Waste Land

2010 was a strong year for documentary filmmaking, as evidenced by the list of contenders for the Oscar. Lucy Walker’s Waste Land made the shortlist but missed out to Inside Job. But, in a manner quite different to that or the aghast Retrepo, Waste Land offers a more hopeful view of humanity, whilst not shying away from potentially difficult subject matter. This magnificent piece of work revels in the endurance of the human spirit.

The film shows us Brazilian visual artist Vik Muniz and his project to create portraits of the people who work on the world’s largest landfill site, Jardim Gramacho, in Rio de Janeiro. Muniz himself is famous for creating images using found, organic or recyclable materials, but this was his largest undertaking, with all of his profits from the sale of the final pieces returning to the dump.

Jardim de Gramacho is a vast place ransacked by carrion birds, where 70% of Rio’s household waste ends up. The pickers, or catadores, who work there earn a meagre living by collecting all of the recyclable material found and selling it to wholesale recyclers. Some of them were born there in the incredibly abhorrent conditions, where dead bodies crop up regularly, and others were from lower-middle class families who fell on hard times. What is truly remarkable about the film is not just that things have been allowed to get to such a point, but that these people actually manage to live in such an forbidding place and stay positive at the same time.

The film highlights the class problems in Brazilian society and shows how the poor catadores are drawn in by the ‘other’ world of Muniz and his crew, with potentially harmful consequences. The film answers the question of exploitation head-on, by a discussion between the artist and his wife, where he claims he is trying to open their eyes to the rest of the world for self-betterment purposes. The fact he came from a poor lower-middle class family is oft stated.

Whether or not you believe him, he did donate $250,000 to Jardim Gramacho and the subjects do seem the better for his help. It does not harp on about the environment and works better by being a human study. Depressing, eye-opening and uplifting all at once, this is an interesting film about a neglected corner of society. See it if you can.

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call, New Orleans

It took Werner Herzog many years to finally make a Hollywood picture with Rescue Dawn, a surprisingly straightforward adaptation of an earlier documentary of his. Therefore, it was something of a shock when he decided to make a reimagining of Abel Ferrara’s 1992 cult classic, Bad Lieutenant. But like any other Herzog fan, I have grown accustomed to expecting the unexpected. The only things you know you’ll get from his films are echoes of his overtly nihilistic worldview and preoccupation with madness and unreason. After watching his version of Bad Lieutenant, I can safely say I was in no way disappointed.

I haven’t seen the original and so am entirely unqualified to talk about similarities and differences from it; but I can say that Nicolas Cage’s Terence McDonagh is a drug-addict cop, and that’s about where the similarities most likely end. Where the original was centred on the rape of a nun, the case in Herzog’s is the murder of a family of Senegalese immigrants. Just from that detail, it is clear how Herzog’s fiercely atheistic views of the world and chaos don’t allow a Ferrara-style examination of evil and his film is preoccupied with something wholly different.

McDonagh’s problems with chronic back pain, which stemmed from a strangely heroic act in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, are the root of his drug problem, though it is clear that he was unhinged beforehand. As the movie progresses and he rapidly loses his mind, his troubles continue to mount up. Gambling debts and the travails of his druggie prostitute girlfriend Frankie, a wooden but stunning Eva Mendes  (is she anything else?), are as important to him as the case itself. In a meandering, inimitable and episodic way, the movie builds towards its conclusion, making light of the noir crime genre.

Werner Herzog

It is punctuated by surreal scenes of alligators, iguanas and various other reptiles, which highlight McDonagh’s weakening grasp on reality. These are darkly comic, as are many of the other exchanges, and remind the viewer of the humour that lay at the heart of much of the Surrealists early 20^th century work. Cage himself revels in the role, unleashing a trademark performance, which none of his peers could hope to emulate. Or his fellow actors in this film can match. Let’s now hope that his Wicker Man/National Treasure days are over and this and Kick Ass represent a return to form.

Although not quite a classic, the film’s oddity and genuine comedy make it well worth seeing. You just can’t help feeling a bit sad about the quality of some of the acting, though. That said, the trippy scenes are a very welcome addition to the noir genre and no other living filmmaker could have made the film; for that I urge you to seek it out.


Bring on The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Submarine

The coming-of-age comedy-drama is a well-worn genre with little room for manoeuvre. Popular enough to be parodied over and over again, it has enjoyed something of a renaissance in the last few years after its 70s/80s/90s heyday. Recent films such as Adventureland and The Wackness are, in my opinion, just as good as classics such as Breaking Away and Dazed and Confused. And now, hot on their heels comes Submarine, Richard Ayoade’s heinously-assured directorial debut; a film that somehow manages to find something fresh to say about adolescence in such a clearly defined and populated medium. It is an outstanding piece of filmmaking.

I have to admit to being a shameless fan of the coming-of-age drama, having grown up with a diet of it and N64; nonetheless I would wager everyone would find something to love about this film. Many people will (sadly) know Richard Ayoade as Moss from the I.T. Crowd: an old-fashioned, largely unfunny sitcom. But he first came to my attention as Dean Lerner in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, an incredibly judged and realized spoof of 80s horror/hospital TV, which he also co-wrote and directed. In many ways it is the antithesis of the I.T. Crowd’s canned-laughter shtick, showcasing Ayoade’s unique brand of deadpan humour and love of genre. If you haven’t already seen it – find it; it’s genius. The former President of the Cambridge Footlights is also a music video director of repute, making some idiosyncratic gems for the Arctic Monkeys and Vampire Weekend. It was in these videos that Ayoade’s love of French cinema and Wes Anderson-esque mise en scène was first displayed.

And these influences are clearly felt in Submarine, adapted from the novel of the same name by Joe Dunthorne. In it, hopeless romantic and intellectual teen Oliver Tate (brilliantly played by Craig Roberts) tries to win the heart of classmate Jordanna  (a sterling Yasmin Paige), whilst simultaneously trying to save his parents’ ailing marriage, which is being threatened by the father’s depression and a former flame of the mother (a mulleted Paddy Considin). The parents are wonderfully played by the omnipresent and excellent Sally Hawkins and a glum-looking, bearded and no less good Noah Taylor.

Richard Ayoade on set

The simple enough and familiar story is imbued with real style and verve by the use of nouvelle vague-like techniques such as zoom outs, freeze-frames, jump cuts and more. Far from being tricksy and unnecessary, they add to the rye way that both the protagonist and director see the world. Inevitably, the script crackles with intelligence and humour, too. Like all good coming-of-age films, Submarine makes you hanker after youth and falling in love, taking you through the gamut of human emotions – with added wanking gags.

What is so refreshing about the movie is that the obvious inspirations are converted and used for something more, making the film very much a Richard Ayoade picture. The acting, often a stumbling block for some lower budget Brit flicks, is uniquely perfect as well. Where Ayoade goes from here – an instant classic, the way I see it – is anyone’s guess. I just hope his next film is half as good. Go and see it. Now.

The Illusioniste (L’Illusionniste)

As a massive fan of Sylvain Chomet’s last feature-length film, Belleville Rendez-Vous (Les Triplettes de Belleville outside the U.K.), it may come as some surprise to hear that it’s taken me so long to get round o seeing his latest, The Illusionist. Oscar-nominated and lauded by just about every critic in the land, I was expecting pretty great things; luckily, get them I did.

Originally conceived by French silent-film legend, Jacques Tati, in 1956, the script had lain untouched for half a century. Somewhat mired in controversy, it has been reported that the screenplay was created as a way of reconnecting with the star’s daughter, whom he had abandoned as a baby. Whether or not that is factually accurate, we do see the famous physique of Tati brought magnificently to life by the hand-drawn animation, in which the main character, M. Taticheff, is essentially the great man himself. With almost no dialogue, the movie is a clever adaptation of the original concept.

Jacques Tati

Taticheff is an elderly variety magician, or illusionist, struggling to find an audience and make ends meet. In his search for a job, he leaves Paris and goes to London, where he finds the audiences equally unreceptive. Most young people are more interested in the effete British pop group, Billy Boy and the Britoons, whose pre-Beatles swagger is reminiscent of Cliff Richard and The Shadows. Conjuring and sleight of hand are passé. After a more successful gig in the British countryside, the illusionist is invited to perform at an isolated pub in the Scottish Highlands, where he meets an unnamed young girl. She is immediately drawn in by his old-school charm and magic, eventually following him back to Edinburgh, where they share an apartment together.

Entirely free of any sinister overtones one might expect from such a situation, Taticheff takes the girl under his wing in a fatherly or avuncular way, buying her a new pair of shoes and offering protection. While in the Scottish capital, the man begins to be disillusioned with his life, profession and lack of success, whereas the girl is more in her element. Smeared with an over overarching feeling of melancholy and nostalgia, brought vividly to life in the precise period detail, the movie has a wistful longing for a disappearing world that may just be completely gone.

Innocent, plaintive and weirdly joyous, The Illusionist is a unique artefact in today’s Pixar-dominated environment. And it is actually all the better for that, as some of the swooping aerial shots of Edinburgh are among the most gorgeous I have ever seen. But it is slow-moving and short at only eighty minutes. Less dark yet more heart-breaking than Belleville Rendez-Vous, it is a worthy companion piece. I strongly advise anyone who likes grown-up animation to find the DVD. It’s incredible.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Cinema has always had a strong link to fantasy and worlds other than our own; that much has been clear ever since Georges Méliès’ 1902 classic, Le Voyage dans la lune. Visionary Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul clearly appreciates the big screen’s magical capabilities and his catchily-titled and controversial Palme d’Or winner, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, is the perfect expression of this branch of his art.

The film tells the story of Boonmee, an elderly Thai man living on a farm in the jungle-bound North East of his homeland, gravely affected by liver disease. Visited by his sister-in-law, Jen, and young cousin, Thong, it soon becomes evident that the old man will not last much longer. One night, while dining with his family, the ghost of his ex-wife – some fourteen years dead – appears at the table, along with his long-lost son, who is now half man, half monkey. This bizarre sequence, related with none of Hollywood’s wide-eyed wonder, just phlegmatic acceptance, sets the tenor for the rest of the film.

Later Boonmee asks his wife about death and being a ghost, and tells her that he can remember all of his past lives. Through the film’s dream-like narrative, we see a number of odd scenes, such as a flashback involving an ugly ancient princess having sex with a catfish (a first for me too) and more blending of the quotidian and the fantastic. It would be pointless to sum up any more, other than to say that the film meanders towards its inevitable – and surprisingly moving – conclusion in a non-linear and beguiling way.

Speaking as its protagonist does of karma, an obvious theme of this mysterious movie is Bhuddism. For reincarnation and the titular past lives cast a long shadow over the action, where past, present and future lives merge seamlessly into one. Incidentally, the mixture of the everyday and the supernatural, while obviously related to Thai folklore, reminded me a lot of García Márquez and magic realism, and especially Juan Rulfo’s masterpiece, Pedro Páramo, where ghosts co-exist with the living and death is not regarded as the end. Though it must be said that this non-Western perspective is slightly different in Boonmee.

Concrete reality is alluded to on several occasions with the mention of the murder of communists and in a strange, nightmarish vision of the future that Boonmee has. But for the most part it is a surreal, slow-moving and enchanting fantasy about layers of reality and different ways of seeing things. It is surprising, confusing and probably not for everyone. So strange was the experience that I was not initially sure what to think. Yet I would certainly recommend it to anyone who yearns for something a bit different. Have a watch – I’ll certainly be seeing it again.

Remainder

Given the hoo-ha surrounding Tom McCarthy narrowly missing out on the Man Booker Prize this year, it is safe to say that his literary celebrity is now confirmed. I haven’t read C but I have read Remainder, a book considered by many to be better. Declaimed as “One of the great English novels of the past ten years” by Zadie Smith in a 2008 New York Review of Books essay, it is an interesting, idiosyncratic read. As for greatness: time will be the judge.

It tells the story of an unnamed man who is the unfortunate victim of an unknown accident, about which all he knows is that it was: “something falling from the sky.” Hospitalized and in a coma for a number of months, the protagonist (or “enactor” as Smith labels him) is forced to relearn how to use his body and to recover the function of his right-hand side. This process causes him to feel inauthentic: as if his actions were somehow second-hand or acted. In exchange for his silence, the victim is paid eight-and-a-half million pounds by an unnamed, Kafkaesque organization. Unsure of how to spend the money and dizzied by déjà-vu, the man remembers vague scenes from his life, which he decides to have meticulously reconstructed and acted out by an army of people he employs with his new-found riches. Only inside these sets can he feel real: a sensation which physically manifests as tingling in his right side. As time passes, his re-enactment fetish becomes an obsession, and the events he chooses to re-enact more and more perilous, unhinged.

Praised for its “imaginative brilliance” by The Telegraph, the book owes an obvious debt to Samuel Beckett in its laconic, anti-lyric style and its plot reminded me of 2008 film Synecdoche, New York and the J.G. Ballard’s classic, Crash. McCarthy himself has mentioned Flaubert’s “Bouvard and Pécuchet, in which two Quixotic figures re-enact gestures from book illustrations in vain bids for imagined authenticity” – so the “imaginative brilliance” isn’t quite as absolute as suspected. It is a really great idea, though, and one that raises interesting questions that are at once philosophical and about the novel itself. Failed transcendence is a favourite theme of the author.

One thing that I will say is that the repetitive style – where whole phrases or details are repeated many times – is trying after a hundred-or-so pages. One yearns for more detail, more information and the meticulous descriptions of texture and the enactments kills some of the momentum built up in the book’s first part. This is partly a legacy of the Francophile McCarthy’s love of Robbe-Grillet and the avant-garde and partly an accurate reflection of the trauma-trashed brain of the protagonist: a necessary evil. Style is not really the point, anyway.

McCarthy has said his job as an avant-garde writer is to “navigate the wreckage of [the modernist] project”, and for that, in today’s anodyne literary environment, he must be applauded. The book is brilliantly controlled and bursting with ideas and questions quite different to those found in much middlebrow (or even highbrow) fiction today. Just don’t believe he is as original as some people say – or some of the hyperbole spoken about this book; provocateurs get extreme reactions. Have a read and make your own mind up.

Inside Job

Documentaries are always going to provoke extreme opinions. A least with me, anyway. Whether exposing an unacceptable evil like Taxi to the Dark Side or showing an eye-opening, seldom-seen world like The Blue Planet, they will usually provoke debate. And the Oscar-winning Inside Job certainly did that. I just wasn’t sure whether it was always the right sort of talk.

Directed by Charles H. Ferguson and narrated by Matt Damon, the documentary sets out to tell the story behind the western banking crisis of 2007 and the global recession that followed. Through interviews conducted with leading American financial figures, academics and other notables, it gives a first-hand account of first the Icelandic banks collapse and the domino effect that followed. The fall-out and effects are well-known, the causes ­– not so much.

Let’s get some things straight: I have never studied economics, nor do I know very much about economics, banking or even finance. And although I know that hating bankers and Wall Street or The City is very much in vogue at the moment, I tried to approach the movie with an open mind. Even so, despite not have fully comprehended every technical detail, Ferguson’s argument – his whining and irreverent, geek-Paxman questioning style aside – does seem very persuasive. You can certainly not take fault with the clarity of expression. The argument that in the past nations manufactured things to get money rather than making it from nothing (or money itself) is especially true for countries like the U.K.

However, what really prompts incredulity throughout Inside Job is not just the recklessness of banking practice, but also the seeming impunity that everyone implicated in the crash was given after the event. As of yet, there have been no criminal convictions, even though there is evidence of foul play, hookers and coke. Indeed, given the evidence that Ferguson presents, it is as much an academic problem as anything else in the U.S. For the inside job of the title refers to the Harvard and Columbia academics paid to write papers condoning the banks actions and sit on their boards, as much as it does Obama’s shameful re-appoint of leading figures such as Larry Summers.

Where the documentary does fall down somewhat is in the number of people whom are interviewed. Because the no-show of many leading figures is as hurtful to the doc as it is their already-tarnished reputations. Also, as I have said, the interviewer’s style is both annoying and unnecessary, though he is really only saying what we are thinking.

So, despite an occasionally unbearable amount of I-told-you-so self-satisfaction, the documentary is an enlightening and well-crafted one, on a necessary theme. Incidentally, I don’t think it should have won the Oscar (Restrepo should have), but I would recommend it to anyone. You will finish it indignant; and that’s a good thing.

The Invention of Morel (La invención de Morel)

 

Fantastic fiction is not always the most celebrated or fashionable genre; the fact that so much of it overlaps with Sci-Fi strongly attests to this. Only last week, SF author Stephen Hunt voiced his campaign for “genre equality”, perturbed as he was about a perceived lack of respect for the genre. But every so often, people like me who don’t often read the stuff get reminded of exactly what that sort of fiction is capable of. Through impossible, exotic, unfeasible and uncanny situations, essential human themes are explored: a more precise mirror is held up to nature.

This was exactly the case when I read Adolfo Bioy Casares' The Invention of Morel recently. To be fair, this particular novella has been described both as one of the greatest ever works of fantastic fiction and as “perfect” by Jorge Luis Borges, so I am not sure what I was expecting. That said – it’s always pleasing when all the hyperbole spoken about something is backed up by your experience in reading the thing.

The superficially simple plot, told in diary form, describes the fate of an unnamed fugitive fleeing from an unspecified foe. Trapped on a desert island wracked by a terrifying wasting disease, somewhere in the South Pacific, the delirious fugitive witnesses the arrival of a number of French-speaking visitors to the island. Petrified that they are there to arrest him, he hides from them and flees to the other side of the island. After eventually falling in love with a female visitor who has the habit of longingly watching the sunset, occasionally accompanied by a man called Morel, the fugitive is perplexed that the island’s visitors either cannot see him or are ignoring him. What is the cause of this and what does it all mean?

Adolfo Bioy Casares

That is about as much of the plot as I can divulge without spoiling the book’s exquisite and delicate charm. Suffice it to say that an element of the speculative creeps into the bizarre chain of events. Influenced by H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau, the novella, just like the work of his great friend and collaborator Borges, uses the fantastical genre to examine metaphysical themes. These include (but are not restricted to) love and loneliness, control, paranoia and the possibility of immortality.

Constantly surprising, this perfectly formed and executed book will keep you glued and guessing. And thinking, which is probably more important. It is one to devour in one sitting and then re-read.

Argentine 1st Edition Cover

Human Planet

I watched the last episode of Human planet and, just like with the rest of the series, I was left with mixed emotions. For more than any nature programme in my time, it had the ability to go from the incredible to the incredibly dull in under a minute. The scenic juxtapositions were almost bathetic: see the first episode and the segue from barnacle fishers in Galicia to sperm whale hunting in Indonesia for further evidence.

Don’t get me wrong, as a long-time fan of the BBC’s documentary programming, there was, as ever, a lot to love in the series. It did contain some genuinely amazing, never-before-seen footage of people who tend to be overlooked by the media and highlighted the plight of many worthy causes. The production values were predictably great and it was mostly enjoyable. But something in it rang particularly false. Or hollow, maybe, as it failed to achieve the heady heights of either Life or Planet Earth.

There were a number of obvious problems with the programme, prime among them the amount of artifice that seemed to go into the capturing of the footage. Nearly every image seemed staged and the dialogue seemed scripted. More HD Hollywood than authentic documentary. As a Spanish speaker, this was certainly the case with the Chileans in the desert episode, who seemed about as natural chatting as Dave Cameron was with the hoodies. The subtitles’ Heroes-esque, dynamic movement did little to hide this and it probably stems from the fact that humans are a darn sight easier to manipulate than animals.

On a personal note, the Madagascar-caused lack of David Attenborough was also a shame, and that is no sleight on John Hurt. It’s just that, having grown up with the gravelly austerity of Attenborough, Hurt sounded disingenuous and pompous in comparison. All of his statements stank of pretentiousness and the faux-grand and Nitin Sawhney’s soundtrack did little to lessen its misplaced self-importance. Also, the pushing of a green agenda – Norman Foster propaganda aside – a staple of any nature show these days, does not have to come at the expense of entertainment.

My misgivings, well-founded or otherwise, could well come from the fact that animals, whatever humans do, will always seem more impressively adapted to whatever environment they are in. They don’t all come from the appalling last episode anyway. Or the wasted ten minutes that the Behind the Lens bit at the end of every episode represented. Given that it took three years and a mammoth quantity of money to film, I expected more from some episodes.

But anyway, I have watched certain episodes (like the Oceans one) again and they are as beguiling and cool as ever and well worth another look. I had jut hoped for more consistency over the eight episodes.

I'll also never tire of watching this:

Rosemary’s Baby

I watched Roman Polanski’s first U.S. film, Rosemary’s Baby, the other day and have to admit I was a little bit indifferent to it. Considering it was recently voted the 2^nd best horror film ever by Guardian critics, I was expecting a bona fide classic – it is surrounded by Psycho, The Shining, The Exorcist and Let the Right One In on the list, for God’s sake! That said, there’s no doubting that it is well made and has had an enormous and obvious influence on so many subsequent movies, but has it aged that well?

Adapted from a bestselling novel by Ira Levin, it tells the story of a young couple (played by John Cassavetes and Mia Farrow) who move into a creepy apartment block in New York City. There, they are befriended by an even creepier elderly couple (the utterly convincing Ruth Gordon and Sidney Blackmer), who take an unusual interest in the couple wanting to have a baby. Events take an inevitable left turn down crazy street and there is a heavy dose of the supernatural. As Rosemary becomes isolated in the apartment block, the grand Polanski themes of persecution, paranoia and motherhood are explored very thoroughly.

Yet for me the film can work on two levels: either as a straight-down-the-line supernatural horror film or as a psychological thriller – neither of which it really delivers on. Firstly, there is not enough supernatural, full-on horror material for it to be truly scary or uncanny. All we see are an odd, Freudian dream sequence and a glimpse of the baby’s eyes. It is tense, however, as one might expect from a psychological thriller. But even there, it falls down because of Rosemary’s complete lack of realistic actions or independence. This may work in normal horror films, where one accepts that the characters will act moronically, but in any meaningful attempt to analyze the human psyche it just does not cut the mustard. A paranoid would clearly make more of an effort to escape.

So, all in all, you could put the film in the good-not-great category. It is well acted, well paced and undeniably tense but there is something missing there. That events are seen solely from Rosemary’s perspective is an inventive and effective way of heightening the viewer’s anxiety and feeling of paranoia, but is at times a source of frustration. Rosemary’s Baby is worth watching, especially for fans of the genre; but, in my opinion, it does not quite live up to its billing as one of the finest horror flicks of all time. Creepy and crafted, not downright terrifying – it may well be the fault of the source material.

Under the Volcano

I recently finished Malcolm Lowry’s 1947 classic Under the Volcano. Present on the Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels list, as well as Time Magazine and Le Monde’s corresponding ones, to say the book had pedigree would be something of an understatement. But did it live up to my romantic expectations of Joycean grandeur or was it the self-indulgent, muddled garbage one might expect of its sot writer? The answer, rather predictably, is more the former than the latter.

For when reading a book of modernist bent, with the lofty aspirations that its author had for it, you expect a degree of difficulty in its comprehension – so that was no problem for me. Ulysses was no cakewalk, after all. In fact, if anything, when you finish one of these books, their trickiness can actually counter-intuitively add to your satisfaction, just as I find with indie films. You almost feel relief when it’s over. I for one don’t always read novels for cheap thrills anyway; the more immediate TV and film have taken over that mantle in my life. What I look for in these sorts of books (without wishing to sound as pretentious as I am sounding) is a real insight into the human condition. And Lowry’s magnum opus definitely provided me with that. It stays with you long after you have stopped reading.

Set in Quahnahuac (Cuernavaca), Mexico, and recounting the last day of ex-British Consul Geoffrey Firmin’s life – fittingly Mexican national holiday, The Day of the Dead, 1939 – the novel has a fixed, strict structure. Each one of its twelve chapters tells the story from the point of view of one of the four main characters and represents roughly one hour. However, the narrative is never straightforward; it is marked by what Michael Schmidt’s introduction refers to as “elaborate time-schemes, switch-backs and gradual accretions of information”. This is admittedly confusing at the start (and end!) but really adds to the total immersion in the lives of the characters; Geoffrey’s psychotic, alcohol-soused solipsism is particularly affecting. And depressing. With Geoffrey already beyond redemption, his younger half-brother, Hugh, and estranged wife Yvonne look on helplessly, the Spanish Civil War raging and the world poised on the verge of WW2.

A Diego Rivera mural from Cortez Palace, Cuernavaca

One of the sources of great enjoyment when reading the novel is Lowry’s bravura prose, his “strained high baroque”. You really get the impression that it couldn’t have been written any other way, which is really the point of style, after all. So dense it rewards – or even necessitates – repeated re-readings, the novel has much to say about Man’s complicity in his fate, love, self-destruction and living abroad. Its tragedy is a real one, poignantly auto-biographical given what we know about the author’s own life. Read it and appreciate a neglected classic; you’ll just never want to drink mescal or tequila ever again.

For those of you who won't ever read it, there is a Hollywood adaptation starring Albert Finney and directed by John Huston:

The Headless Woman (La mujer sin cabeza)

Like the Oscar-winning El secreto de sus ojos before it, this remarkable 2007 Argentinian film took its time in arriving in Britain. Having made something of a stir at the Cannes film festival in 2008, it has beguiled, intrigued and confused viewers ever since. Some people will write it off as typical, pretentious art house fare; whereas I would be more inclined to call it a masterful and nuanced look at the effect of guilt on the human mind.

Either way, there is no denying that it is slow moving – its fixed shots, Lucrecia Martel’s unfussy direction, and the organic development are reminiscent of recent Michael Haneke classic Hidden (Caché) and even the more recent Dogtooth (Kynodontas). But, and tellingly so, this is for a very specific reason and one could not imagine it any other way. For the film tells the story of middle-aged Argentinain mother Vero (María Onetto) who unwittingly crashes into something (which the viewer does not see) on a deserted road. Deciding against stopping and seeing what it was, she checks herself into hospital, shell-shocked, the creeping guilt and sadness slowly but surely driving her towards some sort of nervous breakdown.

What she collided with is obvious from the start and it takes Vero a couple of days to explain this to her nearest and dearest, barely able to articulate anything at all. Her life continues to pass by in a dream-like, anaesthetized haze before her family conspire to remove all evidence of the crime and cover it up. It is in this detail that the movie’s socio-political implications are most clearly felt, as the easy, eerie way in which the evidence is removed is redolent of the many desparecidos (“disappeared” people) of the country’s dictatorial past.

But the guilt is not just derived from this; those affected most by the accident are, in fact, members of Argentina’s indigenous working class, whose lives and subservience are laid bare by Martel. Like the aforementioned Caché, there is a sense of lingering post-colonial guilt and culpability only really felt by Vero, as she stares herself towards the void.

Part of the attraction of this fabulous film is the natural accretion of detail. In a realistic manner, there are many loose ends hinted at, such as the turtles in the local swimming pool, which add towards the film’s ghostly mystery. Though, being an Argentine indie as it is, there is still room for some incest and weird lesbianism, which hint at a situation beyond our comprehension.

Tremendously acted, especially by Onetto and Claudia Cantero, the film’s 87 minutes positively fly by. Though its strange examination of mental disintegration and guilt will linger long in the mind. It has all the right ingredients to be a cult classic – and rightly so. Have a look.

Out now on DVD.