We once again journeyed into the heart of The Big Smoke's biggest festival in search of glitz, glamour, saints, and sinners. This time though, both God and the Devil were on our side.
In the black of night, sweat turns chemical, like a whiff of ozone—something sharp, something dangerous, something that could poison you. Bar lights cut bright, electric against this darkness. It's no coincidence that "colour" shares its roots with "drug" and "intoxicant," flashing here in flushed, poisonous hues. Like Cassavetes before him (this is his Cinderella or Pretty Woman, a worn-out fairy tale filleted down to something desperate and sweat-soaked and where there is no fairy godmother to be found), Baker has an obsession with people clawing their way through messy, half-lit existences, where intimacy is transactional and sold off in instalments half-earned and half-owed, and where even "hello" can sound like an insult. Anora is all this, all urgency and itch. Baker's worlds spin on the axis of need, a jittery swan-dive through lives carved out of longing and bleak, glittered agitation. Because characters here don't have the polish or poise to love themselves, Baker steps in to adore their unpolished edges, their most graceless instincts. Maybe the dust never settles, just clears briefly from the wreckage of each failure, as prickled thoughts trashed as too risky in the daylight surge back like champagne foam, like corks under pressure, clutching at anything—money, affection, brief moments of rococo bravado—that might hold them above water just a bit longer, pulled forward by a strange, tragic charisma, and then drenches them in the harlequin-glow of reality's ugliest, sweetest lights. And, arguably, isn't that what Hollywood has always been for? The American Dream in the roll and grain of 4-perf, widescreen Kodachrome 35mm film.
There are spies in the Congo, played in on independence winds. There are spies in the Congo and glow worms beneath their feet. There are the world players too, President Lumumba on bass, Khrushchev on drums, Ike playing off-key, X throwing chairs, but Grimonprez's conspiracy, Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat, roots its faith in the insurgency of song, blurting a conic upstart of our next century. Desk drumming on le table ronde... Louie (Satchmo) Armstrong pearled in sweat yet grinning, President Dizzy Gillespie whose cheeks are a cityscape flotilla, Nina Simone bursting magenta love-me's, Abbey Lincoln's long petals on Roach's roiling thorns, The Duke. In 1960, when the Overton window was breezy enough to welcome apocalypse, African states won independence then formed a bloc in the UN against their colonial exes. Finding Congo to be a once "dark" heart now radioactively alight, and fearing the great (unprofitable) dreams of a United States of Africa, America sent "jazz emissaries" to try and squeeze red out of their nations with the blues. Considering, with full sincerity, what it means for a culture in which the director of the MoMA is also on the board of Lockheed and a CIA operative, the documentary rivets open a thousand tabs in your mind. Where Grimonprez excels is in his efforts to prove his point whilst making it, utilising the rhythms of improvised espionage to play a jazzpunk psyop on the viewer with filmmaking schizophrenic enough to requisite truth: an anti-agitprop for the cement-written age.
Revelation
With bass and treble,
A hand holds a horn
Like a gun in a knot
& 7
Buisine are blown.
In the age of testimony, what power does allegory still hold? The myth of the sacred fig tree, revealed in the title cards of Mohammad Rasoulof's house burner, is a violent one. This particular tree's seeds are dispersed by bird droppings that plant in the clouds, growing from the sky down in vines that strangle the surrounding canopy, leaving only the sacred tree standing in a desolate clearing. In one lucid metaphor for the structure of Iran's theocracy, the survival of the fig tree is guaranteed only via the obliteration of others, and its sanctity imbued by proxy of its isolation. Its shape is even hauntingly similar to the government's structure, in which elected bodies exist in the shade of the supreme leader's control, feigning democracy, whilst absorbing nutrients from thorny militias and morality police that are anything but independent. Crucially, the regime exists on behalf of the branching violence of others; like most oppressive architecture, the more power that one has the more distance they are afforded from the oppressed, as the evangelists splay uncannily clean hands. The Seed of the Sacred Fig grows its microcosm within the home. The older generation aspires to play the game and the younger generation refuses: as their father sacrifices nameless women to the revolutionary court, his daughters' online diet is a stream of filmed violence against their friends. Interjecting real social media footage of Iran's hijab protests and Mahsa Amini's murder swiftly depicts the threshold of dissonance all of us are required to cross to demand accountability for the atrocities we bare witness to in the palms of our hands. Only, in Rasoulof's film, the perpetrator is asleep on the couch, and the atrocity is just outside the window. Consequence knocks on the door of artifice. In May, Rasoulof was sentenced by the Iranian government to eight years in prison and flogging, as if he knew it would take the same regime he was criticising to both reveal itself and prove that artifice can knock back.
"Beware of narrative and form. Their power can bring us closer to the truth but because of our own deeply held beliefs and the judgments that we make, they can also be a weapon with a great power to manipulate." Or so we are warned in episode one of Disclaimer*, a "psychological thriller told in seven chapters" (i.e. a TV show lol) from Alfonso Cuarón, whose seductive probing into the power of crafted, mutable realities—both for the storyteller's and the audience's sake—finds only a leaf-like fragility beneath every story we believe and every persona we adopt (and who better to stunt cast opposite Cate Blanchette than Sacha Baron Cohen whose confrontational plundering for validation in costume and out of it has brought both joy and misery to so many), the act of storytelling exposed as a double-edged ritual: fiction shields us from truth while simultaneously coaxing it into the light.
In Nickel Boys, a magic trick of a film based on Colson Whitehead's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the splintering of perspective is like two halves of the same story trying to find each other. First-time fiction filmmaker RaMell Ross stages a slow collision, a doubling that twists two voices into a single one; this isn't just two lives, but one story seen from both sides of a mirror, or two selves, each learning to wear the other's wounds. Each half of the story pushes against the other, testing its own reflection, interrogating itself—what is real, what is remembered, and who does the remembering. It's an exploration of identity by way of disassembly. Ross isn't handing us a clean narrative to dissect but forcing us to pick up these splinters and bleed a little.
-Are you annoyed with yourself?
-Yes.
In A Traveler's Needs, Isabelle Huppert plays a French language teacher. She asks her student how they feel. Her student first translates feeling into their language, Korean, and then Korean into English to tell her. Huppert translates their English into her French, and hands it back to the student on an index card. Yet, the destination of translation remain faint pawprints of a long voyage that locks horns with the inner inexpressible. In this way, like Jarmusch's Paterson restored Buddha to the bus route, and like the exchange between artist and audience, Huppert's flashcards become translated poems: cairns consecrating the ordinariness of our unfathomable life. Each word choice and cadence seems to ask, how many times can you divide the sea? This is her version, but even her student's version would be untrue. The cairn's lame insufficiency is precisely its beauty, as each delicately balanced stone tower miraculously infers the shapeless miles travelled to their lode.
-I am so annoyed with myself. I am so tired of myself. Always wanting to become someone else, who is this person in me who makes so tired?
Homesickness could be another name for Payal Kapadia's intimate epic, All We Imagine as Light, describing well the nostalgia besetting its three women who long to arrive in limerence with the self. It is also the name of the song that becomes its refrain by Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, that has long been my own personal Music for Airports. Watching the pearl lark ruffle in that blaring airport light - you know the one, one incidentally very much like the light in October, senescent yet wide awake - Guèbrou's piano accents each of a thousand stirring bodies with the soft burr of a soul. Kapadia employs her to the same effect. Gently, gently, her characters contain the ocean, watching the wind knock Mumbai's lights closer from the shore and longing for a hand to hold theirs and say "It is a pleasure to meet you", meaning "to know you", and mean it, longing all their life for that, learning only in the stations between people and things that it is a crime to long to be made whole. It halves you.
The sun has gone, as the past stretches into night,
The Second Father's voice echoes,
God help the wolf when the dogs fall silent.
"It was really just very organic," Kurzel begins, telling me the story of how Ellis Park came to be, the creation story of a story about creation. The film itself is not so much a product as it is a process, less something earned through fists pummeling and building but a thing granted in the generous act of surrender. "Are those ideas you come up with," Kurzel wonders aloud, "or are they kind of given to you?" Here's the open hand at the centre of Ellis Park: does art grow from the soil of our being, or does it drift in on some old, familiar wind? So much of the story unfolds at this juncture, between creation and grief, between what's held and what's cast away. Kurzel observes Ellis in the early thrall of creation, "at these sort of wonderful beginnings of when an idea forms and comes out of the shadows," and in strange, sacred places, "volcanoes, churches, these giant canopies, these cathedrals of trees" of Ballarat to Sunatra.
Ellis' father Screamin’ Johnny Ellis, a Country musician himself, who insisted that "the older he got he felt as though he could hear voices, a tap on the shoulder guiding him towards those moments of those acts of creation," glimpsing a lineage, a kind of inherited reckoning that makes itself apparent in Ellis' own creation and his own self-destruction: Ellis does not, cannot, shy away from his flaws, the crags, and the hollows. But it's as though Kurzel himself has found in Ellis the "compassion and gentleness" that Kurzel says gave him a reprieve from his "heavy films about not-so-lovely people," perhaps even a certain forgiveness. And it's here that the film finds its purpose. In the "wonderful beginnings", where creation is a kind of grace—a chance to build something beautiful, even in fractured places.
The Australian phone books hold secrets,
Quiet pages whispering of exiled angels and small-town saints.
After a project like this, it's insulation to the outrageous.
Four columns, regardless of the thread we walk on,
You stare down the way ahead,
The brakes screech as you try to remember—
The whole thing, the hard-earned memories.
Stone doesn't forget. It holds the weight of hands that carved it, the eyes that gazed upon it, the stories it was meant to tell and those who silenced it. Statues are meant to endure, to stand taller than time, but they carry the weight of broken histories. There's something fragile in that endurance, though—an illusion of permanence. What was once worshipped becomes a relic, then a trophy, then a hollow symbol, passed through hands that claim it as their own. And yet, the past clings to these figures, a residue of lives lived, lands taken, voices erased.
I am the trance, and the trace. I'm torn… hisses the searching voice of one of the artefacts (namely, the Dahomean king Ghezo) at the centre of Dahomey, director Mati Diop's followup to her billowing, gothic romance, and though this is a return to documentary, it is one no less interested in the construction of reality. The artefacts, long housed in Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, a cavernous institution held up only by objects stained with the bastard legacies of France's colonial empire (objects stolen, haemorrhaged, torn) are returning to their homeland in Benin. More than three hundred thousand pieces still clutter that Parisian hall, ghosts leaching out against pristine glass. The few, just thirteen, that will journey back to Benin feels less like reparation than an afterthought, a ritual of return that hardly touches the wound still festering.
It's not clear who the voice is speaking for, or to, a loose thread between bodies and bloodlines, as ancestral memories brush against the edges of a modern life that can't quite absorb them. The film's score (a collaboration between Dean Blunt and Wally Badarou, a musician with heritage from Benin) thrums through these spaces, murmuring in deep undercurrents, like the hum of a land that remembers itself even if its people can't. Diop seems obsessed with this new tension, the digital hum of security lights, blinking LEDs, the harsh murmur of the present that never quite drowns out the past, ghosts brushing against your skin, tearing history away from its "roots" and unmooring moments from linearity like an invocation, calling forth what was buried, twisting memory into something raw and open, half-seen, half-sensed, never fully released, nor reclaimed; an orison that loosens history's grip, a burning bush inviting it to haunt the present anew.
Land extracts dyes from our skin when we taste it.
It takes its saffron sun from the glow of our cheeks when daubed with nettles, the innermost chalk of its stones from the innermost warmth of our veins after plunging into a lake, and the quicksilver of the tide from our hands threaded by sweet slug sap, discovered at dawn. This uneven exchange is the only promissory we are given that we will inherit the earth, and the horizon between our touch and its dew is a diadem of negative capability so quaint that names are the wash that might kill it. Harvest's stubbornly un-horror folk tale recounts this movement, re-enacting Seamus Heaney's slow extraction of turf into work & words with a main character named after the land's greatest elegiac Walt. But its own poetics of piss & pigs immerses in a muddy middle of history, astutely imagining a less hierarchical commons in which serfs are slaves to lords. Instead, here is one in which expropriation swings like the hands of a clock over a failed utopia, not unlike those still haunting Scotland and the rural NorthNorth where the irascible (race, gender, greed and sex) is invariably jostled by a bigger fish coming to eat the already quite big fish. Where the clime begets a green, gulping grand, landlords loved the hills as much as those that toiled them and each could lie, alone, where the bottom fell out of words, where the blade is the grass of a bone.
The 4K re-release by the BFI of Martin Rosen's Watership Down brings a new depth to its hand-rendered gardenscapes—painted as a site of both immense beauty and tragedy under a grey-throated sky, a bucolia that could only be Britain, with the soft shimmer of English mist and lush, rolling fields and hedgerows soaked in greens so deep it's almost painful, as if nature itself is willing to bleed and scar. In this England, nothing is ever truly still, and though the land flattens any tranquillity into a steady breath of damp, the ghosts of those who've tread this path, nameless now, those whose witnessed violence are still bedded in the loam, the thistle, the foxglove—England's green and pleasant land, as the hymn goes, that holds tight to every wound, that hungers not for rest but for the pull of another dawn, and thirsts not for peace but for a cycle of renewal fed by the sacrifices that came in ages before.
Desire isn't a spark but a symptom, something to be scratched or endured rather than savoured. The title of Queer alone seems to stammer with this self-loathing, a sneer of unrequited longing, like the sour and inward conquest of sex with someone you hate. It opens with a similar feverish plunge, the first sweat drop of which slides into a romance as dry as a prescription chart, where each line, each crease, is a bit of swilled prophecy about how little is left to feel, to hold—this is less about love and more about a defeat seared onto Daniel Craig's face, of something more elusive, brittle—glances that nearly touch but flinch, hands that reach only to recoil. "Be nice to me twice a week," he reasons as though rationing tenderness is the only way to dose it. There's no softness here, but there's a slickness to it all—like Challengers, that other hot-house of sweat and want, bodies entangled in the constant push-pull of same-self and same-sex—a grind, a dance of half-steps, as if romance itself is a joke too played out for William Lee to laugh at any longer, too weary of its own plotlines and so doubles back, finding in the slow leak of bodily erosion only dribble and discharge forcing him to forget what life he's built and whatever calloused futures his cracked palms might still yet map out.
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat; The Seed of the Sacred Fig; A Traveler's Needs; All We Imagine as Light; Harvest reviewed by Caleb Carter
Anora; Disclaimer*; Nickel Boys; Ellis Park; Dahomey; Watership Down; Queer reviewed by Bryson Edward Howe
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