Archive for August/2012

A parable of art and love, and a political allegory to boot, Chicken with Plums centers on an Iranian musician who wills himself to die. Yet the story that then unfolds, mostly in flashback, could hardly be more vital and engaging.

The movie was adapted by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud from the former’s graphic novel. The same team brought Satrapi’s earlier book, the autobiographical Persepolis, to the screen with animated renderings of Satrapi’s drawings. For this tale, which is based on a Satrapi family legend yet has wider implications, the duo largely forgoes the graphic approach in favor of live action.

The narrative, which nests stories within stories, does incorporate a few hand-drawn or CGI-generated episodes. And the other scenes, filmed on sets at Germany’s Studio Babelsberg, are far from naturalistic. In appearance, the movie recalls Amelie or Hugo, but with a shadowy, sepia-toned palette. Its storytelling style is playful and self-conscious, with magically unrealist touches.

A former concert violinist, protagonist Nasser Ali chooses to perish early in the movie, which then circles back to explain his despair. Not even the title dish, his favorite meal, can lure him from his self-made appointment with the angel of death. In fact, the story is narrated by that very figure: horned and black-shrouded Azrael (Edward Baer).

The inspiration for Nasser Ali’s death wish is twofold, although that’s not immediately obvious. At first, it seems that the only cause of his anguish is the loss of a long-beloved violin, which was recently broken.

Even a Stradivarius, acquired after an arduous journey that includes an opium trip, fails to satisfy Nasser Ali. Without his original instrument, it seems, the musician can never again perform to his own expectations. So he resolves to waste away.

As Nasser Ali waits a week for oblivion, flashbacks and asides deepen our understanding of the man, embodied by Mathieu Amalric with his usual flair for playing neurotics who are roughly as likable as they are irritating.

Nasser Ali’s struggle to become a great violinist, we’ll come to understand, has been painful, and his international success as a musician short-lived. Returning to Tehran, he’s forced by his chain-smoking, charmingly overbearing mother (Isabella Rossellini) to marry Faranguiss (Maria de Medeiros), a math teacher who has long adored him. He doesn’t love her, and subsequently doesn’t much care for the two children they produce. (The movie has it in for the kids as well, lampooning them in flash-forwards to their adult lives.)

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Hoy comienza la 13ª Exposición Internacional de Arquitectura-La Biennale di Venezia (29 de agosto al 25 de noviembre de 2012), una cita en la que el pabellón español ofrecerá a sus visitantes una experiencia arquitectónica intensa que les permitirá adentrarse en la intimidad de los proyectos y métodos de investigación que los arquitectos españoles tienen actualmente sobre la mesa y en vías de construcción.

En el pabellón –promovido por el Ministerio de Fomento con la colaboración de Acción Cultural Española (AC/E) y la Agencia Española de Cooperación Internacional para el desarrollo (AECID)–, siete instalaciones, correspondientes a cada uno de los siete equipos participantes, mostrarán los procesos científicos que buscan el equilibrio entre las ideas y su necesaria materialización, trascendiendo los productos acabados para dar acceso a las razones y emociones que los han hecho posibles, a las versiones incompletas, a las referencias de las que se nutren y a los hallazgos.

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Las instalaciones, lejos de representar certezas, servirán de excusa a los distintos equipos para seguir explorando, testar sus ideas y construir prototipos de sus obras en curso, compartiendo así su ámbito de trabajo más vivo.

Las imágenes, obras, bocetos y objetos fruto de estas investigaciones se exhibirán en el pabellón como información en crudo, sin aderezo, reunida en un espacio en construcción, como lo es un laboratorio o un estudio de arquitectura; que invitará al visitante a leer entre líneas y buscará provocar el aprendizaje. Y en esta atmósfera de creatividad e invención convivirán muy diversas aproximaciones y entendimientos de lo que es y puede ser la arquitectura.

SPAINLAB, la apuesta de los comisarios y también arquitectos, Débora Mesa y Antón García-Abril, que han apoyado las instituciones promotoras y patrocinadoras de la muestra, surge con una estrategia clara: demostrar que el verdadero valor de las obras no está en la imagen final que representan y que el futuro de la arquitectura española pasa por el apoyo y la protección de los procesos de investigación personales.

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Wes Anderson’s well-reviewed “Moonrise Kingdom” takes place in 1965 on a beautifully art-directed island, where a pair of 12-year-olds fall in love at first sight. Sam, an orphan, runs away from scout camp to rendezvous with Suzy, who wears eyeliner and knee-socks, and the two set off on a romantic idyll while a handful of morally compromised adults pursue them.

It is a confusing premise, this love story, given that Sam and Suzy hardly talk and are largely presexual. (Communicating and making physical contact are the primary ways I can think of in which people demonstrate love to one another.) Sam and Suzy speak in gnomic phrases and wear flat masks of existential despair while moving through a world of minutely curated picnics, camp sites and coves. Their love is entirely unbelievable, and without it as narrative force, successive scenes quickly take on the tone of blog posts on a well-sourced Tumblr.

The main characters of “Moonrise”—Sam, Suzy, Suzy’s parents, the man with whom Suzy’s mother is having an affair—have no lack of human concerns to dismay them. They cheat on each other and are cuckolded; they are lonely, orphaned, depressed. But these gestures toward dramatic heft are undermined by the panoramic inexpressiveness of the ones whom they afflict. Instead of raging, crumpling, or turning raspberry-faced with tears, the characters wear deliberate outfits and wander amid piles of deliberately arrayed stuff, suggesting that a consistent aesthetic universe will somehow make their startling emotional non-sequiturs intelligible.

Thirty minutes into the film, my hands had furled into irritated claws. Here, it seemed, was an incomplete vision of the world—a wholly aesthetic one—being offered up as a complete one, and my reaction was emetic. I did not like what the movie presumed about my credulity, or about my allegiance to the transcendent importance of buying and collecting cool stuff. I couldn’t stand what it said, or failed to say, about love. Midway through the movie, a line from “The Wings of the Dove” came to mind regarding Wes Anderson: “He had ceased to be amusing—he was simply too inhuman.”

Cranky, maybe, but it’s awfully lonely out here without an ally. “Moonrise” has been getting terrific reviews, and for the life of me I can’t understand why. Mr Anderson, after all, hasn’t always been this way, and three of his earlier films—“Bottle Rocket”, “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums”—are genuinely great. All three also happen to have been co-written by Owen Wilson, with whom Mr Anderson hasn’t collaborated in years. Perhaps it’s time he gave his old writing partner a call.

As published in The Economist

Judges pass over Amis, McEwan and Smith in favour of new generation, including four debut novelists, though Hilary Mantel makes the cut for sequel to Wolf Hall

Man Booker prize judges focused on “novels not novelists” and “texts not reputations” today, to come up with a longlist that overlooks some of the biggest names in contemporary fiction, including Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan and Martin Amis.

Smith, with her first novel in seven years, NW, out in September, was widely expected to make the Booker longlist, as were a host of former winners including John Banville, Pat Barker and Howard Jacobson. Instead, four innovative debut writers were chosen by the judges: Sam Thompson for his first novel Communion Town, the story of a city, Rachel Joyce for The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, in which a man leaves home after setting out to post a letter, Jeet Thayil for his tale of opium addiction in Mumbai, Narcopolis, and Alison Moore for The Lighthouse, which sees a man set out to find himself on a German walking holiday.

Twenty-seven-year-old author Ned Beauman also made the cut, for his second novel The Teleportation Accident, a slice of historical noir set in 1930s Germany.

“Who published a book, and indeed even the author, is of very little concern to Man Booker judges. We were considering novels not novelists, texts not reputations,” said chair of judges Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

Heading the list of big names up for the prestigious £50,000 award this year was Hilary Mantel, chosen for her follow-up to the Booker-winning Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, a continuation of her life of Thomas Cromwell. She was immediately installed as favourite to take the prize by bookies, with Will Self‘s Umbrella, in which a maverick psychiatrist attempts to wake victims of the encephalitis lethargica sleeping sickness epidemic at the end of the first world war, coming in second. Bookseller Jonathan Ruppin at Foyles tipped Self as winner, describing the longlist as “one of the most delightful and unexpected in years”.

Stothard said that the key criteria for this year’s judges was that “a text has to reveal more, the more often you read it”. “We were looking for books that you can make a sustained critical argument about, and when you read them again, you can make a different critical argument – not for books you can just say ‘wow, I enjoyed it’, or ‘wow, that was terrible’.” he said.

“Some novels by well-known authors passed the Man Booker test as to whether or not they repay rereading – there are a few well-established names there, Frayn, Barker, Mantel. But there are also books by very fine writers who didn’t pass that test, or who came up shorter than those who did.”

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