June 2016 book and film review

Thank you, dear readers, if there are any left, for bearing with me through my unintended hiatus. I can only assure you it was due to circumstances well beyond my control. I am sorry I cannot reveal more details right now, though the time may come when I can. Meanwhile, nearly two months late, please read on to hear about books and films I encountered for the first time in June of this year.

BOOKS

ELEPHANT, by Raymond Carver.
Being a collection of short stories by one of the greatest post war American writers. In his languid, easy-going style, Carver takes us into ordinary people's lives where ordinary things happen. Or do they? In the title story, Elephant, a man is persuaded, much against his better judgement, to lend money to his ne'er-do-well brother. He's sure he won't see his money again, and guess what? He doesn't. But then his brother comes back with an even more convincing sob story and the narrator shells out again. Meanwhile he too is slowly becoming destitute. In Blackbird Pie, a man is sitting at his writing desk one evening when a note is pushed under his door. The note is from his wife and announces she is leaving him for another man. But it isn't her handwriting. And in the final story, Errand, Carver imagines the final days in the life of his favourite writer, the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov.

Some say Carver would have been nothing without his editor, who knocked into shape Carver's often confused, alcohol soaked drafts. But I say even the best editor has to have something outstanding to work with if he he's going to make something really great out of it. As an aspiring writer myself I can only say if alcohol abuse could get me within a million miles of Carver's genius I'd start drinking right now. Oh wait, I am.

LE GRAND MEAULNES, by Alain-Fournier
A young man enrols at a rural school in northern France at the close of the 19th century. He is tall, good-looking and charismatic. One day he bunks off and wanders off into the countryside, where he finds himself in the middle of a wedding party on a distant estate. He is entranced by one of the young ladies there, but has to leave. The rest of the book is about his search for this lady, a search that threatens his whole future...

Problems begin in this book right from the title. Le Grand Meaulnes is actually untranslatable into English. It could mean "the great Meulnes" or it could mean "Good old Meaulnes", the more commonly accepted meaning. An alternative title for the book is "The Lost Domain" though this too is hard to convey in English. The book was an enormous hit in France, with its intensely powerful evocation of longing and nostalgia, combined with the doomed hero-worship the narrator has for Meaulnes. And it does create a unique atmosphere which plunges the reader into the fields and streams of the French countryside, and the overwhelming emotions of the players who inhabit it.
This is the latest in a series of books I tried and gave up on in a much earlier era of my life. And once again, I am so glad I hung in with it this time.

THE LADIES' PARADISE, by Emil Zola.
In mid nineteenth century France, an ambitious man runs one of Paris's great department stores. It is already huge and turns over millions of francs a year, but he wants it to be even bigger, to cover a whole city block and become the greatest store in the world. A few things stand in his way: some tiny nearby shops, blighted by the lower prices he can offer for the goods they sell, but who will not sell up so he can expand. Then there is his latest employee, a slip of a girl, far beneath the society ladies he normally associates with, but who nonetheless manages to steal his heart, without making any visible attempt to do so...
Emil Zola is absolutely my favourite French writer. His famous twenty-novel "Rougon Macarte" series provides an endless source of reading pleasure. I have only read about half of them, and not in the correct order, though that doesn't matter. They all stand alone, and I haven't read one yet which isn't utterly absorbing, moving, funny and beautiful.

FILMS

IRRATIONAL MAN (2015) D- Woody Allen. A hard drinking philosophy professor (a very good Joaquin Phoenix) senses his life is spiralling downwards but then feels himself to some extent redeemed when he strikes up a relationship with one his attractive students (Emma Stone). Then one day, perhaps working on the Nietschian idea of exceptional people being beyond normal moral values, overhears a conversation in a cafe where a woman complains that a judge is destroying her life in a custody battle with her ex. He decides on an "existential act"; namely, he takes it upon himself to murder the judge in question. Now feeling existentially enriched, he embarks on other equally radical behaviours...

Woody Allen is one of the busiest film directors in the world, and although some of his films are outstanding, and some even works of true cinematic genius, they don't all work. This one does, however, and I found it gripping and memorable.

FANTASTIC FOUR (2015) D- Josh Trank. A collection of good looking and well funded scientists find they are unaccountably possessed of superpowers. Heard that one before? You should have. The two Fantastic Four movies featuring Jessica Alba have not exactly faded into the mists of time being made very recently. Yet someone at Fox still thought the public would lap up this re-boot. They didn't. The film slumped at the box office and won a slew of Golden Raspberries including worst picture of the year (an accolade jointly awarded to Fifty Shades of Grey). I have in the past banged on about the tendency of Hollywood to produce totally unnecessary re-makes, presumably with the idea of making a fast and easy buck, but really, this beats all. This film has nothing new to offer, has not a shred of humour or any other kind of flair. Absolute crap.

CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER (1961) (documentary) D- Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, photographed by Michel Brault. A number of ordinary French people are interviewed on camera and asked to speak about their preoccupations: work, love, liberty and loss. The film opens with the co-directors discussing whether it is possible for people to speak with genuine sincerity on camera; what follows invites us to assess this for ourselves. The result by general consensus is yes, if the directors are sufficiently skilful, as these two definitely were.

Filmed on a 16mm cine camera and recorded with a portable Nagra tape machine, we chose to see this as part of a plan to track down the world's great documentary films. The BFI voted this number six on its list of best documentaries, and it's easy to see why. Perhaps the quintessential example of cinema verite, as the film begins we can see the participants are nervous and hesitant, but as it progresses they relax, forget the camera is there and reveal themselves in the most extraordinarily candid way. Marvellous.

JUSTE AVANT LA NUIT (1961) D- Claude Chabrol. A man is having an affair with his best friend's wife. They like like their sex rough, and during one of their sessions he accidentally strangles her to death. He stumbles out of the apartment in a confused state, leaving the cleaner to find her body the following day. He soon bumps into his best friend, and feigns as much surprise and shock as him when the news breaks. Bit by bit, the grieving husband begins to wonder if his friend might be responsible, but even as the evidence mounts he is unsure what to do about it. After all, what's done is done...
This film is so French it almost smells of garlic and fresh croissant. And it demonstrates as well as any of his films what a true auteur Chabrol is. Dubbed by some as the "French Hitchcock", this film shows his intimate dissection of human character and weakness is superior even to that of the rotund one. Terrific.

THEEB (2014) D- Naji-Abu Nawar. The Jordanian desert, 1916, at the height of the British-sponsored Arab uprising against the Ottoman empire. A British soldier arrives in a remote village asking to be guided to a well in the middle of the desert, from where he plans to blow up a railway line. A young lad insists on accompanying the small party into the desert, but the group is soon waylaid by bandits who kill his brother and the British soldier. Theeb, the boy, now finds himself lost in the middle of a harsh and unforgiving environment. He doesn't know where the well is, and he doesn't know how to find his way home either. Then he notices that one of the bandits has survived the firefight, though he has been shot. Can they join forces and somehow make their way to safety?

This excellent little Jordanian movie was nominated for the Oscar for best foreign language film of 2014 and with good reason. Shot around the Wadi Rhum area, made famous by T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, it is intensely atmospheric and provides a rare insight into the usually impenetrable minds of Arab people.

THE WALK (2015) D- Robert Zemekis. In 1973, a Parisian circus performer seeking to make a name for himself sees a photo of the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and hatches an idea to string a wire between them and walk across. Strictly illegal of course, but once the deed is done he'll be famous. Or dead. He tightropes between the two towers of Notre Dame cathedral by way of practice, and then sets off for New York with a length of wire and a coterie of like-minded anarchists, not all of whom are convinced it will work...

Philippe Petit's extraordinary feat has already been chronicled in the very good documentary feature Man on Wire (that was how the arresting police officer classified the incident), but Zemekis (Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit etc) thought there was mileage in a dramatisation, and I would agree. Joseph Gordon Levitt makes a very impressive Petit; indeed the great man himself trained Levitt in how to make his wire-walking look authentic. It did. We are drawn into the struggle to transform this audacious plan into reality, and the tension builds magnificently as the day for the fateful walk approaches.
This isn't a remake, it's a radical re-think, and there's nothing wrong with that. Think on, Hollywood.