Turn in the Wound (Abel Ferrara, 2024)

 

At its core, there’s something rather touchingly idealistic about Abel Ferrara’s Turn in the Wound (and how often does one think to describe Ferrara’s work in such terms?): a belief that Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine might have been avoided if Putin’s worldview weren’t so small, and in the expansive capacity of seasoned, evocative artistry. That’s embodied here by Patti Smith, seen rehearsing and backstage and in performance; one might initially assume she’s performing in Ukraine, but it’s actually at the French Pompidou Centre, an assertion of the cultural heritage that persists far from the battlefront (even as Smith’s darkly evocative lyrics and storm-damaged presence and the swirling accompanying visuals seem in productive conversation with Ferrara’s documenting of wartime atrocities and dislocations). The film includes a brief meeting with President Zelensky, commenting on Putin’s inability to perceive or value the rights and desires of Ukrainians, and some piercing battlefield footage, a devastating tumble of mud and blood and fire and chaos; that aside though, it often feels somewhat random in its content and assembly, seeming that Ferrara may have talked to whomever happened to step before his camera (he includes a passage of himself being interviewed on Ukrainian TV, disclaiming any particular agenda). It all contributes to an overwhelming sense of almost unprocessable wrongness, with multiple anecdotes of torture and deprivation at Russian hands, of their soldiers' savagery and recklessness: the film makes no claim to balance, whatever that would mean in this context. One of its last interviewees, a man who lost an arm in combat, comments on how his experiences have helped him mold a better attitude, an awareness that things could always be worse than they are: it’s hardly a complex life lesson, but Ferrara’s film is a penetrating counterpoint to a world that often seems intent on smothering any such reflectiveness.

Mon oncle d'Amerique (Alain Resnais, 1980)

 

A viewer might feel obliged to take Alain Resnais’ Mon oncle d’Amerique highly seriously, to assume that the juxtaposition of the film’s narrative (which follows three very different but eventually intertwined lives from childhood to middle age) and the wall-to-wall commentary by behavioural scientist Henri Laborit generates a work of unusual analytical acuity. Resnais disclaimed any such intention though, and from today’s perspective, in part informed by the director’s often singularly whimsical subsequent work, the film plays primarily as a sly, deliberately unsolvable puzzle, encouraging us to find correspondences and echoes and explanations while fully knowing that the exercise will lead only to frustration (like gifting a jigsaw puzzle in which some of the key pieces are missing, or imported from another puzzle altogether). Even if it could be demonstrated that the story the film tells was in some kind of perfect conjunction with Laborit’s theories and explanations, that story would still be (however superficially enjoyable) a pumped-up melodrama (including such elements as a lie about being mortally ill and a desperate suicide attempt) of limited inherent interest, the exercise providing little or no insight into how to conduct or what to expect from our own lives (the lab-grown aspects partly evidenced in how removed and unmoving it all feels). But any allegations of pumped-up self-importance should be adequately punctured by Resnais’ occasional use of rat-headed people in illustrating our conditioned nature (years before David Lynch and his rabbits!). And the film’s very title provides a warning against overly literal viewing; all three principals refer at different points to an American uncle, but as someone whose biography is unclear, or who may not exist at all, America itself absent from the film until its final sequence, and then used mainly to illustrate the desolation that may result from mankind going off track (and in this respect, at least, the film has a point…)

Here Comes Mr. Jordan (Alexander Hall, 1941)

 

Officially, Alexander Hall’s Here Comes Mr. Jordan is only seven minutes shorter than Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s 1978 remake Heaven Can Wait, but feels much tighter than the later film, sometimes to the point of seeming to rush: for example it sets-up the dimension-crossing romance at its centre in a mere few minutes of screen time, whereas the later version productively lingered at least a little longer. Notwithstanding that broad impression though, and leaving aside Beatty/Henry’s main tweak of making the protagonist Joe Pendleton a football player rather than a boxer, the two follow very similar trajectories, with an almost identical arrival point, both in tone and content. In both versions, Pendleton is killed in an accident (a plane in the original, a bike in the remake), denying him a chance at an upcoming sporting triumph. The administration of the afterlife concedes an error and sends him back, but into the body of a rich industrialist murdered by his wife and secretary; Pendleton rapidly overhauls the man’s cold-hearted public image, along the way turning a bitter young adversary into a star-crossed love. As the change of title may herald, the otherworldly Mr. Jordan is a more prominent presence in the original than the remake, its impact more fully conditioned on the interplay of Robert Montgonery’s pugnacious Pendleton and Claude Rains’ unflappably genial Jordan. Although further point-to-point relative evaluations of the two are largely subjective, the remake certainly does more with the murderous duo by casting Charles Grodin and Dyan Cannon, albeit both under-utilized – the characters in the original barely register as more than plot devices. Pendleton’s friend and trainer Max Korkle is a highlight of both, James Gleason snappy and short-fused in the original, Jack Warden in the remake more slow-burn befuddled (and benefiting from additional time spent on establishing the Pendleton/Korkle relationship).

Youth (Hard Times) (Wang Bing, 2024)

 

As the title indicates, Wang Bing’s documentary Youth (Hard Times) paints a gloomier picture than the preceding Youth (Spring), notwithstanding that both films run over three and a half hours and are set almost entirely in the dingy textile workshops and living quarters of Zhili (the closing captions tell us the city contains some 18,000 such businesses, employing 300,000 mostly young migrant workers); in each case, the great length serves to release us from normal expectations of pace and narrative, allowing at least a somewhat heightened sense of the claustrophobic repetition of such lives. The first film is hardly light viewing by any measure, but contains much camaraderie and joshing and flirting among the workers, the constant preoccupation with hourly rates and productivity offset with conspicuous consumption of the kind whereby one individual notes that another is still using last year’s iPhone. Hard Times feels both literally and figuratively darker, more deeply characterized by anxiety, by recurring resentment that the rates are insufficient, that they’re lower than those paid last year or in other shops; a greater number of its subjects are somewhat older, with families, working to pay off debts. But despite their efforts to act collectively, the workers have inherently little power, particularly embodied by a group whose crooked boss takes off, his obligations unpaid, leaving them to scurry around salvaging what they can. Like its predecessor, Hard Times ends by showing some of its people back in their home villages, the explosion of light and space almost dizzying in contrast to the compressed dinginess of what’s gone before, partly celebratory but also underlining the strangeness of such far-flung economic structures; the basic decency of the final note, one of respect for a neighbor’s crops, underlines (if it were necessary) the scant evidence of generosity in what precedes it.