Mr Jones, Curzon Victoria 14 February

***

This film started with a typical Ukrainian wooden house in a field of typical Ukrainian wheat and in the house the Ukrainian writer George Orwell is writing Animal Farm.

Apart from that, the action presumably takes place in 1933 when Gareth Jones, who has just been made redundant as Lloyd George’s secretary and has previously succeeded in interviewing Hitler in an aeroplane travels to Moscow in the hope of interviewing Stalin and finding out there the money to pay for forced industrialisation is coming from.  By that stage of course there was a National Government without Lloyd George, so the reference to him and Ramsay Macdonald sorting out the economic crisis made little sense.

Anyway, once in the Soviet Union Jones manages to escape his minder on a trip to Kharkov and tramp round the Ukrainian countryside observing scenes of hunger, death and cannibalism.  He also has to contend with Walter Duranty, the senior foreign correspondent in Moscow, who expounds the official line that there is no famine, really.  Then we get what seems to be an entirely fictional entanglement with the Metro-Vickers trial  and the British engineers being held hostage for Jones’s silence.  Similarly, the idea that Orwell was converted to anti-Communism by Jones’s account rather than his own experiences in the Spanish Civil War is…strange…

So the mingling of fact and fantasy was unsatisfactory, which can leave people wondering about the historicity of the Ukrainian famine.  Another question would be what the actual story is meant to be. If it’s about the famine in Ukraine, then why does it only exist when a Westerner finds out about it?  If it’s about the discovery of the famine, then Malcolm Muggeridge for instance had already written about it.  As the subject of a film, the story of Duranty could have been better, or compare-and-contrast of him and Jones as very able men who could not easily find a place in normal life.

 

I, Daniel Blake, Greenwich Picturehouse 29 October

***

Grey Street in the rain

This film is about a 59-year-old carpenter who suffers a heart attack and so is no longer able to work.  He is judged not sufficiently incapacitated to receive Disability Allowance, so has to go through the demeaning pretence of looking f0r non-existent jobs.  He makes friends with a young single mother who has been sent a long way from London because it is cheaper than housing her family there and who has her benefits sanctioned because she got on the wrong bus in a strange town and arrived late for an interview.

I have to admit that I did cry during the film, though not as much as the two women sitting next to me, and it wasn’t all because of the I want to go home feeling.  They got the Newcastle accent right, and also the way people speak to each other, which is a different thing.  When the dialogue and actions were allowed to proceed from the characters and their actions it was actually very moving.  There were some shots of Newcastle in the rain, YESS!!

The essay that Loach was determined to write was probably quite correct at a factual level, but it didn’t really mesh with these characters.  In particular, what Daniel needed was clearly some advocacy from the CAB, a Welfare Rights group, or even Age UK.  Now he might not have known that, but after spending two years in a homeless hostel in London Katie certainly would have.  I approve of making ordinary people the central figures of films and plays, but depriving them of agency isn’t the way to do it.  And I was irritated that St Daniel had to be burdened with demonstrating appropriate attitudes to black people, gays and people with mental illness.  Then I start asking myself what kind of a joiner he had been.  If he was employed, he should have been eligible for sick pay.  If he was self-employed, it’s hard to see how he could have managed to remain totally incapable in the face of modern technology.

Did he call the gay black training-shoe entrepreneur the ‘tycoon of Byker’ or similar?  That didn’t look like Byker to me…But the Evening Chronicle has helpfully published a map of the locations.

It is to the credit of director Ken Loach and scriptwriter Paul Laverty that having stupidly decided to include a scene of archetypal Dostoevskian degradation they clearly had no idea what they were talking about–there are some things you just have to be a bad man to get right.

Tsvetochniy krest/The cross of flowers

***

This book by Elena Kolyadina hardly received great support when this blog did a survey of contemporary Russian novels for translation, and it was also being remaindered during my recent trip to Ukraine.

It appears to start in December 1674, when our heroine Feodosia is 15 and ready to be married off and to end in October 1673, when she is 17 and her son born half-way through the book is able to run around and beg for money.

There are many things it might be, but none of them for very long. The shadow of Thomas Mann’s Holy Sinner grows now lighter, now darker, and at times Kolyadina seems to engaged in a yacht race with Vodolzakins’s Laurus.  A yacht race because the leader ixs supposed to imitate the follower’s manoeuvrings.

At times it seems to be one of those books where a modern miss is plonked down with her insatiable curiosity in ancient times and at others it’s one of those books with detailed retro-porn description of life in Old Russia.  Indeed, we get a detailed description of the old-time salt industry, just like in Perm.  The contrast between carefree pagan sexuality and the strictures of the church might have been going somewhere and then wasn’t. Similarly the un-modern way Feodosia related to her family members just disappeared, leaving behind the usual YA heroine.  And then in a reference to Jan Potocki or perhaps Tolkien we have an entire community living under the ground brought into being.

A plot summary with SPOILER ALERT makes it sound as though the traditional saint’s life is being referenced.  It is 1673 in Tot’ma.  Feodosia is the intelligent beautiful etc etc daughter of wealthy salt-manufacturer Izvara due to be married off to another salt-manufacturer Yuda.  The priest Father Loggin feels himself tormented by her youth beauty intelligence needlework etc.

A company of travelling players comes to town under the leadership of one Istoma, who is not much like a salt manufacturer. The climax of their show is a puppetry version of the Crucifixion, except that Feodosia rescues Jesus from the cross, and Father Loggin takes exception.

Istoma and Feodosia enjoy a night of secret love in Feodosia’s bedroom, then Istoma’s troupe gets into a fight with the followers of her brother Putila as he returns from dealings in Moscow.  Revealed to be a confederate of Stenka Razin, Istoma is burned alive.  Feodosia marries the salt-manufacturer and devotes herself to her son by Istoma.

Influenced by Father Loggin, she practises more and more severe self-denial, including clitoridectomy and saying that like Abraham she would give up her son for God.  The son disappears and Feodosia takes up the lifestyle of a yurodivaya, eventually quitting town for the other side of the river.  There she discovers a community of underground pagans who can speak Russian when necessary and tries to convert them to Orthodoxy, planting a cross of flowers for this purpose.  She also entertains Death in a scene that owes much to Monty Python.

Father Loggin crosses the river to inspect this miraculous and has her burned as a witch so as to further his ambitions for preferment.

But Death does not have Feodosia on her list.

Well, well…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am Nasrine, Stratford Picturehouse 4 July

***

My interest in this film was that I’ve been to Tehran and lived in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. That’s a slightly strange perspective and may explain why I didn’t get on so well with the film.

We follow the story of Nasrine (meant to be about 16 I think) who rides home in Tehran on the back of a boy’s motorbike wearing a coloured headscarf.  She is picked up and (we fear) raped by the Vice Police.  Her father decrees that she and her brother Ali have to go to England.

So they arrive in Newcastle; she goes to school and falls in with a community of travellers which gives her the chance to ride horses and have consensual relations with the brother of her new friend Nichole.  Ali meanwhile takes two illegal jobs and struggles to come to terms with his sexuality…

There seemed to be two main themes here:  the idea that you become an adult by casting off what you were before and the treatment of refugees in the UK.  But they weren’t integrated but rather went on in parallel.  There were other points being made in the contrast between the saturated colours of Tehran and a washed-out Newcastle; between motorbike + bad boyfriend and horses  + good boyfriend;  and how even in going to school Nasrine found herself becoming part of a marginal group, while Ali’s encounter with the normal inhabitants turned out to be fatal…

All in all I didn’t quite get it.

Micsha Sadeghi gave a brilliant performance as the heroine, while still looking even older than Carey Mulligan in An Education.

 

A Long Way Down (Nick Hornby)

***

This book, following the fortunes of four ill-assorted characters who decide to commit suicide by jumping from a tower block on New Year’s Eve and then don’t, provoked a storm of apathy among the members of Try Books!  Not that it was the first book to do so.

An attempt to decide whether the characters had really meant to commit suicide foundered on an inability to engage with them, or to believe in them in the first place.  You might say it was a good thing to show suicidal characters as unattractive and certainly unromantic, and their non-suicide as being just that–continuing to live in the same kind of broken and unsatisfactory way, without any revelation or reward, just living.  But the book really wasn’t well enough done to make these kind of points effectively.

There was a feeling that it resembled a young person’s book–certainly families appeared from the viewpoint of children-as-victims, while the ‘adult’ characters Martin and Maureen were rather as young people might see adulthood.   While the narrative consisted of sections from each of the four in turn, they all sounded rather like Nick Hornby and they all had a clear view of what was happening.  There was none of the disorders of thought or perception you might expect from the suicidal, or even the kind of misperceptions and missing information you might expect from people in general.

Of course the answer to the original question is that they weren’t really going to kill themselves and this was pointed up by encountering a genuine suicide on a rooftop reunion.

The thing quite often had the air of a stand-up comedian doing a set on the subject of suicide, and indeed some of the Nick Hornby jokes were very good Nick Hornby jokes.

A Russian Fairytale (with Q&A), Riverside Studios 31 January

***

Denis, Irina, Ksusha

The film followed the lives of a group of homeless young people in the city of Perm, beginning in Winter and ending in Summer, though it was difficult to see exactly what period it was since footage from different visits had been edited together.  They sniffed glue, they injected drugs, the girls turned tricks at 500R a time, Denis begged in the market…They also laughed and joked and hung out, while Kolya got to visit his family’s dacha, have lunch in the sunshine and swim in a lake.,

My own feeling was that if it had been done more competently it would have been unbearably moving, and even as it was there were many opportunities for tears.  My heart went out to the young women Irina and Ksusha because you could see what they would have been like–should have been like–in different circumstances.  Scenes like Irina going to see her mother in the hostel where she lived with her present ‘boyfriend’ and the mother shouting at her to go away, or Ksusha’s pregnancy test where she clearly had not the slightest resource if it proved positive–apart from a determination not to have an abortion–will be very difficult to forget.

There was a certain amount of the film telling you what to what to think, both in the titles at the beginning giving some over-simplified background information and in the music.  Also it was another of those situations where I knew a great deal more about the subject-matter (drug use and its effects; children in need; Russia) than the film-makers did, which as ever led to discomfort.  The shocking revelation at the end merely caused me a momentary spasm of fucking drug users.

The film was enthusiastically received by a large and predominantly young audience.  Nicolas Doldinger (co-director) said that they had wanted to make a film that dealt with an ugly situation in a beautiful and engaging way.  In answer to a question about whether the young people had been paid, Jake Mobbs (the other co-director) said that they had brought them bread and mayonnaise and lent them a mobile for emergency calls.  They didn’t actually know what their interviews were about until they took the film home and scraped together some money for translation.  The fact that the only rehab available was run by Evangelicals gave rise to a facile comment about this being merely a different form of addiction.   Jake Mobbs said there were plans to show the film in Perm, though there might be difficulties with the authorities.

So I’m left feeling a helpless horror that there should be such lives, and also that the film should have been better to do them justice.

The charity Love’s Bridge works with street youth and at-risk children in Perm.

Short stories/Рассказы Renoir 20 October

***

Tense scene with wedding planner

In this film an author goes to his publishers–in the manner of French films, the publishers have incredibly plush offices and glamorous staff–with a collection of short stories, but they want a nice solid novel.  Then various of the staff start reading through the rejected manuscript and found themselves featuring in the stories.

The first of the episodes, about an engaged couple having their whole lives dictated by a wedding planner so as to be modern and leave nothing to chance was both very funny and extremely boring.  I think the reason for this–and it applied to the other episodes as well–was that the story was really a thesis or lecturette or even joke that did a particular idea to death.

The second episode displayed corruption steadily making its ways upwards (and becoming more expensive) while the fourth portrayed a relationship between a middle-aged man and an uninformed young woman, showing at some length how this was not a good idea.  But this had a line which absolutely cracked me up when she turned to face him in response to questions about what it meant to be Russian and said The Russian Federation is a democratic country with a market economy.

The third episode was some echt Russian nonsense I didn’t appreciate about Pushkin and paranormal powers.

Anyway, the film was loudly applauded by a happy audience at the end.

 

Toryboy (with Q and A), Greenwich Picturehouse 15 March

***

This documentary followed film-maker  John Walsh as he abandoned his lifelong Labour affiliations after working on a Gordon Brown vanity project, then went through the new open selection process for Conservative candidates and stood in Middlesbrough and tried to confront Stuart Bell the sitting and inactive Labour MP.  There were also some animated sections explaining how UK elections work, depicting Stuart Bell reading from a self-penned pornographic novel, and we saw how John and his sidekick Other John came to terms with Middlesbrough and being Tories.

I think the film just about stayed away from bash-the-working-class deprivation tourism, but it’s not clear that anyone would have gained any impression of Middlesbrough other than Featureless Northern Shithole.  It’s also not clear that it had any argument put forward other than ‘Desperately Seeking Stuart’.  John Walsh was certainly extremely engaging–both in person and on film–and you could see why selection panels would have gone for him.

It was also hard to see what kind of a Tory he was in the post-film discussion.  He said quite rightly that what Middlesbrough needed was a good Labour MP.  When asked whether there were not equally useless Tory MPs in the shires, he answered that there if people had problems they could afford to hire someone to sort it out, while in Middlesbrough they couldn’t now that Government grants had been whittled away and so they relied upon their MP doing things for them.  So Middlesbrough needs an active Labour MP and  lots of public money–nothing to argue about there.

Actually I don’t think anyone had a kind word to say Middlesbrough or its inhabitants during the course of the film, unless 15 seconds of Chris Rea were meant to provide the positive side…

People in the audience were quite shocked to learn that John Walsh had spent £ 15,000 of his own money seeking election, and it would have been £ 30,000 if it had been a winnable seat.  I don’t remember him having a convincing answer to how normal people could become Conservative MPs, or indeed how he was doing anything other than aping Michael Moore.

You can buy a download of the film for iTunes here.

The Last Hundred Days (Patrick McGuinness)

***

In this book, our un-named narrator is a working-class ex-student from London who finds himself teaching English in Bucharest at the end of the Ceausescu regime.  He comes under the protection of Leo O’Heix, who combines the roles of academic, philanthropist and black-marketeer.  He makes some really rather good observations about the experience of being in Bucharest.  He has two Romanian girlfriends:  a bad one (Cilea) and then a good one (Ottilia).  He observes, but does not really take part in, some very Graham Greene plotlines about escapes that aren’t and a new regime to replace Ceausescu that isn’t really new, more the people that would have been squabbling over the succession anyway.

I didn’t find the book satisfactory, for a number of reasons.  The narrator is meant to be your working-class rebel and dropout, even jailbird, but he comes on very like a middle-aged professor of French.  On the one hand, the tells us what it was like instead of showing us how he came to realise it was like that, and on the other we have learned comments concerning Flaubert, Cuvier, mise-en-abime.  There is no sense of lived experience in the way that a young man going abroad for the first time would feel things, and indeed might even notice something about the face and body of his good girlfriend.

The good girlfriend Ottilia gave me the most problems.  She starts off presumably as an obstetrician when O’Heix’s secretary Rodica miscarries, and also refuses a bribe, an act of psychotic aberration in the circumstances.  We learn that she was at school with another character ten years ago, so she’s probably about 28.  She transforms herself into a surgeon to perform a miraculous operation on Leo when required.  At the end, she is able to pretend to be a Russian in both Russian and broken Romanian in attempting to get out of the country.  Such heroines may well be perfectly common in Romania, but if she sees anything in our hero the 21-year-old chancer (we learn that he’s two years younger than her step-brother Petre), then we need to be told what it is.

Then there’s the really quite well done backstory of the narrator’s difficult childhood with a brutal printworker for a father and a brutalised mother.  That’s a lot of print to prepare a throwaway remark about how he was one of the very few foreigners prepared for life in Ceausescu’s Romania…

I think a lot of the problem here is McGuinness’s attempt to both use and distance himself from his own experience.  His actual father worked for the British Council in Bucharest, which meant he met lots of interesting people and attended official gatherings (and got given a job teaching English).  What he clearly wanted to do was to write the typical poet’s book where a passive character wanders around witnessing and feeling, but then he also decided he needed to include his realistic experiences and a thriller plot and some lectures as well…

At one stage the bad girlfriend calls the narrator A gap-year deprivation tourist, which really only applies to the actual McGuinness, not his creation.

There’s a Romanian (newspaper) interview with Patrick McGuinness here, and I don’t think the commenters at the bottom are very pleased with him. You can get a Google translation here.

I was interested to see that he actually produced some poems to go with the novel (the way that Pasternak puts the ‘Poems of Yuri Zhivago’ at the end of Dr Zhivago) and then took them out.

Reading Lolita in Tehran

***

Another Try Books! book and the general reaction was that people were disappointed and had hoped it was going to be more interesting.  The same reaction of general but reasonably mild disappointment is all I can remember from reading it when it first came out in about 2004.

The book is in principle about how the author set up a reading group with some of her favourite (female) students after being forced to leave her university position after the Islamic Revolution.  In fact a lot of it is about her life and experiences at various stages:  as  a student in the US; during the Islamic Revolution; during the Iran-Iraq War; and so on.

The Try Books! members complained there was too much about books and not enough story.  Personally, I thought that the points she had to make on literature were generally both interesting and sound; but I did wonder about the idea of lack of empathy being the great sin condemned in literature from which (by extension) novel readers were at least partially free.  The problem with this is that (for instance) by all accounts Stalin had a genuine love of Russian literature and was also a fine Georgian poet in his youth.  So I don’t believe it.  Nafisi rather approximately refers to Nabokov’s concept of aesthetic bliss, which in his thinking is a free-standing spiritual experience, and I think this is closer to what you can hope to get out of literature.

Along the same lines, on page 48 of my edition (as illustrated above) we find:  I had mentioned that Humbert was a villain because he lacked curiosity about other people and their lives. However, the Author’s Note at the beginning of the book starts off: Aspects of characters and events in this story have been changed…to protect individuals…from the eye of the censor…also from those who read such narratives to discover who’s who and who did what to whom, thriving on and filling their own emptiness through others’ secrets.

That’s interesting in a number of ways:  most obviously, we are left wondering whether curiosity is a good thing after all.  But more importantly the language is dreadfully inexact:  it should really be I have changed aspects…since it didn’t happen as some spontaneous process.  It’s not really the censor who goes through stuff that has been published looking for indication of people to punish.  In English, I think it should be filling emptiness with whatever.

There are many examples of not-quite-English:  In my memory the iron gate acquires an elastic quality [p29]–no, from what follows it remains entirely rigid, whatever else it might do.  Then Nassrin jumped in with a screed about one of the female guards [p211];  a screed is normally written, though it can also be spoken.  The female guards at the door, finding a blush in her bag…[p9] has a positively Lewis Carroll charm; presumably she means ‘blusher’ in place of ‘a blush’.  The air was mild, the trees a verdant green [p 339]–but ‘verdant’ means ‘green’; or perhaps ‘fresh green’.

None of this is so awful from someone whose first language is not English, but in her acknowledgments at the end Nafisi does in her own phrase wax lyrical about Joy de Menil and her meticulous editing.  One of these ladies has some explaining to do.

But my main problem with the book is that you have three levels:  the external events, the students and the books and they remain separate.  If you’re going to do do this kind of thing properly, you need to show the external events reflected in the characters and their relations with each other and how this affects their reactions to the books.  It doesn’t happen.  On the one hand, the attempt to obscure who these people actually were means that the reader never gets a clear idea of the different students in the book group while on the other I am too much of an academic:  I have written too many papers and articles to be able to turn my experiences and ideas into narrative without pontificating [p266].