Diary 2016 (Feb 10th)- Two movies, two books

Over the last 5 days, I watched two movies and read two books. I enjoyed Andrew Haigh’s 45 years. It is a sensitive, subtle portrayal of buried tensions in a normal marriage. They come bubbling to the surface when the husband receives a letter informing that the body of a girl he had a short but intense romance with in his youth has been found buried in a glacier. It is my favorite kind of movie, restrained storytelling, great acting, quietly insightful.

While Charlotte Rampling is excellent as expected, British thespian, Tom Courtenay, more than holds his own. He seems to have stepped straight out of the endless supply of great theater actors Britain seems to have.

I had seen rave reviews for German director, Christian Petzold’s previous movie, Barbara. I remember liking it but being just a little underwhelmed. His latest, Phoenix, appeared in Sight & Sound’s best of 2015 list. It is now one of my favorite movies from last year.

A Holocaust survivor returns to a Berlin in ruins. She gets plastic surgery done to restore her devastated face. She seeks out her husband who might or might not have betrayed her to the Nazis. Her husband doesn’t ‘recognize’ her at first. Then he thinks she resembles his wife and seeks to mould her in his wife’s image, so that he can claim her inheritance. She submits to the game, with almost childlike, infuriating (to the viewer) delight.

It is the sort of movie where suspending disbelief is a rewarding experience. Because the ambiguity is so delicious, the symbolism so rich. The movie is steeped in the style of classic film noir, for which I have always had a weakness. Memory and deadly nostalgia, guilt and denial, the past and the present, play hide and seek in the shadows. The ending set to a rendition of Speak low if you speak love is literally pitch perfect.

There was a time when I wondered why there was such an obsession with the Holocaust in the West. Then I hardly knew anything about the Holocaust. I had read brief summaries in school history books, knew the 6 million number, had seen Schindler’s list and the treacly Life is beautiful. Now I know more, just enough to know that I haven’t even begun to grasp, understand it.

I feel enough cannot be said, made, written about it, notwithstanding some painfully corny depictions, such as The reader. It is not that it was an exceptional tragedy. It was that it was not. It is just probably the most well-documented moment in human history, when the veneer of civilization was stripped off. There have been many such moments. The rest are largely forgotten.

The two books I read were translations of Submission, by Michel Houellebecq and My Documents by Chilean author, Alejandro Zambra. I had read Atomised by Houellebecq many years ago. The guy could write. But I was put off by his nihilism. I felt he was being provocative for the sake of it. To his credit, he didn’t discriminate in his targets. He ripped into everything, left and right ideologies, religion and secular humanism.

Submission came out on the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack. The story is about the imposition of Shariah law in France, as told by a jaded literature professor, who is an obvious stand-in for the author. It couldn’t get more controversial. But it is surprisingly complex. He appears to have mellowed down a bit with age, without any change in his worldview. The expression is much more nuanced now.

A moderate Muslim leader of a moderate Muslim Brotherhood becomes the President of France, with support from the mainstream left and right of center parties. The latter two have turned into dead, empty husks with nothing to offer. The only viable alternative is the National Front.

Houellebecq is not out to stoke Islamophobia. Instead his point seems to be that everything is already f****d. France and the world has already gone to the dogs. Half serious, half-mocking, he suggests that maybe a Muslim government imposing Shariah is not the worst that can happen. Though elements of the nightmare scenario are incorporated (women are forced to wear the veil and pushed out of the workforce, Jews are encouraged to emigrate to Israel, education is Islamicized), Islam is presented as a historical force offering larger meaning and a sense of destiny. His pessimism seems even more prescient after the events of the past year, the refugee crisis, the tanking global economy, secularism and liberalism turning into dirty words for many, Trump and Sanders leading the presidential race in the most powerful country (for the time being) in the world.

Alejandro Zambra’s My documents is a highly entertaining, sometimes profound collection of short stories. The stories narrated in the first person feel autobiographical, the character in them a similar young man writing or struggling to write, remembering his more or less ordinary childhood. There are stories which might have seemed gimmicky but are delightful in Zambra’s hands, such as the story of a relationship told through the life of a desktop computer or a literary meditation on smoking while an author undergoes treatment to quit smoking.

I also loved a story about a middle aged jobless man house-sitting for a cousin and inventing a history for himself and another one about a school for gifted students. The latter is structured as a narration of random fragments, strands of memory. But it feels vivid and complete.

The weight of the Pinochet years is always creeping somewhere around the edges. But Zambra brings a lightness of touch. At their best, the stories have a perfect balance of familiarity and quirk, of old-fashioned warm storytelling and experimentation.