This is a couple of days later than I’d like, but I was under the weather again this week.
Anyway …
Book I read:
Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer: If you know me but at all, you’ll know that I’m addicted to copy-editing books – i.e. opinion books about English. Whether it be Fowler’s (King’s English or Modern English Usage) or Kingsley Amis’s follow-up, or The Elements of Style or Plain Words, what have you – I read them like novels.
This is a worthy addition to the canon, written with clarity, precision, and the requisite sense of humour (which can sometimes be lacking in books like this). I got a nice refresher on style and on problem words, and a reading list out of it as well.
If you’d like a sampler before you buy, Dreyer has a Substack here which deals with much the same subject.
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut: A nonfiction novel that was all the rage a couple of years ago, in the author’s words, “a book made up by an essay (which is not chemically pure), two stories that try not to be stories, a short novel, and a semi-biographical prose piece.”
As I mentioned in Part 1 of this week’s update, this definitely falls into the tradition of Sebald and other nonfiction novelists, or authors who use fact as much as they use fiction, though unlike many of those, this reads like a history for much of its length, thereby lulling you into a false sense of pure realism.
I know there are critics who have been annoyed at the fact that Labatut mixes fact with invention, but it is to a specific effect, and that effect is thoroughly achieved. If there’s a book I’d compare it to most directly, it’d be Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, in its steady accretion of detail to convey the weight of history and of time, its obsession with the mundane aspects of big events, and of course, the irruption of its author into the story towards its end.
(PS: If you’ve seen that meme that talks about how lemon trees give out a final, radiant crop before they die, it comes from this book.)
Friday by Ed Brubaker, Marcos Martín & Muntsa Vicente: Probably my favourite thing Brubaker has written, mainly because I enjoy cosmic horror far more than I enjoy crime. But the star here is the pair of Martín and Vicente, who create a whole world for the characters to exist in, and who manage to combine cartoony character design with gorgeous rendering and body language to bring these same characters to life. That is not even beginning to speak of the fantastic page design this book is replete in, and Vicente’s canny mix of modern and old-school colour sense and rendering. Hard to think of a better artist-colourist pair working in comics right now.
In tv, I watched Shining Girls, the adaptation of Lauren Beukes’s novel The Shining Girls (which is a better title, let’s face it) on Apple TV+, which I only continue to have because it comes free with my Apple One subscription.
It’s an enjoyable show, overall. It’s well-shot, and the central performances – particularly Elizabeth Moss and Wagner Moura – are great, with a lot of chemistry between them. I had a good time watching this, but the end, I was left with this feeling that there was something missing, that it didn’t all hold together as well as I’d liked.
There are some gaps in the storytelling, and mostly these are purposeful, yet I felt there were other gaps that, if filled, would have deepened the story and the characters.
Perhaps I need to read the book to figure out what this missing piece was. But maybe I’m so used to watching really good television that something that’s just fine feels unfinished.
That ’90s Show Part 2: Speaking of things that are not great tv. I watched Part 1 of this when it came out and fully forgot it. Part 2 is more of the same – it’s forgettable sequel television to a show that itself had lost its sheen by the end. By Part 2, the characters are a bit more lived in, and there are some pleasantly surreal moments and—
Okay, I can’t do this. I can’t defend this show in any way, and I couldn’t tell you why I watched it beyond “It was on Netflix”. I have no excuse.
The film section will fare better, I can assure you. I’ve been watching a lot of movies these days – it feels like something’s unlocked in my head with regard to films, which I’ll talk about separately.
Short films of note:
Redemption by Miguel Gomes is compiled from archival footage covering Europe in the 20th century, overlaid with four letters written by four individuals to their loved ones. The identities of the “characters” writing the letters come into focus at the end, though there are several hints on the way. Gomes, in appealing to the history of these people, is trying to talk about fascism at an angle, perhaps arguing against the idea that its rise is inevitable, perhaps telling us that normal, decent people aren’t immune to sliding into nationalist fervour. Nevertheless, an affecting film. Here’s a review I enjoyed.
Room 666: A filmmaker friend told me about this – a 1982 documentary by Wim Wenders in which filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog, Steven Spielberg and others are asked if they think cinema is about to die. The sections vary in length – Godard uses up the entire reel, while Mike De Leon answers in a sentence or two. There is a mesmeric quality to the static frame covering the same room in each section, with a television placed right next to the director, playing tennis or a B-grade Hong Kong film based on the time of day. You are drawn in to focus on each guest, look at their body as they react to this existential question (particularly amusing was Herzog insisting this wasn’t a question that could be answered with shoes on and freeing his feet, as if to ground himself to the earth before answering).
But nothing prepared me for the gut punch that is the final section, in which Wenders appears to tell us that Turkish filmmaker Yılmaz Güney, who won the Palme d’Or that year, is confined to his hotel room as he awaits possible extradition to a Turkey ruled by a military junta, and then proceeds to play Güney’s pronouncement on how art cinema needs to be protected from commercial cinema. You are left to ponder whether it makes sense to prognosticate on the death of cinema when there remain parts of the world where filmmakers are censored, arrested and sometimes even killed for the mere act of making movies.
You Are Here: A pleasantly surreal short film that literalises some thought experiments, including the Chinese Room experiment. There are many great shots in the film, some excellent short sequences. The philosophical intent is a bit too straightforward and simple, too often telling you what to think, but there’s some great visual storytelling here.
I’ve also been watching some Iranian films on MUBI, particularly from the filmography of Jafar Panahi, whom I first encountered in This Is Not a Film, which was a film he co-directed while he was awaiting the result of an appeal against his ban from making films.
3 Faces: Panahi has continued to secretly make films while under a 20–year ban from filmmaking. 3 Faces is about women in the Iranian film industry. Panahi and actress Behnaz Jafari are travelling to a remote village to look for a young girl who might have committed suicide when she was banned from joining a conservatory to study acting. The film begins with a gorgeous, seemingly endless long single take, and then we met an eccentric cast of people, including an old man who wants his new son’s foreskin to be buried in the garden of a famous actor so he can grow up to be a star. All the way through, the film observes the hypocrisy of society when it comes to men versus women in film, without excoriating any one guilty party. There is also a point made about the separation of men and women in public life, but at the same time, we also see the intimacy shared within the sex – both by the strange men who are perfectly at ease talking to Panahi, and the women (the “three faces” of women in Iranian film) who find an intimacy that men remain on the outside of. (There’s a lot to say about this film’s relationship with women, and I’d have spent more time on it if I wasn’t running late in posting this. This article teases out some of that stuff.)
Gabbeh by Mohsen Makhmalbaf is a beautifully filmed, colourful fairy tale about an old couple’s carpet coming to life and telling them the story depicted in its image (though it is heavily implied that the story is about the old couple in their youth). There is some wonderful landscape imagery here, and lovely surreal film techniques deployed to depict the side of Iranian life which would usually be censored (as an Indian, I can relate to this, given that for decades, there was no making out in Bollywood films, and sex was implied by showing flowers touching). I was surprised to see that despite these concessions made to censorship, Gabbeh was banned in Iran, which tells you the kind of things that apparently threaten the image of an oppressive regime.
Offside: As I watched more Iranian films, I started hearing more about how Jafar Panahi’s filmmaking underwent a drastic shift after his arrest and ban, so I wanted to watch something from earlier in his career, and Offside turned out to be a great choice, despite my usual lack of interest in anything to do with football.
Offside is a hilarious, raucous and touching film about a group of girls who try to sneak into the Azadi Stadium (“Freedom”, ironically) to watch Iran’s 2006 World Cup qualifying match against Bahrain, only to be caught and then have to spend the rest of the film with the soldiers keeping guard on them, who themselves are village boys doing their national service.
Turns out that a whole lot of this film was in fact secretly filmed on the actual day of the match, which meant that the ending of the movie was in flux depending on whether Iran won or lost the match. The filmmaking team was caught towards the end of filming (they weren’t supposed to have any women with them), and they had to finish a bunch of the scenes set in a bus in a different city altogether.
Even outside the context of this derring-do, though, Offside is a wonderful film, charming and funny without ever coming across as twee, because you are constantly aware of the social norms surrounding the characters within the film. Here’s a great piece about Offside.
If I had to choose a movie to introduce someone to the charms of Panahi’s cinema, it would be this one, because it contains everything that people like about his work – gonzo filmmaking influenced by documentaries, distinctive characters (particularly female), and concerns about mundane life under overbearing societal norms – without the long takes and periods of quietness that might alienate viewers more used to mainstream cinema.