Rossellini

Or maybe that should say “mubi.com, yet again”. One of the few brilliant outcomes from lockdown was my discovery of this film site. They made it really tempting - three months free subscription, just to give it a try. After a month I was totally hooked, and have been ever since. I still watch on average ten films a month, because they keep renewing thepackage, offering extra fresh goodies all the time.

And it’s not a mindless mess like Netflix, where real treasures can hide undiscovered among a smorgasbord of trash. mubi is curate, with intelligence, to encourage you not only to explore films you’ve never heard of, but also to make connections, follow threads, see how a director develops and matures.

This month it’s been Rossellini. I sort of knew about Rome, Open City, and the impact of Anna Magnani, but I don’t think I’ve ever watched it all the way through. Then there was Ingrid Bergman, and Stromboli, with the real life drama of the Bergman/Rossellini affair woven in with the film. Then again, Paisan is totally different, a really thoughtful, complex look at the impact of the war on Italy - on a range of characters, in a range of locales. Intelligent film-making, which really makes you think.

Bound

This is the first film made by the (then) Wachowski Brothers, in 1996. I’d never heard of it, but offered the chance to see it by the magnificent mubi.com, I thought I’d give it a go. It’s brilliant. Stylish, tough, fast-moving, a crime caper oozing with the threat of imminent violence, but somehow you know that these two smart women will end up outwitting the thugs on the other side. It’s part of the fun that at times hat seems in doubt; a baddy has a pair of clippers in his hand, and is about to dismember a finger - when the phone rings. It’s sort of corny but sort of affectionate at the same time, and light years away from the self-important solemnity of The Matrix, which would seriously make their reputation three years later.

And it has a glorious ending. The two women, of very contrasting styles, have brought off their triumph and are about to drive off into the sunset. The tough, streetwise one says to the other - “You know the difference between us?” “No” she says. “Me neither.”

Dear Comrades

Yet again, I’m singing the praises of a foreign film I would never have seen if it weren’t for the magic of mubi.com “Dear Comrades” is in black and white, a record of a real life Russian rebellion in 1962, which was brutally put down by the regime. No news there.

Except that what makes his different is that it’s seen through the eyes of a loyal party official, a tough believer in the russian stae who mournes th passing of Stalin and wants to believe in the old certainties. As the film unfolds, she grasps just how destructive the old certainties can be, especially when her daughter is missing after attending a demonstration. It’s a tough learning process, watching her being forced to question her previous beliefs.

But this isn’t just history. It’s about 1962, but it was made in 2022, so it’s hard to miss the unspoken parallels, the damage that’s currently being done by a tough regime whch is sure it has all the answers, and doesn’t want is people to have the freedom to question how things are run. How this got to be made in today’s Russia is a mystery, bu I’m really glad it did.

John Cassavetes

As a mild sort of film buff, I’d known the name for a long time, with a rather vague sense of rebel, improvised, black and white, sixties…Nothing very precise. But I’m now a lot wiser, having watched four of his films in a fortnight. This is - regular readers will not be surprised to hear - thanks to the glories of mubi.com, the website that encourages you to teach yourself about film.

Those aren’t the only films on offer, and I’m sure there are mubic subscribers who haven’t watched any of these, but by piecing strands together, and regularly feeding new films into the mix, the website encourages you to pursue your own interests and, in the best possible way, educate yourself.

Of course, there’ll be moments in a film from the sixties which date, longueurs that a modern editor might not tolerate, but I’ve been really grateful for the chance to explore this almost forgotten little alleyway - a strange mix of aggressive, male dominance and early feminism, recognising the ways in which these obnoxious blokes are getting it wrong. And I can’t hink of any other way in which I’d have got this chance. So, yet again, thanks, mubi.com.

Only the animals...

Weird title, and it’s another obscure foreign film - but it’s brilliant. Yet again, a triumph for the wonderful mubi.com, which I’ve been raving about ever since lockdown, but so far as I know I’m still their only customer.

It’s one of those strange things where you don’t quite know what’s happening, but happily give in because the storytelling is so clever and convincing. We work around a quintet of characters - a young wife having an affair, her strange husband, a well-off woman who’s gone missing and the girl with whom she’s having an affair…And then there’s this young man in Africa; what’s he go to do with anything? This is all knitted together with brilliant cunning, eventually becoming clear without any cheating but some unforgettable moments on the way. Compared with animals, the movie seems to say, humans are a strange set of beasts, ludicrously driven but blind to the forces that control them - but it’s not heartless or cold. There’s a huge warmth and energy here, not to mention conviction and in the performances and staggering intelligence in th way it’s put together. I almost want to watch it again, immediately, just to savour exactly how it works.

Hold Me Tight

One of the great gains of lockdown for me was discovering mubi.com At the time, this film sit with a rotating schedule of international films was eager to attract new customers, so they had an eyewatering three months trial subscription. After a month, in which I watched a dozen films, I was totally hooked. I’ve stayed with them since, and still see at least eight films a month. “Hold Me Tight” has been ne of the best. It’s a French study of a family, which starts with the wife and mother leaving the home. We move between her and them, and then see them grow older and develop. There are moments of strong feeling, but not any obvious source of anger or betrayal. so is this real, or are we in some kind of fantasy? The film provides an answer, but in a subtle,developing way, so that by the time you’ve got to the end you want to sit down and watch it all again. This is movies for adults - think about what’s going on, pick up the clues - but with none of the superiority that can sometimes imply. It’s a thoughtful, loving study of what happens to people in a tough situation, and about as far as you can get from stereotypical Hollywood. Oh yes, and Vicky Krieps is totally mesmerising.

South Korean cinema

Mubi.com was one of my great gains from lockdown. It started unbelievably, with an offer of THREE MONTHS FREE membership as a trial, but since that expired I’ve been more than happy to spend £6.00 a month - which has probably involved my watching a dozen films in that time. they’re a real mixture, not all brilliant, but there’s so much you can sample that you’d otherwise miss.

Over the last fortnight, for instance , I’ve watched Winter’s Night, Moving On, Heart and The First Lap. All South Korean, each by a different director, and all made in the last five years. No, they’re not as gobsmacking as Parasite, but very films are. They are, though, serious, intelligent presentations of normal people, treated sensitively in a warm and realistic fashion - a real pleasure to watch. And there’s a massive bonus in linking them up, seeing them as a strand, which is the kind of thing Mubi does all the time. Yes, I know the real aficionados would say that you have to see it on a screen, but these would never reach our local multiplex, and I’m very happy to watch them here.

Marta Meszaros

Who? No, you’ve not heard of her. She’s a Hungarian film director. David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of F, over a thousand tightly printed pages and widely celebrated as THE BEST FILM BOOK EVER WRITTEN, doesn’t even mention her. But I’ve watched six of her films in the last month, and I thin she’s terrific.

Yup, this is another celebration of mubi.com, the magical film site which has rescued me during lockdown, and is likely to remain a faithful companion for some time. I was intrigued by the early films, realistic black and white portrayals of women and young girls, often orphaned and/or away from home. Her central characters are always sympathetically presented, but there’s no coyness or glamour involved - it’s a good, hard look at lives which are often quite tough. But she also films work and industrial processes brilliantly, and you can watch her develop over forty years - the most recent film of hers that I watched was an autobiographical account of a girl film student going back from Russia to Hungary, just after the 1956 uprising. Personal and family drama, brilliantly intercut with archive footage from the time. It’s not always perfect, but I’ve never seen anything quite like this, and I can watch ten films a month for less than the price of a single visit to the cinema.

Back Catalogue

It’s a while since I went into a record shop and bought anything. so I’m driven back to the shelves of ffmailiar CDs and yes, now I think about it there are quite a lot of them. So one of the pleasures of lockdown is to follow the impulse provided by stuff I read and watch. The Guardian has a double-page spread in which a wide range of musical names look back over 50 years of Carol King’s Tapestry - so that gets played. I listen to the brilliant Malaika Kegade on a zoom poetry night, send off for he book, and re-eread her wonderful poem Music. that includes the line “Winehouse - that voice could fix anything.” Of course it could, so she goes onn the player as well. As does Keith Jarrett, subject of a stunning portrait by the film-maker Mike Dibb (on Whitechapel Gallery’s website - see my blog entry for Jan 23). I read a book review, where they’ve republished Jackie Kay’s portrait of Bessie Smith, so I remind myself of exactly how good she is. I like this game. It could go on a while.

The Arabian Nights

When I look back at 2020, one of the things I’ll be happiest about is mubi.com. From being a casual taste “might as well give it a try - they’re offering a three-month free trial”, it’s become a basic staple of my digital existence, quite as essential as Netflix or BT sport. I’m really lucky that I can afford all three, and if I couldn’t I’m really not sure which one I’d ditch first, but I don’t think it would be mubi.

The Arabian Nights is a good example. It’s three full-length films, all of them quite leisurely, and a bit strange. There’s an innocent little note in the credits, saying that although it’s modelled on the idea of the traditional Arabian nights (Scheherezade telling stories, to prolong her execution) , it doesn’t actually follow that model very faithfully. They can say that again. There are occasional references to the Arabian story, but there’s also very different strands, some of them pursuing some very weird stories - part three has a prolonged examination of solitary blokes who train their pet chaffinches for a singing competition. And underlying the whole thing is an oblique but passionate resentment of a period of austerity, inflicted on the Portuguese people with no clear benefit to them. Sound familiar? Not tub-thumping, but thoughtful and decent, and it chimes with the modest, polite feel I got from Portugal during a brief holiday a couple of years ago. Here was a people who used to be an imperial power, but hadn’t let it go to their heads. How did they manage that?

The Mike Dibb season

How can we pass the time? There is a benevolent conspiracy to share the various goodies on offer, particularly the ones that are free. So here’s yet another shout out for my best friend, The Guardian. Three weeks ago they warned me about the Mike Dibb season, running at the Whitechapel Gallery from January to March. “Mike Dibb” may not immediately ring bells, but “Ways of Seeing” might. John Berger’s series of four films about art and the way we look at it was hugely influential. So, the first week of this season there they are, all four of them, because they were produced by Mike Dibb. In the second week, I catch up with two of my socialist heroes, Raymond Williams and C.L.R. James. I knew they were coming, but there’s also another stunning film about creativity, featuring talking heads I’ve never heard of, which is just brilliant. You have to be quick, because they’re only there for a week, before they move on to the next batch. (Q: Did Mike Dibb ever sleep?)

And this week (starting yesterday, which is why I’m telling you now) there’s a brilliant film about Moorish Andalusia - “Mirrors of Paradise.” I’m lucky, because I’ve visited (and written poems about) the irrigation of the Generalife, the mosque at Cordoba, and it was gorgeous to be reminded. But if these things are only names then you still need to watch this, as a brilliant introduction to the various ways in which this wonderful, tolerant civilisation stimulated architecture and cooking, music and writing, horticulture and art. Google Whitechapel Gallery, click on the Mike Dibb section, click on “here”, and away you go.

Christmas Telly

I guess my 76th birthday is as good a time as any to reflect on how things change. Earlier this week I was flicking through this week’s TV guide, wondering if there’d be anything I wanted to watch. And I wandered back down memory lane, to those innocent days when I would draw up a complex chart for at least ten days: four columns along the top for the main channels, boxes across for each of the days, and codes for what we’d be watching and what we’d be recording, so as to maximise the choices of four very different viewing tastes…Happy days.

And now, there’s almost nothing being transmitted that I want to watch. But there are riches galore on catchup, Netflix, mubi.com. So on iplayer alone in the last week I’ve savoured Death of Stalin, The Happy Prince and Paddington 2. You couldn’t get a wider spectrum of subject matter and tone, but all put together with vitality and intelligence, teamwork at the service of the grateful viewer.

And that’s leaving out Rocco and his Brothers, a three-hour monster from Visconti, which I watched as a spellbound sixthformer more than fifty years ago - and it still comes snarling off the screen, even if there are bits that now seem over the top. So it doesn’t matter too much that the weather’s not great. I can listen to the video of my son’s family performing Happy Birthday on What’s App in their dazzling Lidl Christmas jumpers, and know that I shan’t be short of entertainment.

The Souvenir

Nothing on TV I want to watch, so last night I take refuge in mubi, my second home. Tucked away in their library they have The Souvenir. I faintly remember rave reviews last year, keeping a note that I’d catch it if it came to any cinemas nearby (it’s by no means guaranteed that high quality films will reach us out here). It looks beautiful, it sounds great, and has a stunning cast - Tom Burke, and Tilda Swinton with Honor Swinton Byrne, as a real-life mother-daughter act. I hated it. All that’s wrong is the main idea, the story, the script. It’s about Julie’s doomed relationship with Anthony, and how that messes up her life. She’s a well-off film student, set on making a film set in working-class Sunderland. We don’t see her going there, talking to anyone in Sunderland, talking realistically about what she’s going to do and how she’ll go about it. We see her and Anthony sparring, and her falling for his superior comments on her project, just like she falls for his taste for highclass hotels, and habit of continually scrounging off her. I get it that bright people don’t always make bright choices, that it can be hard to escape from abusive relationships, but I just don’t believe in any of this, or care about it. She breaks away, tells a fellow student that she’s over it and concentrating on film school now, but the first hint of another posh lunch that she’ll have to pay for - and away she goes. The film students are generally a bunch of pretentious tossers, there as background so she can demonstrate her superior intelligence by offering her view of Psycho, but there’s very little about the excitement of loving films, the mad ambition of setting out to make them. i’m sure Joanna Hogg knows about that, since she has Martin Scorsese and Michael Wood on board as executive producers, but it didn’t come across to me. Today I check the reviews. Mark Kermode loved it. Peter Bradshaw loved it. The Observer thought this was one of the best ten films of the year. They also said that it was autobiographically based, and that makes a whole lot of sense - which I shall hold on to as I sneak back down into my obscure burrow, where I know nothing about film.

mubi.com

Seven little letters, but they’ve changed my life. It’s not hard to see the logic. We can’t go out to shops - so they do home delivery. We can’t go out to cinemas, so streaming companies offer goodies - in this case a free sample period of three months. Compared with Netflix, mubi is tiny - but that’s part of the attraction. There’s a short, clear list of films, a lot of world cinema, some classics and some hidden gems. They stay on for a month, and each day new ones come on at the top of the list, and ones that have been there a month drop off. You can find your way around, and you know understand the terms of the deal. Better than that, there’s a clear intelligence and enthusiasm guiding the selections. They not only want you to watch, they want you to understand and explore. So there are strands and themes, connections you can make. Jean-Pierre Melville, anyone? If you’d asked me a month ago, I couldn’t have named one of his films. Now I’ve watched three of them, and loved them all. Plus, there was the Korean Vengeance trilogy, with Joseph Losey coming up this month. I’m sorry that this will sound like a commercial, and I am not being paid for writing this, but it’s too good to keep to myself.

Acting

It wasn’t that long ago that I raved about the versatility of Lesley Manville, and now there’s another of these talented actors, showing what different people they can be. I watched Begin Again on Netflix the other night. It’s OK, a sort of feelgood redemption movie about a couple with musical interests, who cobble together an album of music which against the odds ends up as both good and successful. The early stages of it feature Mark Ruffalo, a musical produce going extravagantly off the rails - no doubt to prepare us for the moving spectacle as his arc inevitably turns towards the sensitive and inspired. I don’t know whether it’s the script, the producer or the actor, but I thought it was massively overdone.

But then there’s this. Dark Waters is a patient, careful account of the Du Pont chemical firm knowingly poisoning a small town in America, and the work of a lawyer who exposed what they did and - a long way down the line - made them pay damages. Ruffalo is the lawyer, and also one of the producers, and this is obviously a labour of love. He’s not a heroic, charismatic character. The work he does is boring and nit-picky, and it involves him neglecting his wife and family, in ways that are carefully spelt out. Every time there’s the option for heroics or grandstanding, it’s delicately avoided. This is not a hero. He’s a decent man surprised by the facts that he discovers, and increasingly feeling an obligation to the vulnerable people who’ve been abused. I thought it was terrific, and Ruffalo was great.

Parasite

It’s great news that the Oscars have finally, if briefly, liberated themselves from the monoglot corridor and given the best film award to the South Korean movie Parasite. Like its director says, if you can leap over the tiny barrier of those subtitles, you’re liberated to discover a whole new world of possibilities. We went to see it in Shrewsbury, a week after it won, in a huge Cineworld cinema that was almost deserted. But it was still a treat - clever, surprising, shocking and ruthlessly intelligent throughout. And not quite like any other film I’ve ever seen.

So it’s almost to be expected that Trump will wade in to dismiss the Oscar award, even though he hasn’t seen the film. Back in the day, ignorant people were embarrassed about the stuff they didn’t know, but the new brutalism knows no shame. (Just imagine, Barack Obama slanging a film he hadn’t seen. Unthinkable). All Trump needs to know is that it’s in a foreign language, so it can’t be any good. and nobody who works for him has the clout or courage to tell him that airing this prejudice is a bad idea. In terms of his support base, it isn’t. I’m trying not to be despondent, but it’s really hard.

David Copperfield

These are grim times, so we get what consolation we can. Earlier this month I raved about Little Women, and last night I saw another movie which seriously warmed my heart. I left the cinema and drove back in a cosy glow, feeling that maybe some things were alright with the world. As with Little Women, it does clever things with the fact that a central character ends up writing an autobiographical book, and here again devoted aficionados of the book have complained that elements of it have been lost. I don’t care. If what is left is as lively, warm and entertaining as this I’m more than satisfied. As you might expect from Armando Ianucci, there’s a lot of energy and humour. There’s also a gorgeous celebration of multicultural diversity - colourblind casting which ends up with black and Chinese faces which might astonish Dickens but underline this as a modern, positive celebration of who we are - even if our rulers and media work really hard to persuade us that we’re really dull, narrow-minded and totally white. So don’t give in to the gloom - get out and cheer yourself up.

Acting

Yes, I know. Actors are supposed to be good at being other people, so if they manage that really well, we shouldn’t be surprised. but even so…I read a catty review of the TV series Mum which was essentially complaining that Lesley Manville and Peter Mullen were old, so the gentle, tactful revelation of their growing relationship must be really dull. I’m a huge Manville fan, always have been, but I think this is one of the best things she’s done - quiet, low key,affectionate but a long way from stupid and - if she’s pushed, as she is pushed, by everyone around her - with a core of steel.

But then, this week, I caught up with Phantom Thread. Yes, it’s a Day-Lewis vehicle, where the great man airs a further range of eccentricities as a tyrannical head of a fashion house. He’s really good, of course, but his side kick is a superior, ruthless bully played by…yup, Lesley Manville. Yet again, of course, she’s totally convincing. Different era, different class, utterly opposite character - but she can do that too. Of course she can. I shouldn’t be surprised, but yet again I was blown away.

1917

“We had to pay homage to the reality these men suffered. People lived this. It’s not a fantasy.” That’s one of the scriptwriters for 1917, and it neatly summarises my reservations about the film. I didn’t believe a word.

Early on, a senior officer conveniently maps out the journey our heroes will follow - “Go across no man’s land, through the town, follow the river and find the wood where the Devons will be. “ This all thanks to aerial reconnaissance, which somehow hasn’t noticed that the town is crawling with hostile troops. Worse still, they’re very close to the Devons, who are about to launch a doomed attack - but would in any case be immediately cut off as soon as they move.

Our two heroes have to carry this message on foot, because the telephone lines have been cut. But planes can apparently casually saunter over the terrain with very little risk of being shot down. Couldn’t they simply drop a message to the troops below?

In the town there’s a young woman looking after a baby. It’s an idyllic scene; candlelight, neatly made bed, an image of tenderness and love within the surrounding mayhem - and somehow none of the soldiers rampaging through the streets outside have managed to discover this?

At the end of the journey, the fated attack has just started - and already there are massive explosions and tons of casualties. But this is meant to be a trap. The Germans are luring the Brits into too hasty an advance, so that they can slaughter them further down the line. wouldn’t they make the early stages easy, by way of encouragement, to tempt the maximum number into charging on?

Sorry. I know it’s a brilliant piece of film-making, using considerable talents along the way, but I just couldn’t buy it. Little Women, on the other hand, I loved.

Little Women

Anyone who saw Lady Bird could have guessed that Greta Gerwig would be good at family relationships, women together, when she came to make Little Women. But nothing prepared me for the love, warmth and sheer intelligence of this film. It is, as the critics suggest, a total scandal that this isn’t making the running in the big awards. The way Gerwig has soaked herself not only in the book, but in Louisa M.Alcott’s own story, is so clever, and the energy, life and conviction of the girls is totally infectious. It’s not just “Oh look, Jo’s going to be a writer”; it’s Jo and Amy, with all the ferocity of true sisterhood - stunningly acted by Saoirse Ronan and Florence Pugh. But it’s not just that, either. There’s the director-type things , for which blokes are regularly praised - like vivid movement (Jo running through the street, a ball to rival any of the Austen films), but also thoughtful, memorable still pictures, when we just sit and look at the screen, taking it in. This is, you will gather, a really special film. Catch it while you can.