Film review: Pilgrims (Lithuania, 2021)

I’m circling back to writing up the last of the Lithuania-related cultural events that I experienced last year, with a Lithuanian psychological thriller that I saw in October at the second London Baltic Film Festival, held at Riverside Studios. I could have watched several Baltic movies over the course of a weekend, but in the end only made it to only the one screening, which was followed by a Q&A with writer and director Laurynas Bareiša.

Pilgrims (Pilgrimai) is a gritty 92-minute film, which was screened in Lithuanian with English subtitles. It was shot during lockdown on a low budget, in and around a B&B that is featured in the film, and was selected to represent Lithuania in the Best International Feature Film category at the 2023 Oscars. It won the Orrizonti award for Best Film at the Venice Biennale in 2021.

The movie focuses on Paulius and Indre, who meet up again to re-examine the violent death four years before of Paulius’s brother Matas, who was also Indre’s boyfriend. The loss has inevitably tarnished both of their lives, and Paulius is determined to avenge his brother’s death. However, as he is physically hampered by a broken foot, Indre agrees to drive him out to the small town where Matas died. Gradually, the truth emerges as the pair revisit their past and confront their shared trauma. 

I couldn’t work out when the movie was set. There was an overwhelming sense of grey, and the characters had terrible clothes and distressing hair cuts. The palette was murky, and there were a few equally murky moments of humour, prompting some muted laughter from the audience at times. There was no soundtrack, no music to guide the story along, which added to the feeling of gritty realism and general discombobulation. Although the film clearly had a violent theme, thankfully none of that violence is shown on-screen.

The movie is emotionally restrained too. Although the director has spoken of his emotional connection with the concept of buried trauma, and buried crimes that fail to make a visible mark on their physical environment, the actually movie was stripped of feeling, at least until the end. This sense of detachment was an obstacle to my engagement with the story; at times it felt like a long car journey through the wet Lincolnshire fens in late autumn, which probably isn’t a great advert for anything.

Book review: Dust by Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (Kenya)

The UK’s Observer described Kenyan writer Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s 2014 novel Dust as “the most important novel to come out of Africa since Half of a Yellow Sun“, but I struggled with it.

The book opens in Nairobi, Kenya in 2007, where a young man, Odidi, is gunned down, leaving his family devastated by grief. His sister Ajany and his father Nyipir bring Odidi’s body back to the family’s (surely symbolically) crumbling colonial mansion, which he left behind many years before. Bereft, Odidi’s mother Akai runs off into the desert, while Nyipir begins to build a cairn to mark his son’s death. Meanwhile, a young English man, Isaiah Bolton, arrives at the house unexpectedly, trying to track down his father.

With these events, memories and past events are stirred up, with hidden family secrets emerging amid the violence, rebellion and politically motivated assassination thaat featured in Kenya’s history. A Los Angeles Review of Books article points to the novel’s importance in illuminating the post-colonial “period of Kenyan history during the Moi era (1978–2002) that has been silenced, a time when genocide was being perpetrated against the Luo peoples.” 

The narrative flitted back and forth, to a time prior to the births of Odidi and Ajani, and to a much wider cast of characters and locations. This sometimes felt incoherent, and combined with the novel’s poetic language, this dreamlike structure meant that I struggled to follow what was going on at times.

I feel that the fault here is mine though, in finding it difficult to engage with a book that uses a method of narrative that I’m less comfortable and familiar with. The fragmented structure was surely used as a means of reflecting on Kenya’s traumatic past, and revealing family secrets and hidden truths in a gradual and deliberately disjointed way.

Film review: Moonlight (USA)

I recently rewatched Moonlight, which I first saw on its cinema release, shortly before it famously and deservedly beat La La Land to scoop Best Picture at the 2017 Oscars. On both viewings I needed my tissues.

With an all-Black cast, set in and around the notorious Liberty Square housing project in 1980s Miami, this immersive, moving film is divided into chapters: (i) Little, (ii) Chiron and (iii) Black, and follows the life of a young black man through three distinct chapters of his life, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, using three different actors. Written and directed by Barry Jenkins, with a searing score by Nicholas Britell, the film was adapted from a work by Tarell Alvin McCraney. It is beautifully shot, with cinematography by James Laxton.

As a young child, Chiron (Alex Hibbert) is persecuted by other boys, but is rescued from a braying pursuit by Juan (Mahershala Ali), a kind and stabilizing force who also happens to be a local crack dealer, ironically supplying Chiron’s increasingly drug-addled and neglectful mother Paula (Naomie Harris). Juan takes the almost silent Chiron to eat, eventually coaxing out of him: ‘My name is Chiron. People call me Little’; people, his peers, also call him ‘faggot’.

Anti-hero Juan becomes a sort of father figure to the vulnerable Chiron, inviting him into his warm, comfortable home, and, in one achingly gorgeous scene, resonant of a baptism or the scene of the Pieta, teaching him to swim in the undulating, colour-saturated ocean.

The persecution doesn’t end, and as a late teen (played in this segment by Ashton Sanders) Chiron is subject to violent abuse at the hands of other teens, who see him as ‘soft’. Among his peers he has one (unstable and emotionally complicated) connection, with schoolmate Kevin (played in this chapter by Jharrel Jerome), to whom he confesses ‘Sometimes I cry so much, I feel like I’m just going to turn into drops’, and with whom he has his first sexual experience, in a liminal beach scene.

By the third chapter, ‘Black’, Chiron (played now by Trevante Rhodes) has transformed from a quiet, sensitive boy into an adult with a quietly menacing exterior, the embodiment of a sort of performative hyper-masculinity, ripped body, teeth behind gold grills, making his money ‘trappin’ the blocks’. But driving a smooth drug dealer’s car (reminiscent of Juan’s way back when), with its BLACK305 plate, as Cucurrucucú Paloma plays on the soundtrack (Wikipedia tells me the title is an onomatopoeic reference to the call of the mourning dove, while the lyrics allude to love sickness), we can see in his upcoming reunion with Kevin (now played by André Holland) the potential for connection and redemption.

The film’s excellence comes not only in its beauty but in its avoidance of cliché, despite focusing on themes that have often become tired tropes (the coming-of-age tale, bullying, the dysfunctional childhood), as well as more unfamiliar elements (how many films have you seen about growing up black and gay?). Jenkins, who has noted that the film ‘is partly about the way I grew up’, references other directors worldwide as influences on his work, notably Mexican director Carlos Reygada, French director Claire Denis, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien and fellow US director Charles Burnett.

TV review: Drama series The Newsreader (Australia)

Australian series The Newsreader, broadcast in the UK on the BBC during 2022 and still available here on iplayer, is an entertaining and pitch-perfect pastiche of ’80s newscasting, created and co-written by Australian filmmaker Michael Lucas.

It is definitely the best TV I’ve seen so far from Australia (admittedly not loads!). It stars Sam Reid as Dale Jennings, an ingenue news reporter, and Anna Torv plays emotionally complex newscaster Helen Norville, a more senior colleague.

Both are chasing career success in an alpha-male dominated environment characterised by misogyny, homophobia and angry tirades from boss Lindsay Cunningham (played by William McInnes). And amid the contemporaneous news reports (Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster), is a character-driven romance between Dale and Helen. But this is not a straightforward love story.

Helen has mental health challenges, but Dale is dealing with psychological conflict too, as he wrestles with his sexuality, with the viewer – and Dale – uncertain whether his feelings towards men mean that he’s bisexual, or that he’s gay and fighting a deep sense of denial. There are no easy answers to the characters’ dilemmas, but the script rings true, and the main performances are backed by a convincing cast of supporting characters.

The Newsreader won big at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts Awards, bagging prizes for best drama series and best lead actress. A second season is on its way.

Book review: Practicalities by Marguerite Duras (France, 1914-96)

Translated by Barbara Bray

Marguerite Duras is best known for her novel The Lover, but I have a lovely Everyman’s Library omnibus edition that also includes her War Time Notebooks and Practicalities, which is a collection of musings and aphorisms on literature and life, including her alcoholism. It was compiled from spoken conversations that she had in her 70s with writer Jérôme Beaujour: “At most the book represents what I think sometimes, some days, about some things“.

I was keen to read Duras’s non-fiction after loving Deborah Levy’s recent three-part memoir of sorts, including the wonderful Real Estate, which I reviewed in 2021. Levy cited Duras as an influence, so I was expecting to love her reflections just as much as I did Levy’s. I didn’t though – I found Duras a less likeable voice, not least because time has made some of her statements seem uncomfortably harsh, although there are some statements that seem to reflect universal truths.

She notes that for all the opportunities and benefits of feminism, “I seriously believe that to all intents and purposes the position of women hasn’t changed. The woman is still responsible for everything in the house even if she has help … And even if she has changed socially, everything she does is done on top of that change.”

And: “Being a mother isn’t the same as being a father. Motherhood means that a woman gives her body over to her child, her children; they’re on her as they might be on a hill, in a garden; they devour her, hit her, sleep on her; and she lets herself be devoured“.

Her revelations about her drinking are shocking in their blunt openness about the extent of her problems with alcohol:

“Drinking isn’t necessarily the same as wanting to die. But you can’t drink without thinking you’re killing yourself. Living with alcohol is living with death close at hand. What stops you killing yourself when you’re intoxicated out of your mind is the thought that once you’re dead you won’t be able to drink any more.”

The titles of other chapters include ‘The telly and death’, ‘Animals’, ‘Eating at night’, ‘The pleasures of the 6th arrondissement’ and ‘Hanoi ‘, and her musings are thought-provoking and interesting if at times discomfiting.

Lithuanian art installation and opera review: Sun & Sea

By Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte and Lina Lapelyte

In the summer I went to see something unique at an out of town South-East London theatre, the Albany in Deptford. Sun & Sea, a modern Lithuanian opera and art installation, won a Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019, and is currently touring in its English as well as its Lithuanian iterations. The performance I saw was virtually sold out.

A perfectly mocked up beach was populated by people lying on towels in swimwear, the occasional dog, children playing with buckets and spades, people throwing a ball back and forth. There were about 30 performers on the beach, of varying shapes, sizes and ages. Then the singing started: some of the singers were lying on the sand, some seated in deck chairs. Sometimes there were solo voices, or two voices, other times all the voices were heard together.

The libretto laid out a tale of complacent, entitled holiday makers, living parallel lives, and blissfully – or actually often slightly grumpily – ignorant of a fast-approaching environmental disaster.

I was given a timed slot to enter, so I arrived in media res, and the opera unfolded in a cyclical loop, so I saw the beginning after the end. That didn’t matter. It was mesmerizing.

The day was oppressively hot during the heatwave that endured for weeks in London last summer, which added to the real sense, in the sweaty gallery above, of being a voyeur at the seaside. Whether the same vibe would be felt in Vilnius Taxi Park in December is an open question.

Book review: Baron Bagge by Alexander Lernet-Holenia (Austria, 1897-1976)

Translated by Richard and Clara Winston

Austrian author Alexander Lernet-Holenia’s 1936 novella Baron Bagge has been difficult to find in English translation, but has recently been re-issued in a beautiful hardback edition by Penguin Classics, with an introduction by rock memoirist Patti Smith. The English translation by Richard and Clara Winston dates back to 1956.

The book tells the story of Lieutenant Bagge, fighting against Russia with Austro-Hungarian forces, who are overpowered and forced to retreat over the Carpathian Mountains. Their seemingly deranged commander orders them to head north to carry out reconnaissance, in ominous weather, with a Russian assault anticipated at every turn.

They eventually set up camp in a small village, Nagy Mihaly, where the inhabitants seem strangely celebratory, and utterly unfazed by the Russian threat. On his arrival there Bagge immediately meets Charlotte, a passionate, very forward young woman, blonde and pale, who captivates him, and with whom he falls in love. This is where Bagge’s recollections become ethereal, even mystical. The twist in this haunting tale is increasingly obvious, but beautifully done.

The book was banned and burnt by the Nazi Government for its distinct lack of commitment to military values.

“How, I thought during the dancing, can any of this be possible? … for hours we had not seen a soul but the three hanged men; we had spent the night in a village in which I constantly had the feeling that death waited outside; then we had gone though a hard battle which I had thought no more than one out of five of us would survive; then again not a soul to be seen; and now we had come to a town stuffed with people who obviously had nothing by amusement on their minds, where no one talked about the Russians, where the mere mention of the Russians was a cause for laughter…”

Art review: M. K. Ciurlionis (Lithuania)

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911) was an artist and composer who remains something of a national hero in his native Lithuania. Although his music is known worldwide, his art has rarely been exhibited outside Lithuania. However, an exhibition of his work opened at Dulwich Picture Gallery in London in September last year, and runs until 12 March.

Dulwich Picture Gallery is our local gallery, and has set something of a trend in holding pioneering exhibitions of the work of European artists who are little known beyond their own national borders, such as Norwegian artist Harald Sohlberg, who I wrote about in 2020.

Čiurlionis (pronounced Churlyoniss) was a symbolist artist, who is now considered one of the earliest pioneers of abstract art, as well as a contributor to art nouveau.

Lightning, 1909, tempura on cardboard

Although Čiurlionis died in his mid-30s, he left behind over 400 pieces of music and over 300 works of art and, according to Dulwich Picture Gallery, he was “engaged with the idea of our relationship with the celestial and the cosmos.” He was influenced by Lithuanian folklore (Lithuania was pagan and pantheistic before adopting Christianity in 1387), as well as science, religion and philosophy.

Fantasy (The Demon), 1909, Tempera on cardboard

Lithuanian culture and language were long repressed under Russian rule, until after the Russian Revolution of 1905, and Čiurlionis was a founding member of the Society of Lithuanian Art in 1907. In the following year he wrote of his hope for the establishment of a ‘House of the Nation’ – and that museum, the Kaunas-based M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum, has lent his works to the Dulwich Picture Gallery.

Book review: Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald (1944-2001, Germany)

Translated by Anthea Bell

Cult classic Austerlitz was my newbie Classics Club choice in January. It was W. G. Sebald’s final work before his unexpected death in 2001. Although he lived and worked in England from the late 1960s, he wrote all his novels in an archaic and elaborate German, but oversaw the English translations. Austerlitz‘s elaborately crafted passages mean full stops are rare, with one sentence covering up to nine pages.

To begin with I found the book, which I had been assured was a work of unparalleled genius, to be impenetrable. I read endless pages describing the unnamed narrator’s interactions with a man named Austerlitz, who he keeps running into, and who initially spends a lot of time describing various train stations of Europe in painstaking detail.

I was bored, but the text was strangely hypnotic, and eventually our narrator runs into Austerlitz in London, where they resume their conversation as though it had never paused (though their last meeting was years before). Austerlitz reveals childhood experiences, including his discovery, on the early death of his parents, that he had been living under an assumed name, Dafydd, for his entire remembered history.

In middle age Austerlitz finally confronts his past, discovering that his birth parents were Czech Jews; travelling to Prague and onto Paris with a companion he finds that in 1939, at the age of five, he was sent to Wales on the Kindertransport, and there taken in by his austere adoptive parents. On his travels he begins to recover his lost knowledge of the Czech language, along with shadowy memories.

Austerlitz moves through space and time, through dreams and ruined buildings, like a somnambulist, gradually unearthing the collective and personal horrors of his own past.

“I lay there in my semi-conscious condition for several days, and in that state I saw myself wandering around a maze of long passages, vaults, galleries and grottoes where the names of various Metro stations [….] – and certain discolorations and shadings in the air seemed to indicate that this was a place of exile for those who had fallen on the field of honour, or lost their lives in some other violent way. I saw armies of these unredeemed souls thronging over bridges to the opposite bank or coming towards me down the tunnels, their eyes fixed, cold and dead. Sometimes they manifested themselves in one of the dark catacombs where, covered in frayed and dusty plumage, they were crouching on he stony floor and, turning silently towards one another, made digging motions with their earth-stained hands.”

Sebald is famed for his works of ‘spectral geography’, and his work is interspersed with mysterious and atmospheric grainy black and white photos of people and places. (Bizarrely, The Spectator in a review of Austerlitz describes Sebald as a ‘liar’, as a photo purporting in the text to show Austerlitz as a child was in fact found by Sebald in an English junk shop, and is labelled as such on the back. Apparently the pathologically literalist journalist was unfamiliar with the concept of fiction.)

This strange, haunting, mesmeric book might be the best book that I have read about the Holocaust, a work of fiction about the defining tragedy of the 20th century.

Book review: The Endless Steppe by Esther Hautzig (Lithuania, 1930-2009)

I hadn’t come across this classic of children’s literature until my son was assigned it as a year 8 (age 12-13) text. Published in 1968, The Endless Steppe is a memoir of Esther Hautzig’s childhood experiences during WWII, when she and her family were exiled to Siberia.

Hautzig was born in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania (then part of Poland). She had a comfortable early childhood in a large, upper middle-class, happy Jewish family on a tree-lined avenue and, as she recalls later, her wardrobe was bursting with pretty dresses.

In 1941 Vilnius was annexed by Soviet troops, and Hautzig was transported to exile in Siberia, along with her parents and paternal grandparents, leaving behind her extended family of aunts, uncles and cousins – a fact that would haunt the family thereafter.

After a gruelling train journey in cattle trucks, and months imprisoned in a labour camp as ‘capitalists’, amnesty was granted to Polish citizens on Soviet territory under the Sikorski–Mayski agreement, while war continued to rage across Europe. Hautzig, her parents and her grandmother were allowed to look for accommodation of the most basic kind outside the labour camp (their first ‘home’ being one wall of a small, shared hut that accommodated the entire family).

For five years they made a life of sorts, living hand to mouth on the brutal – but sometimes beautiful – Siberian steppe; Hautzig’s grandfather, meanwhile, had succumbed to illness in another forced labour camp.

This account is immensely readable, and Hautzig convincingly recaptures a child’s voice. Despite the desperate circumstances, once permitted to attend the local school the young Hautzig has a child’s concerns: fitting in with other children at her Russian-speaking school, entering school contests, aspiring to get hold of presentable clothing amid impossible poverty, or trying to find the resources to attend a rare showing of a movie when the chance arises.

There are many moments of humour and levity in this memoir, which nevertheless doesn’t shy away from presenting the personal horrors and losses of war. I can see why my son’s school selected it as a non-fiction text. It is absorbing, presenting historical information in a matter of fact way from the perspective of a young adolescent.

After the war the family returned to their home town, and Hautzig later emigrated to the USA to study. Far less well known than Anne Frank’s diary, this is an unexpectedly accessible insight into the life of a teenager impacted by the devastation of war.