Review: This Is Not A Film

A day in the life of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, This Is Not A Film is a portrait of oppression’s grey daily grind, its stifling tedium. At the time of filming, Panahi’s under house arrest awaiting appeal on a six-year jail term and 20-year ban on making films. The film is set in his home, recording and reconstructing his daily movements. We see Panahi strive to maintain his spirits and sense of self in the face of crushing circumstances.

Panahi, along with Abbas Kiarostami, is part of the Iranian new wave school of cinema, and both are heavily influenced by Italian neo-realism; Panahi acknowledges Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thief as ‘the most important film of his life.’ Of Iranian film, it’s largely only Panahi and Kiarostami’s translated films that are available in Australia. Kiarostami’s Taste of The Cherry is probably my favourite of these. I can’t remember its plot: all that comes to mind is a stark mountain landscape, a man walking around by himself, something being buried, a lump of sadness, and a soaring sense of beauty.

Like Kiarostami, Panahi tells small, humble stories about ordinary people, often women and children, who find themselves trapped in a practical and existential crisis. The cinematography is often rough and grainy, yet studied and beautiful. He uses amateur actors, and the focus is on the characters, depicted in a patient, tender but unsentimental way ­– you get a sense that Panahi is fascinated by human beings and their predicaments.

This Is Not A Film‘s credits describe it as an ‘effort’ by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi and documentary maker Motjaba Mitahmasb, referring to the filmmaking ban. It appears to be partly fictionalised, as the scenes correlate with each other and there’s a symmetry between Panahi’s plight and that of the character in the film he wanted to make. Fiction construction probably helped to condense Panahi’s lived experience into 75 minutes.

It begins with Panahi slowly eating a typically simple Iranian breakfast: pita bread, jam, and butter, and fiddling on his phone. He is filming himself with a fixed camera. The apartment’s aesthetic and tasteful surrounds, with large mounted paintings and photographs, shelves of books, beautiful Persian rugs and cheerfully coloured flower pots, speak of wealth, cultivation, and refinement.

Panahi phones his friend Mirtahmasb, asking him to come over because Panahi has ‘an idea’. We get a sense of the ever-present threat here when Panahi tells Mirtahmasb he doesn’t want to say too much about his idea over the phone, and not to tell anyone he’s coming over.

Soon afterwards Panahi is on the phone again, this time to his lawyer. We can hear the woman apologetically telling him that because his crime is political, none of her legal arguments will work. In the absence of international or domestic pressure, Panahi’s sentence will either be confirmed or only slightly reduced.

Panahi tells her it’s unlikely Iranian filmmakers will risk standing up for him, and suggests, laughing darkly, that he should pack his bag and leave it by the door, in anticipation of a probable jail sentence. Then he abruptly ends the phone call and stares at the camera for a moment.

‘I must remove my cast and throw it away,’ he says at one point, speaking directly to the camera. He is comparing himself to a character in one of his early films, The Mirror, a little girl on a bus who rebelliously declares she ‘doesn’t want to be in the movie anymore’, throws off the plaster cast she’s wearing on her arm, and gets off the bus.

When Mirtahmasb arrives, Panahi tells us he’s going to evoke the film he wanted to make. He checks with Mirtahmasb: there’s nothing in the court ruling that stops him describing his films, is there? He explains that the film is about an Iranian girl in a lower-class conservative family. She wants to study liberal arts, but her parents won’t let her, and they lock her up in her room. The symmetry with Panahi’s own dilemma is obvious.

Panahi’s concentration is absolute as he uses tape to mark out the miniscule size of the girl’s room, and positions a chair to represent her small window. There is a boy, outside, staring at the window, he explains, and the girl develops a relationship with him. Panahi’s favourite moment in the film is when the girl’s sister visits him and advises the girl to go with the boy. But in the end, the boy turns out to be a secret agent.

Panahi later shows images of some of his other films, explaining how his amateur actors often drive the emotion of the film by themselves, and describing the use of setting to convey emotion. At one stage he pauses, frustrated at the futility of trying to convey an unmade film through pure description: ‘If we can tell a film, why not make one?’

In another scene, Panahi, checking the internet, comments ‘everything’s blocked.’  It’s a good metaphor for the predicament of someone living in such a maze-like regime, where there’s a barrier to everything you try to do. The level of control exerted by the state is sometimes ridiculous, if not funny: reading a government website, Panahi tells us, ‘It says here that we [the government] directed the Berlin Film Festival.’

In much of the second half of the film, Panahi takes the camera himself, accompanying the good-looking young trash collector on his rounds. The guy’s reaction to Panahi appears to be a combination of the delightfully warm Iranian hospitality and politeness, and genuine awe at being in the presence of the artist. It turns out that he’s also completing a Masters in Arts research, with very little chance of being able to find a job in his field.

This Is Not A Film may have been a poor strategic move, but perhaps Panahi felt that staying human required him to resist, and share his experience with the world. As Mirtahsab says to him at one stage, ‘What matters is that this is documented. It matters that the cameras stay on.’ It’s unnerving, heartbreaking really, to see someone with such creative vision be prevented from realising it. In a less brutish world, Panahi would be remembered as an artist, not a political cause.

‘While some may think X, others may think Y’ – Return to Earth by Lally Katz

‘I don’t get it,’ a man behind me pronounced loudly at the conclusion of Lally Katz’s Return to Earth. I wanted to sock him for his lack of empathy – didn’t he understand that others might be reacting to the play differently from him, that their reactions were equally valid, and that they weren’t asking for his opinion?

But I also have a tendency towards visible bodily reactions and comments in movies, so this was a good lesson for me.

I’ve experienced a spate of bad (or what I think is bad) theatre since I moved to Melbourne (here’s an example), and was feeling negative about Melbourne Theatre Company, too. So they’re trying to attract young people, with $30 tickets for under 30s, but they don’t offer concession tickets. That said, you can go in at 9.00am and get Early Bird tickets for $18, admittedly a good discount on the usual $80. But then you have to sit in an awkward seat. At the last play we went to (which I found appalling), there were spare seats in better locations, and the ushers were quite reluctant to let us move – they asked us to wait until the lights went down.

But Return to Earth is really something. It’s about a Alice (she changed her name from Erika, presumably as part of some kind of awakening), a girl who’s been away for a while and comes back to Tathra, her hometown. The first scene sees her sitting with her mum and dad on the couch while they explain a game show they like to watch, one where you have to guess what answer the other contestants will give. That’s so wonderful, says Alice, wide-eyed. ‘You have to really understand humans.’

On her apparently long journey away from Tathra and into ‘outer space’, as it’s referred to, Alice has had ephiphanies that she’s now unable to communicate to anyone at home. Her parents are also apparently unable to understand why she was away for so long. But back in her ordinary yet absurd hometown, a place where the auto-repair and hospital are next to each other so that they can mend cars after accidents while people get treated and her mum is cross-stitching a doggie from a missing dog poster, she’s trying to find beauty in the everyday.

She wants to fall in love, and have a baby, and she romantically affixes herself to an emotionally intelligent fisherman and auto-mechanic. She wants to be a character in a soap opera, to be constantly shocked but never surprised at what people do. This comes across not as a self-aware coping mechanism in an uncomfortable environment, but an earnest imaginative endeavour. There is a genuinely poetic element to her imaginative fantasies and reveries, but by being so self-absorbed, as her friend points out, she misses the detail and texture of the reality that others are living.

In some ways, Alice is annoyingly oblivious, self-absorbed, and simplistic. But I think she’s a representation of a way of thinking more than anything, and I identified with her. I do that: romanticise things and get so wrapped up in my fantasies that sometimes I miss what’s actually happening, so that when I share my fantasy with people, they’re like, ‘What the fuck?’

There were a few awkward moments, parts where you could see the director’s (or writer’s?) manipulations and constructions too obviously, and it was a bit jarring. For me, most of these moments involved the inexplicable antics of Alice’s slightly insipid niece, who had cancer. But overall, I was amazed by the sophistication of Katz’s perceptions about people and their tensions, and the idea of the pull of a romanticised fantasy world versus the sometimes mundane (and often, nothing else) realities of home and family.

My friends suggested we go for a drink afterwards to analyse the film, and I almost didn’t want to – wanted to keep it to myself. It turned out that one liked it and the other didn’t, thinking Alice’s character was insufficiently developed. At some stage last night, we got to talking about reviews, particularly reviews about consumer items, and how, in an attempt to tell people whether or not something will appeal to them, they often use some kind of variation on ‘While some may think X, others may think Y.’ This would probably be a good template for a review of Return to Earth, but I’m not going to write it.

Review: Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

‘What twenty-seven-year-old Johan Harstad has written is quite plainly a work of genius,’ claims a recommendation on the cover of Buzz Aldrin: What Happened To You in All the Confusion? My inner cynic was immediately suspicious of such effusive praise. But the Norwegian author’s novel has done well: it’s been made into a TV series and the rights have been sold in over ten different countries.

Mattias, the protagonist and narrator, is a gardener at a local nursery, delivering flowers to the dying. He’s excellent at most things he does, and also happens to be an extraordinary, blow-you-away singer. But Mattias is desperately afraid of attention. He wants to be useful but forgotten: ‘a smooth-running cog in the world’.

It’s an interesting aspect of the human condition, the tension between wanting to avoid attention entirely, being happy to do good work unseen, and seeking recognition. Mattias is at the extreme end of the spectrum. His desire to vanish is all-consuming and destructive,  leading to relationship breakdown and mental illness. In this respect, his fate echoes that of his idol, Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon, who also suffered from the pressure of being in the limelight.

But there are no psychological revelations here. Mattias’s condition is explored in a flat, predictable manner; through repetitive internal dialogue, rambling passages extolling the virtues and dilemmas of Buzz Aldrin and other indispensable sideliners, and obvious plot twists, like Mattias losing it when a journalist tries to take his photo.

Perhaps this is how those eternally vexing personal dilemmas play out in real life: as the annoying voice in your head’s echo-chamber, the hang-up that you’re somehow attached to, but that you’d be better without. But Buzz doesn’t illuminate this predicament in a believable way.

Mattias breaks down when Helle, his girlfriend of 12 years, dumps him, and he loses his job. On the way to the Faroe Islands, where he’s reluctantly agreed to sing with his friend’s band, he loses consciousness and wakes up to find himself alone on the island with his face squashed in asphalt.

After wandering around confused for a few days, he’s picked up by a kindly psychiatrist called Havstein, who takes him back to his halfway house, an alternative psychiatric facility. Havstein assures Mattias that he’ll be there for a while. This seems kind of creepy, and for a while I wondered whether the novel was going to turn into some kind of thriller.

As it turns out, Havstein does have his own issues, but the halfway house, more homely commune than institution, becomes a place of healing for Mattias, and its inhabitants a second family. Yet despite these people being seemingly crucial to his personal development, we never get to know them at all. They are only constructed as types, a supporting cast to his emotional journey.

We are given little signs about the characters, including pop culture references, but it’s difficult to piece these together. Enen, for example, Mattias’s best friend at the facility, is insatiably interested in what other people do, listens only to the Cardigans, and when unwell, used to travel around on buses waiting for strangers to fall in love with her. But these indicators don’t give you a coherent sense of her personality.

The sparse characterisation may be an attempt to convey distance and the sense of not knowing someone even though you’re close, or the author may have intended to evoke Mattias’s fear of getting entangled. But given that Mattias’s friendships with the Faroe Island inhabitants are how he overcomes this fear, breathing more life into them would have made sense.

Buzz feels like it’s taking place at a distance. It might be because the characters don’t seem like anyone you know, or might conceivably know. It could also be the translation, Mattias’s oddly detached voice, or the uneasy discord between the very concrete, prosaic elements of the plot and its more colourful, imaginative aspects.

Mattias narrates in fluid, restrained, poetic fragments, and in the end, it was the grace of the prose that carried me through. There are some unexpected moments, too – like when Mattias matter-of-factly picks up a self-help book from the airport without expecting too much from it, and concludes that it’s not too bad, because at least it has a simple, useful message. But in general, Buzz’s problem is that while we’re often told how Mattias is feeling, we’re never there with him.

Cross-posted from Killings blog.

At Home With Julia: OK to fold laundry to

‘I thought it was alright. The start was hard to watch, I would have changed chanels but i was folding laundry and the remote was like 2m away. When the indipendants rocked up in the one ute it picked up nicly and I will proboly watch it next week to see if I like it again. Its not great TV but its alright to fold laundry too and thats alright by todays standerds.’ : Christopher, commenter at The Drum on At Home With Julia.

Hehe.

I’m usually reluctant to hold comedy to the same standards of civility as more earnest endeavours. As viewers, it’s in our interest that comedians walk provocatively close to the line – that’s part of what makes them funny – so of course, they’ll occasionally step over it. In my experience, the best comedy is daring and startling, shedding light on situations which are so subtly ridiculous that laughing at them makes you feel like you’re part of an in joke.

At Home With Julia does not do this.  I have to admit that I didn’t take an objective mind to it. I think it’s pretty lame and obvious, if not irresponsible, to make a show about Julia’s home life – seriously, can you really not think of anything less obvious? Can you imagine a show depicting John Howard in his PJs making sexual advances to Jeanette?

Some say the show will be good for Julia because it ‘humanises’ her. Well, aside from the fact that it actually makes her look like an ignorant twerp who can’t even pronounce Barack Obama’s name right, these continual demands for a warm and personal Julia are getting a bit old.  How about we just judge her on how she governs? Um… oh… well, maybe…

I’m such a hedonist I was prepared to let go of my feminist misgivings if it was actually funny. As Christopher points out, some of the actors’ mannerisms were spot-on, and there were a few jokes of an ‘ok to iron the laundry to quality. But in general, the plot, dialogue and jokes couldn’t have been more unimaginative. Julia as a kind of political incarnation of Kath and Kim? For whom serious political negotiations involves having the independents over to dinner? Tim Mathieson as a downtrodden house hubby, striving to get in shape and frustrated because Julia can’t get home for ‘Date Night’?

Can you imagine the writers coming up with their ideas? ‘Yeah, I think this will make a really good plot and stuff, because like, you know, Tim’s a hairdresser, and Julia’s a woman in power! So we can, like, show the reversed gender roles.’ I feel sorry for Mathieson. As Annabel Crabb so succinctly argues here, Gillard’s not the only victim of sexism. Why do people find it so hard to accept the idea that a guy can be both ‘masculine’ and a hairdresser and housekeeper? Perhaps the writers were trying to poke fun of gender stereotypes, rather than reinforce them, but that’s not clear.

In the end, Tim does what Julia couldn’t or wouldn’t do: get tough and angry with the independants, a confrontation that finally convinces them to back down on an imports issue, and accept him as a ‘good bloke’. He saves the day by reasserting his manliness: as an aggressive saviour.

*More thoughts about sexism against Gillard here.

Crying in cinemas

I went to a day-time session of Jane Eyre on my day off, surrounded in the theatre by choc-top eating schoolgirls whose teacher told them sternly, ‘Make sure you don’t get hysterical when Mr Rochester comes on; remember that there are other people in the cinema.’ Haha, as if – I’m sure they’ve got access to way better eye candy than Mr R.

I loved Jane Eyre,  but reflection, I don’t think it was that good. I liked Jane’s acute, strong, slightly ethereal voice; the slightly claustrophobic, feverish tone; and the redemptive story of romance. But these things are all just (weak) reflections of the book’s strengths; the movie didn’t offer any fresh interpretations or emotional amplifications. Also, while there were some electric moments between Jane and Rochester, at times the depiction of their relationship seemed insipid or overly frivolous. But the absence of friends whispering their discerning post-movie critiques in my ear allowed me to ignore these minor criticisms and cultivate a non-critical, cooing internal dialogue, i.e., ‘Wasn’t that lovely dear? Yes, oh, it was. Such a romantic story, isn’t it? Oooh yes dear.’

Being alone also allowed for completely unrestrained sobbing during the most romantic scene, when Jane returns to the blinded, bearded Rochester sitting under a tree with his cane. Admittedly, Rochester looks slightly ridiculous, more like a feral forest protester than someone who’s genuinely been through hard times. But when Rochester feels Jane’s face and says, ‘Is it really you Jane?’ and they embrace, you know they’ll be together forever, and it’s cheesy but irresistibly tear-jerking, although that said, I looked around the audience and the schoolgirls didn’t seem that moved.

When you cry at a movie, are you crying for the characters or yourself? I was talking about this with my sister yesterday, who’s visiting from Egypt. We’d just watched another film, Beginners, and were checking in with each other about whether we’d cried. We agreed that what makes us cry isn’t a pure empathy with the characters, but the way their plight reminds us of our own. So choking up during Jane Eyre‘s happy ending, I was thinking, ‘Oh, I want that kind of romance for myself!’ rather than ‘I’m just so happy for Jane and Mr Rochester.’

My sister and I also agreed that we feel more comfortable crying when we’re alone. Even when it’s only my sister with me, I still stifle my sobs a bit, whereas when I’m by myself, it’s all on. Is this because crying’s a private thing, because I don’t want to show vulnerability or because I feel lame crying about fictional characters (and how their plight relates to mine)? I think it’s mostly the latter.

There were moments of brilliance in Beginners: of modest, intimate humour; warm loveliness; and sad emotional truths. Like when Oliver, played by Ewan McGregor,  stands with his dog on a park bench and asks him why he doesn’t join his ‘own people’, i.e. the other Jack Russells frolicking around them them.  Or when Oliver’s mum dies and his dad Hal, played by Christopher Plummer (aka Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music), announces that, at 75 years of age, he doesn’t want to just be theoretically gay any more – he wants to put it into practice.

Hal, denied sexual expression for so many years, becomes comically, endearingly and inspiringly uber-gay; joining gay support and political lobby groups, visiting gay nightclubs, holding political letter-writing parties and finding a boyfriend half his age. I imagine coming out as gay after a long marriage isn’t that uncommon, because getting older can lead to the casting away of old pretences and, more obviously, because gayness is now socially acceptable. In one scene, Hal shows Oliver a rainbow sticker, telling him it’s the symbol for gay pride. ‘I know that,’ Oliver tells him. Hal, seeming almost disappointed, remarks, ‘Not many people know that.’ ‘Yes they do,’ Oliver says.

The other main storyline is Oliver’s love affair with Anna, a quirky, playful and emotionally complex French actress played by Mélanie Laurent of Inglourious Basterds fame. They are a beautiful couple, and I kind of just enjoyed watching them. But while McGregor’s acting performance is sound (he does an excellent sad face), I found Laurent’s a little superficial. I could imagine her practising each facial expression in the mirror; she seemed a little self-conscious.

Oliver and Anna have an unusual romance. They meet at a costume party. Oliver is dressed as Freud and Anna plops down on a nearby couch for some faux therapy. Jokingly, he asks her about her mother and her father, and having lost her voice because of laryngitis, she replies to his questions on a notepad. Then she writes, ‘Why are you at a party if you’re sad?’ He asks how she knows, and she just draws these really simple, but very obviously sad, eyes on a piece of paper.

But when Anna and Oliver move in together, they became unhappy and started to fight. This breakdown, though unexplained, was to me the most convincing moment in their relationship, which to me, always seemed a little light on substance. You could see that Anna and Oliver shared moments of emotional truth and a quirky sense of fun, but I still found it hard to imagine what they would have actually talked about over breakfast.

After Beginners, my sister went off to an internet cafe to do an interview for a job in Kenya while I hung out with another friend. We were in Readings checking out book cover art when he spotted a new version of Jane Eyre, with a cover featuring the actress from the movie and the words ‘Now a major motion picture’. He pointed it out to me, and asked whether I’d ever buy a book with those words on the cover. ‘No,’  I lied, pretending to be anti-elitist or something.

Chernobyl, climate change, and the problem with invisible threats

I recently saw Innocent Saturday at the Melbourne International Film Festival, a powerful, if slightly agonising, film about the collective inaction of residents in a town near Chernobyl immediately following the nuclear disaster. Valery, a white collar worker and Communist party member with an inert, unappealing face, hears party officials talking about how the accident could be as bad as Hiroshima and even then sees the horrible smouldering hulk of the reactor with his own eyes.

He runs from the disaster site in panic and grabs Vera, the gorgeous, airheaded girl he’s in love with, as she emerges from a group shower. He forces her to get dressed and run away with him. (They do, however, find time to stop briefly and exchange a hard and urgent kiss). But her heel breaks and they miss the train.

Vera convinces Valery to buy her some new heels; he reluctantly acquiesces, and she spends a long time in the store before choosing the perfect pair (bright pink). Then she wants to collect her passport from a wedding party before they leave. She doesn’t emerge from the party, so Valery goes inside to find her.

Valery ends up getting embroiled in the manic wedding party, where Vera is singing a crazy Russian song with the mockingly menacing lyrics ‘What’s wrong wrong wrong.’ At this stage, Valery, inexplicably, abandons any attempt to escape, instead getting drunk with his friends and playing drums in the band.

The movie then descends into a blur of partying, fighting, and smutting, with no real narrative arc or character development. We watch a bunch of fairly uninspired people who, unwilling or unable to act in the face of a so-far invisible reality, risk radiation sickness and death. The dramatic momentum recedes, and at my screening, many of the audience walked out during one particularly drawn out drumming scene.

The film evokes that nightmarish sense of paralysis, as when you’re trying to run from that monster or serial killer but your limbs won’t work properly. It’s a banal portrayal of the phenomenon of collective inaction arising from failure of imagination and distraction.

Tony Abbott, in an act of calculated stupidity, recently asserted that carbon dioxide can’t be measured because it’s invisible, odourless, and weightless (it’s not actually weightless). It’s true that because of the invisibility and abstraction of climate change, it’s difficult for humans to conceive of it — we’re sensory creatures. If smokers, for example, could see their skin turning temporarily black as an indication of toxicity, I bet they’d give up a lot more quickly. So in the face of an invisible threat, and in the absence of panic, people’s natural tendency is to maintain the status quo, even if the long-term consequences of doing so are disastrous.

The Greens talk a lot about appealing to love and hope instead of fear. And Gillard refers to ‘dangerous climate change’, but she doesn’t use fear, really. But sometimes I wonder whether a small fear campaign wouldn’t go astray. Tony uses fear well. The simplicity of his negative (‘big bad tax’) rhetoric is easily confused with some kind of strength, even though really, he’s taking the intellectual coward’s approach. In contrast, the idea of the carbon tax is complicated; it’s easy to get lost in, and bored by, the policy detail, and difficult to understand how it works, really.

While the science and policy of climate change are complex and often boring, the potential environmental impacts are more tangible. One of my friends had this idea about doing an advertisement, with variations in each state, depicting the effects of climate change – wilting crops, dying animals, and extreme weather events. I’m not sure if something similar has been done before, but it’s an interesting idea. If people could actually envisage the effects of climate change, it might help restore a sense of urgency.

FuckWalk – protests in poor taste

Protests are a funny one aren’t they? Lately I’ve been to a few that have stuck in my craw. On Saturday it was FuckWalk – a protest against Baillieu’s swear laws, a cause which I wholeheartedly agree with, although the protest was also used to promote a broader social agenda. I didn’t originally intend to go, but found myself at Bourke St mall and the protestors just marched up to me.

It was a pretty young crowd, with a a predominance of hippy left-wing fashions – dyed hair, dreadies, piercings, badges, berets, hoodies, sloganed T-shirts. Socialist Alliance and Resistance spoke at the rally and SA had a large banner right at the front – it seemed like they had organised it.

As I arrived, one of the speakers was yelling ‘Unfuck Victoria!’ and getting the crowd to repeat it after him.  They obliged. I stood on a bench so as to get a better view of the speakers.

One of the girls behind me commented, ‘You’d think they would have thought a bit harder about what they were going to say!’ I turned around and said in solidarity, ‘Yeah, Unfuck Victoria?’ She laughed: ‘Sounds like they’re trying to give back its virginity or something!’ Then she offered me some of her popcorn.

The last speaker compared the laws to Nazism – ‘since when was all these Nazi views imposed on us as a country,’ – and called on the crowd to ‘fuck being a conformist – fight now.’ He compared this amassing of people to the Arab spring ‘All over the world, people are getting together and telling the government to get fucked!.. Fuck you! We are not fucking prisoners!’ He then invited people to come to a  a ‘meeting’ at Melbourne University on Thursday night (I’ve since realised this is the Economic and Social Outlook conference), where Abbott, Ferguson, Swan and other politicians would talk about ‘how they control you and the resources boom.’ ‘Come along and tell them to get fucked!’ he shouted in a sandpaper voice. The aggressive tone was quite brutal on my hangovered ears.

This doesn’t seem like the best tactic to engage people. The aggression is one thing, and to my mind, that’s obviously wrong, although there’s undoubtedly a fine line between revving people up and coming on a bit too strong. The situation with the event being so Socialist is a bit of a different thing though.

It reminds me of the Wikileaks protest, where there was a sea of red Socialist flags and crackly loudspeaker which denounced neo-liberalism and the Northern Territory intervention.  At that protest, it seemed to me like freedom of expression was being claimed as a socialist or ultra-left-wing issue,  which would have alienated some potential supporters. Some of my friends who rocked up to that protest in full solidarity with the cause, but left quickly once they absorbed the tone of it.

But as someone pointed out to me when I was bitching about red flags at Wikileaks, freedom of expression (which is what both of these protests were about) means just that – so you can’t really criticise people for choosing whatever mode of expression they want. Some people feel similarly about Greens triangles – in the past, I’ve heard that some concerned members of environment groups have tried to get people to put them away at climate rallies, for fear that the cause would be branded as a political issue owned by The Greens.

The thing with Socialist Alliance is, whether or not you agree with all of their views, at least they’re out there and doing something about issues they care about (some of which I care about, too, but obviously not enough to organise a protest about it). If Socialist Alliance do dominate protests, isn’t that because they’re the ones that bothered to show up? If more people were committed enough to come, the composition of the crowd would become more diverse. But I know some people, who might potentially come, are alienated by the heavy presence of the Socialist types. So it’s a bit of a Catch 22.

Youtube of the protest

Book review: The Amateur Science of Love by Craig Sherborne

Cross-posted from LiteraryMinded.

If you’ve read any of Craig Sherborne’s writing, you’ll know not to expect a rosy-eyed view of the world. The Amateur Science of Love follows the grim journey of a love affair gone wrong.

Colin leaves the unglamorous environs of his parents’ farm to pursue an acting career in London, seeking recognition in the eyes of others and satiation of his own ego. In London, Colin meets Tilda, a young artist whose hint of tragedy and complexity only makes her more attractive. In the fiery early stages of their affair, love and lust are almost inseparable; an all-consuming, visceral illness. Even love, Colin realises, is a small-scale form of fame and power.

Consumed by this desire, so heady and self-affirming as to be a kind of vanity, the two lovers set up a life together, moving to country Victoria. Beset by a series of unfortunate events, and strained by the stifling banality of a deadbeat country town, the lovers’ hastily rendered relationship sours into something deeply unpleasant.

As the affair deteriorates, Colin’s unkind thoughts grow like a cancer, rotting his integrity. He abjectly neglects moral responsibilities (there’s one particularly horrifying example), and treats Tilda like inconvenient baggage. He determines women’s worth based on callous assessments of their physical appearance. Colin’s dark ruminations, laid bare by Sherborne, are both confronting and utterly familiar.

Yet Colin’s not entirely devoid of moral conscience – he periodically segues into a retrospective voice, regretfully ruminating on his ‘lopsided record’ and expressing a desire to ‘square his soul.’ There are even times when he genuinely cares for and looks after Tilda, although we’re still left guessing whether it’s more about his ego.

Tilda, physically vulnerable and sensing Colin’s fading interest in her, is naturally insecure, making her fits of jealous pique, manipulative behaviour and vindictiveness understandable. But it’s difficult to pity her, as we’re never given a sense of her inner self. And this is possibly the author’s intent; the cardboard cut-out version of Tilda is a realistic perception of her through the eyes of self-obsessed Colin.

Sherborne’s humour is acerbic, his prose fluid and sparing. He tells cruel human truths in poetry, often with caustic, biting humour – ‘just a thought-sip of suicide, nothing more’ (a failed interview), and ‘it was like he was from hospital and she was from Spain’ (lusting after the glamorous wife of a cancer patient). The tale moves at a cracking pace, and Colin’s recollections are used to foreshadow his inevitable comeuppance, creating a sense of foreboding which culminates in the uneasy ending.

Colin and Tilda experience the common epiphany experienced by young people with aspirations; that in reality, life can be mundane and unrewarding, that it’s not necessarily a carnival designed for your own enjoyment, or an indomitable escalator of achievement. Colin is left feeling hollow, and wondering whether other people, like him, are living what they feel is a second-class life. Yet there’s still a sense of possibility; the future is pulling him to an unknown destination.

Sherborne doesn’t let much of what’s human slip through his net, especially if it’s unsavoury. The Amateur Science of Love is a brutally honest exploration of what can go wrong when naïveté, vanity, and unrealistic aspirations meet with the curse of misfortune. It’s packed with psychological juice.

Death, ageing and a review of Somewhere Towards The End

Up until your late twenties, you’ve never known anything but being young, it’s almost part of your identity. Intellectually, you know things will change eventually, but it’s hard to imagine it. Then you get a grey hair or two, some back problems, and those little wrinkles around your eyes – chicken feed, really, but it’s a sign of things to come. When you complain about it, people say, ‘that’s ridiculous, you’re still so young,’ almost like it’s a virtue, which is comforting, but eventually they’re going to stop saying that, because it won’t be true anymore.

One of my main fears about ageing (this is a bit embarrassing) is loss of physical attractiveness. How much of our happiness stems from looking good? A little bit, I think. It makes sense from an evolutionary perspective – if you’re less physically attractive, it might be more difficult to find a mate and perpetuate the proverbial gene pool… The other fear, nicely summed up in the annoying dictum ‘carpe diem’, is that you’ll run out of time to do the things you want to do. But this seems a bit gimme-ish – do we really need to do everything, fit everything in? Most significantly, though, when you discover that first grey hair, it’s a reminder of mortality.

Since I was a child, I’ve been quite scared of death; the inevitability of eternal loss of consciousness, and the unknowability of that final state. Thoughts of the afterlife once helped (I was force-fed Catholicism), but it’s really a self-delusion, an artificial panacea to the idea of mortality, which is a difficult, uncomfortable idea to get your head around.

The world is only experienced subjectively. So practically speaking, death is the end of the world – there’s probably still a world, but you won’t be in it, and you’ll have absolutely no awareness of it. Indifference to post-death events, even those happening to those you care about, is one possible manifestation of this belief. Maybe people feel differently if they have children; again, there might be an evolutionary basis for this apparent altruism.

I picked up Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards The End over the Easter weekend. She offers rare insights into topics sometimes treated as taboo, like: What does it feel when your beauty ebbs away? What happens to people’s sex drive when they get older? How does it feel to be forced to care for someone? How does an atheist cope with the thought of death? How do we come to terms with our regrets?

Athill’s take on the deterioration of beauty is that the vanity (if that’s what it is) doesn’t go away just because you get a bit wrinkly. Old people need to look good too, mainly for their own satisfaction – in this respect, she thinks modern day cosmetics are a great help. She describes the process of losing her sex drive. By the end, she was ready for it – ‘there was no reprieve, nor did I want one’- and she even saw some benefits. In Athill’s view (this is probably controversial), biologically, women are more consumed by sex, because they can’t walk away from the results (kids). Thus the ebbing away of sex drive endows women with an enhanced sense of individuality. In her case, she feels that this more firmly established her atheism.

Athill defends atheism as a belief system which, perhaps even more than religion, has the beauty of mystery: ‘Perhaps it is intellectually uninteresting to believe that the nature of the universe is far, far beyond grasping, not only by oneself as an individual but by oneself as a member of the species, but emotionally, or poetically, it seems to me vastly more exciting and more beautiful than any amount of ingenuity in making up fairy stories.’ To Athill, atheism has integrity too, including when it comes to the prospect of death: ‘not exactly comforting, but acceptable because true…and it also remains when I contemplate my own extinction.’ Despite her refutation of religiosity, she does believe a single human life has cosmic signficance, because because every individual makes some kind of contribution or leaves a trace on the world, however minor.

Somewhere Towards The End meanders and digresses, and my attention occasionally wandered. However, the gentle rhythm of her prose, and her intimate, gently contemplative tone, make you feel like you’re in a relaxed, fascinating conversation with a friend, whereby digressions are par for the course. Athill’s famous for her memoirs, and this one, to me, exemplifies a particular type of really good writing; honest, fearless, and bare of affectation.

Howl – wooden, contrived, soulless

If you can concentrate on the dialogue and block out everything else, Howl, the biopic of poet Allen Ginsberg, does present some compelling ideas about writing and literary censorship. I particularly liked Ginsberg’s explanation of the concept of a prophecy; it’s not predicting future events like a nuclear bomb in 1942, but capturing, even in an impressionistic form, an emotion that people will still feel ten years in the future. And the film’s reenactment of the Howl obscenity case brings home the ridiculity of literary censorship. *

But I suspect that these points of interest are derived directly from archival sources, rather than arising out of the virtually non-existent filmic interpretation. The movie consists of various dramatically inert scenarios clumsily strung together – interviews with the bland-faced Ginsberg, a droning court case, airbrushed-looking romantic canoodlings between Ginsberg and his equally good-looking lovers. There is no overarching conceptual vision or emotional sensibility. It’s really a documentary re-enactment rather than a film, and it’s difficult to imagine how that genre could ever be good, except as satire. **

And there are things about Howl that are very bothersome. For example, James Franco, the actor who plays Allen Ginsberg is completely wrong for the part; his smooth, bland, face shows no trace of suffering. His beard looks as if it has been pasted on.

Comfortingly, an image of Ginsberg’s real face appears at the end – craggy, and brimming with warmth and intelligence, as you’d expect it to be.

Ginsberg’s poems are at times accompanied by animation, which is even worse than you might think. The animation is reminiscent of kareoke visuals, or perhaps paintings done by utterly artistically ungifted primary school kids in a free-association exercise and then animated by the Education Department using taxpayer money. Ginsberg’s infamous demon Moluck (“whose eyes are a thousand blind windows”) is represented by a transformer-like figure and some skyscrapers. Sex is represented by the fusion of two articulated stick-figures.

Don’t let Howl ruin Ginsberg for you. If you haven’t read much of his work, you can actually download podcasts of him reading his poems here. My personal favourites are America, A Supermarket In California, Sunflower Sutra, and Howl, but happily, my perusal of his oeuvre is still incomplete.

*There’ll be a Senate Inquiry about this. Censorship is no substitute for good parenting, I reckon.

**Waltz with Bashir is a noteworthy exception, but that’s a beautiful, poetically animated documentary.