.. ..deep order...

We always try to put on a good show don't we? A good spread. Don't let the side down. Make an appearance but don't outstay one's welcome. Not so always, of course. Not so much so that we do not dare do throw ourselves off the nearest parapet in fear of landing on an adjacent ledge. "Once we had anarchy in the UK. Now all we have is monarchy in the UK" is the title of Julie Burchill's latest Observer article. Yet there was almost the Spanish Armada on the Chiswick Thames when a lone protestant swimmer propelled himself into the path of the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Oars were broken, tears spilled and David Beckham's peg-leg was no where in sight;)
Jerry Rothwell's documentary Town of Runners (April 20) has its world premier at New York's downtown Tribeca Fest (April 19th) charting the course of two teenage Olympic hopefuls. The rural Ethiopian town of Bekoji having a track record in champions.

Was the Thames rowing incident some sort of sign? A premonition of a 2012 Olympics to come? Helas. Non. That event's greatest worry is that a purely pragmatic problem of logistically challenged infrastructure just may rear its head if one ailing cog falls out of place. What the boat race intervention did presage is precisely what all but those who were socially antennae challenged didn't catch onto in the recent London riots. That many people don't have what you have and want it! It has bugger all to do with elitism or political agenda. Why else would citizens burn down their own neighbourhood if not out of some Freudian trauma of the Fatherland not delivering even a whiff of the Garden of Eden?

Is the Fourth plinth rocking horse in Trafalgar Sqare's regression to childhood security/ uncertainty a gateway back to the future? How one human can catch the attention, if not of the world, then at least the world of England. Very easily. “England,” declares German artist (Serpentine Gallery) Hans-Peter Feldman, “is the biggest kitsch country in the world,” in a recent Financial Times interview. Gilbert and George seem to be making their v challenging work in recent memory at the White Cube gallery elevating ordinary faux extraordinary newspaper headlines into iconic status. Eureka DVD has just re-issued The Gospel According to Matthew(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964) where 'ordinary' people rather than actors prove that what happened all those millenia ago was in fact possible of being extraordinary. Meanwhile filmmaker Patrick Keiller (Tate Britain) rattles the bones of our being with what lies beneath in our fair British isle. And Dexter Fletcher's impressive Wild Bill is a tale truer than most about surviving and finally being eaten by London reality. Even more impressive as a debut is Breathing (April 20) with a slightly more happier outcome relative to the road it must first travel.
Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31 is out on DVD.

What British cinema has always done best is show how resourceful under fire can be the little cogs in that un-oiled greater wheel of fire - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (April 20)being an example in the vein of Bill Forsythe's Local Hero. It's unashamedly Hollywoody in many regards, and all the better for that yet never sacrificing dialogue (Simon Beaufoy) and character detail. Its politics are more In the Loop vein and damn close to how the game of Westminster is really played. Money talks and if a Yemen sheik wants to throw 50 million pounds into UK government coffers to make salmon fishing a reality in the desert it's no slap in the face with a wet one! The sheik's foe miss the bigger picture and his vision of a very modest Garden of Eden. So too the Brits. Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt's roles are pawns in the sheik's chess game but as if a fairy tale they blossom into a king and queen on their very modest stage.

If onlyMirror Mirror had half the tongue in cheek wit and sophistication of Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress. Tarsem Singh owes his Hollywood directing career to creating wondrous production design to spin a tensile web around his often less than resilient plots. And while Mirror is an enjoyable 110min it is certainly no Enchanted. The dwarfs have edgy comic bite, Nathan Lane's enormous talents are never allowed to make the prince very memorable beyond his sculptured torso. Julia Roberts sends her (not so) aging image up rotten with comic nuance, while Lily Collins acts as a delightful jejeune foil to all of them.

Damsels in Distress (April 27), however, (New York director Whit Stillman's first movie in a well-over a decade) is - like all his films- a fairy tale much closer to the world of Grimm. Suicide is a plot line, anal (consenting?) rape is as calmly declenshed as a Latin verb."What the world needs is a large mass of normal people," opines Violet (Greta Gerwig) the film's lynch-pin among the university students of Seven Oakes College. Violet together with her dorm-mates rather than carelessly watching Rome burn fervently believe that they can be a United Nations ameliorator to the rather uncouth smelly soap- challenged boys who will make a boozy attempt at the Ides of March. What's fascinating about Mr Stillman's world is that it could be easily equated to an honest-to-goodness bourgeoisie in any country not just America. Violet and her friends may superficially eek of noblesse oblige (which in a very true sense are their actions) but, ironically, it stems from a deep rooted concern for the common good. Not so much 'let them eat cake' rather 5-star cooking classes are free and available to all who enter in.
Minnell's The Bad and the Beautiful gets re-released April 20. Violet would no doubt have cried buckets when she would later in years probably see Some Came Runnning.
US indy hit Tiny Furniture just had a UK release. It's creator Lena Dunham has her new series Girls out soon on HBO in the States.

What's so worrying about a very British coup is that the rabble rouses (from all classes as seen from the riot post-mortem) only know to break in and ransack the larder in favour of sweets and a big Mac. Stillman's film is where so many of us would like to be: problems that are real to us rather than those that crash through our roof like some aerial invasion, completely alien to us. Those of us who have so much higher an aspiration of what a popular culture could be. Doug Emmett's hi-def cinematography gives everything the rose-tinted look of a chocolat ad making every glint of sunshine sparkle all the more and giving Ciera Wells' costumes the look of an Upper East Side New York kasbah!

They almost outshine Ray Aghayan's costumes (CinemaScope) in Caprice a late career (1967) Doris Day vehicle and one that she readily disowned. It's not a bad film by any means and very well suited to director Frank Tashlin's comedic prowess (before working with Jerry Lewis he cut his teeth in Warner Brothers animation department. What's more there's loads of other great talent here. Aside from Richard Harris in his prime, Ray Walston plays an obsessed industrial chemist (a household name in American TV after playing the extraterrestrial Uncle Martin in My Favorite Martian. Lilia Skala as the Swiss perfume chemist - an actress who'd worked with theatre maestro Max Reinhardt, fled the Nazis to New York and penniless, rose the ladder again from menial jobs to Broadway.

Adorning Violet's wall in Damsels in Distress is a poster for Jean Renoir's classic La Grand Illusion (1937 and given a great Blu-ray treatment by Studio Canal this week). Inspired by British economist Norman Angell's book - which argued that war is futile because of the common economic interests of all European nations - Renoir (a bourgeois by dint of his father being the great painter August Renoir) paints a cinematic canvas (in B/W) where the colour of C20th reality keeps bleeding into the characters' thoughts during WW1 officer POW internment. Renoir stated that the film was 'a story about human relationships. I am confident that such a question is so important today that if we don’t solve it, we will just have to say ‘goodbye’ to our beautiful world." Jean Gabin plays the working-class character and it's an illuminating comparison with Marel Carne's 1938 Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, re-issued by the BFI May 4) in which Gabin also represents an underdog, the army deserter. "If I see a swimmer, I immediately think he’ll drown, so I paint a drowned man,” says the Le Havre artist in Quai des Brumes. Does he presage his own suicide and is it a fulfillment of fate?

La Grande Illusion could so easily be Stillman's characters a generation on. The youngsters idealism is yet to betray decay. Violet feels it but doesn't know that that is exactly what it is. She loses (to one of her 'gang') her boyfriend who isn't even worthy of the name underdog and goes into what she euphemistically calls "tail-spin" rather than suicide mode. Deep down beneath all her calm cardigans what she desperately seeks is a Jean Gabin to secretly keep alive. Someone to challenge her pre-conceptions. But of course it would only really work in one of her dance sequences. And all would prove futile outside the world of bodily freedom and conform. The real 'Gabin' boy would always be a 'catcher in the rye'. Would always rebel against Violet's philosophical comport. And as much as he truly may end up loving such as her, his yearn for the sea would always prevail. Or just maybe they'd cross the mountains in Sound of Music style.
Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre is on release as well as Curzon (and the UK art-house circuit) new very good value 'on demand' service for first-run releases.

Does Mondrian Nicholson in Parallel makes us think about the real world or do we remain wandering abstractly? The Courtauld makes a great case for the former in another of its small but beautifully formed gallery shows. Nicholson (Mondrian's junior by 20 years) was blown away by his visit to the then little known Mondrian's Paris studio. The latter then became a Hampstead neighbour of Nicholson's in London. And in so many ways they saw the world in the same vein though on parallel paths. They both sculpted out of the paint with Nicholson going so far as to make minimalist "white reliefs" whose shadows were (very arguably amongst art historians) the equal of Mondrian's vibrant expressways. A conference last month at the Courtauld Institute made one even more fascinated by how these two artists confluenced or challenged each other. Student Vanja V. Malloy delivered an intriguing paper on the physics rife at the time that would have influenced these artists while another student gave what on paper seemed would be a somewhat boring presentation (far from it) on re-creating in 3D the interiors of Mondrian's various studios. Some first hand memories varied very, very widely indeed causing one to consider just how reliable are all those primary source citations in our art history gathering. Moreover, another lecture initiated debate over just how much Nicholson was part of any avant-garde artistic circle in spite of sources claiming that he definitely was.
Gift to Courtauld will make London a world centre of Buddhist art studies.


Somerset House has a spring offering from London-based Chilean Fernando Casasempere who's filled the freshly-grassed courtyard of the Fountain Court with 10,000 rhythmically-spaced ceramic flowers. It's an oasis of calm compared to the dull thudding of real life, crazy traffic, people, cyclists on the Strand. Ah - "to sit upon a hill as I do now" and escape life's battles as Shakespeare's Henry VI did. What drives people to do so many horrible things? They do them even in the quietest of places. 'Crazy' maverick director Werner Herzog goes in search of those on death row - Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life . He observes, questions, never judges and is openely an opponent of the death penalty. Why do people kill? It's not so much an answer as a meditation on this question in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Nothing much happens in this film and yet, of course everything does. One memorable moment is when the police with their suspect in tow, have a break from finding where he buried in the bleak Turkish landscape and at 3am in the morning pop into the local Mayor's house for a bite to eat. The Mayor uses the opportunity to politically lever a request that they get funding for a morgue - for a village in the middle of nowhere.

In Paolo Sorrentino's first English language film This Must Be the Place Sean Penn is an ageing Goth (akin The Cure) who traverses America to avenge his father. It's a beautifully shot film and Penn is tremendous. Yet what made Sorrentino such a fascinating Italian director of this new century was the way in which he harked back to an almost operatic view of history, politics and the personal. His latest film feels like Wim Wenders in America when it really longs to be more in the realm of Puccini's opera La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the West). There's always something cool, detached, inevitable in Sorrentino and the film's final scene is that and operatic. There's never a round of applause at the end of a Wenders movie. But with Sorrentino it's almost as if the whole cinemascape is a show for an unseen hand. An Althussian dialectic perhaps with a cut-away to an imagined audience. There's a finality to life in This Must Be the Place whereas in other Sorrentino the wheel of life trundles on regardless even though the curtain has fallen.

Another prism through which to view life: The Hourglass Sanatorium and the Polish sensibility under censure. So much so that the print had to be smuggled out of the country to make it to the Cannes Fest and win a prize. Jafar Panahi was banned form making any films in Iran and his This is Not a Film was secreted to the West on a memory stick. (Palisades Tartan)

The Deep Blue Sea (Blu-ray) a parallel world perhaps to
Las Acacias [Blu-ray] (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
And on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week Peter Carey discusses his new novel The Chemistry of Tears in the context of the world's future past.

..the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living
Damien Hirst at the Tate Modern