Let's all go to the movies...
Adam's Notes for May 29, 2025
Brian
by Jeremy Cooper
Fitzcarraldo Editions (2023); 184 pages.
A novella about movies. Kind of a sneaky thing, really, because there isn’t much in the way of a story, it’s mostly just Brian going to the movies and then inserting his commentary on them into the narrative. Mostly his life is rather sad: he lives alone in shabby but not squalid conditions, has no friends, avoids his family, has bisexual urges but is essentially asexual, has a steady job and income but no life. He has a nightly habit of going to the BFI to see whatever’s on. And yet, from this, he does build up a life: he slowly befriends the other buffs by joining their little post-film huddle, each of them commenting on whatever they’ve seen, and after a while he’s asked to volunteer with the organization in a small capacity. But really this book is mostly just a list of films and associated trivia. When I first caught onto this, it sort of annoyed me. Why not just write a non-fiction book about film? Well, going by what’s in here there wouldn’t be enough to sustain such a book. And yet here it ends up working. It’s a catalogue novel, like the second book of the Iliad. I also liked how it showed the changes to the moviegoing experience over time, not just the rise of streaming but the inevitable deterioration in Brian’s eyesight as he ages. His specialties are gay cinema and Japanese movies, neither of which are really my thing, but he ends up watching such a wide variety of films that I know I’ll be returning to this book from time to time when I’m at a loss for something interesting to watch. It’s neither a great novel nor great film criticism, but it’s more than the sum of its parts and ends up being a good book. Strange.
In the spirit of Brian, here are three films I’ve enjoyed recently.
The Wonders (2014)
Directed by Alice Rohrwacher
Starring Maria Alexandra Lungu, Alba Rohrwacher, & Sam Louwyck
112 minutes
Alice Rohrwacher is quickly becoming one of my favourite filmmakers. Alice Rohrwacher's La Chimera was by far my favourite film of last year. Imagine like a mystical (in a good way) Italian Indiana Jones, obsessed with finding Etruscan artifacts and his missing wife. Just crazy good. Anyway I watched Rohrwacher's earlier film The Wonders and it too blew me away.
It’s about smalltime Tuscan beekeepers in the 80s. Just a miserable life where everything keeps going bad, but the father and the oldest daughter keep it running. She wants to enrol the family on a game show hosted by Monica Bellucci, the father knows he owes his daughter for all her hard work but he doesn’t want to do it, doesn’t want to subject himself to televised humiliation. He is incredibly Italian: when things go bad, it’s a catastrophe… the end of the world… but there’s no one to hear him over all of the noise… he’s just constantly emoting to himself. He’s dedicated to keeping the farm running, it’s all they have. The funniest scene in the movie has him fighting with his wife, we’re led to think he’s finally done something selfish, and he has, he’s spent what little money they have on a gift, but I can’t say more than that, you really have to watch this one.
But my god, what a miserable thing farm life must be: the hydraulic hum of the separator, the hunters constantly encroaching on land that isn’t yours, blasting their guns at night, the pesticides killing your animals, the new regulations from the state, the slaughterhouse guys refusing to take your animals (because they’re ‘not running a circus’!), changing out the fucking bucket every six hours… it’s all too much… and then there’s the constant shouting on top of it all, everything relayed, two-three times because of all the noise… the poor father! It isn’t easy! … I tried to write a novel about beekeepers once, it was set back home in Cape Breton… and they were just hobbyists, by comparison… I knew some people who got into farming, once… it’s a difficult life!… I had to shelve the novel though because I realized the only two bits I liked were stolen from Irvine Welsh… Oh god and the storm comes up and they have to sit on their hives to keep them from blowing away… and the only one who really helps him is his daughter, and her mind is elsewhere, on the pains of growing up and on this damn television show… what a life!
Borgo (2023)
Directed by Stéphane Demoustier
Starring Hafsia Herzi, Moussa Mansaly, & Florence Loiret Caille
118 minutes
A woman prison guard in a men’s prison is slowly corrupted on the idyllic but violent island of Corsica. The prison is fascinating, less a place of oppression than a filthy club hangout. Even in lockdown there are still singalongs and a sort of rudimentary room service run by the guards. I don’t know what they’re complaining about, really. We get the occasional excursion out to see the stunning beauty of the island, but these are sparing and infrequent.
The movie runs along two timelines, one following the woman, the other following investigators working their way back through hours of collected cellphone and CCTV footage, examining a murder that the movie both begins and ends with. I was really fascinated by the way the airport came alive at the end, in part because we’ve spent half the film in a shitty apartment block and a decrepit prison and here we are in a colourful retail space, but no, really it’s because now we’re seeing all that grainy security camera footage and shaky cellphone footage transformed into something big and loud and cinematic, but following a choreography that’s become familiar to us through repetition. We recognize the backgrounds, the extras, subtle gestures—we’ve been trained to watch this footage, plus now we have the context of how and why the crime is being committed. Neat.
Richelieu (2023)
Directed by Pier-Philippe Chevigny
Starring Ariane Castellanos and Marc-André Grondin
89 minutes
Ariane moves back home to her village in Quebec to take a job as a translator for temporary foreign workers from Mexico and Guatemala at a factory that processes corn. Her boss, Stephane, is a friend of her ex-boyfriend, currently in jail for molesting children or something. The workers have to wade into a small pit and keep it clear of corn husks. Too many husks and the pit overflows, shutting down the plant. It’s the last part of the plant that isn’t automated. This is industrial agriculture, as opposed to farming, and the backbreaking labour is a world away from even the harshness of The Wonders, which begins to look romantic by comparison (even if the family ends up in very dire straits).
The workers here are, of course, fucked by capitalism in a thousand different ways: one asks to be sent home to attend his father’s funeral and is refused, one can’t understand the concept of a debit card PIN, there’s no grocery store near their shitty dormitory, which then has security cameras installed in common areas, they need a letter of recommendation to return to the factory next season, they are made to pay union dues but offered no union protections, inevitably someone is hurt on the job. Stephane, too, is under stress from the plant’s head office in France, and nixes Ariane’s project of getting the labourer’s trained to work the factory equipment so that they can have some variety on the job, spend some time away from that boggy pit. Ariane’s mother tries to offer advice, but she’s an HR worker, so obviously she only makes things worse. Ariane becomes something of a de facto union rep, because translation has to work both ways. Things get complicated when the Canadian healthcare system gets involved, and there’s a gruesome medical procedure. It’s all worth your time.
I’m usually pretty trepidatious about checking out Canadian films—I’ve been burned far too many times in the past. But I feel like we’re starting to get somewhere, now. There are a handful of Canadian films that have intrigued me with their trailers, or impressed me if I’ve actually managed to watch them. I think maybe the streaming era expanded everyone’s horizons a little, and made it possible for Canadian filmmakers to make stuff that isn’t just a pale knockoff of the worst stuff Americans make. But yes, I definitely checked this out because I thought it would be some kind of historical epic about the machiavellian French cardinal.
I’ve been thinking lately about pastoralism, in the sense of the ancient and medieval literary genre, and I think each of these films has something of the pastoral in them, but modernity or whatever can’t let the fantasy of the simple life play out without complication, and so we’re offered a taste of the bucolic (with Borgo and The Wonders, that is; it’s long dead by the time Richelieu starts), but it’s thrown into chaos by capitalism and crime and also the fact that the simple life has only ever been an aristocratic fantasy, that agriculture has always been an ugly, dirty business with ultrathin margins. I’ve been thinking of it as the new pastoralism.
I don’t know, I could be way off, it’s just how I group these things together in my mind.
More cinema
Adam’s holiday movie recommendations (it’s just a list of everything I watched in 2024)
The Beasts (2022)
The Teachers’ Lounge (2023), The Night Of (2016), and Les Sauvages (2019)
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I felt the same way about Brian. Also, Alice Rohrwacher is so great.
Great analyses as always, Adam!