Auto Destruction By Appointment

There's a wonderful scene halfway through this novel, in a car during a heavy, wet snowstorm. The characters are stranded, one worrying about how long the engine will run, how long the heater will work, how far it might take to walk to a store through the clogged and draining snowdrifts, whether they might be hit and killed by a snowplough if they abandon the car. The other character sucks Chupa Chups and idly fantasises.

A nameless narrator preys on the lonely and directionless, two brothers bicker and fight over a girl who is intrigued by neither of them. The novel is fastidiously and thoroughly soundtracked, and there are no accidents in it.

Celluloid space-time

All the films I've seen recently have had a fraught or effortless relationship with space; space for events to occur in, space for characters to be in, space for events to flower in naturally, and not be cattle-prodded into motion by the demands of plot or 'action'.

I was thrilled to discover that the opening line to the beautiful Italian pop song "Rosetta e Cioccolado", from the soundtrack to 'Conseguenza dell'Amore' features a request for raspberry syrup.

It's a harsher, more gnarly film than I recalled from the cinema several years ago. Titta di Girolamo is more of a cipher, restlessly and fruitlessly twisting the strands that surround him. The scene in which he bluffs a Swiss bank into giving him £100,000 by simply sticking to his story that he had it when he came in, is gloriously offhand. Di Girolamo is sat in an upright chair, facing a nearly-drawn curtain, smoking languidly. A bank manager stares furiously at his clerks as the total they count up to falls a hundred grand short time and again. Titta smokes on, faking obliviousness.

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"The Double Life of Veronique" appeared to me to be one long dream sequence with the logic of a character study. The light, sudden unpredictable leaps of location, camera movement, focusing of peripheral characters in their rooms, are beautifully woozy and impenetrable, slightly threatening. It was the inverse or mirror image of the 'proper' movie, that might use dreamy techniques to tell the 'actual' story. Here the dream was the story, and the two Veroniques were broken up by the force of the fantasy she was living out.

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"Born Into Brothels" is a completely compelling documentary about the efforts of an American photographer who arrives in Bombay to make a photo essay about the women working in then sex industry there; once in situ, she realises that the children born to these women (and heart-rendingly, kept from school or college with the connivance or collusion of their mothers) are more urgent in terms of engaging subjects than her photo essay would have been. She gives them all disposable cameras, and teaches them to take pictures. The Bombay of the film is a seething, asymmetrical, Escheresque dimension. Several sequences take hand-held footage as

the camera rushes through alleys, rooms, cramped quarters, plunging the viewer into a space in which unimaginable sacrifices of motherhood and childhood are made without a blink.

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"You Ain't From Around Here"

"Let The Right One In" is almost certainly being remade and ruined in Hollywood as we speak. It's a brilliantly grey-white, muddied-snowfield of a film about the messy and contradictory and awkward and relentless business of being foreign and Other. The vampire element is wonderfully submerged within the alcoholism, teenaged fascination, petty small-town regrets, fears and revenges.

The snow is often slushy and dirty and scuffed and stained with mud or road grit or blood. A housing estate looks efficiently made, but essentially cheap, and probably poorly insulated. Sudden silences and empty schools after hours are cavernous, charged and active characters within the visual population of the film.

Plainly, there's an allegory for the disorientation and alienation of the immigrant, or stranger experience. It's never over-egged though, and the disappointed, pinched lives of the locals are well drawn in some lovely drinking scenes.

When the two children first meet, there's a beautifully awkward adult moment; only she knows why they can't be childhood friends, and they are both just ready to feel there is more than just being friends. She is hanging from a brutal metal climbing frame at her first appearance in the scene, and dismounts from it as she begins to speak. It's the only time we see her purely framed as a child in the film, and as soon as she speaks, the spell of her childhood is broken.