A review of the new Norwegian film “The Worst Person In The World”
March 31st, 2022 by Roger Darlington
Joachim Trier is the co-writer and director of this Norwegian-language, Oslo-set, award-winning romantic drama which managed to secure – but not win – Academy Award nominations for Best International Film and Best Original Screenplay.
Structured in 12 chapters with prologue and epilogue, it tells the story of Julie, who becomes 30 in the course of the narrative, played wonderfully by the delightful Renate Reinsve making her feature debut. In a rarity for a drama, all the characters – except Julie’s father – are sympathetic and likeable, especially her two major lovers (Anders Danielsen Lie and Herbert Nordrum). The acting and dialogue are very naturalistic, although there are two fantasy sequences, in this genuinely appealing work.
I loved the film, I loved the character Julie, and I loved the performance by Reinsve. Yet Julie is a deeply enigmatic and frustrating person, if far from the worst in the world.
In reality, I’m sure that I would be exasperated by her: she changes her lovers, she changes her career aspirations, she changes her hairstyle, she cannot decide whether she wants children … As she herself puts it : “I feel like I never see anything through”. But many people are like that which makes the film so reflective of real life.
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Is Ukraine an artificial state, as President Putin suggests, or a true state, as President Zelensky argues? What constitutes a nation state anyway?
March 26th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
At present, I am reading a fascinating history of Ukraine: “Borderland” by Anna Reid. What is clear is that the reality of Ukraine as a nation state is a very recent one.
For many centuries, most of what we now call Ukraine was ruled by Lithuania or Poland or a combination of the two. For many centuries afterwards, Ukraine was ruled by Tsarist Russia or the USSR.
Although calls for Ukrainian independence have ebbed and flowed, they have always come from a small minority. As Anna Reid puts it: “Ukrainians won independence on 24 August 1991 by default. Many had dreamed of independence, but none had expected it, none had prepared for it“. Writing in 1997, she refers to “Ukraine’s fuzzy sense of national identity”.
Over the past three decades, Ukraine has done a decent job of nation-building, even if that required a revolution and involved an insurgency.
Yet, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, there were still major cleavages in Ukrainian society: between Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers, between the west and the east, between the cities and the towns & villages. Ironically what Putin has managed to achieve in the last month is a deeper and more uniform sense of national identity among Ukrainians than has ever been the case in its history.
In my view, Ukraine is now a nation state and deserves that status. Any doubts that anyone might have about this should be dispelled by the bravery and unity of the Ukrainians people in the last month.
But, all over the world, this issue of what defines nationhood is a major political problem. Around the globe, most countries have communities within them that believe that they have a right to statehood. Scotland in the UK, Catalonia in Spain, Kurds in Iraq, Western Sahara in Morocco, Quebec in Canada, Kashmir in India, Tibet & Taiwan in China. The list goes on and on.
Many years ago, I started to discuss this issue of nationhood and wrote a short essay which I think still stands up. You can read it here.
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Let us hail Madeline Albright, the first female US Secretary of State
March 24th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
I was saddened to hear of the death of Madeleine Albright at the aged of 84 following her diagnosis of cancer. She was an outstanding public figure in American politics and the first woman to hold the post of Secretary of State (in European terms, Foreign Minister) in the Clinton administration.
You can read an obituary in the “Guardian” new paper here.
I have two personal recollections of Albright.
First, since I was married to a half-Czech for 35 years, I was very aware of Albright’s Czech heritage. Born Marie Jana Korbelová in Prague in 1937 but known as Madeleine since infancy, Albright fled with her family for London in 1939 after the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia.
Second, I was fan of the U S television series “Madam Secretary” in which Tea Leoni played a non-party Secretary of State. Albright played herself in a couple of appearances es in the series, showing that she had the common touch.
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A review of the new film “Passing”
March 21st, 2022 by Roger Darlington
The title of this film refers to the practice of a light-skinned African-Americans passing themselves off as white, a situation which apparently was quite common in the 1920s when this story is set. The central characters are Irene (Tessa Thompson) and Clare (Ruth Negga), former New York City school friends who meet after a long interval with life-changing consequences for both of them.
Based on a novel of the same name published as long ago as 1929, the movie was written, produced and directed by the actress Rebecca Hall in her first venture behind the camera. While one might think of Hall as classically British and white, it transpires that her mother was part African-American, so that this is a very personal venture for her. At some level, however, this has a message for us all. As one of the characters states: “We’re all passing for something or other, aren’t we?”
“Passing” is an unusual-looking film. It is shot in black & white in 5:4 ratio and often the picture is blurred and the dialogue is muffled. The pacing is slow until a dramatic and ambiguous ending. I doubt that many would have gone to the cinema to see it, but Netflix bought it and the film is an accomplished and moving work to view on the small screen.
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A review of the new film “Ali & Ava”
March 19th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
This British film, both written and directed by Yorkshire-born Clio Barnard, is a tender love story – but an unconventional one in many respects.
First, the setting: the work was shot entirely on location in Bradford with its terraced houses and grim vistas. Then the structure: while it follows the classic three-part narrative of friendship, division, reconciliation, almost the entire film is devoted to the first slow-burning segment of this traditional triptych.
Next the music: both principals love their music but have very different tastes which gradually converge, so we hear a lot of (loud) music of an amazingly eclectic nature: Hindi to Czech, Dylan to Rachmaninoff, Buzzcocks to The Specials.
Above all, this is a different tale of affection because of the characters. Both are middle-aged Northerners with their own ethnic heritage; both have had troubled marriages which have left them damaged; both have close extended families; both are gentle and caring.
Ali is a British-Pakistani who is a small-scale local landlord with aspirations to be a DJ, while Ava has Irish roots and works as a school assistant having obtained a degree as an adult. Barnard gives us a portrait of each before bringing them together in a car ride in the rain and exploring the growing attraction over a lunar month.
Adeel Akhtar and Claire Rushbrook are simply wonderful as the eponymous couple and we ache for them to be together.
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Who was responsible for those famous Odessa Steps?
March 18th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
As the Russian invaders of Ukraine pose to attack the port of Odessa, a film enthusiast like me cannot help recalling the dramatic Odessa Steps sequence in the 1925 film “The Battleship Potemkin” famously directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Indeed this sequence inspired a similar conflict on long steps in the final scenes of the 1987 film “Untouchables” directed by Brian De Palma.
Meanwhile I am reading a history of Ukraine: “Borderland” by Anna Reid. From this work, I learned that the Odessa Steps were constructed by a British civil engineer named John Upton between 1837 and 1841. Who would have thought?
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What Arnold Schwarzenegger has to say about the Russian invasion of Ukraine
March 18th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
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A review of the horror movie “Bird Box”
March 17th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
In 2018, two films were issued with remarkably similar storylines. In both “A Quiet Place” and “Bird Box”, the world was taken over by an alien force that very quickly and very largely wiped out the human population. Both works involved a feisty woman leading a local fight-back and endeavouring to locate other survivors and both women had babies in the mayhem.
In “A Quiet Place”, the creatures had acute hearing but poor sight, so humans could move around but not make a sound and resorted to communicating by sign language. In “Bird Box”, the invaders could be sensed by birds – hence the title – but, if a person looked at them, they immediately became suicidal or psychotic, so people could only move around outside if they wore blindfolds. Pretty similar, huh?
You might have heard of “A Quiet Place – which stars Emily Blunt – because it did well at the box office and spawned a sequel. You may well not have heard of “Bird Box” – which stars Sandra Bullock – because the critics were not keen although it did well on Netflix.
“Bird Box” has its gory moments with elements of a zombie movie and even a touch of ghost story, but it is well-constructed and worth seeing for Bullock’s performance plus those of a range of support actors headed by the redoubtable John Malkovich.
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When did Ukraine come under Russian control and who was responsible for this?
March 16th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
The short answers are January 1654 and Bordan Khmelnytsky.
Khmelnytsky was the leader of the Hetmanate Cossacks who led a successful uprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth of which Ukraine was then a part. At the small town of Pereiaslav, he signed an agreement that, in return for allegiance to the Russian Tsar, the Cossack Hetmanate would receive the military protection of Russia.
For the next three and a quarter centuries, Kiev (now Kviv) would be ruled from Moscow.
This is a fundamental part of the historical background to why Putin wants to take over Ukraine and why the Poles are so welcoming to Ukrainian refugees. Of course, there are many contemporary factors but history casts a long shadow.
For more detail, follow the links.
For my part, I first learned this information through my reading of “Borderland” by Anna Reid.
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Why did Putin order the Russian invasion of Ukraine?
March 15th, 2022 by Roger Darlington
“This war was not inevitable, but we have been moving toward it for years: the west, and Russia, and Ukraine. The war itself is not new – it began, as Ukrainians have frequently reminded us in the past two weeks, with the Russian incursion in 2014. But the roots go back even further. We are still experiencing the death throes of the Soviet empire. We are reaping, too, in the west, the fruits of our failed policies in the region after the Soviet collapse.”
This is a quote from an article in today’s “Guardian” newspaper by American academic Keith Gessen. It is one of the most informative pieces on the Ukraine war that I’ve read so far. It is quite long but worth your time if you want to understand what is going on.
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