Kosua was released only last month, but its journey began two years ago when George Thompson, aka Black Merlin, released Hipnotik Tradisi, a beautiful and captivating document of his travels through Indonesia, seamlessly blending field recordings, found sounds and studio experimentalism.
It’s been an odd year for albums. The one I’ve listened to most is Stop Lying, a mini-album by Raf Rundel, an artist best known as one half of DJ-producer outfit 2 Bears. It’s a genially cynical album, laced with love, dipping into all manner of styles, from electro-pop to hip hop, but essentially pop.
The problem with being an increasingly senile but still rabidly enthusiastic music fan is that you find yourself declaring that an autumn release is Album of the Year only to realise – after glancing back through old Facebook posts – that you repeatedly made the same claim for another record back in the spring. So which one does the glass slipper actually fit? It’s tricky to decide because they couldn’t be more different.
I’ve noticed a stark shift in transition of the kind of music I want to spend my time listening to over 2018. I’ve slowed down. I’ve started listening to Radio 6. I’m a little bit in love with Mary Anne Hobbs. And I bought a record player.
Egbert Nathaniel Dawkins III – Aloe Blacc – is one shrewd dude. He's extremely adept at reaching out beyond the confines of his natural beat of funk and soul, whether that's credible (covering The Velvet Underground's “Femme Fatale”) on his breakthrough 2010 Good Thingsalbum or commercial (co-writing and singing the late Swedish EDM gigastar Aviicii's “Wake Me Up” can't have done his bank balance any harm, what with going to number one in 22 countries). And of course nobody ever went bankrupt releasing a Christmas album...
This is a soundtrack with vast shoes to fill. Frozen, The Lion King and Aladdin may be the best-selling Disney soundtracks but, alongside The Jungle Book, the original 1964 Mary Poppins has the most beloved array of songs. It takes chutzpah to try and match a set that includes such childhood standards as “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “Chim Chim Cher-ee” and “A Spoonful of Sugar”.
What makes a great Christmas song? There’s an alchemy to finding the winning combination of whimsy and humour, juxtaposed with a healthy slice of Christmas angst. This formula has led us to spin the same handful of pop bangers that endure down the decades, soundtracking generation after generation of tinsel and mince pies.
Christmas is traditionally that time of the year when cool rock-dudes like to come over all silly and tinselly. Not Eric Clapton. On this, his first Christmas LP, the veteran axe-man spurns the usual seasonal schmaltz, in favour of some good old-fashioned blues. The results, unsurprisingly, go a little easy on the comfort and joy.
Xmas chez Clapton it would seem, is more about melancholy and regret. The start of "White Christmas", for instance, could almost be an outtake from "Me and Mr Johnson". Similarly "Away in A Manger" is virtually "Run So Far". If you're a sucker for EC's back catalogue you'll surely enjoy his take on the Christmas standards.
That, however, is only part of the story. The other half of the album is made up of lesser-known Xmas songs that EC discovered, apparently, in secondhand record stores. The most engaging is "Home from the Holidays" originally by R&B singer Anthony Hamilton. Clapton reworks it in his weepy, country-blues style, and while it might not be very festive it's certainly pretty and reflective.
Less successful are some of the album's efforts to be jolly. Like "Christmas in my Hometown, a ragtime piece intended to evoke the atmosphere of an American bar. In truth, it's more like the musical equivalent of a cable-knit jumper. Other upbeat numbers work a little better. "It's Christmas Day" is spirited, if incongruously summery.
The strangest track on the LP is "Jingle Bells", recorded as a tribute to Clapton's friend, the late Swedish DJ, Avicii. It's mainly a techno track with a few seconds of Clapton's guitar thrown in - and he's not even playing the tune. And yet, its sheer weirdness also makes it the most interesting track on the album. In recent years, Clapton's increasing sentimentality and repetition has caused some to say he's ready for his rocking chair phase. Sections of Happy Xmas may bear that out, but there are also signs of life in the old dog yet.
Overleaf: Clapton's video for "White Christmas"
Laurent Cantet’s The Workshop (L’Atelier) is something of a puzzle. There’s a fair deal that recalls his marvellous 2009 Palme d’Or winner The Class, including a young, unprofessional cast playing with considerable accomplishment, but the magic isn’t quite the same. And the film’s interest in a social issue, how the young and disaffected come to be engaged with far-right politics, remains an adjunct to a story that becomes finally more involved with itself.
As in The Class, Cantet (together with his co-writer for both films, Robin Campillo) has developed his story around a strong sense of location – in this case, the port of La Ciotat near Marseille, once a centre of shipbuilding, then a beacon of industrial action, now rather a backwater of industrial decline – as well as through the theme of education. His teen protagonists here have been chosen (for reasons we never quite discover) to take part in a summer writer’s workshop with a Paris novelist, Olivia (Marina Foïs), whose speciality seems to be psychological thrillers that pull no punches. The loose idea of the course is that they will develop, together, a story that draws equally on their own preoccupations and those of their milieu.
His discontent seems much more existential - think, Camus - than social
It looks as much like an exercise in bonding as anything else, and the dynamics of (mixed-race) interrelationship between its participants quickly comes to the fore – or rather, how one of them, the loner Antoine (Matthieu Lucci, outstanding; with Marina Foïs, pictured below), becomes increasingly a disruptive force, his contributions to the gestating shared narrative dominated by violence. His discontent seems much more existential – think, Camus – than social (there’s little sense of deprivation in his home environment), while Cantet’s narrative reveals his affiliations, through older friends, with movements close to radical (white) disaffection.
The balance of the story gradually changes. Instead of guiding the wider path of her students’ investigations, Olivia becomes increasingly caught up in herself following Antoine’s solitary world, and trailing the traces he has left behind on the Internet. She can explain such interest by treating it nominally as research for a future book, but Cantet plants at least a germ of suspicion about an unsettling furtive sexuality lurking around this otherwise rather abstract connection. In turn, Antoine develops his own obsession with her, which leads to a last act that unsatisfactorily leaves behind any psychological tension achieved to date in favour a full-blown thriller-style denouement. It may engross, but we’re left with a sense that our attention has been grasped by the rote of genre rather than anything more subtle.
That’s certainly where it departs from The Class, though Cantet’s new film certainly develops his earlier concept that exploring ideas – as envisaged in the group’s shared development of its story – can be as engrossing as any more traditional sense of encounter. Even here, that potential never vanishes entirely: Antoine’s final appearance among his fellows has him delivering a stunning verbal assault every bit as lacerating as any other more direct attack could be.
As its title suggests, The Workshop presupposes a process of development, the result spontaneous rather than predetermined. It feels as if Cantet has stirred together various aspects that have been important in his previous work – an element of social realism, a subject and script explored through extensive “workshop” development with his young collaborators, even the agile handheld cinematography of Pierre Milon (who also shot The Class) – and rather drawn a blank. On occasions, the tensions between his teenage characters are real, as if the experiment is working; then, with a closing scene that steps into a different, entirely conventional retrospective register entirely, Cantet seems to have wrung his hands, and admitted that this pursuit of the dividing line between fiction and reality has been absorbed within its own contradictions. Intermittently interesting, finally a disappointment.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Workshop
This first feature from Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi is a delicate study in confinement, and of how the chance of freedom can bring an equal sense of exhilaration and apprehension. The two heroines of The Heiresses, Chela (Ana Brun) and Chiquita (Margarita Irún), are longterm lovers who inhabit an environment of familiar privilege and comfortable claustrophobia. When confronted by new circumstances that disrupt their long-established private world, the former faces an opportunity for change that may look set to break her, but actually has the potential to make her anew.
The couple live in a spacious but heavily gloomy Asunción villa, Chela’s family home, in an old-style district of the Paraguayan capital. Their life of leisure, defined by a group of women friends in similar positions (men are almost completely absent from this world) and by the maid who looks after them, seems as elaborately ordered as the bedside tray that has to be carefully laid out for Chela every morning. It seems like a timeless hangover from a previous age but the couple has fallen into debt – Martinessi’s script never elucidates how or why – and their world is in jeopardy.
Their new circumstances are forcing them to sell off some of their most precious possessions, a procedure that is carried out with strict decorum, purchasers shown around by the maid while Chela watches from behind a screen. Much more dramatic, however, is Chiquita's imminent confinement to prison on charges of fraud (pictured below, Margarita Irún) . One of the film’s strongest elements is its establishment of character, defining the more extrovert Chiquita as the dominant force in the relationship, her forthrightness set against the apprehension and reticence of her companion.
The reaction of the two women to the prison environment is characteristic, its noisy unruliness a world in which Chiquita quickly finds herself at ease, while it clearly intimidates Chela even more than having to drive herself there (in an ancient Mercedes that is another family hand-down). Despite the attentions of a well-meaning friend who is trying to have Chiquita released, the already limited boundaries of Chela’s world look set for further contraction.
That’s until a neighbour, the mordantly bitchy Pituca (María Martins), accosts her with a request – more a command, actually – to be driven to her bridge party; Chela complies, and uncharacteristically accepts the money offered for the ride. Soon she has become an informal taxi-driver to a whole gaggle of acerbic middle-aged ladies: any judgment of the privileged self-centredness of their world that Martinessi may evince is moderated by his relish of their eccentricity.
When Chela makes the acquaintance of the younger Angy (Ana Ivanova), the daughter of one of this coterie, her horizons start to be stretched – literally so, when she agrees to drive her regularly to a more distant destination – and a subtle transformation begins as she is drawn out of herself, starting to pay to herself in new ways. It’s affecting, and a performance of rare accomplishment from Brun (in her first screen appearance after a career in theatre) for which she won the Berlinale’s Best Actress award this year.
It may seem a rather hermetic drama played out on a small scale, but the resonances of The Heiresses surely run deeper, not least for a society that is itself emerging from decades of repression. Martinessi doesn’t need to stress such aspects, however, just as he doesn’t need to labour the gay element in his film, or indeed emphasise the aspects of class that so clearly underlie the world that he depicts. His accomplishment is to create this particularl world in minute totality, with an apparent ease that belies the scale of the achievement. His cinematic horizons can only broaden after this, in every sense: defintely a director to watch.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Heiresses