... Stands For Comfort

We were out at the Rio on Thursday night for the newest film by the maker of the brilliant and eye-popping "괴물", "Host", 봉준호 (Joon-Ho Bong).

A mother doggedly searches for those responsible for framing her son for the lurid and theatrical murder of a sexually precocious schoolgirl. It's not really a crime thriller though.

The male lead, such as he is, is played beautifully and subtly by Bin Won, and essays a vulnerable, autistic, hesitant, virtually directionless character.

The libido of the plot is entirely driven by the mother's relentless, innocently single-minded pursuit of the invisible, the hidden, the ignored, the conveniently forgotten. This takes her to some bleak scenarios, but the locales are never allowed to overwhelm her sense of purpose.

There are some visual tours-de-force: A golf course at first light, a man picking a driver out of a lake and wading to the bank with it. The mother pours soup into her son's mouth as he pisses against a blue-grey concrete wall by a bus stop.

There's an echo of Laura Palmer in Ah-Jung, as she wonders aloud about the explosive contents of her mobile phone photo folder, and an extremely unflattering portrait of the men of the legal and medical professions in small-town Korea in the reptilian and unctuous lawyer.

The mother's wonderfully judged awkward encounters with the town's schoolgirls, and the unblinking relationship they have with the denied world that Boon can hint at with his bored functionaries, offhand policemen, and self-serving institutional place-men, are compelling and nervelessly drawn.

Family Snapshots

Two films about families at war, with themselves, with each-other, and with the world at large. "Wasp" is a short by Andrea Arnold (maker of the brilliant "Red Road"), that plunges the viewer straight into the torrent of anger, pride and depthless devotion between a mother and her 4 daughters living on an unnamed estate somewhere in Essex. It's impossible not to hope that the children manage to keep themselves amused and safe outside a brutal bungalow-pub while their mother ekes out the couple of pounds she has trying to turn an old flame home from the army into boyfriend material, while trying to explain the children's presence away to him. Desperate and compelling stuff; I'm not sure if I cold have stood up to more than 25 minutes of that sort of tension, so the short format was just as well.

"The Brotherhood" (Tae Guk Gi) is a vast flashback of a war film, which derives all its power from the short sequences at the outset, framing the gunfights and civilian deaths in a search for the body of a lost 'other', a brother captured by the North Korean army and apparently turned into the leader of a terrifying elite unit. It's impossible not to see the enactment of a hoped-for reunification of North and South in the recovery of the older brother's body and the uncovering of the post-war life he had hoped for had he survived the war. The tools for progress in the future are firmly buried in the most violent moments from the past.

No Names

One from the 'Why Did I never Get Round To Watching' file. To it's credit, for a movie that provoked all kinds of moral froth and pompous outrage at the time of its release in 1972, Last Tango In Paris has not dated at all. The rightly infamous anal rape scene with the butter is perfectly set within the economy of the film as a whole; a sequence of moral and psycho-sexual tableaux are set up within the spatial personality of a Paris apartment, which seems to exert a terrible influence on "Paul" (Brando)and Jeanne (Maria Schneider). By far the strongest elements are the relationships and barriers set up and enabled by the apartment building itself: Glass partitions, door-frames, window blinds, shower curtains, internal windows all form a supporting cast of blindnesses, impediments, silences, exposings.

The film seems to lose its psychological confidence about an hour in: The asides featuring Jeanne's husband-to-be become ugly gear-changes, and the Paul-Jeanne relationship loses its dreamlike, Tragic dimension. Paul's character is far too over-drawn in comparison with the brief and comparatively lightweight treatment of Jeanne's life outside the apartment. The early sequences feel as if they are the scenes you would imagine reading a novel, fleshing-out spare words on a page.

Changed The Future

With Yoola, Gail, John, and Heidi we went to Brighton to see Lali Puna. This is a brilliant example of a group that is greater than the sum of its parts: Three fairly anonymous, charisma-free German rock-indie types with a drum kit, a bass guitar, and a heap of sampling kit. They are fronted, if that's not too crassly a rock role to be cast in, by a continuously nervous woman playing a sampler and a keyboard. The vocals are pale, repetitive, non-sequiturs and opaque sloganeering imprecations. It has a completely immersive and hypnotic effect, as if looped from a radio station that had ceased to be inspected by the sponsors some time ago.

I remember seeing Stereolab in a tiny hall somewhere in Hackney in about 1991, and this show had a similar effect; songs in the form of communiques or sonic postcards, a total lack of Rock Action, a quiet but compulsive buildup of persistence of form. It's completely refreshing to feel so un-performed-at but still entranced.

Land Locked Jazz

To obvious English ears, Eastern European music has a perceived tendency to the wild, psychotic, deranged, threatening. Of course, that only tells us so much about the elements of the English psyche that have been firmly denied and/or projected onto foreign musics.

These two groups were great fun; engaging, dedicated to their respective sounds, with no attitude toward their audience other than appreciation that they had one.

The bearded singer of Uz Jsme Doma made an excellent introduction: "It's great to be playing here in London at our first concert in the UK. However we have played in 57 different countries up to this point, so let's not get too excited about that..."

A couple of wild and extremely drunk Czech youths gyrated in front of us, ensuring a decent sized cordon sanitaire around them as those protecting their eye-wateringly expensive lager moved aside.

The aforementioned Uz Jsme Doma (Now We As At Home, my Czech-descended friend Simon tells me) were a bracing blast of punky post-Beefheart, with an excellent song that sounded like it was called "Siva A Schiva". That's unlikely to be real Czech there, though. They also did a nice shouted ballad about the time when there were Czech seafarers.

Much of the audience departed about then, including about half our compadres, muttering about "I ****ing hate ****ing jazz, you ****ing know I won't ****ing listen to it".

I really have no critical language to talk about jazz, which I think helps. The Contemporary Noise Sextet were just a very listenable modern jazz group. Drums, piano, and bass set up a rhythm: saxes, horns and guitars strike up a pleasant 5- or 7-note melody; melody breaks down into freeform soloing; city-scape back-projection works nicely with this: horns come back to the melody again, via some gurning from the guitarist and some so-happy-it-hurts smiling from the pianist. Simon and I kept wondering: Shall we make a run to the pub? No, let's catch one more by this lot.

Indian Ink

There's a luminous kind of writing, which creates a memory as if from one of your own dreams. It's troublesome to read, though, because I now think I have been to Venice during a Biennale, and Varanasi in the off season. Dyer seems to be writing about either someone else's story that he's convinced is his own; or about a dream he is yet to have.

Geoff Dyer is always very dryly funny, self-deprecating (when you know the character is his own cipher), and always puts you in the room. In "The Colour Of Memory", I was in the Brixton pubs and flat-shares that his characters rolled through. In this novel, I was in the heaving, Bellini-swigging tents of ego-fuelled installations.

Strangely, the second section set in India, is less powerful. Perhaps because I've been there for a little while, and the scenes have no dream-space to live in within my own memory. No room in the ethereal.

Zestless City

We were at the ICA recently, hoping for more of the widescreen, Little England Writ Large, almost autistically densely researched "London Orbital". Or at least some of the vivid observational and psychogeographic travelogues that Ian Sinclair dies so well. When his schtick works, it challenges you to see your own neighbourhood with the intensity of the foreign traveller or the manic anthropologist.

However, what we got was a high point of Sinclair reading from 'The Rose Red Empire', a beautiful passage drawing his own history as a flaneur, his partner's life alongside him, the research threads sewn into him by his friends, and the ever-present ghosts of Hackney's history.

After that, things went downhill rather drastically. Stewart Home could not get through a sentence without reference to his True Punk roots, or get away from a camp, stagey, verbose lecturing style. We all write texts essentially telling our own story louder than our subjects, but we do try to keep the Walter Mittyisms and name-dropping to a minimum, if only so that our audiences don't get the overwhelming impression that we are trapped in 1977 with a pocketful of SWP pamphlets and a Crass LP for interpretive tools. To hear Home talk, anybody would think he was a motormouth standup with no jokes and trapped in an orbit around a couple of memories of gigs at the Clarendon.

Ian Sinclair, sadly, was barely better. There was a dreadful encroachment of glistening-eyed memorophilia, beamoaning of practically every effect of the last 25 years. His riff on the Ballardesque fate of the Athens Olympic site absolutely honked.

Surely the task here in London is to generate the tools and language to capture the torrential and n-dimensional flux of developments, and to identify the flow of events around the built environment, be it fragile, irresistible or vanishing.

London's ghosts are going to be living in a louder world; they haunt cultures and traditions all over the world, so whining about the vanishing of the pub where someone's mum met someone who wrote teenaged Trotskyist manifestos is only ever going to come over as the most parochial backward-looking nostalgia.

The reason that "London Orbital" works so beautifully is that there is a powerful sense of the history of place being acted out, the making-itself-felt of the past, without the sepia-tint sense of a wish to return to it. London has a terrifying and unique ability to remind you of yourself, to cut you down to size, to confront you with episodes and scenes that you might have forgotten, or wanted to; to re-cast itself as a constant character in your life.

As place becomes contested and congested, as locality becomes overshadowed or emptied by the virtual and viral, as public space is redefined and colonised by commercial requirements, a psychogeography of London must resist the temptation to become inward-looking and nostalgic.