What a difference eight years can make

I saw two old films on TV this week: Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), both of them for probably the first time since they came out. It's salutary to think that the old films I used to watch as a child, from the 40s and 50s, were only half as old then as these are now. Each film was nominated for a string of Oscars and took home an award or three, albeit for very different things. In their own ways, they're both about aspiration, but what struck me most was the abyss that had opened up in the few years between them in terms of what people asked from cinema. Midnight Cowboy is visually inventive, thoughtful, nuanced. Its take on solitude is unsentimental, even cruel; nothing could be more absurd than Joe Buck's belief in himself or Ratso's faith in the healing powers of Florida. The film has the harsh clarity of vision you find in Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul, another great film about isolation and what people do in their efforts to cheat it. It's a film about growth and (dis)illusion. The party sequence is mildly embarrassing now, but what party sequence isn't after a year or so? Taken as a whole, the film is funny and sad and illuminating. It's the work of an adult (and it's heartbreaking to think Schlesinger would be making The Next Best Thing thirty years later).

By comparison, Close Encounters of the Third Kind feels like the work of a gifted child, with too many toys and no one offering the kind of tough love he so desperately needs. It's a film that seems entirely unaware of its hollowness as it strives for depth by turning on more and more lights, and getting its actors to look more and more starry-eyed at the sheer fucking size of it all. It's a cheap film, for all the money spent on it, and one that turns its back on the kind of redemption achieved, in one way or another, by Ratso and Joe. Because Dreyfuss's character learns nothing; he's too gobsmacked by his brand new friends. He just gets what he wants, which is surely the most infantile satisfaction of all.

Casting away

I've been having a discussion with Giuseppe today. He's finally read The Scent of Cinnamon because a translator friend, Isabella Zani, has rendered it - superbly - into Italian. After over 22 years together (tié Ratzy!), this is the first time he's really read anything of mine and, to my relief, he loves it. In fact, he loves it so much he wants to see it filmed. In fact, he wants to see it filmed so much he's already decided on the director and the actors for the two main roles. 

His choices? Ang Lee (director), Tilda Swinton (Miriam), Daniel Day Lewis (Joseph). Needless to say, these three jobbing labourers in the world of cinema are twiddling their thumbs in shabby bedrooms and waiting for my call. But I'm not sure they're the ones I want. Giuseppe says I should ask you. So that's what I'm doing. If you've read the story and think you have a better idea, let us know.  

Fantastic

Today's online Guardian has a thing about films of superheroes. It's not particularly illuminating but it does have this wonderful picture, which I really need to share with you.It comes from the original version of The Fantastic Four, made in 1994. According to the Guardian, the film "apparently only exists because Constantin Film was set to lose its rights to the comic book franchise if it failed to produce a movie by 1995." To someone's credit, it was never released. Luckily though, we have this photograph. Any ideas who the actors are? The Thing looks eerily like McCain... And what on earth are they looking at?

Malpertuis

Glancing through the New York Times Books Update a few moments ago, I found a review of a novel. I quote: Marie Phillips’s first novel, “Gods Behaving Badly,” in which the 12 major deities of ancient Greece uneasily cohabit in a dilapidated town house in 21st-century London, dwelling just above the city’s “greasy tide” of human flesh.

This sounded as though it might be fun, but it also reminded me of something. It took me a moment (and Google) to remember exactly what. I had an image of Orson Welles, and a sailor in a back street of a European port, frantically knocking a closed door. It didn't take long to track the memory down. A Dutch film, made in 1972, called Malpertuis, based on a curious Belgian book of the same name by Jean Ray (aka John Flanders). I saw it in the Electric in Portobello Road, with another film by the same director, Harry Kumel, in a double bill with Daughters of Darkness, of which I recall nothing. Malpertuis, on the other hand, I remember in the way one remembers certain dreams: an atmosphere, a bedroom, the details of the house, an argument about money, an overall disquiet. Colours and moods, and Orson Welles a brooding and presiding spirit.

What brought the film (and book) to mind, though, was an odd coincidence. Like Marie Phillips' novel, Malpertuis describes the travails of the Greek gods imprisoned, far from their time and world, in a dilapidated northern European house. I wonder if Phillips has seen the film, or read the book. Clearly, none of her reviewers has. Maybe it's the kind of good idea that more than one person can come up with. But it would be nice if people were led back by the novel to Jean Ray's weird and forgotten work, and to Harry Kumel's film.

A normal country

Twenty years ago I taught English for a while to the journalist and historian Lucio Caracciolo, or rather we wandered around Villa Borghese in conversation I rarely interrupted by correction. Most of what we talked about is gone but I remember one conversation we had after I'd seen a Taviani brothers' film, Kaos, based on Pirandello's stories.

I loved the film, particularly an episode called The Jar (La Giara). I loved it for what it seemed to say about an Italy that was in danger, I thought, of being lost, a more elemental, earth- and time-bound Italy, a blah blah blah of long white tables under the trees and - though I didn't admit this to Lucio or even to myself - homoerotic visions of ragazzi, prelapsarian, pre-Armani jeans. Ironically, the best way to see that Italy portrayed now is to look at fashion advertising, Dolce and Gabbana probably being the best at it. It's become the Italian way of doing heritage.

But Lucio insisted that all that was nonsense, a millstone round the neck of Italy. Italy would never become a normal country as long as it was in love with the sentimental version of itself the Taviani film represented. What he was saying was that you can't have the myth without the Mafia, its ultimate defence and defender.

Lucio was a Germanist, I thought, he would say that. But I wasn't happy. I thought he was missing something, but I wasn't entirely convinced of the worth of what he was missing either. And now I'm more and more convinced that he was right. All this stuff about the past, and tradition, and the genius loci and the golden age, somehow more genuine and flavourful than now. It's a nonsense and a vast imprisoning hypocrisy, like bureacracy in the supposed name of order, when all it does is stifle. I could start talking about the Vatican again here, but I'll resist.