Home
Postcard from Kyoto
22
04
I wondered if going from Tokyo to Kyoto would be like going from Hanoi to Hoi An: from a working city that pays visitors no special attention to a place, with all the historical trimmings, that exists mainly for tourists. We’ve found that Kyoto has its own mellow, busy vibe, like every day is a Saturday chock-full of activities. Foreigners do stick out more, congregating as we do around a few famous sites; Ben and I keep seeing the same faces – the tall, flushed woman from Nijō Castle posing for a photo in the Arashiyama bamboo grove, the young man in grey tracksuit bottoms we passed filming his climb to the monkey park and then later, lining up for crepes near the Nishiki market. But Kyoto doesn’t have the naff, noxious feeling of tourist traps the world over, from The Rocks in Sydney to Boca in Buenos Aires – of a culture boxed up for the tour buses – because it’s not primarily for foreigners, but for the Japanese themselves. It’s the difference between a story you craft for outsiders and a story you tell yourself. Everywhere you go, there are people – couples, groups of friends, and families – in traditional clothes bought at the department stores or hired for the day. Laughing groups of girls in kimonos and clogs pose for selfies in front of red torii gates; a little boy struggles to sheathe his toy samurai sword while his mother twirls a parasol. The Japanese approach to other cultures – as a series of styles to sample – seems to extend to their own.
This can sometimes feel strange, because most of the attractions here and in nearby Nara are religious sites, Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Very few of them have a peaceful or spiritual feeling; instead they’re crowded, riotous places. The Yasaka shrine, a place of worship for the Gion entertainment district, sits at the top of Shijō-dōri, one of its main streets. Its orange gate marks the place where the city’s flat river basin butts up against the encircling mountains. The stairs to the shrine are lined with a gay series of food vendors, serving the visitors in their fancy dress. The barrels of sake, an offering you see at most shrines, here take on an orgiastic appearance, like kegs for an impending party. Likewise, the Tōdai-ji temple in Nara, which houses the famous 16m Buddha, had a busy, festive feeling. At the final step into the temple, when the Buddha looms into view, people’s cameras went up in unison, like an infantry unit given the order to charge. There were groups of Japanese schoolchildren, filling out worksheets; guides with little flags, leading tours in many different languages. There’s a hole in one of the temple pillars, exactly the size of the Buddha’s nostril; people crawled through on their bellies because doing so is supposed to guarantee enlightenment. I decided to buy a fortune from one of the vendors inside the temple doors: she gave me a large box to shake, I drew out a number and she gave me the corresponding piece of paper. (“It is strongly recommended that you take a travel now.”) All this felt, for someone from a Christian background, more like fun than religion, and I wondered how these places fit into locals’ spiritual practice.
A couple of women at the Chion-in temple in Kyoto seemed to feel the same way. They stood before one of the smaller temples, lighting incense, while on the bridge in front of them a French girl struck poses and smiled the condescending smile of someone who sees other cultures as cute set dressing. The women looked at her with anger and impatience. Westerners behave poorly at the religious sites here: smirking while they perform the ceremonial washing outside shrines, leering in with cameras while people try to pray, posing with fingers held up in a V in front of a bodhisattva. (They behave poorly in general, blundering into shops and restaurants without learning to say so much as hello in Japanese.) It would be hard to meditate, or even concentrate, in those crowded spaces.
It can be hard to gauge the context of each place, which to approach as a carnival and which with more reverence. In some ways the rowdiness of the shrines and temples here is a pleasant contrast to the Christian churches at home, those dim, whispery spaces which so often seem built to exclude the daily world. Spirituality appears to be something you can approach in a spirit of fun, like the schoolboys who ran laughing up the shrine steps at Kamakura and then stopped in a line at the altar to clap and pray. The holy deer that have the run of Nara are many things at once: sacred animals associated with the Kasuga-taisha shrine; mascots for the town, their image – rendered doubly cute with round cheeks and hooves waving in greeting – plastered on the buses and for sale in the shops; pets for people to feed and pat and be photographed with; and a small revenge by nature on this urbanised country, an irruption of chaos into the world created by humans. Perhaps, in the same way that both Shinto and Buddhist traditions are honoured here – shrines neighbours to temples – Japanese culture is able to acknowledge multiple truths at the same time. The fact that a religious site has become a sight does not undermine its spiritual significance; it’s another function, another layer of meaning. Japan continues to confound my categories. The happy throng of people in these places imbues them with a welcome breath of life.
Postcard from Tokyo
14
04
Tokyo makes me question some of my assumptions, my likes and dislikes. At home, I’d avoid malls and railway concourses as impersonal, artificial; here, where the smog is often so heavy that people go about in masks, malls are clean, controlled spaces. Often we choose this second city, stacked storey upon storey or in mazes underground, over the streets and the open air. At home, with our Anglo anxieties about authenticity and appropriation, I look askance at any business that adopts the style of another culture too cheerily, as both cheesy and suspect, like a restaurant in a food court. Here, different cultures are a dress-up box for people and businesses to rummage in, guilt-free; you might see a shop selling British business attire, all ties and vests and dark wood panelling, next to a perfect replica of a Vietnamese alley or a Spanish cervecería, next to a shop selling pictures of cats superimposed on The Scream and Girl with a Pearl Earring and other canonical works of Western art, and the variety, the sheer visual density, is dazzling. Here, style is not the essence of a culture but its external, and the Japanese show respect for their borrowings with the exactness with which they reproduce them. Here I find myself responding to the artificial and the inauthentic, to spaces intended to sell things. I find myself genuinely moved in department store food halls, like Dorothy overwhelmed by the warehouse of treasures in Return to Oz. It makes me question my categories.
For a city of fourteen million people, Tokyo is surprisingly serene. Partly it’s how densely the city is built – the buildings soak up the sound, so that a block or two back from the main roads there is almost perfect quiet, only the people of the neighbourhood going about their business. Partly it’s the Japanese genius for compartmentalisation, so that by concentrating on a small plot of garden, or stepping through the curtains at the entrance to a restaurant, the urban vastness seems to disappear. Everywhere we pass small gardens created in the space available – pots in a line along a narrow kerb, or sudden splashes of orange and yellow on someone’s wall. In a place where it’s impossible to comprehend the whole, there’s a special pleasure in the details. They’re a reminder that cities are about people; they help you get your bearings. I expected a hyper-modern city, precise grids and glass towers, but Tokyo is more like London than Hong Kong. There are towers, of course, but the bulk of the neighbourhood buildings are on a more human scale, and the local streets are wonderfully wayward, twisting and dividing like tendrils. It’s a terrific place to be a pedestrian. You don’t often see cars away from the main roads; the subway reaches everywhere and to own a car you must first have a place to park it (not a given). The city’s quiet sense of activity (and the host of wonderful shops we’ve found in backstreets) comes from this steady, companionable flow of people on foot and on bicycle. It’s how most people get around. Australian cities seem like half-measures by comparison, yoked to the car, wilful refusals to think through the possibilities of many people living together. (The Australians here stick out like cockatoos, large and squawking and white.)
The only thing missing is nature. The trees lining the streets are pruned so tightly that they’re more sculpture than plant, telegraph poles with a garnish of leaves. The only birds here in any numbers are the jungle crows picking through the trash in Yoyogi Park. (They’re wonderful, obnoxious creatures, whether hulking their powerful shoulders at passing humans or flying past with improbably large scraps of food in their beaks.) Some days are cleaner than others, but the smog is a constant, a taste in your mouth and a layer of grime to wash off at day’s end. My snot has taken on a perverse fascination, like an especially disgusting species of amphibian. When we looked down on the city from Mount Mitake, ninety minutes away, the buildings seemed etched into the white mass of pollution, like a frieze. By our second week here, were leaving the city every second day in search of something that did not feel manmade: the strong clean wind from the bay in Yokohama, the circling hawks and the hills crowded with trees in Kamakura, the mountains around Mitake. Nature and space are such a central part of the Australian experience; here they’re rare enough that they’re powerful in a different way. In front of the Imperial Palace, facing the business district of Marunouchi, there’s a huge expanse of gravel, then a small forest of those checked, sculptural trees, and then, in the background, the modern towers of the business district. From that perspective, the buildings seem like a natural outgrowth of the landscape, another kind of forest.
Tokyo constantly raises these questions of what is natural and what is artificial. By necessity in a city that was largely destroyed twice in the last century, once by the Great Kantō earthquake in 1923 and then again by American bombing in WWII, many of its monuments are modern rebuilds, history in replica. Part of the impression made by something like the Daibatsu – an enormous Buddha dating from the thirteenth century –in Kamakura is precisely its age, the fact that it’s survived in the same spot for almost a millennium, through tsunamis and earthquakes that destroyed everything around it. The Buddha’s serene expression has been tested, and he has not been moved. But the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo and its approaches through a series of enormous wooden gates is equally impressive, and it was rebuilt in the 1950s. It is not the particular building that counts – that particular collection of wood and stone and copper – but rather how well it expresses its tradition. The living traditions here – whether Buddhist or Shinto – do not get stuck in old landmarks but carry on in the present tense, in new iterations. In a similar way, a restaurant can reproduce an old aesthetic of timber and lanterns while opposite a Lawson convenience store sheds its blank fluorescent light on the alley. Both buildings are contemporary; both are authentic examples of Japanese life. The essence of this city is multiplicity. It makes me a little nervous about Kyoto, our next stop, the old seat of the emperor and the centre of traditional Japanese culture. I wonder if it will reflect the openness of a culture that welcomed influences from Korea and China – Buddhism, Confucianism, writing and much else – and much later sent emissaries abroad to bring back the best the world had to offer. Will it have something of the dynamism of Tokyo, sparked by the coexistence of so many traditions, the old and the new? Or will it be a sort of open-air museum, its exhibits’ main claim on our attention simply that they are old? In Tokyo I’ve learned to love the replica.
Diario castellano – marzo
31
03
1 de marzo
Visité una psíquica, una mujer francesa quien llevaba un peinado bob, corto y marrón. Empezó mi lectura con un ejercicio de respiración; ella me pidió cerrar mis ojos y respirar a fondo, y pensé sobre la escena en El mago de Oz cuando el fraude pide Dorothy el mismo así que él puede examinar las pertenencias de élla para pistas. La psíquica tenía una baraja de cartas tarot con dibujos desde varias historias de niños. Sacé dos cartas con personajes de Oz; una con Dorothy, Toto y el globo grande del mago, y la otra con la bruja buena Glinda. Esta historia ha sido un motivo esto año: los personajes, las imágenes me siguen en todos partes, viajeros compañeros.
2 de marzo
En las semanas recientes Ben y yo hemos estado juntos constantemente; era un alivio pasar un día solo, con mi escritura y mis pensamientos y un libro de Agatha Christie, Los asesinatos ABC. Paseé al lado del Lago Daylesford: estaba un ganso muerto al lado del paseo, como la víctima en una novela policíaca. Las plumas de su última cuidado estaban esparcidas en el suelo; solo su pecho se había asaltado y devorado, una excavación ordenada. El resto del pájaro era intacto, su expresión tranquila. No sé que animal había asaltado el ganso – quizás un gato o un zorro – pero había obrado con precisíon. El libro es sobre un asesino serial; es un ejemplo temprano del genero. Lo tiene un giro bueno: el asesino se entrega a la policía treinta páginas antes el fin, y pensé todo no fue como se pareció. La estructura es insólito; las perspectivas alternan entre el asesino y Hastings, el amigo del detectivo Poirot. Christie revela la identidad del asesino inmediamente; al final, él es un personaje muy simpático.
4 de marzo
Paseé para el otro lago en Daylesford, en las afueras, por un sendero a través del bosque. El sendero tiene una aparencia de devastación, como si la gente acaba de despejarlo con machetes. El bosque es lleno de las zarzas; están creciendo agresivamente, amenazando a tomar posesión del paisaje. Lo es solo gran eucaliptos blancos y olas verdes oscuras de espinas. El lago es hermoso, no tan mantenido como Lago Daylesford, un gran parque de caravanas con familias, canoas, pavos reales y bodas informales. El pavo real y su hembra paseaban por separado; el macho solo, sus pies y su pescuezo moviendo con rítmos diferentes, la hembra con sus pollitos marrónes, un brillo verde sútil en su pescuezo.
6 de marzo
Anoche conducimos hacia Lyonville, un pueblito cerca de Daylesford. No hay ningunas tiendas, solo un pub, los Radio Springs. Los martes, el dueño tiene noches de películas misteriosas: yo había llamadole, y él no había dicho a mí la identidad de la película. El bar es decorado en el estilo de la playa, con muchas camisas hawaianas en las paredes, una excentricidad divertida eso lejos desde el mar. Cenamos pizzas y el dueño nos llevó a su cine pequeño. La película se llamó Matewan; la fue sobre un conflicto entre mineros de carbon y sus patrones, en los Estados Unidos en los 1920s. El dueño del pub era protector de la película, casi pesaroso, porque el sujeto era serioso. Me encantó la experiencia: pensé cual rara vez tengo experiencias no he eligido. La película era buena, con un Chris Cooper muy joven y un sensación muy viva de esa comunidad pasada. Volvimos as las 9; estabamos mirando con mucho cuidado el bosque al lado de la carreterra por vombátidos.
11 de marzo
Encontramos un puesto en el principio del desfile de ChillOut: miramos los diferentes grupos maricas, esperando en cola. Las jefas eran las lesbianas en motos, la caballería ruidosa de todo desfile marica. Sus motos eran decorados con gran banderas de arco iris; el desfile empezó con el ruido de sus motores, mientras las mujeres girían los aceleradores. La energía era muy diferente del Mardi Gras en Sídney, una expresión del entero pueblo; un desfile es diferente en la luz del día también, más común y corriente, y de alguna manera más íntegro. Matrimonio era una tema muy común: parejas lesbianas en autos de golf decorados para unas bodas; un hombre llevaba una chaqueta sin camisa, con su caballo enorme llevaba un velo blanco. Más tarde, salimos a un pub: había una fiesta de baile en el patio, y Ben y yo bailamos debajo de las cuerdas de las luces de colores, en una pista de baile tan atestada no pudimos mover nuestros brazos. Necesité algun tiempo con mi gente marica, y era una noche mágica.
12 de marzo
El lunes pasado conducimos hacia un cortijo en el campo fuera de Benalla. El campo es llano y seco, más tierra que hierba, con algunas vacas negras en la sombra de los pocos árboles. La tierra aquí no está solamente debajo tus pies pero en el aire también, un olor y sabor dulce y caliente. Las perritas disfrutan un gran libertad: las deambulan a través de los prados cerca de la casa, perseguiendo las cuervas, tomando el sol. Las paredes de la casa son todas ventanas, sin cortinas o persianas: todas las mañanas nos despertamos con el amanecer.
13 de marzo
Exploré Benalla con mi cámara: el pueblo tiene un festival de arte de calle anualmente, y sus paredes eran cubiertas con obras de pintadas. En general no me gusta arte de calle, pero esto era diferente: la organizadora y muchas de las artistas eran mujeres, y sus obras eran representaciones de mujeres, no como objetas de fantasías masculinas o imagenes sexuales pero como gente diversa y distinta. Mi favorita era un autoretrato de una artista, una mujer altiva con pájaros en sus hombros y una calavera en su mano. La artista se llama Lisa King. Después paseé al lado del lago, medio desecarado para matar una mala hierba. Playas provisionales habían aparecido en su orilla; los patos eran confinados al parte pequeño restante de la agua. El paseo era muy hermoso, a través de un bosque eucalipto, todos troncos blancos y hierba larga, dorado en el sol.
14 de marzo
He leído dos libros de la escritora coreana Han Kang, El libro blanco, y La vegetariana. El primero era apropriado para mi vida ahora: lo se compone de muchas obras cortas y poéticas, todas sobre el color blanco. La autora viaja a un país europeo muy frío, fascinado del olvido de la nieve. Me encantan los vislumbres breves hacia el interior de su mente, una persona en un lugar extraño donde todos los detalles son intensos, a veces dolorosamente intensos. Han Kang conta la historia de uno aborto natural de su madre; normalmente estoy sospechoso de artistas quienes toman prestado el dolor de otras personas para sus obras, pero en ese caso la experienca de su madre era tan traumática entendí como la puede marcar las vidas de toda la familia. La vegetariana es un genero diferente, una novela con personajes y perspectivas múltiples. Admiré la manera vemos la personaje principal solamente a través de las perspectivas de su familia: su realidad queda misteriosa mientras ella escapa su forma humana.
17 de marzo
El sábado hacía mucho calor, y muy temprano visitamos una ciénaga afuera de Benalla. La historia del lugar – se llama los Winton Wetlands – era muy interesante: antes de la llegada del los europeos, la ciénaga era muy importante para los indígenes. Los europeos la convertieron a un lago artificial, inundando la ciénaga. Hoy la agua está salpicado con árboles ahogados, huesos misteriosos. Ahora algunos científicos están intentando a restablacer la ciénaga, a deshacer el daño de nuestros antepasados. Despues el verano la ciénaga está muy seca, toda tierra rajada y aisladas matas de la hierba. Una pareja de serpientes negras nadaban en una charca de la agua verde-marrón. Un camino recto conduce a una estatua métallica en la ciénaga, una cabeza con muchas caras pasando como olas sobre su superficie. La brillaba en la luz de la mañana caliente como si la fuera la fuente del calor. Después condujimos hacia un pueblito se llamó Goorambat por más arte de la calle; un artista había pintado un buho enorme del lado de un silo antiguo, con ojos amarillos muy intensos. Un otro artista había pintado un retrato de una santa dentro de una iglesia pocita. Su cara occupa una pared entera de la iglesia, detrás del púlpito, con una paloma voladora. Me encantó nuestro encuentro con ella, una gigante apenas contenido por el edificio. Aquí se encuentra arte en lugares inesperados; la gente está muy orgulloso de lo, sonreiendo y dando la bienvenida a los desconocidos con suyas cámaras. En el camino a la iglesia, un hombre estaba regando las rosas delante de su casa; él nos preguntó, ¿Vais a ver la señora?
25 de marzo
Mi relación con Ben siempre ha incluido espacios: desaparecemos dentro de nuestro trabajo, así que aunque estemos en casa todo el diá, sin embargo nuestra cena sienta como un reencuentro. Puedo ver los productos de su trabajo, sus dibujos – los tesoros cómicos Ben trae de sus viajes interiores – pero eso mundo es un misterio, una gran privacidad. El libro actual de Ben es un esfuerzo enorme, doscientas páginas de los dibujos colorados, y su mundo no siente alegre pero serioso, hasta sombrió, un esfuerzo coordinado como un maratón. Las semanas pasadas quedamos en una casa con sola una habitación, y la energía de su trabajo, su concentración, llenaba el espacio entero. Yo lo escapé en los pueblos cercanos, en paseos al lado de los ríos, y en baños largos, pero el esfuerzo estresante me seguía en todas partes. Aun las películas veía – El hilo invisible, La ley del deseo – eran sobre la problema de viviendo con un artista. A veces mi propia identidad artistica se pone secundaria de la de Ben: mi trabajo principal sea como un marido, como un instructor de vida. Yo alimente él, yo tire él desde su ordenador por unos momentos cortos en el sol, yo regañe él cuando él necesite descansar. Su trabajo implica nosotros ambos, aunque yo no compartolo. Siendo el amante de un artista no es siempre facíl, y no es un accidente los amantes de Daniel Day-Lewis y Eusebio Poncela en esas películas ambos eran locos, intentando descubrir sus papeles en las vidas de sus hombres importantes. Necesitamos mucha humilidad, mucha paciencia, mientras nuestros artistas completan sus obras.
28 de marzo
Como el dinero
quiero cambiar
Como el dinero
quiero moverme
sobre los bordes,
como las nubes
quiero flotar
en mercados extraños
Como el dinero
quiero saber
que
puedes comprar
con mi cara actual
que
puedes comprar
Como el dinero
quiero saber
mi valor verdadero
quiero cambiar
manos, países y nombres
Quiero comprar algo para ti
quiero ser tu regalo
Amor, gástame;
como un átomo
yo reensamblo
en una forma diferente
una cosa extraña
un nuevo mueble
Al mismo tiempo
soy el precio
en la mano del vendedor
valor potencial y flexible
no como tu compra
yo, todavía
como el dinero
Movie Diary 30/3/18
30
03
Oprah Winfrey in A WRINKLE IN TIME.
Black Panther (2018) – In outline – a superhero from a hermetic culture must decide how to engage with the wider world – this is very similar to Wonder Woman, last year’s blow for comic book diversity, but this is much better executed. Partly it’s the way the movie spends most of its running length in Wakanda, so that its customs and tribal politics have time to signify, rather than hustling us, as Wonder Woman did, into the world we know. (It also means we can enjoy the costumes and production design at leisure.) The screenplay (by director Ryan Coogler and Joe Robert Cole) takes the kingdom seriously and trusts it to hold our interest; where Wonder Woman‘s last third was marred by reveals and context-free CGI that undermined the storytelling to that point, this remains a contest of personalities and ideas to the end, with a climactic battle that meaningfully involves all the major characters. The actors are uniformly strong (except for Andy Serkis, who rivals Sharlto Copley in Elysium for Afrikaans unpleasantness); one of the movie’s pleasant surprises is that, apart from the central pair of Chadwick Boseman and Michael B. Jordan, most of the significant characters are women, from Danai Gurira’s palace guard to Letitia Wright’s techie kid sister. The generational stuff lands too; this story of royal succession is a family story too, and Boseman and Jordan’s scenes with their ancestors are particularly powerful. If more Marvel movies were like this I would go to see them more often. ***½
The Lost City of Z (2017) – For the first half an hour, this seems handsome and dull, a period drama that’s all hunting parties and stifling English class distinctions, and then, once its hero reaches South America, a series of quotations from Werner Herzog (opera in the jungle, a claustrophobic river voyage, the Europeans’ petty doings juxtaposed with the sublime landscape). But then the white explorer goes home (the film is based on David Grann’s book about the actual British explorer Percy Fawcett), and things become more interesting. Fawcett (well played by Charlie Hunnam, whose good looks bestow an appropriate glamour on his activities) was not a typical European, and the movie has a complex interest in both his personal compulsions (and the impact they have on his family) and of history more generally, of how scientific inquiry fit into an imperial program of domination and commercial exploitation (and, not incidentally, reinforced the whites’ sense of their own superiority). It turns out that director James Gray has adopted his deliberate pace (the movie runs nearly two and half hours, and it feels long) so that he can explore these issues and others (a familiar figure like Sienna Miller’s waiting wife is given a more complex range of reactions than is the norm), and Darius Khondji’s images, dark-toned and golden, are worth lingering over. It’s a sustained inquiry into what, exactly, constitutes civilisation. ***
Molly’s Game (2017) – There’s an interesting tension here between the close-mouthed protagonist, who stakes her identity on refusing to betray confidences, and Aaron Sorkin, the garrulous writer/director who adapted her book. Molly Bloom’s story is rife with opportunities for Sorkin to show off his familiarity with such diverse topics as competitive skiing and high-stakes poker; his Bloom narrates constantly, her explanations juiced with quick cuts and stock footage. (The expertise on display could be spurious; Sorkin has Jessica Chastain talk so quickly that it’s hard to evaluate what she tells us.) This approach tends to encroach on Chastain’s performance: too many of her scenes are mere illustrations of what she tells us in voiceover, rather than scenes that are allowed their own present tense or meaningful interactions between characters. (There’s a moment where Idris Elba corrects one of her recollections that suggests Chastain might be an unreliable narrator a la Margot Robbie in I, Tonya, but Sorkin doesn’t go much further with this possibility.) Sorkin reserves much of his feeling for the scenes with Bloom’s father (Kevin Costner), one of those dangerous parents who use their professional expertise (he’s a psychologist) to undermine their children’s reality. The blundering sincerity of the father-daughter scenes – Costner’s character is an egotist even when taking responsibility, turning up at the eleventh hour to claim that Molly’s entire career is all about him – is exasperating and affecting, like Sorkin himself, who likewise means well while taking up too much space in Bloom’s story. **½
Phantom Thread (2017) – This is both perfectly formed and deeply eccentric: after all, it argues that a little mild poisoning can be good for a marriage, something a couple can enjoy together. It explores two pathologies: the male artist’s belief that he can only work under certain conditions (and that the people around him are obliged to meet them), and Alma’s belief that her only value is in how necessary she is to her man. The richness and exactitude of the writing and acting exposes the relative poverty of so much moviemaking – operating on one level only, straining to express a single idea: the density of each moment here, achieved without the appearance of effort, is nothing short of amazing. In this Paul Thomas Anderson’s movie is, of course, a perfect analogue for Reynolds Woodcock’s gowns. The choices are impeccable, from where Anderson mounts the camera on the tailor’s car to the way Alma’s English breaks down when she is angry to the New Year’s Eve party that teeters between exuberance and chaos. Of course, what Anderson appears to be saying – that Alma is a Delilah who finds fulfilment only when she cuts the hair of her Samson – is pretty dubious, but he mounts his argument so beautifully that you may come to believe that these people are, in their own way, happy. ***½
A Wrinkle in Time (2018) – The quality of the effects here varies: some of the sequences (the cabbage dragon, the flight through the forest) suffer from the basic CGI problem that anything is possible and so nothing matters; some environments (the meadow with the flowers in particular) have the generic prettiness of every Disney fairy land, and others (the suburban cul-de-sac) would be better as physical sets. The best is the simplest: a beach with an infinite crowd of umbrellas and sunbathers and towels, where the jaunty colours quickly become oppressive. The film nevertheless feels intimate, thanks to Ava DuVernay’s direction and her handling of the actors. She emphasises relationships, shooting in close to capture faces and the way characters touch and stand in relation to one another. (In the final encounter between Meg and her father, the shift in their relationship is communicated wordlessly, in the way she looks at and touches him.) For once, the loss of a parent in a Disney film is not simply a way to kick-start the story (there is, apparently, no adventure without bereavement), but rather the story’s motor. It’s meaningful because of the precise way DuVernay captures this particular family, these individual characters. In this she’s assisted by performers like Gugu Mbatha-Raw and, especially, the three children at the film’s centre, Storm Reid, Deric McCabe and Levi Miller. Even when the effects bland out, they keep things grounded. ***
Diario castellano – febrero
28
02
1 de febrero
El jueves, visitamos el centro turístico de Merimbula y conocimos una mujer canadiense, con un casco sólido de pelo como un tejado de paja sobre una casa antigua inglésa. Se llamaba Joan. Joan se nos acercó y nos dio muchos mapas y folletos de la pared; ella tenía muchas sugerencias y consejos, sobre paseos, restaurantes, parques nacionales y parques de diversiones. No todas sus sugerencias fueron útiles, pero ella fue muy amable y nos hizo sentir bienvenidos. Todos los pueblos necesitan una Joan.
4 de febrero
En algunas maneras, la mayoría de los pueblos australianos son similares: las mismas tiendas y piscinas, la misma gente blanca con su cultura de cerveza y fútbol y la CWA. Pero todos los pueblos tienen sus propias personalidades también, y es misterioso como estas personalidades cambian de pueblo en pueblo, y como un pueblo tiene éxito mientras otro se frustra. Hemos conducido a Eden, un pueblo solo a mediahora al sur de Merimbula. Es un pueblo de pescadores; en la época de los balleneros, los barcos pequeños cazaban ballenas con la ayuda de las orcas. En el promontorio hay un monumento para los hombres perdidos en alta mar. La región se llama la Costa del Zafiro, y el agua azul del Pacífico rompe en los acantilados con una violencia limpia. Sin embargo, el pueblo era muy triste, sin centro: muchas tiendas estaban vacías, el pub hermoso y antiguo estaba sellado, la gente apática, sin destino. El contraste con Merimbula – vivo, concurrido, a mediahora lejos – fue enorme.
5 de febrero
Ayer por la tarde, caminamos a traves de una ciénaga recuperada en Pambula; antes había sido el hipódromo del pueblo, pero ahora le ha sido devuelta a los pájaros y los canguros. Un camino sigue el hipódromo y serpentea al lado del río. Encontramos muchos canguros: uno saltó en el camino delante de nosotros. Suspendimos por un momento largo. Había algo formal en ese encuentro: el canguro se había quedado de pie, su postura erguida, dandonos su completa atención. Después se juntó con su mob en la ciénaga.
6 de febrero
Esta mañana, Ben y yo hemos caminado por la rambla en el manglar de Merimbula. Somos como jubilados: disfrutamos de las tiendas de muebles usados, museos de historia local y paseos llanos y suaves. Esta mañana hemos estado con nuestra gente; como en Blackheath, todos los viejos nos han saludado. He disfrutado esto tanto, he dicho “¡Buenos días!” a la misma gente en ambas direcciones. Los pelícanos se han sentado al lado de los pescadores en el banco de arena, vecinos en la misma empresa.
8 de febrero
Hemos conducido por siete horas, de Merimbula a Beechworth, a través de las Montañas Nevadas. Fue el diá en que vinimos a Victoria, y en este largo viaje pude sentir que nuestra vida antigua en Nueva Gales del Sur había quedado atrás. Delante de las montañas, el paisaje tenía cerros verdes, con la lozanía mágica de la Costa del Este, las montañas una pared súbita de árboles. Del otro lado, no había nada de humedad: el campo era un resplandor de oro, la hierba cegadora en el sol. Me sentí ambivalente sobre este nuevo lugar seco, su blandura endurecida, hasta la tierra parecía tan delgada como la luz.
9 de febrero
Mi primera clase con Jimena fue muy interesante. Este año he leido y he escrito mucho en español, y siento un poder crecimiento para entenderlo y emplearlo. Pero no he hablado mucho, y delante de las palabras seguras de mi profesora, me sentí herrumbrado y lento. En esta situación, no se puede consultar un diccionario; no se puede escribir oraciones prudentes. La lengua es más como un animal o una canción, una cosa viva con su propio rítmo. Se tiene que lidiar con esta presencia.
10 de febrero
Beechworth es un pueblo muy raro: existe principalmente por los turistas, pero no tiene un espíritu de bienvenida. Ben y yo hemos viajado a muchos pueblos australianos y nunca hemos tenido ningunos problemas por nuestra sexualidad. El jueves, nuestra primera noche aquí, un hombre fuera de una taberna nos llamó maricas, y en la calle recibimos miradas sucias de la gente. Los edificios históricos contienen tiendas de regalos; el pueblo es una gran tienda de regalos, un lugar artificial. El sábado condujimos a Myrtleford, un pueblo de clase trabajadora, con una gran población italiana. Allí la gente sonréieron a nosotros, y hablaron en una manera amable, y me sentí agradecido por este simple reconocimiento humano. Compré un racimo de albahaca a una mujer vieja italiana, y nuestro coche era lleno de su olor verde. Myrtleford no es un museo como Beechworth: es un lugar vivo y cotidiano. No quiero vivir en una tienda de regalos, especialmente una homofóbica.
15 de febrero
Después una semana en Beechworth, creo es un lugar mal, separado del pueblo y su inhabitantes: hay algo maligno en el paisaje, una atmosfera no bueno. Gente hubieran evitado este lugar si oro no era descubrado aquí, hubieran evitadolo instintivamente. Los perros se sientenlo; no pueden descansar y ladran y se pasean inquietamente en los patios. El bosque afuera el pueblo se parece un vertedero, los pinos herrumbrados y los cantos rodados granitos la basura de la busquéda de los mineros para oro. El paisaje tiene belleza, pero es una belleza ominosa. Las casas se agachan bajo en la tierra, como si en emboscada.
19 de febrero
La vida gitana tiene algunas desventajas: Ben y yo pensamos constantemente sobre el lugar donde estamos, si lo nos gusta suficiente para hacemos un hogar aquí, y sobre nuestra próxima parada. No podemos dar los detalles por sentado; no tenemos una rutina sin sentido. Nuestra vida está variada y viva, pero agotadora también. La exige nuestra atención completa, como un niño con un dibujo nuevo. Yo leyo solo guías de lugares varios, folletos sobre paseos, parques, edificios antiguos, y las historias insignificantes de todo pueblito australiano. No tengo sitio en mi cabeza para otras cosas: solo el viaje, y nuestro busco para un hogar. Mientras tanto nuestras corazones van a la deriva atrás a los cerros verdes y la agua zafiro de Merimbula, un lugar hemos pensado ser solo un destino de vacaciones. Está un momento muy inquieto; estando despierto constantemente no es facíl.
22 de febrero
Conducimos para algunos pueblos cerca de Maldon – Maryborough, Talbot, Clunes, Creswick, Trentham y Kyneton – y nuestras posibilidades estrecharon en una manera útil. No me encanta Maldon, pero me gusta lo, y puedo imaginar una vida aquí. En cuanto a los otros pueblos: Maryborough es tosco y triste, la gente vieja viajando en sus escúteres despacios; Talbot es encantador pero pequeño, sus calles sin actividad; Clunes es una versión inferior de Maldon, otro pueblo del fiebre del oro; Creswick es un sencillo pueblo maderado; Trentham es como Bowral, caro, con muchas señoras estiradas; y Kyneton es como Melbourne, todos trabajadores pendulares y tiendas ostentosas. Maldon es único: la amibildad de su gente, sus edificios antiguos pero no preciosos o afectados, la manera la gente se congrega en las tiendas y las calles por conversación. Pero no es hermosa: el bosque apenas sobrevive en la tierra pobre aquí, todos eucalíptos delgados y agostados sin matorral. La tierra no tiene riqueza o generosidad.
23 de febrero
Mi relación con inglés está cambiando: recientemente he intentado escribir poémas y historias en inglés y no he podido. Las palabras son muertos en la página: son dificultosas, demasiadas conocidas, como un ego antiguo o un foto de un corte de pelo vergonzo. Escribo solo una página y las palabras se extinguien: voy a la deriva a las temas familiares, a tristeza y a derrota. La arquitectura de la ficción – los personajes, el argumento, la voz – me aburre la, me parece artificial. En castellano las palabras retienen su poder, su frescura. Me encanta la economía de la lengua, su línea recta, y los momentos cuando descubro una frase perfecta, como “el fiebre del oro”, que captura la locura de esa época, o una palabra mágica como “serpentear”, para una calle no recta. Puedo escribir en una manera más simple, más concreto; puedo desbrozar a cuchilladas mis hábitos, mi historia triste, y empezar de nuevo, describir mi propia experencia, no estar vergonzo a ser básico o directo.
25 de febrero
Ben me dejó en Muckleford, a medio camino entre Castlemaine y Maldon, y paseé los kilometros para Maldon, al lado del ferrocarril antiguo. Me gustaría entender esto paisaje mejor: mi primera reacción era demasiada como la reacción de los primeros europeos, hostilidad irreflexiva delante de algo desconocido, algo ellos agarraron de todas formas. Buscé para la belleza en esto paisaje; intenté no lo comparar con los lugares conocidos para mí. Una vez interrumpí una junta de urracas; de otra manera notaba la falta de pájaros. Era silencioso salvo el viento; sopló hojas y trozos de corteza en mi camino, como si intentara compensar por la quietud, la ausencia de vida. Mi sola compañia era la vaca occasional, y un padre y su hijo gordo, subiendo un cerro con bicicletas eléctricas. Grumos de pizarra y cuarzo eran esparcidos sobre la tierra, en lugar de matorral, con sus venas naranjas y marrónes. Los eucaliptos jovénes tenían una frescura verde; no ya eran torcidos como sus ancianos. Descubrí detalles interesantes cuando miré con cuidado.
Movie Diary 15/2/18
15
02
Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf in LADY BIRD.
Blade Runner 2049 (2017) – The design here – post-apocalyptic environments where colour is almost completely excluded, or luxurious digs bathed in yellow – is certainly striking, if a little monotonous. (It’s a little mystifying that Jared Leto and Harrison Ford get the same colour scheme.) The lighting is terrific, with the standout a fight sequence amongst holograms in a Las Vegas showroom that distils the film’s interest in manufactured reality into a few minutes of tense action. Like the original, this is limited by being such a male fantasy of the future: the women (aside from Robin Wright’s hard-bitten cop) are either compliant sexbots or sexy killing machines. (It would be nice to see the dynamic reversed: with his bland good looks, Ryan Gosling would make the perfect boyfriend in the Cloud.) Sylvia Hoeks’ composure suggests more complex reactions (she modulates her voice and expression expertly) – pleasure in the power conferred on her by her employer, resentment of his cruelty, a teasing identification with Gosling – but the movie soon flattens her out. It’s never boring, but it doesn’t add up to much either, and the climactic fight feels makeshift, like the placeholder for a better idea. **½
I, Tonya (2017) – Much of this is shallow by design: the film is interspersed with interviews with each of the principal characters, and the bulk of the action dramatises their recollections, memories long since ossified into stories. The scenes have the flatness of re-enactments, of situations experienced from a single perspective: every so often one of the characters addresses the camera directly, to remind us that this is someone’s version of events. For all the fuss about the slipperiness of truth, however, the movie never seriously entertains the possibility that Tonya Harding was involved in the plot against Nancy Kerrigan, and Kerrigan is almost completely absent – even from Harding’s perspective, as a rival figure on the skating circuit. There’s something touristy, condescending, in the movie’s depiction of Harding’s white-trash milieu – the AM radio soundtrack (usually deployed ironically), the young couple doing wheelies in the dirt, the kitchen that the older Harding fails to clean up for the interviewer’s camera. It doesn’t feel lived in but rather selected for its ‘colour’. The best reason to see the film is Margot Robbie, who sinks into Harding’s strong centre and moves with blunt power on and off the rink. **½
Lady Bird (2017) – What sets this apart from other coming-of-age stories is its specificity, taste and kindness. Greta Gerwig has a gift for selecting telling moments – the ones that lodge in the memory – and her movie proceeds cleanly from one moment to the next, rarely lingering, cutting them free from the flab of reality. The American rites of passage familiar from a hundred other high school stories – college applications, homecoming, the heroine ditching her friends for the cool kids – feel fresh because of this rhythm, and the small ways Gerwig subverts your expectations, foregrounding an unexpected character’s emotions in a situation. She’s especially good at registering the abrupt shifts in the relationship between mother and daughter: the interactions between Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) and Marion (Laurie Metcalf) are a maze of love and recrimination that both actors navigate with total precision. Both women have to reckon with Marion’s sense of disappointment, with the difference that her daughter can imagine a way out of it. Sometimes Jon Brion’s score is too cute, but this is a beautiful movie. ***½
The Post (2017) – Steven Spielberg’s newspaper drama shows the limits of skill: the production is mounted with care and thought, but can’t shake off a basic dullness, reflected in its dishwater palette. Spielberg keeps things moving, his camera another participant in the action – sometimes, as in the opening war sequence, giving us quick, obstructed glimpses, other times moving unobtrusively into a space with the actors and panning around to orient us. But the background stuff he choreographs to make the scenes feel lived in – the children running in and out, the TV programs, Sarah Paulson’s art materials – always feels placed rather than found, and obvious, which gives the film a corny, second-hand texture. The cast, a veritable Who’s Who of actors from the prestige TV of the past decade, will likely remind you of their other, better roles (Paulson’s wise wife bustling in with sandwiches is probably the nadir). Only a single moment surprised me in the performances: David Cross, taking someone a pile of documents, smiles as if surprising them for their birthday. Meryl Streep, fiddling with her glasses, and Tom Hanks, at the cantankerous end of his decent-guy range, are overfamiliar, like this unnecessarily boring film. **
The Shape of Water (2017) – Guillermo del Toro’s monster-movie tribute feels more French than 50s Hollywood in its whimsy, its ostentatious sense of unreality – like Jeunet, or Michel Gondry at his most laboured. It’s hardly possible to miss the rippling lights, the swampy colour, or the raft of film references (two of the characters live above a cinema, and they spend much of their time watching old movies on TV), but the effects are stilted, self-important, rarely simple or inevitable in the manner of real movie magic. (The Rogers/Astaire tribute only reminded me of the much better one on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.) The plotting asks us to accept a lot of improbabilities and arbitrary limits, even for a fairy tale. Why are there cameras everywhere in the facility except the lab with its most valuable asset? Is the canal the only place the creature can be released? Del Toro moves his players into position so clumsily that it kept throwing me out of the story. The actors are all effective, if mostly playing to type; it’s good to see Sally Hawkins in the sort of full-scale role she deserves, her best since Happy-Go-Lucky. But it’s lucky del Toro has a gift for violence: without the brutality, this would be as twee as The Artist. **½
Diario castellano – enero
6
02
1 de enero
Un año nuevo, y una lengua diferente. Espero conseguir una expresión fresca, más simple: en inglés soy quisquilloso, demasiado cuidadoso. Me gustaría ser más libre, sentirme más cómodo con los errores. El año pasado fue una época de recuperación, de curación; ahora estoy más fuerte, y listo para experiencias variadas, para diversión y vida. No sé exactamente que esperar: que palabras, que lugares o egos. Pero le doy la bienvenida a esta duda: es un vacío creativo. El viaje me ilusiona mucho.
2 de enero
Anoche Ben y yo paseamos por el bosque hacia Govetts Leap bajo la luna llena. El bosque es diferente en el crepúsculo, es más antiguo: la sangre seca de los geebungs, las estrellitas de los árboles de té, las líneas varias de los eucaliptos, brazos blancos, baterías de luz. Las aves y los insectos se acostaron al unisono: no corriá viento, y la noche estaba silenciosa e inmovíl. En el valle Grose la niebla estaba llena de la luz de la luna, y Ben y yo fuimos las únicas personas.
4 de enero
Ayer paseé por las calles estrechas de Enmore y Newtown, barrios tan familiares como mi propio cuerpo. Todo es igual: mugre en cada esquina, capa negra que hace todo más oscuro, esboza las formas como la tinta en un libro para colorear. Conozco íntimamente los frangipanis en los patios pequeños, los árboles paperbark, los limpiabotellas llenos de loris de arco iris. La privacidad no es posible: me encantan los vislumbres de otra gente, sus muebles, la mujer con un libro en su balcón.
16 de enero
El sábado pasado, fuimos con Bill y Taryn a Dryridge, una viña en el valle Megalong. La calle en el valle es muy tortuosa: serpentea por el bosque seco de eucalipto hacia la selva llena de helechos y sombras. No llueve mucho en el valle: es abierto y seco, con hierba larga y amarilla, y cobertizos viejos, rojos con herrumbre. La viña está en un cerro con una gran vista del bosque y los acantilados de piedra arenisca. Los perros de la dueña curioseaban debajo de las mesas mientras probábamos el vino.
21 de enero
Esta mañana, Ben y yo hemos caminado a Govetts Leap, muy temprano, antes del completo calor del día. En el camino hemos encontrado un hombre parecido a un personaje de un libro de Mark Twain. Ha tropezado por el camino, con un bastón roto en dos y reparado con cinta adhesiva. Llevaba una chaqueta de piel negra, gastada en los hombros, y tocaba una armónica. Olía fuertemente a alcohol. Nos ha preguntado cuán lejos está Govetts Leap – ha sido demasiado lejos para él, y ha vuelto al pueblo.
23 de enero
En nuestra última noche en Blackheath, con el garaje completamente vacío, descubrí dos huellas de manos en el hormigón del suelo. Nunca las había notado antes; pensé cuán poco conocí eso lugar, aunque vivimos allí muchos años. Una de las huellas estaba debajo de la pared, como si la huella de mano sostuviera la estructura entera en su palma, o el albañil la enterrera a propósito. Vacié una botella de colonia en el fregadero de la cocina, y mi última impresión de la casa fue ese olor pesado.
24 de enero
Ben y yo vinimos a Mollymook con nuestros perritas y un coche completamente lleno. Bil no viaja bien en el coche, y vomitó en las últimas curvas de la carretera. Estuvieron muy calladas por los grandes cambios, y mientras Ben y yo caminamos hacia la playa durmieron en nuestra casa de vacaciónes. Cenamos pescado y papas fritas al lado del mar: todavía no podíamos creer que ya no íbamos a volver a las montañas, que ahora vivíamos a la deriva.
28 de enero
Leí un libro de Philip Pullman, El espantapájaros y su servidor. Es menos ambicioso que la trilogía famosa de Pullman: es solo una serie de aventuras fortuitas. El espantapájaros es un personaje como Don Quijote: tiene ideas románticas sobre el honor, su personalidad y su destino. Él no me gustó mucho: mi personaje favorito fue una cuerva muy vieja, impaciente y enojada. La cuerva resuelve la mayoría de los problemas del argumento: la historia es más dinámica cuando ella aparece. El libro me pareció un poco aburrido.
31 de enero
Los edificios en Mollymook son menos feos que otros lugares en la costa del sur; sin embargo lamento la presencia de la gente blanca aquí. Estoy sentado al lado del manglar de Narrawallee: la marea está baja, y un llano de arena se extiende hasta el mar, con árboles bajos y redondos, como nubes verdes. Los cerros sobre el mar son cabezas afeitadas, espacios feos en el bosque, las casas las costras de esta violencia. La mayoría de los jardínes no tienen árboles: son extensiones esteriles de césped, como si sus dueños estuvieran recelosos de la capacidad de la tierra para crecer. Es un lugar sin sombras, con un sol ininterrumpido. Todos los habitantes son codiciosos por las vistas del mar, un paisaje que no pueden cortar o reducir. Los eucaliptos aquí tienen una belleza especial, con sus troncos y ramas alérgicos a las líneas rectas; son todos curvas espontáneas. Antiguamente los eucaliptos cubrían este lugar. Pensé sobre esto cuando vi las banderas en las toallas de playa y en las antenas de los camiones, en el día de Australia. Nuestra mayor contribución a ese paisaje es la fealdad.
Movie Diary 21/1/18
21
01
Woody Harrelson and Frances McDormand in THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI.
Call Me By Your Name (2017) – This wears its luxury more lightly than Luca Guadagnino’s previous films: the characters’ wealth is expressed in cultivation rather than consumption, their freedom to translate and transcribe music and study old things while their servants, happy peasants, bring them fish still gasping from the river. Guadagnino also, thank goodness, drops the arbitrary deaths, there to raise the stakes, that marred his last two movies: he trusts this love story to hold us, and it does. I was sometimes uneasy about the age difference between Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer): Elio, with his skinny boy’s body, and his reactions – the petulance, the quick tears – that are still those of a child, is at a disadvantage both physically and in experience. Crucially, though, he is not an object but the subject – the film is told almost entirely from Elio’s perspective – and the movie captures the consternation, the insistent physicality of teenage sexuality. Guadagnino, with his gift for surfaces, find the gestures that lodge in the memory, creates a texture – the characters slipping in and out of clothes and water, onto bicycles – that is all body. ***
The Florida Project (2017) – This takes the sharp, specific social observation of Tangerine and inundates it with beauty: shot on 35mm film, environments that might otherwise seem squalid – the purple motel where people live more or less permanently, but without the rights of tenants; the abandoned homes; the outlandish businesses that line the roads – bloom in front of Alexis Zabe’s camera. In this it mirrors the perspective of the movie’s heroine, six-year-old Moonee (Brooklynn Prince, extraordinary) and the feral band of kids who range around with her, bumming cash, spitting on cars, testing the patience of the well-meaning motel manager (Willem Dafoe). This is their neighbourhood, and they know it with loving intimacy. Director Sean Baker captures the way kids move, the exaggerated way they swing their elbows or slouch against a wall, testing out their bodies, looking at their friends to gauge the effect of their postures. At the same time (and this is what distinguishes it from Beasts of the Southern Wild, which attempted something similar), it does not use the kids’ resilience to excuse their neglect: the movie is very clear on how adults let children down. ****
Mudbound (2017) – The basic story – the histories of two families occupying the same patch of land, their lives shaped by race, weather and war – is familiar, but the manner in which it’s told is not. From the outset, there is no narrative centre: the perspectives are dispersed among members of both families. At first, a chorus of voiceovers helps orient us, but Dee Rees’ direction is so skilful that even as the voices recede, we retain a sense of both the individual points of view (and their blindspots) and how they fit into a collective. The film is distinguished, too, by its feeling for the physical, and its interest in the details of farm life: Rachel Morrison’s cinematography captures both the hard slog of their routine and the occasional sublimity of the sky above their flat land – a sky that both dwarfs and inspires. This double-edged beauty extends to the human relationships too, finding small moments of grace despite the unthinking entitlement of the whites and the violently curtailed opportunities for the black farmers. ***½
Paddington 2 (2017) – The Paddington films, with their bright colours, their gentleness and their celebration of eccentricity, mount the most delightful argument for Englishness since Wallace and Gromit. (One might object that Englishness does not deserve to be celebrated in quite so uncomplicated a fashion, or that the movies pride themselves on their depiction of London as a melting pot without granting any significant roles to people of colour, but the films mostly banish such cranky thoughts.) Visually they’re splendid, honouring the old-fashioned and the handmade: the gags are elaborate contraptions (my favourite here involves a bucket of soapy water, a pulley, and a flowerpot), and the movies’ elastic sense of reality can dive effortlessly into the pages of a fold-out picture book, or pull out to reveal that a house or prison is an elaborate scale model. It all feels like the work of a keen and gifted hobbyist: director Paul King aims to surprise and delight, and he constantly finds new styles in which to tell his story, new environments to deck with bunting. The sequel is every bit as good as the original, Hugh Grant’s fatuous, scheming actor as satisfying a villain as Nicole Kidman’s chilly scientist. ***½
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) – There are some flaws in Martin McDonagh’s writing: the Abbie Cornish character is not a person but ‘the wife’ (Cornish is miscast; she doesn’t belong in this town); two other young women are too much alike, identical sweet scatterbrains; and McDonagh overdoes the attempt to be even-handed with Woody Harrelson’s sheriff, spending so much time establishing what a nice guy he is that he becomes a sort of angel, dispensing wisdom from the afterlife. But McDonagh’s movie powerfully captures the seductions of anger: Frances McDormand, her hair shorn at the back, ready for action in her overalls and bandanna, strides through the film like the antagonist in a Western. Her willingness to offend and injure makes her powerful. You feel her exhilaration as she violates social compact after social compact – as immune from consequence as the town’s violent cops – and the ease with which those violations escalate, until the whole town is involved in her rage and grief. ***
Movie Diary 17/12/17
17
12
Daisy Ridley in THE LAST JEDI.
Battle of the Sexes (2017) – This is a mainstream entertainment as good as A League of Their Own. The casting is impeccable top to bottom – from Sarah Silverman’s way with a cigarette to Alan Cumming’s finely calibrated mixture of kindness and bitchy speculation. It’s a particular pleasure to witness Emma Stone’s return to form after her insipid performances in La La Land and Magic in the Moonlight: she’s good at conveying King’s mingled fear and desire as she begins to explore her sexuality. There’s a scene at a salon – a woman’s hands in her hair, Stone looking at herself in the mirror – that turns a haircut into foreplay. Directors Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton have a gift for finding the telling moment – when Stone’s glasses come off as a prelude to a sexual encounter, it’s as potent as a full undressing – and for staging, like the comedy they find in hotel corridors. There are plenty of clichés – the cuts to characters watching various tennis matches are the worst offenders – but the shifts in the characters’ relationships are nuanced and surprising. The point of view is generous: the people behave better than you expect, mostly erring on the side of kindness. The film also gets at the ways sport can register as theatre and politics, and the relationship between its different kinds of liberation story. ***½
Coco (2017) – There are Pixar story elements here, like the child alienated from his family (think Brave or The Good Dinosaur) or the scary possibility of being forgotten by the people you love, that are familiar to the point of cliché: Pixar keeps wringing the same tears from us, from Bing Bong to Woody at the tip. Coco hits its beats effectively, however, and the character design is so perfect and the world so richly imagined that the film feels fresh anyway. The power of the film’s Mexican matriarchy is expressed in the squat, sculptural presence of one abuela and the severe elegance of another; the identity of each member of Miguel’s extended family is fixed in an instant, so that the movie feels densely populated without ever losing its momentum, and the hairless dog is a triumph. Perhaps most impressive is the ease with which it moves between worlds (in this it’s indebted to Spirited Away): the movie wears its supernatural elements lightly, like this culture in which the spirits of departed ancestors are welcome guests. Docked half a star for Olaf’s Frozen Adventure, a short that feels very long. ***
Get Out (2017) – From the opening sequence, this is so elegantly framed and shot – a long shot that excludes vital information until someone lunges out of the darkness, a figure placed in the background so that an apparently friendly house tour takes on an air of unease – that a large part of the movie’s pleasure is in Jordan Peele’s command of the medium. It’s packed with references to other horror classics, from a Hallorann figure out of The Shining (not only there to provide a snowmobile this time) to the brief, distracted car ride out of The Haunting. This belongs in their company. There are echoes of Peele’s sketch comedy in the hero’s rapport with his best friend and the highfalutin white monsters at the garden party: another sign of Peele’s mastery (as writer as well as director) is the confident way he combines genres and tones. The way each villain is dispatched is funny and perfect, but the most potent moment of violence is emotional. These white people feel entitled to everything, even the hero’s most personal experiences. ****
The Last Jedi (2017) – This is a significant departure in tone for the series – from the campy, declamatory way the actors (particularly Domhnall Gleeson as a perpetually thwarted Imperial officer) deliver their gobbets of exposition to the various species of alien introduced as animal sidekicks, Rian Johnson’s film is goofier, cuter, more sentimental than its predecessors. This is both good and bad. On one hand, the absence of self-seriousness is a virtue in blockbuster filmmaking – a healthy recognition of its essential silliness – and the tone Johnson cultivates is close to the movie serial heroics that inspired George Lucas in the first place. (There’s a red throne room right out of Flash Gordon.) On the other, it sacrifices some of the qualities that make Star Wars stand out: its sense of space as a grand stage, its yearning spirituality. To me, it felt like a calculated attempt to bring Star Wars closer to the Disney house style, so that these characters could slot in to Pirates of the Caribbean or The Avengers or any of its universes. (The most egregious Disney moment is a troupe of kids – the next generation of consumers – soot brushed on their cheeks, learning to love the Rebellion.) It was probably inevitable, as the Star Wars movies and their spinoffs proliferate, that they would become less distinctive, less special. Still, it’s a fairly entertaining act of corporate course correction. **½
The Meyerowitz Stories (2017) – Noah Baumbach is so consistent in what he does – Woody Allen’s heir in making small, personal films with stacked casts and a familiar set of thematic preoccupations (failed artists, monstrous fathers, the failure to be hip) – that small differences stick out: where While We’re Young (my favourite of his films) was an out and out comedy about a middle aged couple falling under the spell of an attractive pair of hipsters, this dives back into the family inferno of The Squid and the Whale. Baumbach is right there with his characters: as the movie opens, we sit, another passenger, in the car that an increasingly rattled Adam Sandler is trying to park. At the same time Baumbach is aware of how little their emotions matter in the scheme of things: often he cuts away from his characters as they’re on the verge of blowing up. Their outbursts aren’t cathartic; they’re how this family functions. At the heart of the film is the spiky relationship between the half-brothers played by Sandler (giving his best performance since Punch-Drunk Love) and Ben Stiller: the children are close to the surface in these men, whether seeking their father’s approval, clumsily defending their sister, or squabbling in the grass. ***
Murder on the Orient Express (2017) – Kenneth Branagh’s chief vice as a filmmaker is his insistence on giving himself the biggest role in his movies. His Poirot dominates more than he should, and the bits that screenwriter Michael Green contrives to humanise him, like the photograph of a lost love that Poirot confides to in his cabin, or his rumination over the burden of being a great detective, are maudlin. This Poirot is less entertaining fusspot than drama queen, and Branagh’s hamming is not as fun as it should be. As a director he’s florid too, given to computer-generated landscapes (every plain infinite, every mountain an Everest) and a camera that whirls, prowls and plunges. This gets in the way of the genre’s chief pleasure: an all-star cast playing caricatures to the hilt. There’s no Angela Lansbury in Death on the Nile or Kim Novak in The Mirror Crack’d here: the people aren’t given enough time to be vivid, and Branagh and his moustache keep getting in the way. **
Movie Diary 21/9/17
21
09
IT.
Baby Driver (2017) – Though Edgar Wright had the idea for this film in the 90s, this plays as a rip of (the already derivative) Guardians of the Galaxy: not only the hero with his attachment to outmoded music technology, for whom a particular cassette is a talisman of a lost past, but the way the film piggybacks on its soundtrack, uses it in lieu of an attitude. It’s easy to like Wright’s corny soul, his film and music nerd enthusiasms – there’s no froideur in his sense of cool, no wish to exclude – and there’s wit in telling a story from the perspective of a millennial wedded to his earbuds. But this is corny in bad ways as well as good, more second-hand than it needs to be – when Ansel Elgort dances down the street or in his kitchen, every person he encounters is a movie cliché. The first half is almost as naff as La La Land; it’s only when Wright puts Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm in a room together that the movie develops any tension or stakes. (It helps that that these actors are fully present, unlike Ensort or Kevin Spacey, whose schoolmaster affect is weirdly reminiscent of Kevin Rudd.) From there it takes off: the next hour is a non-stop thrill ride, behind the wheel and on foot. **½
Colossal (2016) – There’s racism baked into the premise: Anne Hathaway’s monstrous avatar does not rampage through an American city (which would have a certain logic, given that her character’s made a different sort of mess in one), but in far-off Seoul, where the casualties never register as people. The disproportion between the American characters (Hathaway and the small-town loser played by Jason Sudeikis) and the destruction they wreak is meant to be part of the comedy, but this is a movie that never finds its tone. Much of it plays like a second-rate Young Adult: where Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman (or Chris Kelly in Other People) proved that it’s possible to wring something fresh from the tired trope of the big city failure going home, writer/director Nacho Vigalondo is not up to the task. Hathaway waking up with her hair mussed is no Charlize Theron, and Sudeikis manages to give two different unpleasant performances. The monsters never feel anything but grafted on; this is my candidate for worst movie of the year. *½
Dunkirk (2017) – Christopher Nolan takes the celebrated opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan and extends it to feature length: there are some sops to the audience, like the unlikely survival of most of the people we follow through the action, but Nolan shows a bracing indifference to Hollywood characterisation, the way we’re usually made to care about people in movies. In fact, personality is mostly irrelevant in this situation where life or death depends on the accident of where you happen to be standing when a bomb chews away part of the wharf you’re standing on, and our identification with the young man (Fionn Whitehead) who scrambles from deathtrap to deathtrap is very basic, based more on his scraped knuckles or the way he tears into a piece of jam and bread than any sense of who he is. The different time scales allow Nolan to orchestrate different perspectives on the evacuation, imbuing each with a similar sense of urgency, and he modulates visually too, taking us from the terror of open, exposed spaces to terrible claustrophobia and back again. My only complaint is that Hans Zimmer’s score, which overuses its one musical idea about the clock ticking (with bits of Elgar thrown in for uplift), often intrudes on the excellent sound design, hyping situations that have no need of it. Nevertheless, this is Nolan’s best film. ***½
It (2017) – This could use more modulation, both in its characterisation (unlike the Stephen King book, the adults here are uniformly monstrous) and visually (the kids’ homes are such dark, Expressionist caverns that there’s little difference between them and the haunted house or the sewers later on). It’s monotonously grim, in a way that flattens out the horrors: there’s no sense of shock or violation, only more of the same. The change in period cuts the story loose of its moorings too, rooted as it is in the kids’ consumption of 50s pop culture (particularly old monster movies), and director Andrés Muschietti and the screenwriters do not find equivalents in their new 80s setting. Nor are the kids as sharply individual as in the book: one reason that Bev (Sophia Lillis) is a standout is that we simply spend more time with her than the others. The monster loses much of its cultural and psychological resonance; the movie’s no more than a fairground ride. On that level it works, however, and the rapport between the band of child heroes is very charming. **½
Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) – For the first half hour, every image is fit for framing, and the sensuality and the creation of a collective female consciousness anticipate the films of Sofia Coppola. The ensuing hour wrests the perspective from the girls and hands it to a rich young man, and belabours points (the mystery of the girls’ disappearance, the school as prison) made at the outset, often in single images, like the headmistress caged by upstairs banisters. The visual energy goes out of the movie in a rush, almost as soon as Miranda disappears: suddenly it’s a stodgy costume drama about our loveless forebears, an extended postscript to the actual story, as dull as an English detective show. This is a feature that should have been a short. **½