it doesn't matter about your name.

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach

Not a day this week without severe tube delays on one line or other. At least they did a better job of informing the public about alternative travel options last weekend than the previous. I did, however, spy a staff member at one station hastily scribbling options, his superiors must have known about much earlier, on a board mid-afternoon. Commuters face big squeeze as record one billion cram on Tube, wrote Dick Murray recently in The London Evening Standard. I can't find you a link for this. "An increase of 50 million in just five years. By 2016 it is estimated 25% more people will use the Underground." Peak time seems to extend later and later these days, 19.30 is what 18.00 used to be on some lines.
Transport for London website
Fenchurch St commuters risk lives, revolt and walk the line

A lot of the characters in Aki Kaurismäki’s Lights in the Dusk look as if they’d just spent a nightmare journey on the London tube, as in the other two of Aki’s “The Loser Trilogy", Drifting Clouds and The Man Without a Past. (Kaurismäki withdrew Lights from the Oscars in protest against current American foreign policy). Koiskinen (Janne Hyytiäinen) works as a night watchman for a Helsinki security firm. His only friend seems to be the girl Aila (Maria Heiskanen) who runs a mobile grill van. His love life is as bleak as the Ruoholahti landscape he inhabits in Helsinki. In a bar he picks up the blonde Mirja (Maria Jarvenhelmi). “It’s crowded here, let’s go somewhere else,” she says. Crowded is the last word to describe that bar or indeed any location in the film. Alas, he’s the patsy “faithful as a dog, a romantic fool” for Mirja’s be suited conniving boyfriend Lindholm (Ilkka Koivula). Many critics have found this film a little lean in comparison to Aki’s others (and it’s only 78 minutes). Lacking his usual editor, he does that as well as writing, producing and directing in this one. But it seems to me he knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s almost A Man Without a Presence as if the bluish grey Koiskinen is being drowned in a screen full of saturated Hollywood colour (Timo Salminen, camera) with Mirja as a Hitchcock femme fatale. It’s a fantastic soundtrack as well (not yet available) “Without wings I must remain chained to the frozen earth,” sings Olavi Virta the Finnish tango legend who shares the soundscape with opera tenor Jussi Björling and Argentine Carlos Gardel. If you know the Büchner play and Berg opera Wozzeck about the little guy up against society’s closing walls, you’ll find this ‘deadpan romantic’ in spite of its stark Brechtian look (more Brecht poem than play). A quiet, sad beautiful film, never sentimental with a very dim light at the end of the sewer.

Koiskinen, needless to say, winds up in prison. “I don’t know if sentences set examples or not. I’ve always asked that question, I just don’t know,” says one of the lawyers in the documentary Beyond Hatred. Francois Chenu was a gay man murdered by three skinheads in 2002. The attackers, never seen in the film, went to Leo Legrange Park in Rheims, France, looking for an Arab to beat up but turned on Chenu instead who, when asked, admitted he was gay. They threw his body in a pond where he drowned. Director Olivier Meyrou interviews the Chenu family and friends often over lingering static shots of the park to create a documentary feel rarely seen these days. It’s a meditation: can there be forgiveness and understanding in such a case the film asks?

Interesting to see this in the same week as Days of Glory (Indigènes), another Oscar nominee, about the native North Africans who also believed in Liberté, Fraternité, Equalité fighting for France in WW2 and who were never treated as equals hence the French title ‘natives’. In January, the pensions of 80,000 veterans were raised (frozen since 1959) to the same level as their French counterparts thanks to a screening of the film for French president Jacques Chirac. I’m not a war movie person and it took me a good half hour, after many battle scenes, to get into this. Ultimately, it’s a handsomely photographed but very old fashioned British war movie with a message, though no less compelling for that. Director Rachid Bouchareb holds your attention by really getting under the skin of his characters. I couldn’t help thinking, though, of Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957)that follows a British Army platoon sent to intercept and confiscate Nazi paperwork in a Libyan desert. Quite melodramatic but profoundly existential and one of Godard’s favourite movies. "All men are cowards, in some things," says Richard Burton’s Leith to his girl Jane in Bitter Victory. And you wish Bouchared had created more shadows of existentialism in his script. Would the film have had the same success if it had? Possibly not.

What would an Alan Bennett script for Days of Glory have been like? It certainly made Prick Up Your Ears one of the funniest and unlikeliest best British films of the last, well at least 20 years since its birthday. Stephen Frears (The Queen) directs these mostly anti-social (depending which side of the fence you're on)characters with his usual curiosity. You’d have to be the greatest prudish prune in the world to be put off going to this gay love story of playwright Joe Orton (Gary Oldman) and his lover Kenneth Halliwell (Alfred Molina) in 60’s London. Vanessa Redgrave gives one of the sexiest performances of her career (I’d just worked with her back then) as Orton’s agent Peggy Ramsay. And every shot by cinematographer Oliver Stapleton looks as if they’ve spent the whole week getting it perfect.

It took me a while to catch up with Sleeping Dogs but it's politically incorrectness makes it really funny. Aki Kaurismäki’s hero should have met up with an Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton)who admits she once pleasured a canine. Written and directed by Bob "Bobcat" Goldthwait of Police Academy fame it's tone is absolutely that of American indie film. His use of accordion music is cheesy but perfect. Great date movie to sift the wheat from the chaff!

Travelling even further back in British time, BBC 4 had some fascinating documentaries this week about the BBC’s controversial Director General (1927-38) Lord Reith, a Scotsman. Ironically, he was never a great advocate of the new medium of TV. He may have had a difficult nature but he’d have made an interesting choice for getting London transport in order. When asked of his failings he reflected that he should have been more tolerant of the average in human ability. He felt a task could be achieved in 5 minutes rather than the average hour it took most people. Raises a lot of poignant questions about success, ambition and achievement in British society. Another irony is that without that average there would be no celebrity gazing, Big Brother, talent and makeover shows. As Lord Reith found out to his cost, you can never win that battle. His critics saw him as arrogant and over-ambitious. The picture you get from these documentaries, though, is that of a man who truly believed he could win a battle against the world’s mediocrity and bigotry. The doctor’s motto in Camus’ existential La Peste (The Plague) comes to mind: all we have is the certitude of the daily round.

Finally, I must plug a repeat on BBC4 starting this Saturday April 7 of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s Art of Eternity.

historical process

the bay is frozen up
the trawlers are ice-bound
so what.
you are free.
you can lie down.
you can get up again.
it doesn't matter about your name.
you can disappear.
and return.
that's possible.
a fighter howls across the island.
even when a man dies
letters still come for him.
there isn't much to be lost or thwarted.
you can sleep
that's possible.
the ice-breaker will be here by the morning.
then the trawlers will leave.
the channel they follow is narrow.
it freezes up again by the morning.
so what.
it doesn't matter about your name.
Hans Magnus Enzensberger translated from the German by Michael Hamburger