Watched

Sound of Falling

I have wanted to watch this film ever since I saw this perfect promo image of this impossibly blonde girl staring into the camera. Her name is Alma, and she is one of four generations of girls and women whose lives are portrayed in the film. At the core is a farmhouse in Germany, which features the various generations who inhabit it between the 1910s and our modern day.

The film has a fantastic opening, where I feel like it peaked. With the first two generations, the film establishes its dreamy and dark tone. It is as if Tarkovsky took an interest in the inner lives of women, and that melded with Michael Haneke’s brand of German Protestant menace, which is basically all I’ve ever wanted in a film. I just felt that the stories of the latter girls that were intercut weren’t as interesting, and there was a major departure in tone. Like I just saw somebody get brutally maimed and then I saw an iPhone which took me out of the film.

The editing for the most part handles the abrupt timeline jumps quite well; it does feel intuitive to how the director wanted to depict the different lives of her protagonists. The cinematography is beautiful, and the production design also does a great job at differentiating the various generations, but I was ultimately begging the screen to go back in time to Alma.

The President’s Cake

Iraq’s entry into the Best International Film Category at this year’s Oscars caught my attention because of its premise: In 1990s Iraq, 9-year-old Lamia must bake the President's birthday cake. She scrambles to find ingredients for the compulsory task, fearing punishment if she fails.

It actually turns out that she has to bake the cake for her class and not Saddam Hussein himself. Nevertheless they got me. The sanctions on Iraq have made it so that every ingredient is a luxury that Lamia, who is being raised by her ailing grandmother, doesn’t have access to. Banin Ahmad Nayef as Lamia gives one of those perfect first-time actor performances. She is having quite possibly the worst week of her life, and so is her pet rooster that accompanies her.

I think this film owes a lot to the work of Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf who really perfected this type of film, following children on their journeys with missions through these landscapes. It is set in the Mesopotamian Marshes, which is one of those settings that does the heavy lifting because of how striking it is. It is beautifully made, but it does feel slightly like it was cooked in an American film lab and that it had to hit certain beats, which contrasts with the work of Kiarostami or Makhmalbaf, who were working without any real interest in what was going on in the West. Go watch The Silence or Where Is the Friend’s House. But I do recommend this because it is timely and imperfectly sweet.

Wuthering Heights

I was done with the discourse about the recent Wuthering Heights film before it even came out. However, it bought back to my attention a Japanese adaptation set in the medieval period that got lost in my watchlist.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is a book about generational trauma, race and class. This adaptation gets the terrible atmosphere across and is able to translate the Yorkshire Moors to a volcanic mountain in Japan. I have never seen a film set in medieval Japan that wasn’t brutal. It seems like the worst possible time period ever, which I think suits the story and it gets that evil, gothic tone right. However, I don’t think it was particularly interested in Kinu, who is the Cathy equivalent, but her character has never been adapted well in any version. She is just as feral and unrestrained as Heathcliff or Onimaru, who gets all the screen time here.

Serial Mom

I was convinced to watch this by an excellent TikTok edit. I love Kathleen Turner; she gives an all-time performance in Crimes of Passion, and her voice is everything to me. She also does a complete 180 as the mum in The Virgin Suicides. Here she is again as a suburban homemaker who commits murder over minor offences. I was cackling the whole time.

Reading

The Use of Photography

I sometimes feel that Annie Ernaux is my close personal friend, whom I know way too much about. She really does tell you everything with no inhibitions, which I love and respect. This book is co-written with her ex-partner Marc Marie. It covers their relationship and their decision to take photos of their surroundings. It also touches on her cancer diagnosis and treatment. It is raw, and I don’t think I am in the season of my life to really appreciate this, but I do enjoy catching up with Annie.

Hunchback

Hunchback is the story of Shaka, who has myotubular myopathy and writes erotic literature. It’s an insight into life with a disability, tackling sex, class and gender. It packs a lot into 97 pages, and perhaps it is intentional on the part of the author, as at one point the story does a segway into how physical books can be inaccessible. But I really did want more time with Shaka; her dynamic with one of her carers feels a little unfinished, and there was so much more to explore.

The Virgin Suicides

I don’t play about the film, so I had to read the source material. I was surprised by how faithful the film was to the book. I loved how you could easily see Sofia Coppola reading it and visualising how she was going to put it on screen. But also, Jeffrey Eugenides’ prose perfectly captures that very particular and discomforting gaze that men have, where dead girls are infinitely more interesting to them as opposed to being alive and well. I think about this passage a lot:

Contagious suicide made it palpable. Spiky bacteria lodged in the agar of the girls' throats. In the morning, a soft oral thrush had sprouted over their tonsils. The girls felt sluggish. At the window the world's light seemed dimmed. They rubbed their eyes to no avail. They felt heavy, slow-witted. Household objects lost meaning. A bedside clock became a hunk of molded plastic, telling something called time, in a world marking its passage for some reason. When we thought of the girls along these lines, it was as feverish creatures, exhaling soupy breath, succumbing day by day in their isolated ward. We went outside with our hair wet in the hopes of catching flu ourselves so that we might share their delirium.

Jane Eyre

The reputation of this book as gothic is a bit misleading - it’s very much the goofiest rom-com I have encountered. Mr Rochester gets into drag at one point! I also saw the 2011 adaptation before reading, which is beautiful but omits the warmth and humour of the book. I will need to catch one of the BBC television versions at some point.

Listening

I am mostly listening to Fairuz; she’s the kind of singer who makes all the other ones feel pointless. But the new Iceage song is really good, and I am getting into Jane Remover, who scratches a very specific itch in my brain.

Felt

I must delete Substack.

Making stickers and putting them on everything is a great source of serotonin.

I am doing the opposite of being locked in.

Not being a pessimist because you are alive word to James Baldwin.

I must randomly quote Sexistential by Robyn.

Emotional re-listening to my friend’s voice notes.