Graeme Macrae Burnet rose to prominence with his Booker Shortlisted, His Bloody Project – a genuinely original historical crime novel, of sorts, that was transfixing from start to finish. He’s followed it up with this Longlisted Booker contender.
Again you could say it’s a crime novel of a sort in which no real crime takes place, but may have been autosuggested by the psychiatrist who plays one of the novel’s two central characters.
Arthur Collins Braithwaite is a brilliant lothario that stumbles on a career in psychiatry in the 1960’s in Oxford and London. A rule breaker, he actually has no formal qualifications but has some celebrity status and notoriety that keeps him in patients for a while. One of those patients, Victoria, is the sister of our second (and third as it happens) main protagonists – Victoria’s mousy sister, (unnamed throughout the book) and her alter ego Rebecca.
Victoria is the autosuggested victim, having thrown herself to her death from a bridge after a session with Braithwaite. Unnamed sister decides to visit Braithwaite to suss him out but undercover as a patient that she calls Rebecca.
What follows is a quite brilliant study of, I would say, Schizophrenia. So different are unnamed sister and Rebecca in so many ways that we have a clear Jeckyl and Hyde situation, although without the horror.
It’s a fascinating story based around Braithwaite’s case study notes of Rebecca and unnamed sister’s ferocious battle with herself to define her true identity.
In parts hilariously funny, but always with an undertow of sinister mental health issues it makes for a unique and unputdownable read.
My Aunty Margot is a bit of a legend in sport and in teaching but today, after a long period of ill health, she was joined by family and her beloved congregation at St John The Baptist RC Church in Corstorphine to be bestowed the Archdiocesan medal by the Archbishop Leo Cushley. This is a rare honour and reflects her devoted attention and dedication to the church. It goes back a long way and is a really lovely recognition of a great, great woman. i was honoured to be there with Jeana, Jane, Emily and many of my extended family.
We all had a ball and were fed a King’s ransom of food afterwards by an adoring church community. What a lovely day.
By some pretty bonkers coincidence I was handed a hymn book that had a tribute to my Grandmother, Peggie, Margot’s mum.
Four movies into his very slowly expanding movie CV (Sexy Beast, Birth and Under The Skin) Jonathan Glazer once again lands a punch that no-one could see coming. I mean, how could they?
It’s been ten years since the sublime and shocking Under The Skin (from a source novel by one of my favourite authors, Michel Faber) now he’s done it again with a novelistic source from Martin Amis. Having read a little about this it would seem that the movie and the book are barely related. Same theme and location, yes, but story-wise very different.
For a start it would be a push to say the movie’s narrative led. There is a slight thread holding it together but this is really an exercise in stylistic horror like you’ve never seen before.
The psychology of the holocaust has long fascinated me. How could an entire country apparently sign up to a dictator’s whims when his charisma, to me, seems so indecipherable. But worse, how could so many of his followers carry out such atrocities seemingly without question?
But this movie goes a step further still. How could the families of these monsters knowingly reap the benefits of this accursed man’s activities?
Sandra Hüller (who might win best actress at the Oscars for the incredible Anatomy of a Fall) stars as that very woman (Hedwig Höss). Living a life of privilege in an unattractive house with a cultivated, but not exactly stunning, garden in the lee of Auschwitz. Her husband, the camp Kommandant, played by Christian Friedel, is a snidely little creep who sleeps in a separate bed (his work done having sired five children to his despicable wife). At night he takes his pleasure with the Jewish housemaid, who’s always one dropped crumb away from the gas chambers that brood ominously just across the garden wall. Höss’s more than happy to remind her of that.
Höss takes her pick of fur coats, new blouses, diamonds concealed in toothpaste tubes as the apparent spoils of genocide filter regularly into their home. They party, they feed sumptuously, they swim in the river, they cough up the ashes of dead Jews – only a small blot on an idyllic lifestyle
Höss’s mother arrives, but soon leaves in disgust at this heinous way of living.
A young girl sneaks out at night to hide apples for the Jewish labourers – a death defying act that is momentously captured on night vision film. This stunning technique turns her into a lurid white spectre against what looks like a nuclear background, to the sound of an outrageous soundtrack by Mica Levy. Underscoring the score the Kommandant reads Hansel & Gretel to his younger children (it’s no coincidence that the evil witch is burned in the oven – although the story “cooks” her to soften the blow). Who this mysterious figure is is not revealed, but perhaps it’s the Kommandant’s oldest daughter. The one with a conscience. The only one. The Kindly one.
It’s truly remarkable moviemaking.
The star of this colossal piece of work though is Johnny Burn, the sound designer, who brings Auschwitz to life without ever really seeing it. other than its rooftops.
On a side note. I’ve been to Auschwitz (which is actually three death camps not one) and the one that features in the movie, Auschwitz III is now a museum. These days it’s impeccably manicured and the buildings are entirely surprising, two or three story high red brick constructions that could be schoolhouses if we didn’t know better. It’s very disarming. The muddy, filthy wooden huts we all remember from the movies and the newsreels are in Auschwitz I, a short drive away. So this clean, Teutonic death factory is disarming and Glazer captures that strange orderliness of the setting as we often see the well-kept rooflines of the houses beyond. (Albeit with smoking chimneys and glowing fires)
What Burn does though is pull the rug away. The air of semi-respectability that we are seeing is subsumed by endless industrial groans suggesting boilers (certainly machinery we don’t want to think about too much) working at full blast. Gunshots echo out, but subtly in the distance, muffled shrieks, distant dogs barking, at one point a cold blooded murder. The steam train arriving with fresh cargo.
It all adds up to make Auschwitz a looming threat, playing out a murderous background soundscape, like a satanic orchestra, whilst in the foreground we see a sort of Utopia at play.
The movie is shot as a series of beautiful tableaux, often reminiscent of classical paintings, but interspersed with empty screens, red or black, and the mind-boggling night vision work. (it’s searingly black and white, not green, as you’ve come to expect). This creates a sense of tranquillity and opulence, and yet it’s backgrounded by the worst atrocities ever committed in Europe.
Jonathan Glazer has created his masterpiece. Few would imagine he could top his first three movies and yet this comes from a place that only he can truly understand. It’s not clear why he’s made this movie. It’s not actually telling us anything new and yet it feels like the most original take on a familiar tale we will ever come across.
Ultimately it became clear why Gabrielle Zevin is a children’s book writer, but it took a while.
It’s an accomplished book that wants to be more than the sum of its parts and can’t quite reach its lofty ambitions. For a start it chooses one of Macbeth’s most famous soliloquies as its title and that’s bold. Macbeth is grieving the death of his wife and wondering what’s the point. It’s all just another day.
That’s kind of the point of this novel. Unrequited love between the two central characters, Sam and Sophie who are gamers turned celebrated game-makers. They both love one another but neither can find it in themselves to declare that love and so tomorrows follow tomorrows as their lives gradually unfold, alone and apart.
It’s nearly a masterpiece, but it falls sadly short by believing its better than it really is and the characters become caricatures of themselves and eventually outstay their welcome so that, in the end, it becomes a bit of a drag to complete. There’s also a bizarre penultimate chapter that is so up itself its laughable.
But, it’s a good read. It’s fun and it’s fresh. It’s just not as good as it wants to be.
Why this has so many Oscar nominations is beyond me. Admittedly it’s a poor year, although the winner will be a good one. This will not be that winner.
Paul Giamatti dials in his performance as a grumpy (actually not THAT grumpy) teacher of Greek History in a second rank American private school.
He has to look after a bunch of kids during the Christmas/New Year holidays alongside the school cook.
Most of the kids f*ck off and he’s left with one sensitive sixth former (looking suspiciously older) and, of course, they all bond.
It’s such a movie of tropes that I found it tiresome from the get go and entirely predictable.
Nothing is BAD about this movie, but nothing is good either. A Beautiful Mind and Dead Poets Society are both better exemplars of the genre and I didn’t especially love either of them really.
If movies by numbers is your thing then this is your movie.
I so wish I liked this movie more. It’s gorgeous and thoughtful and wonderfully acted, by Andrew Scott in particular. It’s a touching subject about grief, loneliness, the act of coming out, death and suicide.
But I’m afraid it’s just really boring. It’s way too darkly shot – the cinema projector simply couldn’t cope with how black it is and consequently you could actually see the projector’s bulb fighting to get on top of the opaqueness of the subject matter. Clare Foy looked out of place and Paul Mescal must dream for a role that doesn’t require endless shagging.
I nodded off several times as Andrew Scott struggled with his endless, tiresome grief over the death of his parents (like 20 years ago FFS) who are actually still alive, or are they ghosts, or is it a dream?
Actually…who cares in the end. My wife wept a bit. I did not. And I’m a sap.
gibberish 