Axl & Vera do London - Unmade Beds

I seem to have completed an anniversary of some sort at my local video store so when they offered me a complimentary DVD, I decided on Unmade Beds. For no other reason than that it seemed to feature a girl wearing an animal head.

It turned out to be one of those happy choices for it's a charming film set in London's squats and music clubs. There is little plot - a Spanish boy searches for and engages with his father in London, a Belgian girl comes to London to get over heartbreak only to find her heart captured by yet another handsome lad. But that doesn't matter for the plot is simply an excuse to capture the feeling of being young and dislocated in a foreign place, all of it captured in delectable visuals and accompanied by an off beat, indie music score. The actors are sufficiently pretty and hip, the sex disarmingly and sweetly casual, the drinking sweet oblivion. There are film making nods here and there to the usual suspects, Godard most of all, but the film it put me most in mind of was Joachim Trier's Reprise. It turned out that they share a common cinematographer though Reprise has a Nordic coolness whereas Unmade Beds has a warm, autumnal palette. The actors are charming enough, Deborah Francois in particular being as good as she was in The Page Turner. The bands featured are not very well known which lends some authenticity to the night crawl of its young protagonists and the music is sort of naive/anti-folk (amongst the better known singers are Kimya Dawson and Jeffrey Lewis) peppered with swoony Italian songs. Despite it's slightness, it's the kind of movie so immersed in youth, its fleeting moments, its abandon, its hopeful uncertainties that you long to return to that time of your life again.

The DVD extras featured an interview with the director. Normally these are dull affairs but Alexis dos Santos proved to be charming and articulate. The film arose out of his  experiences in London (he is Argentinian) and it appears his intention was to veer away from the immigrant film (e.g. Dirty Pretty Things) or the upper class English film and show a different kind of London.  European expats in London it appears make for sexier and cooler subject matter:-)

Weekend Mash Up

For one reason or the other I haven't been reading much or watching any movies.  Then over the long weekend I caught up with a few movies and books.

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First up, Kaagaz ke Phool. I must have seen the songs of this movie any number of times but hadn't seen the movie itself.  Given that it is generally touted as a classic, I bought the DVD on a visit to India and finally got around to seeing it.   It turned out to be movie that had a few things to say but said it all so badly that you had to wonder if this really is the best of Hindi cinema.  Its tale of genius/creativity crushed by the world at large was well meant but given that every tired trope and stereotype from the adoring ingenue to an insufferable wife (I must note that many Guru Dutt movies are laced with a certain kind of misogyny) are present in the movie, it makes for tortuous viewing.  The film is at its best when immersed in the workaday life of films and it goes against the grain of popular cinema in being relentlessly pessimistic about the chances of sustaining both creativity and love in this world.  The people who Dutt casts are also regulars  (including of course Murthy, Dutt's photographer) so there's something of the sweetness of the man himself that comes through. But it's hardly up there with an early Ray or Ghatak or even Tamil movies like Parashakti and Andha Naal. If anything it illustrates the perils of straddling the conventions of both art and commercial cinema.  And like many an Indian film it harbours the contradiction of an often laboured, naive and embarrassing narrative punctuated by sublime songs.  In the songs, the films seem to find exactly what is to be said - Waqt ne Kiya for e.g is pure art even on repeated viewing - pity about the rest of the film.  And sadly, Johnny Walker, so delightful in all his songs, is otherwise completely insufferable. 

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Talking of songs, the somewhat cheesy remix of Kitni Akeli has been on high rotation :-)

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I was unable to read more than a few pages of How we are Hungry. The general reviews of McSweeneys and The Believer seemed to suggest tweeness.  So I was predisposed to give Away We Go, which is scripted by Dave Eggers and his wife, a skip.  I did however watch it and was unexpectedly charmed.  Some of the criticism regarding its smugness is true.  Still, this tale of a couple expecting a child who travel everywhere only to return to a sense of home is sweet.  It's central theme really is that each couple works out in their own way what they want their family to be.  This is admittedly compromised by the farcical nature of some of the families the couple meets on their journey (the redneck mom, the nutty leftist etc. etc.) and perhaps lead to the charge of smugness.  But on the whole this is such a gentle, sweetly tart movie that I quite liked it.  And on a reading, The Believer was not bad either.

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Also got around to reading a long held copy of Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.  It is many years since I read a play and this one was brilliant.  It is witty, beautifully mixes science (thermodynamic, chaos, fractals) and art and moves easily through the centuries.  Stoppard wears his erudition lightly and I think every bit of praise that Arcadia has garnered is more than well deserved. 

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The ABC had a decent, detailed documentary on Walt Whitman which stirred memories of a long ago reading of Leaves of Grass. Which I must read again.  Here's Whitman on animals:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So they show their relations to me and I accept them,
They bring me tokens of myself, they evince them plainly in their possession.

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The doco of course made reference to Whitman's homosexuality. Which reminded me of a recent visit to the airport and the tender kisses and farewells exchanged between an Indian boy and his Chinese boyfriend. Sydney is by and large tolerant and this has an effect - I have an Indian friend here who quickly progressed from being homophobic to acceptance. The ordinary, matter of fact nature of the exchange is a measure of how much things have changed and how much they will continue to change.

The Cousin's Artwork

Like my brother, my cousin Sneha has been drawing since she was a child.   A few pieces of hers found their way to me so I thought I would put up a sampler of her work today.

First up a squirrel she did in her art class, perhaps when she was about 8-10.  We of course thought it was brilliant and were rather proud!

Last year she gifted me a pencil sketch of me aged 10 (below).  The basis for the drawing is a photograph taken by my uncle, then recently returned from a trip to Japan and armed with a new camera.  The photograph belongs to a set of his beautifully taken B&W pictures which was my first introduction to the idea that a photograph was both a record of daily life and a piece of art.  Already in '75, there was something timeless about those photographs and this drawing does justice to the particular photograph.  A bit of trivia-the polka dot frock was known as the "Bobby Frock",  after the movie of the same name.  And my love for off beat hair ribbons is already evident in this drawing/photograph, this one was a plaited white one that ended in tassles. 

During her visit here, also last year, she did a few sketches of skylines.  This is by no means the Sydney skyline but simply one that was inspired by it and one I like very much. 

The Gentlewoman

I read a Jezebel post on new magazines which left me mildly curious about a magazine that called itself The Gentlewoman. An issue has made it's way to our shores (it appears to be a UK magazine and they reach here fairly quickly) so I picked up a copy.

It is not earth changing by any means, it is after all to some extent a fashion mag, but it isn't a bad read. As it's title suggests, it is rather elegant in tone. And its editorial sets the mood by championing "optimism, sincerity and ingenuity" as opposed to the "cynical cool of recent decades". The inside pages reveal a decent variety of concerns as opposed to the celeb, goss, fashion mix of many women's magazines.

I particularly liked a piece on Josephine Chime which is basically on girls who cycle (Modern Transport).  And the one on Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima. 

There is also the requisite amount of eye candy: slender girls in trendy clothes kind of thing though some are artfully composed as with a piece on two friends, one short and the other tall.  A few are in B&W and are rather elegant (that word again) and timeless.

The red flowers are of course not a part of the magazine.  I picked up these fallen rosea blooms on a walk and before they faded I wanted to capture some of their beauty. I like to think they both absorb the beauty of The Gentlewoman and give back some of their own.

Spring Summer Winter

Each morning at the train station, I stand under a group of middling height trees waiting for the train. In the middle of the group is the bauhinia. The others I have yet to identify. For the large part the bauhinia retains its leaves, though it briefly flowers closer to summer.

This picture of the bauhinia taken in early spring:

The same tree flowering in early summer.  This bauhinia has pale white flowers as opposed to the more common pink.

As winter is setting in, the bauhinia has still retained its leaves.  But the tree next to it has shed most of its.  The rain has been incessant and water drips off the leaves. The mornings are blue with the cold and rain. The station lights remain on till late morning.

Whatever be the season, there is something comforting and familiar about this patch of green. And it serves as a small reminder that life is not merely a series of tasks carried out within the concrete structures we inhabit.