ROLAND BARFS FILM DIARY WEEKS 9/10
February 24. A bad day: depressed, bored, irritable with myself, at a loss. I feel as though I have been pushing up against a limit of myself recently, and that perhaps today I cross it. Unpleasant. I build some flat-pack furniture and read some Henry James. I job hunt with a combined sense of futility and desperation. I feel bad about the writing work that I’ve been doing over the past year, including—particularly—this diary. In the evening L makes a cottage pie and Kate and Catherine come over. We watch Poetry (dir. Lee Chang-dong, 2010), which we’ve been vaguely talking about watching for a while. More than once we’ve gathered with the intention of watching it but have decided it’s too long—two hours and twenty minutes—and end up watching something else; usually something much worse. I think Poetry is fantastic. I don’t know if the others agree, but I think it’s a wonderful film, enormously rich, very beautiful, very powerful. The only other Lee Chang-dong film I’ve seen is Burning, which I also loved, which was made nearly a decade after Poetry—I wonder what he was doing in that time. Poetry feels much less slick than Burning, less polished. It looks like it was made on a much lower budget; the lighting and the quality of the image feels much brighter, less corrected, less stylised. It is a slow burn, a film which deals with a broad sweep of painful topics: ageing, dementia, sexual assault, gender, suicide, class, family, loss, beauty. At points it feels like a Korean Jeanne Dielmann; but Lee is less interested in the gruelling quality of life than Akerman, and he’s slightly more optimistic about the potential for us to find beauty in the everyday conditions of our world. Poetry follows Mija, a grandmother who has early onset Alzheimers, raising her surly grandson who is involved in the rape of a girl in his high school who, at the start of the film, has committed suicide. She works as a maid and care worker for an elderly man who owns a grocery store. Everyone describes her as ‘chic’. She wanders around and has conversations with people. The fathers of the other students involved in the rape at the centre of the film (which is only discussed vaguely, is never exploited for any sense of lurid entertainment) become fixated on paying the mother to make the problem go away; Mija doesn’t have the money to participate but becomes passively absorbed in their scheme. She enrols in a poetry class and struggles to write a single poem, but still carries a small notebook with her everywhere and takes brief notes about what she sees. She goes to some poetry readings. Perhaps I could have done with a bit less footage of people reading poems and offering ex tempore commentaries on them: in my daily, waking life I try to avoid poetry readings as much as possible, so to be confronted with one here is reminiscent of the scene in Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour when the characters attend a book talk and Q&A which is shown in minute and painful detail. But the readings in Poetry are also a reminder that poetry has many uses for many people, and that the earnest pursuit of beauty through verse is something that some people might still believe in, even if I don’t know if I do. I find Poetry to be a very amazing film though; really remarkable. It isn’t an easy watch, but it’s unhurried and it avoids melodrama, preferring a slow and painful unfolding. It is bleak at points, but is shot through with a sense of deep pathos and empathy. I loved it. I want to watch it again quite soon, because I feel like there is so much going on here that it is impossible to do it justice on the back of one viewing.
February 26. Slightly hungover after celebrating a Russian themed pancake night with Beth and Dan the night before. I hadn’t seen Dot for a few months and in the interim she has become even cuter than before, and was apparently pleased to see me. It is nice to know babies and for them to recognise you. I feel the depression that I’ve been mired in over the last few days start to shift slightly. All day the weather moves between sleet and blue skies. Flooding elsewhere in the country. In the afternoon I spend two fairly useless hours working in the Sanctuary before coming home in the snow. I potter about and don’t achieve anything for the rest of the day. I read some Emmanuel Bove. Time passes. In the evening L and I watch The Servant (dir. Joseph Losey, 1963) which is a truly fantastic and deeply unpleasant film which was written by Harold Pinter. I haven’t seen any Losey before but I am now very keen to watch much more of his work. I first read about The Servant in David Thomson’s The Whole Equation, in which he draws a straight line from the experience of being blacklisted to the grim attitudes expressed in the film. I can see that connection: there’s a kind of cynical embitteredness which parallels that other big film which is obliquely about McCarthyism: In a Lonely Place. Losey studied with Brecht in Germany, and worked with him during the his exile in Los Angeles. The Servant feels very theatrical, as one might expect from a collaboration with Pinter—the script is very good, very typical Pinter; its atmosphere is very claustrophobic and constrained in the particularly tight narrative space of the house in which it takes place—but Douglas Slocombe’s cinematography is very good, and prevents the film from feeling like a cinematic play. The Pinteresque menace of inarticulacy looms in everyone scene. There are lots of excellent shots which use mirrors; good uses of staircases and bannisters—quite similar to some moments in Douglas Sirk films, but with much more implied threat and psychological tension. While we watch it, L suggests that it’s thematically quite like Parasite; after it’s over I read that Bong Joon-ho directly cited The Servant as inspiration. Which makes sense, though Parasite is so much tighter than this, which is loose, slow, a bit more meandering and uncertain at points. The plot, roughly sketched out, involves Dirk Bogarde gaining employment as James Fox’s servant and gradually manipulating and exerting control over his employer. Nobody is likeable. It is as seedy and lurid as you would expect from its screenwriter. It feels very strongly related to Peeping Tom (three years earlier), with Powell’s obsession with colour and over-stylisation being replaced with simmering class tensions, a slightly watered down or half-remembered Marxist analysis, and alcoholism. In Powell’s cinematic imagination eroticism is sublimated through the gaze; in The Servant erotic desire exists as a means of manipulation. There is definitely a queer undercurrent to the film, not too dissimilar to that of The Sweet Smell of Success. It is a horrible, brilliant film. Losey and Pinter later worked (with Barbara Bray, who was responsible for Samuel Beckett getting into radio plays) on a film adaptation of Proust’s À la recherche… that was never made, which sounds like a loss.
March 1. In the morning I wake up in Camberwell with a deep and croaky voice after over-extending myself socially the day before. Katie and I wander around and head into Brixton while she catches me up with the gossip from the London literary scene. I then travel back to Sheffield, reading Martin Eden on a train, surrounded by people sleeping in the late afternoon sun. I don’t feel particularly well, on the cusp of an illness. Not Coronavirus. L is travelling back from visiting her grandfather in Dorchester. I try to cook some miso-glazed aubergines but burn them and end up making kimchi fried rice instead. We decide to watch something relatively asinine and easy, and end up choosing Fighting with my Family (dir. Stephen Merchant, 2019), which is an extended WWE advert that L says feels like an episode of Tracy Beaker. It’s totally fine: predictable, exactly what you might expect from a heavily-marketed film described in the promotional materials as a heartwarming comedy. The plot follows the path of Paige, an actual wrestler, from her origins in a wrestling family based in Norwich to her winning a championship belt in her first TV performance for the WWE. I believe that for reasons of character arc and simplicity a lot of her actual career trajectory is brushed over. Florence Pugh is quite good in it, I guess. Nick Frost is in it, phoning it in. Dwayne The Rock Johnson does his usual schtick, Vince Vaughn is there for some reason. Nobody is really trying very hard and I’m sure they all got paid a nice hefty amount of WWE-dollars. I’m quite surprised to find the screenplay pretty bad, quite sloppy and awkward at parts, having expected Stephen Merchant to do a reasonably good job, but it most feels quite stilted and slightly awkward. As if it’s made to be shown with a laugh track that was forgotten in post-production. It’s pretty enjoyable, I guess, even if it does has the ring of a slightly cynical cash-grab. Good to watch if you are struggling to think of a film and want to have your emotions lightly pulled around for a little bit. It reminds me of how deeply invested in the WWE I was as a small child, and I enjoy it partially for nostalgia reasons. Whatever. A fine and totally adequate film which I doubt I will ever think about again.
March 3. I’m still unwell. I spend the morning in bed and in the afternoon I do some work for the Sanctuary under a duvet. I look for a job and feel quite desolate about my prospects once again. I spend an hour or so editing the draft of my Rousseau book, which I haven’t managed to look at with much focus for some months—finally spurred to break through my revulsion by a feeling of desperation about somehow getting it out there. In the evening, Tara, Kate and Catherine come round for a new attempt at starting Film Club. I cook a lentil slop. Tara has brought some cornflake cakes. A few of us drink some wine, and we watch Rosetta (dir. Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne, 1999). This is L’s choice. It is deeply unpleasant and stressful. I haven’t seen any other Dardenne brothers films before, but I have a very vague idea of what to expect. Rosetta is horrible. Like a cross between Vagabond by Agnès Varda and an early Harmony Korine film, with a hint of Catherine Breillat. It’s very Belgian, by which I mean bleak, grey, cold-looking, dreary. The cinematography is reminiscent of something like Son of Saul: non-stop close-ups of Émile Dequenne’s face as she sprints around her miserable life, looking after her alcoholic mother, trying to get a job making or selling waffles, desperately trying to live a “normal” life—working legally, not accepting charity, not accepting benefits. She is proud and stubborn and very angry. It is gruelling. It’s a film about the ordeal of those outside the labour market, trying to get into it: employment in this film operates on a strictly one in, one out system. Catherine—loyal and attentive member of the Marx reading group that she is—points out that it is a very good example of what Marx talks about in Chapter 25 of volume 1 of Capital. There are some truly excruciating scenes in it, but there are also some moments of absolutely dire humour: when the “friend” Rosetta makes—a young waffle-seller called Riquet—feeds her some French toast, then plays her a cassette tape of the sound of him practicing the drums, then forces her to dance, mid-chew. It’s awful, but it’s very funny. We make a few jokes throughout, mostly to dislodge how uncomfortable we all feel throughout. I won’t write about the ending here other than to say that it is very impressive how the Dardenne brothers manage to find a way of making an enormously abject and bleak event feel even more abject and bleak. It’s a very good film. Worth watching if you want to feel like your life could be much, much worse than it is.
March 5. Writing, or trying to, most of the day. Editing—slow progress. Much despair and self-disgust. Still largely feeling discouraged by all the work I’ve been doing recently—though I am aware that it’s an improvement on what came before. I go to therapy in the evening and feel relieved to think about something else for a few hours. When I was in individual therapy I took quite detailed notes after each session, but I no longer feel the need or desire to do so with the group work. In part it feels like it would be impossible to remember or re-articulate all that happens in a session; in part it feels like it would be an intellectualisation which would remove me from the actual experience of the session—keeping track of what’s being said or what I’m feeling for the sake of writing it down afterwards. I meet L when she gets back from work. We eat a burrito and go to Showroom to watch Portrait of a Lady on Fire (dir. Céline Sciamma, 2019), for which I use MUBI Go. A very good film, really. I like it a lot. I could perhaps do without the frame narrative. I really enjoy the first half or so of it—before there is any consummation of the desire between the protagonists, while they are both just looking at each other a lot. It is a very cinematic film, by which I mean it really understands how cinema is a technology which is really to do with the relation of desire and looking. We look at them looking at each other. This is wonderful. When we look at them kissing each other I am less interested, more detached—things feel slightly less charged, to me, personally. I am of course aware of my own subject position here: I am not a queer woman. When the desire between the two protagonists moves beyond looking intently at each other the film starts doing something else, also important, which I recognise isn’t for me. Of course, nothing in this film is for me, but hopefully you get what I mean. Something shifts in the movement from the shot/counter-shot pattern of mutual glances to the lingering focuses on the kiss: the position of the spectator changes. Other than that—I like the moments focusing on painterly technique, I like the mise-en-scène, I love the use of music: especially the use of the Summer movement from Vivaldi’s Four Quartets, and especially its use at the end of the film, when Sciamma uses music and the power of the gaze to create an almost unbearably powerful effect. Yes, it’s very good. There are some particular shots that will stick with me for a long time, which feel very self-consciously painterly. During the micro-utopia which the three women of the film create in the second act, there is one shot in the kitchen in particular which expresses so much without any moving the plot along at all—it provides no narrative function but is completely wonderful, very painterly and well-balanced: they are in the kitchen, sat along a table in front of a fireplace, the fireplace is centred, two of the women are on either side of it—one embroidering, the other chopping an enormous mushroom (the servant embroidering, the wealthy young woman chopping vegetables: delightful role reversal)—the painter enters the frame, and pours some wine for herself and the others right in the middle of the shot. Wonderful symmetry. It feels, formally, almost like a Vermeer painting. I am very glad to see it in a cinema, because it feels like the kind of film that will suffer from home-viewing. This is not a TV movie, it is a work of cinema: it creates and sustains a space of fantasy and desire, which requires the audience to sit in a dark room, looking at some enormous faces of beautiful women looking at each other with a great intensity.
March 8. Still quite far in a depressive slump, which has taken up much of the last few days, as well as feeling physically unwell. Set off by a resurgent moment of bereavement and building on the (not so) latent feelings of futility I’ve had around the direction of my life and my writing recently, this ambience of total despair partially manifests itself in a real dislike of the idea of watching and writing about any films—which, in turn, makes me feel ridiculous and even worse. An annoying and frustrating cycle: reading back these complaints makes me feel worse but it would be dishonest to delete them. I wake up feeling marginally better than I have been but still not well. I am largely at a loss in the morning. I drink some coffee and read some of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. I braise some lentils. Outside it’s sunny but I can’t quite bring myself to go outside. I finally write the entries for this diary which I’ve been putting off, unhappily and brusquely. At around three o’clock I go out, walking through the Botanical Gardens up to Broomhill and then into town via Weston Park and the university library, where I collect a dual-language edition of some Balzac stories which will undoubtedly sit on my desk until I return it unread. After wandering aimlessly around while the shops shut, I meet L at the Light, where we watch Dark Waters (dir. Todd Haynes, 2019). This is a pretty good remake of Erin Brockovich with Mark Ruffalo. Mark Ruffalo doesn’t wear as good outfits in this as Julia Roberts does in Erin Brockovich, but otherwise more or less the exact same structure unfolds. I enjoy it: the story is well handled, it’s a pretty absorbing legal drama with very clear-cut moral positions. DuPont are non-ambivalently evil. Mark Ruffalo, who has been at best a lawful-evil corporate lawyer, becomes good. Anne Hathaway gets a bit of short shrift as his long-suffering wife. It feels like a Todd Haynes film only in very occasional moments: its focus on the strange visual alienation produced by blowing up footage taken on digital camcorders to the size of a cinema screen; the deft and careful depiction of the unending bleakness of rural communities in West Virginia; the sublime corporate blandness of cities like Cincinnati. Mark Ruffalo looks very hang-dog and sad for most of it. He’s doing quite gentle and noticeable character work: he’s clearly portraying someone who is a nervous, awkward oddball, but it’s not made much of—it’s just… what he’s doing. He likes drinking Mai Tais, which is cute. Dark Waters is good. Stop using your Teflon pans. Capitalism has poisoned our planet irredeemably and everyone who works in the corporate side of a large chemical company is most likely an evil and malign figure who deserves to be punished. At a few points during the film I think that perhaps the best way to resolve my lack of motivation and worry about purpose would be to become a lawyer, but I don’t hold that feeling for very long. I don’t know if you need to see Dark Waters in a cinema, but it’s good to support Todd Haynes, who has made some very good films (and some… less good films). It feels quite like Oscars bait but didn’t get nominated for anything: I guess one Mark Ruffalo as a force for good exposé film is enough, and we already had Spotlight five years ago.
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