August 24 2025, 17:56
Parasite
Director: Bong Joon Ho
Release year: 2019
A family friend grants Ki-woo an opportunity to teach English to the daughter of a rich businessman, Mr Park. Ki-woo’s family is struggling to make ends meet, and they live in a basement flat in the poorest part of town. Once he’s secured the teaching job, Ki-woo and his family manipulate the Parks into hiring Ki-woo’s sister, father and mother, replacing all the existing staff. But the modernist house contains unexpected secrets, and their parasitic peace doesn’t last long.
I didn’t see this when it came out, and I can see why it won the main Oscars in 2020—it’s a masterpiece, and a rare hit film that takes a sledgehammer to the ideals of capitalism. The Park family live in a secluded house built by a famous architect in an exclusive part of Seoul high in the hills. When a storm sweeps through Seoul, the water flows downwards and floods the poor neighbourhoods with sewerage, and the rich don't even notice. Every relationship is transactional to the Park adults, although the younger children are shown as more innocent.
The Kim children are as corrupt as their parents, but no matter how hard they try, they can’t lift their family out of poverty. They are fighting a losing battle when they play by the rules. It’s hard not to cheer for them when they break rules to even the scales.
It all falls apart when they fail to show mercy to others in the same class as them. Once the workers stop helping each other, the rich win. The beautifully stark concrete house has a basement, and in the architect's paranoia, a basement far below that that’s more like a bunker. There are metaphors galore in this film. The wealth stone given to the Kims at the start of the story is one of the film’s best ironies.
August 18 2025, 20:11
Fever Dream
Author: Samanta Schweblin
First published: 2017
~ 25,000 words. First person, Amanda, in conversation with another, David.
An even shorter book than Fatale, Fever Dream is a conversation between Amanda, a mother on holiday in a rural part of Argentina with her young daughter, Nina, and David, troubled son of their neighbour, Carla. In the opening, they talk about worms in the body, and we realise Amanda is in hospital and that David is peppering her with very direct questions about how she got there. He says that her memories are important to everyone, but doesn’t elaborate, and so we are launched into a recounting of a harrowing couple of days in the lives of the four characters, with David leading Amanda on in a disturbingly knowing way.
Amanda is dying, and the fate of her daughter is uncertain. We don’t know if David is real or in her mind. David’s urgency, Amanda’s anxiety about her daughter’s wellbeing, and the ambiguous details that she recalls all add to a remarkably effective sense of increasing dread. I read this in an afternoon on my February writing retreat. It was in the library, the cover was intriguing, it was appealingly short, and I had a couple of hours—I am not exaggerating when I say that I could not stop reading it. I had to know what happened next, even as it ruined my afternoon because it was so intense.
I wanted to read it again to understand how it had that effect on me. There are no chapters. The pace is quick. The descriptions are lyrical but short. The mystery deepens on every page. Amanda and Nina are lovely characters in the wrong place at the wrong time. David’s nature is mysterious, and you don’t know if he is good or evil. You want to know what happens to them all.
And there’s a central question that David keeps asking (“We have to find the exact moment the worms come into being.”). He also wants Amanda to realise “the important thing”. When you put all these elements together, it’s highly addictive. It’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, but the ending makes you work for answers to those questions. It shows how much you can do with very few words. The ambiguous ending is infuriatingly apt,
August 17 2025, 09:53
Caché
Director: Michael Haneke
Release year: 2005
Another French classic from the early noughties that I’m only now getting around to. Georges and Anne, and their son, Pierrot, are living a comfortable middle class life in Paris when a VHS tape is left on their doorstep. The tape shows the outside of their house, with the family coming and going oblivious to the hidden camera. In the coming days, they receive more tapes, wrapped in violent child-like drawings, and Pierrot is sent one of the drawings in school. Increasingly freaked out, Georges suspects someone from his past, and tries to clear things up once and for all.
Haneke puts the bullish Georges in spaces where anyone else might feel threatened, and between the foreshadowing of the tapes’ content, Georges following the trail of clues, and the camera lingering over his shoulder and on possible antagonist faces, the suspense is palpable. The heart of the film emerges in Majid, who we learn was sent away to an orphanage when Majid’s Algerian parents, who worked on Georges’s parents’ estate, were killed in a 1961 massacre by the French National Police. Georges is convinced Majid wants revenge. Majid denies it, and we believe him, but unable to think of who else would send the tapes, Georges doubles down, eventually getting Majid and his son arrested.
Georges’s personal shame at his actions as a six-year-old is repressed so thoroughly that he cannot acknowledge the injustice he inflicted on Majid, and instead it makes him lash out and make things much worse. Haneke shows news footage in the background of many shots, and he seems to be saying Georges is a mirror of affluent French society, where the consequences of not acknowledging the horrors inflicted by their country’s power structures, especially on immigrants, leads to simmering resentments and social unrest.
We see a version of this in the UK now with Brexit, the scapegoating of immigrants, and Far Right groups rioting outside immigrant accommodation. Narratives of colonialism and British exceptionalism are still everywhere in right wing media, sickly nostalgic ideas kept alive by billionaires for profit.
Like Irréversible is famous for its violence, Caché (hidden, in English) is famous for the ambiguity of its ending. Certainly on first viewing, it isn’t clear who is making the tapes, and the final scene as the credits roll makes some suggestions, but the favourite take I read was that the hidden camera was God judging Georges for lack of empathy and remorse for his crimes. Psychologically, it could also be Georges’s own conscience, or unconscious, forcing him to face up to his past. Both work for me.
August 14 2025, 21:32
Irréversible
Director: Gaspar Noé
Release year: 2002
It’s been a couple of days since I watched this, but I needed time to let my thoughts percolate. Irréversible is infamous for the extended and brutally violent rape scene at its centre. The shock of it overwhelmed the critical thinking part of my brain, and it’s rare that I finish a film completely confused. Was it good, bad, clever, disgusting, homophobic, misogynistic, racist, or all of these things? What was Noé trying to achieve? I had to do some reading to help me work out what I thought.
I don’t think the plot of this movie can be spoiled. Noé’s trick is to play the scenes in reverse order, so we see the ending at the start. Its power comes from making the audience see the results of the choices made by the characters before knowing the reasons. The opening/finale is shown with a swirling camera that goes upside down, on its side, making us feel nauseous, while a rumbling drone constantly assaults our ears. We follow Marcus and Pierre into a version of hell. Marcus has lost his mind, but we don’t know why, and the violence he provokes is shocking. We are presented it all without context.
From here, we retreat through the evening. A couple, Alex and Marcus, go to a party with her ex-boyfriend Pierre. When Marcus takes cocaine and becomes aggressive, Alex leaves to go home, and in an underpass she is raped and beaten. Marcus wants revenge and sets out to find the rapist, finding the man in a gay sex club. Marcus gets into a fight, and in protecting Marcus from being raped, Pierre beats the man to death with a fire extinguisher. The police take them both away, but Alex’s rapist escapes justice.
Alex is an intelligent, independent woman, who bristles at Marcus’s view of her as somehow his property. She is surrounded by men who let her down through the evening. When she leaves the party, neither Marcus nor Pierre go with her. The police talk to Marcus and Pierre as if they are the victims of the crime. When Alex is taken to the hospital, instead of going in the ambulance, Marcus is tempted by local gangsters into seeking revenge, and Pierre goes with him. These are selfish decisions that leave Alex vulnerable and alone.
The further into the film we go, the closer we get to who Alex is, and the pace slows, there is more intimacy and tenderness, and the weight of what has happened to a woman with everything to live for hits home.
August 12 2025, 18:25
Summer experiments
It’s twenty-nine degrees outside, and I’ve drawn the blinds, turned on the fan, and hunkered down until my swimming lesson at seven. My family return at the weekend, and I’m excited to see them. Tomorrow I’m taking a last-minute day trip to Edinburgh, and I’ve bought tickets to hear A.L. Kennedy talk about her new book at the Edinburgh Book Festival.
I’ve seen her in person once before, thirty years ago at the Dylan Thomas Centre in Swansea, when I was twenty-two. Back then, I was overwhelmed by the power of her work, partly because I knew she wasn’t much older than me, so she represented literary possibilities. I’d booked the train ticket for tomorrow before I knew she was speaking. It’s a serendipitous closing of a circle.
Last week I spent two days in London, being a tourist at Borough Market, the Tate Modern, the BFI South Bank, Foyles on Charing Cross Road, and Coal Drops Yard near Kings Cross. Before that, I went to Salt’s Mill, Saltaire. As a karmic down payment, the first weekend alone I spent sanding and oiling the kitchen worktops, and I wined and dined my mother-in-law. It worked.
I’ve had two weeks to myself. It’s been a joy. I can’t wait to see everyone and hear their stories, but I’ve really used my time well. Most importantly, between the jobs and adventures, I’ve made real effort to build habits to take into the autumn when I’ll be back in work with everyone around me firing on all cylinders.
Stretching and strengthening. Learning to swim. Learning to play guitar. Writing every day. Reading every day. Meditating every day. Eating well (most days). I’ve done these things regularly for a fortnight.
I was partially doing them around my 9—5. Is it possible to work full-time and keep them all going? I’m back in work for a week, then off again for the bank holiday week, so I’ve got a chance to experiment then regroup to process the results.
August 11 2025, 20:12
Fatale
Author: Jean-Patrick Manchette
First published: 1977
~ 30,000 words. Third person, limited/omniscient, Aimée.
My copy of Fatale has a foreword by David Peace that includes extended quotes from Manchette’s essays and letters expressing frustrations at the reactions of both publishers and critics to the novel, which was a departure for him, and expounding on his communist politics. It’s an intimidating introduction to what is ultimately a lean, bordering on sparse, crime thriller.
In the opening chapter, we meet a group of aging, well-todo huntsmen in the French woods, one of whom is gunned down by a woman he greets with warmth and good humour. The prose style is clean, sharp and rich with details, but it doesn’t linger, so the whole scene is done with in two pages. In the second chapter the woman gets a train to Bléville, and we learn she changes her identity in each town she visits, and she has robbed a great deal of money, so on arrival she becomes Aimée Joubert and immediately sets about learning about the people who live there.
Aimée quickly works her way into the circles of the town’s powerful, playing bridge with them, going to functions, all the while making notes and looking for a way to get at their money. She is constantly listening for secrets and working out where the skeletons are buried. When a despised outsider, Baron Jules, seems to offer Aimée the perfect plan, his wayward behaviour is something she comes to admire, and the plan begins to go awry.
Manchette’s politics is woven subtly into the story, and if you didn’t know them you might not even spot the signs, which was perhaps his intention. It’s class warfare I crime fiction form. Aimée’s raison d’etre is to extort from and murder the corrupt in France’s small towns and steal their money. She is a lethal force, trained in martial arts and weapon skills, and she makes quick work of those who stand in her way.
Her backstory adds some flavour, but at heart she is the rejected and suppressed in society returning for revenge. Perhaps the revolution Manchette hoped for will start through small acts of rebellion and violence by victims of the patriarchy. Aimée is ruthless and amoral, but clearly the heroine when compared with the contemptible mayors, industrialists and corrupt police of Bléville. Manchette has written the communist version of Michael Winner’s Death Wish.
August 09 2025, 19:52
The Girl on a Motorcycle
Director: Jack Cardiff
Release year: 1968
I’m pleased with myself for seeing one of these #ArthouseSummer films in the cinema. The BFI South Bank is an amazing space, and it’s been several years since I’ve visited, so I’d forgotten how they have red curtains in NFT2 and how uncomfortable the seats are. Also, the weirdos.
A guy made a beeline for me in the foyer, an older fella getting far to close to me, and I had to do an unexpected pause and side step to get away from him. He then sat next to me in the film. My seat was booked hours earlier, but I can’t believe it was a coincidence, he must have crashed someone else’s seat. He struck up a conversation.
‘What brings you here to watch this film?’
I was confused. His emphasis was provocative. ‘Well, I’m writing some blog posts on arthouse films...’
‘You think this is an arthouse film?’
‘I haven’t seen it yet. I don’t know. I hope so.’
‘What are you writing?’
He didn’t seem to understand what a blog was, or pretended not to. ‘Posts on the internet.’
‘Well, whatever, you follow your dreams.’ The derision was floating around him in a cloud. ‘But it’s not good. It’s certainly not arthouse. It’s a piece of crap.’
‘I hope that’s not true. Look, please don’t spoil...’
‘And have you met her?’ He pointed towards the front of the cinema.
‘I don’t know who you’re pointing at...’ The penny dropped. ‘Marianne Faithfull? No, of course not. Have you?’ I knew the answer before I’d finished asking.
‘Yes. She was awful.’
At this point I exploded. ‘Are you going to spoil this for me? I’ve asked you not to. Are you going to be trouble? Because if you are I’ll have to move.’ I could sense the people around me listening to all this, but I was furious.
‘Okay, if you don’t want to talk, I’ll leave you alone.’ He pulled a large black backpack off the floor, heaved it onto the empty seat to his left, pulled out a large bag of sweets and started rustling them loudly.
Reader, I left the cinema. At the entrance, I spoke to the usher and he said just to sit anywhere once the film started, so I zipped down the front when he closed the rear doors and got an aisle seat, which was perfect. (I should say something about the film!)
Newly married Rebecca is given a motorbike as a wedding present by her sadistic lover, Daniel. Her husband, Raymond, allows her to keep it, and one morning she secretly sets off from their French home across the German border to visit Daniel in Heidelberg. We discover her story as part of her journey.
If I’d seen the film at home, I don’t think I’d have finished it, but there was something about it on the big screen that made it sing. It’s cheesy, the dialogue is often clunky, and Marianne Faithful gives an over-the-top performance, but damn it if I didn’t have a really good time. They showed the Alex Cox Moviedrome introduction to the film, and he’s pretty dismissive and snide about it, but I think he misses the swings director Jack Cardiff is going for.
It might be overgenerous to say the film is deliberately funny, but it’s definitely knowing in some of its humour, and it wrestles with ideas of marriage, monogamy, marrying young, what it means to be free, free love, types of masculinity, and indeed femininity... and it’s playful.
It’s not erotic, which was part of its marketing/mystique, because whenever there is sex, the screen pulsates with neon pinks and greens. It’s an experimental film, for sure, and the narrative unfolds in flashbacks and dream sequences to clever effect. It’s incredible, based on its current reputation as a bad cult film, that A Girl on a Motorcycle was the sixth most popular film on general release in 1968. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s far more ambitious than most things that get made today.
August 06 2025, 21:59
Irma Vep
Director: Olivier Assayas
Release year: 1996
Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung arrives in Paris to take the lead in a remake of a classic silent film, Les Vampires. The cast and crew are friendly, but Maggie is an outsider, and the group's conflicts and histories become increasingly pronounced as director René begins to realise the film is not working. Costume designer Zoé has a crush on Maggie, leading to further complications.
I thoroughly enjoyed this. Sometimes a film hits you just right. The camera weaves between the people working on the film set so that it feels like we are eavesdropping. Each character has some sort of grievance or flaw that plays out through the story. Maggie Cheung, playing herself, navigates with charm the petty politics and negative opinions of the film (and French cinema in general!), staying ever the professional as things falls apart around her.
René’s film is based on an infatuation with the idea of Maggie Cheung in a catsuit. That’s his entire energy for the film, and once she arrives and he gets what he wants, because the script isn’t good enough to sustain the idea, he has a nervous breakdown. As an actress, Maggie needs to understand what her director wants from her. Distraught at the creative failure of the film and not being able to help, Maggie wears the latex catsuit to sneak around her hotel, as if she is Irma Vep, her role in René’s vision. She steals a necklace—but was it a dream?
Unwilling to be replaced on the film, René makes a cut from the footage for the new director which is completely unhinged and wonderful. Perhaps Assayas is saying that French cinema has the possibility of being more adventurous, for all the film’s talk of it being stuck in the past. This was made in 1996, almost thirty years ago. It makes me want to find out what happened.
August 04 2025, 19:48
Players
Author: Don DeLillo
First published: 1977
210 pages, two acts, 10 chapters, ~60,000 words.
I disliked this book at first. Two voices, Lyle and Pammy, intertwine in the opening chapters, where he is a trader on Wall Street and she works in marketing for a grief counselling service run from the World Trade Center. They’ve become friends with Ethan, an older man Pammy works with, and his much younger partner, Jake. My initial take was that these were people who didn’t talk about anything meaningful, hiding behind banalities, especially Lyle and Sammy who have their own relationship speaking style that quickly grated on me.
The first half of the story sees Lyle begin to investigate a minor terrorist attack on his trading floor, leaving Pammy to spend more time with Ethan and Jake. Lyle is a sucker for patterns and, we start to realise, doesn’t feel like other people, or particularly empathise with them. He hooks up with a new secretary on the trading floor to find out how the attack happened, who did it, and how he can thwart them next time, although that veneer of respectability becomes doubtful as the story unfolds.
Pammy, on the other hand, looks for a connection with Jake when he reveals to her he’s not really gay, but that gambit backfires spectacularly. Jake is the character with the clearest sense of his feelings, but his vulnerability is his downfall, and Pammy retreats to her apartment and relationship with Lyle for safety. But Lyle doesn't seem to have Pammy’s sense of the limits of what she will do. Lyle and Pammy are reliant on each other, but in going so strongly in different directions, it’s implied they break apart. Lyle seems to be truly lost in the web of conspiracy theories and lies he finds so fascinating. At least Pammy is looking for life in the right places.
Players reminds me of a book I read earlier this year, Martin Amis’s Success, with its two half brothers alternating chapters and gradually growing catastrophically (for one of them) apart. That was a hard book to like on first reading, but it grew on me as I gave it more attention. It’s the same with Players. DeLillo’s sentences are exquisite, but he makes you work for the meaning behind them.
August 03 2025, 16:44
Le Samouraï
Director: Jean-Pierre Melville
Release year: 1967
Hitman Jef Costello takes a contract to kill a nightclub owner, but he is seen leaving the premises by several employees. Despite having a watertight alibi, the police superintendent doesn’t believe Costello and puts him under surveillance. Meanwhile, Costello’s employer is unhappy with the police involvement and the hitman has to find a way to get both parties off his back.
This feels like a seventies film, so it’s amazing to me that it was made in 1967, four years ahead of The French Connection, seven years before The Conversation, both of which take chunks of Le Samouraï’s DNA. Thinking about it, many films flow from here, including Ghost Dog, The American, Drive, The Killer... but then, Melville was heavily influenced by the gangster and noir films put out by Hollywood in the 40s and 50s, so it all goes around.
Alain Delon hardly moves his (beautiful) face, and the lack of emotion is deliberate, but it makes Costello a hard character to care about. The final scene is set up by a subtle display of remorse, but it wasn’t enough for me to feel much for him. Like Tati’s PlayTime, it is flawless in what it sets out to do, but doesn’t let you close to anyone. It’s technically perfect, but too cold for me to love.