SFIFF 52: 'Hooked' and 'Bullet in the Head'.

'Hooked', the first feature by Romanian director Adrian Sitaru, is a sublime blend of realism and haunting mystery, shot in three weeks and made on a very low budget with astonishing actors who worked for no pay. A bickering couple leave Bucharest for the day to have a picnic in the country, but they accidentally run over a young prostitute on the way and, after some more disagreement and confusion, agree to hide her body in the woods, so that their illicit affair will not be exposed. When the apparently deceased girl (Ana/Violeta) miraculously revives, the couple improvise an unlikely explanation and then agree, while their guard is down, to share their picnic with her. The rest of the film convolutes in ways both comedic and disturbing, as Ana/Violeta (we are not sure which is her real name, if either) plays one half of the couple off against the other in a series of fascinating dialogues in which the girl quickly discovers and exploits the fissures that threaten their relationship. Clarity and mystery proceed apace, as Ana's appearance begins to take on the character of a fated visitation, while the web of lies in which the couple is snarled becomes exposed and they start to hurtle toward some sort of inevitable denouement. The dialogue is delightful; nimble, light, conversational, and at the same time freighted with the load of meanings and half-meanings we scramble to put together as the couple themselves scramble to understand ... it made me slightly light-headed, as if I were drinking champagne, or contemplating the flight of a butterfly, and all this without the benefit of understanding the host of double-entendres and in-jokes which, according to the producers who participated in the Q and A afterwards, had Romanian audiences in stitches. Further, there is deft deployment of symbols at certain junctures which create patterns, nodes and faultlines in the landscape of the film, adding layers of possibility to an already sophisticated study in relationship. The total effect is one of haunting depth in the center of something perfectly light and amusing. There is the matter of the 5 lei, the price of a beer, or of a prostitute; the sharing of the beer bottle, the bonus bottle discovered in the river; the strange payment at the end - for what, by whom, we can hardly say. Then there is the angling, the hooking, the fish/bird dichotemy, the possible drowning. And the strange, blurry, shuffling perspective at the close of the film drops us suddenly, but uncertainly, into the body of this stranger who ultimately conjures for herself a sort of mythic aura, as if she is a djinn or fairy of unknown character and possessed of dubious motives who is nevertheless caught in the slightly demonic loop of a weird Romanian folk tale. It is such a perfect film, there is very little can compare with it, but it did bring to mind the stunning 2007 'Runaway Horse' from German director Rainer Kaufmann; both films focus on the problems of relationship, both bring together the strange and the familiar in charming, disarming ways. The latter is more sophisticated, and very funny, but Kaufmann has several features to his name and a budget, as well as the benefit of an already realized story in the original novella by Martin Walser. Sitaru is barely out of the gate, and has written as well as directed this brilliant debut.

At the other end of the pleasure spectrum, that is, in the utterly dismal category, is Spanish director Jaime Rosales' horrible 'experimental' offering, 'Bullet in the Head'. Billed as a thriller which "will leave you stunned and gasping for breath", this quasi-silent film was the most banal, the most dreary and infuriating thing I have ever had the misfortune to see. For the first half of the film I employed my otherwise 'stunned' brain in counting the number of people who walked out - over 50, which left about 400 diehards gazing uncomprehendingly at the screen, fidgeting in our seats, whispering, chuckling, sighing, and rattling bags of chips, as we came to terms with the fact that we were not about to start enjoying this film any time soon. The short version of the catalogue blurb did not prepare us for the fact that the entire film was shot, to use Rosales' words, in the manner of "a wildlife documentary", with telephoto lenses and no audio equipment, or rather, only a short-range mic which picked up the less-than-interesting ambient sounds of traffic in the north of Spain. Lips were seen to move, but we did not hear a word throughout the entire film, except at one crucial part, by which time we couldn't care less. And to compound our misery, there were several long stretches where we were treated to the view of the back of our character's head; some minutes at the ATM, for example, at a magazine kiosk, a cafeteria and, in a dully ironic twist, at a listening station in the record store. These scenes were punctuated by more lively segments where people ate sandwiches and wandered around, drove, parked, met other people and said things. Then the 'main characters' shot a couple of cops in a parking lot and drove away with their colleague. It was a sort of cross between your worst Andy Warhol film and John Cage's 4'33", only more boring. Don't bother with this one.

Mission and 18th

Laura Restrepo - 'Delirium'

"Delirium' has earned lavish praise from such luminaries as Jose Saramago, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Harold Bloom, and Vikram Seth, not to mention a cluster of glowing reviews in the book sections and periodicals. Saramago goes so far as to call it "a truly great novel, of a kind that you seldom encounter any more", while the Washington Post Book World is almost overcome with emotion, describing it as "stunning, dense, complex, mind-blowing ... This novel goes far above politics, right up into high art."

These people have to be smoking something very exotic, because 'Delirium' doesn't even come close to deserving such accolades. It is an entertaining diversion, a snack between meals, the sort of book you might finish on a long flight and think no more about. Its narrative technique (split perspective) has been used to great effect elsewhere; in Faulkner, for example, where the change in perspective turns things inside-out and completely alters the moral landscape. Here it is used to no effect whatsoever. One character simply tells the story, another deliberately does not tell the story, a third is removed from the main plot altogether, and the fourth tries to find out what happened. This fourth is Aguilar, a horribly conventional character (as are they all) who comes home from a trip to find his wife has gone crazy. He spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out what happened to her. We could call him the 'good guy'. Agustina, his wife, is similarly cliched, mad but beautiful, with her long black hair and her perfect white skin. Her ex-lover, the money launderer Midas, is almost laughable as the caricature crook and chauvinist pig; his sections struck me as the most implausible, not so much in content (there is actually some interesting analysis of how the old Columbian oligarchy is complicit in the affairs of Pablo Escobar's drug cartel) but in style - his unlikely epithets ("Agustina, doll"? "Agustina, kitten"?) and ridiculous mix of crass, slangy eighties streetwise jargon with literary flourishes for the reader, utterly unbelievable. And minor characters are just as bad; the lovely but remote mother, the authoritarian and homophobic father, the beautiful and sensitive gay brother, the kind aunt with a secret, etc etc. Nobody strays an inch from these narrowly defined characteristics, so there is no complexity, no nuance, no ambiguity, no real humanity to speak of.

Restrepo is a well-known and widely admired political activist in her country and elsewhere, and it is likely that her story is, on one level, an allegory of Colombia's brutally tragic recent history. Agustina is the broken soul of her country, driven insane by the cynical machinations of her people, staggering about helplessly in a forest of worn-out and ineffectual religious symbols, but within reach of redemption through the wholehearted commitment of the 'man' who loves her. Aguilar's struggle to put together the pieces of her past, and his ultimate discovery of the diaries of her grandparents, supports the idea that Columbia's people must reconcile with their own sordid history if they are to have any sort of a future. The problem with this reading is that the allegory is unrooted in social detail, and so its floats in the imagination like an ancient romance. The reader wants more social and political exposition: it is not enough to hear that Midas listens to Paul McCartney and E.T. is playing at the theatres; we need to get a thorough sense of the heat and fear and corruption and poverty and hardship and loss and madness at large to understand that this is a story about Columbia and the struggle to save its soul. Without that, the characters are unsupported in their roles, and because they are so narrowly conceived to begin with, they appear finally as ciphers in a sort of elaborate wish-fulfillment.

Nor is the novel's language particularly inspired. There has been some fuss over the 'loveliness' of Restrepo's words, but they struck me as prosaic and dull, with occasional flashes of color and the odd surprising image, but nothing to get excited about. I liked the line "later in life I learned that it's a kind of law that the dead always lose their shoes", but only for purely personal reasons. It is possibly a problem with the translation - Saramago might have read the original Spanish (he is Portuguese) and Garcia Marquez most certainly must have - but it's impossible to say for sure if you are restricted to English.

The best writing was to be found in the descriptions of madness; how it manifests by clotting and dividing in the mind, how it is transferred from one generation to another, not by nature so much as by nurture, or the lack of it. The character of Nicholas Portulinas, Agustina's grandfather, is more interesting than the others, not more complex, but somehow more tenderly imagined, as are all the scenes of Agustina's childhood. The scene where Portulinus disappears is exquisitely handled. It is not a beautiful passage, particularly, but it is sensitive to very subtle aspects of psychological functioning. We are made to see exactly how denial in a dysfunctional family works to overthrow the mind of its weakest link, the child-witness. It is heartbreaking. If only Restrepo would concentrate her skills in this department and leave the slangy, pop-culture, pot-boiler elements alone, we might get a novel worth thinking about for longer than it takes to write this review.

Quote: Eugene Ionesco

"Nothing will be forgotten. It's all quite safe in a mind that needs no memories."
Eugene Ionesco 'Exit the King'

Grass

Les Murray - 'Fredy Neptune' and the poetry of the vernacular.

It isn't fashionable to tease out the biographical threads in a work of fiction, but it is usually interesting and, in the case of 'Fredy Neptune', Les Murray's epic adventure or 'novel in verse', it is really helpful. Which may or may not be a criticism of the work - perhaps it lacks pathos, or is incomplete or obscure in some way and requires grounding in the life of the poet. If so, Murray has turned potential artistic failure into a virtue, since 'Fredy Neptune' is an account of one man's extreme dissociation from his body in response to shock, and a lack of pathos probably says more about that condition than any more deeply inhabited sense of the character could do. It is precisely Fredy's predicament that he feel his own absence, or not-feel his own presence; he can no more inhabit his body than we can, and so he must experience his story as we experience it - sprawling, episodic, picaresque, teeming with detail, with events and characters, but unmoored, chaotic, even, perhaps, untrue. And just as Fredy turns this predicament to his own advantage by exploiting his unnatural strength and oblivion to pain, so the poet employs the condition of objectivity, of hovering somewhere out of or above one's own experience, as a means of addressing a condition which must otherwise remain obscure, an experience which has to do with un-experience and which borders on the unreal.

This is the condition of the human being in a state of profound shock. We encounter it in the literature of the Holocaust, and also in the documentary analysis of victims of torture, of war and dispossession, and of sexual abuse. It is to these numberless victims that Murray tunes his poetic sensibilities, and a brief glance in the direction of his biography reveals a harrowing personal acquaintance with tragedy, beginning with the bloody death of his mother when he was 12, and continuing through phases of guilt, alienation, rage, sexual humiliation and self-loathing compounded by poverty, a sort of contemporary spiritual katabasis which connects umbilically to the fate of his protaganist.

It is difficult to say whether the poem would have been more powerful had Murray actually invested his character with this psychological charge. He would certainly have lost the distancing effect of his objectivity, but in so doing would have lost that paradoxically accurate way of describing Fredy's predicament. It is not enough, though, to learn in one brief stanza early on in the narrative that Fredy loses his feeling after witnessing the immolation of a group of Armenian women in the War, although the scene is shocking enough. It is likewise only revealed on the penultimate page that salvation lies in his ability to forgive not the perpetrators of the crimes he has witnessed, but their victims - the Aborigines, the Jews, the Armenian women, all women - a fascinating revelation of his state of mind which could have been used to greater effect earlier in the narrative.

That being said, the story is saved from its own psychological occlusion, and the consequent drift we might experience as readers, by its exquisitely empathic use of language. Here is the heart of the matter, the feeling that was presumed lost, hiding out in the open so to speak, in a fiercely politicized, populist vernacular; elastic, defiant, energetic, funny, and true. It contains, by virtue of its authenticity, the secret of what it was to be undivided, one with one's culture and one's people, and so it functions as a vessel, an ark in which the numb and unknowing Fredy sails until he reaches the state of reunion with his body proper. The only other modern equivalent use of common language would be Joyce's Ulysses, but Murray's epic is far more accessible and ordinary and thus ultimately more democratic, which is of course the point. Ordinary language as poetry, the real poetry, rooted in unselfconscious (and therefore whole) human life, fresh and uncontrived, with the abundance of natural metaphors and ingenious compressions characteristic of all authentic vernacular. It's liberating to think of common language in this way, revolutionary even, in the sense that Chaucer or Dante were revolutionary. From the first line of the poem, "It was sausage day/on our farm outside Dungog" Murray pronounces his faith in the uncommon beauty of the ordinary, and it buoys up the entire narrative. There is an absence of pretension and a pitch-perfect ear for truth in representation that argues passionately for Murray's cause without resorting to political invective. Socialists get very short shrift in this people's document. There are the "honest men who thought you could box this what? solidarity, and have it to share with all people" and the "dishonest buggers out to corner it for their lot". The unionist in the pub foolish enough to start "preaching ... in the name of Worker-" is cut short by another who

"... lifted up a face gnawed blue

by the dog Rum and growled out Fucking work!

Who's proud of lumping shit at the bottom all his life?

...Not a man here is proud that this is the best they could do,

donkey work for blacks' wages grafting your guts out till you're old

and life's passed you by and the posh smarties pick you by your hands

your voice, your skin, your cheap tog, your fat old missus.

Work's the penalty for no brains. Dignity of labour

my hairy date. Bullocks don't skite about their yoke."

Murray knows his people. It is not simply in the rhythms and eccentricities of their speech, but in the specificity of detail, the dust and grit of their stories:

"This day, Cos and Betty and me and Laura were sitting

up in King Edward Park above the city. We each told a story.

Betty told how when she was a station cook

she had one boss who made her take the raisins

and sultanas out of any cakes that went stale

and use them again. He was deaf, but you got his attention

by saying Twenty-five quid, as soft as you liked, around him.

While she was there, her baby used to sit on a blanket

right near the kitchen door, on the homestead verandah.

One day Betty saw a wet circle round the baby's head

and she puzzled over it. A gleamy wet ring above the ears-

and then her blood ran cold because she knew what it was:

a python had tested to see whether it could fit over the baby.

They swallow big prey by drawing themselves over it

like a stocking. Apparently the child had been too big ..."

It is intimate and true without probing the interior, and beautiful, and funny, and horrific by turn.

Murray has said that he considers poetry to be "the only whole thinking", and so it is proper that his craft contain the dislocated soul of his wandering Odysseus as it has probably at critical moments contained his own. Poetry holds the body abandoned by the mind until the mind understands it is still possible to live in its body, that the body has not died. It is the sort of religious thinking that belongs to the pre-Enlightenment belief in the resurrection of the whole person; there is no Cartesian dichotemy of body and soul in poetic thought, and no modern alienation patched with political rhetoric, only the one reality, the "single heart" which is free of judgement and capable of acceptance.

Fredy longs to return to his body and his home, but he cannot forgive the 'police' of the world or indeed their victims, since it is the victims who are the site of his identification-trauma and the reason for his existential refusal. Until he can accept what he has witnessed, he is left alone in the bombed-out shell of his body to act the part of an embodied self, which is why he is found in so many guises and performance scenarios, serving time as circus strongman, Hollywood extra, German seaman, and so on, a kaleidoscope of roles which share the one fact of their being a complete sham. He ricochets from one situation to the next like a pinball in a machine, taking in every damned and damnable episode in the history of the first half of the twentieth century, starting with the Armenian massacre and crashing through the Depression, poverty, racism, police brutality, the rise of Nazism, and two world wars. It is only his numbness and alienation that enable him to bear witness to this madness, which is ironically the outcome of modern alienated man's quest for meaning in a world without God or the sanctity of the ordinary.

And so it is an act of Grace that permits reconciliation in the end, not to be reasoned or understood beyond the injunction to "forgive God ... Judging Him and sensing life eternal ... are different hearts. You want a single heart, to pray. Choose one and drop one" but, significantly, to be experienced at last. And experience, true to reality, is both ordinary and poetic, "sore and heavy and bogged in chairs", which is where we leave him and where storytelling is no longer necessary or adequate, because in reality "there's too much in life: you can't describe it".