Named originally as an antidote to Yahoo (both are rival creatures in Gulliver’s Travels), Houyhnhnm has for a while been a prompt to myself to make comparisons between the last two things I’ve seen/watched/read. I hope you enjoy my at times torturous attempts to wrest meaning from two unrelated pieces. Mega SPOILER ALERT – I assume you’ve seen or read whatever I’m writing about, as I am my own target audience.
My first time. A real surprise. It’s one of those pieces – like The Artist, and (apparently, donchaknow) a new Downton offering – which deals with the problems faced by some horrible-voiced silent movie stars when the talkies came along. This is a comedy, but has an amazing extended sequence where the story’s hero/Gene Kelly (here the two seem to fuse) projects his vision of how a number (‘Broadway Melody’) might be produced. Dream-like, sexual, all very strange, and a long way from my previous ideas of the film which were based entirely on Eric and Ernie’s parody of the actual singing in the rain song.
Dune (1)
The book was great (when I read it in the 1970s), and I hadn’t seen any earlier film versions. This was jolly good fun, close in atmosphere to the book, but I don’t remember the Harkonnens being as obviously ‘we’re the bad guys aren’t we’ as the Nazi way they were portrayed – that was the only off note. Weird seeing the guy I saw for the first time recently as Wonka in a sci-fi messiah role, but hey, er, whoops – wossa difference – he’s fighting pantomime baddies in both.
How they are related
Messianic parallels aside, I’m tempted to make a comparison between the amazing dancing in Singin’ and the agility and physical skill of the Fremen (the indigenous people of the desert) in Dune. Both certainly represent a heightened mode of existence, a way of living which both physically and mentally marks them apart from lesser mortals like me. It’s about an intensity of focus over a lifetime and concentration in the moment.
Same team as Anselm: Wim Wenders and Franz Lustig. (Which post I see is still in drafts…)
Beautiful and didactively clever. A series of days in the life of a toilet cleaner (Kōji Yakusho, as Hirayama), each of which has different things happening, some nice, some less so, but, as the beaming face of our hero tells us in the last shots, all perfect.
It’s nicely constructed: the first day takes 30 minutes, the second 15, the third and fourth complete the hour. Then there’s the eponymous Lou Reed song. After that first hour the structure inevitably becomes more fluid.
Wicked Little Letters
An apparent (more or less) true story about the rocking of Littlehampton by a series of foul-mouthed hate letters; the culprit was finally identified as one of the recipients. Olivia Colman’s nice portrait of a repressed woman’s poisonous verbal escape vent. Funny and convincing.
What’s best though is the character of Rose Gooding (played by Jessie Buckley). She’s an outsider – Irish – and doesn’t care a hoot about the social conventions which govern Littlehampton, and Edith Swan (Colman’s character) in particular. She’s a single-parent, but most relevantly is a potty-mouthed joyous swearer – and hence is the prime suspect in the case of the sweary letters.
How they are related
Hirayama and Rose are the goodies here: both unrelentingly positive about life, not letting things get to them. They’re different: Hirayama rejoices in service – cleaning people’s toilets – Rose in just the sheer abandon of living life to the full. But they are top-class exempla.
Boys told they have a pig’s brain transplanted into their heads, which explains a) their poor behaviour and b) their effeminacy/homosexuality. Those are the monsters.
It’s got a wonderful ending, when you are supposed to think, I believe, that the two boys have died and have woken up in some kind of paradise version of our world – but you can’t be certain. It might just be a happy ending.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
For the third time. But for the first two I was asleep for most of it, so didn’t really have a clue. I remembered it as mad and incomprehensible, but from watching it ‘properly’ saw that it’s actually a pretty straightforward martial arts multiverse story – inasmuch as martial arts multiverse stories can be so.
But – and this is probably true of most martial arts multiverse stories, certainly of adventure stories (tLotR big-time) – it’s really about something much more homely and (dread word, my first casual usage) relatable. It’s a kind of dream sequence in which our protagonist works through her relationships with her husband and daughter. That’s it really, and it’s brilliant.
How they are related
Monsters are beings from magical adventure stories, so in that sense both films address perennial, real-world, family questions through an extension into the unreal magic/sci-fi.
A modern-day Charon takes his victim/customer to the underworld; or, rather, a cabby drives an old woman across Paris from her apartment to an old people’s home. They strike up a deep friendship, ending with the woman – who dies that night – bequeathing the money the cabby needs to help his family.
The Holdovers
A modern-day Scrooge is forced to look after an unpleasantly unhappy young man over Christmas. They strike up a deep friendship.
A superannuated classics teacher ends up being eased out of his job.
How they are related
Both describe an arc of personal relations moving from tension to warmth and affection. They’re also both about affirming family life.
The true story of the Von Erichs – a 1980s US wrestling family. The father, a star wrestler who never got the world title, pushes his five sons to get the title for the family – with inevitably tragic consequences, including two deaths and a lost foot. I was reminded of the family of Ludwig Wittgenstein: three of his brothers died by suicide, partly as a result of their father’s obsession with them continuing the family’s steel business.
My third Curzon film with Jeremy Allen White (with Fremont and Fingernails).
Wonka
Another business… This is basically a founding-myth story about how Willy Wonka got to be running the amazing magical chocolate factory in that other Ronald Dahl story. And it does the job well, with amazing visuals, cheesy musical songs, a great cast of ‘Oh that’s wossisname from x’ moments, and some decent satire of evil cartel-ery. Three faces from Ghosts, the nice English teacher from Sex Education who believes in Maeve, Sally Hawkins, Matt Lucas, the nice old chap from Shakespeare in Love – they’re all in it. And apparently the lead – Timothée Chalamet – is also well known (even I’d seen his face in posters for Dune 2).
How they are related
Both are about business, about working hard to achieve business success, and about family.
Read about it yourself – anything I say will not do it justice. For a sense of the depth of thought and preparation behind this film have a look at this from Wikipedia:
Glazer did not want the atrocities occurring inside the camp to be seen, only heard. He described the film’s sound as “the other film” and “arguably, the film”. To that end, sound designer Johnnie Burn compiled a 600-page document containing relevant events at Auschwitz, testimonies from witnesses, and a large map of the camp so that the distance and echoes of the sounds could be properly determined. He spent a year building a sound library before filming began, which included sounds of manufacturing machinery, crematoria, furnaces, boots, period-accurate gunfire and human sounds of pain. He continued building the library well into the shoot and post-production. Most of Mica Levi’s score went unused, as Glazer and Burn did not want to have the film “sweetened or dramatized” by it. The music Levi wrote for the prologue remained, as did soundscapes created for several sequences and a sound collage for the epilogue.
So it’s a kind of irony, a misdirection, making us see something by showing us something else. In Aidan Andrew Dun’s phrase, looking ‘to either side of what is seen’. And the purpose is to make us see the truth better through this misdirection; the film’s final scenes suggest that we have become immune to Holocaust-museumification, -heritagisation – so a new approach is needed. But the genius of the ending is that in those final shots Höss seems to be magically granted a vision of the future, of the stinking pile of evil which is his direct legacy. And he is physically ill at the sight, but then deliberately descends silently into the darkness to continue his work.
American Fiction
A very clever parody of white people’s attitudes to racial guilt. So it’s a film of ideas, particularly – in what I found the best scene – when three white literary judges end up voting down two Black judges, in favour of the spoof ‘Black’ novel written by our hero (who is secretly one of the judges). ‘It’s so important to listen to Black voices’ is the conclusion of one of the white judges. The hero’s back story is strong too, a narrative which nicely supports the primary intellectual element.
How they are related
Two ways of addressing racism, but so so different: one a comedy, one something quite new. And two different kinds of racism – in fact it seems wrong to call what happened at Auschwitz ‘just’ racism – again that was something new.
(Literally ‘Round Lake’ – a town near Buenos Aires.)
An Argentinian film in two parts, totalling over four hours. Quiet, mysterious, and disconcerting: I often felt, particularly in Part I, as I did when watching Tarkovsky’s Stalker, or (less directly) reading something by W.G. Sebald. Part II, with the arrival in the town lake of a strange being – child or beast – is a little more like Arrival or Annihilation, though its theremin soundtrack reminded me of Asteroid City.
I guess in short it’s a long film where nothing happens, but that’s not to say that things don’t threaten to happen. There are people interacting, forming relationships, and conventional enough plotlines which emerge and develop, but which then tend to peter out and morph into others. If there’s anything deliberate in this story (which took six years to produce) it’s a wilful refusal to complete narrative. And it works.
The End We Start From
This film, on the other hand, simply reeks of story arc: in brief, a couple have a baby, are separated by a climate emergency, and finally reunited.
Two things make it great: Jodie Comer’s performance, and the whole what-Britain-might-be-like-in-such-a-crisis mise-en-scène, with dire news reports, the army running refugee camps, and ordinary citizens trampling each other to death to get food parcels. And Gina McKee.
Jodie finally gets to a commune on a Scottish island, seemingly led by Gina. Then she has a swim in the sea, shouts a bit, and decides to go back to the mainland because she doesn’t want her child to grow up knowing her mother had run away (or similar). Me and my mate thought this volta was not done very plausibly, but the other who tempered our negative view of Priscilla in similar vein persuaded me it was OK.
How they are related
(Other than in their being opposites in adherence to plot norms.)
Two women protagonists showing grit and perseverance in unfamiliar and dangerous circumstances. Both women determinedly pursue their stories, and disappear: Laura on purpose from her known world, Jodie’s character by circumstance, hiding on the island. The difference is the narratological one: Jodie comes back, Laura’s plot path just sort of fades out, gets lost in the marshes.
What’s weird about my reception of this film is that it’s a heartbreakingly sad portrayal of and meditation on loneliness, but I – who weeps in cinemas if someone smiles in a sad way – was tearless throughout. Why? Perhaps because I didn’t realise that it was said portrayal of and meditation on until afterwards… And then it was just too late.
Lots online about what actually was going on. It seems clear that Adam’s initial rejection of Harry led to Harry’s death, and so the whole affair was, like Adam’s meetings with his parents, imagined.
We are all of us strangers, and the film seems to suggest that we remain so because we drive others away. But does the ending suggest that this isn’t actually a problem? Frankie’s The Power of Love, and Adam and Harry’s warm spooning might be telling us that imagination is all we have, and it’s OK.
Samsara
Well, I didn’t actually see all of this, walking into the wrong screen, and getting angrier as what I thought was the start time came and went, and then nipping out quick as the certificate All Of Us Strangers flashed up. Whoops. So I arrived some 30 minutes late.
In the first half – Buddhist monks in Laos – an old woman is helped through her death by prayers and readings from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Then there’s 20 mins of darkness / different coloured screens with music and sounds. And then film about a Muslim family on the coast of Zanzibar in Tanzania. A new goat is born, who then gets lost.
A friend told me last night that the word Samsara refers to the cycle of life, so the goat is the old woman reincarnated. The central section is her soul’s journey between in carnations, through the ‘bardo’ as described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I should have realised that… perhaps in a future life I’ll be less obtuse.
[Have now watched the beginning, and, yes, friend was right. There’s mention of a golden deer living behind a waterfall which got killed in a a flood; which foreshadows the goat’s imminent death from flooding at the end of the film.]
How they are related
There’s lots going on in the imaginary space where these two films are mates. Both depict a solitary soul making a journey, and address the nature of death. Both are also, despite appearances, positive (I feel). In Samsara the soul prepares itself for the journey, and is as far as we can tell ready; whereas in Strangers Adam’s soul isn’t in any kind of state of preparation, but just passively experiences. We, likewise, don’t realise what’s happening, or happened, until then end. But at that point we are made to contemplate what Adam’s lonely soul has done, and what – arguably – it has achieved.
A man walking, walking, walking. When he collapses, a doctor finds his home address in a pocket and contacts his brother, who comes to take him back home. So it’s the Odyssey, with his brother acting as Telemachus. But when he gets home, he’s as in Scrapper, as his son never knew his dad but now has to come to terms with him. Which he does, and they go looking for the man’s wife…
Poor Things
A Frankensteinian feast of steampunk, spawning feminist questions about whether showing a woman really enjoying sex is liberatory or oppressive.
Easier to compare with Saltburn – an over-the-top Gothic fantasy whose Gormenghastian protagonists’ arcs rise to take over the castle, or whatever.
How they are related
Alliteration aside, the connection must be the two brothels – one where the hero’s wife is discovered making her living, the other where Emma Stone becomes (financially) independent of Mark Ruffalo. The Paris, Texas one is weird (at least as far as my limited experience can tell) in that each room is dressed up as a different kind of room where the punters can get the women to act out their particular fantasies. Whereas the Poor Things one is just a rough and ready Parisian knocking shop (with, btw, a wonderfully wise old madam). It’s the non-brothel sets of Poor Things which form a parallel to the little rooms in the Paris, Texas brothel – huge and dripping with every luxury and elaborate decoration, vast skies of shifting colours and patterns, vistas and backdrops to the journey of sexual discovery undertaken by our heroine…
A 2020 novel by Laura Jean McKay. It’s in the voice of Jean, a middle-aged woman who works at a wildlife park in Australia. A zoonotic pandemic enables people to communicate with other species.
What’s really interesting about this is that when we see what the animals say (set out in a different font, as poetry), it’s very hard to understand. It’s the first time I’ve understood what Wittgenstein meant by his ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’: I mean it’s in English, right? But the world of the other species has such different concepts and conventions that even when ‘Englished’ it’s often unfathomable. I found this frustrating when reading the novel, as (I guess) I’d been looking forward to seeing what animals actually thought, forgetting first that it’s a novel and second Wittgenstein’s warning.
The sample below manages to include the utterances of several (labelled) species – which is rare, as the vast majority of animal-talk is Sue the dingo): dog (the dingo Sue); bugs (they are terrifying); and ‘night birds’.
The Normal Heart
A 1985 play by Larry Kramer, written – before either of the terms ‘HIV’ or ‘AIDS’ had been coined – as a wake-up call to the world about the new disease killing gay men in New York. The production was at the ADC in Cambridge, directed by {disclaimer} our nephew Alex Velody.
How they are related
The obvious connection is the arrival of surprising new diseases which turn everything upside-down. Both situations are also about the failure of communication, due to a dominant group’s writing off of the less powerful one (humans: animals; straights: gays). The trajectories differ, however, as humans manage to shut off the animal chatter, but the voices of gay men are not cut off, but get more and more mainstream.
Houyhnhnm 