The Pleasures of Underachievement

Films of the Year - The Best and the Worst

2011-12-20T18:06:00.008+01:00

After a disappointing year in 2010, this year was considerably better at the movies. There were a number of big disappointments (I'm thinking mainly of Terrence Malick, Lynne Ramsay, Gus Van Sant, Steve McQueen and the Coen brothers) and some recently flourishing national cinemas (Taiwan and Germany in particular) were noticeably absent but the films on show were for the most part a diverse, intelligent, inquisitive and often entertaining lot. France continued to produce some excellent films and amid exceptionally demanding circumstances Iranian cinema was once again to the forefront of cinematic brilliance after a few years in abeyance. Even Hollywood got in on the act with the uproarous recession comedy Bridesmaids and a number of smart films based on real-life sporting scenarios, in Moneyball and The Fighter.

As ever, my criteria for inclusion are a cinema release in France before the last week of the year. Hence there will be a number of films in here that might not have made it your way just yet; there will also be others missing that either were released here last year or have not yet been shown. Among the latter category include Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; A Dangerous Method and Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre.

1. A Separation (Asghar Farhadi - Iran)

Asghar Farhadi’s fifth film gets the ball rolling early with a brilliantly simple title sequence. A photocopier’s senser glides across a black field, making copies of passports and other official documents. There’s a slightly sinister ominousness to the sequence which proceeds with only the whirr of the machine for a soundtrack. We don’t know who the documents belong to but the niggling suspicion is that having your documents copied in a country like Iran means good news is not in store.

The separation of the title is between Naader and Simin, a middle-class couple from Tehran. Simin wants a divorce because her husband refuses to emigrate with her because he wants to care for his father, who has Alzheimer’s. In the opening scene the couple present their case to a judge, filmed from the judge’s point of view. It’s a device familiar from Iranian films of the past and has a Brechtian effect in that the characters are effectively addressing the audience itself.

Having failed to obtain the divorce, the couple decide to separate. They hire a working-class woman Razieh to take care of the elderly father but after an argument between Naader and Razieh takes a tragic turn, the law once again intervenes. A Separation is similar to Farhadi’s previous two films - About Elly and Fireworks Wednesday - in the sense that the characters try to carve out zones of autonomy for themselves in which they don’t have to deal with the State. It’s a subtle critique of the Islamic Republic, which looms fearsomely but is never directly criticised - for obvious reasons. Simin wants to leave the country, a recourse taken by an increasing amount of Iranian university graduates, and an out-of-court settlement may be the best option both for the middle-class Naader and Razieh’s young indebted family.

The brilliant intensity of A Separation as a drama would alone make it the best film of the year but what edges it into masterpiece territory is the battery of dramatic and cinematic devices employed by Farhadi and the constant needling of the audience to question the motives and veracity of all involved. It comes at a particularly testing time for Iranian filmmakers and Farhadi has managed to avoid the fate of Jafar Panahi, Mohamed Rasoulof and Bahman Gobdadi, all of whom have been persecuted by the Islamic regime. But Farhadi’s films are implicitly resistant (particularly Fireworks Wednesday, which incorporates a popular contemporary festival that never ceases to infuriate the Mullahs). He is also somebody that has studied closely his country’s cinema over the past two decades, a cinema that has forever been forced into new resourcefulness by the strictures placed on it. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say A Separation is a distillation of practically every great Iranian film of that era. That is why it is film of the year.

A Separation trailer:

2. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu (Andrei Ujica - Romania)

Andrei Ujica’s Marker-esque portrait of the former Romanian dictator proceeds without any captions, commentary or interviews to guide the viewer. The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu is pieced together entirely from archive footage - much of it officially filmed for the Romanian Communist regime - giving it a wonderful strangeness, as if a ghostly parallel history is being played out in front of our eyes.

We catch glimpses of de Gaulle, Dubcek, Brezhnev, Nixon, Honecker, Queen Elizabeth II, Carter and later Gorbachev over the three hours’ duration, going through the official motions with the most versatile despotic ally of his generation. It’s a performative fiction that mirrors the queues of mourners - filmed in striking black and white - that file into the building where Ceaucescu’s predecessor as Communist Party General-Secretary Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej’s body lies in state in 1965.

There is no hint of the brutality of Ceausescu’s regime - that presumably would be well enough known to most viewers - instead we get the official reality, the ‘autobiography’ as it were, which extends to official home movies - filmed for Party consumption only - showing the Ceausescu family at play in summer and winter. The effect is jarring, at once hilarious and monstrous, through which the history of a viciously squalid regime is seen as a bad dream mounted with a cast of thousands, many of them illustrious, and a state-monopoly cinematic apparatus. That might make the film sound more flippant than it is; though Ujica’s narrative is largely unjudgemental, he allows the cleavage between the images and the history known to the viewer do the talking.

The film, significantly, is book-ended by footage, shot on video that looks even grainier two decades on, of the ‘trial’ of Ceausescu and his wife Elena. It’s a counterpoint to everything else, a process that is every bit as dubious and fictive as the state archive footage’s Stalinist narrative, but which nonetheless delivers an abrupt historical verdict - the execution of the presidential couple. The do-it-yourself nature of the filming reflects the crumbling of official authority as the Ceausescus find themselves at the mercy of a lowly band of revolutionaries and it also points to a new era of filmmaking, where the edifice of the media begins to experience the wearing away of the once firm ground beneath it.

The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu trailer:

3. The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr - Hungary)

Béla Tarr retires from filmmaking at the age of 56 and leaves us with a fascinating conundrum. The Turin Horse takes its title, and ostensibly its theme, from the horse in the city of the same name whose cruel treatment at the hand of its owner one day in 1899 tipped Friedrich Nietzsche into insanity. A voiceover relates the anecdote at the start and says with what might at first be mistaken for undue seriousness, ‘what happened to the horse is not known’. The focus then switches to a semi-lame nineteenth-century peasant driving a horse through a storm. Back home, he and his daughter live out a taciturn existence, eating the same meal of a boiled potato every day, speaking only when things appear to be going wrong. And things begin to go wrong over the course of the film’s six days, inexorably, inexplicably and disastrously.

Tarr’s style and palette are so finely honed by now that it would be hard to date any of his films made since 1987’s Damnation. He cuts even The Werckmeister Harmonies’ parsimonious number of shots - in that film, he used only 38 different set-ups. This time it is 30. The relatively cramped sets mean Tarr’s familiar elaborate pans, zooms and travelling shots are less expansive than usual but Fred Keleman’s monochrome cinematography is at once gorgeous and unsettlingly claustrophobic. The film’s spare and repetitive narrative bears multiple readings but having watched it a second time, it appears less enigmatic than at first sight. Much of the explication seems to be a red herring - including one suspects the title and the incident that forms it. The Turin Horse may even be an unlikely, achingly cruel dark comedy. Tarr, in his retirement, is to set up a film school in Zagreb, and he already has commitments from the likes of Wim Wenders, Gus Van Sant and Aki Kaurismäki to teach there. If he indeed makes no more films, it may not matter so much - there’s so much to mull over, watch and re-watch and obsess over in the dozen or so of his films that we’ll be kept going for years to come.

The Turin Horse trailer:

4. L'Apollonide - Souvenirs de la maison close (Bertrand Bonello - France)

Films set in brothels tend to veer from the crassly romantic to the piously moral but Bonello’s portrayal of a fin de siècle Parisian maison close is lucid, bracing and unsentimental. Framed by the horrific facial disfigurement of one of the prostitutes by a client - a scene returned to a number of times in increasingly hellish flashback - L’Apolonnide is a frank portrayal of what is essentially a place of work. We see the women entertaining their johns, smoking opium, doing medical check-ups, attending to their ablutions and mostly being bored. The situations with clients are by turns cheerful, uncomfortable and demeaning. In a shrewd move, Bonello implicates his own profession in the exploitation by having a string of contemporary male French film directors (Jacques Nolot, Xavier Beauvois, Damien Odoul) play clients.

L’Apolonnide has all the trappings of a lush costume drama and is a beautifully mounted film. But despite its clear discomfort with the world it depicts it is not coy - the film is both sensuous and sexy while never losing sight of the darker aspects of the trade. Ultimately, Bonello is ambivalent on the matter of maisons closes; for all the exploitation they engendered and facilitated, he suggests, via a haunting epilogue, they were still preferable to the more dangerous reality of today’s France, where prostitutes walk the streets, forced out by the 1945 law that closed the brothels. It’s a judgement that many will cavil with but it’s fully in the spirit of an honest and dramatically unrelenting film that acquits itself far better than most others treating the same subject matter have done.

L'Apollonide: Souvenirs de la maison close trailer:

5. Boxing Gym & Crazy Horse (Frederick Wiseman - USA/France)

The master of anthropological documentaries, Frederick Wiseman released two films this year, both of which offer the usual warts-and-all look at institutions and the people that work in them. The better of them is Boxing Gym, which shows a year in the life of a modest gym in Austin, Texas. The gym’s owner is Richard Lord, a quiet, unassuming forty-something who is one of those documentary subjects you inevitably fall in love with. He hosts hundreds of members per year, who range from budding fighters to students to young mothers, who train alongside their baby baskets. There’s no divergence from Wiseman’s usual non-obtrusive style. There is no commentary and no interviews direct to camera; the meat of the film is long takes of people working, dressing, sparring. It’s a film with an almost perfectly even rhythm that a lot of people might find boring but Wiseman’s brilliance at filming humans at work and play leaves you with a warm feeling inside. Yet another addition to the pantheon of great boxing films, that most cinematic of sports.

The other film couldn’t be more different, even if the basic premise is the same. Crazy Horse is a portrait of the legendary Paris cabaret of the same name, Wiseman’s third film about a French institution following his documentaries on the Comédie française and the Opéra de Paris. The obvious focus is the nude dancers in both rehearsal and performance, overlooked by the famously perfectionist choreographer Philippe Decouflé. But we also see the more mundane aspects of the night club - managerial meetings, prepping at both the bar and front of house, costume and hairdressing. As with Boxing Gym, many will be nonplussed by the subject, as I admit I was before watching, but Wiseman’s eye is so sure he could film a team of housepainters over a year and still make it interesting. One of the more frustrating things about the film is the dancers aren’t interviewed and have few speaking parts so they remain as anonymous as they are at showtime. Whether this was a choice on the part of Wiseman or Crazy Horse itself is unclear, but the film could have done with a greater variety of voices. That quibble aside, it’s an enjoyable if slight film with the bonus of a guest appearance by Philippe Katerine, composer of the Crazy’s current hokey theme song and probably the coolest Frenchman alive. Anyone interested in watching either of Wiseman’s films would be advised not to pass up the opportunity to see them in the cinema - the 81-year-old is obstinately resistant to new formats and none of his 41 films is as yet available on DVD.

Boxing Gym trailer:

Crazy Horse trailer (NSFW)

6. Good Bye (Mohammad Rasoulof - Iran) & This Is Not a Film (Jafar Panahi - Iran)

Two films by Iranian directors who have suffered the full force of the Islamic Republic’s repression in the past two years. Both Mohamad Rasoulof and Jafar Panahi were sentenced to six years in prison, on typically nebulous charges of ‘crimes against the State’. The response of each to their ordeals was to deliver parting shots in the form of films that are either incredibly brave or reckless, depending on your point of view.

Good Bye treats of a human-rights lawyer, Noura, who has been banned from working by the regime, presumably after the Green Revolution clampdown. Having been banned from making films for twenty years, Rasoulof filmed Good Bye clandestinely, much of it in interiors dimly-lit with an icy blue filter. Noura’s daily life is one of harassment by authorities - the secret police arrive at her apartment to do a search while her mother obliviously watches TV, a sharp metaphor for the functioning of a police state in 2011 - and of bureaucratic frustration - to do anything she must get signed authorisation from her husband, despite being a once accredited lawyer herself. If anything, the evils of the Islamic Republic are more palpable in this deadening infantilisation of its citizens than in outright brutal repression, though that too is hinted at.

Not surprisingly, Good Bye is a bleak film, like watching a door slam shut in slow motion - as, surely, Rasoulof must have felt while making it. But it adapts its slow pace and inquisitive mood well to what is in effect a real-life thriller. It’s hardly entertainment, but gripping nonetheless. Panahi’s This Is Not a Film, on the other hand, is made with an unexpectedly light touch. Not that Panahi has been incapable of humour or lightness in his previous politically-charged films but it is surprising in what is a video-diary filmed during a year when he was under house-arrest and was anxiously awaiting his fate as his case went through the courts. Filmed by documentarist and co-director Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, Panahi storyboards on his living-room floor a film he has been unable to make due to the ban imposed on him. He also analyses scenes from his earlier films, providing a unique masterclass that is conducted with a refreshing lack of pomposity. Periodically he calls his lawyer and sees his prospects of freedom fade. His only company, apart from Mirtahmasb, is an enormous pet lizard, who drapes himself across the sofa and bookcases, and a young student filling in as the building’s superintendent, who Panahi films on his iPhone, making a brief, probably illegal, foray out into the lift and down to the building’s forecourt as festive fireworks pop in the background.

If one charge can be levelled against Iranian filmmakers in recent years, it is that they appear to have retreated into their own social class for their films - only Asghar Farhadi’s work acknowledges the very real fissures in Iranian society - but, given the constrictions they face, especially Panahi, who, when not in prison, has been unable to leave his house, it’s understandable, if regrettable. In many respects, the censorship they face - formal and informal, sometimes negotiable, often emphatically not so - has made Iranian filmmakers prodigiously inventive and enabled them to develop a cinema of wonderful stylistic and dialectic sophistication. I have argued before that Iranian cinema, unlike most others, is one that derives its richness from the fact it is contingent on real-time history. The fate of Panahi and Rasoulof as well as a number of others suggests that the perspectives for such inventiveness are narrowing, even as Iranian cinema regains the verve that made it among the most exciting in the world.

Good Bye trailer:

This Is Not a Film trailer:

7. Bridesmaids (Paul Feig - USA)

The gross-out/dumb comedy is the last real redoubt of Hollywood excellence. Largely unpoliced by concerns of taste, respectability or target demographics, it ploughs its own furrow and some unusual stuff often slips in under the radar. Some of it is faintly subversive (the Farrelly brothers, Adam McKay), some reactionary (Judd Apatow) and some surreally barmy (Dodgeball) but, in its shambling way, it is more usually more interesting than the drearily ‘legitimate’ comedies than come out of Hollywood.

Bridesmaids breaks new ground by being one of the first gross-out comedies made from a female perspective. Annie (played by Saturday Night Live’s Kristin Wiig) is recovering from a business venture sunk by the economic crisis, and is asked to be maid of honour at her best friend Lilian’s wedding. But Lilian has made a new friend, the glamorous, pushy Helen, who has her own ideas about how the wedding preparations should be handled, often at a price that is well out of the range of the impecunious Annie.

Financial worries are a constant presence in Bridesmaids, as they rarely are in the movies, other than those that involve extreme scenarios such as owing money to people with violent tendencies. The last film I remember with such an eye on the petty cash was Walter Salles’ Central Station, way back in 1998. You could say reminding audiences of their bank balance is one of the last taboos of cinema, and this extends far beyond the mainstream. Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne once recalled his frustration, watching films as a child in California in the 1930 and 40s, at certain narrative conventions. One of those was people blithely leaving change behind them in diners and cafés, something he said people didn’t do in the Depression-hit town he grew up in. Bridesmaids works in this spirit, and it is not only Annie that frets - Helen’s father regularly pipes up, albeit comically, saying ‘I’m not paying for this shit.’ It’s a bit of a risk for a film to talk so freely of money, though possibly less so for a comedy, particularly one with as broad a brush as this one.

Beyond an anchoring in a very recognisable present, one in which millions of Americans alone are sliding inexorably into poverty, and a setting in a mostly overlooked American city (Milwaukee), Bridesmaids is a very funny, occasionally jolting comedy. It might veer a little too much into gross-out territory (the bridal fitting a case in point) but there are some wicked laughs too, such as a hilarious scene of airplane drunkenness (something very hard to play) and a painfully credible Irish cop played by Chris O’Dowd whose earnestness is steadily eroded by the shenanigans around him. It’s also quite telling that practically everybody involved, in front of and behind the camera, has made the jump from the small screen.

Bridesmaids trailer:

8. La Guerre est déclarée (Valérie Donzelli - France)

Actress/director Valérie Donzelli and her former partner, co-writer/co-star Jérémie Elkaïm’s use their own torrid real-life experience of their infant son’s Gabriel brain tumour. It’s a gruelling tale, in which they sell their apartment and max out their bank accounts for their child’s health, and it’s to Donzelli’s credit that she makes what could be a banal domestic tale so compelling. She tackles the matter with a martial diligence reflected in the slightly enigmatic title but her direction also has a lightness of touch that reminds you of early Godard and Truffaut, even if Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 is clearly the key reference. The last few years have been a good time for French cinema with a richly diverse range of films enjoying success (and La Guerre est déclarée did incredibly well at the box office following its August release). The film has been put forward as France’s entry for Best Foreign-language Film at the Oscars. It may be seen as too obstinately offbeat for that notoriously conservative slot but Donzelli’s film looks set to get an audience outside of France, which would be well-deserved reward for a filmmaker worth keeping an eye on.

La Guerre est déclarée trailer:

9. Le Quattro Volte (Michelangelo Frammartino - Italy)

Italian cinema of late, though vastly improved on the picturesque tat of the 80s and 90s, has not been a particularly reflective one and it was this that made the appearance of Le Quattro Volte such a bolt from the blue. Michelangelo Frammartino’s second film is a beautiful unvoiced, discreet, dialogue-free account of life over the course of a year in a Calabrian village. And as much of that life is animal and vegetal as human. The film is a string of tales, loosely connected by the goats that are one of the village’s main sources of sustenance. They also feature in a somewhat savage sacrificial ceremony every year, which is a remnant of a pagan tradition that is millennia old. Another of the village’s main centres of activity is charcoal production, which is made in a massive mound that is half-kiln half-pyre and which provides the film with one of its most arresting images. It’s not always clear what is happening in the film and what the viewer is supposed to draw from it but its strangeness, the frissons you get from watching a goat being born or charcoal burning situate it in a field of film that is thinly populated. The ethnographic cinema of the Iranian Abolfazl Jalili is the only comparable example I can think of. Le Quattro Volte is probably the quietest film that will be released this year but it emits a reverberation that will be felt and recalled long after you’ve seen this gorgeous gem of a film.

Le Quattro Volte trailer:

10. Drive (Nicolas Winding Refn - USA/Denmark)

Nicholas Winding Refn has long been a director with promise but with an unfortunate predilection to privilege style over substance (the Pusher trilogy being an honorable exception). Ryan Gosling is a talented actor with a troublingly high ratio of films that are clearly below his station. So I wasn’t expecting too much from this, Refn’s second American film.

But Drive is as mesmerizing as it is ostensibly cold and for once, Refn’s reliance on style comes up a winner. The film’s 80s look and music remind you of early Michael Mann (Thief in particular) and Gosling’s glacial hero is reminiscent of Alain Delon in his films with Jean-Pierre Melville’s (Le Samouraï, Le Cercle rouge and Les Doulos). It’s a thin, lean film that will annoy many - some might be tempted to think of it, less as those illustrious references, as The Notebook with added urban alienation - but sometimes style in itself is not such a bad thing. Drive is a handsome thriller that won’t overload you with sustenance but it is great cinema, in the sense of a film to be seen on the big screen, enjoyed on a night out.

Drive trailer:

The Best of the Rest

Tomboy (Céline Sciamma - France)

Another Year (Mike Leigh - UK)

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Turkey)

Moneyball (Bennett Miller - USA)

Polisse (Maïwenn - France)

Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimomski - USA/Ireland/Israel)

Santiago 73 - Post Mortem (Pablo Larraín - Chile)

Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky - USA)

Le Roman de ma femme (Djamshed Usmanov - France)

The Strange Case of Angelica (Manoel de Oliveira - Portugal)

Ha Ha Ha (Hong Sang-Soo - South Korea)

The Fighter (David O. Russell - USA)

Le gamin au vélo (Jean-Luc & Pierre Dardenne - Belgium)

The Hunter (Rafi Pitts - Iran/Germany)

Poulet aux prunes (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud - France)

Pater (Alain Cavalier - France)

Meek’s Cutoff (Kelly Reichardt - USA)

The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog - USA/France/Germany)

Habemas Papam (Nanni Moretti - Italy)

Attenberg (Athina Rachel Tsangari - Greece)

Neds (Peter Mullan - UK)

The Artist (Michel Hazanavicius - France/USA)

L’Exercice de l’Etat (Pierre Schoeller - France)

Hors Satan (Bruno Dumont - France)

Melancholia (Lars Von Trier - Denmark/France/Germany)

La Piel Que Habito (Pedro Almodóvar - Spain)

Carancho (Pablo Trapero - Argentina)

I Wish I Knew (Jia Zhangke - China)

Carnage (Roman Polanski - France/USA)

The Worst

The King's Speech (Tom Hooper - UK/USA)

And what of the year’s worst films? It’s always a crowded field but 2011 had two stand-outs. They stand out not so much because of their inherent awfulness (though both are bad) but because they scooped the two biggest prizes going - Academy Award for Best Picture and the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

It was fairly obvious from early on that The King’s Speech was going to clean up at the Oscars - it has everything that Academy members recognise as ‘culture’ - country houses, posh British accents, tweed and Colin Firth; it also has another thing close to Hollywood’s heart: a handicap and the will to overcome it. Even better, there is the vulgar but enterprising dilettante Lionel Logue, an outsider from the margins of Empire, there to shake the muddling royal out of it and get him to speak to the nation. Hollywood likes the glamour of royalty for decor but to get anything done, you’re going to have to turn to a commoner.

And, to be fair to the Academy voters, much of what we see onscreen is excellent. The set design is excellent, the cinematography is excellent, the costumes are excellent, the acting (especially by Guy Pearce as the abdicating Edward VIII) is excellent. Yet the film itself never excels. All the constituent elements are technically brilliant but none transcends that; for all the brio of Pearce, Firth and Geoffrey Rush’s performances, they are really no more or less important in the heel of the hunt than the quality of the hairdressing or the make-up. Job well done and all that but what we are left with is a Laura Ashley sports-movie, a drearily inexorable trajectory towards a pitchman’s target, shorn of nuance, ambiguity or depth. Tom Hooper, whose actual sports movie The Damned United possessed all those three qualities, in this film commits the worst of directorial sins: he guides the audience. And much of that guidance is keeping them away from trouble spots as ushering them to the final prize. The King’s Speech is a wonderful salve but comforting drama doesn’t make for great cinema. There are good intentions behind the film but watching it will do you about as much good as a diet of organic junk food will.

The King's Speech trailer:

The Tree of Life (Terrence Malick - USA)

The decision of the Robert de Niro-chaired jury at Cannes this year to bestow the Palme d’Or on Terrence Malick was not too surprising. It’s hardly the first time that better films have been overlooked (in this case Drive, L’Apollinide, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Le Gamin au vélo among others) for the top prize and Malick is, let’s face it, still a big name. The sad fact, however, is his films are not what they once were (even if there are many that will disagree with me on that). The rot began to set in with his comeback The Thin Red Line in 1997. Fine film though it was, it was marred by an unnecessarily starry cast and self-indulgent perorations on being and nature that were not in James Jones’ excellent source novel nor had they any place in a war film. Still, The Thin Red Line was not entirely sunk by this self-consciousness. His next film, the Pocahontas-John Smith drama The New World, was a slog to watch - more pantheist gibberish and a pace deadened to the point of lassitude.

The Tree of Life, like those two films, has many sequences that are brilliantly filmed, many of them involving children playing or the brutal patriarch played by Brad Pitt. Pitt is possibly the best thing in the film, breathing an enormous amount of life into what is essentially a caricature. If Malick still has the magic touch on set, how are his films so bad? Probably because he writes and produces them too. The Tree of Life sets out to be about much more than just the tale of a man traumatised by his abusive upbringing - it is about the very capacity for conflict and cruelty in living beings, if we are to gather from the sequence where a dinosaur-ish creature refrains from stepping upon the head of its prey. Some critics saw beauty in this scene. I saw it rather as Malick overplaying his hand, which he does throughout the film.

Sean Penn, as the man the child grows up to be, seemingly can’t handle a conference call such is the malignant influence of his father’s bossiness on him. He is supposed to be an architect but heaven forbid that Malick give us any inkling as to how that might form his life or his character - Terry is answering to a higher power. The Tree of Life would be drastically improved by removing every scene with Penn in it, or even better, replacing them with scenes of Penn as the Robert Smith-esque rock star in This Must Be the Place. Editing however is not Malick’s strong point; his template is clearly Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, even going so far as to drag Douglas Trumbull out of retirement to produce similar visual effects. 2001 is a far from perfect film but having re-watched it shortly after seeing The Tree of Life, it is a lot more forceful and cohesive. Malick’s film, on the other hand, asks narrative cinema to carry far too big a load. It’s not that ideas are incompatible with cinema but such is the leap from biological pre-history to suburban 1950s America, Malick encourages us to think in absolute terms. The jarring discrepancy between those grand precepts and a pretty humdrum underdeveloped narrative quickly turns to bathos. There is a lot in The Tree of Life’s three hours but it is a film that seems weirdly overfed and undernourished at the same time.

It is frustrating that Malick continues to plough this self-indulgent furrow as he is still a wonderful director of actors, and has a great eye for the strangeness in nature. If only someone might take him aside and persuade him to make simple films like Badlands and Days of Heaven again. Those were witty, intelligent and perfectly calibrated films, with an anchoring in a specific time and place. They were also, crucially, modest in their intellectual ambitions. The sort of films Malick wants to make these days are done far better by other directors, such as Michael Haneke and Lars Von Trier. Malick lacks their ironic self-awareness and unfortunately his films are empty bombast, even if he still has enough champions in the critical fraternity that think otherwise.

The Tree of Life trailer:

Other stinkers of note:

We Need to Talk About Kevin (Lynne Ramsay - UK)

Restless (Gus Van Sant - USA)

Burke and Hare (John Landis - UK)

Some books of the year

2011-12-19T12:10:00.004+01:00

A far from definitive list, but rather a selection of the better stuff I read this year, minus the more canonical works (I could regale you with my Panglossian enthusiasm for some guy called Shakespeare but maybe I shouldn't). Eagle-eyed readers will notice most the books here were not published this year - not to worry, there's plenty of time to get round to 2011's batch of publications.

Long Time, No See - Dermot Healy, Faber, £12.99

Healy’s first novel in over a decade confirms him as the unlikely experimental stylist first glimpsed in Sudden Times. The novel is narrated by one Mr Psyche (not exactly a Sligo name, but anyway) who has recently left school and who spends much of his time administering to his older neighbours Uncle JoeJoe and the Blackbird in a small coastal village in the north-west of Ireland. There is a hint of McGahern’s That They May Face the Rising Sun in the gentle pace of the rural setting but Healy divulges most of the tale through dialogue, much of it phatic and repetitive. It can hamper the mechanics of the plot at times but there’s a justness to the flow of niceties, making it almost a lexicon of small-town etiquette; its social interactions are convincingly spare but endowed with the sometimes ruinous reticence of the rural Irishman.

The drama is provided by the older gentlemen, eccentric Malibu-drinkers armed with tales of surprising social exuberance from the prehistory of Celtic Tiger Ireland. Mr Psyche is a sage anchor for the proceedings, a sensible foil for an entertaining, generous novel that goes about its business with everyday grace and quiet confidence. Irish writers are notoriously non-prolific, knocking out novels at their own pace and on their own terms. You can’t begrudge Dermot Healy that if the result is as pleasing as Long Time, No See. Still, you hope there won’t be as long a wait for the next one.

If it is your life - James Kelman, Penguin £8.99 (2010)

Cantankerous old Jimmy Kelman is one of the few genuine originals in British fiction and one who, his 1994 Booker for How Late It Was, How Late notwithstanding, is rarely afforded the respect he deserves. He is also a rare novelist whose short stories are every bit as vital as his longer work and his eighth collection, published last year, is as sparky and belligerently eloquent as ever.

The collection opens with ‘Tricky times ahead pal’, a tale of an unexpected amputation and the task of tailoring a pair of trousers to cope with it, delivered in a comically matter-of-fact way. Kelman shifts tone and voice effortlessly, encompassing wounded pride (‘talking about my wife’), genial solicitude (‘The Gate’, the story of a man trying to carry a second-hand children’s bike home after buying it) and paternal indignation (‘The Third Man, or else the Fourth’). Long pieces are interspersed with micro-stories, only a page or two long, as gnomic as they are evocative. The long title story is a painfully poignant account of a young working-class Glaswegian negotiating his own gentrification at college with a mixture of industrious pride and guilt at what he is leaving behind. It is a beautiful, magnanimous piece, the crowning achievement of a diverse, absurdist and bleakly funny book.

I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan - Alan Partridge, with Rob Gibbons, Neil Gibbons, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, Harper Collins, £9.99

I normally steer clear of audio books, partly because I consider books to be sacred objects but also because far too often you are at the mercy of the person entrusted with reading them and the risk of an annoyingly-voiced narrator is too high to part with cash. (Last I looked, printed books are also cheaper). But there are times when recourse to the spoken word is warranted and the much awaited 'second' autobiography of Norfolk’s favourite light entertainer is one of them. It is, as Partridge himself might say, textbook narration.

I, Partridge takes us from Alan’s birth (‘my father held me aloft like a fleshy World Cup’), through his miserable childhood and schooldays, to his meteoric rise to - and fall from - fame, and his uneasy reconciliation with provincial obscurity. Partridge is already one of the finest comic creations of the last thirty years, a precisely calibrated avatar of Middle English rightness and petit-bourgeois indignation. What is surprising is how the gag rarely flags over 300 pages - or almost seven hours, if you are listening. It’s a catalogue of cringe, a bathysphere of bathos, a symphony of squaredom. It’s also one of the finest badly-written books of this or any year (it is useful to listen to it periodically as a negative yardstick while writing) and one whose author would be only too proud to accept a Bad Sex award for.

The Music Instinct - Philip Ball, Vintage £8.99 (2010)

Philip Ball’s book won’t teach you how to read music because its premise is that you already know how. The title suggests a lineage from Steven Pinker but the inspiration is not the one you’d think, but rather a passage in How the Mind Works, where Pinker dismissed music as ‘auditory cheesecake’, and which provoked a minor kerfuffle in musicological circles. A science writer by trade who also has an impressively broad knowledge of music, Ball promptly takes Pinker to task before positing that we are all innately endowed with an ability to parse and interpret the sonic, tonal and rhythmic properties of the music we hear. Music leads the book but it is always underpinned by recourse to scientific studies - that might prove too technical for some it does make you look at and listen to the music afresh.

Ball is also an enlightened listener, he refuses blanket dismissals on grounds of taste of even the most wretched popular music and he is impatient with musical absolutes, allowing himself to admire and decry Schoenberg in equal measure. And neither is it all Western music that informs his theory - Indian, African, Native American music are all considered, while Javanese and Balinese gamelan is a crucial counterpoint to Western tonality. An online repository of recordings (albeit pretty insipid computer-generated ones) accompanies the book, which demystifies much of the heavier technical stuff. The author would no doubt be uncomfortable with suggestions The Music Instinct should have an ameliorative purpose but the book does make you a better listener. And it’s enjoyable in the process too.

Tentative d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien - Georges Perec, Christian Bourgois (1975) €5

(Available in English as An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, translated by Marc Lowenthal, Wakefield Press $12.95)

Perec had a Joycean impatience with form, rarely attempting anything more than once. If he ran out of literary archetypes, he would invent more. Among those inventions were tracts on how to ask your boss for a raise, a list of everything he ate and drank throughout 1974 and, in this short piece, a description of everything he saw over three days sitting in Café de la Mairie on Paris’ Place Saint-Sulpice in October of that year.

The title of the piece suggests Perec wanted to bleed the place of life, to record it for posterity, much as one might pin a butterfly lifeless to a display-case mount. It’s an idea that seems remarkably prescient today in the age of Google’s omnivorous thirst for documentation. And Perec was himself an able archivist, in both a professional and literary sense (he worked as a scientific archivist). One of his posthumous works was a collection of short essays entitled Penser/Classer (Think/Classify) but, like the lexicographer in Life - A User’s Manual whose job is to retire obviated words from the dictionary, Perec also knew that classification demanded selectiveness.

Tentative d’épuisement… purports to describe everything that passes into his view as he sits looking out into the square but Perec is chopping and excluding just as any other narrator would. And he is constantly questioning his observations, wondering if a tour bus is full of Germans or Japanese; if the plat du jour, which he can no longer see listed from a different table, has changed since yesterday. The only constants in his observations are the buses, the 63, the 70, the 86, the 87, the 96, which punctuate his text with familiar irregularity. What Perec seems to rather be doing is trying to exhaust the possibilities of non-literary description. That his Place Saint-Sulpice springs to life so readily from his seemingly obsessive list is testimony to an abject but brilliant failure on the part of the laureate of literary taxonomy.

X’ed Out - Charles Burns, Pantheon $19.95 (2010)

Burns’ first new comic book series since the hugely successful Black Hole is an intriguing account of a nightmare experienced by a patient recovering after what seems to be a traumatic accident or assault. In this first installment of a projected six, there’s no clear indication as to how art student Doug got into such a state, nor is it clear what his dreams, in which he appears as a Tintin surrogate, might mean. Burns’ gradual and discrete unfolding of the narrative is irresistible though and his use of darkened intertitles and blank panels impart an eery Lynchian menace. The book, with its bedridden hero trying to muster up clues from his past to elucidate his dreams, reads like a grotesque Proust, articulated in a clean, almost academic style that throws the disturbing vision into sharp relief.

Seeing - José Saramago (translated by Margaret Jull-Costa) Vintage £8.99 (2006)

The late Saramago’s 2004 novel is a parable on the tolerable limits of democratic mandates, which gained added resonance with events in the past year. A majority of voters in a general election return blank ballots, prompting the government to rerun the election a week later. An even bigger number of blanks - 85% - is returned and the government declares a state of emergency and vows to crush the unseen forces that threaten the fabric of democracy.

Seeing is written with Saramago’s characteristic faux-naive laconic drollness, and reintroduces - though not entirely convincingly - characters from Blindness, the novel of his most people are familiar with. And the scenario - where a plurality of political opinion is considered incommensurate with the totem of the ballot box - is one that is borne out with all too frequent familiarity these days. The blackmailing of the Irish electorate in the two Lisbon referendums and the similar stance taken by the Euro elites at the time of the earlier plebiscites in France and the Netherlands indicate exercising one’s suffrage a bit too seriously is not be encouraged. Now we see the Hobson’s Choice faced by voters in Spain and Portugal - and not even that in Italy and Greece - in response to the mismanagement of the economy. There is also the assumption in western countries that the chief goal of the Arab revolutions is to win the right to vote - a partial aim that becomes increasingly questionable when the ‘wrong’, ie. Islamist, parties are the beneficiaries of the polls.

Saramago deftly crafts a bleakly funny - but ultimately bleak - narrative that so precisely delineates the infantilising rhetoric of the political class, it is probably the finest fictional paradigm of a political reality since Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, and one that will likely gain further currency in years to come.

Knowledge of Hell - António Lobo Antunes (translated by Clifford E. Landers) Dalkey Archive $13.95 (2008)

There was a ‘new’ Antunes published in English this year - a new translation of his 1979 novel Os Cus de Judas, previously available as South of Nowhere and now as The Land at the End of the World - but the novel that followed that in 1980, Knowledge of Hell, is a fuller, more even work. Like the earlier novel, it draws on Antunes’ own experience as a medic for three years at the end of Portugal’s bloody colonial war in Angola. A veteran of the war, now practising as a psychiatrist at a mental institution in Lisbon (as Antunes was early in his literary career) recounts his experiences in an imaginary conversation with his daughter.

Knowledge of Hell is very much an apprentice novelist’s work, with self-doubt and bravado at turns bubbling below the surface of the text. But it is nonetheless hugely impressive. Antunes’ stunningly acute eye for visual metaphor is here already highly developed and his dense Faulknerian prose is the right vehicle for the confused nightmarish morass of memory conjured by wartime service. If, as Tom McCarthy remarked last year, prose is the chassis of fiction but poetry the engine, Antunes’ novels are seriously high-performance. Antunes has written a further sixteen novels, almost all of which document the at times harrowing reflux of Portuguese decolonisation, but only about half are available in English. Even more puzzling is how relatively unknown he remains. Though he has his high-profile champions - George Steiner, James Wood and Harold Bloom are fans - he has yet to be published in the UK. Maybe his novels are considered a bit prohibitively ‘difficult’ by a publishing industry that increasingly lauds the ‘readability’ of literary works, but you can help but think many people are missing out on one of the finest writers alive, writing in any language.

New Finnish Grammar - Diego Marani (translated by Judith Landry), Dedalus £9.99

Italian linguist Diego Marani’s 2000 novel, celebrated across Europe, finally gets an English-language publication. New Finnish Grammar charts the anatomy of language-learning, through the device of an amnesiac soldier in the Second World War who is convinced by his Finnish doctor that he too is Finnish. Repatriated to Helsinki, in the throes of war with the Soviet Union, the patient sets to learning the notoriously difficult language and tries to piece together his memories of the city that is supposedly his own.

He gathers his impressions in a diary and correspondence with a nurse who takes a shine to him before she rushes back off to the doomed front in Keralia. The novel perfectly captures the twists and turns of learning a foreign language, the dead ends, the frustrations, the breakthroughs, the wounded impatience with the target culture and the occasional quixotic identification with it. It is also a touching tribute to a unique country and culture, which seldom attracts the attention of anyone abroad. The success of New Finnish Grammar makes one hopeful translations of Marani’s five other novels will soon follow.

The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov, Allen Lane £14.99

The fact that Morozov’s book, published just after the New Year, was very quickly dated by the Arab revolutions, only underlines its timeliness. The Net Delusion, developed from Morozov’s Net Effect blog for Foreign Policy, takes aim at those ‘cyber utopians’ and ‘internet centrists’, who believe in the unfailing potential of the internet and technology to enable a passage to democracy and to defeat totalitarian regimes and old-school dictatorships. The popular belief that access to knowledge online was the exposure that would consign such regimes to history took a battering during the clampdown on the so-called Green revolution in Iran in 2009, in which protestors were easily picked off thanks to the online trail they had left. Morozov shows how every benefit of technology conceals a danger and these dangers are posed, not simply by the usual bogeymen in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran but also by governments in western democracies.

It soon emerged that there was a troubling interaction between some of the high priests of cyber-utopianism and unsavoury regimes - Clay Shirky had visited Libya in an IT consultant capacity back in 2007. And while people in the west enthusiastically added twibbons to their profiles for revolutions in the Middle East and decried the hounding of bloggers and activists there, later in the year we were being encouraged to post pictures on Facebook of rioters in Vancouver and London to name and shame them. It never seemed to cross anyone’s mind that such a habit quickly acquired might later be applied to political protestors. Morozov knows better than most the dangers that lurk in online activism for citizens of certain countries, having grown up in Belarus. A new foreword came with a paperback edition towards the end of the year; he does not deny that social media played an important role in the Arab revolutions, and continues to do so, but his warning that technology is a double-edged sword should be heeded by anyone with a blind faith in its progressive properties.

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Underachievement Films of the Year

2010-12-20T22:11:00.004+01:00

It wasn't the greatest of years for cinema, to be honest, and it's hard to figure why, unless the planets pulled sufficiently at once to put filmmakers from Buenos Aires to Tokyo to Rome sufficiently off their game. There were certainly no more bad films than usual out there this year (though certainly more than usual involving George Clooney) but few stood out. There were plenty of competent modest works made by up-and-coming directors and more established ones (even Woody Allen weighed in with a surprisingly decent film). But the films that will last can probably be counted on one hand. That said, all the films in the top ten here are worth a look and more than a few from the list of the rest at the bottom of the page. As ever in this end-of-year list my criterion for inclusion is a French release this year, hence the omission of certain films, such as Mike Leigh's Another Year (not yet released here) and Lucretia Martel's The Headless Woman (here last year), that might otherwise have made it. There are also films missing that I missed - Yorgos Lanthimos' Dogtooth is one I would love to have seen but it just didn't happen for one reason or another. There are films that aren't there because I thought they were awful cack (yes, I'm thinking of you, Inception) and finally, there are films that may not have been released elsewhere this year, putting me either ahead or behind the time on that count.

Enjoy reading and watching and feel free to argue strongly about anything that you think should or shouldn't be there.

1. Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu - Romania)

Corneliu Porumboiu surfed the wave of the New Romanian cinema in 2006, when he won the Caméra d’Or at Cannes for his first film 12:08 East of Bucharest. Based on his own experiences working as a cameraman in local TV, the film was a witty political comedy, which queried, in mock-heroic fashion, whether there actually was a revolutionary movement in a small Romanian town before Ceausescu abdicated at 12:08 on the 21st of December 1989. It played with themes of bravado and bragaddoccio familiar to every liberation movement, and its good-natured puncturing of faux-heroism was best exemplified by the film taking place during the none-too-momentous 16th anniversary of the revolution.

Porumboiu returned to Cannes last year with his second film Police, Adjective, a similarly astute examination of the legacy of the Securitate police state in contemporary Romania. Dragos Bucur plays Cristi, a young conscientious small-town cop, who is entrusted with tailing a trio of schoolkids who smoke hash during their lunchbreak. His boss and the public prosecutor both want a bust and the kids sent down but Cristi is reluctant to wilfully destroy the lives of the youngsters with a certain prison sentence when he is naively convinced that the drug laws will soon be overhauled. Cristi also suspects the older brother of one of the kids of trafficking, thereby giving him an extra incentive to bide his time.

It all sounds like a low-rent version of The Wire, and there are superficial similarities with the HBO show (it is not too surprising either that HBO’s Romanian arm was involved in financing this film). But the scale is much smaller, with the focus firmly on Cristi, a droopy but sympathetic figure, a Bartleby-in-the-making, who questions everything – the law, his superiors, the grammatical exigencies of the Romanian Academy that his schoolteacher wife tells him about. It would be a stretch to say Cristi is idealistic but he is responding naturally to what he perceives to be the absurdity and the injustice of the system he is forced to work in.

Cristi’s boss, police chief Anghelache is a formidable, malevolent figure played with great brio by Vlad Ivanov, the abortionist from 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. He is the ultimate arbiter, who holds the fate of all, his terrified employees and the townspeople alike, in his grasp. The showdown scene between him and Cristi is a masterpiece of dark sardonic comedy. Police, Adjective is an improbably gripping drama, filmed at a languid pace and with a lightness of touch that has been compared to Jim Jarmusch. But unlike the watery brew of Jarmusch’s work, in Porumboiu’s films, the characters have no refuge from contemporary society, nor from history itself.

2. Des hommes et des dieux (Xavier Beauvois – France)

Beauvois, the great autodidact of French cinema, turns his focus once again to an enclosed group of men, following his engaging police drama from 2006 Le petit lieutenant. This time, the subject matter is the sombre tale of the Tibherine monks, a community of French Trappist brethren based in a village in the Atlas Mountains in Algeria, who were massacred, allegedly by Islamists, in 1996, at the height of the Algerian Civil War. Beauvois, a decidedly non-spiritual filmmaker, is at ease documenting the artisanal day-to-day life of the monastery, with many sequences recalling Philip Gröning’s masterly documentary Into Great Silence, about the Carthusian monks of La Grande Chartreuse.

The monks enjoy a good relationship with the Muslim villagers, not least because of the free medical clinic they run, but they are threatened by the advent of Islamic fundamentalism. A pair of Croatian contractors get their throats cut at a nearby building site and then an armed group of FIS jihadists turns up at the monastery on Christmas Eve, demanding medicine for one of their wounded. They go away empty-handed but the monks are left with a quandary, whether they should leave for their own safety, abandoning the villagers or to stand their ground, putting themselves at risk and also inviting accusations of colonial arrogance. The latter is the view of the local police chief, who wants them gone. He sees them as a legacy of French imperialism and he also would have them out of the way for him to prosecute his intended dirty war against the FIS. The villagers, however, saddled with unbearable poverty and terrified at the onslaught of radicalism, want them to stay.

Given the fate of the monks is well known to the viewer – or certainly in France, at least – the film plays out as a sombre foretelling of their doom to come. The monks vote to stay, though there are some who clearly do not want to. The cast does a superb job laying bare the terrified vulnerability of unremarkable men, and one has to hand it to Beauvois for having the nous to choose one of the frothiest of French actors, Lambert Wilson, to play the abbot Christian. Christian is a frail, bookish presence, but a man who shows stirring fortitude when forced to take a stand against the menace he and his community faces. The film builds to its inevitable climax with an intensely moving last-supper scene set to the strains of Swan Lake, before the monks who fail to escape are taken away as hostages by the Islamists. Controversy still hangs over the death of the monks, whose heads were discovered at an FIS encampment several months after their kidnapping. In recent years, fresh allegations claim the Algerian security forces accidentally killed them in a botched raid and then dressed the killings up to make them look like they were executions. The order has since decamped across the border to Morocco. Des hommes et des dieux is a simple, beautifully-mounted film about one of the countless tragic episodes of Algeria’s bloody civil war.

3. Ajami (Scandar Copti & Yaron Shani – Israel)

The fact that the Oscar-nominated Ajami was co-directed by the Palestino-Israeli Copti and the Jewish Shani might give the impression that the film is one of those humanistic reconciliatory dramas so beloved of fok who prefer to see the Palestine-Israel situation as an unfortunate falling-out between neighbours who really should know better. Ajami is however made of darker matter and does not easily bend to ‘why-can’t-we-all-get-along’ flummery. The film is set in the eponymous impoverished neighbourhood in Jaffa, home largely to Palestino-Israelis, and beset by both organised and petty crime. The film follows a number of interconnecting stories, a local family that is the target of extortionists; a teenager from the West Bank, who has entered Israel illegally in an attempt to earn money to pay for his mother’s operation; an Israeli cop whose brother has gone missing and a small-time drug dealer whose Jewish girlfriend doesn’t go down well in the neighbourhood.

Ajami is a straightforward enough crime film, filmed with all the energy and streetwise verve of a young Scorsese. It also casts a light on a community that is largely ignored by even the more liberal wing of Israeli filmmaking, and also on that community’s own ambivalent relationship with its brethren from the occupied territorities. The film is neither a plea for tolerance nor a polemical insistence that inter-communal relations are beyond repair. It is, rather, a hard-nosed portrayal of a marginalised community, a film that is not afraid to show the Israeli police humiliated by the Arab locals, something that hardly went down well with some members of the current Israeli government. In a further twist, a recent attempt by Jewish residents of Jaffa to restrict muezzin’s calls in Ajami because of noise complaints is strangely reminiscent of one episode in the film.

4. The Robber (Benjamin Heisenberg – Austria)

Based on the true story of Johann Rettenberger, a marathon runner who moonlighted as a bankrobber, Heisenberg’s second film is a fascinating unflinching portrayal of a man tracked. Rettenberger leaves prison at the start of the film, having gained the approval of the authorities with his assiduous training and endurance running. He continues this upon his release and becomes a minor star, coming from nowhere to win the Vienna marathon. Neither, however, does he give up robbing banks. We are never told why, but back-story doesn’t really matter. What does is Rettenberger’s relentless resistence to captivity. His desire for freedom is instinctive, animalistic and, at times frightening. There is more than a touch of Peter Handke's The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, about The Robber, and the shadow of Jean-Pierre Melville also looms over proceedings. It’s a stark, pessimistic, but deeply admirable film by a young director who looks to have a great future ahead of him.

5. Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán – Chile)

The Atacama Desert was the centre of world attention for a few days in October as thirty-three miners were lifted to safety after more than two months underground. Chilean president Sebastian Piñera and his government wasted no opportunity to turn the rescue into a grand media event. It was a canny piece of stage management that ensured a better public image for Chile’s right-wing leader than the last one of a similar political hue, Augusto Pinochet.

Patricio Guzmán was a victim of Pinochet’s regime, being forced to flee Chile after the 1973 coup d’état that toppled the government of his friend Salvador Allende. Since his return to his native land, he has chronicled the dark days of Chilean democracy’s demise in documentaries such as The Battle of Chile and Salvador Allende. In his latest film he heads to the Atacama, indulging the passion for astronomy he has held since he was a child, and filming and interviewing scientists at the world-famous La Silla and Paranal observatories. But the Atacama Desert is also where a number of Pinochet’s victims were unceremoniously buried. Guzmán meets some of their relatives, including an oprhaned daughter who now works at the observatory as an astronomer and who reminds us that the living and the disappeared are all essentially stardust.

One thing that strikes you about the relatives (something I’ve also noticed with the relatives of the Disappeared in Argentina) is their dignity. They are holders of a righteous anger but you never get the sense they are consumed by bitterness or a thirst for revenge. Though they have never attained anything like the justice they deserve, they have always comported themselves infinitely better than those who aligned themselves with Pinochet’s regime. The latter are people such as President Piñera’s brother José, the General’s labour minister, whose website continues to use a 1973 editorial by the Economist as a threadbare rationale for the defence of fascism and state-sanctioned murder in Chile. Nostalgia for the Light is a gentle but angry work, a vital corrective to a media mogul’s government that would try to use the rescue of the workers it has always held in contempt to absolve itself of its historical sins against the people of Chile.

6.A Serious Man (Joel and Ethan Coen – USA)

Bar a few nods here and there, the Coens have rarely touched on Judaism in their films. They seem archetypal examples of what Greil Marcus once diagnosed in Bob Dylan – the Jewish American desperate at all costs to integrate himself into the goy mainstream. This is what makes A Serious Man such an exotic, and pleasant surprise. From its non-sequitur opening scene in the Polish-Ukrainian shtetl to a suburban setting in the late 60s that is so square it might as well be the 50s, it feels like nothing the Coens, or anyone else, have done. You imagine they had this in mind when choosing their cast entirely from unknowns or seasoned character actors. That said, there are familiar Coen themes and tropes in there, not least the title character, Larry Gopnik, played with magnanimous angst by Michael Stuhlbarg, who battles against forces trying to deprive him of tenure at his university, WASP neighbours that might just be vicious anti-semites and his wife, who, well, just takes him for a ride. A wonderfully entertaining, occasionally disturbing film that even has the outlandish audacity to suggest that a Korean student could possibly have flunked a maths exam. Yeah, pull the other one…

7. My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa – Russia)

Celebrated documentary filmmaker Loznitsa moves into fiction for the first time, for an enigmatic yet entrancing film about a trucker’s violent progress across Russia to deliver a shipment of flour. If it were cheerier you might call it picaresque. Georgy’s adventures are interlarded with episodes from the Soviet era, which may or may not have a bearing on goings-on in the current day, and Loznitsa mercilessly uproots the orientation of his narrative on more than one occasion. Closer to the brooding existential cinema of Andrei Zvyagintsev or Pavel Lungin than Alexander Sokurov’s spiritual interrogations, My Joy can be hard to watch for those of frail disposition. Loznitsa has however managed to fashion something of wonder out of bleak material.

8. Alamar (Pedro González-Rubio – Mexico)

A five-year-old Italian boy travels to Mexico to visit his father, whom he has never met before. The father, Jorge, subsists happily with his own father, on the Banco Chinchorro, the world’s second-largest coral reef. Jorge shows young Natan how to fish and cook and introduces him to the manifold wildlife of the Mexican coast. The sequences are all filmed with a natural matter-of-factness and the film given a documentary verisimilitude by the knowledge that Jorge and Natan are father and son in real life too. It’s no surprise that González-Rubio comes from a documentary background and the scenes he depicts with such a benevolent languour provide a thrilling frisson of discovery for even the most seasoned of parents, fishermen or naturalists. A film to watch with your kids, who would be sure to love it too.

9. The Social Network (David Fincher – USA)

This was the biggest surprise of the year for me. I have never been a fan of the slick vacuity of Fincher’s films (though I admit Fight Club and Zodiac had their moments) and Aaron Sorkin’s peddling of wet dreams for well-meaning beltway liberals had, for me, all the urgency of an Internet Explorer upgrade. And then it was about Facebook, the biggest pricks in the room at this point; you figure that Google chose their motto to be ‘don’t be evil’ because they saw Zuckerberg and Co. coming sharp around that bend. So I wasn’t completely sure how this could turn out to be a good thing at all.

But The Social Network works, strangely, as a piece of historical film (and we all know how quickly things begin to look old in the world of technology and the internet). Fincher’s restrains his crasser instincts and even his inability to resist filtering his images to a Rembrandt dunnish tone that seems designed to mask the dirt in the corner of the frame. Sorkin’s dialogue zings – a little too much, but it does the job – and Jessie Eisenberg is a better example of the Mark Zuckerberg we all know than Mark Zuckerberg probably is. Eisenberg’s avatar is a nerd from hell, supercilious, socially retarded, desperate to be loved by all those he despises, but brilliant and as ruthless in his excision of troublesome relationships as he is cavalier in his attitude towards anything beyond the limited purview of the matter in hand.

It certainly helps the Zucker-Eisen-berg case that almost everyone else is either 1.0-dim, 1.0-out of touch or even more of a dislikeable 2.0-muppet than he is. The only truly admirable characters in the film are female – and there aren’t many females in The Social Network that one can plausibly call ‘characters’. The film may also rely a bit too heavily on the jilted Eduardo Saverin’s side of the story and Lawrence Lessig has detected Hollywood vindictiveness in the negative portrayal of the ebulliently enterprising Sean Parker. But The Social Network is a decent, instructive film, a reminder that dim elites are always bound to be usurped by smarter elites and that nice guys don’t even get the honour of finishing last.

10. Tehran (Nader T. Homayoun – Iran)

Iranian cinema, the star of the 90s, has retreated from the international spotlight in the Ahmadinejad years as its luminaries have either faced exile (Mohsen Makhmalbaf) or taken refuge in increasingly tiresome formal obsession (Abbas Kiarostami). Only Jafar Panahi and Bahman Ghobadi have kept the flame alive internationally for Iran with their socially engaged cinema. But now Panahi has been locked up by the Islamic regime and banned from making films for twenty years, while Ghobadi was forced into exile after his fiancée Roxana Siberi was expelled after being imprisoned on charges of spying. On his way out Ghobadi cemented his fall from favour with Nobody Knows About Persian Cats, a drama about clandestine rock bands in Iran. It was a pleasing if uneven film, as might be expected from one that had to be shot in secret and on the hoof to circumvent the ban on rock music in the Islamic Republic. But it also signalled the end of a golden era of Iranian cinema, a cinema that appears to be no longer capable of flourishing under the stifling conservatism of the diminutive Twelver Ahmadinejad’s government.

Thus it was a relief to discover Homayoun’s Tehran, which had all the spark of the films that first came to international prominence in the early 90s, and which also explored new territory that had previously been intimated by the likes of Panahi and Abelfozl Jalili. It tells the tale of Ibrahim, a migrant from the provinces who rents a new-born baby from a people-trafficker to give him an edge begging in the streets of the capital. Things take a turn for the worse and it inevitably becomes complicated for Ibrahim. For those that know Iranian cinema and its codes and conventions designed to skirt government restrictions, Tehran is a startlingly candid piece of realism. It delves into the grim, murky underworld of migrant workers, who live three or four to a room, and who survive by recourse to practices that are not only forbidden but their existence denied by the Iranian authorities. It remains a mystery how Homayoun got the film made but as it is we should be thankful for one of the few fictional documents of a crucial period of Iranian history to have made it all the way to the West.

And others that weren’t too bad at all:

La terre de la folie (Luc Mollet – France)

Shirin/Certified Copy (Abbas Kiarostami – Iran/France/Italy)

Disgrace (Steve Jacobs – Australia/South Africa)

Mother (Bong Joon-ho – South Korea)

Nobody Knows About Persian Cats (Bahman Ghobadi – Iran)

Precious (Lee Daniels – USA)

Weaving Girl (Wang Quanan – China)

Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans (Werner Herzog – USA/Germany)

Ander (Roberto Castón – Euskadi/Spain)

The Ghost (Roman Polanski – USA/France)

Optical Illusions (Cristián Jiménez – Chile)

White Material (Claire Denis – France)

Después de la revolución (Vincent Dieutre – France)

Daddy Longlegs (Josh and Benny Safdie – USA)

Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz – USA)

Film : Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard – France)

Like You Know It All (Hong Sang-soo – South Korea)

Green Zone (Paul Greengrass – USA)

Dirty Diaries (Various – Sweden)

Tales from the Golden Age Parts 1 & 2 (Various – Romania)

L’illusioniste (Sylvain Chomet – France/UK)

The Mouth of the Wolf (Pietro Marcello – Italy)

Benda Bilili! (Renaud Barret, Florent de la Tullaye – France)

Vénus Noire (Abdelketif Kechiche – France)

The Housemaid (Im Sang-soo – South Korea)

Rubber (Quentin Dupieux – France)

The Other Guys (Adam McKay – USA)

To Die Like a Man (João Pedro Rodrigues – Portugal)

Fair Game (Doug Liman - USA)

Fix ME (Rael Andoni - Palestine)

Draquila – L’Italia che trema (Sabina Guzzanti – Italy)

Mysteries of Lisbon (Raúl Ruiz – Portugal)

Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Remember His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Thailand)

Submarino (Thomas Vinterberg – Denmark)

Poetry (Lee Chang-dong – South Korea)

You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger (Woody Allen – USA/UK)

Kaboom (Greg Araki – USA)

Homme au bain (Christophe Honoré – France)

Honey (Semih Kaplanoğlu – Turkey)

Toy Story 3 (Lee Unkrich – USA)

Four Lions (Chris Morris – UK)

The City Below (Christoph Hochhäusler – Germany)

Was It Any Good Then?

2010-07-12T23:11:00.005+02:00

Spain carry off the World Cup, deservedly so, and even if they did not manage to impose their dominance on the tournament as firmly as they and many neutrals would have liked, they were certainly the best team in South Africa. There has been a lot said about the standard of the World Cup just passed, with many being rather hasty to dismiss it in comparison to past tournaments. A lot of the dissenters are drawing ill-thought-out conclusions, generated in part by short memories. Even though diving and play-acting are a scourge on the sport, they are nothing new either and were already a feature of professional football in the 1980s, and some would say, before that. There were some appalling refereeing errors - which, to be fair to the officials, might have been avoided if FIFA's obscurantism on employing technological evidence at the highest level of football were dispensed with. But major refereeing errors have always been with us, and are the stuff of World Cup legend, you could say, from Clive Thomas' blowing for full-time just before Zico scored against Sweden in 1978 to the leniency shown Harald Schumacher's vicious assault on Patrick Battiston in Seville in 1982, not to mention the Hand of God itself.

South Africa 2010 was a decent enough tournament that managed to maintain a good level of quality football and excitement after a sluggish first week. Of course there were downsides. The tournament lacked a truly fantastic stand-out side. Spain, Brazil and Germany all showed glimmers of sustained brilliance but they were in turn compromised by obligations of difficult opponents. Spain tailored their patient possession football to defence-minded adversaries such as Portugal, Paraguay and the Netherlands. It was frustrating that they were unable to score more (with eight goals they are the lowest-scoring champions in history) but you also got the impression they weren't too worried by that either. They knew the breakthrough would come and their composure throughout was testimony to their status as a great side.

Brazil played some great football in the first half against the Netherlands before imploding inexplicably in the second period. Their overly-physical approach also possibly backfired, with the Dutch being far less intimidated than most teams would have been. That match was also symptomatic of many in the tournament, tactically astute sides cancelling one another out. There was a broad homogeneity to the tournament tactically, with 4-2-3-1 prevailing and making it very difficult for full-backs to attack. Which is not to say that this defensive-tinged football was necessary bad - there is nothing wrong, after all, with good defending - but many games looked similar to one another. And there were also long periods in games where teams surrendered dominance. That may be attributed to fatigue, altitude or poor organisation. But it's telling that there were only a handful of teams that were immune to this trend.

Germany, churlish as it might seem to say, were a bit overrated. There were certainly one of the more exciting teams in the tournament on the counter-attack but there was a lingering sense that they were not going to be so formidable when the avenues through the centre of the field they enjoyed against Australia, England and Argentina would be cut off by cannier opponents. Serbia and Ghana had already made the Mannschaft look ordinary enough and it was no surprise that Spain overran them in the semi-final. This German team has a great future ahead of it, especially with young talent as irresistible as Meslut Özil, Thomas Müller and Samir Khedira available to them. I still believe they are ultimately as one-dimensional as Jürgen Klinsmann's side of four years ago, for all the counter-attacking pyrotechnics, but with greater tactical application they could become a more complete team.

The final was pretty much in the image of the tournament itself. It wasn't as dreadful a match as people are saying - though the first half was dire. The Dutch's spoiling tactics and Howard Webb's cravenly incompetent refereeing allowed the game to be fatally fractured from early on. Spain finally imposed a sense of shape in the second half and, if the football was hardly top quality, there were plenty of chances and it turned into an enthralling war of attrition.

So it may not have been the most satisfying of tournaments but it was certainly far better than Italia 90, more consistent than USA 94, which lost its spark after the quarter-finals. And it was overall better than the last two tournaments too. In all I think only France 98 out of the last five tournaments was a conclusively better one.

It was also good to see Diego Forlán win the Player of the Tournament award. I thought Xavi possibly edged him, but the Catalan's integration into the wider woof of the Spanish tapestry may have counted against him. He resembled one of those anonymous medieval artisans so lauded by Roland Barthes in his essay on the Citroën DS. Forlán's performances were more grand-standing - and I mean that in an entirely positive way. As he has done so often with Atlético Madrid in recent years, he lifted Uruguay almost single-handedly. That is a little unfair, granted, as the celeste also counted on fine performances from Diego Lugano, Diego Pérez, Maxi Perreira and Luis Suárez, but Forlán's efforts were herculean and possessed of a level of character rarely seen in a player in the service of a team effort. He and Uruguay were among my stars of the tournament. A small country with a famous footballing history that acquitted themselves honorably, and who clearly enjoyed every minute of their stay in South Africa. There will be those that grouch about Suárez's handball against Ghana but Uruguay knew that they were paying a price for that. Their manager Oscar Tabárez could also have complained about Wesley Sneijder's offside goal in the semi-final but he chose not to, knowing that these things even out in the end. Uruguay fought to the very last in the 3rd place play-off against Germany and provided a fantastic finale with Forlán hitting the bar in the last minute when a goal might have given him the Golden Boot and his team 30 minutes of respite. And their wonderful national anthem also won new admirers across the world. It's one I could listen to again and again. I hope to see them in Brazil and, roll on next year's Copa America.

The Netherlands and Spain: Unknown Quantities

2010-07-05T17:20:00.005+02:00

The Netherlands and Spain have something in common in this World Cup in that they have reached the semi-finals without playing terribly well but also because they have both conquered a bogeyman that they would always have to slay in order to win the tournament for the first time. For the Dutch it was Brazil, whom they couldn't overcome in 1994 and 1998; for Spain, it was getting to the semi-final for the first time in their history (we'll disregard their appearance in the final-four group stage in 1950). Spain felled a similar foe in the European Championships two years ago when they beat Italy - albeit on penalties - for the first time since the Spanish Civil War, and that gave them the a marked rise in confidence for the rest of the tournament, which was obvious when they swept the Germans aside in the final.

Both sides face tough challenges in the semi-final though the Netherlands will be glad that Luis Suárez, who scored freely in the Eriedivisie last season for Ajax will be missing because of his dastardly deed against Ghana, and the fact that captain Diego Lugano will line out not fully fit suggests that Uruguay are being stretched a bit thin. Spain are, surprisingly, being given few chances against Germany, not least because of the Germans' impressive performances against England and Argentina. Joachim Löw's boys are irrepressible when they have the initiative, which they grasped early on in those games but if they are held scoreless for long enough they soon begin to look very ordinary, as they did against Serbia and Ghana. Spain's ball retention will make it difficult for Germany to find the spaces to exploit as they did in their previous games. Even though they haven't been too impressive so far, Spain have also shown they are difficult to score against too. It should be a fascinating match, which I think Spain will edge 1-0 or 2-1, provided they manage to strike first.

A Spain-Netherlands final would give us a fixture that is rarely played in international football. The two teams have never met in a European Championships or World Cup and friendlies between them are few and far between. This is unusual given the profile of the two sides. They did however play against each other in the qualifying round for the 1984 European Championships and the group ended in one of the more controversial qualifying results in modern times. In a high-scoring group (even third-placed Ireland knocked in 20 in their eight games), the Dutch and the Spanish both finished their qualifying with games against Malta in December 1983. A 5-0 win for the Netherlands in Rotterdam left the Spaniards needing to win by eleven goals five days later in Seville to progress. Despite being only 3-1 up at half-time, they managed to reach the magic target, with Santillana scoring four goals and Poli Rincón three. The Dutch cried blue murder at a fix and the result was as responsible as the Anschluss match between West Germany and Austria in Gijón at the previous year's World Cup for FIFA and UEFA mandating final group games be played at the same time.

Spain went on to shock reigning champions West Germany (at the time under Jupp Derwall's management a team as loathsome as the current Germans are admirable) in France and reach the final where Luís Arconoda's unfortunate blunder allowed Michel Platini's free kick to squeeze under his body. But I wonder what would have happened if the Dutch, with much the same players that would win the European Championships four years later, had got to France? Gullit, Rijkaard, Koeman and Van Basten were already in place, together with a few of the older generation from 1978 as well as Arnold Muhren and Johnny Metgod. They then failed to reach Mexico 86, being edged out by Belgium. Who knows, if Spain had not scored that twelfth goal against the Maltese, the Dutch team of the 1980s would be remembered even more fondly than that of Cruyff, Rep, Rensenbrink and Neeskens.

Here are the goals from Spain 12 Malta 1. See if you can spot anything fishy:

The Pantomime Villain

2010-07-05T16:33:00.007+02:00

A friend spent the first few days of the World Cup in Uruguay and Argentina, and was in Montevideo for the celeste's first match against France. As the friend was coming from Paris, his hosts assumed he would be supporting les bleus. He explained he wasn't because of the Thierry Henry handball, which struck the Uruguayans as unusually moralistic, as they would figure a win is a win no matter how you get it. And they should know, as their passage to South Africa was secured thanks to a goal against Costa Rica in San José that was offside.

So one shouldn't be too suprised that the Uruguayans are shrugging off the brouhaha over Luis Suárez's last-minute goal-line handball that kept his team in the tournament. The truth is any team would shrug their shoulders in the same way, though few would probably celebrate Suárez's ethically dubious action as he himself and teammate Diego Forlán have. That fits in with the Uruguayan footballing ethos of garra (guts) that combines toughness, guile and spirit. It has given the world the wonderfully redoutable teams that won two Olympic Games and two World Cups, but also, more unfortunately the disgraceful shower of cheats and cloggers that marred Mexico 86.

I'm not going to condemn Suárez too strongly. What he did was cruel and, in the spirit of the game, wrong but few fans or footballers would expect anything else of a player in that situation. It was a last-ditch effort to keep his team in the World Cup and he probably expected it to fail. Asamoah Gyan missed the penalty and Ghana missed the opportunity to become Africa's first ever semi-finalist. There has been talk about introducing a penalty goal to punish such infractions. There's something in the idea but Suárez's transgression was so egregious (committed in the very last minute) and so clear cut that it hardly serves as the best test case. How would one deal with Harry Kewell's goal-line handball in Australia's match against Ghana, which though seemingly less intentional still prevented a goal being scored? One can imagine, in the event of a rule change, goalmouth mêlées might give rise to any number of unjustly awarded goals because they ricocheted off people's arms two or three yards from the goal-line. It might seem perverse to say this but cheating to prevent a goal is a little more acceptable to me than cheating to score one, probably out of an innate defensive-mindedness. Therefore I am less inclined to condemn Suárez as I was to condemn Henry (or Maradona before him).

In any case Ghana have little to complain about. They benefited from two poor officiating decisions in the build-up to the goal (a free-kick resulting from a dive and two players were offside when the ball was flicked into the box) and the penalty was given and Suárez sent off. It's true that a chance to score does not necessarily equate with a clear goal but such are the rules for the moment. I feel sorry for Gyan, who was one of the players of the tournament and who showed immense character to return to the penalty spot two minutes later and put away his shoot-out spot-kick. But if he had scored, Suárez's handball would be a footnote in World Cup history. And Ghana should be thankful they got the penalty which is more than can be said for Arsenal when Stéphane Henchoz's handball went unpunished in the 2001 FA Cup final or the United States when Torsten Frings got away with a similar foul in the World Cup quarter-final a year later. I think that most of the outrage directed at Suárez comes from the fact he dashed an African teams' hopes. That's understandable but Ghana, fine team that they are, are well capable of craftiness when it suits them too.

Suárez is the villain of the piece now but few in Uruguay will care. He has fallen on his sword for the semi-final against the Netherlands and that will probably cost his team. But his last-ditch gamble paid off.

The One I Missed (and the One, Alas, I Didn't)

2010-07-03T14:21:00.005+02:00

The first World Cup I fully had an interest in was 1986. I had been strangely indifferent to football until two years earlier, when the high drama of an end of season suddenly got me hooked, at the age of 8. There was Manchester United's run to the Cup-Winners' Cup semi-final, where they fell to Juventus; Watford and Elton John and their fairytale march to the FA Cup final; Liverpool and Spurs' penalty shoot-out wins in the Champions Cup and UEFA Cup finals respectively; and, most importantly there was Euro 84: Platini, Arconada, Elkjaer, Laudrup.

So it all teed things up nicely for Mexico 86. It didn't even matter that Ireland languished second from bottom in a qualifying group that featured both Denmark and the USSR; I assumed that that was the way things were (I was a bit too young to realise how close they'd come to qualifying for Spain 82). Both those teams got off to a flying start in Mexico before being cut down to size by the more constant Spain and Belgium in the last 16. Though my memory of the tournament is clearly tinged by nostalgia, I can confidently say it was one of the best, if not the best ever. It had loads of great games (and a few dire ones, of course), bucketfuls of fantastic goals, sizzling team performances from the afore-mentioned Danes and Soviets, and the Spanish, the French, the Brazilians. And there was also, of course, the man who, more than anyone else, put his imprint on a tournament: Diego Maradona. It also had one of the best finals ever, if not the best: Argentina powering to a 3-2 win over West Germany in a thriller that produced three goals in the last seventeen minutes.

But I didn't see it. Having watched as many of the games as a ten-year-old could expect to up until then (many of them kicked off at 11pm and 1am Irish time) the elements conspired to stymie me on final day. The night before a storm hit our village and the makeshift illegal deflector system that we all relied on in those pre-cable days broke down, presumably because the mast was blown down on a neighbouring hill. I was condemned to follow the match on the radio, obviously no substitute but something I was well used to in those days when there was rarely more than one live football match per week.

So I prepared to listen to it with a friend of mine. With five minutes to kick off, my Dad came into the house saying that he was going to watch it at the home of an acquaintance, who, for some reason had managed to circumvent the TV black-out. He said I could come, but for reasons that remain obscure to me, I didn't go. Maybe it was because my Dad was reluctant to bring both of the kids over to the house of somebody he wasn't really that friendly with; maybe the friend might have been persona non grata in the house (it might seem ridiculous that a ten-year-old would be treated this way, but the kid's father had plenty of enemies); or maybe I myself felt awkward about gate-crashing and wasn't terribly sure if we could both go along. I can't remember which one it was. In any case I dallied. I'm not even sure if the friend found out about the offer to watch the match but we continued listening to the medium-wave crackle of the ever-excitable Gabriel Egan relating the drama from the Azteca.

And I missed a cracker. It was only later that I saw this, in its entirety, of course:

Four years later I was in the Gaeltacht at Coláiste Lurgan in Inverin during the final of the dreadful Italia 90. A much less attractive Argentine side slouched and kicked their way to the final, shocking the Italians in Maradona's adopted home city of Naples. Germany, the only truly great side in the tournament were up against them again. I was worried that the directors of the school might have been soccer-phobes (almost any Irish person over the age of thirty can relate an anecdote of the petty attempts of GAA folk to thwart people's enjoyment of the 'foreign game'). But I needn't have. A TV was mounted in the assembly hall and we all strained our eyes to be able to follow the action (the screen was little more than 18 inches and the reception was poor). But the match was appalling. A dull spectacle marred by Argentine cynicism and a lack of German edge. Pedro Monzón was given the first red card in a World Cup final, later joined by Gustavo Menzotti when Argentina disputed the non-existent foul on Rudi Völler that gifted the winning penalty to Germany. Wretched matches have an annoying tendency to stick in your memory every bit as tenaciously as the great ones and they sear themselves on your conscience. There were many of those at Italia 90 (Ireland v Egypt was possibly the nadir) but for a final to take place in such an acrimonious atmosphere with little or no football being played was too much. Most the World Cup finals up until then had been exciting games (or so I learned from the testimonies of older people and from World Cup histories). I wanted to forget this match but I never can.

There's no way I'll be missing this afternoon's clash between the two giants.

Brilliant Orange Cracks the Brazil Nuts

2010-07-02T20:13:00.004+02:00

They came, they saw, they kicked. And then they were caught out at setpieces, as in 1998 and 2008. Brazil are out and few real football fans will mourn. True, the Netherlands' win was not terribly pretty and their first-half performance was febrile at the very best. But they took the game to the Brazilians with admirable ambition in the second period and once they made the breakthrough they grasped the initiative. Wesley Sneijder once again underlined his credentials as a serious Ballon d'Or candidat with his wicked inswinging cross for Felipe Melo's own-goal (a misfortune you couldn't wish on a more deserving character) and his glancing header for the winner.

It wasn't a vintage Dutch performance but they played like a team that had more interest than merely cancelling out the opposition. I didn't expect the Netherlands to win but I had also said that if they got around the significant mental block of beating Brazil they could win the World Cup. There's a long way to go but they are surely as confident as they've been for three decades now. Given that the Dutch won all eight of their qualifying games and all five of their matches in South Africa so far, could this be the first time ever a team will win a World Cup with a complete grand-slam of qualifying and tournament games?

Quarter-final playlist

2010-07-02T14:24:00.002+02:00

Uruguay

I've put them up before but here's Los Iracundos, one of the better beat combos from the banks of the River Plate in the 1960s. Still going strong:

Ghana

There were many greats from Ghana's Highlife scene but none are bigger than E.T. Mensah:

The Netherlands

I could have gone for Nits, Shocking Blue or even, shudder, Acker Bilk but I'm going to pick a staple of my indie-youth existence, Bettie Serveert, named after the great Bettie Stove:

Brazil

Where do you start with Brazil? Elza Soares on account of her being married to none other than Garrincha? Tom Jobim? Gilberto Gil? Chico Buarque? Bondê do Role? Tetin? CSS? Sepultura? Gal Costa? Marcos Valle? Quarteto em cy? João Gilberto? I'll settle with the godfather of samba himself, Cartola, and his magnificent cover of Candeia's 'Preciso me encontrar'

Argentina

I suppose I should go for some tango but with a nod to Carlos Tevez, who likes this sort of thing, here's Los Fabulosos Cadillacs:

Germany

It can only be Can:

Spain

Los Planetas: presumably the Castillian for Hüsker Dü

Paraguay

OK, I'll admit, I had to dig out some Paraguayan rock. The ska group Ripe Banana Skins were the pick of the crop.

Paraguay

I'll admit I had to look hard to dig out some Paraguayan rock. Ska group Ripe Banana Skins were among the pick of the crop.

At Close Quarters

2010-07-02T13:46:00.002+02:00

And so we get down to the business end of things: the quarter-finals are upon us. By rights, the tournament's most important action should be crammed into one-eighth of its matches though that's not always the case, as the drab petering-out of the 1994 and 2002 World Cups at this stage proved. Three of this weekend's four ties look enthralling, even if the Netherlands v Brazil could possibly be smothered out by two highly-organised sides with two holding midfielders each. That would be a shame, as the two countries, in their three World Cup finals matches to date have each time served up one of the matches of the tournament. Their first meeting in 1974 in Dortmund signalled the Dutch's definitive arrival as a force in world football. They prized apart the World champions, who resorted to an unusually physical game. I was reminded of this listening to a Dutch journalist speaking on the Guardian podcast earlier was pessimistic about the Dutch chances, particularly regarding Arjen Robben, whom he said would be double-gamed and 'kicked wherever he can be kicked' by Felipe Melo.

Other great matches took place in Dallas in 1994, where a squabbling Dutch side, mediocre until then and fortunate to beat Ireland 2-0 in the last 16, finally found their feet and pushed Brazil all the way, succumbing in the end 3-2 to the combined genius of Romario and Bebeto. Four years later in Marseille, Guus Hiddink's fantastic team looked like they would put an end to their twenty years of hurt, but although they outplayed Brazil for much of the match, they needed a Patrick Kluivert goal two minutes from time to save the game and when the match went to penalties, everybody knew one team was going to win.

The Dutch have been largely uninspiring so far without ever really being threatened in any of the four matches they have played. Their defensive approach hasn't pleased fans but they have done the minimum, which was surely always going to be to survive till this inevitable match. Bert van Marwijk has praised his defence, noting that the only two goals they have conceded yet were from the penalty spot. But there were a few hairy moments in the second half against Slovakia and they relied on a pair of fine saves by Maarten Stecklenburg to maintain their lead. Had the Slovaks expressed a greater deal of urgency, they could well have been in trouble. The prospect of Maicon bearing down on Giovanni van Bronckhorst is also an alarming one. While I hope the Dutch sneak this one, and save the whole world from another Brazil win, I think it will be beyond them.

Uruguay and Ghana looks a far more open game. The South Americans look by far the better team on paper but they way they surrendered control of the game in the second half against South Korea should provide some cause for concern. Ghana did fantastically well against the United States (and probably should have pushed Germany more than they did) but they still have the scoring problem. At least against the US they got off the mark from open play though their two goalscorers Kevin-Prince Boateng and the brilliant Asamoah Gyan are uncertain to start today due to injury. I would expect Uruguay to take it narrowly but if Ghana get that lift of playing for a whole continent that clearly gave them the edge against the US, they could become the first ever African team to make the semi-finals. Whoever wins, I will be happy.

Argentina and Germany is another chapter in a Titanic saga of World Cup football. Though the Argentines scarcely harbour the same enmity for the Germans as they do for England, this is a definite grudge match. The two countries faced off successively in one of the best World Cup finals ever (1986) and one of the worst (1990). Argentina had two players sent off in the latter and went down to a non-existent penalty converted by Andreas Brehme. Four years ago in Berlin, the majestic gallop of José Pekerman's side was curbed by the hosts, in what was a bit of a shock at the time. To be fair, the Argentines were much the better side in that game but a puzzling attempt to defend a lead, against the Germans of all people, backfired and a Miroslav Klose goal pulled the match into extra time. Then there's the famous story of Jens Lehmann's secret list of Argentine penalty kickers and the mass brawl that broke out after his winning save.

So far both sides have been among the best in the tournament, though it is difficult to gauge exactly good either are. Argentina benefited from a pitifully weak first round group and an offside goal by Carlos Tevez broke the spirit of Mexico in the last 16. That said, they have won all matches handsomely and Lionel Messi is having a stellar tournament, and surely it's only a matter of time before he finds the net. Germany have been hugely impressive in hammering hapless Australia and England, and less convincing against Serbia or Ghana. It's interesting that the Germans, previously the villains of the piece at almost every World Cup are now a side almost universally popular. It certainly helps that the rather one-dimensional football deployed by Jurgen Klinsmann four years ago and by Joachim Löw at Euro 2008 has been discarded in favour of a more dynamic counter-attacking game. The Germans are fearsome going forward and with three dodgy Argentine defenders in Samuel, Gutierrez and Dimechelis, the albiceleste could be in big trouble before they even get on the target. That said, the Germans are far from perfect at the back either. I think this one could be a 2-2 draw and then go to penalties. And we know who always wins on penalties...

The we have Spain, who have been winning relatively ugly too. Like the Dutch, they should be happy enough to get to the quarter-finals and open up the way for their first semi-final (if you discount the final 4-group stage they contested in 1950). After a rickety start they have grown in composure, even if Fernando Torres' continual inclusion remains questionable; Athletic Bilbao's Fernando Llorente looked the part against Portugal and should prove a sharper tool in unpicking the Paraguayan defence. Paraguay are a team notoriously difficult team to beat (and a 0-0 draw against them in Saint-Étienne in 1998 effectively put Spain out of that tournament) but also a wretched team to watch. With the exception of Tunisia, Paraguay have been involved in the greatest number of dire World Cup matches I have had the misfortune to see. I haven't been convinced of their worth in this tournament either; they were incapable of stringing three passes together against Italy and scoreless draws against New Zealand and Japan are hardly the stuff of champions, even if they did deserve to go through against the Japanese. Paraguay have conceded only one goal so far and one will probably be all the Spanish get tonight. As we have seen against the United States in last year's Confederations Cup and against Switzerland in their opening match, Spain have difficulty with defensive opponents. A little extra width in the game with the introduction of the homesick Sevillano Jésus Navas should do the job. It will be a frustrating evening and it's unlikely to be pretty, but I thin Spain will carry the day.

My pre-tournament prediction for the semi-finals was Uruguay v Brazil and Argentina v Spain. There's still a fair chance of that being right.

Glass Half Full

2010-06-26T14:15:00.003+02:00

The pruning has begun. The World Cup slims itself down to 16 teams, and, by and large, it's the right 16 teams. The tournament has livened up considerably after an opening few days marked by excessive caution and I would even say the final round of group games provided more drama than I can ever remember. A number of teams, such as Nigeria and Serbia were just a kick of a ball away from a place in the second round and the quality of the football has been high. I can even shrug off the dull scoreless draw between Portugal and Brazil as an irrelevance, about as indicative of things to come as a friendly international in February.

So of the teams left?

Uruguay v South Korea

Uruguay have surfed the wave of Latin American form in this tournament. After a cagey start against France, they have dazzled since. They swept aside South Africa with ease and brought the game to Mexico when a draw would have been enough to win the group. They have a superb defence and one of the tournament's best defenders in Diego Lugano. Monaco's Diego Perez has been inspirational in midfield, and Diego Forlán has brought the same immense character to the Uruguayan effort as he has to Atlético Madrid in recent seasons. Some say they are over-reliant on him. It's possible but it should be enough to get them to the semi-finals and certainly enough to beat South Korea, who have shown verve and industry in their matches so far but who are found lacking against stronger opposition.

United States v Ghana

A possible grudge match given the Black Stars knocked the Americans out of the 2006 World Cup with a 2-1 win in Nuremburg, thanks to a disputed penalty. The US have been impressive so far, showing a lot of steel and guts to come from behind and steal deserved qualification in injury time against Algeria. While they have been unlucky with bad refereeing decisions against them in both the games against Slovenia and Algeria, the idea among some of their new-found fans that there's an anti-American plot afoot could quickly lose them the goodwill the world is showing them. I expect them to beat Ghana, simply because Ghana have a chronic scoring problem. The Africans have scored both their goals from the spot and they missed a hatful of chances that could have sealed the game against Germany before Mehmet Özul's wonder strike. Despite their wonderfully fluid play and a powerful midfield, and Asamoah Gyan, a bundle of energy and character, their inability to find the net will cost them. The US to win 1-0.

More anon. In the meantime here's more Uruguayan rock. Los Iracundos:

Tri-iffic

2010-06-17T23:48:00.004+02:00

As an Irishman, it would be too easy to savour les bleus being predictably cut down to size, and I have to admit that the fact both goals came from debatable refereeing decisions made their misfortune all the more delightful. But we have to give credit to Mexico. The glimmers of promise visible in their warm-up games and in the opening match have now flared into something more substantial. The team's classy, elaborate passing did not always gain a foothold in a sometimes scrappy game but when they did things right, they were light years ahead of the French. Carlos Salcido's penetrating runs made me think of Jonathan Wilson's theory that the team with the best full-backs always wins the World Cup. That might be slightly beyond the reach of this Mexican side but the industry and flair shown by Carlos Vela and Giovanni dos Santos, and then, super sub Javier Hernández marks them out as one of the most exciting teams in South Africa. Rafael Márquez also marshalled his defence superbly, displaying an authority that will surprise many Barcelona fans that have seen him underperform in recent seasons.

They will be hoping to beat Uruguay in their final group game (no small feat) so as to avoid their perennial bogeyman Argentina in the second round. Either way, it is great to feast on the return of Latin American football to top form in this tournament. It's true that France are the first European side to be beaten by any of them but the South American qualifiers and Mexico have shown superb flair and initiative (well, perhaps not, Paraguay) and have defended well.

And the tournament is now alive, having thrown up six good games in two days. The curse of the first round of games has been lifted, with even Greece reacting to the hangman's shadow by going out and attacking. Leo Messi has once again being stellar, practically scoring a hat-trick for Gonzalo Higuaín. Argentina looked fantastic today but I'm still thinking it's probably too much too soon. The tournament though, is getting better. And I'm enjoying that.

The Slow Start

2010-06-17T16:01:00.002+02:00

The slow start is almost engrained in our conscience as a prerequisite for a lengthy run in the World Cup, or any other tournament. The truth is however, there is a finite number of teams afforded a slow start (and the implication is these are the big ones). Germany and Italy have historically been slow starters, but it must also be pointed out that the last time each of them have won the World Cup, they were getting wins on the board from the off, and Germany's 4-1 hammering of a superb Yugoslavia side in 1990 was as explosive a start as you'll ever get.

Some people I know also seem to have got it into their heads that France start tournaments slowly though I think this may be because the last World Cup looms large in their mind. France do start slowly often enough but, 2006 aside, they usually proceed slowly and then exit the tournament with the leisurely gait of a Left Bank flâneur. Their previous wins, at the Euros of 1984 and 2000 and the World Cup of 1998, started with straight wins in the group stages (a sole defeat to the Netherlands in 2000 came when both sides were already through to the quarter-finals). When France get off to a shocking start, it's usually a bad sign. Of course that will all change if they beat Mexico tonight but then, with two games out of a maximum seven gone, it can hardly qualify anymore as a slow start.

A piece on Tim Vickey's blog over at the Beeb said that World Cup winners pace their tournaments. Viewed through the wide-angled lens of history that might seem as profound as saying World Cup winners win a few games here and there, but it's obviously intended as a corrective to those that think Germany and Argentina's free-scoring starts make each of them bound for glory. Of course they can't both be, not least because they are now likely to meet at the Quarter-Final stage.

Spain don't start slow too often but they are given to bottle it at the moment of truth. Their 1-0 defeat to Switzerland* may yet prove as fatal as their early defeat to Nigeria in France 98 but I think the greater space afforded them by both Honduras and Chile will favour them and see them through to the second round. But then they may have to get their world-beating hat on sharpish, with the possibility of playing Brazil in the last 16 and, should they win, the Netherlands in the quarter-finals. The slow start will have to knocked on the head. But that's only fitting, really because, in most cases future champions don't get off to a slow start, even if they rarely blaze from day one either.

*I'm still mystified as to the over-reaction in the international media to this result. Yes, it is surprising, and Spain are a clearly superior side to the Swiss but with Ottmar Hitzfeld, one of only three men to win the Champions League with two different clubs, pulling the strings, surely taking Spain down was within their capabilities? After all, one need only look at the last two sides to defeat Spain, Northern Ireland in a European Championship qualifier in 2006, and the US at last year's Confederations Cup. Two very ordinary sides, indeed.

Like the Team, Shame About the Regime

2010-06-17T00:07:00.002+02:00

Like many, I was cheering on North Korea - or the DPR Korea, as its manager Kim Jong-hun, is fond of reminding foreign journalists - in their match against Brazil last night. The team, possibly benefiting from their international isolation, appeared completely unawed by their date with the five-times world champions, and matched them defensively for long stretches. They even created a clutch of half-chances and when Ji Yun-nam put the ball in the net, they got their just desserts. Back home the faithful undoubtedly went into raptures, seventeen hours later.

But a few people on Twitter were wondering aloud about the morality of supporting a team representing such a repressive country. I can understand that, even if the propaganda benefits Kim Jong-il is likely to get from three probable defeats at the World Cup are obscure to say the least. It'll be hard to put an ideological spin on that one. There's always a tinge of discomfort to be had when unsavoury regimes stand to benefit from the national team's sporting prowess, examples include Franco and Spain's 1964 European Championship win over the USSR (not to mention Real Madrid), Salazar's troika of football, fado and Fatima as weapons of mass distraction, the Nigerian regime of Sani Abacha during Nigeria's glory days of the mid-90s. Brazil's generals were also keen to claim credit for the selecão's glories, despite occasional resistance from the likes of Socrátes and Miguel Saldanha. Players of other national teams were subjected to terrorism by the tyrants their peoples laboured under, such as Haiti under Duvalier, Zaïre under Mobutu and Iraq under Saddam Hussein (or more precisely, his son, Uday).

The New Statesman, for the second tournament running, has compiled its list of World Cup qualifiers' ethical credentials. It is, of course, a laudable attempt to draw attention to the wrong-doings of countries but there would be few genuine football fans that would use it as a basis to root for someone, otherwise the likes of Denmark and Slovenia would have disproportionate support from neutrals.

Perhaps it's because I came to football at a very early age but I rarely associate a team with the politics of its country, or even its people. For instance, my current dislike of the Portugal side does not tally with my love of that country. I have supported Portugal in the past but I suppose a certain Real Madrid midfielder might have a lot to do with that disenchantment (his new club manager doesn't help their cause either). I have similarly fallen in and out of love (and sometimes back in love) with teams such as Spain, France, Italy and Argentina. My dislike of the English football team does not reflect on my attitude towards ordinary English people, but has more to do with the arrogance of their media; I can also say the same thing about France and their media's idea they have a divine right to be in the World Cup every four years. And I have huge sympathy for those faultlessly cosmopolitan Americans who play for and support the US national team, and draw brickbats from embittered right-wing isolationists at home and left-wing populists on their travels in Latin America.

There are heroes and villains at every World Cup. Usually the best are garnered in the drama of the game itself, except for the perennials: the grand guignol muppets of the rancidly corrupt national federations, headed by the big rancid cheese himself, Sepp Blatter. The corrupt will always be with us. But I won't hold that against the joy the citizen of any country holds in supporting their national team. Most do it in perfect innocence, and without thinking its the be-all and end-all.

The Dutch Masters and Their Apprentice

2010-06-14T12:32:00.001+02:00

My dear Netherlands play Denmark in a wee while. The current Danish side might not follow quite the same Dutch-inspired ethos as Sepp Piontek's wonder team of the mid 1980s (and Richard Moller-Nielsen's 1992 European Champions certainly didn't) but the Danes do have a pleasing honesty about their play and a commitment to good passing. They also invariably contribute to one great match in each tournament they play in (anyone remember their stirring 3-2 defeat to Brazil in the 1998 World Cup?)

The Dutch are unbeaten in 19 games, have two of the best wingers in the world (though how long Arjen Robben lasts is another matter). I think they will edge out the Danes, who are missing Niklas Bendtner. That should open up the way for that quarter-final meeting with Brazil, which would be a likely contender for match of the tournament.

And wouldn't it have been something if this team:

could have played this one?

Day 1 (and 2)

2010-06-12T13:14:00.003+02:00

It's all under way and it was an opening day that was familiar in its mix of sporadic drama and grinding boredom. What drama there was came in the second half of the opening game. After an initial ten-minute period early on where the hosts South Africa looked in danger of being overrun by Mexico's more able technique, bafana bafana found their feet. Fulham's Kagiso Dikgacoi played an exquisite forty-yard pass to Siphiwe Tshabalala who finished with a strike equal in its splendour.

The hosts should have finished it off after that but Mexico exposed their defensive frailties for Rafael Marquez to equalise five minutes from the end. What was refreshing about the South Africans though was the way they continued to chase the victory, with Katlego Mphela striking the post in injury time. Carlos Alberto Parreira's team is now thirteen games unbeaten and they will surely be capable of making life very difficult for the two other teams in the group.

Those two teams, as football journos are fond of saying, 'flattered to deceive'. Diego Forlán fashioned a couple of goalscoring opportunities but Uruguay were by and large appalling in everything but the marshalling of their defence. France looked the more lively but apart from Franck Ribéry's brilliant curling centre, which Sidney Govou should have finished from five yards out, they created little. Yoann Gourcuff had a poor game other than a cheeky free-kick that almost caught out Fernando Muslera at his near post. Anelka was another under-performer and was replaced by Thierry Henry, who was a little more industrious, though the whole world, not least the Irish, must have regarded with wry derision his efforts to claim a penalty from an unintentional handball. France are still short of ideas, but they are nonetheless well placed to advance to the last 16. A number of people I know are saying they usually start slowly in major tournaments. This is true but these slow starts generally don't generate any pace, and are the harbingers of an early exit. Of course, four years ago it was different. We'll have to wait and see...

South Korea and Greece are already off and away. 1-0 to the Koreans after Lee Jung-soo was left ridiculously unmarked at the far post on a Kim Sung-yeung corner. I have to confess that this is a match to cook pasta to (which I will be doing shortly) but Korea's enterprise is refreshing and I hope they bury the dour Greeks.

Later there is Argentina v Nigeria, two opponents that face off regularly in both World Cups and Olympic Games. I fancy the Argentinians to win this one comfortably bar a brief surge in Nigerian pressure in the second half. Both teams should come out of the group.

England v US, in the 'war-on-terror' group is likely to be a physical, possibly even bad-tempered, match. It may also be very ugly to watch. Though the Americans will fancy their chances I think both sides will cancel each other out. I also think that the US will be ill-prepared for the more mundane task facing them against Slovenia in the second game. I think Slovenia will do a smash and grab to put them into the second round before even having to face England.

A Great Little Country

2010-06-11T19:53:00.004+02:00

It was already easy, as an Irishman, to choose sides in tonight's Group A match between France and Uruguay. I have to say though that the look of the current Uruguayan side, with what is one of the most electrifying strike force in world football, Luís Suárez of Ajax and Atlético's Diego Forlán - close to 100 goals between them this past season. I also have an admiration for Uruguayan football that survived the experience of watching their ugly abrasive sides of the 1980s. It's hard not to admire a tiny country that dominated international football in its early days, shocking Europe by winning two Olympics in the 1920s, winning the World Cup on home soil in 1930 and only a fit of pique prevented them from travelling to Italy to defend their crown in 1934. And then there was the 1950 World Cup-winning captain, Obdulio Varela, (pictured) possibly one of the greatest, noblest men ever to play professional football. And there was also the magnificent Enzo Francescoli, the only saving grace of the disgraceful team that could have lit up Mexico 86 but chose instead to kick everyone in sight. Uruguay did nothing special in qualifying but the memory of their valiant efforts against Senegal and Denmark eight years ago is fresh enough to root for them and hope for some magic.

And they will believe of course that France and within their reach. I still believe les bleus will repeat their first round exit of 2002. Everyone blames it on Raymond Domenech but there's been a culture of shiftlessness in the French set-up that predates him by some time. The way they collapsed in Korea without Zidane and their uniformly awful performances in Portugal two years later suggest that the rot is deep set. I don't expect it to be resolved in this competition.

In the meantime, here's some classic Uruguayan rock from the 1960s. It's Los Shakers, you might be able to spot one or two of their influences:

Cup of Plenty?

2010-06-10T23:50:00.004+02:00

This occasional blog will become less occasional for the duration of the World Cup, barring other commitments and laziness. As I remarked when I posted around the time of the draw, few of us, not even professional football journalists, really know anything about any of the teams of the World Cup. Our knowledge is limited to the dozen of so big footballing nations, those players that have passed through the Champions League or Premiership. Of course, as ever there are places where people are more attentive than most - Latin America is the obvious example - but few Europeans know anything about Honduras, Paraguay or New Zealand, and few English speakers know anything substantial about the likes of Serbia (the former Luton defender Radi Antic's stewardship, notwithstanding), Slovenia or Slovakia. Our judgements of the collective merits of teams is largely based on hazy memories of performances in past tournaments, some of which stretch back a generation but never quite seem that long ago.

So, in short nobody knows anything. Or very little in the detail. That's why I can confidently predict that either Chile or Honduras will be a surprise package. As will Slovenia. And probably Uruguay too. What am I basing this on? Not a huge amount, other than a passing familiarity with a handful of players, a cursory study of recent form, and, most crucially, the fact that they all face favourable enough starts (Slovenia, for one, could already be qualified for the second round by the time they have to face England).

As for teams at the business end of things, unfortunately it's going to be Brazil. It's a long time since I thrilled at the auriverde. I think it was probably the 3-2 win against the Netherlands in the 1994 World Cup, a stellar match, which was one of the few sparks of brilliance demonstrated by that team, led to victory by Dunga. And Dunga is the manager of the well-oiled maquina that looks like it can sweep all and sundry aside as it powers in a business-like manner to victory. Brazilians are bored by it, but they are unlikely to be too put out if Lúcio lifts the World Cup for a sixth time on the 11th of July (in which case, will Brazil get to keep it, like they did the Jules Rimet trophy before it?) O jogo bonito is of more interest to Nike commercial directors these days than the Brazil coaching staff. Brazil are Germany in yellow shirts. A sexier Germany, but still Germany. And those once-every-four-years football fans who flock to bars to support the Brazilians even when the match is academic, my contempt knows no bounds for them (I remember having to walk for miles to find a place showing Croatia v Australia four years ago, as every bar was catering to yellow-clad non-Brazilians). My heart hopes they don't go all the way. My head tells me otherwise.

And what of the others? Spain are the favourites. I want them to win, as I wanted them to win two years ago. But their fabled breakthrough two years ago may not necessarily count for anything this time around. One defeat in 47 matches is a formidable record but that blip - a 2-0 defeat to the US in last year's Confederations Cup - was a significant one. And another such blip will undo the near-perfection of the past four years. That's the way great teams sometimes go. Injuries and fatigue may also affect them. In a just world they would beat Brazil in the final, and most of the world will applaud. But, in the world we know, they might even come up against the Brazilians as early as the second round.

Italy qualified comfortably enough but the guile they showed to win the tournament against all expectations is unlikely to suffice in itself this time around. They will probably stumble at the quarter-final stage, if not sooner. England are beginning to demonstrate a return to the mental febrility that has cost them dearly in past tournaments (only an Engishman seriously thinks penalty shootouts are a 'lottery'). They should qualify for the knock-out rounds after an early scare against the US, but a lack of strength in depth and a dodgy defence will ultimately be their undoing. Semi-finals are within their reach but they'll more likely be gone home by them.

The Netherlands, as ever, are my team. Bert van Marwijk has built well on Marco van Basten's unfulfilled promise. They emerged from a mediocre qualifying group with a 100% record and they've been sizzling in warm-up games. They have Wesley Sneijder and Arjen Robben, two of the most influential players of the past season. Captain Mark van Bommel will provide the steel in midfield, and a returned-from-injury Robin van Persie could be in line for top scorer. If things go well, they will face Brazil at the quarter-finals. If they can conquer the side that edged them in the Titanic struggles of 94 and 98, they could win the thing. But as ever with the Dutch, there will be other things to reckon with.

Germany are likely to reach the quarter-finals at least, despite missing Michael Ballack, while Argentina are the real conundrum. Either they will implode disastrously under the wanton management of Diego Maradona, or he will prove to be the talisman that drives a team of wildly-varying talents to go beyond anyone's expectations. I suspect we will see them in the semi-finals. France will probably go out at the first hurdle, of which, more tomorrow. African teams' best hopes lie in Nigeria, Ivory Coast and Ghana, even if only the latter of those were impressive in the Africa Cup of Nations. Nigeria should progress from a manageable group, Ivory Coast, if Drogba is fit, should be able to outmuscle Portugal, while Ghana's lack of firepower up front will see them fail in the Group of Death against Germany, Australia and Serbia. None of them will get beyond the second round.

Of course, I will be pleased to be disproven in all of this. Just as I was when Russia tore my beloved Netherlands apart at Euro 2008. If the football is good, so be it. The last really memorable World Cup was 1994, and even then the fizz went out at the semi-final stage. If we see a tournament to rival Mexico 86 (and yes, I will be prepared to watch another England v Morocco or France v West Germany) I don't care who wins. The French or the English can even go ahead and do it if they want. Enjoy the tournament!

Better Luck?

2010-02-09T08:35:00.002+01:00

There's an air of the consolation prize about Ireland's Group B draw for the Euro 2012 qualifiers; perhaps this is what Sepp Blatter meant by the 'moral recompense' that was due us for suffering Thierry Henry's creative machinations last November. It's probably the best possible draw we could have expected as a third seed. Russia are most definitely the least fearsome of the top seeds and they have been unable to build on the promise of their Euro 2008 performance. True, Moscow in winter and the Luzhniki plastic pitch will present problems but if Guus Hiddink departs, as expected in July, I expect the Russians to revert to their usual febrile selves. Taking four points off them is well possible.

Slovakia took full advantage of a winnable, evenly-matched group to qualify for South Africa, their first ever finals as an independent country. How good they are is hard to gauge. Even under Stephen Staunton's shambolic reign Ireland were good enough to beat them in Dublin and almost repeat the trick in Bratislava. It probably would be a good idea to get the away game out of the way early in the campaign. Macedonia will send shivers up the spine of us all after the 3-2 defeat in 2007 and the last-minute goal two years later that cost us our place at Euro 2000. Avoiding the sweltering autumn and summer temperatures in Skopje will be paramount, even if we should fancy our chances. We will play Armenia for the first time, and Andorra for the second. At the risk of sounding cocky you would be expected to have twelve points there. It's not a terribly glamorous draw and the FAI won't be too enamoured of the task of putting bums on seats to watch Ireland play Armenia or Slovakia. But it gives us our best chance in years of winning a group.

Those Oscar Nominations

2010-02-02T22:09:00.003+01:00

A rare plug here for the Hollywood self-congratulation fest, the Oscars, only really because of the unprecedented presence of three Irish films among the nominations, Granny O'Grimm's Sleeping Beauty in the Best Animated Short category and The Door for Best Short. And there was also a welcome surprise, Tomm Moore's The Secret of Kells. I saw the film last year here in Paris, where it did reasonable enough business during the Easter holidays. Unfortunately I saw it in a dubbed version (it's a Franco-Belgo-Irish coproduction) so I missed having the pleasure of hearing Mick Lally and Brendan Gleeson voicing cartoons. It's a superbly animated and thoroughly enjoyable film that fully deserves a big audience; it doesn't go on release in the States until April. It's unlikely that it will be able to see off the big guns such as Up, Fantastic Mister Fox or Coraline but Gunn and Kilkenny's Cartoon Saloon should get well established as a result of the publicity.

There were also Irish success stories within the machine with Ballyfermot alumnus Richard Beneham up for Best Visual Effects for Avatar and Peter Devlin for his sound work on Star Trek. This year the Academy has reverted to his original format of selecting ten films for best picture, presumably to allow five extra middle-brow movies with fine notions to claim some dubious prestige. The result is rather lopsided but it does at least allow some consolation to the scandalously overlooked A Serious Man, which garnered only one other nomination. It's probably a better film than either Fargo or No Country for Old Men, hitherto the Coens' most successful at the Oscars. But then again, what does the Academy know? (The nominations also remind me to finally watch The Hurt Locker; critically acclaimed though a friend of mine who has worked as a journalist in Iraq says it's rather risible, comparing it unfavourably to Generation Kill.)

Here's the trailer for The Secret of Kells:

Is That It?

2010-02-02T21:32:00.003+01:00

.

Robbie Keane goes to Celtic. I should be excited about this but I can't really be arsed. I just can't really see the point; of course he might provide the edge to help pull back the ten-point deficit and I can see him bullying Scottish defences in a Kris Boyd-like manner (you could probably get decent odds on him hitting twenty goals by the end of the season). But, in the absence of European football, his true usefulness is questionable. Especially if he's back at White Hart Lane in June.

Update: A 1-0 defeat to the Killie at Rugby Park with the new boy on board now threatens to make his coming ever the more pointless...

CAN Do

2010-02-01T18:11:00.003+01:00

And there was the final of the Africa Cup of Nations too, or the CAN as the French call it (doing likewise in English can give rise to some inelegant locutions such as 'being on the CAN for three weeks'). This year's tournament in Angola was, by most accounts, a disappointing one. I say 'by most accounts' because I saw little of it until the quarter-final stage. In France, the CAN is ring-fenced, rather unfairly by the cable channel Orange Sport, an annoyance for many football fans in the European country that cares most about the tournament. There were 68 French-based players in Angola, almost three times more than the next biggest representation, and nine of the 16 competing nations were former French colonies. Not surprisingly, there are few Ligue 1 managers that dare moan about losing their players to a competition played mid-season.

Togo are still reeling from the CAF's absurd decision to ban them from the next two tournaments because their withdrawal from this year's one following the Cabinda shooting was done because of governmental interference. As unjust and ridiculous as this decision is - not to mention insensitive - I'm not terribly surprised. The Togolese government was rather public in its requesting its team to return home for three days of mourning, as it had every right to be, and I could see the suits in the CAF bridling at this. FIFA and its minion affiliates like to invoke this division of government and football as if it were as worthy or undeniably ethical as the separation of church and state. There are, of course, good reasons to keep governments' mitts out of football but sometimes FIFA's motives seem more like eluding scrutiny of its own questionable practices. Besides, as L'Equipe commented yesterday, government interference in African football is practically de rigueur and if one were to indulge it in lesser instances, why not do so after a tragedy such as befell the Togo team? But I tire of expecting decency from football administrators anywhere, not least the sort whose first reaction to the attack on the Togo delegation was to condemn them for allegedly failing to observe security measures.

After all this, Egypt trotted out winners once again, sneaking a sly victory over Ghana thanks to a fine late goal from supersub Gedo, his fifth in the tournament. Hassan Shehata has fashioned the Pharaohs into an Arab version of the Germany of old: a formidable, well-marshalled, powerful outfit endowed with the mental strength to soak up pressure and strike at the vital moment. In the bar on boulevard St-Martin, where I watched the final, everyone, be they sub-Sahran or North African was cheering Ghana on, for any number of reasons, I imagine. But all were admiring of the Egyptian smash-and-grab, a mark of true professionalism. Egypt have been lucky in the tournament, with an appalling refereeing decision gifting them a non-existent goal to kill off Cameroon in the quarter-finals. Over the 90 minutes Cameroon had looked the better team. Ghana similarly passed the ball with far greater fluidity but the Black Stars rarely looked like making the breakthrough, relying far too much on strikes from distance. A goal at the other end always looked a possibility, given the swiftness of the Egyptian breaks and it probably would have come in extra time if Gedo hadn't played that sharp one-two with Mohammed Zidan and coolly placed the ball beyond Richard Kingson's reach.

Now that, with three titles on the trot and with half a dozen players featuring on all three occasions, the Egyptians can be conclusively proven to be a better side than any of the six African representatives at this year's World Cup, one wonders what might have happened if they got there. We got a glimpse at last year's Confederations Cup, where the Pharaohs gave a good account of themselves, losing narrowly to Brazil and beating Italy before collapsing, alarmingly, against the United States when they were on the brink of the semi-finals. We'll never know, and Egypt will have to keep up the momentum and try to make it to Brazil in four years' time. As for Ghana, their stylish play will be welcome at the World Cup, even if a tough group involving Serbia, Australia and Germany might be too tall a task for their enthusiastic youngsters.

Tutti Guti

2010-02-01T14:29:00.004+01:00

Lord, I hate Real Madrid but I have to salute the majesty of this barnstormingly brilliant set-up from Guti for Karim Benzema in the Riazor last Saturday night. Quixotic in its excellence to search out a teammate running behind when it would have been easier to score. Of course, had it not come off, we'd all be frowning disapprovingly at a wanton piece of showboating. But it did and we have this goal that even a confirmed antimadridista like myself can appreciate. Ludique is what a French intellectual might call this. Call it what you want...

Twittercide

2010-01-31T15:53:00.001+01:00

There used to be, in the sidebar of this page, a collection of my latest tweets and the more eagle-eyed among you will probably have noticed they're no longer there (or maybe not). About three weeks ago, I decided, in a fit of whimsy, to commit twittercide and erase all trace of myself from Twitter. It was a sudden acte gratuite; in the morning I was tweeting away to beat the band, by midnight my twitter presence was no more. I told nobody I was going to do it, not even the dozen or so of my 'followers' whom I actually know personally. I didn't even have to use the Web 2.0 suicide machine; it was all quick and painless and it was a good feeling to disappear into the night like that. Though I did enjoy Twitter, I can't say I really miss it. It was leeching up too much of my time (particularly since I got an iPhone) and I have since spent the regained time more efficiently, by reading. To a certain extent, contra the cliché spouted by social networking sceptics, I have become less rather than more sociable since leaving.

I'm not going to join the chorus of uninformed bores who rail against Twitter or any other social networking site. Twitter was enjoyable and can be of great use to some people but, even as my tweeting snowballed (I hit the 700 mark after nearly two years activity last July, by the week of my demise I was up to 4000) I couldn't really justify it from a professional point of view. I've used it once or twice to that end but, to be completely honest its effect was minimal and even the traffic diverted to this blog from it was negligible. I don't know if those folk I used to correspond with on Twitter read this blog (or even if many of them notice me missing) but for those that do, this will explain the absence. I was flattered to find out the founder of one major political website (whom I've never met) wondered where I had gone to. While I have not gone completely offline, it's nice not to have to express oneself in 140 characters or less anymore.

Raul Hilberg on International Holocaust Day

2010-01-27T22:29:00.007+01:00

Today is Holocaust Memorial Day and the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. I happened to recently watch Claude Lanzmann's Shoah once again - all nine and a half hours of it - after reading Lanzmann's thoroughly enjoyable memoirs Lièvre de Patagonie.

In the clip above, we see Raul Hilberg, the first major historian of the Holocaust - a term he, incidentally, disliked - demonstrating, via Reichseisenbahn documents, how railway officials of the Third Reich knew full well why they were transporting Jews to Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Hilberg, as in all his interviews in Shoah,can barely conceal his disgust at the task in hand, but that's hardly surprising seeing he lost 26 family members in the Nazi death camps.

Hilberg died three years ago. Though he could be a loose cannon at times, his old-fashioned Mitteleuropean sense of academic rectitude never deserted him and he never allowed what might appear to be the 'right fight' to cloud it. He deplored the shoddy tendentious scholarship of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners and proved an unlikely ally for Norman Finkelstein during the controversy over Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry. Hilberg agreed with him that the extent of Nazi gold stolen from Jews held in Swiss banks was exaggerated.

Inconvictus

2010-01-27T01:11:00.003+01:00

Though every new Clint Eastwood film is worth a gander, the quality control is not always the most stringent, so it's not terribly surprising that two good films, The Changeling and Grand Torino should be followed by one that's, well, more than a bit silly. Invictus is an adaptation of John Carlin's Playing the Enemy, the account of how Nelson Mandela put aside his well-founded prejudices toward the Springboks and got behind their surprise World Cup win in 1995. The film is very much a white person's wishful-thinking fantasy and it's hard to imagine Hollywood making a film about Bafana Bafana's victory in the Africa Cup of Nations a year later, despite the fact the footballers had more white players in their squad than the Springboks had black players in theirs. The rugby is likewise not too realistically filmed, and the matches take place in decidedly more balmy conditions than those who watched the World Cup in that South African winter will remember.

I also find it hard to believe that so many black South Africans shed their hostility towards the Springboks so quickly as appeared the case in the film. I would guess that the kindest emotion many of them expressed was rather indifference. Readers of this blog will know about my own indifference to rugby; I can't quite say I would always support Ireland's opponents in a match (though whenever Argentina dump them out of the World Cup, I always find it strangely amusing) but their Six Nations success last year left me as cold as a Chelsea-Man U League Cup semi-final would be likely to. If that's my reaction, I would find it strange that the majority of black South Africans could bring themselves to be so magnanimous to the sporting symbol of the hated apartheid.

But of course Mandela was exceptionally magnanimous, in this, as in many other cases in the years following his release. And, among his own electorate, he was largely alone. The film lacks the subtlety or the insight to really flesh out the historical stakes of Mandela's intervention; for all its good intentions it cannot avoid appearing to resolve more than four decades of apartheid by means of a unlikely sporting success. I'm reminded of a review I read of Roland Emmerich's Independence Day when it came out; the now forgotten critic said that though the world has been destroyed and civilization lays in tatters, the characters celebrate the conquest of the alien invader's like they've won a volleyball match.

But all this is a little unfair on Invictus. It's a likable enough film despite its manifest flaws. It is by Clint Eastwood after all, one of the more likable and admirable personalities in the US, never mind Hollywood.

Invictus - Official Trailer [HD]

It's as silly and enjoyable in its own way as this little masterpiece:

But neither is as good a film as this:

The Reverend James Cameron

2010-01-26T23:39:00.001+01:00

One shouldn't waste too much time on Avatar other than to remark that its 3D technology will serve many better directors than James Cameron well in years to come. One of that swarming horde, John Boorman - though he may not may use of the technology himself - summed up the film's success rather drolly in a letter to today's Irish Times:

The religious aspect should not be taken lightly. In Hollywood they speak of Avatar in reverential tones. They believe there is something sacred about a cultural object that makes that kind of money.

Somewhere up there Karl Marx is roundly smirking...

100 Films of the Decade - Part 5: The Top 10

2009-12-25T12:05:00.004+01:00

The top ten for the decade – or, as the more observant will notice, a top 12 – a miscalculation resulted in there being more left at the end than I originally thought. But none of these films could be left out and there’s no obligation to stick too closely to the rules. So here they are, and 12 films that everyone with an interest in either cinema or the contemporary world should see. Happy Christmas to all and a very Happy New Year too. See you all in 2010.

11. Still Life and 24 City - (Jia Zhang-Ke - China, 2006 and 2009)
Now that Zhang Yimou and Chen Kaige have given themselves over to the impasse of heritage cinema and martial arts movies, Jia is now the foremost Chinese director, providing a much more nuanced and interrogative look at China’s industrial boom. He is also the greatest geographer in contemporary cinema. Still Life follows a woman searching for her long-lost husband in a city that is in the course of being dismantled by its inhabitants before being engulfed by water to make way for the Three Gorges Dam. Hauntingly beautiful, it makes excellent use of sound and a bleached-out visual aesthetic that reinforces the ghostly nature of the passing of history and the way it affects ordinary people.
24 City continues Jia’s familiar blend of drama and documentary. It charts the closure of the former chief munitions works in the southern Chinese city of Chengdu, which in its day employed 50,000 people. It is due to be turned into a luxury hotel and apartment complex. The film features interviews with people who have passed through the factory, some of them real workers, some of them played by actors. And Jia’s sense of history is palpable. A middle-aged woman is interviewed about her youth, when she was nicknamed after a Joan Chen character she resembled; in a deft stroke of inspiration she is herself played by the middle-aged Chen. And the most heartbreaking moment in the film comes when a couple who arrived from the north in the 1960s to work in the factory tell of losing their child at a port-stop on the way, resigning themselves to the loss as the ship, symbolizing the future of China, could not dally.

10. Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman – Israel, 2008)
It might seem crass for an Israeli film about soldiers serving in the IDF in the very offensive that facilitated the massacres of Sabra and Chatila, to dwell on the after effects concerning the soldiers themselves. But Waltz with Bashir has its logic nonetheless. It testifies, like other recent Israeli films such as Avi Mograbi’s Z32 and Eytan Fox’s The Bubble to how the comprehensive militarization of Israeli society has blurred the line between military service and leisure activity. Israeli soldiers have full responsibility and no responsibility. Youngsters on military service increasingly use the opportunity to humiliate and poke fun at Palestinians and peace activists alike. IDF casualties are miniscule compared to those among Palestinians yet all military funerals are televised and the dead honoured with Wikipedia entries.

Folman builds on his own experiences of serving as a conscript in the Israeli Defence Force in the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Unlike some of his former comrades he cannot remember anything from the time so he interviews others, fellow soldiers, military commanders and journalists to piece the personal history together. The film is a harrowing, yet matter-of-fact exploration of the war that veers from hallucinogenic phantasmagoria to moments of keen psychological observation. Folman’s blocking out of his memories is undoubtedly linked to the guilt of the Israelis guiding the Christian Phalangist militias – with flares - to the refugee camp of Sabra and Chatila, where they massacred thousands of Palestinian civilians. The film closes with real footage of the slain bodies, which provides an uncomfortable jolt after the stylised animation of the previous hour and a half. And even if the film might have the distasteful feel of self-indulgence in the face of the slaughter of thousands of civilians, Folman is being honest in his recollections of a military campaign remembered almost as if it were a gap year, but underneath which lie the sordid and disturbing truth of an army that deliberately stood by and let evil take its course.

9.Two Lovers (James Gray – USA, 2008)
With two superb films in recent years James Gray might well be the true heir to the great Scorsese of old that we have seen so little of over the past twenty years. All his films have been set in Brighton Beach in Brooklyn and are steeped in the atmosphere of that musty down-at-heel neighbourhood. Gray also reminds you of many of the finer forensic observers in the history of cinema, the Bergmans, the Rossellinis, the Ozus.

Two Lovers is a departure from the crime films of Gray’s previous work, being a simple yet psychologically sophisticated love story involving a young man with a troubled past. Joaquin Phoenix is superb as Leonard Kraditor, jilted for his medical history and who struggles to rehabilitate himself having moved back into his parents. His parents encourage him to start a relationship with Sandra, the daughter of another Jewish businessman, and she is all game. But the irrational call of love incites him to look elsewhere, towards Michelle, the glamorous blonde who has moved in upstairs. She finds him charming, indulges him but is ultimately uninterested. It’s a banal tale of unrequited infatuation that will be familiar to everyone, but Gray films it with the same tautness as he did his tales of hoodlums and hard-nosed cops. It is one of the most psychologically plausible love stories ever to have been put to film and Phoenix’s performance is such that you hope his current retirement from acting will be only temporary.

8. Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Turkey, 2006)

Following on his hugely impressive second feature Uzak, which was a prizewinner at Cannes four years ago, Turkish director Ceylan cast himself and his wife (along with his own parents) in this melancholy domestic drama charting the break-up of a relationship between a sullen architectural lecturer and his younger girlfriend. Like Uzak, Climates is beautifully paced and each frame is rich with the tautness of minor human dramas. There is an echo of Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy in the film’s impassive retelling of a rupture. What makes it all the more striking is the unsympathetic nature of Ceylan's own character, the greatest directorial self-abasement since Fassbinder in Fox and his Friends.

7. La Graine et le mulet (Adbelketif Kechiche – France, 2007)
Adbelketif Kechiche didn't exactly come from nowhere with La Graine et le mulet - his previous film L'Esquive also won best picture at the Césars three years ago previously - but the jolt felt by this marvellously ambitious and inventive feature was such that you had a sense of seeing cinema entirely anew.

Kechiche started off as an actor in the films of André Techiné and he has inherited his mentor's astutely deft handling of ensembles and his clear-eyed humanism. The film tells the tale of Sliman, a Maghrebin sexagenarian living in Sète in the south of France, who after being laid off his job renovating boats in the town's harbour, decides to do one up himself and open a couscous restaurant on it. So far so banal, this hoary old tale is given extra pertinence for the fact that its protagonist is so firmly outside the French system that simple scenes such as visiting the bank and the local authorities are invested with unbearable tension and discomfort. Sliman is assisted by Rym the daughter of his common-law partner, a resourceful young woman, who works the system, herself half in the dark as to its labyrinthine intricacies.

Everything about the film ought to work against it; Kechiche uses non-professional actors and improvises heavily, he shoots long takes and lingers on small dramatic details. And the simplicity of the plot would be hard to get past most producers in this day and age. But Kechiche pulls it all off, mainly because he understands so well how cinema works, how much it is a fusion of the kinetics of human drama and the strange fabric of familiar everyday life. The film's magic is a fine balancing act between sociological observation of an immigrant community and dramatic exploration of a group that fleshes the characters out as the film develops.

The film's resounding success in France, where it did very well at the box office for a low-budget film without any stars, and also won Kechiche another brace of Césars, was even more remarkable. It also introduced Hafsia Herzi, a 22-year-old law student from Marseille, in the role of Rym. She herself won a César for best female newcomer and is likely to become a star, having stolen the show with a belly dance (which she put on 6 kilos to perform) that marks the film's dizzying climax. Internationally its success was not so great, hampered by a lack of big names and the awful title 'Couscous' but it’s a film that will last.

6. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg - USA/Canada, 2005)
Cronenberg’s was the comeback of the decade. After a period in the shadows in the 1990s when he made films of varying artistic success, he hit form again with his 2002 adaptation of Patrick McGrath’s novel Spider. But it was a comic-book adaptation that gave him one of his finest film’s yet. Viggo Mortensen plays a man with a hidden violent past that comes to light when he is hailed as a hero for killing two violent assailants in his diner. His Philly gangster brother, played by Ed Harris, tracks him down and tries to gain the pound of flesh he’s been looking for since Viggo’s absconding years earlier. The film, like Cronenberg’s next one Eastern Promises is shot in a deceptively crude Hollywood style. It looks like a contemporary B-movie without the jokey self-referentialism of a Tarantino or a Robert Rodriguez. But the A History of Violence, despite its outer simplicity, is the work of a master at the height of his powers. Cronenberg’s interrogation of violence goes beyond the merely gorely or visceral. Many people will find disturbing the reactions the film provokes in them, I for one found it creepy that the sudden collapse of Mortensen and Maria Bello’s marriage gave me more of a jolt than the rising body count or the conjugal rape. It’s not a pleasant feeling to have and Cronenberg knows how to supply it.

5. Avenge But One of my Two Eyes (Avi Mograbi – Israel, 2005)
Mograbi is a giant among dissident filmmakers. The Israeli served time in the 1980s for refusing to serve in the IDF’s occupation of Southern Lebanon, a move that has since been replicated by his teenage son. He has been a constant thorn in the side of the IDF and the Israeli authorities, even if his own susceptibility to the charm of Ariel Sharon – whom he has no hesitation calling a war criminal – led to his disgusted wife leaving him after his 1995 documentary How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Ariel Sharon. Of course Mograbi never did actually love Sharon but the film was an indication of the ambiguity inherent in political struggle on the Israeli left.

Avenge But One of my Two Eyes is the greatest documentary of the decade. The more straightforward parts of it show Mograbi filming the daily humiliation of Palestinians at check-points and at the Israeli ‘security barrier’ in the West Bank, Mograbi, a great big bear of a man, regularly intervenes and berates thuggish recalcitrant soldiers by reminding them ‘you work for me’. Mograbi also corresponds with an Arab friend by telephone in a series of illuminating conversations where the Palestinian’s resigned sense of outrage and refusal to condemn suicide bombings tests Mograbi’s own hopes for peace and justice. The more offbeat part of the film looks at Jewish suicide cults currently popular in Israel based on the histories of Samson and Massada. The clear suggestion is that Israel can hardly expect to disregard the injustice that drives Palestinian suicide bombings while continuing to valorize their own such suicide drives. The title itself comes from a rock song sung by a band affiliated to the far-right Orthodox Kash. It’s a chilling, bewildering detour into the fringes of settler fascism, but Mograbi is in no doubt that such extremists are a functional cog within the greater wheel of Israeli expansionism and triumphalism.

4. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke – Germany/France/Austria, 2009)
Haneke won the Palme d’Or with his first period drama, set in the twelve months preceding the outbreak of the First World War. A series of violent incidents violate the peace of a seemingly bucolic feudal domain in Northern Germany. It is never made exactly clear who is responsible for the outrages but there are indications as to the culprits. But Haneke is concerned more by the violence itself than by who was responsible for it. The acts of the locals suggest a greater fracture and social dysfunction than is presupposed at the start of the film. And though it would be a bit too much to read in it the roots of Nazism it is significant that the menacing brood of children would be just of an age to later enact the cruelties and atrocities conceived by Hitler. As ever with Haneke it’s a wonderfully mounted piece – shot in black and white, which lessens the distraction of the period detail – laden with dark premonitions.

3. The Wind Will Carry Us (Abbas Kiarostami – Iran, 1999)
Kiarostami at the peak of his career. Having just shared the Palme d’Or in 1997 (with Shohei Imamura) for the excellent Taste of Cherry, he bettered it with this intriguingly gnomic piece about a camera crew that arrives in Iranian Kurdistan to film the local waking rituals of a woman about to die. The film has the usual geometrically precise images of a Kiarostami film and there’s also gentle satire of the cosmopolitan Tehran elite. But the overall intent and ambience is profoundly humanistic. Kiarostami takes his title and much of the inspiration throughout the film from a poem by the late celebrated poet Forrough Farrokhzad, a particular bugbear for the Islamic regime. Kiarostami seems to have got bored with cinema in recent years, channeling most of his creative energies into art installations and photography. There are still films here and there but they seem more spin-offs than freestanding projects. Good as these are, it would be nice to see a string of new films from the man many consider to be the greatest filmmaker alive.

2. The Death of Mr Lazarescu (Christu Puiu – Romania, 2005)
Christu Puiu took the Un Certain Regard sidebar award at Cannes in 2005 for this brilliant comic drama about an ailing sexagenarian alcoholic's passage from one Bucharest hospital to another one autumn night. The self-confessed hypochondriac Puiu used his experiences in the city's hospitals to create this drama in which the splendidly-named Dante Lazarescu undergoes a nightmarish journey, entirely beyond his control as he lies semi-conscious on a stretcher, aided only by a sympathetic brow-beaten female paramedic. The state of the Romanian health service is abysmal and Lazarescu is successively misdiagnosed, rediagnosed and at one point turned away by a megalomaniacal doctor intent on punishing him for his drinking. Mr Lazarescu is redolent of the 'little man' in many a Central European novel and even while prostrate for much of the film he is a beguiling presence. The final, protracted scene where his dead body is washed and dressed is almost unbearably moving, all the more so in the light of the fact that the actor portraying Lazarescu, Ion Fiscuteanu himself passed away two years after the film. Puiu intends this to be the first of a sequence of six films, inspired by Éric Rohmer's Moral Tales; somebody ought to keep the chequebook open indefinitely for him if this stunning film is anything to go by.

1.Dogville (Lars Von Trier – Denmark/Sweden/Germany/France, 2003)
There are simple-minded folk that think Lars Von Trier is an inveterate misogynist and anti-American bigot. A close look at his films, where the trope of misogyny is practically a clinical control – and an enormous red herring – and the complex portrayal of a grieving mother in Antichrist should disabuse any sensible person of the previous illusion. As for the supposed anti-Americanism, if one supposes Dancer in the Dark and Dogville to be savage critiques of the United States, one must think likewise of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. If one persists in those nonsensical ideas about Von Trier, there’s very little that can be done, save perhaps watch The Five Obstructions, the film he made with his ‘hero’ Jørgen Leth and which lays bare his modus operandi and his outrageous provocation.

As for Dogville, well it’s not about the US, stupid, despite LVT’s bombast at press conference and despite the needling in the final credits. Von Trier’s real theme is the corruption of public discourse. The mountain village turns on Nicole Kidman’s Grace in a savage way but far more significant is the rhetorical justification for it proffered by the villagers themselves but also by the film’s epicentre of villainy, Thomas Edison (a fine name) played by Paul Bettany. This is why Dogville is the film for a decade, which was marked by a criminal invasion of a middle-Eastern country justified on pseudo-humanitarian grounds, and where jackals such as Blair, Berlusconi and Sarkozy protested innocence while they were engaging in acts of political garroting, a decade where Israel murdered 1400 Palestinians in a three-week offensive – a death toll of a ratio of 1000 to 1 – all the time claiming to be the ‘most moral army in the world’. Von Trier is a far more serious filmmaker than his press conferences suggest and he is possessed of a savage indignation worthy of Swift himself. He doesn’t always get it right – such was the case with the second film of the Grace Mulligan trilogy, Manderlay – but the man raised by dogmatic communists is rightly suspicious of both groupthink and the bullying consensual rhetoric of public relations. He’s the right cynic for our times, one we all deserve.

100 Films of the Decade - Part 4

2009-12-21T13:26:00.002+01:00

The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismäki – Finland, 2002)
Kaurismäki narrowly missed out on both the Palme d’Or and Best Foreign Language Film Oscar for this film in 2002 but it deservedly made him known to a wider international audience. A man is brutally beaten in a mugging and wakes up with no recollection of his past. He starts life from scratch and strikes up a relationship with a Salvation Army worker played by Kati Outenen, who won Best Actress at Cannes for this. Like Kaurismäki’s earlier Drifting Clouds and later Lights in the Dusk, the film is a loving, matter-of-fact look at the resilience of the poor. He sees heroism in people whom many would dismiss as losers or basketcases; and underneath the deadpan front, a darkly humorous genius glistens. Kaurismäki is one of the great characters of international cinema and an unfailingly generous one. When, at the height of the Bush-era xenophobia, Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami was refused a visa to appear at the New York Film Festival, Kaurismäki refused to turn up himself.

Nobody Knows (Kore-Eda Hirokazu – Japan, 2004)
Hirokazu is a quiet, unassuming director probably best known for his brilliant 1998 film Afterlife, where the recently deceased pass through an clearing house on their way to the eponymous afterlife. In Nobody Knows, a single mother abandons her four children, the oldest aged twelve. The four fend for themselves with remarkable success, managing to find food to live and even pay the rent. The mother returns briefly and then disappears almost as quickly. Hirokazu’s patient, gently paced direction is mesmerising but best of all is the performances he gets out of the four kids who, in most scenes don’t even have adults to play off.

There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson – USA, 2007)
For all its scope, its anchoring in the history of California oil and its origins in Upton Sinclair’s Oil!, Anderson’s fifth film is largely an interior one. There’s not much nuance in its historical portrayal of the oil trade, nor in Paul Dano’s preacher, who is almost a cartoon character who never ages throughout the film. But the film is a superb character-centred film with Daniel Day-Lewis striding the surrounding big country like a colossus. The opening half-hour where he silently labours towards his breakthrough is a stylish tour de force that few Hollywood directors would even conceive of. And Daniel Plainview (a representative name if there ever were one) storms through the film and his life with an irrepressible sense of self-entitlement and bitterness. He is a personification, if not of capitalism itself, but of the energy that drives entrepreneur’s on even when the goals no longer have any meaning. Probably the closest thing to Citizen Kane that has ever been attempted since Welles’ film came out.

Stuck On You (Peter and Bobby Farrelly – USA, 2003)
The Farrelly brothers’ gross-out comedies often have hidden in them an unlikely moral purpose – one that is far more subversive and sympathetic than the suburban conservatism of the overrated Judd Apatow. This insanely silly tale of conjoined twins – played by Greg Kinnear and Matt Damon doubles as an adroit critique of prejudice and marginalisation of the disabled, without ever sinking into mawkishness. And everybody, including Meryl Streep and Cher – who send themselves up gloriously – looks like they’re having a ball playing in it.

Yi-Yi (Edward Yang – Taiwan, 2000)
This decade saw the sad death of Edward Yang at the relatively young age of 59. Yi-Yi was his most successful film ever, a touching drama about three generations of a Taipei family, whose father NJ is unhappy in his career, has seen his mother slip into a coma and his wife leave him to go to a rural retreat following a mid-life crisis. It all sounds grim but it has a lighter touch than you’d think. And despite running for almost three hours it never gets dull.

Far From Heaven and I’m Not There (Todd Haynes – USA, 2002 and 2007)
Haynes is one of the most fascinating American directors there is, a true original, who delights in playing with the conventions of form and the icons of American pop culture. Far From Heaven is a pastiche of a Douglas Sirk that ought to be wearisome in its slavish reproduction of 50s suburban Connecticut and its right thinking. But it works, Dennis Quaid, Julianne Moore and Dennis Haysbert play it straight and Ed Lachman’s stunning fall-inflected cinematography raises it to the level of Sirk’s lush Technicolor masterpieces. I’m Not There retells the more interesting years in Bob Dylan’s career and Haynes has the inspired move of getting a string of actors, including Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere and Heath Ledger to play the man. There’s more than a touch of Haynes’ underrated Velvet Goldmine in the playfulness, and Haynes gets Dylan’s significance spot-on without regard to lengthy exegesis or sociological musing. And a double album soundtrack of Dylan covers by some great artists is the icing on the cake.

Beau Travail and L’Intrus (Claire Denis – France, 1999 and 2005)
Claire Denis is a quietly prolific treasure of French cinema, whose films feature heroes in existential revolt against constraining environments. Beau Travail updates Herman Melville’s Billy Budd to a Foreign Legion outpost in Djibouti. Denis Lavant play an officer who becomes fascinated by and jealous of a younger, better looking recruit played by Grégoire Colin, whom he sets out to destroy. In L’Intrus, Michel Subor goes on the run to Tahiti after a heart transplant. There he reminisces about his life as a young man, which is illustrated by footage from an unfinished film Subor shot in the Pacific with Paul Gégauff in the early 60s. It’s a liberating film about a solitary but defiant man approaching old age. Adapted from a philosophical text by Jean-Luc Nancy, which was more obliquely adapted the same year by Nicolas Klotz for the film La Blessure, about African immigrants squatting in Paris.

WALL-E (Andrew Stanton – USA, 2008)
Disney did well to acquire Pixar back in the 90s because just as the Mouse has seemed incapable of producing out any original material, never mind good stuff, Pixar has matured into a glittering studio the likes of which has not been seen in Hollywood for decades. It’s a pleasing vindication for Pixar founder John Lasseter whose adventurous proposals earned him the sack from Disney as a young man. Wall-E is probably Pixar’s best film so far (though there’s some very stiff competition). The quality of the animation has by now evolved so well to deal with the complex graphic depiction of an abandoned planet. There are techno-anthropomorphic thrills galore as Wall-E, the waste disposal robot discovers love in the form of the reconnaissance ‘probe’ Eve, and you can’t help but like it, even as it gets cutesier and cutesier. The film doesn’t quite live up to its stunning opening half hour but it is still possessed of a far greater dollop of misanthropy than you’d expect from such a film. And there’s great peasure to be had in the workings of the cutting-edge Heath Robinson devices that populate the ‘earth-in-exile’. And some of the gags are priceless.

Les invasions barbares (Denys Arcand – Canada, 2003)
Arcand’s sequel to Le declin de l’empire américain was so good that it actually breathed life into the preceding film, which I always thought had dated very soon after its 1986 release. Arcand had initially intended making a different film about death after his own father’s death from cancer a couple of years previously. But he soon realised a reunion of the group of philandering left-wing academics was the perfect vehicle for the film. But the main focus of the film is the dying Rémy’s relationship with his financier son, who, despite a hugely successful career has never lived up to his intellectual father’s expectations. It’s a talky film endowed with superb acting and a poignant sense of loss for earlier ideals, with the shadows of the fall of Communism and 9/11 looming large. Despite the grandiosity and the pretentions of its protagonists it’s an accessible and moving drama.

Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud – France/USA, 2007)
Satrapi’s Persepolis was probably the comic book that defined the decade and enjoyed a huge international success. She then adapted her autobiography for the big screen with fellow bande dessinateur Vincent Paronnaud. It’s a faithful enough adaptation and the book’s distinctive heavy monochrome lines are preserved with some slight shade for the domestic scenes and the book’s dark humour is maintained throughout. The book – and the film – is probably more responsible than anything else for destroying the idea in the West of Iranians as firebrand anti-American fundamentalists. In a memorable appearance by Satrapi on Stephen Colbert, her host called the humanizing of Iranians before a possible Israeli or American strike ‘dangerous’. Not surprisingly neither the film nor the book pleased the Mullahs in Iran, which is surely the highest of praise.

Kandahar (Mohsen Makhmalbaf – Iran/Canada, 2001)
Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a star of world cinema in the 90s though this decade he’s been much quieter. He did however briefly spring to public prominence shortly after 9/11 when his film about a Canadian Afghan returning to her native land while under Taliban rule coincided with the Allied invasion of Afghanistan. The film is his usual blend of fiction and documentary and is a disturbing account of a woman’s disappearance into a hellish trap. It was afforded a Presidential screening at the White House, even if Makhmalbaf was no fan of Bush. After years of conflict with the Iranian authorities he moved to Paris, where, along with Marjane Satrapi, he was to the forefront in protesting the disputed re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Entre les murs (Laurent Cantet – France, 2008)
François Bégaudeau’s third novel – a semi-autobiographical tale of a teacher in an inner city Paris school – looked like it would be difficult to film. Laurent Cantet got around it by getting Bégaudeau to play the teacher himself. The film is surprisingly close to the book, charting a whole school year, with the hero getting embroiled in petty squabbles with his charges – and one or two not so petty ones – and he tries valiantly to drill them in the correct usage of classical French. Largely improvised, the film is a hugely enjoyable and persuasive portrait of modern French society, the sort normally ignored by the bourgeois-obsessed French cinema. And seeing the teenage cast whisked around the world from Cannes to New York for screenings was a delight.

Match Point (Woody Allen – UK/USA, 2006)
The last person you would expect to see on this list is Woody Allen, so far has his star fallen from the glory days of the 1970s and 1980s (even his so-so comedies from the 90s seem a distant echo now). But Woody reinvented for one last great film, which was the start of his self-imposed European exile. It was an unusual departure for him, a chilly Chabrolien thriller in which arriviste tennis professional Jonathan Rhys-Meyers finds he must choose between dull but wealthy Emily Mortimer and sexy but penurious Scarlett Johansson. It’s a dark and disturbing film, peppered with a wickedly witty script in which Woody surprises us with his ability for ventriloquism of the Home Counties bourgeoisie. The run of form didn’t last however, Woody’s British hiatus continued with two of his worst films ever, Scoop and Cassandra’s Dream. But Match Point is one for posterity.

Morvern CallarI (Lynne Ramsey – UK, 2002)
It doesn’t quite have the bleak grace of Ramsey’s debut Ratcatcher but this adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel is still a fine film. Samantha Morton plays a young woman who following the suicide of her boyfriend, publishes his manuscript under her own name, and, like Juliette Binoche in Three Colours: Blue, enjoys a new-found freedom. The only question one must ask is why Ramsey hasn’t made more films.

Un prophète (Jacques Audiard – France, 2009)
Jacques Audiard cemented his position as a great of French cinema to rival his legendary father Michel with this film, which in any other year would have easily swept the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Tahar Rahim is a revelation as a young Arab prisoner who reluctantly falls under the wing of Corsican gangsters. He then plays them off against his fellow Muslim inmates who naturally view him as a traitor. A superbly gritty portrait of a thug-in-the-making and of atavistic survival.

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog – USA, 2005)
Werner Herzog became famous again this decade with a string of brilliantly essayistic documentaries. Grizzly Man was the most famous of them. It is a cinematic post-mortem of Timothy Treadwell, a failed actor turned ecologist who lived among grizzly bears for thirteen summers before being mauled and eaten by one along with his girlfriend in October 2003. Herzog is blessed by Treadwell’s obsessive documenting of his work in video diaries and a large number of witnesses give their testimonies. It’s ultimately a sympathetic portrayal of a troubled soul, even if, as Herzog concludes, Treadwell was a Promethean transgressor who was only ever going to end the way he did.

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson – Sweden, 2008)
It may not have had the stratospheric success of Twilight but Alfredson’s vampire film and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s original novel, was a surprise international sleeper hit, driven mainly by Internet word-of-mouth. It’s a surprisingly elegant piece, beautifully framed and shot, as if Michael Haneke had undertaken to make a teen movie. The film tells the flowering relationship between twelve-year-old Oskar who is tormented by bullies in suburban Stockholm in the early 1980s and Eli, a anguished child vampire whose father kills young children to feed her. It’s a sad and sometimes disturbing tale, unlikely to be bettered by the American remake next year.

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck – Germany, 2006)
Von Donnersmarck’s smash hit may indeed have the fatal flaw identified by Stasiland author Anna Funder – that there never existed a single Stasi operative who spared one of his subjects. But that aside the film is a powerful look at the squalid cruelty operated by the GDR state apparatus. It was made all the more poignant by the death soon afterwards of Ulrich Mühe, who here plays the renegade Stasi agent who becomes fascinated by Georg Dreyermann, the playwright he is surveying. Mühe had himself been spied on in a similar way in real life, at the instigation of his actress wife, who was presumably working under duress. The Lives of Others is a technical and dramatic tour de force that pays fitting tribute to the hundreds of thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by Stasi surveillance. One of the better winners of the Best Foreign Film Oscar too.

Bullet in the Head (Jaime Rosales – Spain, 2008)
Catalan director Rosales followed up his arthouse hit Soledad with a more ambitious piece. Inspired by the ETA assassination of two Spanish undercover policemen in France in 2007, Bullet in the Head is shot entirely in long-range shots, often through windows and doors, with only scraps of dialogue heard. The action builds up in cool, detached fashion, with the audience implicated in the voyeurism of the crime. A great companion piece to Coppola’s The Conversation.

Mesrine L’Ennemi public Nº1/Mesrine L’Instinct de mort (Jean-François Richet – France/Canada, 2008)
The French have always had more than a sneaking regard for former bankrobber Jacques Mesrine, gunned down, almost certainly unlawfully, by police in 1979. So it wasn’t a surprise that this double biopic starring Vincent Cassel in a César-winning role was a big hit. And the success was replicated abroad. Richet, who previously directed a highly regarded remake of Assault on Precinct 13, directs with aplomb and the film has a stellar cast, none of whom detracts from the power of the work. It’s superb entertainment and also a highly intelligent crime film, written by Abdel Raouf Dafri, who was also responsible for Un prophète and the Wire-esque TV series La commune.

Into Great Silence - Philip Gröning (Germany - 2005)
A 160-minute documentary about the silent monks of La Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble would not set many people’s hearts racing but Into Great Silence is a surprisingly engrossing experience. The film follows the monks in their everyday life over the course of six months. It details prayer, silent contemplation, the manufacture of habits and other essentials and, of course, the famous green liqueur, which is the monastery’s main source of income. A measure of Gröning’s Herculean patience is the fact that permission to film was granted only 16 years after he first requested it. He’s the only outsider ever to have been allowed inside the walls of the monastery and he filmed all on his own. If ever a film deserved the tag ‘unique’ this is surely it.

100 Films of the Decade - Part 3

2009-12-15T17:14:00.002+01:00

The Life Aquatic…With Steve Zissou (Wes Anderson – USA, 2004)

People either love or hate Wes Anderson, though I find I have a foot in either camp. I initially detested The Royal Tennenbaums before a second viewing revealed it to be not quite as irritating as I first thought. I then joined the anti-Wes backlash when I found the hipster impassivity of The Darjeeling Express nigh unwatchable. But occasionally Anderson does it right, even if his films, for all their notional subtexts of failing fathers, are frivolous things. Along with Rushmore, The Life Aquatic… is his best film. For no reason other than it is funny. Very funny. One of the few performances by Bill Murray in recent years that doesn’t feel like it has been faxed in, a string of great sight gags, and as usual, a great soundtrack, with Scott Walker and Iggy interspersed with Seu Jorge’s Bowie covers. It stays just the right side of quirky.

Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl (Manoel de Oliveira – Portugal, 2009)

Filmmakers don’t come any more amazingly redoubtable than Manoel de Oliveira. The Portuguese director turned 101 last week, and this decade he turned out a film per year, as well as a handful of shorts, in both Portuguese and French. He even starred in one of them, Christopher Columbus – the Enigma along with his wife of sixty-nine years. Almost any of the ten films would deserve a place here but I’ll go for a personal favourite, this year’s Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, a charming adaptation of an Eça de Queiroz short story, scarcely an hour long but bewildering in its pacing and its wilful anachronism, which nonetheless works perfectly. The film is like palimpsests layered on top of one another, each one gradually becoming visible, much like the faded charm of Lisbon itself. De Oliveira is the only currently active filmmaker whose career goes back to the silent era (he even worked on Portugal’s second sound film in 1932) and his continued vitality and intelligence puts to shame dozens of cineastes decades younger than him.

What Time is it There? and The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-Liang – France/Taiwan, 2002 and Taiwan, 2005)

Tsai Ming-Liang is not an easy director and he has become increasingly experimental since he first came to international prominence in the early 90s. What Time is it There? was his first sortie outside his adopted homeland of Taiwan (he’s originally from Malaysia), a touching tale of loneliness and disaffection experienced by a young Taiwanese woman visiting Paris. It’s a convincing portrait of timidity in the face of culture shock. Tsai renewed his relationship with Paris with this year’s almost impenetrable Visage but a little more accessible is his 2005 film The Wayward Cloud which combines watermelons, a Taipei heatwave, an impromptu porn film and the high-camp song-and-dance numbers already glimpsed in his earlier surreal drama, The Hole. Tsai can be hard work at times (there always seems to be at least one walk-out during a screening) but his films are also often fun and in the hangdog, perpetually mute Lee Kang-Sheng he has one of the great comic actors of our time.

We Own the Night (James Gray – USA, 2007)

I suppose I shouldn’t go on knocking Martin Scorsese all the time but it was striking, following the hugely successful but overrated The Departed, how a younger New York director was able to mount much the same film a few months later with far greater élan, economy of style and theme and with far less pretentiousness. Until this film I was not particularly taken by Gray but his tale of family cops, played by Robert Duvall as the father and Mark Wahlberg and Joaquin Phoenix as his sons, battling the emerging Russian mafia in Brighton Beach in 1988 was irresistible. Gray followed it up with the even more stunning Two Lovers, of which more later. Phoenix and Wahlberg also produced as well as turning in great performances, a doubly great contribution to contemporary American cinema sorely missing intelligent dramas like this.

The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan – UK/Ireland, 2002)

Though actor Peter Mullan’s directorial debut Orphans was promising, I wasn’t sure that his account of women condemned to the hell of the Irish Magdalene laundries would amount to much. You could sense the playbook well in advance. And though the film pulls no punches in its polemical accusations towards the Church, the film is intelligent, subtle agitprop rather than a crude tirade. The reason it works so well is Mullan implicates the viewer in the onscreen crime. For an Irish viewer of even my generation, the society on display is uncomfortably familiar, and while the Catholic Church is clearly villainous and rotten to the core, there is also a searing indictment of a society and a people that let them get away with it all. And judging by the official responses to the Ryan and Murphy reports, intends to continue to do so.

Capote (Bennett Miller – USA, 2005)

Biopics out of Hollywood are usually godawful, full of pious platitudes about journeys through harrowing adversity and the horrors overcome by people with the right can-do spirit. Bennett Miller's portrayal of Truman Capote's descent into terminal depression while writing In Cold Blood is a marvel however, beautifully shot and edited, perfectly scripted and a fine performance, just on the right side of mannered, by one of the finest American actors alive, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, who deservedly picked up an Oscar for this. Mercifully a literary film that is neither vulgarly inane nor tweedy.

Black Book (Paul Verhoeven – Netherlands, 2006)

After years of making brash thrillers in Hollywood that were always too clever for their own good and built of ambitions far exceeding their execution, Verhoeven returned to his native Holland where he made some of his greatest films in the seventies and early eighties. Black Book is a virtuoso old-fashioned thriller, set during the Nazi occupation of Holland and based on a true story, about a young Jewish woman named Rachael Stein who joins the Resistance in The Hague and goes undercover to seduce the local SS Captain. The film is a masterpiece of detail - cosmetic, historical and political - and it has a splendid twist about half and hour from the end that nobody will see coming. Best of all though, it is a refreshingly unsentimental and clear-headed drama about both the Holocaust and the local Resistance to Nazism.

Control (Anton Corbijn – UK, 2007)

Photographer to the stars Corbijn's first feature is a moving portrait of one of his earlier collaborators Ian Curtis. While many complained of the film not focussing enough on Joy Division and their music, Control excelled for this very reason, fleshing Curtis out (thanks to Sam Riley's fine performance) and putting his epilepsy and his legendary demise in a human context. As you would expect from such an accomplished photographer, it looks great and it's also unexpectedly funny.

Night and Day (Hong Sang-Soo – South Korea/France, 2008)

I’ve been a fan of Hong’s unassuming intimiste dramas for a few years but Night and Day took me by surprise. Going to Paris to make a film has by now become almost an obligation for Asia’s top directors and Hong follows the lead of Tsai Ming-Liang, Nobuhiro Suwa and Hou Hsiao-Hsien with this tale of a Korean artist, Kim Sung-Nam, who flees to France having been ratted out to the police by an American backpacker for sharing a joint. That starting point is representative of the film as a whole, which is a succession of brilliantly filmed episodes, most of which could themselves pass as self-contained stories. Kim loafs about Paris in the cocoon of its tiny Korean immigrant community, meets a former girlfriend by accident, has a falling-out with a North Korean over an unguarded comment about Kim Jong-Il, develops an ill-advised infatuation for a young, narcissistic art student and pines for his wife back home. The film’s tagline is ‘everything is as it seems’, which puts it fairly well. Not only a fine film in its own right but also one of the few that offers a foreign perspective on Paris without falling into clichéd and banal observations.

Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood – USA, 2008)

You never really know what you’re going to get from Clint. The quality of his films varies as widely as his subject matter, but you have to hand it to him for the frequency with which he turns them out. His finest film of recent years may well be the one the older Clint is remembered for. A film that veers close to clumsiness in its examination of racism in blue-collar Detroit, it had particular timeliness for being released just as the US auto industry began to endure its death pangs. Walt Kowalski is a hateful old racist crank who is bitter at everyone in his life, including his two sons, who have even gone so far as to betray his life’s legacy by driving Japanese cars. Walt treats the arrival next door of an Asian immigrant family with predictable disdain, which is reciprocated by many of the family. Things change though when he runs off some thuggish relatives, and the grateful Hmong family and Clint gradually warn to one another. The film has the potential to be very hokey indeed and on first appearance does seem a little simplistic but the overlying simplicity masks a robust moral purpose, worthy of a studio-era classic (the film is, quite suitably, a Warners production). Eastwood has forged an unlikely but genuine humanism in his films over the past twenty years and even when he doesn’t get it right, to see someone from the very mainstream of American popular culture exercise such principled free thinking is stirring.

Tony Manero (Pablo Larraín – Chile, 2008)

Tony Manero is the tale of Raúl, a 52-year-old ne'er-do-well obsessed with Saturday Night Fever in the dark days of the military dictatorship in Chile in the late 70s. His dream is to appear in a TV talent contest as a John Travolta clone. So far, so-Full Monty. But Tony Manero is a far more scabrous, disobliging work, an ill-mannered riposte to the idea that popular culture (especially American pop culture) can provide redemption in the face of political repression. In this film, pop music is, at best a malign distraction from the evil within, at worst a vector for the rotten state of a country whose ruling élite has placed its consumer concerns above human ones. It reminds me of the lines parrotted by Pinochet supporters as the old bastard was held under house arrest in London ten years ago: "Before the General came to power, you couldn't even get blue jeans in Chile. He saved our country."

Apparently at its Cannes screening 18 months ago, several Hollywood studio executives left violently angry, incredulous anyone could envisage their product used for dark ends. Job well done, Pablo Larraín, whose second film this is. It’s a work that cares too much about the history of Chile to blindly do the bidding of entertainment. Not that it isn’t entertaining either, mind.

12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Poromboiu – Romania, 2006)

Corneliu Poromboiu put his experience as a cameraman on a local television station to good use in this incredibly funny political comedy which attempts to establish, sixteen years on from the fall of Ceausescu, if there was any revolutionary impetus in a provincial Romanian town before the dictator, abdicated, at 12.08pm on the 22nd of December 1989. Tiberiu Manescu, alcoholic college professor, claims there was, and he was part of it. Conflicting testimonies on a phone-in show say otherwise, that he was part of a group of drunken revellers who seized their moment of revolutionary glory when it was safe to do so. The film is by turns gentle good-natured and cynically sinister, not least when a former Securitate officer, now a successful businessman, ‘persuades’ Tiberiu to withdraw allegations made on air. The film drags a little towards the end but it has a sharp comic spirit and Ion Sapdaru, who seems to pop up in every Romanian film these days, is great as the poor, pathetic Tiberiu. And Poromboiu, a young talent to watch, directs with a lyrical touch.

Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Thailand, 2004)

Thai cinema gained a new international prominence this decade, and Weerasethakul was probably the most successful director, with a string of films appearing at the big festivals. Tropical Malady is a strange beast, a diptych of two films that seem to have little in common, the first a gay love story between two Thai soldiers and the second a pursuit through the jungle of a mysterious tiger spirit. The film is a masterpiece of sensual cinema, with almost no dialogue at all in the second part, with the narrative relying on only the basic of dramatic hooks. It is also fantastically shot, the screen bursting with lush colour. A visual treat.

Code inconnu: Récit incomplet de divers voyages and Caché (Michael Haneke – France, 2000 & 2005)

Austrian moralist Haneke upped sticks and moved to France to work at the start of the decade, extending his themes to absorb the ills and fears of modern French, and European society. Juliette Binoche starts in each of these films, the first a gripping, open-ended series of fragments in which she plays an actress married to a war photographer and whose fugitive brother sets in train a series of events that result in the expulsion of a Romanian asylum seekers. In Caché, a much tighter film, she is married to Daniel Auteuil, a TV arts presenter who is being harassed by a figure from his distant past. Both films have the customary iciness one expects from Haneke and each manage to avoid the more deterministic scenarios of his weaker work. And, as ever, the films are a perfect blend of style and substance.

Songs from the Second Floor (Roy Andersson – Sweden, 2000)

The flop of Andersson’s second film Giliap in 1975 was so chastening an experience he was unable to get funding for a feature for another 25 years. Instead he made some of the most inventive commercials ever and when he came back it was with a bang. Songs from the Second Floor is a surreally apocalyptic deadpan masterpiece that uses the same elaborately choreographed single takes as the commercials. It is both hilarious and nightmarish and the glumness of the décor and the ugliness of the characters make Aki Käurismäki look like Vincente Minelli. Andersson took a mere seven years to follow it up with the equally bizarre You, the Living.

Oxhide (Liu Jia-Yin – China, 2005)

I don't expect that many people will rush out to watch this, a two-hour docudrama shot on low-resolution DV, entirely in a tanner's workshop in Beijing, in long static takes, using the director's family (including herself) as cast. It looks gloopy green and the camera never moves once but it is completely entrancing. The director Liu was only 25 at the time and she did practically everything on this film in an astounding piece of DIY filmmaking; as ever with prodigies of the sort, it has an incredible maturity and the performances she draws out of her cranky family's quotidian life are marvellous. Despite the best efforts of the Chinese government to marshall cinematic output there is still good stuff being made and the freshness of the work never lets up.

Our Daily Bread (Nikolaus Geyrhalter – Austria, 2005), We Feed the World and Let’s Make Money (Erwin Wagehofer – Austria, 2005 & 2008)

Food documentaries came into vogue this decade; the films were of varying quality but most had a bien pensant streak in common. Two of the better ones came from Austria and were both released within months of one another. Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread was the more experimental of the two, being a non-narrative look at food production across Europe, going from salt mines in Poland to slaughterhouses in Austria to greenhouses in Almería. The film is a hypnotic, if sometimes unsettling passage through the various production cycles, portrayed via lengthy, geometrically precise tableaux. More overtly polemical is Erwin Waghofer’s We Feed the World, which takes its title from the motto of the German agri-giant Pioneer. There are more accusatory interviews, particularly with Swiss sociologist and UN Special Rapporteur Jean Ziegler, and Nestlé chief executive Peter Brabeck steps in to defend his company, in much the same vaguely sinister way as the Mondavi family in Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino. The film’s focus is more on the cost and waste, both humanitarian and ecological, of an industry that is wildly skewed in favour of Europeans in search of cheap food. The film may strike some as preachy but Wagehofer has a fine visual sensibility for a journalist. He then pulled the same trick a second time three years later on the financial services industry with Let’s Make Money. In production long before the crisis, by the time it came out it was fully vindicated.

Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki – Japan, 2001)

Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning animated gem won him wide recognition in the West. Lonely 10-year-old Chihiro is left friendless when her family moves to a new town; one day when walking in the woods with her parents she disappears down a tunnel and is befriended by a number of mysterious spirits. In order to save her parents, who have been turned into pigs for the dinner table of the gods, she takes a job in the gods’ bathhouse. The film, like most of the best tales for children is dark and admonitory, a parable that teaches the virtues of self-responsibility and loyalty to friends and family. It might be said that Miyazaki makes the same film every time but his clean, old-fashioned cell animation, and his formal inventiveness, not to mention his first-class story-telling make Spirited Away a kids’ film to watch again and again.

In the Mood for Love (Wong Kar-Wai – Hong Kong, 2000)

Perhaps even more so than Chungking Express, this is the distillation of the entire career of Wong Kar-Wai. Wong revisits the Hong Kong of the 1960s he treated in Days of Being Wild for this gorgeously atmospheric tale of adultery between neighbours played by Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, sparked by their common suspicion that their spouses are themselves engaged in an affair with one another. It’s a film of modest ambition that’s all the more impressive for this. Wong’s flimsy English-language debut My Blueberry Nights later suggested that buried beneath all the Cantonese dialogue was whimsy all along, but In the Mood for Love rings true, as was the unorthodox ‘sequel’ 2046, released four years later.

Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze – USA, 1999)

Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s bizzaroid comedy was one of the original thing to come out of Hollywood this decade and it took a rare genius to take a personality as imposing – and at times unpleasant – as Malkovich and send him up. And Malkovich went for it too, though who wouldn’t want to be immortalized, however ridiculously, in a cult film? It’s a film that is actually as clever as all that and the pair pulled off the trick again three years later with the equally left-field Adaptation. And judging by their respective films since then, they need one another badly.

Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch – USA/France, 2001)

Lynch’s failed TV pilot was salvaged to provide one of the most enduring American films of the noughties. Not quite as indecipherable as the later Inland Empire, the film nonetheless stumped many viewers and Lynch even published five clues in newspaper advertisements that worked brilliantly to entice people back to watch it multiple times. Lynch can be maddening at times, not least the Zen Buddhist nonsense he comes out with, but he is one of those artists that articulates himself far better through his work. And even when you don’t have a clue what’s going on, it’s engrossing stuff trying to figure it out.

The President’s Last Bang (Im Sang-Soo – South Korea, 2005)

Im’s darkly comic account of the murder of Korean president Park Chung-Hee at the hands of his bodyguards, not surprisingly caused some controversy in his home country. Park’s son secured a court injunction forcing Im to make cuts, which resulted in the film strangely carrying three-and-a-half minutes of a black screen, until the injunction was reversed a year later. The portrayal of the former President is none too complimentary with him viewed largely as a lascivious alcoholic buffoon with suspiciously Japanophile tendencies. Having already survived two assassination attempts, a web of intrigue surrounding his handling of student protests finally put paid to him. The film is stylishly mounted and well paced, with most of the action taking place in the days preceding Park’s murder. And in case anyone had any doubts about where Im’s sympathies lay, he followed it up a year later with The Old Garden, an account of a former dissident’s release after decades in prison for his part in the 1979 protests.

100 Films of the Decade - Part 2

2009-12-09T11:50:00.002+01:00

Man on the Moon (Milos Forman – USA, 2000)
Milos Forman followed up his Larry Flynt biopic with one of another American curio, comedian Andy Kaufman. You don’t have to think Kaufman was an undisputed comic genius (I certainly don’t) to be both tickled and moved by this film, which features Jim Carrey’s finest performance as the late comedian, who was best known for playing Laika in Taxi. Carrey had only recently proven himself as a serious actor in The Truman Show and this film cemented his reputation, earning him a Golden Globe and he was incredibly overlooked for an Oscar nomination. The film is especially impressive in that it manages to relay at second hand how funny Kaufman could (sometimes) be and the stand-up scenes are masterfully staged. Forman, being both an outsider (Czech by birth) and contemporary witness (he rose to Hollywood fame at the same time as Kaufman), was uniquely placed to impart a sense of wonder in the film and the sharp script is by the Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewki, writers of the finest biopic of the 90s, Ed Wood. Man on the Moon is an equally fitting portrait of an unsung hero of American pop culture.

This is England (Shane Meadows – UK, 2007)
Nottingham autodidact Shane Meadows is a one-man film industry, having risen from making camcorder shorts on the cheap to arthouse auteur. His films all benefit from his clear affection for his characters and a complete lack of pretentiousness. After a brief blip using name British actors in the uninspired Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, Meadows went back to working with lesser lights, including his old friend Paddy Considine, whom he, ironically helped turn into one of Britain’s most sought-after young character actors. The disturbing Dead Man’s Shoes was followed by This is England, a semi-autobiographical tale about a 12-year-old boy getting sucked in by the National Front in 1982 Scarborough. Shaun is recently arrived in town following the death of his father in the Falklands War. Some friendly skinheads take him under their wing only for the sinister fascist Combo to muscle in on things on his release from prison. Shaun falls for Combo’s tough-guy charisma and is soon abusing Pakistani shopkeepers and attending far-right rallies. The film is a clear-eyed, non-moralising view of the menacing embrace of racism closing in on a vulnerable person. Meadows is one of the rare talents in British cinema who can combine a superb skill with actors with a visual sensibility that is almost European in its lyricism. Thrilling stuff.

The Werckmeister Harmonies (Béla Tarr – Hungary, 2000)
I first heard of Béla Tarr ten years ago in a eulogy penned by Gus Van Sant and published in Le Monde. As well as being proof that Van Sant still had a stirring of adventurousness in him it was a tantalising glimpse of the sort of director you see so rarely in contemporary cinema. The Werckmeister Harmonies is a relatively straightforward work compared to Tarr’s earlier seven-hour long Satantango, but it nonetheless demands attention and patience, running to 160 minutes and being comprised of no more than 38 shots, and shot entirely in claustrophobic monochrome. Tarr is not terribly interested in plot or story and his pre-apocalyptic tale set in a village on the frozen Hungarian plains has only frail scrimpings of either. But when it comes to atmosphere, mood and character, he has few betters. And, like all his films, The Werckmeister Harmonies leaves you with a murky uneasy sensation, rather similar to a dog’s distant howl on a dark night.

Uzak (Nuri Bilge Ceylan – Turkey, 2002)
Turkish photographer and filmmaker Ceylan made an international name for himself with this beautiful film about the gradual falling out between an enthusiastic young provincial freshly disembarked in Istanbul and his successful photographer cousin whom he stays with. The cousin is a man who feels he has outgrown family obligations and his gauche relative quickly becomes an unwelcome imposition. As one would expect from an accomplished photographer the film is wonderfully shot right from the lengthy opening scene of the young hero leaving his snowbound Anatolian village. The film is also rich in dramatic detail, with the heartbreaking final rupture cruelly hinging on an incident of petty crime. It also has one fantastic gag, where the photographer tries to watch a porno, but is forced to switch on Tarkovsky’s Stalker to discourage his cousin when he intrudes.

Dancer in the Dark (Lars Von Trier – Denmark/Sweden, 2000)
Von Trier finally won the Palme d’Or for this maddeningly provocative film and secured a lifetime of brickbats for his alleged misogyny and anti-Americanism (neither of which is true). Taking the Dogme strictures he conceived more or less for his own benefit to another level, LVT fashioned a roughly-hewn masterpiece that, like Björk’s acting, gets better and better as it progresses. Unusually for an established artist, the film inspires the exact type of thrill you get when you discover brilliance in a complete unknown. There’s an army of Von Trier haters out there to rival his admirers, and that’s exactly the way he wants it.

Blackboards (Samira Makhmalbaf – Iran, 2000)
Made when she was only 22, Makhmalbaf’s tale of itinerant schoolmasters in Iranian Kurdistan is an impressive but bleak interrogation of the value of culture and learning amidst the most adverse human suffering. Using, like so many Iranian directors, non-professional actors, Makhmalbaf has a steady, unsentimental eye and her social questioning has an echo of early Pasolini about it. She’s a resolutely unglamorous filmmaker, who has since concentrated on Afghanistan for her films, with varying degrees of success. But there should be more like Blackboards to come.

The Free Will (Matthias Glasner – Germany, 2006)
The German cinema renaissance is one of the most inspiring things to have happened in recent years. The country has a chequered film history, with its glory Ufa days ending when the Nazi’s rise to power sent the talent fleeing to Hollywood. There then followed the golden age of the New German Cinema in the 1970s which faded out with the deaths of Fassbinder and Syberberg , the decline of Schlöndorff and the self-enforced irrelevance of Wim Wenders. Until a few years ago there had been little to get excited about in the film production of Europe’s biggest country but now the quality of output is such that almost every German release is worth seeing nowadays.

Matthias Glasner’s The Free Will was one of the better German films this decade. Jürgen Vogel (who also co-wrote the screenplay) plays a sex offender released from prison at the beginning of the film who moves into a halfway house with hopes of rehabilitating himself and settling back into society. Things, as you can imagine, don’t work out as his brutal urges resurface, overcoming even the possibility of a relationship with the young student he develops a normal relationship with. It’s a frank, disturbing film that is a rare dramatic portrait of an everyday monster.

Hunger (Steve McQueen – UK/Ireland, 2008)

When I first heard about Hunger, I couldn’t have been less interested. Did we really need another film about the hunger strikes? And, Steve McQueen’s reputation as a visual artist notwithstanding, I was worried that the result might be an over-aestheticization with most of the politics sucked out of it. So I’m glad I was proved wrong. Hunger is a fascinating, unflinching look at the strength of a principle and people’s determinations to stand by them. Previous H-Block films such as Some Mother’s Son and H3 were typically void of either a visual sense or ideas like many British or Irish films but McQueen dissects the historical incident with economy and aplomb. Michael Fassbender is great as Bobby Sands, with the 20-minute-long colloquy with Liam Cunningham that lies at the centre of the film a masterclass in dramatic writing. More remarkably, though McQueen’s sympathies are clearly with the hunger strikers, there is no facile endorsement of the IRA forthcoming. The Republicans are shown to be every bit as brutal as their captors and you don’t need to be a supporter of the men of violence to be affected by this film.

Je veux voir (Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas – Lebanon/France, 2008)

The Lebanese video artist pairing of Hadjithomas and Joreige came to international attention a couple of years back with the Antonioni-esque Perfect Day, the tale of a narcoleptic young Lebanese haunted by the disappearance of his father who was kidnapped during the Civil War and now about to be declared officially dead. It was a film I should have liked but I found it stultifyingly languid and ironically, for a film about a narcoleptic, put me to sleep.

Perfect Day came out before the 2006 Israeli bombing, the results of which form the basis for their second oblique film. Catherine Deneuve, attending a film festival in Beirut, announces she wants to see the damage done to the country. Hadjithomas and Joreige go with her and film her. It’s a strange film, where Deneuve plays herself in what appears to be a documentary but of course is a scripted film. Ill at ease, she slowly develops a rapport with her driver Rabieh Mroue; they chat about the effect of decades of war on Lebanon and view the rubble in the Lebanese capital and the southern towns, shattered by the bombings. Very little happens in this short, 75-minute film, but few other films have managed to make a country come to life on screen so well with such modest means. Just sit back and watch.

Eastern Promises (David Cronenberg – UK/Canada, 2007)

Cronenberg went off the boil a bit in the 1990s (though without ever really descending into irrelevance in the way that his contemporaries Scorsese, de Palma and Coppola did), and his resurgence over the past few years has been one of the most gratifying things in contemporary cinema. Eastern Promises is, like his previous two films Spider and A History of Violence, a hyper-realist jaunt through a range of subjects such as guilt, violence, broken trust and the audience's capacity to be outraged or shocked by the most unexpected things in a film. Shot and styled like a piece of banal direct-to-video fodder, the film is deceptively simple, masking an ingenious network of provocations that question our attitudes to the very film itself. And, best of all, it is damn scary.

Silent Light (Carlos Reygadas – Mexico/France, 2007)

Reygadas' first two films, Japón and Batalla en el ciélo were arresting and often shamelessly provocative examinations of the mundane existential struggles of ordinary people in testing situations. For this story of infidelity and forgiveness among German-speaking Mennonite farmers in Chiahuahua, Reygadas once again uses non-professional actors though the tone and the methods are more restrained than in the previous two films. Lovingly rendered landscapes and a punctilious attention to sound detail make the two-and-a-half-hour film one of the most enthralling of the year. While many people will hate it, Reygadas has no problem with that; he has stated in interviews that he has no interest in entertaining his audience. Demanding his films might be but the pay-off rewards the attentiveness.

Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait (Philippe Parrano and Douglas Gordon – France/UK, 2006)

The prospect of a documentary filmed in real-time on one of the greatest footballers ever by two video artists renowned for their endurance-testing installations was not instantly appealing and, when I saw this in Paris just before the 2006 World Cup, half the audience walked out, probably a mix of arty types and football fans expecting something different. But Gordon and Parrano's film of Zidane playing for Real Madrid in a 2-1 win over Villareal in April 2005 is riveting stuff for the insight it gives both into the work of a modern footballer and the movements of the human anatomy. Sixteen cameras were trained on Zidane for the duration of the game, and the result is intriguing and boring in turns but one of the few great art/film crossovers. Zidane's surprisingly gnomic pronouncements about the game are interlaced with a soundtrack by Mogwai, and there is even drama, prophetic of the great man's eventual exit from the game: he gets sent off in the last minute after a mass brawl. Along with the efforts of Steve McQueen and Khalil Joreige and Joanna Hadjithomas, Zidane suggests video artists moving up to the big screen is not such a bad thing at all.

Close to Home (Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hager – Israel, 2005)

One of the big cinematic success stories of the decade is Israel. An influx of funding from television and a flowering of a talented generation of filmmakers have resulted in a string of great films, many of which give a glimpse of Israeli society to Westerners that is more nuanced than the rigidly heroic or villainous tone taken by either sides in the Israel/Palestine debate. Close to Home is one of the lesser known of those films but it’s a little gem. Two Israeli girls doing their national service patrolling West Jerusalem, hassling Arabs at random, and doing their utmost to shirk their duties, all the while maintaining a breezy indifference to the war on their doorstep. A cool examination of the demeaning nature of Israeli checkpoints that also manages to be funny and touchingly human.

To Get to Heaven, First You Have to Die (Jamshed Usmonov – Tajikistan, 2006)

The world is not overrun with films from Tajikistan but Jamshed Usmonov has managed to carve out an international reputation with his understated, grimly comic cinema. Here he follows up the acclaimed The Angel on the Right with the tale of a teenage husband unable to consummate his marriage but, who, it appears is not any the less horny for all that. He takes a trip to the capital Dushanbe, tries his hand at following the city women around, with little success, only to fall in with a small-time hood, who inveigles him into a dodgy heist. The film is one gripping episode after another, all imbued with a wonderful dramatic ambiguity, bestowed as much by the passivity of the actors as by Usmonov's clockwork-precise direction.

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog – USA/Germany, 2007)

Werner Herzog continues to give the best value of those German filmmakers that sprung to prominence in the 1970s. Now focusing mainly on documentaries, Herzog persuaded the National Science Foundation to fund his Antarctic film but declared that he would not be making another film about penguins. Herzog joins the research teams at the McMurdo research station and interviews those there about their motivations for going there, he meets a Russian philosopher, a Canadian linguist who specializes in dying languages, a Czech former refugee who has a 20kilo pack ready for a quick getaway at all times and vulcanologists studying one of the world’s most active volcanoes. Herzog’s mordantly deadpan narration is wildly funny and he has an admirable distrust of pseudo-spiritual cant and a love of scientific enquiry. The film is beautifully shot, both above and under the ice, and a lone, deranged penguin, despite Herzog’s initial intentions, ends up giving the film its best known scene. One of the most entertaining documentaries of the decade.

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino – USA, 2009)

Like many, I had given up on Quentin Tarantino. Kill Bill was too big and too unwieldy for such a flimsy theme, Deathproof was a return to form but you still felt Tarantino could stretch himself more. The news that he was doing a film about Jewish Nazi-hunters during World War II wasn’t encouraging; I doubted the subject matter would survive the exposure to Tarantino irony. And I have to admit it’s still a mystery why his scattershot approach to history is so successful. I think it might be due to the fact that Tarantino understands the spirit of the second World War better than most. Not for him a slavish reconstruction of the facts but, better than almost any American filmmaker before him he understands how vital a role language played in the occupation by the Nazis. The tour-de-force opening scene plays on this as does another scene where Melanie Laurent’s Jewish escapee listens to a conversation in German, on which the camera lingers and which is, crucially, left unsubtitled. This is a brilliant distillation of the alienating effect of occupation, something that French critics – who almost universally acclaimed the film – recognised better than their Anglophone counterparts. Many would quibble at the counter-factual nature of much of the film but this was a common theme in popular culture of the time (Michael Chabon already touched upon it in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay) and it also contains a kernel of truth, with an echo of the infamous Ratlines that helped thousands of Nazis escape justice at the end of the war. The film is not perfect, with some of the acting and the plotting quite mangled but you certainly don’t feel cheated at the end of it. Quite how Tarantino pulled it off, I don’t know.

Gomorrah (Matteo Garrone – Italy, 2008)

The young Italian writer Roberto Saviano was already in hiding before the release of this film version of his best-selling non-fiction book but the film’s success can hardly have helped his security situation. The film examines the Comorra, the Neapolitan mafia, and its tentacular reach into all sectors of Italian business and society. The film departs from the book by dispensing with the narrative voice, which was Saviano himself, who occupied a recklessly central role in his tale. What we are left with are six distinct tales told in a sober, dispassionate manner, similar to Alan Clarke’s Elephant or Gus Van Sant’s of the same name. Tim Parks has complained that the film lacks an oppositional force, a crusader that might represent resistance to the thuggery of the Naples mob. But this misses the point of the film, which is to resurrect the mob film from the relativistic morass and the dubious glamour it has been mired in for near on thirty years now. It is significant that the two young numskulls that try to muscle their way onto the turf of much more formidable men should be beholden to Brian de Palma’s Scarface. But Gomorrah has little truck with the mythologizing of that film – its gangsters are brutal thugs that bully their way around any situation, fascists in shellsuits.

The film is bleak in that it declines to offer a way out for anyone, the only characters that manage to opt out do so at the expense of their career. But it’s a timely film for its frankness in tackling the canker of organised crime from a left-wing point of view without making facile, shopworn observations about how it’s simply another extension of mainstream capitalism. The Comorra is deeply embedded in mainstream capital but the film makes no attempt to exonerate the organisation because of its unorthodox status.

24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom – UK, 2002)

The incredibly prolific Winterbottom, like Steven Soderberg, can be a bit hit and miss but he’s always worth a look, his subject matter ranging from adaptations of Hardy and Tristram Shandy to tales of Afghan refugees and internees of Guantanamo Bay. And sometimes he completely surprises you with a film like 24 Hour Party People, a hugely enjoyable account of the rise and fall of Factory Records, told through the eyes of its mercurial founder Anthony H. Wilson, played by Steve Coogan. Unlike Anton Corbijn’s Control, the tone is light, even the sequences covering Ian Curtis’ last days, but it never feels frivolous. While the film’s subject matter obviously limits its appeal, for those in the know there is a pleasure to be had spotting the personalities from the various Manchester scenes in both their real and onscreen incarnations (Howard Devoto of Magazine, for example, pops up as a toilet cleaner while The Stone Roses’ Mani plays a sound engineer). The music’s good, it doesn’t take itself seriously and it gives a rare chance for Manchester to appear on the big screen. One of the better films about music.

The Return (Andrei Zvyagintsev – Russia, 2003)

Andrei Zvyagintsev came from nowhere to win the Golden Lion at Venice in 2003 with this bleak but stylish film about the return of an alcoholic father to his family. He insists on spending some quality time with his two young sons who know him only from an old photograph, and it soon becomes apparent that the reunion is going to be an uneasy one. In one respect the film might be considered the epitome of the Russian miserablist family drama and there are times when it veers close to cliché. But the overall tone rings true, with superb acting, particularly from the two children. Zvyagintsev returned at Cannes four years later with the similarly dark The Banishment, which most critics hated. But that too is worth a look.

Rois et reine (Arnaud Desplechin – France, 2004)

Desplechin made his international breakthrough with this compelling ensemble drama about two ex-lovers (Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric). Devos is coping with the impending death of her father, having previously lost a husband, while Amalric’s musician is trying to break free from a mental asylum. Like in his later Un conte de Noël (also excellent) Desplechin paints human relationship with punctilious, novelistic detail. A talky film in the best sense of French cinema but one mercifully devoid of pretention.

The Draw

2009-12-06T09:18:00.006+01:00

The thing most notable every time a World Cup draw is made is how adrift most of us are as to the actual ability of all but a handful of teams. As William Goldman famously said about Hollywood, “nobody knows anything.” Few of us have watched a wide range of qualifying games in Europe, never mind South America, Africa or the other confederations, and our assessment of the capabilities of teams is based largely on the players they have playing in either the Premiership or the Champions League.

And so we have a few misdiagnoses of the groups. Everyone agrees that Group D, which sees Germany, Australia, Ghana and Serbia square off, is the Group of Death; these are four teams of broadly similar ability, the Germans would be reasonably considered the favourites but none of the other three will be overawed by them. But there is also too much respect being paid to Group G, where Brazil, Portugal and the Ivory Coast will slug it out for the top two spots. The group, however, is likely to be hellish only for the latter two; Brazil, motoring along efficiently if inelegantly with Dunga’s brand of pragmatic football, will probably take the group – and I fear, the tournament – comfortably. So it’s up to the Ivorians and the Portuguese to fight for the second spot. Many, watching the tournament in their Premiership-refracted haze will bill it as Drogba v Ronaldo, but there'll be more than that. And I suspect, the Portuguese, wary of being muscled out of it by an Ivorian team unfazed following their fine performances in the Group of Death last time round, are probably the more worried.

Other highly competitive groups are likely to be Group B, with Argentina, Nigeria and Greece – all of whom met each other in USA 94 – all in the running, with South Korea possibly being the bystanding kingmaker. It may not be dazzling football though, especially with the Greeks involved. That may come in Group E where the Danes play their footballing mentors the Dutch, with Cameroon also capable of excitement providing excitement. And though European Champions Spain are likely to win Group H at a canter, Honduras, Chile and Switzerland are all capable of fighting for second place.

France and England both got draws that, though favourable enough, could prove to be harder than they first appear. Nobody fears France these days, as Ireland showed in Paris last month, and both Mexico and Uruguay will fancy their chances, even if the Mexicans have never yet beaten France in international football. Particularly perilous for France is the fact that their easiest match, against hosts South Africa comes last, by which time dropped points in the first two encounters could put them under pressure. And, with the notorious benevolence often shown to host countries by referees, the karmic wheel could swing right round in an unpleasant manner for the French. My hunch is that France’s collective lack of backbone (which cannot be entirely blamed on the hapless Raymond Domenech) could see them on an early flight home.

England should be able to finish top of their group but the sort of complacency the English do best could give them a few jolts. The US are a tough side for anyone to beat, and should provide stiffer resistance to England than in last year’s friendly at Wembley. Slovenia will be similarly undaunted having given England a decent game in another friendly last November. A young Algerian team may be four years short of gelling into a formidable side but they will, like all the other African teams bar the hosts, have the advantage of playing in January’s African Cup of Nations in Angola. Algeria shocked the world in 1982 before being disgracefully shafted by West Germany and Austria, and now they are arguably better, with many of their players having come through the French national youth team system. A technically gifted side who showed immense character to come through a torrid tie with Egypt, they can cause anyone trouble. That said, I expect England to finish top, which they will want to do, presuming Germany finish top of Group D. The Germans are now back to the level of composure where they can unnerve the English and were the two to meet in the second round, England’s World Cup would end there. If they avoid each other, England can reach the quarter-finals and, with some extra discipline, the semi-final. That’s really as far as they’ll go, with suspect goalkeeping, an occasionally febrile defence and a glaring lack of strength in depth to be their undoing when up against the big boys.

And who are the big boys? Spain, Brazil, Germany, Italy. The winners will come from one of those four. Argentina probably could do it if freed from the mania of Maradona’s management and an African side might benefit from a tournament held on the continent. The Ivory Coast look like the only side strong enough to put up an ultimate fight but they too will probably have to hope for semi-finals at best. And the winners? My head rather than my heart, says Brazil, who these days are eschewing the jogo bonito in the same way they did in 1994 and 2002. And we know what happened then…

100 Films of the Decade - Part 1

2009-12-03T16:18:00.006+01:00

The past decade presented cinema with both new challenges and new opportunities. While on the one hand new technology freed filmmakers from the shackles of financing, a greater homogenisation of taste and lack of adventure among distributors and producers has made it harder to get interesting films seen. The internet has made it possible for films to bypass traditional media outlets but it is still far from a renumerative means of publicity. In the United States, with a few exceptions, mainstream cinema has reached a cul-de-sac of sterile, self-congratulatory mediocrity. Hence there is a notable dearth of Oscar-winning or nominated fare here. Hollywood has surrendered excellence to American TV, which often produces far superior work in the fields of both comedy and drama. For this reason, casual cinemagoers are convinced the quality of cinema overall is on the slide. Of course this is not true, with countries as diverse as Portugal, France, Taiwan, Korea, Argentina, Israel, Iran, Germany and Romania regularly producing great films.

The 100 films I have picked are broadly those I have been most impressed by over the past ten years. It is not however exhaustive – some are there despite the fact they have a number of major flaws, others have been left out perhaps unfairly and deserve a second viewing, and there are a number of candidates that I contrived to miss when they came out. There are a number of big names absent, some of them rightly (Martin Scorsese and Brian de Palma are two I have no qualms about overlooking) and others perhaps unfairly (the Coen brothers, the Dardennes, Ken Loach, Christophe Honoré, Nanni Moretti among others). There are also a few films that will have passed even the keenest eyes by, and some that others might consider modest works of promising talent rather than among the best produced this decade. But I stand by the films selected and though any reader will be doing well to have seen all 100 of those on the list, I think a list that offers a few surprises is more useful than one than one that recycles the familiar, more obvious suspects. Here’s the first batch of the 100, in no particular order. When I get to the top-10 I’ll introduce a more ruthless system of classification. Until then, consider these all films equally worthy of one’s attention.

PS You might notice 1999 appended to a number of films. This is the date of their original release in their country of origin. I have however taken films that were released after January 2000 in either of the countries I’ve lived in since then – Ireland and France.

M/Other (Nobuhiro Suwa – Japan, 1999)

Nobuhiro Suwa won the FIPRESCI International Critics Prize at Cannes in 1999 for this beautifully observed tale of a six-year-old boy’s efforts to adapt to a new stepmother. Two and a half hours long and shot almost entirely with static cameras, the film combines the intensity of Cassavetes with the formal exactitude of Ozu. Suwa, incredibly, remains unknown outside Japan and France, where he has been making films for the past few years.

Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson – USA, 1999)

There’s a good case for saying Magnolia is not as good a film as either Punch-Drunk Love or There Will Be Blood, but Anderson’s sprawling third feature makes up for its many flaws with its many long sequences of brilliance. Audacious, funny and immensely entertaining, it makes great use of a fantastic ensemble cast in a way only Robert Altman could better. Visually and dramatically, it’s a splendid feat, studded with memorable characters and possessed of an energy generated by an almost decadent lack of discipline. The guilty pleasure of the decade.

Pingpong (Matthias Luthardt – Germany, 2006)

Young German director Matthias Luthardt expanded his film school graduation piece to make this icy cuckoo-in-the-nest drama. Teenage malcontent Paul shows up at his rich uncle’s country home and insinuates his way into every relationship to be had. It’s a simple straightforward film and there are no big surprises. But the film is a gripping look at an uncomfortable situation. Luthardt is a great talent for the future.

The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman – Palestine, 2009)

Suleiman is a quiet resistant, choosing to mount his family drama spanning 60 years of a Nazareth family beginning with the 1948 nakba, as a deceptively whimsical burlesque. Suleiman plays his alter ego ES, with his usual Buster Keaton hangdog look, uttering not a single word, like his younger selfs, as an anti-imperialist schoolboy and a naïve young revolutionary. The tragedy of 20th-century Palestinian history is given an absurd twinge, with tabbouleh being searched for explosives, Suleiman pole-vaulting the Israeli apartheid wall and the Suleimans’ elderly neighbour continually failing to put an end to it all through public self-immolation. But though it’s a funny, wondrous piece Suleiman’s impassive humour is the vector for a troubling, potentially savage anger.

The Circle and Crimson Gold (Jafar Panahi – Iran, 2000 & 2003)

Crusading filmmaking in the west takes on a rather worthy tinge but when you live in a society with rather precarious freedoms such as Iran, taking on the mantle of political cinema is something a good deal more dangerous. Panahi famously wrote to the master Abbas Kiarostami back in the 1980s asking for a job. He eventually passed on to directing himself, winning the Caméra d’Or for The White Balloon in 1995. There then followed The Circle, a dark feminist thriller that follows fugitive women across the Tehran cityscape as they attempt to escape the morals police after them for what is most likely prostitution. Panahi went out of his way to beat the drum for Iranian women in his 2007 film Offside, an absurdist drama about women trying to get into an international football match. And there was also Crimson Gold, a sympathetic portrait of an Iran-Iraq war veteran turned pizza-delivery man caught adrift amidst the Iranian nouveau riche pizza-eating classes. It was no surprise that when the anti-government protests sparked off last June Panahi was to the fore of the protestors. He’s a man whose work attests to the value of dissent.

Together (Lukas Moodysson – Sweden, 2000)

Moodysson is an unlikely sort in the field of international cinema, a man raised by Marxist parents – like Lars Von Trier – but professing a very different robust Christian humanism. He has also gone from bubbly, purposeful feel-good comedies to hellish visions of human evil and the fortitude of the wretched, such as Lilja 4-Ever. But it is his second feature, Together, a semi-autobographical account of life in a left-wing commune in Stockholm in the 1970s, that is the most memorable. Moodysson weaves wife-beating, closet homosexuality and sexually precocious teenagers into the narrative and over it he pastes a soundtrack of Abba songs, songs that he gleefully admits the communards would have readily scorned. It’s a strange but fantastic piece and one of the best pieces of popular cinema of the decade.

Gerry and Elephant (Gus Van Sant – USA, 2002 and 2003)

What a difference a decade makes. Ten years ago Gus Van Sant was mired down in sentimental Hollywood productions such as Good Will Hunting and Finding Forrester, films that, though they bore his recognisable imprint, reeked too much of a sad compromise. Van Sant used some time out with two of his mainstream buddies Matt Damon and Casey Affleck to make Gerry, a bleak minimalist chamber piece in Death Valley. Van Sant films both faces and landscapes with an unerring eye, and the exercise in experimental rigour reinvigorated him, helping him win the Palme d’Or the following year with the Columbine reconstruction Elephant. After a string of fine counter-cultural films, Van Sant went back to the mainstream with Milk and this time he had Hollywood on his own terms.

Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter – USA/France, 2004)

I had never been impressed by Nossiter’s rambling, pretentious fiction films but it was a real pleasure when he brought his day job as a wine importer to bear on this monumental documentary on the wine trade. You may not buy his arguments such as planting the Mondovani family, the titan of wine critics Robert Parker and wine consultant par excellence Michel Rolland in the camp of villains, but the film is gripping drama. Pitted against the above are pluckily genial Bourgonnais viticulteurs whose own daughter has crossed over to the dark side, a Jewish wine importer in New York who bemoans the increasing homogenisation of the global wine trade and pernickety European left-wing politicians unimpressed by the new wine gospel. The film is about more than wine though; it’s a study of the trade-offs, wilful self-abnegation and fierce resistance induced among people by the pensées uniques of globalisation. The mouthpiece of the latter is the exemplary ‘quiet American’ Parker, who might be construed as an oenological equivalent of the belligerent liberals who have found creative new ways of waging war in our overly-comfortable times. Also released in a 10-hour version for French television.

La Ciénaga (Lucrecia Martel – Argentina, 2001)

Martel says that she does not make political films but it was hard to watch La Ciénaga, released in the wake of Argentina’s economic collapse, without thinking of it as a stern corrective to a culture of fiscal irresponsibility and avarice. This is a film where all the responsible characters are children; from the very opening scene – one of the finest of the decade – we see the adults as drink-sodden zombies, edging catatonically towards an inevitable crisis. The film has a fetid air, suitably unclean for one whose title is the Spanish for ‘swamp’.

Topsy-Turvy, All or Nothing and Vera Drake (Mike Leigh – UK, 1999, 2002 and 2004)

While most of his American contemporaries have wandered up avenues of critically acclaimed irrelevance, Mike Leigh just gets on with making films and he rarely misses a note. You have to go back to 1997’s Career Girls to find a poor film by Leigh. His best this decade was his first effort, the unexpectedly entertaining Gilbert and Sullivan biopic Topsy-Turvy. Leigh’s first period piece was a breath of fresh air amid the stuffy academicism of British costume drama; he didn’t stint on the detail, nor on the historical context and best of all the film had its flashes of autobiography in the scenes where the light operatistes put their actors through rehearsals. There then followed the darkly tough urban drama All or Nothing and another period piece, Vera Drake, with Imelda Staunton a star turn as a 1950s back-street abortionist. Special mention too to Happy-Go-Lucky, not on this list, but one of the more sophisticated comedies of the noughties.

Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki – USA, 2003)

It started off as a documentary about New York party clowns but Jarecki changed tack when he discovered the story of one of his subjects, David Friedman. David’s family were embroiled in a child abuse scandal in the 1980s, which led to the conviction of his father Arnold and 18-year-old brother Jesse. Most amazingly, the family were willing to talk (though Arnold had, by then, passed away) and even more so they had home movies galore to fill in the gaps. Despite the confessions and convictions of both, questions marks remain over the actual guilt. Both claimed they lied in their confessions, making the film a maelstrom of doubt (its tagline was ‘Who do you believe?’) Though there’s something unseemly about the film’s voyeuristic position, it’s enthralling viewing. The Friedman’s bizarre reaction to their family turmoil is proof that reality TV and Balloonboy were dramas that were only waiting to happen.

Saraband (Ingmar Bergman – Sweden, 2003)

The master’s swansong, made for Swedish TV four years before his death but it got an international theatrical release. A sequel to Scenes from a Marriage (which was also made for the small screen) it reunites Karin and Johan 30 years later, by now a divorced couple and beset with crises involving their various children. It’s an elegant drama, in which little happens, but the depth of characterisation is impressive and the whole thing rings with the pain and cruelty that runs like letters through a stick of rock through the life work of Bergman, a life’s work that ended with this film.

En construcción (José Luis Guerín – Spain, 2001)

Guerín’s ludic cinema was still unknown on the release of this film in 2001, and it was only the international release of Dans la ville de Sylvia seven years later that brought it to the attention of most people. In a similar way to the recent cinema of Jia Zhang-Ke, Guerín deconstructs history through the decline of a building. As the century ends he follows the demolition of an apartment building constructed in 1900, being knocked as part of the gentrification of the barrio chino, Barcelone’s traditional red-light district. Like Jia, he mixes documentary and fiction, following those working on the building and interviewing locals on their memories of a vanishing neighbourhood. He also struck it lucky as during demolition, human remains dating from Roman times were uncovered, adding an unexpected extra layer to the film’s dense texture. A great film about urban history.

Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmid – Germany, 2006)

Hans-Christian Schmid's harrowing account of the exorcism of a young German woman in the 1970s is both a masterful piece of kinetic cinema and an angry, if even-handed examination of faith and madness. The young woman, played by the amazing Sandra Hüller, is doomed from the start, as her epilepsy cuts her off from society and hampers her studies and her efforts to live an ordinary life. Her obsession with Catherine of Siena does not help - leading her to believe her illness is a messianic affliction thrust upon her by God. A perfect counterpart to Breaking the Waves and arguably more moving, Requiem is proof of the current rude health of German cinema.

Guernsey (Nanouk Leopold – Netherlands, 2005)

A little-known Dutch film, about a young mother who witnesses the suicide of a colleague while working as an engineer in Egypt and then tells nobody about it, allowing her marriage and her relationship with her widowed father and her desperately embittered sister unravel almost as an existential experiment. Leopold touches all the right buttons in the Antonioni fashion but her film has a bracing individuality and an almost-Protestant rigidity of economy in its editing and mise en scène. There is not a shot wasted and as well as featuring a great, haunting performance as the wife by Maria Kraakman, it has a cast of some of the finest buildings seen on film in many a year.

4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days (Cristian Mungiu – Romania, 2007)

The consolidation of Romanian cinema as one of the world's most impressive came in 2007 with the awarding of the Palme d'Or at Cannes to Cristian Mungiu's drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days which told the harrowing account of an illegal abortion in the final years of the Ceausescu regime. The film is a finely calibrated slice of life, shimmering with the squalid discomfort of the Communist-era gloom, brilliantly acted and difficult to sit through. If the clutch of Romanian films that have their way west in recent years is any indicator, the country is, despite its many social and political problems, a formidable repository of stories that will produce many more in years to come.

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Un petit tricheur...

2009-11-25T20:08:00.005+01:00

There's been an unusual silence from me in the seven days since the match last week largely because I have followed Virginia Woolf's
injunctive never to write when one is angry. While that anger has only subsided a little, there's little point in poring over the ashes of the
game, to glean either good or bad points - in any case, the whole match is by now, dominated by one bad point of monumental size. FIFA, though
they may be an organ of such corruption and rancidness capable of being matched only by a planeload of Third World kleptocrats touching down at Geneva International Airport, are correct not to order the match to be replayed. As egregious a wrong as Henry's handball was, FIFA cannot overrule referees, even if sometimes they wish they could have.

The French Football Federation though, had it in their gift to offer a
replay, and they might have felt it incumbent on them to do so, seeing
as so many of their countrymen were mortified at the way they qualified
for South Africa. It appears however Raymond Domenech put a spanner in
the works by refusing a rematch. To be honest, I think Jean-Pierre
Escalettes, the President of the FFF, is every bit as lacking in
backbone as his manager and nobody at 87, boulevard de Grenelle gave
serious thought to killing the golden goose they had almost given up for
dead. It's an ignoble dereliction of fair play but let's not be too
pious about it. France will trot out at the next World Cup in imposture
in the eyes of the world and many of their own supporters. And given
their usual form in tournaments this decade they will hardly do better
than Ally McLeod's Scotland who deprived Wales of a World Cup finals
spot in 1978 thanks to a Joe Jordan handball. The cosmic retribution
will be swift, just and probably underwhelming. A passionless French
team will limp from one uninspired draw to another before being soundly
beaten by a modest enough opponent - Denmark, Slovakia or Cameroon
perhaps. And Raymond Domenech will refuse to take any blame...

But what of the villain of the piece, a man who has, in the past week,
revealed himself to be of less than monumental proportions? Not so much
in the act of cheating he committed, though it was clearly an
intentional double-handball; any schoolboy who has ever juggled soccer
and Gaelic football over a season can train their instinct to wrap their
hand around the ball when playing the foreign game - highly-paid
footballers can do the same, without any excuses.

Since he handled the ball not once but twice before setting up William Gallas to score the goal that put Ireland out of the World Cup, Thierry Henry has done a lot of pleading. It started at the final whistle. By now settled down from his exuberent celebration of Gallas' goal, Henry consoled Richard Dunne and said 'it was handball but I'm not the ref'. One has to admire Richard Dunne's magnanimity that he didn't, as Eric Cantona suggested he should have, socked Henry one there and then. It continued the following day, with Henry sheepishly apologising via his Twitter feed, then he said he was not a cheat and called for the match to be replayed, after FIFA had already put his foot down. It was a communiqué delivered, crucially in English rather than French, aimed at touching up his tarnished image. Henry doesn't want to go down in history as a cheat - though there will be many who have followed his progress over the years who will say his cheating started neither last Wednesday nor the day before - so you have to question his motivation in blatantly cheating last week. If you can't do the time, don't do the crime. Then Henry said he felt all alone and considered quitting the French team, because the FFF, rather ungratefully did not give him more wholehearted support for his cheating.

Once again, I'm not going to be too pious about cheating. Everyone does it at some point in the game. And most of them are never noticed. Some do it in minor instances, and others, like Henry do it in, ahem, grander ones. Diego Maradona's 'Hand of God' goal is one of those grander instances. But where Diego differs from Thierry is not in the fact that El píbe scored a fantastic goal within moments of his moment of treachery, but because Maradona has never shirked the fact he cheated. From the very moment he coined the immortal phrase to his more recent likening it to 'pick-pocketing Prince Charles', Maradona has brazenly embraced his cheating. He knows it was important enough, and he, unlike Henry is not going to hide behind a referee's call. England fans may not take much comfort from that but Maradona is, in Graham Greene's words 'man enough to be damned'. Thierry Henry, fretful of his reputation having crossed over to the dark side, is not. He is milksop Jonathan Harker to Diego's Count Dracula. And it is this cravenness that makes Henry's behaviour all the more repulsive.

Anyway speaking of 'hiding behind a referee's call', here's the exemplary Thierry Henry in a 2006 Nike ad. Is he still talking to Cantona, I wonder? Or did he bottle out of talking to him that day, too?

The Day of Reckoning

2009-11-18T16:46:00.004+01:00

A quick note before I head off to the Stade de France for the second leg of the World Cup final play-off. I have to admit I'm being realistic about the chances for the Boys in Green. France are 65% there. If we play the same way we did in the second half on Saturday we can wave goodbye any chances of going to South Africa. The fact we haven't beaten a major nation away from home in competitive football in so long is also an ill boding. But on the upside, we have nothing to lose and a 1-0 lead is not impossible to overturn if we apply ourselves well.

France were not much better than us on Saturday and, for all their second-half possession, rarely troubled us. There is probably no home ground in international football with such a negligible determination on home advantage as the Stade de France - there are no visiting teams overawed by it and France regularly lose at home. There is also a huge over-confidence in the French public at the moment - former manager Michel Hidalgo told L'Équipe yesterday that he "wouldn't bet sixpence on Ireland". Such an attitude may not reign among the squad, but if the ugly behaviour of Lassana Diarra is anything to go by, there may be a hint of it. The French have a ridiculous sense that playing at the World Cup finals is their birthright. This despite the fact that they have failed to qualify for six finals in the past, as recently as 1994. And also despite the fact that, other than the Zidane-led revolt of 2006, they have brought nothing to any major finals since they won Euro 2000. It is this sense of complacency that could well undo France. And, of course, under Trapattoni, our best performances have been away from home.

But back to reality. There is a huge task ahead and conceding a goal first will probably finish us off. I have a worry that our lack of strength in depth (poor old Leon Best) and overly-negative tactics from the Italian will hamper us. We might have to settle for a valiant 0-0, that will put us out. But we'll still roar on the boys. It should be a great night, if not a great game.

The Year of the French II

2009-11-14T11:30:00.005+01:00

Ireland kick off against France at Croke Park tonight in the first leg of the World Cup play-offs. The game takes place against a backdrop of sometimes bizarre fervour, whipped up by both the Irish media and team over the past week. Richard Dunne started the mind games going by saying Raymond Domenech was a man who only seemed to know 'how to mess up' the talent at his disposal. Former Ireland manager Eoin Hand (who was pipped by les Bleus on goal difference for qualification for the 1982 World Cup) said that if Ireland were saddled with Domenech, they wouldn't have reached the play-offs. (I'm not a big fan of Domenech, though I don't really agree with that - even under the hapless Steven Staunton, second spot in an ordinary group was for long within our grasp). Tony Cascarino weighed in in his Times column and this was later relayed to the entire sporting press in France. Cazza had a successful spell in France in the mid-90s with Marseille and Nancy and the French media have an inordinately high opinion of him, no doubt because he scored 31 goals one year in the gentle confines of Ligue 2.

One wonders why the Irish are ganging up on Domenech like this, as it seems likely to only galvanize a French side whose unity is still in question. But the fact that Liam Brady himself said that Domenech doesn't always know what players to play suggests that such an approach has been officially sanctioned by Trapattoni himself. It's a risky approach to take as it deprives Ireland of their underdog status, which has served us so well in the past. But, as my father has suggested, maybe it's a strategy to build an arrogance with the aim not so much to intimidate the French, as to bolster the self-confidence of the Irish players. That doesn't seem unlikely. For all the poor performances in qualifying, coming through the group undefeated has raised the confidence of a mixed group of players. The occasional lapses in defence and some very poor ball retention in midfield fail to reassure those of us watching on the sidelines but if the team at least attacks the game knowing they are the equal of France (I think they are, more of which later), it can only be a good thing.

The French camp, Domenech included, has been rather reticent; the French coach was mouthy in the run-up to the Lansdowne Road game four years ago but he's a more embattled sort these days and imparts only sparse information to the media. He may also be cognisant of the silly furor he inadvertently sparked in Ireland with his 'England B-team' comments (which he never said but were mistranslated by the Irish media). The Irish press continue to breathe life into a non-existent verbal sparring match, with the Indo blowing up Éric Abidal's comments into something more confrontational than they were in an interview with L'Équipe Thursday. The French are relaxed enough; they will enter the game with a wary respect for the Irish but they do not fear them. Nor should they. The French media have, with a few exceptions, been building up the cauldron-like atmosphere their team can expect in Croke Park. Something that will come as a surprise to Irish football fans, as Croker has yet to seriously intimidate any visiting side. The distance of the pitch from the stands and a largely casual public, with many of them rugby fans twiddling their thumbs in indifference, render the atmosphere muted.

And even if the ambience is going to be more electric tonight, that's not going to unduly worry the French. Vikash Dhorasoo, who played in the 1-0 win at Lansdowne four years ago (and whose anti-climactic World Cup provided the basis for the wonderful documentary Substitute) said this week that the atmosphere, though formidable, is not terribly upsetting compared to Greece or Turkey. He's right about that, and a look at the welcome afforded the Algerian national team in Cairo Thursday makes the 'Croker roar' look like centre court at Wimbledon in comparison. Besides, France went to Serbia in September and outplayed the locals in front of a hostile crowd. And the weather, however miserable it might be, will not bother the French. They are professional footballers and they play outdoors all the time.

So what are our chances? Fairly high, I would say. Because the two teams are evenly matched. Not of course in terms of individual technique - the French are way ahead in that department. But Ireland are blessed with a stronger defence (with the exception of Kevin Kilbane) and a better goalkeeper than anything France have to offer. We are also better in the air and better at set-pieces. There is also a greater sense of self-belief among the Irish, though the French have been displaying a greater cohesion and team spirit of late. Their five qualifiers since August have seen improved performances even if three were against the exceptionally flimsy Faroe Islands and Austria, while draws were scrabbled impressively against Serbia and alarmingly against Romania. Brian Kerr, who observed them at close quarters in the two games as Faroes manager dismisses any talk of disarray in the French ranks. He should be heeded by the Irish, and I imagine he will be. It's hard to gauge their real level of form but if France put in a display like they did when down to ten men against Serbia, then Ireland could be in trouble. On the other hand, if France get shaken and disoriented early on they may be too mentally brittle to mount a meaningful recovery.

Ireland will be hoping to expose France's vulnerability at set-pieces; it's far from the only means of us scoring but that's where the French look dodgy. The French press are relying on Hugo Lloris, the 22-year-old Lyon keeper to command in the box. He is generally good at that and played well recently in the 2-1 win at Anfield but in a physical game he may be suspect. Added to that his positioning leaves a lot to be desired. That he was responsible for three of the five goals conceded in the 5-5 draw against Marseille last Sunday should give us encouragement. France have already been resigned to the loss of Franck Ribéry, the only player they possess who can win a match on his own - as he did twice against Lithuania - but the loss of Jérémie Toulalan deprives them of a defensive robustness in the middle of the park. They will instead field the two Diarras, formidable enough but unlikely to faze Glenn Whelan and Keith Andrews. Instead it is Yoann Gourcuff who is the real danger man though he has not been his usual dazzling self since returning from injury last month. Interestingly Gourcuff and the entire French back-four are on yellow cards so they will have to be very careful not to further deplete the side for Wednesday's match. Ireland, on the other hand have only Andrews and Shay Given of the starters on a yellow.

I expect the Irish back-four to be exceptionally well-drilled for the game and slips will be few and far between. But the worry is that there will always be a slip, especially where Kilbane is concerned. If we concede a goal, even with a victory, the second leg will be very difficult. If we keep a clean sheet I think we will go through. A worrying thing is that we have kept only two clean sheets so far in the qualifiers, and two of those were against Montenegro. It doesn't bode well.

I'm reasonably optimistic, even if I don't like it that Trapattoni is describing this as 'our World Cup final'; it's not, it's a qualifying play-off. We've been at this stage often enough to expect qualification for a major finals every time they come around. We may have limited resources but so do most other countries, even a team like England, for all their rejuvenation under Fabio Capello, have a glaring lack of strength in depth that will hinder any hopes of lifting the World Cup next July. But by ten o'clock Irish time tonight we'll know what prospects Ireland have for the second leg. Best of luck, boys!

Raymond Domenech and the Irish

2009-11-07T17:15:00.003+01:00

Reading in France Football today, I learned that French manager Raymond Domenech made his debut as a player for the national side against none other than Ireland. It was a World Cup qualifier at the Parc des Princes on 19th of May 1973. The match ended 1-1 and both sides failed to qualify for West Germany, the Soviet Union going through. The 21-year-old Domenech was given a torrid time by Miah Dennehy, of all people, though Raymond did get one strike on target late in the game. Ireland manager of the day Liam Tuohy wasn't too impressed, asking L'Équipe, 'was your number 2 picked just to give his best?' What are the chances of Raymond ending his international career against the same opposition he started it against?

French Acting a Bit Irish

2009-11-05T17:49:00.002+01:00

The estimable French football magazine So Foot tells me that the French Football Federation, sore at their Irish counterpart doing their own deal with M6, a French TV chain not partnered with the FFF, for the Dublin play-off game, are getting their revenge. They are demanding a minimum €1.5million for the rights from RTÉ (and I presume, TV3, if they're up for it) for the rights to broadcast the second-leg on November 18th. The offer tabled from the Irish side runs to only €600,000. I expect a deal will be hammered out in some fashion in the next couple of weeks but the behaviour of the French is shabby, to say the least. The amount offered by RTÉ is a little more than 10% of that demanded of M6 (the same amount, incidentally, that French broadcaster TF1 pays the FFF for every home match), perfectly fair considering the Irish TV market is approximately 5.5% that of the French one. I can understand how the French Federation were keen to avoid too many Irish fans seeing the match in the flesh on the 18th of November, but are they really determined to prevent them watching it back home too? Here's hoping they get their comeuppance and they'll be forced to undertake sponsorship tours to China next June to drum up revenue.

Yadda Yadda Yadda

2009-11-05T17:27:00.003+01:00

I'm of the opinion, like many others, that those at the very top of the football-playing pyramid get paid rather obscenely inflated salaries. And, even if one can defend them on a market-based rationale, as folk like Simon Kuper and Joseph Stiglitz have done, one might expect the well-paid players to at least contribute their fair share in tax. Such is the thinking of the French government, which intends at the end of the season to do away with tax breaks tied to collective image rights, which limits greatly the amount of tax paid by wealthy footballers, basketball players and rugby players in France. The Spanish government has already moved to plug similar tax gaps, unsurprisingly given the shocking rise to 18% unemployment the country has experienced in the past year.

Of course, football clubs are up in arms about it, particularly as hefty salaries being paid by the big clubs are finally making French teams a force to be reckoned with in Europe, with Bordeaux and Lyon both qualified for the second-round of the Champions' League after four games and Marseille are still in with a chance of progressing. Secretary of State for Sport, Rama Yade has voiced her opposition to the measure, backing the clubs up saying it will make French clubs less competitive. Considering her immediate superior Roselyne Bachelot supports the move, it's not a smart move. And it's one that the young Yade made out of enthusiasm for her portfolio (I've read a number of interviews with her in the sporting press recently and she is rather to eager to please) rather than out of any strong point of principle. But she is bound to pay for her gaffe; Sarkozy has had it in for her ever since she refused to stand for the European elections. The junior sports portfolio was widely considered punishment and now even that is likely to be taken away from her. Le Monde says her days in Sarkozy's UMP are numbered, but it seems that the Socialist Party will intervene to save her from the dogs once she is thrown to them. The PS say they will put her at the top of the list in Hauts-de-Seine for next year's regional elections. I presume she would have to soften her opposition to tax cuts for millionaires first.

A French Paradox

2009-11-05T16:54:00.001+01:00

Following on the controversy over the Toronto International Film Festival's showcasing Tel-Aviv a couple of months back, the roadshow moves on to Paris. Le Forum des Halles, the excellent municipal-run cinemathèque in the Les Halles shopping centre is hosting 'Tel-Aviv : le paradoxe', a season of films set and filmed in the Israeli city, which celebrates its centenary this year. The season, which started yesterday and runs until the 25th of November, contains a far wider range of films than were shown in Toronto, both contemporary and from the past, such as Ephraim Kishon's Arvinka (1967) and Avi Nesher's Dizengoff 99 (1979). Unlike Toronto it also looks likely to be a more self-critical look at the city (the title alone suggests that) with prominent leftist filmmakers Eytan Fox, Amos Gitaï and Ronit Elkabetz among others appearing as guests, a series of debates on Tel-Aviv's bubble-like status as a tolerant liberal haven strangely free of an Arab population, and there's even place for Hany Abu-Assad's Oscar-winning Palestinian film Paradise Now, which tells of two Palestinians' attempt at a suicide bombing in the city.

But not everyone's happy. There's nothing like the brouhaha that followed John Greyson's protest at Toronto, but prominent pro-Palestinian activist Michèle Sibony (who, for what it matters, is herself Jewish) has written a letter to the cinema directors decrying the decision to showcase Tel-Aviv only ten months after the murderous Gaza invasion. Her letter goes a bit like this:

"You have entitled your homage "Tel-Aviv - the paradox, wishing, no doubt to suggest an ambivalence or a certain ambiguity. Tel-Aviv is not a paradox, it is rather proof: a 'Capital of Segregation and Apartheid'. Constructed on the expulsion and destruction of Palestinian villages, it has completely rid itself of any Palestinian presence since the so-called 'Oslo peace process'. The bubble, as it likes to call it, is a city as white as Cape Town was during the Apartheid years."

Even for those of us sympathetic to the Palestinian cause it's a drearily familiar tread through the verbiage of official letter-writing. Not that Michèle Sibony isn't entitled to her stance but it is curious that the season has failed to stimulate much protest beyond this, and Paris is certainly not lacking militants for the Palestinian cause. Is it the Parisian cinephilia that allows one to dissassociate unpleasant acts and behaviour from enjoyment of good films, or do most people see the season as being far from a whitewash of Tel-Aviv? I suspect it might be the latter. As for myself, I'll be staying away, less out of conviction, than simply due to the fact I have seen most of the contemporary films showing, including Raphaël Nadjari's excellent Avanim, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz's To Take a Wife and Fox's Walk on Water. I have films to watch elsewhere, not to mention fences to tend to before sitting on.

Tickets, please...

2009-10-30T13:22:00.001+01:00

The first 49,000 tickets for the Ireland-France playoff second leg in the Stade de France sold out in hours last week, quicker than I expected. French football fans may have been heeding Raymond Domenech's call not to allow Irish fans to pack out the Stade de France, as they did five years ago (though the number then was no way 45,000, as L'Équipe and some other French media have reported). But it may well be possible that the tickets were being snapped up by opportunists to ultimately pass on to Irish fans for a handsome profit. Almost every Irish person (or even internationals supporting Ireland) I know bought the maximum four tickets. Whether this translates into a heavy Irish presence is unclear, as the French Football Federation appears resolute that the FAI's official allocation will remain at the minimum 8,500. There are 20,000 others reserved for football bodies within France and commercial partners - I noticed tickets being offered though my own place of work - and it's safe to say that some of these will end up in Irish hands too.

Speaking of opportunists one chap who arrived at Leclerc (a supermarket) in Val-de-Marne on his day off from said shop and produced a list of 80 'friends' whom he bought tickets for, ahead of everyone else in the queue. A disgruntled punter caught it on film (though it has since been taken down) and the french blogosphere is indignant. One wonders where his friends are going to be on the night of the 18th of November.

As for myself, what I previously thought was a non-negotiable work day turned out to be more flexible so I will be in the stands on the night, accompanied by a recalitrant Canadian who is insisting on supporting France. I'll get my revenge during the ice hockey at next year's Winter Olympics.

The Death of Gearóid Walsh

2009-10-30T09:09:00.001+01:00

Sad news yesterday on the death of Irish backpacker Gearóid Walsh in Sydney following a late-night fight. But this report from the Sydney Morning Herald is humbling in how it shows the forgiveness and complete lack of bitterness of Gearóid's mother Tressa, who says she doesn't want her son's killer to go to prison. While it was clearly not an attack of such viciousness as often makes the news, the calm of Tressa Walsh in reacting to such a tragedy is admirable. The SMH reports a man has turned himself into police; I don't know if Australian law takes into account pleas for clemency but it would be best for all if Tressa Walsh's words were heeded.

Irish backpacker bashed in Coogee dies | Gearoid Walsh | I don't want my son's attacker to go to jail, says mother of dead backpacker

So It's France...

2009-10-20T16:56:00.005+02:00

I had a premonition we were going to end up playing France in the play-off for a World Cup final spot. I can't say I'm too disappointed with it either, even though an open draw for the play-offs would have been infinitely fairer, but FIFA just couldn't countenance big names (and big TV audiences) missing out on the finals. To expect fairness from the corrupt suits in Zurich would be akin to expecting a Catholic Church float at Gay Pride so we'll just have to live with that. By most reckoning Russia would have been far worse what with playing in Moscow in November, on a plastic pitch, against a side that is significantly fitter and more motivated than most others in Europe right now. I think Portugal and Greece would have been well within our reach but I could see the latter being the sort of team capable of bogging us down and taking the sharpness off the big-game appetite. A needle match with France is all the better.

And if France, their current disarray notwithstanding, might be a formidable opponent for us, they didn't want to get us either. They have unbeaten records against Ukraine, Slovenia and Bosnia and would have preferred either of them. Of those three only Ukraine would be a real threat, and even then they are temperamental in the extreme. Bosnia are an exciting up-and-coming team but the fact they could only take one point off Spain and Turkey, the two big teams in their group, shows they are not really up to this level just yet. Before the draw was made L'Équipe said Ireland was the team to avoid, above all with a return leg in Dublin. Well, they got the consolation prize of the second leg in the Stade de France. Irish fans who have watched the mind-numbingly poor performances of Trap's boys in green so far will be bewildered at this wariness. But France have been equally poor in a group that was arguably worse than ours. Only recently, with the supposed mutiny led by Thierry Henry have they gelled and begun to play with something approaching a team spirit. That said one can only describe their draw away to Serbia as an impressive performance. That Karim Benzema could say he wasn't trying his hardest in the home draw against Romania suggests there's a long way to go to building a talented bunch in players into a footballing machine to be really feared. And most French football commentators and fans were not exposed to our performances in a mediocre group where we failed to beat anyone but Georgia and Cyprus. They just see the two draws with Italy, two games in which we acquitted ourselves well but could also have done better in. They are also fully aware that in Trapattoni, we are blessed with a manager who towers above their own hapless steward Raymond Domenech.

That said, it would be a silly fantasy to think that France are quaking in their boots at the prospect of a two-legged tie against Ireland. Overall they have the better players, and if Yohann Gourcuff and Jérémie Toulalan are both fit, a central midfield that could put worrying pressure on our own central formation. Much will depend on whether Thierry Henry goes into hiding for a big game (as he did in the Stade de France in October 2004) or delivers the goods (as he did a year later at Lansdowne). André-Pierre Gignac has scored four goals in his first eight internationals but three of those were against the Faroe Islands; there's no guarantee yet he won't turn out to be another Stéphane Guivarc'h, handy in Ligue 1 but out of his depth elsewhere. At the back France are not as solid as they were when they beat us four years ago (the real matchwinner that night was Lilian Thuram whose superb second-half performance calmed nerves after a first period when it looked the game was going Ireland's way) and they have an alarming tendency to concede goals from dead-ball situations. Which suits us fine, as we find it hard to score any other way. Richard Dunne's recent proflicness from corners and free kicks in particular has already been mentioned by the French press. In between the posts, Hugo Lloris and Steve Mandanda have been far from reassuring in recent matches for the national team or Lyon and Marseille respectively, and we can definitely put pressure on them.

The two ties are unlikely to yield many goals and Ireland's prospects rest on our level of organisation. After the catastrophic Staunton era, many gaps have been plugged but we still have a tendency to lapses in concentration at the wrong time. Far too many of the eight goals we conceded in the group matches came from unforced errors. Likewise, the two Italy games aside, there was little imagination in our forward play. We have to accept that, in the absence of Steve Finnan, we have no fullback really capable of outstripping on the flanks, and the centre of the field lacks an industrial pivot such as Steven Reid or the assertiveness of Stephen Ireland. At this point of the tournament, Trap's sidelining of Andy Reid, who had a fine game in our last meeting with France, looks ever more foolish. What goals we do score are likely to come from set-plays and if we do manage to put France on the back-foot it will probably be while chasing a lead.

Raymond Domenech, one of the least popular men in France these days, has riled the Irish by allegedly calling Ireland "a sort of England B-team", or so the Examiner reports. I've read the original French interview though and he said Ireland are 'Angleterre bis' which means rather a fascimile or replica of England; if anything it's a compliment more than anything else. But Domenech showed in the run-up to the Lansdowne match four years ago that he was a man of little or no class, and he will undoubtedly intentionally provoke the Irish before the 14th of November. Which is of course all the better for us. He is also worried that Ireland will hog the tickets at the Stade de France and make it effectively a home game for the Irish and he called on French supporters to snap them up quick. Thankfully French football fans are not too keen on indulging Mr Domenech. Irish fans should have no problem getting their hands on tickets when they come free, either via the French Football Federation or FNAC. Unfortunately non-negotiable work commitments mean I can't make the Paris game but I will thankfully be able to keep a close eye on it.

Domenech also has some previous with Marco Tardelli. Both men faced off as managers of Italy and France in an under-21 match in 1999 that was also a qualifier for the Sydney Olympics. It was a bad-tempered return leg, won by the Italians, and Domenech has since claimed that the Italians bought the referee, for which he was admonished by FIFA in 2007. Tardelli was asked in today's L'Équipe if he would shake Domenech's Hand; he replied coyly, 'he's not my opposite number, it's Trapattoni that shakes the hand of the opposing manager.' And there's me worried about FIFA encouraging a referee in the second leg to ease France's passage to South Africa.

Working Class Heroes on Film

2009-09-26T16:34:00.002+02:00

In an era where any old fool can film something and post it on YouTube, it's a real pleasure to discover this week two hidden pearls from a time when home movies weren't quite so ubiquitous and which, even better, show us glimpses of people from before they became world famous. The short bit of film below shows us Phil Lynott and Brian Downey, later the rhythm section of Thin Lizzy, wandering the streets of Crumlin in 1969, with their band of the time, The Black Eagles. The quality of the film isn't great and neither is the framing and, not surprisingly there's no audio (The Yardbirds' 'Heartful of Soul' provides the soundtrack) but the film is mesmerisingly candid for all the selfconscious posing of the budding rock stars. There's a thrill to seeing any footage of the past in which you recognise things and the old 1940s council houses that flicker into view in the background are familiar to people all over Ireland, we can still see their likes in Limerick, Cork, Sligo, Athlone, Dundalk today, many of them now gentrified out of the price range of the working class that originally inhabited them. But most of all this is about Lynott and his stardom that was to come, the youngster who was to become Dublin's first ever rock star and the first black Irishman of world renown; as Conor McCabe put it in a fine post on Lizzy on Dublin Opinion last year, Lynott

is Dublin. The city seeped from him, from everything he did, from the way he moved and talked and looked. It’s hard to think of Phil Lynott coming from anywhere else but Dublin, and even at that, from anywhere else but a Dublin corporation estate. The city was such a part of him, and him of it.

And this gem of a clip is a great counterpart to the video for 'Old Town' that Philo recorded later in life, before his tragically early death in January 1986. Both remind me of the eerie thrill that befalls the sailor in Kipling's great short story 'Mrs. Bathurst' on his first encounter with the new-fangled thing called the cinematograph.

And the YouTube user MsRiposte, who it seems was a family friend of Phil, has also provided us with footage of Philo playing with Skid Row, including Brush Shiels and Gary Moore, the same year.

A huge thank you to Ms Riposte for sharing these with the world. They are absolute gold. And thanks to Philo's fellow Crumlin man and another great musician, Richie Egan of Jape for spreading word of them on his Twitter feed.

Chapeau #2

2009-09-23T14:21:00.003+02:00

Another good break for friends of mine this week. My friends Chris, Alex and Dave opened the doors of their bar/restaurant Chair de Poule* in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. It's a small but charming place that intends to serve food at the bistro end of nouvelle cuisine (food's still a few weeks off) and knowing Chris' pedigree as a farm-to-plate type of chef, having worked in several countries, the food will be nothing short of top class. The place is located on the corner of rue St-Maur and rue des Trois Bornes, in an area with no shortage of lively bars, cafés and restaurants for a good night all round. There's a website too under construction. You'll be hearing more of this in the months to come.

Chair de Poule, 141, rue St-Maur, 75011 Paris. Métro Parmentier/Goncourt Tel: 01.43.38.89.06

View Larger Map

*The name means literally 'chicken flesh' in French, but idiomatically, it's closer to 'goose flesh'.

Chapeau #1

2009-09-23T14:06:00.003+02:00

Enormous news from New York Monday night where my friend of many years (and former colleague in more than one job) Tim Grucza received the Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Cinematography in the field of Documentary. The award was for his work on the PBS Frontline film The War Briefing, which was made last year. I've known Tim for almost as long as I've been in France and he has spent that time and longer enduring discomfort and sometimes danger covering the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but also working in other parts of the world such as Chad, Nigeria and Georgia. His work has always been top class and the Emmy is the result of years of trevelyan work and sacrifice. It's not the first award Tim has received for his efforts but it's certainly the most prestigious, and it will not be the last either. Tim has another, self-directed, film on Afghanistan in the pipeline, due to be released in the New Year. Below is an excerpt from The War Briefing and the entire film can be watched online on the PBS website. Bravo Tim. Now it's time to update that Wikipedia page.

The Rehabilitation of Raymond Domenech, by Catherine Ringer

2009-09-22T13:34:00.004+02:00

Raymond Domenech is once again an embattled man forced to put on a brave face as the players under his command mutiny and succeed in undoing the damage he has inflicted on the French national team over the past five years. It happened once before in the 2006 World Cup when Zinedine Zidane, Fabien Barthez and Claude Makelele generated a team spirit and fluidity previously absent under Domenech. And now Thierry Henry has decided to take matters into his own hands and the approach has produced two good performances in recent qualifiers against Romania and Serbia. It will probably allow France to progress to South Africa via the playoffs as they enjoy a resurgence of form and confidence.

Raymond is not the most popular of sports personalities in France, and his penchant for astrology, though not uncommon among the French, hardly serves to boost his credibility. But he now has an admirer from an unlikely quarter, Catherine Ringer, former lead singer of classic 80s band Les Rita Mitsouko. She has just released, free to download on her website, a track entitled 'Je kiffe Raymond' ('I love Raymond' in the slang of the era). It goes as follows: "Je kiffe Raymond !/ Trop beau ce mec/ Ouais, son style, son nom/ Il est impec ce Domenech/ J’aime son image, sa stature de vieux crampon/ De son ramage, ouais je monte à l’action.." (Rather ungainily translated: "I love Raymond!/What a looker/Yeah, his style, his name/He's the tops this Domenenech/I love his image, his clinginess [an untranslatable pun on 'crampon', meaning both football boots and leech]/At his command, I leap into action.")

The mind boggles like never before. One wonders who's going to benefit most from this strange project. But maybe Catherine, who started off as an actress in films that one might diplomatically call 'exotic', detects in Domenech a certain outré raciness from another era. Certainly the moustache he sported during Strasbourg's championship-winning season in 1979 wouldn't be out of place in some of Ms Ringer's early work.

Catherine Ringer - Je kiffe Raymond

"They are just writers, no matter how great."

2009-09-19T11:03:00.002+02:00

A quote, unsourced alas, from the great Liam O'Flaherty I read last night:

There are some writers whom one immediately recognises, bookish fellows whose drawing-room civilisation obtrudes unpleasantly on the senses. They are just writers, no matter how great. But there are others who are great men, because they are men and who write because chance turns their energies towards writing as a means of creation. These are the men I love. Out of their speech, out of their eyes, out of the movements of their bodies, joyousness and exuberance flow and they make you feel it is good to be alive.

I'm sure O'Flaherty, a progressive fellow, would have intended women writers to be included in that equation too. That oversight aside, it's as good an observation on the whole writing thing as one could wish.

Distorting the Anti-Israel Protests in Toronto

2009-09-17T19:48:00.007+02:00

John Greyson's entirely reasonable decision to protest the Toronto International Film Festival's City-to-City spotlight on Tel-Aviv (and the supporting letter from a group of activists, artists and intellectuals such as Naomi Klein, Jane Fonda and Slavoj Zizek) has been predictably distorted and misrepresented by Israel's backers. Greyson cites the war in Gaza (for which both Hamas and Israel were criticised for human rights abuses by the UN this week), the continuation of a long-established apartheid-style policy in the Occupied Territories as reason for his reluctance to allow his film 'Covered' to be shown at a festival which turns a blind eye to the reality of Israel's outrageous flouting of decency and international law:

To my mind, this isn't the right year to celebrate Brand Israel, or to demonstrate an ostrich-like
indifference to the realities (cinematic and otherwise) of the region, or to pointedly ignore the international
economic boycott campaign against Israel. Launched by Palestinian NGO's in 2005, and since joined by
thousands inside and outside Israel, the campaign is seen as the last hope for forcing Israel to comply with
international law. By ignoring this boycott, TIFF has emphatically taken sides -- and in the process, forced
every filmmaker and audience member who opposes the occupation to cross a type of picket line.

The follow-up collective letter to the TIFF protests the spotlight also, correctly pointing out the uncomfortable fissure between a city such as Tel Aviv, that admittedly has its admirable qualities, and the grim reality of Israeli state policy:

The emphasis on 'diversity' in City to City is empty given the absence of Palestinian filmmakers in the program. Furthermore, what this description does not say is that Tel Aviv is built on destroyed Palestinian villages, and that the city of Jaffa, Palestine’s main cultural hub until 1948, was annexed to Tel Aviv after the mass exiling of the Palestinian population. This program ignores the suffering of thousands of former residents and descendants of the Tel Aviv/Jaffa area who currently live in refugee camps in the Occupied Territories or who have been dispersed to other countries, including Canada. Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.

Israel's supporters haven't been long making their voices heard: Marvin Hier of the Simon Wisenthal Center told a press conference that "Tel Aviv is one of the freest cities in the world, warts and all: a model city of diversity, freedom of expression and tolerance, for Arabs and Jews." He added: "It is the height of hypocrisy to single out Tel Aviv. These protesters cannot masquerade their hatred toward Israel." One need only point out the fact that the Tel Aviv distict population is comprised of only 2% Palestinian Arabs, a shockingly low number for a city built on razed Arab villages, to show Hier's model of diversity to be the nonsense it is.

Then a number of Hollywood Jews (their words, not mine) have signed a letter of counter-protest, employing some breathtaking hyperbole to denounce the anti-Israel protest as 'a blacklist', saying that "Blacklisting them [Israeli films] only stifles the exchange of cultural knowledge that artists should be the first to defend and protect. Those who refuse to see these films for themselves or prevent them from being seen by others are violating a cherished right shared by Canada and all democratic countries."

Let's go back to what Greyson said in his letter (my emphasis):

Let's be clear: my protest isn't against the films or filmmakers you've chosen. I've seen brilliant
works of Israeli and Palestinian cinema at past TIFFs, and will again in coming years. My protest is against
the Spotlight itself, and the smug business-as-usual aura it promotes of a "vibrant metropolis [and] dynamic
young city... commemorating its centennial", seemingly untroubled by other anniversaries, such as the 42nd
anniversary of the occupation. Isn't such an uncritical celebration of Tel Aviv right now akin to celebrating
Montgomery buses in 1963, California grapes in 1969, Chilean wines in 1973, Nestles infant formula in
1984, or South African fruit in 1991?

and the collective letter of support (my emphasis once again):

We do not protest the individual Israeli filmmakers included in City to City, nor do we in any way suggest that Israeli films should be unwelcome at TIFF. However, especially in the wake of this year’s brutal assault on Gaza, we object to the use of such an important international festival in staging a propaganda campaign on behalf of what South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, and UN General Assembly President Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann have all characterized as an apartheid regime.

Now, call me old-fashioned, but a diligent close reading of those two statements reveals to me no hatred of Israel or its film-makers but rather points out the iniquity of doing what is in effect propaganda work for the Israeli state. I don't blame the likes of David Cronenberg, Jerry Seinfeld or Minnie Driver for standing up for Israeli filmmakers and it's quite possible that their knowledge of the controversy was at best flimsy or distorted by the pre-drafted letter of protest they were asked to sign. One must also bear in mind that the majority of the signatories are American, and in much of the US, on the left as well as the right, criticism of Israel is routinely tarred as anti-semitism. But all those signatories should at the very least read the two letters as they were actually published. There is no hatred of Israel nor is there any overly-emotive chest-beating.

As regular readers of this blog will know, I'm a great admirer of recent Israeli cinema, particularly the films of Avi Mograbi, Ari Folman, Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz, Eran Riklis, Raphaël Nedjari, Keren Yedaya and Eytan Fox. Films by some of them were screened in the TIFF. Israeli films deserve to be seen, not least because they sometimes offer an honest, objective account of Israeli society that is at odds with some of the brow-beating nationalism of right-wing Israelis and their Zionist supporters (Fox's The Bubble is, ironically, a clear-eyed account of Tel Aviv's shortcomings as a 'diverse city'). But Israel, or Tel Aviv, cannot be treated the same as other countries as long as its government continues to flout international law, proceed with policies that border on ethnic cleansing, while at the same time having the gall to accuse those who oppose illegal West Bank settlements of supporting the same. It is likewise disingenuous of an Israeli filmmaker such as Samuel Maoz to claim he might not have won the Golden Lion at Venice, as he did for his war film Lebanon, had Jane Fonda or any other signatories been on the jury. Israeli films get a fair crack of the whip in international film festivals and I know nobody who suggests that they should be boycotted or shunned. Ken Loach was accused of censoring Tali Shalom Ezer's Surrogate at the Edinburgh Film Festival last year when he called for a boycott. But his target was not Shalom Ezer or his film, but rather the fact that the organizers had accepted money from the Israeli government to pay for Shalom-Ezer’s travel costs.

It's true that boycotts of Israel, be they academic or cultural, should be applied with care and discretion (I have no qualms whatsoever about applying economic boycotts) and though they are supported by some on the Israeli left, such as Ilan Pappe and Neve Gordon, they are opposed by others such as Uri Avnery. It is also true that some of those who take a pro-Palestinian stance are motivated more by hatred of Israel than a sense of justice for Palestinians. But the calls of protest against the Toronto International Film Festival were nothing but measured and reasonable.

Update

All credit to Roger Ebert, who, having initially condemned the protest, revised his position when presented with more facts. He said

I'm writing this the day after first posting this entry. I now regret it. The point I make about artists is perfectly valid but I realize I wasn't prepared with enough facts about the events leading up to the Festival's decision to showcase Tel Aviv in the City-to-City section. I thought of it as an innocent goodwill gesture, but now realize it was part of a deliberate plan to "re-brand" Israel in Toronto, as a pilot for a larger such program. The Festival should never have agreed to be used like this.

It's a brave, honest retraction, and one which aims to please neither side of the debate. It also confirms my suspicions mentioned above that some of the Hollywood figures that signed the condemnation of the protest might not themselves have been fully aware of the situation. It all underlines the importance of getting information out to combat the hasbara lies. Even staunch supporters of Israel can view things clearly when they are provided with the truth.

Disco Infernal

2009-09-16T14:53:00.003+02:00

This is a film that has been and gone most places but I'll give it a mention because I wasn't on blog duty when it came out a few months back. Tony Manero is the tale of Raúl, a 52-year-old ne'er-do-well obsessed with Saturday Night Fever in the dark days of the military dictatorship in Chile in the late 70s. His dream is to appear in a TV talent contest as a John Travolta clone. So far, so-Full Monty. But Tony Manero is a far more scabrous, unobliging work, an ill-mannered riposte to the idea that popular culture (especially American pop culture) can provide redemption in the face of political repression. In this film, pop music is, at best a malign distraction from the evil within, at worst a vector for the rotten state of a country whose ruling élite has placed its consumer concerns above human ones. It reminds me of the lines parrotted by Pinochet supporters as the old bastard was held under house arrest in London ten years ago: "Before the General came to power, you couldn't even get blue jeans in Chile. He saved our country."

Apparently at its Cannes screening 18 months ago, several Hollywood studio executives left violently angry, incredulous anyone could envisage their product used for dark ends. Job well done, Pablo Larraín, whose second film this is. One of the films of 2009 so far.

Apologies for the lack of subtitles in the clip:

Joe Stiglitz on Sport and Bankers

2009-09-16T14:34:00.005+02:00

Joseph Stiglitz, writing as guest editor of Libération yesterday, on high-earning sports stars:

The salaries of sports stars, soccer in particular, don't bother me near as much as traders' bonuses do. A soccer player is like a singer. The best singer sells the most records, it's public demand that decides that. And for sport too, the public digs into its pockets to go see the best. It's not the same in the world of finance: traders' salaried are fixed by bankers who, to a certain extent, steal from the shareholders, who are the effective owners of the company. In finance, everyone thinks they're smarter than everyone else - it's completely irrational. And if you know you're not the very best, why measure yourself against the very best? In finance, the deal is: "If you only give a million, you only get one-third of my attention; if you want more than that, you pay me more." In sport, the stars are paid according to their competitiveness. What's more, they pay taxes. A trader, on the other hand, if he thinks himself underpaid, will take risks, and if things go bad, it's the taxpayer that pays.

I have a sneaky feeling Stiglitz isn't too bothered by sport and thus didn't give more than a cursory analysis. But none other than Simon Kuper expressed a similar opinion in his FT column a few months back. The truth about the public wanting to watch better quality is undeniable but I don't think a salary cap would be any harm in that it might take the pressure off small and medium clubs and make the game more competitive and prevent badly-run bigger clubs like Valencia going to the wall.

Michel Platini's laudable plans to give the champions of all European countries a fair chance to reach the Champion's League group stages have produced a number of minnows in this years opening round. Poor starts by FC Zurich, hammered 5-2 at home by Real Madrid, and Maccabi Haifa, beaten by Bayern Munich. But hats off to Cypriots Apoel Nicosia who came away from the Vicente Calderón with a priceless 0-0 draw against Atlético Madrid.