Film

Mary Harron on the RBP podcast

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In this episode we welcomed the wonderful Mary Harron, director of cult movies I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho. After a brief digression on dating Tony Blair at Oxford, the Canadian relived her memories of the punk rock scene at New York’s CBGB club, including her interviews with the Ramones and Talking Heads for John Holmstrom & Legs McNeil’s pioneering Punk magazine. Mary also talked about her friendship with ZE’s Michael Zilkha and her long fascination with Warhol and the Factory. Along with her hosts, she heard clips from Martin Aston’s 1987 audio interview with Tom Verlaine, prompting her recall of his seminal band Television and a general discussion of 1977’s classic Marquee Moon album.

Mark & Barney paid heartfelt tribute to tragic blues-guitar hero Peter Green, ruminating on what made the Fleetwood Mac man so much more emotional a player then his UK blues-boom peers. They also said goodbye to the hilarious CP Lee, former frontman with Mancunian satirists Alberto Y Lost Trios Paranoias. After bringing Mary’s directorial career up to date – with an aside on the American Psycho soundtrack that afforded Jasper a chance to wax lyrical about Huey Lewis & the News – Mark selected his library highlights, including notable pieces about Brian Jones, Labelle, the Bush Tetras and, erm, the Knack. Jasper rounded things up – and brings matters back down to earth – with remarks on pieces about “superstar DJs” and Stock Aitken Waterman teaboy Rick Astley…

A Waits in your ear: Happy birthday, Tom

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Happy 70th birthday to Tom Waits: That’s me in the middle of David Hepworth & Mark Ellen, clutching the paperback of my Waits biog Lowside Of The Road… and about to start the highly enjoyable Word In Your Ear podcast last Monday. Thanks to those major dudes for inviting me… and also for inviting the excellent Alexis Petridis to talk about Elton “Me” John.

river

 

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Knotted into consternation,

weight of words and burdens

and injunctions to do better.

On a dime a song

floods into me and washes,

softens knots and nodes

and liquifies rigidity of

what I think I am,

splays me forlorn and

floating down this river:

Wider than the sea,

the sound of Hepburn

and her huckleberry friend

and me.

Judd Apatow’s Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling

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LAST NIGHT I finally came to the end of Judd Apatow’s extraordinary four-hour film about the late Garry Shandling – the so-called Zen Diaries of said comedian.
As the director of There’s Something About Mary read aloud a letter that Shandling had written to the older brother who’d died, as a child, of cystic fibrosis, I completely lost it – I broke down and sobbed. I’d come to the close of a remarkable, hilarious, neurotic life haunted by the loss of Barry Shandling (a death never explained to the little brother) and felt overwhelmed by compassion for the witheringly brilliant creator of the meta-show about host Larry Sanders.
It made me realise how much Shandling and his Comedy Store peers – a particular strain of American-Jewish humour that slices through to the heart of the human condition – have meant to me. And it prompted this short distillation of gratitude for the sheer fearlessness of Shandling, Seinfeld, Silverman, Larry David – and of Mel Brooks, Joan Rivers, Jackie Mason and the many who came before them. Out of such pain has come the purest comedic joy I’ve ever known.

 

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Always I’m in awe of them:

unsparing men and salty women

lancing my illusions

and my gentile self-delusions.

No hugging and no learning,

nothing left to lose:

ancestral agony of pogroms

and the terrors of the Zyklon B.

The balls it takes to work that space,

illusion of a mastery that masks

the backstage whimper of a fevered need:

  “You think they liked me?”

“Man, you killed out there.”

Rediscovering Rublev

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This week I finally found time to watch Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 epic Andrei Rublev, recorded on TV a few weeks ago. I hadn’t seen it for many years and now wonder if I ever saw it at all. The only mental snapshot I retained of it turned out not to be in the film at all, though it did involve a church. I also retain a snapshot of Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia, which, again, I haven’t seen for years: a long shot of rainwater on a puddle in a ruined building. I’ll doubtless discover that too was a false recall.

There’s a lot of water in Andrei Rublev: the slow studies of wet stuff that make people think of Tarkovsky as a kind of pantheistic mystic. The most beautiful one – and the most mystical – is of the young apprentice, shot with a Tartar arrow, who (in slow motion) falls into a stream, followed shortly after in the water by a small, swirling cloud of white paint: the paint, one is forced to assume, that leaked into another stream in one of the film’s earlier scenes.

I’d forgotten the many horrors in Rublev, which wasn’t shown in Soviet Russia until 1971, and then only in censored form. It remains a brutally real depiction of life in medieval Russia: gouged eyes, burned limbs, panic and devastation wherever you look. Yet at the centre of its long narrative sweep is the still, Christlike visage of the icon painter Rublev himself, striving to square his humanity with the reality of power, violence and religious conditioning. (He refuses to paint a Last Judgement in the cathedral because he believes Christianity shouldn’t rule through superstitious terror.)

For all the film’s atrocities, there are as many moments of preternatural stillness and austere tenderness. Divided into chapters that jump forward in time, Rublev‘s only real thread is the haunted consciousness of its eponymous protagonist, who in one section takes a vow of silence that renders Anatoly Solonitsyn’s melancholy good looks even more despairing. (With a touch of perversity, Tarkovsky described the actor’s single-minded intensity as “demoniacal”.)

I remember thinking Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, was a pretentious travesty, so it’s nice to rediscover that Rublev, his second, is as beautiful, as meditative, and as visually thrilling as it is shocking and starkly unsentimental.

“Love bears all things, believes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.” Those magnificent lines from 1 Corinthians 13 – we hear them spoken in the film – turn out to be true after all.

 

Things to Come – A Francophile writes

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MY WIFE OFTEN mocks my penchant for austere Euro art movies. So when we went to see Mia Hansen-Love’s L’Avenir (Things to Come) at one of London’s inevitable Curzons, it felt like slipping into an old pair of espadrilles. I remembered liking Hansen-Love’s Le Père de mes enfants (2009) and figured – on the basis of the inevitable reviews by Peter Bradshaw et al. – that I’d like L’Avenir.

And guess what, I did. Apart from anything else, Isabelle Huppert was superb: bustling, unsentimental, alone and ultimately atomised. Yet I wasn’t entirely moved by her late-middle-aged losses, however many of them I’ve shared. That’s partly because her character (Nathalie Chazeaux) so effectively seals herself off from compassion, retreating for comfort into the pensées of Pascal, Rousseau and the many other philosophers whose work she teaches to her Parisian students.

But it’s also partly because L’Avenir felt familiar to the point of generic staleness: with a few changes of wardrobe and automobile, the film could have been made 30 years ago by, say, the great Bertrand Tavernier. The arthouse tropes were reassuringly non-Anglo-American: the endless bookshelves, the coffees and the baguettes, the jagged Alpine mountains and the Brittany coastline, the sardonic political banter à table.

En route home, my wife inevitably asked if I’d enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure. I’d admired it; it wasn’t pretentious; its absence of catharsis was, in many ways, admirable. But had it really just been another fix for my Francophile snobbery? Some residual belief that French intellectuels think more deeply about the human condition than Brits or Yanks do – even when all the pages of Pascal and Rousseau (or, for that matter, Adorno and Schopenhauer, who also get regular namechecks in L’Avenir) offer so little comfort to Hansen’s heroine?

In that connection, here’s a poem I wrote a couple of years ago about, well, my penchant for austere Euro art movies:

Art House

Plusher seats and fancier snacks,

Guardianista dreaming in the dark:

No popcorn here, no CGI,

just quiet scenes of bourgeois desperation,

suites in Paris or Milan,

the quaint and crumbly farmhouse,

tension and baguettes,

father, daughter, in a Citroen,

not even speaking.

Four-hour films without a single gun,

occasionally a breadknife raised in anger.

Haneke, Almodovar, Zvyaguintsev's The Return.

Films of slow release for middle-aged and middle-class,

waiting for catharsis as we crunch Wasabi nuts.