Well at Least He Has His Health...

The superlative and very funny French football magazine So Foot dubbed Group B of this European Championship (the one containing co-hosts Austria, Germany, Poland and Croatia) the 'anschluss group', a delightfully insensitive quip, but which has been proven to be pertinent in the light of events in the past week. While Croatia have been rock solid in defence so far, conceding only a late goal to Germany's Lukas Podolski, one of their countrymen, former Ustashe chief of police Milivoj Ašner let his guard slip by being out and about to enjoy the football in his town of domicile Klagenfurt, where Croatia played their games against Germany and Poland. Ašner, 95, who cunningly goes by the name of Georg Aschner in Austria, escaped extradition to his native land two years ago to be tried for war crimes, as the Austrian government claimed he was in too poor health to stand trial. The Simon Wiesenthal Centre has again called on the Austrians to extradite him and that renowned organ of Nazi-hunting, The Sun, has snapped a hale and hearty Ašner with his wife among revelling football fans. Croatia has been criticised for its team's links to far-right groups but the country is surely doing more to atone for a shameful chapter of its past than Austria is by protecting this criminal. I wonder does it have anything to do with Klagenfurt being the home and fief of that pin-up boy of the far-right, Jörg Haider? And I wonder what Mister Ašner's secret for a long and healthy life is?

Ah No, Domenech...

France exited stage right last night in a pitiful display which saw them outplayed by the Italians in a soporific match (I was awoken from a first-half doze by Thierry Roland announcing the expulsion of Éric Abidal for the foul on Luca Toni that led to the first Italian goal). It has been sad to watch the collapse of the French team in this tournament, mainly because you know what talent there is there in the country's football set-up, probably more than in any other country in Europe. It was also sad to see one of my favourite footballers Lilian Thuram be humiliated by the Dutch on Friday night - however undeniably thrilling it was to watch the Dutch do their magic. When Thuram came out of retirement three years ago along with Claude Makelele and Zinedine Zidane to sort an ineffectual team out and qualify them for the 2006 World Cup, it was him that dashed Irish hopes at Lansdowne Road with a magisterial second-half display that cut off all the danger that Ireland had mustered in the first half of that match. He was equally imposing in France's march to the final the following summer but now it is clear that he is a year or two past his best and about five yards off most the strikers he would have easily snuffed off not so long ago.

Thuram, whether he decides to retire now or not, will have a career that extends far beyond football, and given the man's intelligence and political activism, I wouldn't be surprised if he becomes a glittering star on the French left, which sorely needs a man of his stature and conviction. When Abidal got sent off last night, Thuram stood up on the bench and prepared to strip to run on, rightly assuming that the most-capped player and captain until his dropping, would be the obvious replacement for a missing centre-half. French manager Raymond Domenech had other ideas however and in his wisdom, he sent on the underwhelming Lyon full-back Jean-Alain Boumsong instead, presumably the same wisdom that allowed him to select Boumsong ahead of players such as Gaël Clichy and Philippe Méxès in the first place.

Though the French players (the injured Franck Ribéry excepted) must bear their own responsibility for their spineless performance, they were hampered as ever by the cluelessness of the baffy charlatan in charge of them. Domenech's predilections for astrology have long been ridiculed by many (and even suspected for some of his team selections) but there is a deeply unpleasant side to the man that deserves more comment. Ireland saw it in the run-up to the game in Lansdowne three years ago when he dismissed Brian Kerr's side as a bunch of hoofers (say what you like about Kerr but his teams were never of the kick-and-rush variety) and his ungraciousness in two defeats against a plucky but limited Scottish team indicates his general lack of class. The Swiss media and people alike have deplored the arrogance and commitment to secrecy of Domenech's entourage since before this championship began, comparing them, unfavourably, and not to mention ominously, to Marco van Basten's Dutch squad. Many people are of the opinion that his sidelining of Méxès, consistently one of the best centre-halfs in Serie A in recent years, is due to petty animus. And then last night Domenech criticised the sending-off of Abidal, claiming that there was not a clear goalscoring chance denied. The man's cowardice and complete lack of responsibility was finally cemented when, questioned by his common-law partner Estelle Denis, on his future after the game, he proposed marriage to her. While being knocked out of the European Championship is not, in the wider scheme of things, a terribly serious occurrence, one might expect of Domenech at this point a greater degree of professionalism and seriousness than this. L'Équipe was moved to call it in an editorial, 'more than a managerial error, a lapse of taste.' Right they are, and Mlle. Denis' tolerance of this nonsense may prove to be the first of many such examples in her future life. The French Football Federation will surely elect to remove this craven, unprepossessing buffoon next month, following a tournament in which there were not enough of the old guard to rebel against his foolishness and play as they wished, as they did in Germany two years ago. He will not be missed in the world of football.

All of this is not to take away from Italy's performace, which showed a great deal of character and adventurousness. Even in the defeat by Holland they have been playing some good football in this tournament and I expect them to burst the Spanish bubble come the quarter-finals to set up a rematch with the Dutch in the semi-finals. But, then again, having seen, Guus Hiddink's Russia outplay Sweden tonight without even being impressive, the Dutch may find one being put over them by their former manager...

Iran v Israel (but not in the football)

My movie-going has been suffering because the football's been so good I'm afraid to miss any of it, but I have managed to live off my memories to pen an article over on Irish Left Review comparing Iranian and Israeli cinema (well, somebody had to do it). Having just seen Mario Gomez try to lob the Austrian keeper from three feet to provide surely the most comical miss in a major championship since the heyday of Stéphane Guivarc'h (he won a World Cup medal, you know), I'm going back to the football. Even the Teutons are providing high drama.

Isn't it Only Great?

I don't know what has got into the managers or teams at this Euro 2008 tournament but the abandon with which teams have been attacking (and counter-attacking) has ensured that it will be remembered as a classic, and we're not even out of the group stages yet. The Dutch have been the most glorious of the sides so far, but credit also to Spain, Portugal, Italy and Romania and Croatia after their shaky starts. Much as I would love to see Holland add to their 1988 title, I think they will come unstuck, as their dodgy defence gets found out against sides more clinical than France were the other night. Edwin van der Sar can only save them for so klong. The more likely winners are a side such as Croatia, who showed in their match against Germany a combination of flair and pragmatism, and mental toughness that will allow them to go all the way. Germany cannot be ruled out either despite the alarming way they imploded in Klagenfurt. I do feel, however that, Austria could give them a real fright in Vienna tomorrow night. A week ago I would have laughed at such a suggestion but the Austrians have been punching above their weight so far and they will be up for a chance to put one over the Germans, just as they did in Cordoba in 1978, when they knocked out the reigning World Champions 3-2. Austria's lack of edge in front of goal will ultimately be their undoing but they'll take the game to Germany at the very least. Tonight's game between Turkey and the Czech Republic could go to penalties, which would be a first in the group stages, and the same thing could also happen in Tuesday's potential decider between France and Italy. All very exciting.

A couple of fascinating stories from the glorious past of Austrian football (and prior to the 1938 Anschluss it was indeed glorious): the early death of Matthias Sindelaar, considered by many to be the greatest Austrian player ever, and the fate of the Jewish Viennese club Hakoah, who were disbanded on the coming to power of the Nazis and who are now being revived.

Johnny Chadda RIP

A bad week for Sligo Rovers (they were knocked out of the FAI Cup by old rivals Shamrock Rovers) turned into a sad week when Johnny Chadda, one of the pillars of the club for over fifty years, passed away. On my regular trips to the Showgrounds when I was a kid, Johnny would be everywhere, selling raffle-tickets, manning the turnstiles and marshalling the ground. One time he had noticed that a group of us had scaled the wall to get in free to a vital promotion decider against Kilkenny City and he chased us round the ground until the terraces filled up and he gave up. That anyone would devote his life so selflessly to as unfashionable (and for most of its history, unsuccessful) team as Rovers is remarkable enough. That Johnny Chadda was an immigrant from India in the bleak 1950s, and I imagine the only one in Sligo other than his wife, makes his work even more touchingly generous.

There are hundreds of thousands of people the world round that will identify with the work that goes into keeping sports clubs of little or no means alive, and the fact that Sligo Rovers still exist after eighty years is in large part due to Johnny Chadda and others who worked alongside him down the years. The club went from being almost wound up in the late 1980s to being run as a successful co-operative while enjoying some domestic success in the 1990s. There are few people that can claim to have been associated with a club for so much of its history and Johnny Chadda's devotion to Sligo Rovers, in a league that was about as unglamorous as football can get and for practically no renumeration, is proof that football is about a lot more than just Galacticos, Golden Generations and big-money franchises. May he rest in peace.

More Football

Classic Dunphy: after hearing Ronnie Whelan and Graeme Souness lay into Russia for the supine way in which they surrendered the game to Spain this evening, and then listening to Souness wonder why the Russians should always be like that, as they were 'in his playing days too', Dunphy threw in the observation that 'well, there is a melancholy streak in the Russian character, a bit like the Welsh really'. The generalisations were flying and Eamon couldn't resist a bit of one-upmanship. He was a bit mean to Souness too.

After my previous criticism of the flaccid nature of French television's football coverage I am reminded that M6's 100% Foot programme during this tournament is presented by Estelle Denis, partner of French manager Raymond Domenech. Though it's hardly an unethical conflict of interests, how in God's name are you supposed to mount an interesting, objective television show if it's presented by the French gaffer's missus? That nobody in France seems to think it strange underlines what a joke the football coverage is in this country.

Though the Swedes were not exactly a perfectly-functioning outfit it was nice to see the Greeks run out of ideas when delivered a sucker punch in the form of that bullet from Ibrahimovic, his first goal for Sweden in almost three years.

Grope of Death

My usual tournament team (in the absence of Ireland, of course) the Netherlands started their campaign last night in impressive style, dispatching the world champions Italy 3-0 in Berne. Their slick counter-attacking football and their constant willingness to push forward was a joy to watch, particularly as many of us had suspected that the pragmatism that Marco van Basten has instilled over the past couple of years might stifle the creativity. The four touches that led from a Giovanni van Bronckhorst clearance off the line to a deep cross by the Barça player himself to Dirk Kuyt to be finished spectacularly by Wesley Sneijder contributed to the best goal of the tournament so far. The Italians had reason to be aggrieved by the opener however; like many people I imagined Ruud van Nistelrooy to be clearly offside when he toepoked Sneijder's skewed shot home, and so did van Nistelrooy himself. However a look at the laws of the game tells us that the referee applied the offside rule correctly - if harshly -. Law 11.11 states that

If a defending player steps behind his own goal line in order to place
an opponent in an offside position, the referee shall allow play to
continue and caution the defender for deliberately leaving the field
of play without the referee’s permission when the ball is next out of
play.

It is not an offence in itself for a player who is in an offside position to
step off the field of play to show the referee that he is not involved in
active play. However, if the referee considers that he has left the field
of play for tactical reasons and has gained an unfair advantage by re-
entering the field of play, the player shall be cautioned for unsporting
behaviour. The player needs to ask for the referee’s permission to re-
enter the field of play.

A more sympathetic referee might have decreed that Christian Panucci went down genuinely injured but then you never know with these Italians. All in all, the Dutch fully deserved their victory though their longer term prospects are not assured, especially as few teams that start so gloriously last the pace. They are also suspect at the back and may be found out by a team less out of sorts as the Italians were last night.

In the other match in the group of death Romania and France played out a stinker, though I was fortunate enough to see only the first half. Though Romania will be happier with the point, they were depressing to watch; I can understand their approach in trying to thwart the French but their level of skill and their initiative was sadly lacking the finesse of their attractive teams of the 1990s.

As for entertainment, I was tickled by an anecdote told by Barney Ronay on the very enjoyable Guardian Football Daily podcast, where he told us about Steve McClaren being mistaken for the former Republic of Ireland manager by an Austrian accreditation official. My gripe the other day about being deprived of Giles, Dunphy and Brady has been answered by the wonders of the World Wide Web, it being possible to watch the pre- and post-match analysis, if not the coverage itself. Yesterday's post-match natter wasn't vintage stuff but it'll get better.

The Football So Far

Two days into the European Championship and though there hasn't been a game of absolutely excrutiating boredom (Austria v Croatia threatened to become that at times, mind), the tournament has yet to really catch fire. Both the hosts deserved better than the 1-0 defeats they suffered in their opening matches. Austria in particular will find it difficult to pull back the deficit. The pick of the games so far was tonight's between Germany and Poland. The Poles brought the game to Germany, playing some attractive attacking football but unfortunately they were lacking any real edge up front, where former Celtic reserve Maciej Zurawski struggled to carve out openings. The Germans, obviously having developed a strong understanding over the past couple of years, are playing a more expansive game than they did on their own turf in the World Cup of two years ago and on tonight's evidence they are worth their favourite's tag. Their defence (and Jens Lehman) look suspect and they may suffer against a side possessed of more incisiveness than the Poles. It looks unlikely they will be tested however until a potential semi-final against Portugal, and given the dreariness of Croatia's performance today, they shouldn't have to break a sweat to even reach the quarter-finals.

Once again I am restricted to watching the matches on French TV, whose coverage is appalling as ever. TF1's commentary is saved only by the presence of Arsène Wenger in the gantry, who is the only person who knows what he's talking about. Over on M6, Thierry Roland (the French John Motson) and Frank Leboeuf dispense inane patter, devoid of any insight or knowledge of any players not associated with either the French national team or Ligue 1, and littered with enthusiastic 'magnifiques', 'superbes' and 'belles actions' to describe the most workaday efforts by highly-paid professional footballers. The tone of deadening banality and politesse makes you feel like watching the damn thing with the sound turned down, listening to the radio, à la Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh. On top of this there is nothing in the way of pre-match, half-time or post-match analysis and commentators for both channels make the most pathetic attempts at pronouncing the names of players e.g. Peter Cech is Peter Sèche, which presumably means he hails from 'La République Sèche'. It makes you pine for Motson, Clive Tyldsley and Andy Gray, never mind the unrivalled trio of Giles, Dunphy and Brady.

As preparation for the tournament I went to see Emir Kusturica's documentary on Diego Maradona, which proved irritating and enjoyable in equal measures. A few short months ago i walked out of Kusturica's infinitely tiresome comedy Promise Me This and I was a little suspicious about this. Actually, my suspicions were mostly confirmed, it being a massaging of El Píbe's ego while making Kusturica look good too (interspersed with the interviews with Diego and the stock footage of the man in his prime are outtakes from most of Kusturica's films). Diego spouts shite about politics, most of which involves taking potshots at the Yanks and the Brits and lauding Chávez and Castro, in a typically populist Latin American way. But his gleeful remark about feeling he'd pickpocketed an Englishman when he rose above Peter Shilton to score the infamous 'hand of God' goal is a refreshing alternative to the insufferable piety of the English who complain incessantly about it (as if they didn't win the World Cup due to a non-existent goal or Gary Lineker didn't dive to win a decisive penalty against a superior Cameroon team in the 1990 World Cup quarter-finals). Kusturica throws in a couple of interesting asides about residues of aristocratic dignity amongst the poor and the birth of the Tango, that I suspect he has filched from Borges or García Marquez, and he must surely be one of the few film directors that could go for a kick-around with Maradona and emerge with credit. The film is most remarkable though for its YouTube-esque montages of Maradona goals, which of course look all the better on the big screen.

The tournament starts in earnest tomorrow with two intriguing matches in the group of death. Romania v France and Holland v Italy. As ever I am supporting the Dutch though I think they may struggle to make it out of this group. France look the best equipped to give the Germans a run for the title but they can't afford to slip up early on. More later in the week.

The Excluded Youth of France's Angelique Guardian

Dear me, the Guardian, like a dear but cantankerous old friend, continues to exasperate much as one loves it. It remains, along with the FT, the best of the English newspapers (my relative unfamiliarity with Scottish and Welsh papers prevents me from saying 'British') but it can also madden with its one-note, one-dimensional coverage of certain things, France in particular. The latest shoddy missive from Paris comes today from the paper's Paris correspondent Angelique Chrisafis in an interview with the young French novelist Faïza Guène, which rails with savage indignation against the Parisian literary scene's shunting out of a reportedly talented young novelist from an immigrant background - I say 'reportedly' because I haven't read Ms Guène's work, though I look forward to doing so.

What bothers me about the piece is not Guène's bitterness about her marginalisation in both literature and society - the former of which is believable and the latter the reality for many Africans and Arabs in France - nor her analysis of Sarkozy's appointing the ethnic minority trio of women Rachida Dati, Fadela Rama and Rama Yade as tokenism, which I agree with. No, what riles me is the plain stupidity of the piece, which, being the cover feature in the G2 section and of a good length, can hardly be explained away as a piece of serviceable hackwork conceived to beat a deadline. Chrisafis invokes injustice after injustice while all the time compounding those very injustices for an English-speaking audience; there is also her recourse to lazy journalese to propel her story forward, not to mention a dubiously close identification with the opinions of the interviewee.

First up, in the opening paragraph, Chrisafis treats of the publication of Guène's first novel Kiffe kiffe demain, which came out when she was only 19:

When the book came out in 2004, Guène was hailed as the "Françoise Sagan of the high-rises", the antidote to the navel-gazing French novel in crisis.

One doesn't have to wonder too hard where a lazy journalist found the epithet "Françoise Sagan of the high-rises" nor the standard-issue Anglo-Saxon anti-intellectual "navel-gazing French novel" though you do wonder how many of those Chrisafis has read. I imagine that, writing for the Grauniad from Paris she has at least a smattering of French. As for the French novel being 'in crisis', well it must be if word has trickled all the way down to the G2 section of the Guardian.

Then we are told:

One thing Guène notices as she tours the world, attends book fairs in Britain and lectures on the evolution of slang in the US, is that back in France, she tends to take up more space on the "society" rather than the "literary" pages of the papers.

Well where does she appear in the papers in the far more receptive English-speaking world? Certainly not in the literary Review section on Saturday, where the interview would most likely have been conducted by somebody with literary expertise. Indeed a previous interview with Guène in the Guardian was covered in, guess what, the Society pages. There is no assessment of either Guène's work or its reception in France; surely Chrisafis has at least read her books and surely she could have phoned around for someone to say something, positive or negative, about them? Instead Chrisafis blindly accepts Guène's grievances and endorses them by implying that she is on the writer's side:

But in France, despite her huge readership, the élite still see fiction set in the suburbs as something exotic and alien. Society is so polarised that the world Guène writes about is not something the establishment has ever seen close up; they are not streets they might ever have walked down, even by accident. She is still asked with wide-eyed fascination about the forbidden lands. "I feel ridiculous explaining things like people there love each other too, that they decide to have babies out of love and not just to claim benefits."

Again, I am not gainsaying Guène's experience, but is Angelique Chrisafis herself spending that much more time than the French literary élite seeing how the other half live in the Paris banlieues?

Of course, the real, implicit theme of the article is finally laid bare in the next paragraph:

She says every time she lands in London she finds herself marvelling at women going about their lives in headscarves, without the state deciding where they can or can't wear them. She meets people in London from the estates of "93", Seine-Saint-Denis, hoping to find a job without their race, name or postcode putting a brake on them. She thinks nothing has improved on French estates since the riots. "If that hasn't changed things, what will? Apart from civil war or revolution?"

If only those Frenchies were like us English! A typically fatuous example of the smugness of many British and American commentators on the social problems of France (and yes, I know that the French media can often be as infuriating when analysing the US and the UK). France and Britain both have their problems with the integration and marginalisation of immigrant communities and I don't deny that Britain is largely better in this respect but to claim that Britain is a world of unlimited opportunity for immigrants is downright silly.

Chrisafis, continuing in her amateur-litterateur vein, notes approvingly that immigrant fiction in Britain is long established and accepted, citing Hanif Kureishi, Zadie Smith and Monica Ali as examples. But literary marginalisation is alive and well in Britain, one need only return to the horrors experienced by the London literary establishment when the great James Kelman won the Booker Prize in 1994 for How Late it Was, How Late. Kelman is a writer whose one-page short story 'Acid' alone outweighs the entire careers of literary blowhards such as Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and John Banville but this didn't prevent bluenose cretins such as Julia Neuberger and Simon Jenkins calling his work 'a disgrace' and 'the rambling thoughts of a blind Glaswegian drunk' respectively. He is also considerably chippy, understandable given the savage reception of his work, but sometimes exaggeratedly so as this interview with Theo Tait illustrates. It's also quite possible that Faïza Guène's bitterness at her literary exclusion is an over-reaction and maybe her work is not actually that good. I don't know but the fact that the literary establishment is not falling over itself for the novels of a 22-year-old does not necessarily mean she is being wilfully excluded.

To be sure, the French resistance to linguistic innovation such as Verlan is as absurd as it is exquisitely vulgar and François Bégaudeau's novel Entre les murs, which I wrote on last week, makes much of this absurdity. But I would like to see the issue treated with more intelligence and more expertise than Angelique Chrisafis is capable of bringing to it; not knowing anything about literature or film has in the past not been a barrier to the Guardian's Paris correspondent writing, as the French say, n'importe quoi on the subjects. It is sad to see that, once again, even left-wing Europhile British newspapers only seem to interested in reinforcing lazy preconceptions about France. Compare this approach with this excellent review of Elfriede Jelinek's novel Greed in the London Review of Books; Jelinek is another writer who has been ill treated by the literary establishment in both Austria and Germany and Nicholas Spice's piece is a brilliant, learned defence of her life and work. I plan to read Faïza Guène's novels soon and I sincerely hope that the Guardian will afford her work more respect than the French literarati has, or it itself has on this occasion.
Technorati Tags: France, literature, Guardian, books

Ghosts of Glasgow Football

I wrote last year about visiting the Estadio Nacional Jamor, just outside Lisbon, where Celtic defeated Inter Milan in May 1967 to lift the European Cup for the first, and only time. The stadium is a beautiful old arena in a charming woodland setting, and though it's rarely used for anything other than the Portuguese Cup final or national team training sessions these days, it still imparts the same breezy meridional exoticism that so marked the colour television images of the final that memorable day. The same week their cross-town rivals Rangers were being defeated 1-0 by Bayern Munich in their second Cup-Winners' Cup final; but back in Glasgow another club, Third Lanark, was being wound up only five years after finishing third in the old Scottish first division. The club was the victim of mismanagement though many supporters claim that the board of directors deliberately ran it into the ground.

I remember first seeing references to the club in an old News of the World football annual that my uncle had retained from his schooldays, and the ghostliness of their history would even colour my reading, years later, of Alasdair Gray's mighty apocalyptic novel Lanark. I used to think that the club got their name from being Glasgow's third club (though Partick Thistle or even Clyde might dispute that classification) but it was actually from the Third Lanarkshire Rifle Volunteers, out of which the club originally sprang. The club's old ground Cathkin Park, which was itself formerly the second of the three Hampden Parks, still stands as a municipal park, and a new incarnation of the club plays junior football there. Two of the terraces also stand, going back to nature as trees and vegetation grow on them; this collection of photographs of the ground illustrates this and, if the sight of the ruined terraces were not haunting enough, they are also strikingly reminiscent of the sylvan setting of the Lisbon stadium where Celtic were making Scottish football history just as another chapter of that history was coming to a sad end.

Though Thirds disappeared from Scottish football while the country was still a force in European football - and would continue to be for another twenty-five years, their fate sadly mirrors the decline in Scotland's own footballing prestige. Though the national team have made great strides in the last couple of years, despite limited resources, and Celtic and Rangers have made decent dents in European football after years of underachieving, beyond the Old Firm there are few clubs capable of competing consistently, a far cry from the 1980s when Dundee United and Aberdeen were teams feared by some of the giants of European football. Meanwhile, Gretna, a club with a far lesser pedigree than Third Lanark, may also go the same way having gone into administration.

For more on Thirds - or the Hi-Hi, as their fans knew them - here is a clip from a Channel 4 documentary commemorating the 40th anniversary of their folding:

Virgin Territory

News in France at the moment is the annulling of a marriage by court order in Lille because the bride lied about her virginity, which was discovered by the groom on the wedding night. The court applied article 180 of the Civic Code, which states that if there is an 'objective error' about the status of one party (by this is usually meant a past of prostitution, according to most media commentators) the marriage may be annulled. Aside from the fact that this 'objective error' is probably more likely to be imputed to the female party, this troubling precedent would appear to restore the onus of virginity on the bride, something that we might have thought had long been banished from the modern world.

The couple in question are Muslim, and said to be not at all extremist; there will be those usual 'Gates of Vienna' fascists that will pipe up about this latest manifestation of the mortal danger posed to European civilisation by Islam, but the majority of people condemning this decision are on the left and, not surprisingly, French Muslim women, represented by groups such as Ni putes ni soumises, many of whom say they are fed up of the hypocrisy of those French Muslim men who play around sowing their wild oats but who go back to the old country (or al bled as Maghrebins call it) to find a pure bride. The article in Libé linked to above speculates whether hymen restitution surgery will become widespread among French Muslim women, as it has become in semi-liberated Muslim societies such as Lebanon. Of course medical consensus states that a ruptured hymen is no indicator of virginity and the virginity test has more purchase as a tool of gender domination but it's hard to explain all this to folk that but their faith in religion and tribal practices. Ironically, many of the 'pure' girls from al bled are said to have resorted to anal sex in order to protect the hymen for marriage, which leaves us at a very pretty pass indeed.

One Muslim women who has defended the court's decision, albeit on pragmatic grounds, is the Minister for Justice Rachida Dati. Quite what a member of government is doing giving her opinion on court decisions is unknown to me but Ms Dati said that it removed a threat to the safety of the bride, who may have wanted to get out of the relationship as soon as her 'impure' past was discovered. This may be true but surely there is a better way of going about getting an annullment than favouring the application of a stricture more suited to the Middle Ages?

Class Trip

A surprise from Cannes, which I haven't been blogging on for the very good reason that I'm not there; the host country got its first Palme d'Or since Maurice Pialat's Sous le soleil de Satan in 1987. The winner was Laurent Cantet for Entre les murs (known in English as The Class) an adaptation of Parisian teacher and Cahiers du Cinéma critic François Bégaudeau's novel of two years ago. The film was only admitted to competition at the very end of April, and though Cantet is a well-respected filmmaker, known for his lucid and even-handed approach to social themes, I found his last film Vers le sud, about sex tourism practised by women in Duvalier's Haiti, muddled and mechanical. Cantet had the stroke of genius (not to mention the nerve) to get Bégaudeau himself to play the role of the teacher. The cast is also made up of non-professional teenage actors (I hesitate to call them 'real-life students' as many media have - what else could teenage actors be, after all). In a nice touch, Cantet brought 28 of them along to the Croisette, where they predictably made quite a racket.

I thoroughly enjoyed Bégaudeau's book but I was sceptical both of its potential for film material and for its prospects of translation into English or any other language, given that much of the humour and the ideas extrapolated in it derive from the tension between the offical language of the French classroom and the reinvention of it by the urban, mostly Arab and African, teenagers. But I'm coming around to the idea of watching the film now, not least because it is likely to be a pleasing change from bleeding-heart feelgood films about educating the urban masses. If anything, it looks similar to the classroom scenes in season four of The Wire, albeit with less violence and crime.

Though some of my own favourite contemporary directors, Lucrecia Martel, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and the Dardenne brothers were also in competition (and Ceylan apart, they all went away empty-handed) it is good to see French cinema back on the podium. Along with Abdelkettif Kechiche's La graine et le mulet, Entre les murs is evidence of life in the French film industry, which is all too often dismissed by lazy, misinformed pundits as being talky, cerebral and pretentious. The best summation of the film, which was unanimously rewarded by the jury, was from the splendidly imperious Marjane Satrapi, a Grand Jury prizewinner last year, and juror this year: "There's almost nothing I believe in anymore, but I believe that culture and education give us the opportunity to be less stupid. It's always better to be less stupid than more stupid." I'll go with 'less stupid' too. Here's the film's trailer (no subtitles, sorry):

And well done to Steve McQueen on the Caméra d'Or for Hunger; though I don't think the world really needs another film about the Troubles McQueen's video work has always been compelling and I look forward to seeing his step up to feature making.

Football etc.

The search for more gainful employment has kept me away from here of late. There has also been a lot of football to watch, as the seasons in various countries draw to their close. It has been a happy month for myself, having seen Celtic wrap up a third successive Scottish Premier League title, their first three-in-a-row since 1974. Despite this the supporters' discontent with Gordon Strachan is likely to cause him to step aside during the summer. In France, St-Etienne reached Europe for the first time since 1982, something that seemed unlikely in March, when they lay fifteenth in the league. Their bitter rivals Lyon won their seventh title in a row and also beat Paris Saint-Germain in the French Cup final last night, their first ever win in that competition.

Yesterday I watched the gallant Doonhammers from Dumfries, Queen of the South, give Rangers an awful fright in the Scottish Cup final. The third division side came from two down to equalise and at one point they looked like they might cause an upset until Kris Boyd scored a second to give Rangers a consolation prize. Later on there was the dull spectacle of Ireland against Serbia in Giovanni Trappatoni's first match in charge. The most remarkable thing about the match was how similar to Ireland under Steve Staunton the team were. I suppose that the players may be granted some indulgence at the end of the season but Serbia were the more fluid and more threatening side and were it not for Andy Keogh's spectacular volley in injury time would have claimed a deserved victory. The goal, impressive as it was, didn't quite warrant the reactions of Trappatoni and Marco Tardelli, who got a little carried away. Less theatrics will be needed come September. And, finally, Sligo Rovers move to fourth in the League of Ireland (yes, I still call it that). Can we hope for European football next season?

Tommy Burns RIP

Sad news from Glasgow where Celtic first team coach and former Parkhead great Tommy Burns lost his battle with cancer at the age of 51; Burns played in the first live game of football I ever saw, a 1-0 win over Finn Harps in a pre-season friendly, when I was aged eight, and signed my match programme afterwards. A few years later I got as a Christmas present a copy of his official autobiography Tommy Twists, Tommy Turns, not by any means a classic and a bit too enthusiastically religious for my liking, but it stayed in the memory at least.

Tommy had a run managing the Bhoys in the mid-nineties but despite one cup win and getting the team to play some attractive football, he was badly hampered by the pervasive corporate incompetence of the club at the time, not to mention Rangers' then dominance. More recently he assisted Bertie Vogts and Walter Smith at the reins of the Scottish national team. Hats off too to Rangers, who cancelled their open-top bus procession through Glasgow as a mark of respect, in the spirit of Burns' own disdain for sectarianism:

"I think the saddest thing about the Old Firm rivalry is the people who have lost their lives after these games in the past, for such stupid reasons," he once said.

"This is football. I remember Jock Stein always said that: it's just a game.

"To think that people can go out with hatred in their heart and take away people's sons or brothers or fathers is just beyond belief. That's the way I think about it now: it's only a game.

"Educate the kids to integrate with one another and not pay any attention to who's a Catholic and who's a Protestant, and any of that rubbish.

"Just go out there, support your team, make good friends and get on with your lives."

Link

Gift Horse in the Mouth

After digesting Rangers' defeat (which proved to be a surprisingly underwhelming experience), I listened alternately to John Phillips (he of the Mamas and the Papas), rain falling outside, which, if you strain your ear, sounds slightly tropical, and the latest batch of Gift Grub sketches, including Bertie's resignation. No sign yet of a Gift Brian Cowen - maybe Mario Rosenstock doesn't want to repeat the backfiring effect that the Gift Bertie had on Ahern's popularity. Has Biffo been on Gift Grub before? Does anyone know?

Another character who I'm surprised doesn't feature on the show is RTÉ football stalwart George Hamilton, the man of ripe metaphors, recondite references to the popular culture of the 1970s Federal Republic of Germany, and absurdly accurate pronunciations of Johnny Foreigner names. And he does all the same on Lyric FM too, I'm told. Surely this is a man that needs to be cloned and cast in amber for future generations. Mind you, there's never been a Jimmy Magee either though, has there? It would be hard indeed to beat Magee's real-life comment at the opening ceremony of the 1982 World Cup finals in Barcelona: 'and there it is - the international symbol of peace - the pigeon!'

Footballing Schadenfreude Part 3

The end of the season is often, according to the turn of Fortune's wheel, also the schadenfreude season. The result I hoped for didn't quite pan out at the Parc des Princes last week, the 1-1 draw between PSG and St-Etienne, combined with Lille's 3-1 win over local rivals Lens, means that PSG will probably avoid the drop and les verts miss out on the UEFA Cup spot that was so briefly dangled in front of them.

Manchester United carried off the league title at Chelsea's expense, which pleased me simply because of my loathing for the West Londoners that long predates the arrival of dodgy Russian money. Man U (like Arsenal) are teams I like only for the football they play, while at the same time being clubs that are largely unlovable (as are many of their fans). Liverpool are the opposite, a likeable club with a one-dimensional game that sometimes thrills and more often grates. Premier League football in general is like supporting Burger King or McDonald's and I stopped really caring about it a long time ago. Ironically though the FA Cup final this year between outsiders Portsmouth and Cardiff now looks a more attractive draw that the all-English-franchise Champions' League final.

Speaking of unlovable clubs, Rangers run out tonight against Zenit St-Petersburg at the City of Manchester Stadium in an improbable UEFA Cup final pairing. Former Huns manager Dick Advocaat is at the helm for Zenit, who also count former Ger Artur Numan Fernando Ricksen among their number. On paper, Zenit, who hammered favourites Bayern Munich in the semi-final, should be expected to win. But Rangers, who, in the words of the Guardian, have been in their path to the final, the 'footballing equivalent of a son, only whose mother could love', have a chance of grinding out a depressing shock result. Especially as Zenit striker Pavel Pogrebnyak, who has scored ten goals in this year's competition against Rangers' five, is suspended. I don't expect Rangers to abandon their negative tactics, as Walter Smith has claimed they will but I wouldn't rule out an upset.

Which would piss me off, given my allegiances to their rivals from the East End of Glasgow. But having seen Rangers try to browbeat the SFA into changing the end of season fixtures to suit them (I don't recall any such favour being extended to Celtic in their UEFA-Cup final season of 2003 and there was no whining after our last-gasp league title loss) makes me even more hopeful than usual of a Rangers defeat; 'throughout the world, people will laugh at this decision in disbelief', Huns chairman David Murray thundered. As if anyone beyond Galashiels would even give a toss about Rangers. I was certainly in disbelief as I expected the SFA to satisfy their demands, seeing how anything other than a Rangers league title sticks in the craw of the Hampden suits. Rangers were given a weekend off to prepare for their Champions' League group game against Lyon last November despite Celtic being offered (or seeking) no such derogation the previous week for their equally vital match in Milan (against the reigning champions!) Then, having seen a Rangers win against Dundee United facilitated by appalling refereeing decisions on Saturday, there really can only be one outcome to this season favoured by the SPL (and SFA).

The league is now Rangers to lose and unfortunately I can't see them doing that. But let's hope so. I hope Zenit stuff them too, but that is no certainty either. But good luck to them, I might have a visceral dislike of Rangers as a club, but I know a few decent Rangers fans (and I know there are many more). Fans of every other club in Scotland will point out that Celtic are little different; that is debatable, though I can see how people think that, and Celtic are certainly no shining beacon of goodness. I for one bemoan the lack of competition in the SPL these days and would love to return to the days when it was dominated by the 'New Firm' of Aberdeen and Dundee United. But, that has been undone by the Bosman ruling, and, following the vote in Strasbourg against introducing foreign-player quotas, it is sadly, unlikely to return. And you can't rely on mad Lithuanian millionaires to bring you success either, as Hearts fans will tell you.

Footballing Schadenfreude Part 2

The sadness of Ireland's failure yet again to reach a major championship finals was deepened by England's failure to make as well, if only because it deprived Irish football fans of at least three teams to support in the final stages. Well, the English had to fall at some hurdle, didn't they? Nothing against the English in general but it is always a laugh to see their imperiously smug and chauvinistic footballing media get their comeuppance. Especially as nowadays, in the broadcast media at least, English football coverage is just so awful. I seem to recall as recently as France 98, the Beeb still mounting a worthwhile panel of experts but it has deteriorated seriously since then. The panel has been a complaisant old boy's club of chummy ex-pros that pull every punch going especially regarding their own country's team, the interjections of Johann Cruyff and Martin O'Neill providing the only light, or dissent. Marina Hyde, in a Guardian piece the other day, half-jokingly suggests that the Beeb lighten up the match coverage with the addition of Terry Wogan. Not a bad idea, really.

Of course, one thing that RTÉ beats the Beeb, and probably any other channel in the English-speaking world, hands down on is their football coverage. Giles, Dunphy and Brady may have a level of telegenism to make most television executives apoplectic but their match analysis is usually spot on and is sharpened by their candour. Brady apart, none of them have close links remaining with top-flight football in Britain, so they're not afraid to step on anyone's toes. The friction between Dunphy and Brady (which is likely to get even more interesting is things turn bad for Ireland under Trappatoni) has also provided some great TV moments. Not all the panel members over the years have been able to keep up (I'm thinking mainly of Frank Stapleton and Andy Townsend) but there have been memorable bruisers too, such as John Toshack, Pat Crerand and Joe Kinnear. Graham Souness, after an innocuous start, and some brutal hazing at the hands of Giles and Dunphy, is similarly beginning to come up to speed.

Here's a recent example of vintage Giles, Dunphy and Brady, laying into Cristian Ronaldo after Manchester United's semi-final first leg against Barcelona:

Ireland and England are currently pretty much at level-pegging in the scale of footballing infamy, having danced almost in perfect step over the past couple of years, both appointing bumbling managers of negligible experience, resulting in disaster and then appointing Italian proponents of dull, old-fashioned calcio as their replacements. Never before have Irish and English football fans identified so closely with one another. Another thing I found on YouTube was this famous match between the two when Ireland became the first non-British team to defeat the Sassenachs on home soil, at Goodison in 1949. Thrilling stuff, though I don't know who that team 'Eyy-wa' whom the Pathé commentator periodically mentions, are.

Technorati Tags: football, ireland

Footballing schadenfreude Part 1

Paris is a city that is close to my heart but I have never been able to reconcile it to something that is equally close to my most vital of organs: football. Paris just isn't a football town. Though it has hosted two World Cup finals, two European Championship finals and five Champions' Cup finals (as well as being the birthplace of all three tournaments) there is no buzz around the city associated with the game. It is not London, Manchester, Liverpool, Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Milan, Rome, much less more heaving cauldrons of fandom such as São Paolo, Buenos Aires, Istanbul or Cairo.

The city's main team is Paris Saint-Germain, who have a flimsy pedigree, having being founded only in 1970. I have never warmed to PSG, partly because of that prefabricated heritage, partly because of the flagrant bias shown the club in the French media and also because of the indulgent attitude the club has towards its notorious racist hooligan element, the Boulogne Boys. Since media heir and friend of Nicolas Sarkozy, Arnaud Lagardère tired of having Racing Club de France as a plaything, Paris has been without a second club in the top flight. US Créteil-Lusitanos, a suburban club with roots in the Portuguese immigrant community, narrowly missed out on promotion to Ligue 1 a couple of years back but they have since dropped down to the third division where they play derby matches against Paris FC, who are themselves a splinter from PSG. Now, PSG are in serious danger of dropping to the second division for the first time since 1974. With two games to go they are in the relegation zone level on points with Toulouse, who they drew 1-1 with last Saturday.

I would not be lying if I said that PSG's relegation would fill me with pleasure but my own preferred French team, the once mighty St-Etienne may have benefited from a fortuitous cup final pairing of PSG and the dominant Lyon, St-Etienne's bitter local rivals. Because PSG have already carried off the League Cup in a final remembered more for the notorious banner unfurled by the Boulogne Boys and Lyon look likely to wrap up their seventh title in a row, an extra UEFA Cup place will be open to the fifth-placed team, which is at the moment, les verts from the Massif Central. This would mean that ASSE (to give them their full abbreviation) would play European football for the first time since 1982, the year of their last title and also the year that a certain Michel Platini embarked for Turin and five successful years with Juventus. Given that my own reasons for supporting St-Etienne are wrapped up in nostalgia - they were defeated in the 1976 Champions' Cup final by Bayern Munich, stymied by Hampden Park's famous square goalposts, which deflected a Jacques Santini effort away from danger, this would be pleasing symmetry. While St-Etienne, after years of financial turmoil and numerous relegations, are nowhere close to emulating their glory years, which saw them win a record ten league titles, the team, still one of the best-supported in France, and having, along with Marseille and Lens, the best fans, it would be thrilling to see them back in the big time. First they have to face PSG in the penultimate game at the Parc de Princes on Saturday. To see ASSE reach Europe again while PSG go down would please me greatly.

Here's the best of the action from that night in Hampden:

The Perfect Vehicle for Racism?

Charles de Gaulle famously attributed his surviving an attempt on his life to the design of his armoured Citroën DS. Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen is another French poltician who gets around in a heavily-protected motor and now it's yours to bid for on eBay. The FN is a bit hard for cash at the moment and the sale of Le Pen's 1991 Armoured Peugeot 605 follows on the auctioning of the fascists' headquarters in leafy St-Cloud, just west of Paris. The FN is moving to Nanterre, which as well as being home to ethnic minorities that wouldn't be too attuned to the party's 'message', is also a little bit rougher so perhaps Le Pen might need to beef up on security with an updated model.

The car in question has passed an MOT test as recently as the 4th of July last year, is blue (naturellement), equipped with air conditioning, central locking, anti-lock braking, automatic transmission (curious, that), CD car stereo, and despite its daily use by its very active owner, is reportedly in excellent condition. The bidding currently stands at €18,050, to close on Monday evening next, and the seller considers the car to be a collector's item. 'No timewasters', is also helpfully added.

On a not really related point, here is the latest video from Parisian electro duo Justice, which features a gang of French suburban youth (all of them black) going on a rampage, terrorising and attacking passers-by, police and security guards alike. It has been ignored by French TV, which is not surprisingly nervous of the accusations of racism. It has been racking up the hits on YouTube since; a friend of mine, who directs music videos herself, thinks it's racist and a perfect recruitment video for the FN but I think it's simply provocative, not to mention exploitative. (For those that don't know, the members of Justice, Gaspard Augé and
Xavier de Rosnay, are both white and from rather well-heeled backgrounds.) But the video is hardly any more racist than if they used a gang of marauding white football hooligans. Of course there is an inescapable racial angle and the video will goad a lot of viewers to apply their own prejudices when watching it. If you think that mindless violence is representative of black suburban youth that's what you will think when you watch this; many others won't however. But the fact that the young thugs wear hoodies with the very-recognisable Justice crucifix logo, and they attack a microphone boom operator at one point, and the title of the song is 'Stress' suggests a self-reflexive jokiness; that of course will madden and offend some folk even more. But there you are. Interestingly, the director is Romain Gavras, the 26-year-old son of Costa-Gavras, the lefty Franco-Greek director of such films as Z, Missing and Betrayed.

A Funny Thing Happened...

Some films benefit from a second viewing; for my own part, among those that I didn't 'get' first time round are classics such as Repulsion, Vertigo and Heaven's Gate, films that I now view as undeniably great. But when I got wind, a couple of years back, of Michael Haneke's intention to remake his horror movie-cum-moral film essay Funny Games in English for an American audience, I was sceptical, not least because I found the film insufferably preachy in its original incarnation. The film, which was an interrogation of an audience's willingness to tolerate its desolate violence, backfired for what I perceived to be Haneke's didactic manipulativeness. Haneke himself said that those that stayed until the end of the film were those that 'needed it most', a presumptuousness worthy of any moral physician. I, for what it's worth, did stay till the end (and I often don't); I don't quite know what that says about me. All I know is that I certainly didn't feel that I needed it, or Haneke's hectoring either.

So I was reluctant to go see Funny Games US despite the fact that I am a big fan of Haneke's other films, particularly his two French films with Juliette Binoche, Code Inconnu and Caché. The fact that the film is a scene-by-scene remake (nay, a frame-for-frame remake) didn't augur well either. THe last time this was done was with Gus Van Sant's technicolour Psycho, which I admired more for the audaciousness of its conception than for its inconsiderable dramatic qualities. Having fallen prey to the exigencies of time however, I was left with only one film I could watch at Bastille yesterday afternoon, and that was Haneke's. And, I'm surprised to say, I found that I liked it.

Perhaps it's because I got my original resentment at the didacticism out of the way, or maybe it was because I was getting an eerie sense of having missed a lot in the original (though, I have to say I probably remembered a good two dozen scenes, at least, perfectly). Instead I was struck by how masterful Haneke is at racheting up the tension (though I knew that from his other films), especially early on when Peter creeps Naomi Watts' Ann out by dropping the eggs. While Michael Pitt (one of my least favourite actors) is no match for the cheerful sadism of Arno Frisch in the original film, Pitt's own perennial absence of personality is no bar to a role which blandly mines from the seam of that most obscure and incomprehensible of human characteristics: cruelty. And the cruelty is believable, as anyone who has ever had to suffer the passive agressiveness of someone desperate to pick a fight will attest. Naomi Watts (who seems to specialise in remakes these days, with the Ring films, King Kong and Martin Campbell's The Birds) and Tim Roth are as effective as the terrorised couple as Susanne Lothar and the late Ulrich Mühe were in the 1997 film.

Not only is the film shot identically, it uses much the same set design, though, as Haneke has said in an interview, the country house in the original was based on American homes, such dwellings being rare in Austria. The exact same music is used too, in all scenes. In a way, Funny Game US is fulfilling the promise of the original. Some films can be enriched by what comes after them; I'm thinking of Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire, which I found dour until watching its sequel The Barbarian Invasions gave it an unexpected grace. Who knows, maybe Haneke's Austrian original is still as insufferable as I originally found it, but I am a bit more willing to give it another go. Not that it has put me off violent films altogether.

Here's the trailer for the 2008 film:

and here is the one from eleven years ago:

Those That Have Kerviel Done to Them...

My absence from here over the past few months has caused me to miss some big news and I should forsake commenting on stuff that has long gone stale. I can't however resist going back to the story of Jérôme Kerviel, the French trader accused of being responsible for the loss of 4.82 billion euros, particularly on hearing the news that he is back in work after being headhunted as an IT consultant.

When the story broke in January there was a curious rallying on the French left to support Kerviel, proclaiming him a hero for exposing the mania of financial speculation. While it is quite likely that Kerviel is being held as a scapegoat for his part in the affair (it has been alleged by a number of sources that his employer Société Générale knew of his dealings and tacitly approved of them), the notion that an ambitious young financial trader might have some leftist whistle-blowing agenda is fanciful to say the least.

I find Kerviel fascinating though, mainly because of his very ordinariness, which is in sharp contrast to the magnitude of his financial losses, but also because of his name, which is wonderfully evocative, for English speakers at least. The plosive 'k', common to Breton surnames, followed by a 'v' and an 'l', suggests 'live', 'curve', 'evil' (something that is compounded by that unfortunately sinister-looking photograph of him that circulated in the wake of the affair) and also the late Eval Kineval, a suitable metaphor for Kerviel's acts of financial daredevilry. (English speakers should also note that the name is pronounced with three, not two, syllables, the el at the end carrying the main stress.)

Then there was the news that the story is to be turned, inevitably, into a film. No doubt it would follow the familiar trajectory of the financial scandal movie (most of which are scarcely memorable). Given that there is little of Kerviel's personal or professional life that gives itself to great drama (or drama full-stop) I think it would be more interestingly to dramatise the police interrogation of Kerviel, played along the lines of Claude Miller's brilliant 1981 film Garde à vue in which Lino Ventura's detective interrogates wealthy businessman Michel Serrault on the suspected muder of his wife. Gilbert Adair, on reviewing the film of Nick Leeson's own financial misdealings in Rogue Trader complained that the film was short on facts, relying instead on clichéd scenes of arriviste high living. An interrogation film in which Kerviel guards his hand carefully would be something I would gladly watch and which would tease the truth out of the story a lot better and more beguilingly than reams of newsprint. Somehow I don't think will be the film we'll be seeing though.

May 68

A plug for myself here; I am currently to be seen occupying the Essay of the Month slot at my other online home Irish Left Review where I give my views on the legacy of May 1968. It's a long one, one must be warned...

Flagging Orders

We have already heard of Irish hurleys being manufactured in Poland (it appears one-third of our camánaí originate beyond the Oder), of Palestinian keffiyehs being made in China, but hearing that the Free Tibet snow flag is being made to order in a factory in Guangdong despite being banned in China is the strangest piece of news yet.

While I'm quite sanguine regarding the reality of lower manufacturing costs in China or elsewhere these days and I'm not too sentimental about the decline in symbolism occasioned by this, surely this is a desacralisation of old nationalist shibboleths; exposing them to the cold harsh light of global economics may be the beginning of the end.

Laissez-le tranquille...très tranquille

French comic book artist Johann Sfar is to direct a biopic of the great Serge Gainsbourg, starring Eric Elmosnino,entitled Gainsbourg : Une vie héroïque. Le Figaro has a slideshow of the the youngster relooké as old cabbagehead. Elsmosnino is probably a bit too pretty but it should do the job.

Back Into the Fold

After a silence of six months or so, punctuated by the odd return, I have decided to revive Underachievement (as I always said I would). I'm not sure why; part of the original reason I set it aside was to allow me more time to do other things and to wrench myself away from the pleasurable horrors of the World Wide Web. I've accomplished each of those things, with the occasional lapse but the lure has been too great to resist. In true Underachievement style however, the new blog will be a slimmed-down version of the older one. Posting will probably be more occasional and erratic than before and I don't plan to post any lengthy reviews of obscure arthouse films. The highest intellectual standards will of course be maintained; Underachievement 2.0 will be not so much dumbed down as dumbed across.

I have passed up the opportunity to comment on a number of things over the past few months, such as a clutch of fine films, Bertie's resignation, the US Presidential election (time enough to come on that I suppose), the appointment of Giovanni Trappatoni as Ireland manager, ensuring the Boys in Green's inevitable end to a search for World Cup glory in South Africa in two years time. But no time for regrets here. Thanks to all that have added links over the past couple of years, even since I left off posting last October, as its Technorati authority slipped from a hopeful 16 to a more suitably underachieving 7. I will reciprocate in kind. More anon.

Cartoon by Randal Monroe of the excellent xkcd.

Irish Left Review

Another step in from the cold, if only to alert you all to Seanachie's blogging activities elsewhere, on the newly-launched Irish Left Review, where he is writing on cinema alongside fellow Irish pinkos drawn from Dublin Opinion, Cedar Lounge Revolution,ie-politics, Maman Poulet, Notes on the Front and Irish Election.

As I have said before, Underachievement is not down for good; it will come back at some point in the near future. But, for now, ILR is where it's at, as they say...

Underachievement Films of the Year

About nine months into the year, after enthusing yet again about a great film I had seen, a friend of mine accused me of being suspiciously different in my outlook on the quality of contemporary cinema, an outlook, which, I have to say is often pitched somewhere between bleak and mournful. She even joked that I was an impostor for the real Seanachie. I took this comment on board and myself wondered if I had lowered my criticial standards over the past year. Thankfully a number of true stinkers such as Woody Allen's latest film Cassandra's Dream, Tom diCillo's utterly inane Delirious and Todd Field's Little Children were on hand to provide a timely benchmark for awful cinema.

Looking back over the year now, I might even say that 2007 was an exceptional, even vintage, year for cinema. Or it certainly was if you were lucky enough to live in Paris. Nobody has it better for movies than Parisian cinemagoers, and many of the better films I saw this year are likely to have only the briefest and most limited of releases in other countries, if, that is, they get released at all. Some will not get releases in the English-speaking world until 2008, such as Cristian Mungiu's Palme d'Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days and Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park while conversely there were others I didn't get to see as they have not arrived in France yet. This is one explanation for the absence of The Darjeeling Limited, No Country for Old Men and Lenny Abrahamson's Garage from the list below.

What was most remarkable about the films of the past year was the consistent spread of fine cinema being produced by a number of countries that have been showing much promise over the past few years. Argentina has had a thriving industry since, paradoxically, the collapse of its economy, producing some great popular cinema as well as more austere auteur films. Israel continues to turn out a remarkable sequence of films, that provide a fascinating portrait of a society by turns paranoid, aggressive and anguished. Though most Israeli filmmakers are firmly liberal, their films are nonetheless pitted with troublesome lacunae about their relationship with the Palestinians, which gives the exhilarating impression of a national cinema that is reactive to everyday political and social stimuli. It is ironic that the cinema it most closely resembles in this respect is Iran's of five to ten years ago, which unfortunately, has diminished in prolificness and daring since the rise to power of Mohammed Ahmedinejad. German cinema had another great year, producing one the greatest foreign-film Oscar winners in living memory The Lives of Others, and a slew of fine dramas from a golden generation of young directors, all of them in their late twenties and early thirties. That the biggest country in Europe currently has such strong talent after years of mediocre output is good for cinema everywhere.

The greatest sensation of the past two years though has been Romania, having garnered three top awards at Cannes, and after last year's Underachievement film of the year The Death of Mr Lazarescu there were further delights in Corneliu Porumboiu's 12:08 East of Bucharest and 4 Years, 3 Months & 2 Days and California Dreamin', the posthumous comedy by Cristian Nemescu. Though few of the films have been commercial successes back in Romania, the confluence of talent is, once again, significant and many of the films share the same brilliant character actors such as Ion Sapdaru and Teo Corban, both of whom are are worth the price of the ticket alone. Incidentally, Ioan Fiscuteanu, the actor who played the ailing Mr Lazarescu, passed away a few weeks ago from cancer (thanks to Tia for that information), as did, indeed, Ulrich Mühe, the star of The Lives of Others.

English-language cinema, which had been largely unremarkable of late, made a comeback this year with even directors I have previously found intolerable, such as David Fincher and Paul Haggis, offering films that were not so bad at all. The music biopic, which had been suffering badly following the turgidly similar Ray and I Walk the Line, received vital injections of life from Anton Corbijn's portrayal of Ian Curtis Control and Todd Haynes' ingenious Bob Dylan fresco I'm Not There. David Cronenberg made yet another strong case for his being the greatest filmmaker of his generation with the grisly and jarring Eastern Promises, which featured the Russian Mafia, as did James Gray's We Own the Night, a much less pretentious and far superior variation on Scorsese's The Departed. Old reliables David Lynch and Gus Van Sant also produced fine films. Shane Meadows excelled even himself with This is England and Kevin McDonald's The Last King of Scotland was a rare and welcome examination of Africa that was devoid of either sentimentalism or sublimated paternalistic racism. Add to these a number of excellent documentaries from all round the world and memorable films from mainstays of Asian cinema such as Jia Zhang-Ke, Tsai Ming-Liang and Apichatpong Weerasethakul and it was a year of superb films, many of which I will be watching a second time soon.


10. Persepolis - Marjane Satrapi, Vincent Paronnaud (France/USA)

Satrapi's autobiographical comic book was a worldwide bestseller and her adaptation, co-directed with fellow bande dessinateur Vincent Paronnaud, elaborates on the book's distinctive visual style and its nightmare vision of a country's revolution being hijacked by religious fanatics. By turns hilarious and horrific, it is one of the greatest comic book adaptations ever and the best French film of the past year.

View Persepolis trailer

9. Still Life - Jia Zhang-Ke (China)

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, tackling contemporary subjects and risking the wrath of the Communist Party with each new film. 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. A good companion piece is Manufactured Landscapes, Jennifer Baichwal's documentary on Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose work covers the same ground.

View Still Life trailer


8. pingpong - Mathias Luthardt (Germany)

Developed from Luthardt's film-school graduation piece, pingpong is one of the many great domestic dramas produced by a brilliant young generation of German directors. A classic cuckoo-in-the-nest tale, in the vein of Pasolini's Theorem and Polanski's Knife in the Water, it tells the tale of a feckless teen who bunks up with his rich cousins for the duration of the summer holidays, and who quickly becomes obsessed with his aunt-in-law. A chilly, brilliantly-shot and brilliantly-edited tale of unwelcome intimacy and spite.

Watch pingpong trailer

7. This is England - Shane Meadows (UK)

Seanachie has long been a fan of the Nottingham autodidact filmmaker Shane Meadows and this year Meadows produced his finest film yet, the semi-autobiographical tale of a bullied 12-year-old boy who falls in with a band of racist skinheads in 1982 Scarborough. The opening credit sequence is an amusing montage of 80s nostalgia but thereafter film is hard-headed and bleak, with superb improvised performances by a cast of Meadows regulars and particularly the dogged young newcomer Thomas Thurgoode. A devastatingly simple portrait of how racism takes hold of ordinary people.

View This is England trailer

6.We Feed the World - Erwin Wagenhofer (Austria)/Our Daily Bread - Nikolaus Geyrhalter (Austria)

These two Austrian documentaries on the food industry were independently produced and are markedly different in style and approach but both provide mesmerising insights into the methods and industrial-scale rationalisations that contribute to the production of cheap food for mainly Western consumers. Wagenhofer's film is the more polemical, while Geyrhalter takes a more silently impassive look at the production process. Both however are wonderfully rich documents that give a touching prominence to the repetitions and the ardour of manual labour.

View We Feed the World trailer
View Our Daily Bread trailer

5. Eastern Promises - David Cronenberg (UK/Canada)

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.

View Eastern Promises trailer

4. Control - Anton Corbijn (UK)

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.

View Control trailer

3. Silent Light - Carlos Reygadas (Mexico/France)

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.

View Silent Light trailer

2. Climates - Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey)

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. 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.

View Climates trailer

1. 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days - Cristian Mungiu (Romania)

My film of the year last year was Cristi Puiu astounding social drama The Death of Mr Lazarescu in which a dying alcoholic is shunted from one Bucharest hospital to another. The consolidation of Romanian cinema as one of the world's most impressive came this year with the awarding of the Palme d'Or at Cannes to Cristian Mungiu's drama 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days which tells 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.

View 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days trailer

Seanachie also liked:

Naissance des pieuvres - Céline Sciamma (France)

Armin - Ognjen Svilicic (Bosnia & Herzegovina)

Joe Strummer: the Future is Written - Julien Temple (UK/Ireland)

The Bubble - Eytan Fox (Israel)

Kings of the World - Valérie Mitteaux, Anna Pitoun, Rémi Rozié France)

Deathproof - Quentin Tarantino (USA)

El Camino de San Diego - Carlos Sorín (Argentina)

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone - Tsai Ming-Liang (Malaysia/Taiwan)

Zodiac - David Fincher (USA)

12:08 East of Bucharest - Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania)

Tehilim - Raphaël Nadjari (Israel/USA/France)

Paranoid Park - Gus Van Sant (USA/France)

INLAND EMPIRE - David Lynch (USA/France)

Le Scaphandre et le papillon - Julian Schnabel (France/USA)

Très bien, merci - Emmanuel Cuau (France)

Jesus Camp - Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady (USA)

El Custodio - Rodrigo Moreno (Argentina)

Letters from Iwo-Jima - Clint Eastwood (USA/Japan)

The Boss of it All - Lars Von Trier (Denmark)

Notes on a Scandal - Richard Eyre (UK)

The Last King of Scotland - Kevin McDonald (UK/USA)

The Lives of Others - Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (Germany)

Into Great Silence - Philip Gröning (Germany)

August Days - Marc Recha (Spain/Catalonia)

I'm Not There - Todd Haynes (USA)

Nue proprieté - Joachim Lafosse (Belgium)

The Edge of Heaven - Fatih Akin (Germany/Turkey)

Les chansons d'amour - Christophe Honoré (France)

Hounds - Ann-Kristin Reyels (Germany)

The Band's Visit - Eran Kolirin (Israel/Egypt)

American Gangster - Ridley Scott (USA)

We Own the Night - James Gray (USA)

Manufactured Landscapes - Jennifer Baichwal (Canada)

The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford - Andrew Dominik (USA)

The Forest of Mongari - Naomi Kawase (Japan)

The Old Garden - Im Sang-soo (South Korea)

Le Leon - Santiago Otheguy (Argentina)

Jellyfish - Etgar Keret, Shira Geffen (Israel)

Retour en Normandie - Nicolas Philibert (France)

Secret Sunshine - Lee Chang-dong (South Korea)

Syndromes & a Century - Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand)

Si le vent soulève les sables - Marion Hänsel (Belgium/France)

We, the Living - Roy Andersson (Sweden)

Notes on a Scandal - Richard Eyre (UK)


and the stinkers:

Little Children - Todd Field (USA)

Cassandra's Dream - Woody Allen (USA)

Youth Without Youth - Francis Ford Coppola (USA/Romania)

99F - Jan Kounen (France)

Breaking and Entering - Anthony Minghella (UK/USA)

A Very British Gangster - Dónal MacIntyre (UK/Ireland)

Delirious - Tom diCillo (USA)

A Brief Return for Christmas

Since putting this blog on hold a few months ago, I've had the odd urge to start things up again and, strange to say, I've actually missed blogging. That said I don't regret putting it aside, for the simple reason that it had become that most troublesome of things, a distraction and an obligation, and sad to say, the micro-blogging possibilities afforded by Facebook have proven to be a much easier and quicker way of drawing people's attention to the recherché and bizarre elements of Web 2.0 . The traffic to the site has not abated, though I imagine those that used to read it regularly no longer bother, and Underachievement's ability to fulfil the most arcane of Google searches should assure it of a healthy rate of transient readership for some time to come.

This return is but a brief one, to wish all a Happy Christmas and also to review the year, in a rather half-arsed way. There will be one or two more posts over the Christmas and then it will be back to normality for the New Year, though that's not to say that I won't be returning again at some point later on when the mood takes me. Have a Merry Christmas all, and thank you for reading over the past eighteen months.