Review no 59: Capernaum, film by Nadine Labaki (Lebanon)

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

This is a beautifully realised but harrowing 2018 film, directed and co-written by Nadine Labaki, and nominated in the category of Best Foreign Language Film in the 91st Academy Awards. The film made the shortlist, although it eventually lost out to Mexican film Roma. According to Wikipedia, Capernaum (a word indicating chaos and disorder) is the highest-grossing Middle Eastern film of all time, and in China it became a surprise blockbuster, grossing over US $54m.

Zain (played by Zain al-Rafeea), aged about 12, lives in poverty in Beirut with his parents and several siblings, including his favourite sister Sahar. Zain is determined to protect his barely-adolescent sister from marriage to the predatory Assad, the family’s landlord. The fall-out from Zain’s opposition to this marriage, which is being arranged by his desperately poor, neglectful parents, leads the boy to become a runaway, seeking his fortune in a coastal town.

There he meets Ethiopian immigrant Rahil, who takes pity on him, and lets him stay in her makeshift, inadequate accommodation in return for babysitting her adorable baby son Yonas. However, Zain ends up taking on more responsibility than he imagined, and his life, already difficult, becomes even more so.

The action is inter-cut with a court room scene, and early on in the movie we learn that Zain wishes to sue his parents for allowing him to be born at all.

The film is unswerving in its documentation of poverty and the travails of streetwise, angry but ultimately well-meaning hero Zain, who tries with desperate resolve (Tramadol shot, anyone?) to keep the baby boy with whom he’s been landed fed and well, and to find some kind of future. The website IndieWire.com, whose reviewer really didn’t love the film, nevertheless found the film contained “the best baby performance in the history of cinema”, and it’s hard to disagree with that. Given the limitations on babies’ acting skills, the heart-breaking realism of the scenes featuring Yonas are quite staggering. Zain, too, is astonishing in his portrayal of an angry, hurt and hungry young boy, railing against the injustices of the world into which he has been born.

The relentless bleakness is softened by occasional flashes of humour, and by a more uplifting ending, which nevertheless reduced me to tears.

Review no 58: The Shadow King, book by Maaza Mengiste (Ethiopia)

AFRICA

*****

“What he knows is this: there is no past, there is no ‘what happened’, there is only the moment that unfolds into the next, dragging everything with it, constantly renewing. Everything is happening at once.”

The Shadow King, published this year, deserves to become an instant classic. It is an epic tale set around the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930s (which I didn’t know about at all). It initially took me a while to get into the book, which is a bit of a slow burner, and the early themes of the domestic subjugation of young women to powerful men – something that has been repeated endlessly throughout history – felt familiar.

As the writing gathered pace, however, it began to tell a lyrical and gripping tale of quietly resolute women, the casual, heart-rending cruelties of war, the endurance of memory, and impulsive actions that take minutes, hours or days, but can haunt us for ever. The writing is beautiful, and at times has a mythical feel, reminiscent of Madeline Miller’s powerful Song of Achilles, a huge favourite of mine.

The characters, even the most reprehensible, are nuanced and fully realised, with the depths that come with being human. We know these people’s losses, their loves and their darkest secrets. The book became totally absorbing, the sort of book that provokes a physical response: at times I could feel my breath quickening, the back of my neck tingling, tears pricking my eyes.

The action centres around three separate sets of characters, whose fates become intertwined. Although the set up sounds conventional, the writing is extraordinary and the plotting and structure are more ambiguous. Due to family connections, orphaned Hirut ends up as a maid in the home of Aster and her husband Kidane, who comes from a privileged patriarchal background, and in whom macho rhetoric has been instilled from his earliest years. When Italian forces invade Ethiopia, the family and servants flee, and Kidane begins to assemble a guerrilla army, supported and sometimes challenged by the strong, resourceful women of his household, who eventually find themselves taking up arms.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to Col Carlo Fucelli, a sadistic, truly despicable military leader, who takes a perverse pleasure in imaginative executions. The complex and flawed Ettore Navarra – a military photographer with the Italian army and the son of a Ukrainian Jew – is forced to record the horrific deaths ordered by Fucelli, becoming complicit in Fucelli’s actions, even as he is eaten up with fear about the terrible fates that might be meeting his family back home in fascist Italy.

Finally, the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie, is painted as a man guilt-stricken and broken by grief following the death of his teenage daughter. A man who turns his back on the conflict, seeking exile in England, and leaves his men fractured and struggling to rise against the Italian invaders, leaving the way open for the “shadow king” of the title to take his place.

“....she is Hirut, daughter of Fasil and Getey, feared guard of the Shadow King, and she is no longer afraid of what men can do to women like her“.

Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and although the book is a work of fiction, she writes in an author’s note of her great grand-mother, who enlisted in the Ethiopian army, and eventually went to war. She notes that “The Shadow King tells the story of those Ethiopian women who fought alongside men, who even today have remained no more than errant lines in faded documents. What I have come to understand is this: The story of war has always been a masculine story, but that was not true for Ethiopia and it has never been that way in any form of struggle. Women have been there, we are here now“.

Since reading the book in March, I’m pleased to see that it has been longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize for fiction.

Review no 57: Force of Nature by Jane Harper (Australia)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

Crime isn’t my natural preference when it comes to fiction. However, I came across a secondhand copy of Force of Nature in a charity sale, and decided to give it a go. I knew that Jane Harper’s first novel, The Dry, had attracted widespread praise and been a huge commercial success; a film adaptation is reportedly due to hit the big screen in 2020. And it soon became clear that Force of Nature gives The Dry‘s policeman-hero Aaron Falk a second outing.

Based on the accolades for The Dry, I was expecting genre fiction, but superior genre fiction. That is pretty much what I got. The novel is effectively a new take on the sort of Agatha Christie-style novel in which a mysterious happening takes place in a stately home, among a bunch of people in a confined space, and the detective’s role is to untangle it. But in this re-interpretation of the familiar formula, we have several people on a corporate bonding exercise in the Australian bush – and a missing colleague.

Characters are not developed deeply, and personalities are revealed through deeds, rather than inner thoughts. We get repeated reminders of the characters’ defining characteristics: the company Chief Executive’s self-consciously charming smile, Lauren’s blandness, Gill’s inscrutability, Alice’s meanness.

That omnipresent, everyday lifeline, the mobile phone, is not permitted on the trip, and even when someone has smuggled a phone along, it is unable to pick up a signal. In traditional, older-skool mystery stories you would often come across scenes in which the characters discover to their horror that the phone lines have been cut; this variation on the theme brings that convention firmly into the 21st century.

There are some unlikely coincidences in the relationships between characters. For example, upon their arrival in the bush, the colleagues are split into two groups, men and women.

The women’s group comprises CEO Jill; Lauren, who used to go to school with Alice (both of whom now have daughters of similar ages attending the same prestigious private school that the two women used to attend); and identical co-worker twin sisters with an unexplained difficult relationship. The men’s group is led by Jill’s brother Daniel, while (requiring a further suspension of disbelief) Alice’s daughter has been dating Daniel’s son Joel. Meanwhile, the company is already under investigation by financial branch police officers, whose contact inside the organisation has been Alice. It is Alice who unexpectedly disappears, and everyone has a motive.

Force of Nature is a undemanding and enjoyable page-turner, with a good sense of place, and the wild and inhospitable environment of the Australian bush is the perfect location for the action. However, at times the narrative lurches just that little bit too far into melodrama and, let’s face it, plain silliness:

“Whatever had happened to Alice, she was out in the open, exposed. Somewhere, beneath the howl of the wind and the groan of the trees, Falk thought he could almost hear a death knell toll.”

Review no 56: Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert (1881–1946) @ Royal Academy of Arts, London

23 February-25 May 2020

EUROPE

I went to see this at the end of February as coronavirus panic was starting to hit the streets of London, and people on the buses were beginning to wear faintly ridiculous face masks (given there were all of 20 cases reported in the UK at this point). So I was glad to enter the calm of the Royal Academy, with its polished wood and gilt edging. The Royal Academy would have no truck with pandemic panic.

I’d never come across Léon Spilliaert before. His art is beautifully atmospheric, with a limited palette, and the exhibition comprises a preponderance of moody night scenes, moody seascapes, moody domestic interiors that have prompted comparisons with Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916), plus a smattering of moody portraits.

By all accounts Spilliaert’s work became more cheery and used a brighter palate as he grew older and embraced family life, but his earlier life was characterized by insomnia, partly due to a chronic stomach complaint, restlessly somnolent night wanderings and, judging by the work on display in this exhibition, an overwhelming sense of loneliness and existential despair.

Just the balm I need, you might think, sarcastically. But the work on display here until May is really beautiful.

The Gust of Wind (1904)

Indian ink wash, brush, watercolour and gouache.

Spilliaert was born in fishing town and burgeoning holiday destination Ostend, moving to Brussels later in life; he is considered a symbolist painter. Spilliaert’s paintings evoke a sense of sometimes oppressive and otherworldly stillness, other times haloed by a kind of haunting luminosity. Meanwhile, monochromatic portraits of still and foreboding rooms are suddenly illuminated with brief flashes of colour.

Young Woman on a Stool, 1909

Indian ink wash, brush, coloured pencil, coloured chalk and gouache on paper

I bought from the exhibition shop a “mantlepiece card” of the mixed media work above, and my family immediately noted my predilection for paintings of “seated women with their back to us”, given my existing reproduction of a work by Hammershøi (‘Woman Reading’, below).

Regular readers of this blog will know that I like to include self-portraits where possible in exhibition reviews. This particular self-portrait was one of the more disturbing I’ve seen, and the pupil-less stare and bleached out colours evoke a sense of dissociation and estrangement, combined with the visual effect of a photographic negative.

Self-portrait with Blue Background (1907)

Indian ink wash, brush, pastel, coloured pencil and coloured chalk on paper, mounted on canvas

This exhibition is definitely worth a visit, and an expanded show moves to the Musée d’Orsay in France in mid-2020 (assuming the museums aren’t shut due to the coronavirus – at the time of writing the Louvre has just decided to close temporarily amid fears over widespread transmission of the virus).

Review no 55: Christine Craig, Mint Tea and Other Stories (Jamaica)

AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

A change is as good as rest, or so they say. So I decided to read a short story collection, and make a rare foray into the short form for the blog. I heard about this collection in a little radio snippet, and ordered a secondhand copy (the book sadly seems to be out of print, but used copies are readily available online). Christine Craig made her name as a Jamaican poet and children’s writer, and Mint Tea and Other Stories is her first (and I think only) short story collection for adults.

This collection of 15 stories, published in 1993, explores social pressures, the injustices of poverty and sexual politics. The stories are mainly set in Jamaica, and they are written in a well-handled mixture of standard British English and Jamaican Patois, and often focus on female disillusionment and the interior feelings of women. Mainly they are realist tales, with the exception of the eerily surreal Roots. Several stories benefit from a lushly described sense of place, and beautifully realised evocative passages:

“But recently, she had found herself sitting somewhere, perhaps with some mending on her lap, caught up in vivid memories of the past. The early morning smell of the mountains mixed with the light and birds singing. They came over her in a wave, so fresh that she would tilt her face up absorbing the smell of moist leaves and opening flowers and then the sound of Mother in the kitchen grinding coffee beans and she would wait for that smell to form itself, to come slipping out to make the signal that woke up the rest of the house.“

I didn’t love all the stories. Some were, frankly, a bit confusing, and left me wondering wtf just happened. However, I really enjoyed several, particularly The Cousin. In this short story, a quintessentially uptight, ageing, visiting English academic gradually unfurls and thaws in the Caribbean surroundings as he forges an unexpected connection with a local woman, the open and friendly Carmen – but is too set in his ways to know how to display his feelings and forge any true intimacy. Perhaps I could recognize that English stiffness and awkwardness, which genuinely does remain quite a widespread impairment!

Review no 54: The Attack, book by Yasmina Khadra (Algeria)

Translated from the French by John Cullen

NORTH AFRICA, MIDDLE EAST AND CENTRAL ASIA

Yasmina Khadra is the nom de plume used by veteran Algerian army officer Mohammed Moulessehoul, who now lives in France. He has written several novels that have been translated into English, including this one, The Attack, which has been shortlisted for a number of French literary prizes, including the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Femina (judged by an exclusively female jury) and the Prix Renaudot, and which won the Prix des Libraires in 2006 (becoming the first work by an Algerian writer ever to do so). The Attack, published in French in 2005 as L’Attentat, has subsequently been adapted for film and the theatre. It first appeared in English translation in 2006.

The premise is immediately gripping. Dr Amin Jaafie, an Israeli Arab, is a well-respected surgeon whose life comes crashing down around him after a suicide bomb kills 19 people at an eatery in the middle of Tel Aviv. When his wife Sihem is found to be among the dead, with her body showing injuries characteristic of perpetrators of suicide attacks, he is forced to confront the possibility that Sihem has done the unthinkable.

I didn’t really engage with the book, despite its enormous potential. Amin does plenty of anguished soul-searching, and the novel valiantly attempts to unpick what it is that would compel someone to carry out a suicide attack. However, in spite of all this, Amin still seemed fairly two-dimensional, and other characters even more so. I don’t know if this was due to the translation, which in some places seemed quite clunky, and I was itching to edit paragraphs like this for ease of reading:

“We leave the Jewish areas with our eyes straight ahead, as though we were wearing blinders. Don’t think about looking left or right or stopping for any reason at all; the smallest inadvertence could make everything go wrong.”

For a more nuanced and completely unputdownable exploration of somewhat similar themes, I would instead wholeheartedly recommend Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, which is a brilliant and powerful read.

Review no 53: Winterlust, Finding Beauty in the Fiercest Season by Bernd Brunner (Germany)

Translated from the German by Mary Catherine Lawler

EUROPE

“Great god! this is an awful place!” – Robert Falcon Scott referring to the South Pole

I received this book for my birthday in early February, and suddenly realised that if I was going to include a post about it on the blog I would have to finish it before the end of February for it to have any immediate relevance. Although spring can’t be far away now, it doesn’t yet feel like it here in London, where for two consecutive weekends we’ve been battered by wintry storms.

Winterlust is a fascinating miscellany of wintry facts and historical anecdotes, which has been a joy to dip in and out of over the last week or so, although it probably isn’t a book to sit down with and read from cover to cover. The pleasure of reading the book is enhanced by the fact that it is richly illustrated throughout with paintings and other images depicting winter scenes from throughout history.

I’ve dog-eared loads of pages so I can find some of the best stories and interesting snippets again. (I’m not precious about keeping books pristine, even beautifully produced books like this one. There doesn’t seem much point in owning books if you’re not going to really read them!).

Different chapters describe various different aspects of winter, both modern and historical, environmental and urban, whether as a gruelling test of reserves or a time of cosy indulgence. However, the focus is always on the pleasures, beauty and eccentricities of winter.

I learnt how the monotonous, snowy terrain of the Arctic can bamboozle travellers by messing with their sense of perspective. The explorer Vilhjálmur Stefánsson “was once convinced that a grizzly was lying in wait for him; it turned out to be a marmot“. Meanwhile, in the very cold European winters of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, people sometimes “woke up to realize that the nightcap they were wearing was frozen to the headboard of their bed“.

The book ends with a reminder of a favourite quote of mine by Albert Camus:

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer“.

Review no 52: Parasite, film by Bong Joon-Ho (South Korea)

FAR EAST, SOUTH ASIA AND AUSTRALASIA

****

This had to be my first choice for a film from South Korea, given the huge amount of media attention that has followed its multi-Oscar-winning release. As everyone now knows, the 2020 Oscars have been historic in awarding the Best Picture plaudit to a foreign-language film for the first time. No matter that Bong Joon-ho (who also won Best Director, and who co-wrote the film, which also won Best Screenplay and Best International Feature Film) had previously dismissed the Oscars as “not an international film festival. They’re very local.”

The British BAFTAs had, just days before, awarded Parasite the prize for best film “not in the English language”, while the overall best film prize had gone to British war film 1917. Hot on the heels of BAFTA best actor winner Joaquin Phoenix’s speech calling out the whitewashing of the film industry in the West, I did wonder if the Oscars panel had a bit of an “oh shit” moment, and swiftly scribbled out their first choice for best picture, and wrote in “Parasite” with Sharpie à  la US President Donald Trump and his (allegedly, possibly, maybe) doctored weather maps.

So, anyway, is Parasite any good? The short answer is yes. It’s extremely entertaining. As a social satire it is not aiming for subtle, and it is full of Quentin Tarantino-esque levels of violence and chutzpah, as well as dark humour. It has a few plot holes, but you’ll be so swept up in the action they don’t detract from the overall whole. I wouldn’t recommend it to my most squeamish friends though, as it definitely aims for the shock factor, which meant I ended up watching parts of it through my fingers.

The Kims are a family living in a crappy Seoul basement and only just about getting by, living hand to mouth and doing odd jobs. Their fortunes improve, however, when they meet the rich and credulous Parks, but their newfound good fortune is soon challenged by a disturbingly unexpected turn of events.

As an attack on middle class complacency and the depth of social inequalities the film works very well. The Kims’ ups and much more frequent downs notably prompt a searingly fatalistic soliloquy from Song Kang-ho (who plays the family patriarch), when they find themselves, quite literally, at the wrong end of a shitstorm.

The success of Parasite has resulted in widespread announcements of the imminent rise and rise of South Korean culture throughout the Anglophone world, and forecasts of a surge in the popularity of world cinema overall. We can only hope. As Bong Joon-ho himself is quoted as stating: “Once you overcome the one-inch tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to many more amazing films”.

Film Review: Atlantics (Senegal)

AFRICA

****

At the time of watching, this film was showing on Netflix UK (and, no doubt, elsewhere). Atlantics is a haunting evocation of lost love, exploitation and the experience of migration from the perspective of those left behind. It moves beyond the realism of those issues, however, to include a supernatural element. This otherworldly feel includes a love scene reminiscent of, but much less cringy than, that between Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in 1990 US film Ghost (though to be honest I remember crying buckets at that film, and then forcing a boyfriend to sit through it so I could cry at it again).

Atlantics is set in the Senegalese capital Dakar, and it opens with scenes of men employed to work on the construction of an futuristic monolith, who have yet to receive their wages. In despair, a young man called Souleiman and others make the decision to set sail for Spain, and the prospect of new opportunities.

Beautiful Ada (played with natural magnetism by Mame Bineta Sane – who had apparently never acted before) is in love with Souleiman, and heartbroken by his departure. However, despite pining for her lost paramour, she is pressurised to go ahead with her planned marriage to the rich, arrogant, sunglasses-toting Omar, who plies her with gifts, but who has nothing to offer beyond material comforts. Subsequent events defy rational explanation, and could be intensely silly, but the film’s beautiful and evocative soundtrack and dreamy film work carry the viewer along.

Repeated imagery of the rolling sea and waves, whether lapping or crashing, is gorgeously and widely deployed to suggest both the comforts and dangers of the sea, and the liminal space that it represents.

Released as Atlantique in 2019, the Senegalese film Atlantics was shortlisted for the Oscars in the category of Best International Feature Film (although it didn’t make the final selection). Mati Diop, the film’s director, who also co-wrote the screenplay, was the first black woman to compete for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival, where Atlantics received the Grand Prix.

Some reviews have criticised the slow pace of the film, but I felt this simply added to its atmospheric feel, and the realism underpinning this intensely enjoyable supernatural fable.

Review no 50: Jeanine Cummins, American Dirt (USA)

THE AMERICAS AND THE CARIBBEAN

****

This newly published US page-turner, to which the film rights were snapped up a full year before publication, has attracted huge amounts of publicity and not a little controversy. The novel was at the centre of a bidding war by nine rival publishers, which resulted in a seven-figure book deal for author Jeanine Cummins.

The book tells the story of a middle-class Mexican wife, mother and bookstore-owner, Lydia, and her 8-year-old son Luca, who are forced to flee their home town of Acapulco and attempt to seek refuge in the USA after 16 members of their extended family are gunned down by narcos at her niece’s quinceañera. The murders are carried out by local drugs cartel Los Jardineros, following a newspaper article by Lydia’s husband Sebastian, an investigative journalist who has recently profiled the cartel’s boss, the charismatic Javier Crespo.

The book is a vivid and compelling read, and a timely examination of the often treacherous and desperate migrant experience, at the mercy of terrifying journeys and the honesty (or otherwise) of people traffickers, although I feel it is not necessarily the “literary triumph” the book’s publisher claims it to be.

Cummins spent seven years working on the novel, and carried out painstaking research into the plight of migrants. I’m not entirely clueless about the opposing perspectives around illicit migration, but here in the UK I was somehow totally unaware that, with a passenger rail system almost non-existent in Mexico, migrants often feel compelled to ride illegally and dangerously on the top of freight trains or el train de la muerte (the death train) as they make their way north.

The book has sparked debate, as some critics have accused Cummins of appropriating the migrant experience from a position of privilege and for her own gain. The US book tour was even cancelled amid threats to the safety of both booksellers and the author, after charges that the publishers were marketing “trauma porn”.

Cummins herself has anticipated criticism, and in an author’s note at the end of the book writes “I worried that as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants …. But then, I thought, If you’re person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?” I think this is legitimate; the onus is on the reader not to confine themselves to this particular US author, since there are plenty of Latin American perspectives to discover too.

As Kenan Malik has recently written for The Observer: “let us not create gated cultures in which only those of the right identity have permission to use their imaginations.” He also quotes the writer Zadie Smith: “what insults my soul is the idea … that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally.”

Despite some implausibilities (in particular, it didn’t ring true to me that Luca was only eight years of age, he seemed much older), and some clumsy writing, American Dirt tells a gripping story. Notably, the book will be relatable for many in its depiction of the very normality of Lydia’s life before the tragedy that destroys her world. And its undeniable accessibility could mean that larger numbers of people find themselves sympathetic to, and better informed about, the human stories behind the impersonal immigration statistics that they hear in the news.

Some critics of American Dirt have said that they do not mind if white, US authors write about Mexican immigrants. What does bother them is when white, US authors write badly about Mexican immigrants. And despite some comparisons with John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, American Dirt isn’t a literary feat, with its at times clunky dialogue and an often ‘by numbers’ plot. What it is, though, is absorbing, informative, thrilling and genuinely moving.