle and often invisible consequences of indoctrination. It is about friendship, responsibility and love. But it is mainly about abortion, at that time regarded as an act of freedom and protest against the communist mode which prohibited it in order to increase the disciplined labour. I remember it very clearly, I was twenty years old: the abortion was not a moral problem - the main concern was being able to arrange one. Though women often died during the operation we thought of this as unlikely. We were so young."
[translation from French via the internet and my cleaning up, so may not be all that)

Personal responsibility also features: In a scene late in the film Otilia's careless boyfriend, though entirely unconnected with Gabita's plight, is clearly as much part of the problem as Romania's statist-medieaval abortion laws. It's odd that there has been so little coverage in the English-speaking media of this film - such rights under legislation as have been secured in the West are hardly invulnerable. Since the movie won the 2007 Palme d'Or, therefore hardly an underground flick, this almost equates to silence.

Released here on 11 January, though no-one told the Curzon group, as they've had it from yesterday.
'Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days' (4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile) Dir: Christian Mungiu (2007). http://www.432-lefilm.com/

Otilia - Anamaria Marinca

Gabita - Laura Vasiliu

Bebe - Vlad Ivanov

The orange Tic-Tacs are on me.

'Don't Touch the Axe'

The Andalucian coast, and Paris in the 1820s. Based on Balzac's novella, published first as 'Ne touchez pas la hache' later 'La Duchesse de Langeais', 'Don't Touch the Axe' was previously filmed by other directors in 1942 and 1995. Guillaume Depardieu is Armand de Montriveau a withdrawn French General, a war hero with a gammy leg, honored in society despite his taciturn manner. Jeanne Balibar plays Antoinette, the Duchess of Langeais, amusing herself through the balls and receptions of Parisian society in the absence of the Duke. Through her lorgnettes she observes Montriveau and determines to take him aside and have him tell her tales of his suffering in the desert and toy with him in the process. The general for his part falls in love with her and embarks upon a lengthy campaign of seduction that veers between propriety and near-violence.

The pair interact in a choreography of visiting cards accepted or sent away, letters read or unread, meetings punctuated by the ring of bells for servants. Always there is the threat, for Antoinette, of scandal, and the sense above it all of a complicated game in which the rules are malleable by reference to a person's gender, status, rank. For all that the duchess and the general conceive a passion for each other, in their own ways, never do they appear to achieve that happiness and contentment glimpsed momentarily between the butler and the maid, below stairs, between bells.

Both leads deliver deliberately remote performances, Depardieu Jnr inscrutable beneath his brooding brow, Balibar (best known outside France for another Rivette film, 'Va savoir') working from a limited palette of pouts and side-to-side eye swivellings. But given the social context, who knows if such characters might not naturally occur, their expressions considered realistic?

'Don't Touch the Axe' ('Ne touchez pas la hache') ['The Duchess of Langeais' in some anglophone distributions] Dir: Jacques Rivette (2007).


Balzac's original is fairly typical of his output, enthusiastic description and digressions on society to the fore. An English translation of this novella can be found at Project Gutenberg.

'The Band's Visit'

Waiting for the 472 to Beit Hatikva


"Do you like Chet Baker?"

The Alexandrian Police ceremonial band finds itself stranded until morning in a small Israeli town which suffers remoteness and council estate architecture, without a connection onwards to their concert booking. Circumstances compel the band members to remain as guests and 'The Band's Visit' shows the encounter the band and some of the people in the town experience over the night of their stay. Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) is an ageing authoritarian and the band's conductor, Khaled (Saleh Bakri) a young Casanova type who plays violin but prefers the trumpet, and Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) is the dry-witted proprietress of the cafe who forms a kind of friendship with Tewfiq.

Khaled is taken to the best available entertainment for young people in the town, a roller disco where in a bladder-threateningly funny scene the visitor teaches his host how to approach girls, and they both conspicuously fail to roller skate. Dina takes Tewfiq to the equivalent for older people, a restaurant and supermarket, and later the park, much of the amenity of which is imaginary. Other members of the band have dinner with a local family and bond tentatively over jazz. There are visual jokes that resemble fragments of Tati, and plenty of humour in the dialogue, which mostly uses English as a lingua franca, with occasional discursions into Hebrew and Arabic to let hosts and guests communicate directly, aside from each other.

'The Band's Visit' never quite mentions the situation, the context - it's assumed that the viewer will know enough about this to hear all the resonances, feel some of the awkwardnesses for the characters. One of the band discreetly places his cap over the picture of a 1967 era tank hanging above his table in the cafe; Dina recalls a time when the streets in Israeli towns would clear as the population would watch the Friday afternoon Arab movie on television, though without elaborating on why this scheduling fell from popularity. Yet if we thought the two nations were thoroughly amicable neighbours the body of this film would be much the same, discords among hosts and band respectively, affinities and shared hopes and experiences discovered by the two groups together. There's something perfectly rueful and tender about Tewfiq and Dina's conversations. It's a film about small-town life, music, people who are different and the same.


"Arab Cultural Centre? There's no Arab Cultural Centre here. No Arab culture, no Hebrew culture, no culture at all. This is nowhere."


At the roller disco.

"Why the police need to play Um Kulthoum?""That is like asking why a man needs a soul."

The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret), Dir: Eran Kolirin (2007)http://www.thebandsvisit.com/

Bliznji

Somewhere around Amiens

Seen from above, maybe one or two storeys up and distant. An open window, sunlit, early or late as the light is very direct and tinted yellowish, in a warmer season than this. The face of an old man leaning into the frame created by the window, two-thirds profile, lightly bearded as if ordinarily he shaves. The pictures are very similar, they have been taken in sequence with a camera that is not fixed to a tripod, possibly with a burst function or manual repetition. With each successive photograph he is further into the frame, leaning forward towards something, or trying to rise. He bears an expression of discomfort or irritation. His eyes are blue and pink and watery. There are at least a dozen images in the series, which is run through several times, but nothing gives any clue as to why the pictures have been taken, of this subject, from a remote vantage point.

Then the girl in carriage 18, seat 52 goes back to watching action movies on her laptop, the glossy keyboard surround surfaces of which she strokes occasionally as if to remove perceived dust. I go back to my book and read the page twice over without the text sinking in because as guilty as I ought to feel for peeking out of the corner of my eye at the scenes on my neighbour's fold-down tray, I cannot stop thinking about the old man, and the person who took his photograph, from a distance, in sequence.