by Jonathan M

Love Like Poison (2010) – No Escaping Christ’s Lustful Gaze

Perhaps the most depressing things about the financial crisis is that as banks collapsed, governments groaned and the wheels of global capitalism ground momentarily to a halt, nobody stepped forward with an alternative to the current system. For a moment there, the world might have changed and a new system might have been built but instead of forging a new world, governments took money away from poor people and threw it at the rich in the hope that they would return to doing whatever it is that they were doing before the global economy went tits up. This was a failure of the imagination not only on the part of governments but also on the part of political activists and theorists the world over. As global capitalism teetered, stumbled and nearly fell, Margaret Thatcher was proved right: There Is No Alternative.

The idea that there is simply no viable alternative to market capitalism and (more or less) liberal democracy is the most potent defence of the status quo imaginable. Thanks to thinkers such as Francis Fukuyama arguing that we have reached the end of history, alternatives to neoliberalism are strangled at birth. As citizens of liberal democracies, we have certain political options open to us but none of these options are radical because radical options are not viable alternatives.  And thus we are free and yet everywhere in chains…

Un Poison Violent, the first feature film by Breton director Katell Quillévéré, is an exploration of the nature of female self-determination in a world where men impose their own limits on what is and is not an acceptable mode of being. Whether in Church or a teenaged bedroom, nowhere can women escape the merciless glare of the male gaze.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

The Veteran (2011) – The Consolations of War and its Theories

Humans are a curious species in so far as our desire to understand the world frequently outstrips both our analytical skill and our willingness to accept the truth. Nowhere is this tension better expressed than in the explosion of conspiracy theories that invariably follow the unexpected death of a celebrity.

As JG Ballard correctly diagnosed in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), celebrities are not merely people but symbols and signs. These signs and symbols bind culture together in such a way that, when the celebrity attached to them suddenly dies, the symbol continues to exist simply because of the structural role they play. Dimly aware of the undead symbolic status of these celebrities, humans attempt to account for the cognitive dissonance by either denying that they are dead or by seeking to transform their deaths into important historical moments: Osama bin Laden is simply too important to be shot dead in some Pakistani suburb.

Our desire to see the world in terms that make sense to us is also evident in our attempts to build theories that account for such random and chaotic events as war. Matthew Hope’s The Veteran explores the idea that, far from being a violent and random convulsion of the body politic, war might actually be a force of nature.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Hanna (2011) – The Cinema of Fraying Worlds

To be human is to live with the assumption that, somewhere out there, other people are having more fun than you. These other people sit in VIP lounges enjoying better food, better sex, better clothes, better conversation and better access to all the fun stuff that the world has to offer. This assumption underpins literature’s obsession with what has come to be known as the demimonde (literally the ‘half-world’).

In the 19th Century, operas such as Verdi’s La Traviata (1853) and novels such as Dumas’s La Dame aux Camelias (1848) and Le Demi-Monde (1855) described a sub-culture where the bourgeois values of respectability were flouted in favour of a lifestyle based upon decadent self-indulgence, pleasure and self-destructive hedonism. The success of these operas and novels reflect the fear amidst the European middle classes that all of their wealth and their social status came at the cost of being locked out of a world that was much more fun than the world they knew and created around them. The demimonde is as much a fantasy as it is a paranoid delusion; the tendency of the demimondaines to reach a sticky end represents the profound ambivalence that the middle classes felt about their own fantasies of hedonism and rebellion.

This ambivalence continued to hold true as 19th demimondes devoted to sensual indulgence transformed into demimondes based upon fantasies of power and influence. The 20th Century demimondaines were not consumptive courtesans but criminals, business leaders, Soviet officials and intelligence operatives. These were the people who were thought to be the true leaders of the world, those who dwell behind the velvet ropes and who get to have all the fun.

Joe Wright’s Hanna is an espionage thriller that draws extensively upon the idea of the demimonde as part of an exploration of the coming-of-age process. For Wright and his teenaged protagonist Hanna, the world is but a series of partly overlapping demimondes: the world of childhood is the world of the forest and the world of adulthood is the world of espionage. Each of these worlds has its own inhabitants and the viewpoints of these inhabitants are not only perfectly adapted to those worlds, they also help define the character of that world and the beliefs required to survive within it. However, as Hanna attempts to escape childhood and become an adult, the artificial nature of these demimondes becomes increasingly clear and ‘growing up’ becomes not so much a rite of passage as a choice between different – but equally flawed – ways of seeing the world.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

Home (2008) – Images of the Post-Post-Nuclear Family

Civilisation, much like society, is always someone else. Wherever we live and whatever it is we do, it is easy to come to think of civilisation and society as being external forces that we must protect ourselves against lest they impinge upon our autonomy and deny us our Purity of Essence. But the truth is that while civilisation is always someone else, we are just as much ‘someone else’ as the next person and the ills of civilisation follow us because they are the ills of the human condition.

Ursula Meier’s drama Home tells the story of a family that live by the side of a motorway. Though their home is small, the family enjoy an idyllic life by virtue of the fact that the motorway was never finished and so, despite living cheek by jowl with a million tons of concrete, the family lives as though they are the last people on earth: All the joys of civilisation, none of the downfalls. Then, their stretch of motorway is hooked up to the rest of the grid and the beautiful post-apocalyptic silence is brutally replaced with a wall of engine noise, pollution and honking car horns. Home is the story of the family’s attempts to get used to the motorway and how the motorway changes them both an individuals and a family.

Continue reading →

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Death Notice: Ikigami (2008)

Videovista have my review of Deah Notice: Ikigami, Tomoyuki Takimoto’s adaptation of Motoro Mase’s manga Ikigami: The Ultimate Limit:

There is something profoundly refreshing about Death Notice because not only does it seek to tug the heart-strings rather than quicken the pace, it also tugs the heart-strings in a way that displays a real depth of insight into the human condition and the different ways in which we face death. Each of Death Notice‘s episodes functions as a delicious and perfectly contained capsule of loss, grief and hope in the face of death.

In fact, I enjoyed the film so much that I went out and purchased a few volumes of the manga.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – La Signora Senza Carmelie

Videovista have my review of Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Signora Senza Camelie:

However, look beyond such technical considerations and you will find not only a fascinating glimpse into the state of female emancipation in 1950s’ Italy but also an absolutely vicious indictment of the Italian studio system at the time.

Looking back at the review (I actually wrote it for the April issue of Videovista), I think I was a trifle harsh in giving the film only 7 out of 10 but my rather subdued marking does reflect a problem I have with Antonioni.

One of the accusations leveledat the postmodern novel by more traditionally-minded readers is that these works are nothing more than ‘clever tricks for grad students’. What this means is that the people who write postmodern novels imbue the work with so much front-loaded theoretical complexity that their novels can only ever be appreciated by people who share their understanding of postmodern theory. While I would never argue that Antonioni made films with film students in mind, I do think that his worth has been inflated by people who have studied his work in an academic setting.

As with L’Avventura (1960), I can watch La Donna Senza Camelie and marvel at its technical sophistication, its intellectual politics and the ways in which it moves the medium of film onwards and upwards. I understand both why and how he made the film, I understand how he was trying to attack the mythical status of Cinecitta. I can understand and appreciate all of these things about the film and still it bores me. La Donna Senza Camelie imparts information but it does not speak to me.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Savage (2010)

Videovista have my review of Brendan Muldowney’s Irish thriller Savage:

The concept of a crisis in masculinity is undeniably an interesting one but Savage seems more of a victim of this crisis than a commentary upon it. Having asked the question of what it means to be a man in the modern world, Muldowney fails to see past male complicity in patriarchal oppression and so he struggles to come up with any conceptions of masculinity that are not anchored in adolescent willy-worrying and cartoonish levels of violence.

Savage‘s problem is reflected in Jonathan Liu’s recent piece for The New York Observer:

From the back row, looking at the sea of shiny pink scalps, it was easy to chalk up the whole scene to a category error: Someone mistaking the biographical decline of a man—namely himself—for a historical Decline of Men. Yet, strange as it may sound, grown men still have influence—if only on not-grown men—and should perhaps not be cut the slack reserved for the subjugated and infantilized.

In other words, it is difficult to delve into the issue of what it means to be a man in the 21st century without such delving coming across as either a misogynistic entitlement whine, an attempt at historical revisionism or (as is the case with Savage) slavish adherence to popular prejudice and received wisdom.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – The Dark Angel (1987)

Videovista have my review of The Dark Angel, a British TV miniseries based upon J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864):

If judged as a thriller then The Dark Angel suffers for the fact that Uncle Silas is very much a book that is ‘of its time’.

While the TV series is, in and of itself, perfectly watchable, I could not quite get over the extent to which a) the plot reminded me of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White (1859) and b) quite how superior The Woman in White is to the content of this series.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Marchlands (2011)

Videovista have my review of ITV’s recent miniseries Marchlands:

Those who approach Marchlands expecting a traditional Jamesian ghost story are destined for disappointment. Marchlands is not scary, or creepy, or even particularly tense, and the few supernatural set-pieces the series does contain are fiercely derivative and quite poorly implemented by two writers and a director who are clearly incapable of moving beyond the increasingly shop-worn genre ornaments of dead pets and ghostly dripping water.

I then go on to explain that, even if one judges Marchlands not as a ghost story but as a drama, it is still a sexist, stupid and boring piece of television.

by Jonathan M

REVIEW – Monsters (2010)

Videovista has my review of Gareth Edwards’ low-budget science fiction film Monsters:

The ‘big idea’ behind Monsters is that instead of fearing the alien and trying to isolate ourselves from the ‘other’, we should be opening ourselves up to its strangeness by looking at it with an open mind and an open heart. Edwards initially makes us fear the creatures by drawing upon our fears of terrorism, immigration, chemical weapons and third world squalor. However, he then makes us come to appreciate the innate beauty of the creatures and, in so doing, suggests that there may be some beauty to be found in the things that we, as a culture, fear the most.

Easily one of the best science fiction films in recent memory, Monsters was (of course) absent from the recently released Hugo award shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation – Long Form thereby raising the question, yet again, of what point the award actually serves beyond reminding the world that Hugo voters know fuck all about film.