One Battle After Another

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Director Paul Thomas Anderson with Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn

Or “One Damn’ Thing After Another” as I thought of it as I was bombarded with quickfire scenes and dialogue, leaving no time for reflection. I’m far too old for something so chaotic, crude and shouty! (But the car chase was absolutely brilliant.) The only times it slowed down, as far as I recall, was to spotlight the malevolence of the powerful white supremacist cell, and a slightly jarring (given the circumstances) genuflection to motherhood at the end. Had I not read years ago the Pynchon novel on which it is loosely based, I would have been floundering a bit.

It’s about a father searching for his daughter against a background of underground agents: revolutionary anti-capitalists, resistance groups on the side of the oppressed, and chilling white supremacists in positions of power that they don’t intend to give up. Once past the cartoonish aspects (e.g. Sean Penn channelling every Sellars character from Dr Strangelove), there is a punchy – if incoherent – resistance to the current Trumpian agenda and actions.

It’s left me with a desire to see The Battle of Algiers again and vague comparisons with a couple of old programmes about state power I’ve recently watched on BBC iPlayer. One is Edge of Darkness – father and daughter again – and the other is David Hare’s play, Absence of War. Unsurprising, both are far more to my taste – but what, more objectively, I note is the way in which atmosphere is built and complex ideas are presented through dialogue and explanation (some of it admittedly clunky) rather than hurling images, vibes and one-liners in the direction of the audience.

Grange to Levens

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As I listened to the heavy rain last night, I wondered if my plan of walking over two limestone (slippery when wet) outcrops from Grange to Kendal was a sensible one. But I’d set my alarm, checked the bus timetable and had my sandwiches, so I wasn’t going to be put off.

At Grange-over-Sands I checked the poetry post – again while en route for a bakewell slice – and decided to let that be my guide. So my route skirted the foot of Whitbarrow Scar and avoided Scout Scar completely by turning south at Levens through Brigsteer Woods. A good, circumspect walk: “not fast, not slow, but sure”.

Saltaire

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Leeds, Shipley, Saltaire, a walk around Shipley Glen and along the Aire and the canal – then back to Saltaire, Shipley, Leeds. A lovely day, and I discovered the Shipley tramway. It was so short a line that I couldn’t imagine its purpose. I have since discovered that it is a funicular tramway built simply, in bygone times, to take people to funfair attractions at the top of the hill.

The Long Day Closes (1992)

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Director Terence Davies

I have certainly watched a variety of films over the last fortnight. This was definitely my favourite. It swept me up, whereas The Green Ray and Radio On engaged only my curiosity and my brain. I don’t know how autobiographical it is: scenes of a boy’s life in 1950’s Liverpool, his loving family, the magic of the cinema, the brutality of his new school and the guilt-inducing teachings of the Roman Catholic faith – particularly for a boy attracted to his own sex. Memories are heightened: the rain always lashes down, women’s lipsticks are as red as can be, everyone has a good singing voice, his mother is the epitome of lovingness, the wonderful dream-like tableau of his family at Christmas straight out of Hollywood. The nit nurse is witch-like (rather as Miss Gulch turned into the Wicked Witch of the West) and the teachers are Dickens’s caricatures. Via the film, the ex-child shows how the long day – his carefree happiness? – closed with his new school, growing up, his former playmates running off to the cinema without calling for him; refusing to run after them, he retreats to the coal cellar, the shadow of the area railings and loneliness.

Go to the dreamless bed
Where grief reposes;
Thy book of toil is read,
The long day closes.

The soundtrack is every bit as significant as Radio On. The opening credits are like a lush Hollywood biopic, written in copperplate so elegant that it’s almost unreadable. The music is, I think (I could check), that which The Ladykillers appear to play as they plan their crime, and the opening scene is very much like that street . . . and, yes, here is Alec Guinness’s voice enquiring about a room. You read the screen images as carefully as any religious painting. Thresholds, front doors, narrow staircases are as significant as St Lucy’s eyes on a plate. When he’s standing in the lashing rain outside the cinema asking an adult to take him in – shades of Gene Kelly about to start singing in the rain?

Strange how the sentimental scenes in Dead of Winter left me cold but in this film I basked in their warmth. Perhaps because they left space for/contrasted with other emotions – and perhaps because I suddenly recalled that my father used to sing when I was a child. Even now I can hear him singing “The voice in the old village choir” (“accompanied” by me as the bells’ dongs) – now there’s a whole meta-chain of nostalgia!

Radio On (1979)

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Director Christopher Petit with David Beames

I thought about “radio off” partway through, but I persevered. It’s got to be a cult film for a reason, I reasoned. An English road movie – all the way from London to Bristol! – with a great soundtrack.

An odd, disaffected film that made me think of J G Ballard and Michelangelo Antonioni. Was there a plot? It was partly financed by the German film industry, and it shared that bleakness and gloom that put me off German films forty years ago. 1979 rushed back to me, but this time I experienced it from the eyrie of age. What happened to all that postwar optimism and rebuilding? How did it turn into this alienating, emotionally stunted world, shot in inky B&W, stripped bare – not of luxuries (for simplicity would be preferable), but of essentials? Where is friendliness, love, interaction, nature, warmth, beauty? It was all concrete and tarmac rather than softness, hostility rather than kindliness, hard core pornography rather than love, screens rather than real life. Potential emotional cores – his brother’s suicide, the German woman looking for her little daughter – were perfunctory. (The little girl now spoke a different language to her mother: intimacy was always fragile.) The acting was minimal, devoid of feeling unless it was anger or irritation. What was the point of it all? What was the director trying to convey? Anything at all? Was it just self-referentially “cinematic”?

I’m still not sure about that, but it definitely had the feel of its time. The camera lingered on things that I had gazed at myself: peeling paint, pylons, petrol pumps. I had forgotten how big women’s hair was in the late 70s and how voluminous their clothes until the two German women appeared. The feel of driving a car – something I did only at that period of my life – or just travelling in a car came back to me with all those shots through the windscreen. The underlying violence of the period – Northern Ireland always in the news, terrorism on the Continent. A film of impressions.