Marea Alta (2020)

Really enjoyed this, but it's one of those which I perceive might not be for everyone, and what was extremely prickly for me, could be almost stultifying for others. 

 

 

I'm fond of saying that some of my favourite novels are those which would be extremely hard to turn into movies, and the reverse is also true. Anyone with only Verónica Chen's screenplay to hand would likely make a very different film to the one she made - for the silences work hard here and one of the most interesting things about her storytelling in Marea Alta/High Tide is the way she shows us things without explicit comment or explanation, techniques that are hard for any author to achieve so effectively.

I liked the way it opened, cutting straight to the chase, so to speak, making the audience thirsty for the context, some of which is either added later or needs to be intuited. The way the narrative works on you is going to be subjective, inevitably. It's 'about' class, race and gender, but not in the most obvious, accountable ways.

Laura is an artist, yet inhabits a second home on the coast which is an absolute nullity from a taste perspective. it's low season in Mar de las Pampas, in Buenos Aires province, a location where those pines that always tend to appear in violent films run right up to the shore. She's there to work, but also to oversee a small construction project being undertaken by a contractor called Weisman and his two Guarani workers.

Laura and Weisman go to bed together, in a series of scenes where the dynamics are immediately a bit uncomfortable. It ends with her saying she will call in a way he finds dismissive, but then HE doesn't call or indeed turn up the next day and she is left to try to impose some sort of increasingly leaky authority over 'Hueso' and Toto who find ever more creative ways to test and then violate the boundaries.

I found this in Netflix's 'Understated Spanish-language films bucket. The most understated thing about it, other than the aforementioned silent scenes and the interior design, is the violence, and this is, in the end, an extremely violent film, but you may not be quite so aware of this in the moment , as you would be during the course of more well-trodden Halloween-week programming. Nor, I can assure you, is it the violence you might have anticipated.

One thing did make me ponder: the rather haphazard tattoos on Laura's body. Do these appear as a coincidence deriving from the casting of Gloria Carrá, or are they an additional element of Chen's storytelling? The actress was forty nine when the movie was shot and I imagined that the director might have been using these ink drawings to encourage us to imagine what sort of person Laura had been at a younger age, prior to marriage and children, and the shade of this earlier presence seemed to me to feed into the thematic murkiness with regards to social and gender interactions.

Open Air Prisons

Gaza is often described rather loosely as an 'open air prison', notably by David Cameron.

What is far more resembles however is one of the great Jesuit missions set up during the early seventeenth centuries within the amorphous border zone between Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay. 

Rather than being taught the violin, agriculture and how to sing in a choir, UNRWA, the modern equivalent of the Society of Jesus, appear to mainly want to pass on a form of cosmic grievance and hatred, but the effect is the same for the Gazans as it was for the Guaraní: total dependency.

They are forced to live within an artificial, anomalous legal bubble in which they are utterly infantilised, and thereby absolved of all responsibility for their own actions, and attitudes. 

And UNRWA, just like the Jesuit order, defends the permanency of this state of tutelage for largely self-serving reasons.

Their ‘protected’ community needs more external aid than any other human population on Earth because, how else could they even exist? 

They have to be comforted that theirs is not the ordinary lot of citizens, the task of building a prosperous secular society. UNRWA feeds them, not just with actual victuals paid for by outsiders, but also with an existential fantasy, a vision of a promised land, a world without the evil of Israel, without Jews and other infidels, a return to how things were before all the sins were committed, and these will of course all be forgiven. 

One interesting difference however. The Jesuit missions resulted in a form of genocide. The Guaraní were incapable of adapting to their physical and spiritual cage, and thus died off rather rapidly.

Meanwhile in Gaza, in spite of a reported 40,000+ casualties of this recent war, the population has increased by a further 2% October to October.

It may be relevant that the Jesuits chose to immerse a ferocious people (Guaraní means war) in a permanent condition of peace, whereas UNRWA...

 

 

 

 

 

'Missing Context'

Marxism is a dialectical system, which on some levels means that it is more interested in where we have been and where we are going than where we are at now. (Sometimes emphatically so.)

For this reason, perhaps a little counter-intuitively, when I was starting out as an undergrad, it had lately been at its most invasive and sometimes rather damaging when applied to the period (supposedly) prior to capitalism, slavery etc. 

 

Central to this were a group of French historians who operated under the banner of the Annales School, which included Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre. Duby, Braudel and Le Goff also became key figures.

By the mid-80s the discipline as a whole had seemingly put them back in their boîte, extracting useful research and insights, but no longer permitting their like to run riot around the past, particularly the late medieval and early modern past. 

 

Each new intake of historians at Cambridge was immediately notified who the ‘enemy’ were: those academics who would try to apply grand theoretical structures to reality, suppressing pesky facts and events wherever necessary.

Such thematic obsessions might be all right for the Anthropology department, but we would fight tooth and nail to keep them out of our faculty.

Back then we had the sense that the battle had been won, that we were the mop up operation. The irony is that the left-wing ultra-theoretical approach is now arguably more endemic within English-speaking academia than it ever was in the French, and thus — with apologies — more international. 

 

This has to have occurred in part because the USA has always had an antagonistic relationship with big, complex history (#oldworldroblems) and the surrounding popular culture relentlessly works to turn this into bite-sized, easily digestible chunks for local consumption, which in practice involves a lot of seepage into the wider world. 

 

Mass-market historical narratives are the perfect fodder for Marxists, because the peskier facts often come pre-suppressed. They work their peculiar magic, and suddenly the dead and the unborn appear to have greater 'rights' than the living, and one can feel absolved of the need for anything resembling a viable (and humane) plan for the here and now. 

 

And this fosters an environment where non-experts are actively encouraged to shout down (and shut down) people who bring deeper, more multidimensional perspectives to the table.

'Missing Context' is just the start of it.

 

 

Monster (2023)

Kore-eda Hirokazu is my favourite director working in world cinema today, and all the finest qualities of his work, particularly when working in Japan and and with child actors, are on display here.

 

But not his writing, because the screenplay was produced by Yûji Sakamoto, most noted for his plays, television scripts and song lyrics.

Its episodic structure, featuring three re-treads of the same temporal ground, will have people reaching for their Rashōmon comparisons, but these are not three separate, subjective interpretations, but rather alternatively-skewed re-tellings, blending some things we've seen with things we haven't, with an adjusted mix of protagonists, central and support, seemingly with an objective of adding a bit more murk even as some clarity gradually emerges.

Within this tripartite structure, the narrative is a little disjointed with perceptible gaps that deliberately disrupt the experience of flow between scenes.

All this means that, on some levels, Monster feels a bit like hard work. 

It certainly didn't help that in the version we watched, the hard-coded subtitles were a little off. It wasn't so much that the language was inaccurate, just that the way it was rendered came across as mechanical and affectless, and I'd imagine that the precision and tone are very important to this Cannes Best Screenplay winner. (It also took the Queer Palm in 2023.) 

We also felt there were a few cultural references that went flying past us, and the ambience of urgent unfamiliarity was perhaps accentuated by the setting, around Lake Suwa (in Nagano prefecture), characteristic of a form of Japan one rarely comes across in the movies.

Freed from the need to tell the story with words, Kore-eda is conspicuously devoting himself to the visuals. He calibrates the colour palette in a manner I've not seen done before, which is both fun and a little distracting (one has a sense of being bombarded with details, foreground and background) and some of the scenes have that exquisite, ethereal quality which one tends to associate with the hand-drawn animations of Miyazaki — complemented by the equally diaphanous final score of the late Ryuchi Sakamoto.

Is Monster worth all the heightened attention (and sensibility) it appears to require? Resoundingly yes, I would say. 

(For the record, one reviewer on IMDB commented that the 'monster' of the title is Japanese society and its mores. This is very much NOT a horror movie, but there does seem to be an underlying premise at work in the story that this society can sometimes function as a hall of mirrors, making it that much harder to make observations without perceiving malformations which are not really there.)

Half Empty

One of the reasons that the Democrats have failed to smother the threat of Trump seems rather more obvious to me than to them. 

They relentlessly take the Donald at face value. In doing so they place him in the same bucket as maybe half of his supporters — so when the Democrats call him a dictator, these folk say "hell, yeah!"

Meanwhile, the remainder of his supporters more or less hold onto the idea that what he says on campaign is just the idiot fodder necessary to carry the swing states and that, once elected, he will do what the big business, libertarian elites want him to do and not the MAGA-hat morons. 

Some of this lot are (rightly) scared that perhaps, after all, it's not so straightforward to read Trump this way. But the Democrats are doing nothing to address this potentially mythical "just pretending' version of Trump. Instead they relentlessly mock and/or fear-monger in response to the flow of the "just what it says on the tin" rhetoric, which somehow provokes them into this permanent pattern. 

Essentially this means that their riposte to all the scary nonsense is only of interest to his base and they take it as reinforcement, the part of scary that's a thrill ride. 

It really doesn't matter that Trump should be taken at face value if enough highly educated, successful individuals think he shouldn't be. They vote, they influence, and their position needs a counter-position.

Harris’s strategy of calling Trump a fascist is precisely calibrated not to win over moderate Republicans, however counter-intuitive that might seem.

Toxic Instruction Manuals

​You can argue, with little exaggeration I believe, that the distinguishing feature of the Quran compared to the other holy texts of the Abbrahamic desert delusion, is that it functions more or less explicitly as an instruction manual, at the collective level.

Within its pages are precepts relating to the aggressive treatment of non-believing communities.

Christian imperialism, by contrast, is firstly rooted in the adoption of the faith as official religion by an actual pre-existing empire. But then we can see that the Spanish and Portuguese urge to conquer in the name of their faith was also partly an inversion of the stalled Jihad on their peninsula, a 'Reconquista' which sought to turn the tables and borrowed some of the Islamic fervour.

Later European imperialists tended to be Protestants, in other words, people who were determined to take the 'good' book as a private and collective instruction manual, no matter how apt it might be for such a use. 

Colonialism is not baked into Bible in the same way it is into the Quran — Jesus is on many levels an anti-violence, anti-imperialist figurehead — but there are both readings of the Old Testament — with its intimations of ethnic exclusivity — and readings of the New, that tend to map onto a more 'capitalistic' outlook, which might be said to compensate for the lack of more explicit directives to subjugate. 

 

 

Sherwood, Season Two

As with Shōgun, it was hard to appreciate just how good the second season of Sherwood was until the last few episodes had run.

The slow build works differently here though. James Graham begins by setting up a series of adjacent narrative bubbles populated with well-defined characters. This makes the initiating drama feel a bit like a British working class soap opera. Quite soon however adjacency becomes intersection, at first in a manner which feels a bit arbitrary, but once the major themes are applied, and the various deeply 'torn' characters have stated their inner conflicts, it all starts to feel that much more satisfying, rather like a classical play.

There was a stage where it appeared to be a blend of the original Sherwood with Roberto Saviano's Gomorra...in a good way.

My one serious objection was perhaps the presence of Robert Lindsay, a creepy left wing extremist playing a creepy right wing extremist. The overall effect was more creepy than I really needed. (With hindsight I suppose we now realise that when we watched him in Citizen Smith, we were laughing AT him and not with him.)

The story also tiptoes (I think necessarily, but nevertheless usefully) around another issue: are individuals with learning difficulties always innocent, and does the visibility of the cognitive impairment affect our judgment on this matter?

There were enough loose ends at the conclusion of part six to suggest that we will yet be treated to a third season.

Dual (2022)

The 'futuristic' conceit here is that the dying can provide comfort for everyone that cares about them by having themselves duplicated.

 

The replacements then have a short period in which to 'imprint' on their originals. Karen Gillan's character Sarah, faced with terminal illness, opts for this process, and the indebtedness it implies, but from the outset there are some imperfections in the replication, minor defects are that are nevertheless taken as significant improvements by Sarah's mother and partner. 

And then all of a sudden Sarah is no longer dying, and the law only permits one version of her to persist. 

Sarah is clearly not especially good at life, but believes it is worth fighting for anyway. Her double possibly possesses the personality tweaks necessary to be a bit better at it, but the duel (a word I think has been cunningly camouflaged in the title) will ultimately undermine her more self-confident approach.

Dual is billed as 'Science Fiction', but like the scenarios in the novels of José Saramago, it isn't really, for this take on cloning is less of a projection of technology, and more of a fable where the key anxiety might well be social: life in Finland (where it was shot), or at least a society where everyone seems to be interacting in an affectless, deadpan fashion, on the edge of abject misery. 

 

War and Violence

I will not actively support the War in the Middle East or any other war or armed conflict for that matter. 

Regardless of the underlying motivations, all violence enmires the partakers in a lasting debit of evil which can never be offset. Once these things are done, there is no undoing them — committing any kind of evil in the name of good is an ethical compromise one is obliged to regret on some profound level, regardless of circumstances. 

However — and this caveat comes from my own life experience of growing up in peacetime in a household with parents and other close relatives who had not been given much choice in the matter,  around a generation before my own birth — when a group of people constituted as a national group with a clear collective identity and the impulse to live freely and fairly, are faced with the existential threat of hostility from a neighbour who consistently expresses that animosity in a broadly anti-liberal, fascistic, annihilation-centric fashion, such being the situation of both Ukraine and Israel today, I will not criticise their urge to self-defence (or even their chosen methods), at least not without checking the baggage of my own peacetime privilege at the cloakroom beforehand.

As a child, my instincts were essentially pacifist. But these ideals were time and again tested by the facts of recent European (...World history) and I found myself having to compromise, mentally. Not the same compromise of the person who actually pursues uninhibited violence as a means of self-defence, but enough to know where I would stand should I ever face the same situation as my immediate forebears.

I would still be encouraging myself to constantly evaluate the terms of that compromise, based on my understanding that evil is in a sense always more lasting than good.

Lopsidedness

Each of the key libels the deranged Left levels at Israel has been fabricated in order to impose an inverted logic on one of the significant features of a century-old conflict between competing nationalist aspirations which, in combination with others, render it existential from the Jewish perspective. 

These are the essential pair...

‘Genocide’

Not only does this represent a fairly deliberate appropriation of Jewish historical experience and a reworking of the ‘blood libel’, it rather crucially diverts attention away from an obvious lopsidedness in the conflict: Israel has had the means to commit genocide and has not*, its enemies have demonstrated their genocidal tendencies at every available opportunity, they have only lacked the means. 

Hence this war has always been an existential struggle for Israel, for the Jews can only really end it by submitting to national dissolution and genocide, where by contrast, the Palestinians could end it almost right away by taking a territorial deal in return for recognition as a nation state and an end to all hostilities. 

‘Apartheid’

This is one of the most pernicious, and not just because it suggests that Jews themselves are beholden to a retrograde, racist ideology.

Those who use it have to be aware that non-Jews in Israel benefit from civil and political rights which Jews could never enjoy in a Muslim-majority country, no matter how weakly fundamentalist. 

Should there one day be peace, with Jewish and Arab states living alongside each other, it will still remain likely that there will be far more Arabs in Israel than Jews in Palestine. 

This is another critical disparity at the heart of the conflict, because it underpins the very need for a state where Jewish safety and self-determination is preserved, and also explains why the ‘right of return’, which Palestinians have refused to surrender as part of any peace agreement, poses such a significant threat to the population of Israel as currently constituted.

* Even if they have tried, they have failed, for the population of Gaza has increased by over 2% since October 2023, with 50,000+ live births according to internationally-recognised statistics.

Columbus Day II

 

October 12, 1992 was marked in San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, by the toppling of a statue of Diego de Mazariegos, conquistador. 

 

Resistance to foreign conquest is seemingly coded into the Mayan DNA. They gave the Spanish their first and bloodiest of noses when the first shiploads showed up on the mainland, and a pattern of often violent push back continued into the twentieth century.

This had a couple of interesting features which are worth remarking on. Firstly, during the Caste Wars — ending 1901 — the insurgents were as likely to target their rage at the Hispanic population — those who'd long been busy blending, assimilating — as the Criollos of 'purer' European descent.

Secondly, although they seemingly rejected the non-'original' civilisation imposed on them, they typically did so in the name of the Middle Eastern prophet Jesus of Nazareth, who had kind of tagged along for the ride with Columbus. (A socially-radical Jewish thinker fully committed to a non-violent approach to imperialism…but they sort of skipped that rather significant bit of his teachings. You won’t find ‘by any means necessary’ in the New Testament.)

These Maya retained the sense of having been politically and culturally overrun, while filtering out the promise of eternal reward, which they regarded as the best part of the whole bad situation.

Contrast the indigenous peoples of North Africa and elsewhere who were conquered by the Arabs from the seventh century onward.

 

 

The recent Mohammed Salah British Museum meme has a relevant double-edge to it, as the joke is both that much-loved Mo is standing before small pieces of Egypt taken by light-fingered British colonialists, while at the same time he may be unaware that he is himself the representative of an invasive culture that came and stole the entire place; The Full Montu, so to speak.

In effect, he's one of those long term assimilators that the Mayan indigenous resistance would likely have singled out for punishment.

Arabs have spent far more of recorded history as colonial oppressors than as the victims of incursions from outside, rolling out conquests which featured many of the most repellent features of imperialism wherever or whenever it has occurred, such as brutal mass enslavement — particularly of black Africans — yet they consistently get a free pass on this today, not just in western academia, but also in the history that is generally understood in the conquered populations, like Egypt or indeed, Persia.

It seems rather obvious that it will remain difficult to engage in rational debate about some of the most pressing issues in our contemporary world until that blanket is removed.

Islamism, Jihadism and so on are leftovers of that first 'inflationary period' after the Caliphates formed, but they are also, crucially, products of contact with twentieth century totalist systems of thought which first emerged in Western Europe.

A grown up approach to this threat to the liberal democratic way of life requires us all to ditch the hackneyed models and simmering hatreds peddled by the intellectually-bunged up ideologues of Left and Right.

As I mentioned in part one, the first Iberian arrivals in this hemisphere came with a package of intentions and plans for the future. Religious and secular motives were often intertwined and difficult to unravel, both then and now, yet it had always been an abiding feature of European Christianity since the religion had been adopted by Constantine, that the majority understood on some fundamental level that a separation of the things of Caesar and the things of God was not only possible, but desirable — and the Maya appeared to have grasped this concept when they started cherry-picking which parts of forced Europeanisation would need to go.

There have been and will continue to be theocratic variants of all the monotheistic faiths, but Islam will always be the most problematic in this respect, because there are ultimately no real protections for lay society, with the political and spiritual far harder to prize apart.

This was perhaps Mohammad's great innovation, and its legacy has been complex. It possibly explains why many North Africans see themselves as 'Arabs' in a manner that would seem bizarre indeed to Mexicans or Central Americans, who would never refer to themselves as 'Spanish', not even the ones who have retained a fully European DNA admixture.

They appear unable to conceive of themselves as peoples still living with a legacy of colonial conquest, because they cannot find a way in their minds to separate the political imposition from the religious one.

So, unlike the Maya, they'll rarely conclude that while it is a good thing to have adopted a foreign religion, all the other stuff that came with it needs to be considered with a less worshipful frame of mind.

And alongside this cultural constraint, we see how the Arabs and their useful idiots abroad consistently blame the West in their rhetoric for all forms of colonialism, which helps maintain the smokescreen.

Their task has been made easier by the fact that, more than any other time in history, Western intellectual life is now dominated by cultural streams gushing out of the USA, and Americans are often by nature, historically myopic and somewhat self-obsessed.

 

Columbus Day I

Ignorant of the historical narrative beyond the report which had landed on his or her desk, the Reuters hack responsible for this topical piece for 'Columbus Day' appears to have concluded that the evidence now points to the Admiral having been Spanish rather than Italian, which was almost certainly not the case. 

Anyway, the basic finding of the study, that Columbus was a more or less closeted Sephardi Jew, has always been an open secret (though not of the Keir Starmer sort.)

Cue all the 'stealing other people's countries' comments from the would-be wags.

Yet, if there is an historical parallel that is worthy of consideration it would be the context in 1492 of a mass expulsion and persecution of Jews, leading to the extremely urgent need for a safe haven.

The Colón family had in all likelihood moved to Genoa a century earlier after the pogroms of 1391, the beginning of a wave of massacres and forced conversions in Spain and Portugal which targeted the Sephardi population.

 

As he sought investment for his project to go east by heading west, Columbus's key ally at the court of Queen Isabella was Luis de Santangel, the royal treasurer, himself a secret Jew, who at one stage offered to fund the voyage out of his own pocket. 

 

On April 17 1492 Columbus signed up to the Capitulations of Santa Fe which would limit his rule over any territories accumulated to his own lifetime, thus also limiting his ability to limit state interference, but with Santangel, he continually pressured King Ferdinand, and in the end sailed with the right to hereditary enjoyment of his 'discoveries', the key to his hidden agenda.

A group of Jewish youngsters came along for the ride, children of wealthy conversos in Spain who had helped provide much of the funding. They looked upon the Admiral as their Moses, which fitted nicely with his own self-image.

This group would be instrumental in the settlement of Jamaica, eventually achieved by Columbus's son Diego along with a chap called Juan d'Esquivel — also a converso — who had captured Melilla on the North African coast in 1497 and helped establish it as another part of the empire which would be exempted from the expulsion order.

Jamaica’s role as a Sephardi outpost and sanctuary would persist, even after the island was taken by Oliver Cromwell.

The sudden urge to push out into the wider world, from a relatively ‘backward, part of western Europe, which would lead to this (ultimately inevitable) contact between 'Old' and 'New' has typically been explained as a blend of 'Gold, Spices and Christians' e.g. one off personal enrichment, steady commerce and a chance to come up upon Islam from behind by locating hitherto isolated Christian communities long rumoured to exist in Asia.

But the repressive policies of the Catholic monarchs targeting both Muslims and Jews, seemingly led the latter to reach the conclusion that they rather urgently needed a new homeland abroad where no one would expect the Spanish Inquisition. 

 

And it turns out that this fourth spur to conquest would be almost as significant as the other three.

The Substance (2024)

 

There are almost too many things to say about Coralie Fargeat's movie, that one hardly knows where to start.

And I am conscious that there are perhaps a few things one ought NOT to say, especially as I believe I am personally acquainted with a few people who might be inclined to take this deal, or at least some version of it.

Beyond all the more gender-specific themes, this worked for me most as an examination of selfhood, provoking questions like: 'What would it be like to interact on some level with the person we were a generation (or perhaps two) ago?' And, 'How weirdly unfamiliar would this individual be now, leading to potential hostility?'

And this part of the film's payload was where I detected some weaknesses, where I wanted a bit more than mere metaphor, which was working for me extremely well in all other areas. At Cannes The Substance was recognised for the director's own screenplay, yet this was for us the least excellent part of it.

V also griped a little about how extreme the finale became. I didn't mind that so much, but it did whiff a bit of one of those OTT endings that emerges because the writer has not quite encountered a more elegant manner to wrap things up.

Speak No Evil (2024)

 

An excellent film, based on a the gag that if you ever come across some British people abroad and they say you must come and visit them at their home in the countryside some day, something has to be seriously off!

McAvoy has always creeped me out a bit, but here he becomes the consummate on-screen avatar of all the darkly manipulative individuals I have ever rubbed up against — individuals who seem to actively seek out 'polite society' where they will always be on the edge of weird transgressions committed with a twisted smile, and who appear to like nothing more than making sure that acquaintances, especially new ones, join them in doing whatever they want to do, particularly if there is an element of danger, or indeed of weird transgression, involved.

Killer Heat (2024)

Monozygotic twins have a Chekhovian quality, the Russian author having established the principle that if you mention something with an obvious narrative use in your story, you are required to have it used later on. 

 

And how else does one use identical human beings in a whodunnit/love-triangle ‘mystery’ like this?

 

Jo Nesbø’s source novel had a different title which one could almost take as an additional spoiler, ramming home the message that readers were not going to have to tax their brains all that much to get to the bottom of things. 

 

This adaptation is a truly terrible movie, yet at times entertainingly so. Joseph Gordon-Levitt wanders around Crete in a Roland Garros Panama doing his routine (and associated background monologue) as the wounded, alcoholic PI, and it all feels pleasingly spoofy, almost like a comically noirish take on Inspector Montalbano.

There's this one scene where the self-mockery seems to come out of the closet, so to speak, where a supposedly Greek character drops a remark about how the modern Hellenes have a word for people who act as if they are Greek, at which point it must already have popped unaided into the heads of many Greek-conversant viewers, because this is a Mediterranean island where locals seem very thin on the ground, certainly locals with significant speaking parts.