The Train, by Georges Simenon

I expected more drama in this wee book than it delivered. Marcel has a nice life: a wife, daughter, house self-employment in a business he enjoys. He lives his life according to a timetable established according to "habits rather than obligations". This life is disrupted by news that the Germans are about to invade; while they are fortunate enough to evacuate, Marcel is separated from his family on the train which is taking them to safety. A "young brunette in a black dress covered with dust", "pale-faced and sad looking" gets into the same waggon as Marcel and huddles in a corner. This is Anna. As the train starts to move, Marcel muses on the break: it is as if the town in which he has lived had lost its reality. He is a sickly man, lucky to be married and he knows it, yet he gives no thought to his wife and family: this carriage has become his reality. Simenon does a good job of presenting life in it.

Marcel's family are in the same train for a while; when it is made into two trains, he is not at all concerned that his family is heading in a different direction but finds himself in a bit of a pickle. He sees messages of sympathy in Anna's eyes and is unwilling to show her he does not care. He and Anna eventually join forces, saying hardly anything to each other but "as if by common consent", staying together for the duration of the train journey. On their first night, Anna draws him to her, on top of her, both "silent as snakes". This is a pretty new experience for poor old Marcel:

I came close to talking incoherently, saying thank you, telling of my happiness... I should have liked to express all at once my affection for this woman ... who was a human being, who in my eyes was becoming the human being... For the first time in my life I had said I love you like that, from the depths of my heart.

Eventually they're off the train and put in a camp, where Marcel claims Anna to be his wife so they can be together. She thanks him and asks what would have happened had they not let her in: "I'd have gone with you" and it didn't matter where.

So the basic thing is that he is living with Anna, feeling more for her than anyone in his life, including for his wife, in a state of "happiness which bore the same relation to everyday happiness as the sound produced by passing a violin bow across the wrong side of the bridge bears to the normal sound of a violin. It was sharp and exquisite, and deliciously painful."

Then, of course, he finds his wife and he has to make a choice. I would have expected a certain amount of angst over which life to choose: the one of duty or the one of love; Jeanne or Anna. For him, the choice is so natural he doesn't hesitate for a moment. I don't even think I would have made the same choice as him. 

Three Italian Films

We have an Italian Film Festival on at the moment; I managed to overlook it for the first three days but sprung into action yesterday and am already three up. The first two are more in the nature of serious dramas while the third is a comedy, but they're all examining the nature of family.

What More Do I Want? (Cosa voglio di più)

Anna is a vaguely attractive but dull woman. Alessio thinks it is time she and he have a baby (the movie starts with their friends having one): Anna, after some, time, says she'll go off the pill. She doesn't: clearly she's after more than Alessio is giving (he seems to be an incredibly sweet, trusting guy, happy in his work and to help out his mates with fixing their random electronic gizmos). So along comes the smiling waiter with a plate of shrimps, Domenico, and its game on. It is all a bit tawdry and full of snatched four hour sessions in a rather baroque motel room.

He, unfortunately has his own family, with two kids. As Alessio rather conveniently reads out at about this time, it only takes a moment to forget a lifetime but it can take more than a life time to forget a moment. Anna is completely taken with Domenico (the sex is apparently the best she has ever had) and he, while similarly smitten, is conscious of his responsibilities. I couldn't help but think how devastating this affair would be to his children in particular (his wife is more knowing). Anna needs and demands more. I left the movie thinking that when she didn't get it, she was probably going to go back to Alessio and make like nothing ever happened, which didn't seem particularly fair to him. I think I would have enjoyed this movie more if I could have seen anything attractive about Anna: I could see how she'd be attracted to Domenico but not the reverse.

Our Life (La Nostra Vita)

Now if Anna had been played by Isabella Ragonese, I could have understood it: she's gorgeous. Unfortunately, she isn't in the movie very long, as her character dies giving birth, leaving her husband, Claudio, to cope as best he can with three young sons. He's in construction and evidently quite ambitious: he takes advantage of a situation to blackmail his boss into giving him his own construction contract. So much of the movie is about his rather poor attempts at getting this apartment block built. He doesn't seem to be a very good boss, as he spends much of his time screaming at his workers. He doesn't seem to be very good at business: he borrows money, via a friend, from the mob. The building itself is, to use a technical term, shit: when it rains, the thing nearly dissolves.

But friends and family rally around, he finds some sort of turnkey building outfit which will move in and complete the project, and learns the life lesson about the value of family. As his kids say towards the end, he never says to them he loves them, but I get the feeling this has changed.

There is one episode which shows just how bad at being a human being Claudio had become. He has as one of his workers the son of the watchmen who had died and whose death had been concealed. I never caught the son's name, but he's troubled by the fact his dad has never been in touch, says dad is worthless. Claudio, thinking to salvage the situation, reveals the truth about his father: the poor son is forced to do an on the spot re-evaluation of everything he understands about his dad.

Something else that this movie did rather well was to show the plight of the illegal immigrant worker: they have to hide whenever the police show up and are vulnerable to being exploited by meatheads like Claudio but, ultimately, they have their pride and will only take so much from him.

Sorry, if I Want to Marry You (Scusa ma ti voglio sposare)

This was a very busy movie, lots of colour, sounds, people, movement. I found it a bit hard at first, working out who everyone was (I suppose it would have helped if I had seen Sorry if I love You, to which this is a sequel). Niki is 20, a student, with rather rebellious parents. Alex is 40, from a very wealthy and traditional family. They each have their sets of friends but they are in love. Alex has a bit of an anxiety attack after imagining what young fellows might say to Niki. Thankfully he rejects the advice of his friends (all of whom have broken up or will break up during the movie): they suggest he follow her, act mysteriously and engage in something called insecurity therapy. In other words, they suggest he play games whereas he runs with his feelings, whisks her off to Paris and proposes (well has a neon sign on a bridge do the job for him).

   

That's basically the set up, it takes the first 10 - 15 minutes. The fun is in getting them to the altar (it is a romantic comedy, so we know that's where this is going). Her parents hate the idea of Niki marrying someone so much older. His parents don't seem to mind so much, but who would know what they're really thinking. They don't take too kindly to Niki's folks who they have to stay in their grand country house (not helped when her dad shoots the family dog on a pig hunt he detests).

Alex works too hard and isn't there when Nike needs him. She has too much help from his family and in comes a fast young man on a motorcycle, Guido.

But the movie isn't just about them. Their friends are part of the story as well: the young couple struggling with the decision to have a baby, the fashion designer fighting for recognition, the various husbands who stuff things up with their wives. This is probably the most important thing as, bizarrely, all five men end up living in the same house. That finally prompts action which leads to the resolution.

Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) by Werner Herzog

This movie is something of a curiosity, as it doesn't really go anywhere and features an absurd situation.There's an asylum

for patients who happen to be both mentally ill and dwarfs (although I suspect being the latter helps the powers that be characterise them as the former).There is a day on which all of the staff except one seem to be absent, and the one staff member on duty has an inmate, Pepe, tied up as some sort of hostage to good behaviour of the others.

The problem is that they simply do not seem to be concerned for his welfare. They have their freedom and they're going to enjoy it. It has to be said, he doesn't seem too worried, either: we see him frequently during the movie and he is generally smiling, and never says a word.

Oddly enough, although town is nearby and they have a vehicle, they never leave the environs of their insitution.Instead, they revel in their freedom. Some of what they do is kind of sweet, innocent even, like arranging for Hombre to get "married", which seems to be no more than putting him in a room with a woman (there is no account of what sort of feelings they might have for each other - this movie doesn't do backstory):

Unfortunately, he finds getting on to the bed a bit elusive:

even with the large number of magazines he uses as a platform, which turn out to feature pictures of naked women, so they all have a good time

 

Even sweeter is the inmate who has an entire wedding party, comprised of various bugs, which she shares with her fellow inmates

A lot of what they do is fairly harmless, like setting the vehicle to run in circles all day in the compound, and surf on top

or practice bull-fighting techniques with it

They also ransack the kitchen, but the food looks inedible (presumably this is the slop they've been fed) and so they have a food fight with it instead and have great fun throwing the crockery at the van as it passes by.Various objects are broken or burnt (although not the asylum itself).

Not all is fun and games, however. There are two blind dwarfs, who are normally kept separate for their own good but today they're out with the others and are periodically tormented. I think its mostly in fun, like sneaking around them and taking some food

but as the day wears on, the actions of the inmates darken - I actually think they do away with one of the blind dwarfs. Every so often, they get the person on duty out on the balcony and harrass him to the point he goes mad

 

Even though that was sad, I had to laugh at one of their ways of tormenting the person on duty, which led to him chasing around his office after a bunch of chickens

 

 There is even a form of crucifixion scene (apparently it is a live monkey on the cross)

This is not a movie which comes to any sort of point or has any sort of lesson, save the simple celebration of freedom. Perhaps that is why Herzog saw fit to conclude the movie with the most unlikely of images

Tokyo Story by Yasujiro Ozu

This is a movie with quite a reputation, showing up in various best films ever made lists, so I thought I should watch it. Although I did enjoy it, I don't quite get why its such a big deal, although I can see it is a kind of film-maker's film. It was very carefully paced and I noticed several recurring images, such as the way characters were often posed in lines.

This was a movie about family, and yet it was very noticeable how they never touched each other and how there were recurring images of empty rooms.

The basic set up is quite simple: an elderly small town couple go to Tokyo to see their adult children, who have very little time to spend with their parents. The next generation seems worse - the son was portrayed as incredibly selfish and set permanently to whine mode:

They feel guilty that their parents are sitting upstairs doing nothing, so send them off to a beach resort (Atami - just out from Mt Fuji) to do nothing. The parents get a bit fed up with this, decide to go home - not before their kids let them down one more time and they find themselves "homeless".

They find a solution: dad catches up with an old mate and has a big night on the town, getting absolutely plastered

 and has to be taken to his po-faced daughter's

house by the Police.

She is very unamused to find he has brought a mate home and neither can stand up:

Mum, on the other hand, visits with their deceased son's wife, the lovely Noriko,

and is well looked after for the night.

Both parents have a good talk with Noriko, saying that she has to move on, that they won't be worried if she finds someone new to marry, which was kind of sweet - these were among the few times that there was any sort of conversation in which the people connected with each other.

There seemed to be something going on with small town values versus big city ones. The movie is framed by appearances of a cheery neighbour, initially wishing them a happy trip to Tokyo, and then giving Dad a sort of cheery welcome home (although she may not have cheered him as much as she could have, by pointing out how lonely he will be. The parents themselves are particularly dignified

and here, at least, there is one of their children who will stay home and look after them, despite having a job which is just as important as those of her her cityfied siblings

Since the movie is on so many lists of best movies, I am glad I've seen it, and I enjoyed its sombre investigation of the breakdown of family. Unfortunately, some of the characters came across as caricatures - Mum and Dad were incredibly slow moving, although they seemed like decent uncomplaining people.I had thought that maybe the trip to Tokyo was made with knowledge that Mum would not live much longer, because there was talk that they wouldn't be able to make it back up to Tokyo, but I don't think they expected death to come quite so soon. When I think about it, with the effort it took for them to get to Tokyo and their knowledge it was probably not going to happen again, the way their kids acted was rotten: I don't buy Noriko's story that this is what to expect, that kids develop their own life and abandon their parents.

Leave Her to Heaven

Another movie watched solely on the basis that someone said the female lead (Gene Tierney) is beautiful - not really my style, however.

She plays Ellen Berent Harland: as she is returning by train to her father's funeral, she spots a young man,

Richard - they talk, she says he reminds her of her father, there's a bit of humour where she says the book she's reading is terribly dull,

he agrees and then it is revealed he is its author and before you know it, she's dumped her fiance (Vincent Price) and is marrying Richard, saying she'd never let him go.

He's a nice enough fellow, loves his disabled brother (Danny), gets on well with Ellen's sister, Ruth, and all could have ended happily. Problem is, Ellen is screwed up, can't handle competition so those who appear to love Richard have to go - there's one cold blooded scene in which she watches Danny drown. When it looks like Richard might like Ruth more than he should (he dedicates his book to her), we're led to think that Ellen is about to poison her, but Ellen is more subtle than that, as well as more damaged.

The movie tended to move fairly slowly through these waters, but then the pace and tension picked up remarkably at the end, with a murder trial. Ellen's former fiance is the prosecutor, and he's like a dog with a bone - going way beyond merely badgering his witnesses - his questions were intense and repetitive (spoilers after the photos):

So, as I said, Ellen's plan was a bit more subtle than just killing Ruth: she killed herself and framed Ruth. She might have got away with it - Ruth confesses to being in love with Richard. If the fiance hadn't been a bit bitter and twisted about losing Ellen to Richard, he might have stopped: instead, he recalled Richard to the stand in order to force him to confess to being in love with Ruth. Only then does the truth spill out.

On a completely unrelated point, I liked the look of the club car of the train:

Bug

I've just joined Fatso, and already have a queue of movies lined up to watch. Because my membership is just $3 for two months, I feel no need to be particularly discriminating in what I watch, which is how I came to watch Bug - someone on the net said Ashley Judd was beautiful in it and that was enough for me. I didn't even know who Ashley Judd was. Maybe if I'd known that the movie is directed by William Friedken and that he also directed the Exorcist, I would have known better what to expect.

In Bug, she plays a bit of a loser - a waitress in some out of the way place,

 

living in a run down motel in an even more out of the way place.

Part of her backstory is that she has a child, who was taken from her a few years back, just stolen from a supermarket trolley. She has a husband who has been locked up for violence and has just come out of jail. While he is a jerk and does beat her up a couple of times, he is the least of her problems.

 Her friend introduces her to Peter, he seems nice, he never once hits her, even protects her from her husband - she gives him a place to stay.

The inevitable happens, and the initial part of their story is sweet - he does seem kind and she's in need of someone, too much so, because when he turns out to be more than a little deranged, she buys into it, totally. His story is one of a grand conspiracy, that he has been part of some Army human testing programme which has seen him injected with some form of bug (an aphid) which allows him to be the subject of central control. There's some pretty articulate statements from him as to how it is done and what they are up to - of course, he is probably nuts and there are no bugs: the point is, she believes him, enters his paranoid world where the Army is out to get him. First the motel room is decorated with bug strips, but ultimately it is lined with tinfoil - it stops the bugs communicating.

The movie is more of a psychological thriller than violent, although there are a couple of disturbing scenes, such as when Peter wrenches out his own teeth, or becomes convinced that a Government agent who comes into the room is a machine. I have to say, the fellow playing Peter (Michael Shannon) was pretty convincing.Ashley Judd was even more so, as she goes from a normal sort of person to someone who totally believes her house is infested with bugs deployed on some sort of Governmental secret mission.

Into the Heart of Borneo by Redmond O'Hanlon

I recently went to Borneo, but nowhere near its heart. In fact the heat got to me so quickly that I even abandoned a trip I had planned to a national park to see some wildlife.

Redmond and his mate, James Fenton, walk, boat and carry a boat right into the centre, to a place which had had no explorers for 50 years (I'm pretty sure there were some local inhabitants). Their destination is a Mt Batu Tiban, which is sort of accessible by going up the Rajang and Baleh Rivers. I don't know how they did it! Its not like they're commandos: they're a reviewer of natural history books and poet respectively. O'Hanlon gets off the plane in Kuching and is sweating withing 15 yards and thinks "a mile would be impossible; five hundred miles an absurdity".

This is the book of their trek, which I read in my comfy seat in the Air Asia plane taking me to Malaysia (Borneo is an island (third largest in the world) to the East of mainland Malaysia, comprised of two Malaysian states (Sarawak and Sabah), Brunei and the Indonesian province of Kalimantan):


The first couple of chapters are about their preparation - lots of reading very quickly:

Powerful as your scholarly instincts may be, there is no matching the strength of that irrational desire to find a means of keeping your head upon your shoulders;... of barring 1700 different species of parasitic worm from your bloodstream and Wagler's pit viper from just about anywhere...

He wanted to wear a wetsuit and steel waders but for obvious reasons could not. Luckily he gets help from the SAS (I like the line from their visit to a SAS training area: "impossibly burly hippies in Levi jeans and trendy sweaters piled out of a truck like fragments of a hand grenade").

There's public transport available from Kuching upriver to Kapit: from then they have to find their own way. The local Iban Tuah Rumah, or headman, agrees to lead the party along with a couple of young Iban guys. Right from the beginning, they show they care, asking "Redmon" if he has been with the women from the hotel, they'll make his spear rot, there's a disease, they don't know the English word but in Iban, its called syphilis.

As they travel, Redmond is frequently consulting his history and natural history books, which give depth to the story. By way of contrast, James reads poetry as they putter upriver, pausing as they go through rapids - very stylish. So, too, are the Ibans when they have something to laugh at:

There was a weird, gurgling, jungle-sound behind us [Redmond has just hooked himself in the rear with a fish hook]. Dana, Leon and Inghai were leaning against the boulders. The Iban, when they decide something is really funny, and know they are going to laugh for a long time, lie down first.
Dana, Leon and Inghai lay down.

If the heat wasn't enough, there was also the insect life that attacked every night and the fact that the only fish to be caught were like "a hair brush caked in lard". The river journey lasts several days - there is only one incident in which one of the party nearly dies - James loses his footing and is swept into a whirlpool, but his crew save him, and are very proud to also save his boater. The writing is a revelation - it gives a very realistic account of the river, the birds and other wildlife they encounter and of the good humour of the men.

At one point, they come across another tribe, the Kayan, and after exchanging formal greetings, its time to party in the longhouse (I hadn't realised how high off the ground they are or that they're accessible only by scrambling up a notched log, one which was muddy and very slippery when Redmond tries it). There are war dances (Redmond tries one and is so good at it his Iban mates need to lie down), singing, dancing, clowns, what read like a fantastic dance performance by the headman's young daughter, story-telling and lots of the local booze, tuak.

But it is not all song and dance - Redmond and James provide medical aid for lots of people and learn there is an extremely high mortality rate - there are many threats to life in the jungle and they're too far from medical help for it to do much good. This is one of the sad aspects of the book, the other is the feeling that this life is coming to an end. Redmond is quite keen to see some particularly rare birds he has pictures of in his book, but he has great trouble finding anyone who has even seen these birds. Saddest of all for me was the visit to the Ukit longhouse - the Ukit are the people who live right in the centre of Borneo, the most nomadic and independent of all, so having a government provided longhouse is something of a contradiction. Its an unfinished sort of place and the younger generation know nothing of their parents' way of life, are quite disparaging of it.

As they get near journey's end, where the Baleh river splits in two, they find themselves in a particularly beautiful spot, an "enclosed, still world of gentle water", "ringed with ochre-coloured shingle, edged with boulders and driftwood". So what do they do in this oasis? They have a cook-off, Masterchef-style - James v Leon. The former cooks something which look like peas but which the Iban dismiss as tasting like rat shit (Redmond finds that they taste like a particular haemorrhoid cream made from the oil of shark fins). Leon's contribution is a fish soup with spaghetti - at least it looks like spaghetti, but are actually "the little snakes that live in the fishes", otherwise known as worms.

The end, when it comes, was curiously anti-climatic. They've had to abandon their boats and climb, even the early slopes were so steep Redmond is reduced to hands and knees, then its up and down through the horribly humid jungle (98%), temperature well over 100 degrees F, James is attacked by a leech (which causes another Iban lie-down). There's three days of this then "suddenly the steep slope levelled: we had reached the top". They look around a bit, did a peasant dance, exchanged hats and "returned to camp at great speed". It is no time at all, one day and a short chapter, and they're back where they started, yet going up had taken more than a week.

Gary Numan in Auckland (21 May 2011)

I have a list of musicians, the idea being that once I have seen them all play in New Zealand, I'll be ready to die. It is a slightly worrying list in that there is only one musician to go (Tom Waits). If it had ever entered my mind that Gary Numan might tour, he'd have been on the list. I still remember the impact he had on me with Are Friends Electric? The combination of a barely moving Gary, the electronic sounds of the synthesizers and the lack of any sort of rock and roll feel came as an extreme novelty (I think my musical diet consisted largely of Dire Straights, Pink Floyd and the Motels at that stage, with the only "edgy" song being Ian Dury's Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick).

So when I heard that he was coming, it was a no-brainer: I bought a ticket as soon as I could. I flew up to Auckland the night before, made a fruitless journey to much touted pizza place Epolitos (who ever heard of a pizza shop selling out, before 8:00 on a Friday night?), spent the day wandering around coffee and food places and finally it was game on.

I was a bit disappointed that I didn't have my camera - I was worried I wouldn't be allowed it, but others were there, snapping away. Mind you, it might have proven to be a distraction. I was also a bit disappointed that it was an all seated venue, but the music had hardly started and people were leaving their seats. By the end of the show, the spaces around the seats were packed with happy dancing people, right up to the back wall. Me: I'd scooted forward early, and was right against the stage.

There was one slightly confusing aspect: Gary was here to play the Pleasure Principle in full. Its not my favourite of his albums (Replicas is), but still that was the game plan. So why were people calling out for other random songs? Mind you, he did play an equal number of songs after he'd finished playing the album. Thanks to the magic of the internet, here is his setlist:

Edit this setlist | More Gary Numan setlists

Some of those songs in the second half were completely unfamiliar to me, and a bit of energy leaked out of the show, but on the whole it was a fantastic experience. The thing that really got me was Gary himself: as I said, when he first emerged, it was as a rather robotic presence, and a lot of white makeup was involved:

If he was wearing any in Auckland, it was not noticeable. And the robot thing? Completely gone! He looked like he was thoroughly enjoying himself on stage, and gave a very physical performance. Here he is at his Adelaide show:

Doesn't show his broad smile but when you're stealing images from the internet, beggars can't be choosers. For more images, there are plenty on this fan page.

 

All in all, it was a brilliant night which I polished off with a dose of Korean Fried Chicken and roast duck before the long walk back to my hotel in Parnell.