An exemplary life …

Film: Sophie Scholl: The Final Days by Marc Rothemund
Rating: 8/10. Pedestrian cinematography but reputedly a highly authentic telling of this story

It’s been a good week for biographical cinema. First there was William Wilberforce’s history as told in Amazing Grace and tonight I was pleased to learn for the first time that Sophie Scholl had lived among us. Sophie was one of five students who, with her university professor, published tracts calling on the German people to abandon Hitler and the war. She was arrested, interrogated, tried and guillotined, all in the matter of a few days.

For the most part, the film seems authentic in its portrayal of the parties. The director offers us a story where the Nazi captors behave with decorum and treat their prisoners with dignity. Actress Julia Jentche plays an intelligent woman with a profound trust in her convictions. Alexander Held who plays her interrogator is a father of a son about her age and is torn between, one the one hand, his duty and his conviction that Germany is better under Hitler than before and, on the other hand, his embarrassment at charging a young and principled woman with treason. He offers her an escape route which she rejects. Only the judge in a kangaroo style “People’s Court” smacks of caricature though it seems that the real judge Roland Freisler behaved in this way.

I’d have liked to see some early biography of the Scholls and to learn at the end what became of the principal participants in this affair. Otherwise, this was a worthy and interesting film. Compare with Verhoeven’s Black Book, another wartime heroine story to see two entirely different directors at work.

Addendum: In looking for a title for this review, I was reminded of a delightful book (sadly out of print) from one of Germany’s finest (and most under-rated in the English-speaking world) novelists. An Exemplary Life recounts, in a very droll and ironic manner, the efforts of a three-person committee to select a biography for inclusion in a school textbook. The hypocrisy and prejudices of the panel members cause them to recommend the most bizarre candidates for inclusion and it is safe to assume that Sophie Scholl could never have figured in their lists. How nice it is then to learn (from Wikipedia, of course) that in 2003, a German television audience survey to choose “the ten greatest Germans of all time” (ZDF TV), selected Hans and Sophie Scholl in fourth place, placing them above Bach, Bismarck, and Einstein.

Book: An Exemplary Life by Siegfried Lenz
Translated from: German
Rating: 9/10.

Saving wretches …

Film: Amazing Grace directed by Michael Apted
Genre: Historical period drama
Rating: 9/10.

I went, dragging my heels, to see this because the alternative was David Lynch’s Inland Empire and the prospect of watching that was not inviting. Rare are the films that cause me to head home early from the cinema but Lynch’s Blue Velvet was one such and his other offerings have confirmed my distaste for his oeuvre.

However, costume period dramas never rate too highly on my Richter scale either and my forecast for Amazing Grace was for a score around the 6/10 level. How wrong I was!

While the chief merit of this film is its heart-warming and uplifting story of good triumphing over evil, the entire production is of a very high quality. The screenplay eschews the ‘obvious’ strategy of making its case by showing us the degradation of slavery and opts instead for the riskier approach of keeping us cooped up in parliament or committees listening to the arguments. The settings: parliament, stately homes and the dockside are filmed flawlessly. The cast (unknown to me with the obvious exceptions of Albert Finney and Michael Gambon in superb cameo roles) all carry their parts without a false note.

More than anything, though, its the message that resonates. It says that even in early 19th century England, without anything even approaching the communications technology of today, men were able to mobilise in the face of overwhelming opposition to change society. It’s too easy to resign oneself to the fact that most accept the status quo; this true story shows that though massively outnumbered, good can prevail. At one point, Wilberforce asks some reformers how they find the energy to try to improve the world in one small way, when so much improvement is needed everywhere. He is told in reply that an improvement in only one thing makes the world better in every way. Romantic nonsense? Not this time.

Vaguely nouvelle vague

Book: Travels in the Scriptorium by Paul Auster
Rating: 7/10. Back to style I like best, but ultimately disappointing.

This is a very short book. Reading it, I felt I had found a lost work from the French nouvelle vague and was amused later when Auster decides to call his tribes the Djinn, surely a reference to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s book which does what this one does; it finishes back where it started on an endless revolution.

The good news is that this is a return to the style Auster first delivered with The New York Trilogy. The bad news is that, when all is said and done, this latest novel disappoints. Although I like surrealism in my reading, I felt the situation he sets up is unoriginal – a guy waking up in a kind of cell not knowing who he is or where he came from. Auster never sets up enough questions for us to go figure our own version; instead he just throws a catalogue of obscure, undeveloped characters at us. Perhaps what I liked least, however, was an obsession with bodily functions which did nothing for this reader. In the course of this short novel, we are ‘treated’ repeatedly to our hero stripping, urinating, vomiting, masturbating and fondling his nurses breasts.

As frequently before, Auster provides us with an unfinished novel within the novel but I have to confess to mixed feelings here. Is Auster telling me that ideas are so easy to come up with that they are disposable and he can throw them away, half-done, in his books? or is he an author full of ideas who is unable to bring any of them to completion? He writes so appealingly that I’m inclined to opt for the former, but I can’t help worrying about it.

Ultimately, the book seems to be aimed at Auster’s die hard fans who will certainly appreciate his many references back to characters in previous works. Presumably we can take the old man to be himself and his ‘crime’ to be setting up the characters from his previous books and leaving them with unresolved lives; his punishment is that his life will now also be unresolved. Occasionally an author will entertain the conceit of writing a book aimed only at those who know his work well. Iain M. Banks did that with Inversions, a book which can really only be properly appreciated by a fan of his Culture, but Inversions can be enjoyed (albeit at a lower level) on its own merit. Here Auster, gives us a book which is completely impenetrable for the uninitiated.

Death by 300 cuts

Film: 300 by Zack Snyder
Rating: 4/10 not bad looking juvenile twaddle

300 opened in Dublin today and I’ve been waiting to see it. Partly because the pre-publicity promised interesting styling, a comic book look; partly because the child in me remembered, several years ago, reading and enjoying Stephen Pressfield’s book Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae.

I dragged my poor long-suffering missus along to what turned out to be the most juvenile heap of trash I’ve seen in a long time. To be fair, I’d feared the worst and had invited my son instead, but unfortunately (for his mum, not him) he had other plans. The critics had panned the film and, for once, I raise my glass to them. The film makes Boys Own Paper look like high-brow literature.

The film has a certain comic-book feel as promised, but this was less appealing than I’d hoped for; some battle scenes were excellent but the Spartan town was without interest. The characters were cardboard cut-outs who roared and screamed at each other … in the manner of comic-book characters; this could have worked well if played for laughs or if the comic-book style was pushed to the limit, when it would have added authenticity; sadly, it just came across as a trashy script. I waited in vain for Leonidas to tell Xerxes to ‘gerrup de yaard’ as it would have raised the standard of repartee to a level Dubliners would have enjoyed!

According to Wikipedia, the film’s director Zack Snyder states that:

The events are 90 percent accurate. It’s just in the visualization that it’s crazy… I’ve shown this movie to world-class historians who have said it’s amazing. They can’t believe it’s as accurate as it is.

Give us a break Zack! Your Persians are straight out of Lord of the Rings, Xerxes is out of La Cage aux Folles and you’re beginning to believe your publicist.

This will be a huge undeserving hit.

Tales from the black hole

Book: Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra
Genre: Police Procedural, painted on a wide historical canvas
Rating: 9/10. Superb, but marred by a minor diversion into Hollywoodian melodrama

This is not one novel, but several interlaced. At its most basic, it’s a police procedural with the indomitable Sartaj Singh carrying out his low-tech job as a police detective in Mumbai. Like all the best modern literary detectives (such as Mankell’s Wallander) Sartaj is a decent, complicated, divorced and troubled man. Unlike most, he lives in a world where graft and corruption seem to be a part of everyone’s life, including his own; he takes bribes, he beats confessions out of captives and he feels guilt about it all. Put him in London or New York and he’d be detestable. In Mumbai, he’s a champion! He is a superb creation and I fervently hope to meet him again.

Interleaved in Sartaj’s daily muddling through, Ganesh Gaitonde, a major Mumbai crime-boss tells us his venal life story. Although some of his history is fascinating, this is the least attractive part of Sacred Games. I was uncomfortable with this narrative for a number of reasons. Firstly because Gaitonde dies in the first hundred pages and I saw no literary justification for this life-story narrated in the first-person. Secondly, because his self-justification began eventually to jar on me. Thirdly, because the key plot leading to his downfall smacked a little too much of a Stephen Siegal thriller with nuclear bombs and last minute rescues. Nevertheless, Gaitonde’s story had its merits; it’s witty, frequently original and it introduces Jojo, the woman who refuses to meet him but who provides him with girls. The foul-mouthed, corrupt Jojo is one of this novels fantastic originals. It is through her that we get to explore aspects of Bollywood and the depths the ambitious and unconnected must stoop to in order to succeed.

More than anything else, what I really loved about Sacred Games was its principle character, India. I knew nothing about India before I picked up this book and it has mesmerised me. Flashbacks take us back fifty years to Partition when India and Pakistan went their separate ways and tens of millions of people were displaced. We get insights into a state which is simultaneously modern and feudal. The book is steeped in politics and religion. We are treated to many brief but fully fleshed-out biographies of people from all strata of society, loosely connected to the main storyline, but fascinating for themselves. This is a novel we want to enter and get involved with its very real inhabitants. I continuously wanted to intervene, to use my privileged insider-knowledge of all their stories to correct the accidents of history, set them straight and help them out.

Some reviewers have criticised the Insets, chapters which recount stories outside the main thread of the narrative, as distracting to the reader. Personally, I found that these were the elements that elevated the book beyond good to GREAT. The author uses these tales to underline that none of the characters ever knows the whole story. In this way, the reader has a perspective that the characters miss. We see, for example, mitigating circumstances in the life of the cop killer. I particularly liked the story of the two sisters, separated by the Partition, who end up living long and rewarding lives in opposite camps.

I can’t remember when I was so ‘involved’ in a story. This is the book that will bring me eventually to visit India.