the making of "the adventures of a horny widow"
Torremolinos 73
Director: Pablo Berger
Following my grand karmic tradition of watching films about porn films with guy friends (two movies do not a karmic tradition make, i hear some wetblanket intone, and in the name of Hyperbolic-Writing promptly silence the voice with a disapproving glare), i approached Spanish film Torremolinos 73 with some trepidation. The last time i'd seen one of these self-reflexive films-about-porn-films, the movie (Boogie Nights - more on that one some other time) left such a bad taste in my mouth that i swore never to inflict such an experience on myself again. And now, here i was, not only doing exactly what i'd determined never to do again, but imposing a possibly painful two hours on some poor bloke who probably had even less of an idea of what he was getting into than i did.
Fortunately, what we were both getting into was a gem of a film that is as sweet as it is hilarious, and that is even more about love and family than it is about sex and the porn industry. But above all it is a loving tribute to the art of cinema - with a tongue-in-cheek sideswipe at the cheesy Seventies, complete with campy disco lights and even campier music.
Plotwise, the movie is so zany it borders on farce. The basic premise: Alfredo, an encyclopaedia salesman and his wife Carmen find themselves in an ethical quandary when Alfredo is given an ultimatum by his boss - make documentary films for the World Audiovisual Encyclopaedia of Human Reproduction, or get fired. Faced with impending pauperdom, the couple finally give in to the fact that 'integrity buay sai jia eh' (literally, 'integrity cannot eat one', as some of my guy friends put it), and agree to take on the job of making soft-porn films for the Scandinavian market. This bold enterprise takes the decidedly ordinary couple where they have never gone before, with Alfredo developing a passion for film-making and finding a new hero in legendary director Ingmar Bergman, and Carmen becoming a soft-porn movie star in Scandinavia. Alfredo's obsessive ambitions soon reach epic proportions when he decides to direct his own feature-length tribute to Bergman called 'Torremolinos 73', with Carmen in the starring role. Real life, however, fails to live up to his dreams. Caught between the realities of commercial interests and Carmen's longing to have children, Alfredo finds himself making the most difficult decision of his life - and it is here that the film reaches its poignant and comically bizarre climax.
Filmed entirely in the grainy, slightly ill-defined cinematic style of the Seventies, the film has a quirky charm deriving from the distinct sense we get that the story is being told by a camera with a
personality. In most films, we are aware, if at all, of the camera as simply a narrative device. Seldom does this awareness develop into the feeling that there is an active, intelligent, wryly humorous
consciousness directing our attention and response to everything onscreen - everything from the opening shots of Alfredo labouring up the stairs (the lift under maintenance, as luck would have it) only to have doors slammed repeatedly in his face by his potential clients, to the hilariously solemn footage of Carmen fastidiously folding her clothes and placing them neatly on a chair even as she is being taught the art of strip-tease by a Scandinavian porn-star.
All art speaks to us as individuals at specific points in our lives. Perhaps if i were to watch this again, say, in ten years' time, i would see it as a study of a loving marriage troubled by circumstances beyond the couple's control. At this moment, however, what strikes a chord is the film's exploration of the cost of passionately and single-mindedly pursuing a dream. Something has to give, somewhere. In the movie, what gives when Alfredo becomes increasingly obsessed with film-making is his relationship with his wife, and that it all works out in the end is probably due more to the rules of the comic genre rather than to a truly satisfactory resolution of the tensions and dilemmas faced by Alfredo and Carmen.
Food for thought, perhaps, for those of us chasing after our private rainbows.
champagne supernova
One of the most energetic explosive events known is a supernova. These occur at the end of a star's lifetime, when its nuclear fuel is exhausted and it is no longer supported by the release of nuclear energy. If the star is particularly massive, then its core will collapse and in so doing will release a huge amount of energy. This will cause a blast wave that ejects the star's envelope into interstellar space. The result of the collapse may be, in some cases, a rapidly rotating neutron star that can be observed many years later as a radio pulsar. I never thought I'd say this. But the truth must be spoken, even if it hurts (cue melodramatic background music). And the truth is, U2 is now a has-been. Actually, it’s been a has-been-in-the-making ever since the curiously-labelled 'comeback album' “All That You Can't Leave Behind” that the critics went radio-gaga about when it was released four years ago. But the latest album “How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb” is the final nail in the coffin of what used to be the best band in the world. And if the members of the former best band in the world had any sense at all, they'd quit now while they're still ahead, while the music critics are kind (or deluded) enough to continue writing good reviews of their work, while listeners around the world still have enough goodwill to give them, despite the evidence, the benefit of the doubt.
The new album is not bad. In fact, as most albums go, it's pretty good, and is definitely a worthwhile addition to my ever-expanding CD collection. U2 is still more than capable of writing a decent melody. Bono's voice still has that faintly Messianic edge that all the postmodern sunglass-wearing irony in the world has never been able to erase, and there are tracks like ‘Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own’ and 'Yahweh' in which The Edge's guitar riffs soar in good ole Joshua Tree fashion over the solid bass lines provided by Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen. Some things you just can’t leave behind. This album sounds polished, well-thought-through. Tracks like 'Vertigo' might even fool the casual listener into thinking that the band has managed to translate the spontaneity and sense of mischief it's always shown in performance into a studio effort. The songs are all based on suitably important themes. To all intents and purposes, it looks like U2 is back for good. Yet, despite all the apparent likenesses, the group's old spirit has gone. U2 has produced, for once, a thoroughly listenable and decent album.
Decent. Competent. And boring.
There’s nothing really wrong with the new album. Upon repeated hearing, it even takes on its own comfortable charm, like a favourite t-shirt well-worn with age. It’s something that grows on you. But U2 never used to be just a band that just grew on you. They were a band that grabbed you by the scruff of your neck so that you simply had to pay attention, whether you liked it or not. They didn’t do ‘floataround stuff’ like the blatantly radio-friendly music that has characterised their recent efforts. And even when they courted their fans in the most outrageous of ways, they never looked as abject in their courtship as they’re starting to look now.
I used to be a loyal U2 fan. And because I'm the sort of person who doesn't love in half-measures, my fandom used to border on worship. For someone who doesn't like collecting things (I don't like the way they clutter up my life and eventually take on a life of their own), I own an uncharacteristically impressive collection of U2 paraphenalia: eight CDs, an oversized t-shirt, a book entitled 'Until the End of the World', the credit card receipt for the tickets to their 1997 'Pop' gig that I had to sell because I couldn't make it back to London in time to catch the show. But the band meant more to me than just the sum of the shelf space it took up in my room. For years, U2 was to me an emblem of a life lived in perpetual quest of that something more, proof that passionate engagement in the world around us is more than just a hypothetical possibility, a beacon of purposeful and meaningful audacity in a world that so often seesaws between pointless rebellion and mindless conformity. Of course, I was aware that all of this was probably just a clever marketing gimmick designed to sell an image to gullible consumers like me, but at least it was an image that I could buy into, one that I wanted to believe in, in contrast to so much of the other trash that Hollywood and MTV try to hawk to us nowadays.
What I used to admire most about U2 was that they were always so eager to try out new things - new genres, new philosophies, even new identities. I've watched them evolve from the earnest born-again Irish Christians who rocked entire stadiums with anthems like 'I Will Follow' and 'Sunday Bloody Sunday', to the postmodern self-reflexively ironic (and, may I say, patently ludicrous) rock stars who strutted on stage in gigantic plastic lemons, wailing the lyrics to songs with titles like 'Mofo' and 'Lemon'. Their music ranged across an entire spectrum of different genres - stadium rock, intimate ballads, electronic dance grooves, and their own unique brand of rock-pop-jazz that simply defied categorisation.
They sang about love, of course - but not just romantic love, though as far as that went they did it in a way that most other bands have never even come close to emulating. Crowd-pleasers like 'One', 'With Or Without You', and 'All I Want Is You' contained edgily bittersweet lyrics that explored the complexities of loving another person with needs and desires equal to but different from one's own. Then there were songs like 'Love Is Blindness' and 'So Cruel' that, with their lacerating self-awareness, slowly and methodically peeled the layers off dysfunctional romantic relationships to reveal the obvious but rarely realised truth that most unhappy relationships exist because, basically, people choose to be in them. Then there were other kinds of love - love of country, love of humanity, love of God. All of which were expressed in songs that had nothing much in common other than intelligent lyrics, truly original music, and a certain passionate urgency in the delivery that shone through even the most polished of studio-editting – ‘MLK’, 'Bullet the Blue Sky', 'Pride (In the Name of Love)', 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For', 'Until the End of the World'.
They sang about our times - war ('Miss Sarajevo'), the media (‘Babyface’), alienation ('Numb', 'Zooropa'), consumerism and excess ('The Playboy Mansion'), urban angst ('Stay - Faraway So Close'). They sang about things that mattered, yet somehow managed not to come across as preachy and heavy-handed. And damn, they were good.
No matter that their excesses sometimes made them look a little ridiculous (in the case of the lemons, for example, or the ridiculously over-the-top make-a-statement supermarket launch of 'Pop' in 1997). Never mind the grand posturing, the cross-dressing, the silly sunglasses (said The Edge: "In the beginning the idea of wearing sunglasses for an interview seemed kinda stupid. Now we realize that in fact it’s not whether you wear sunglasses that’s important, it’s what kind of sunglasses you’re wearing."). U2 dared to do things that no one else had the balls to do. And their sheer audacity somehow made it all okay.
And how could you not forgive them their occasional trespasses, when they used the publicity generated from such rock star wankiness to further various good causes such as raising AIDs awareness and relieving third-world debt? Of course, one can be cynical and accuse them of milking the public's sympathy in order to boost their own profile, but whatever their motives, the fact remains that they've done more to engage in and contribute to the world around them than any other pop or rock group I know of, and that in itself deserves to be acknowledged and lauded.
So this is my tribute to the old U2, the band that were once the unacknowledged legislators of my emotional world. It feels strange to write about them in the past tense. And, even after their latest disappointing offering, there is still hope that the unforgettable fire which used to inspire their music has not yet been wholly extinguished. And that someday, they will find it in themselves to once again write, and perform, music that truly matters.
retrospective
This was written.... gasp! FOUR years ago, and i'm only putting it up here because i think it offers an interesting counterpoint to the previous entry. i must confess that i haven't been able to look at this with a straight face ever since a friend spotted the (unintentional) Obi Wan Kenobi echo in 'You have taught me well...' Still, i shall spare everyone the usual self-flagellating criticism - not because i think particularly well of this poem, but because i'm starting to find the (possibly very Asian) tradition of pseudo-modest fishing-for-compliments-disguised-as-self-deprecation ('Sorry, but the cookies are really not crispy enough...') and the consequent assurances from politely-appreciative friends ('No, that's not true.... yum yum, they're very crispy...') slightly annoying. Honest critique from all of you is, however, more than welcome.Prayer
Humankind’s instinct is to search for patterns,
Impose them, if need be, on the random
Splash of extravagant starlight
Spilling across the night.
We seek to order chaos, and if
That is not quite possible, ma’am,
We do apologise for this unfortunate
Turn of events – may we suggest, ma’am,
That you try again some other…..
But we have no patience for the long haul,
In the long run we’re all dead, and
What good is knowledge if you’re not
Alive to taste its fruit?
I want to believe.
Help thou my unbelief.
The Pilgrim Fathers read the earth,
Scanned the mottled blue of hope-new skies
For signs of Your divine solicitude.
They found it in the simplest
Fall of autumn leaves
Russet on the forest floor.
Please, Sir, I want some more.
But when that ‘more’ comes,
Bang in the middle of my placid life,
I, petulant child,
Question its provenance,
Will not accept Your gift,
If gift it is at all.
What then is belief?
Help thou my unbelief.
For faith means hope,
And hope is the serpent
I have learnt to distrust.
You have taught me well,
Master of my life.
So I see, in this sudden
Conflagration of patterned unlikelihoods,
Nothing but the purely coincidental.
Your burning-bush party tricks
No longer leave me in wide-eyed wonder.
So I tell myself.
Yet You, knowing conjuror,
Stand, smirking, in the darkness of the wind.
Why then this belief?
Give me my unbelief.
signs and wonders
"Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe."
- John 4:48
We all love the spectacular, the extraordinary. As children, which of us did not gape in wonder at the sight of fabulous fireworks exploding in the night, the heady mix of colour and sound fading slowly into wispy tendrils of light? And later in life, how many of us have not been fascinated by tales of the supernatural – the virgin birth, the miraculous healing of fifty-two cripples at a famous pilgrimage site, the overnight conversion of the wife-and-alcohol abuser into a saintly father-figure and motivational speaker?
All the things that i used to call, at a time of general bitterness and cynicism, God's burning-bush party-tricks.
For the past few weeks, though, i've been thinking about the miracle of the ordinary. It seems to me now that even our waking up each morning is a miracle in itself, a miracle that too many of us take entirely for granted. And the only reason we don't see it as such is because our minds have been dulled by custom, lulled into complacency by habit, such that we no longer see the poetry in the everyday.
But that begs the larger question of what exactly constitutes the miraculous. According to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary:
miracle · n. 1. an extraordinary and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws, attributed to a divine agency -> a remarkable and very welcome occurrence.
2. an amazing product or achievement, or an outstanding example of something:
a miracle of design.
- origin ME: via OFr. from L.
miraculum ‘object of wonder’, from
mirari ‘to wonder’, from
mirus ‘wonderful’.
The first definition is of particular interest, because it seems to assume firstly that natural or scientific laws are somehow independent of any sort of divine agency. This is a rather strange assumption, given that most major theistic world religions do attribute the natural world (and therefore the laws that govern it) to the work of a divine agency. It also suggests that anything that is explicable by natural or scientific laws (which, by the way, seems to me to be another illogical dichotomy) is neither extraordinary nor particularly welcome.
Yet, if we only stop to think about it, we'd realise that everything which we are to perceive in this world is, in its own way, ‘an amazing product or achievement’, ‘a miracle of design’. The earth that nourishes the olive tree. The sunlight reflected in the diaphanous wings of a common dragonfly. The dirty roadside puddle that harbours a million living organisms. The fossilised remains of long-dead plants and animals that fuel our vehicles and industries. The tired commuter slumped in his seat on the rush-hour bus who sees the world, responds to that world, and thus creates a world, in a way that is uniquely, unequivocally his own.
With such an abundance of daily miracles happening and existing around us at every moment, perhaps it is for the best that we don’t usually see them as such. Perhaps there is only so much wonder the human mind can take, and our habitual dullness of perception is a coping mechanism, designed to help us get on with the necessary work of daily life, uninterrupted by the over-stimulation of the senses that would result from being in a state of constant rapture. And perhaps that is, in itself, a miracle worth celebrating.
to my gentle readers
Just a little authorial intrusion here:
Thanks for reading, and i hope it's been at least mildly entertaining.
A request: if you're leaving a comment (and i hope you do), pls do sign off in some way that makes it possible for me to identify you. i do want to put a face to the comment. :)
thankee. :)
bimbonic bitching
The world is made up of two types of people - those who give way when swimming towards you in the same lane in the swimming pool, and those who don't.
There is nothing more annoying than having to give way,
time after time, to some hirsute hulk of a man with his beer-belly spilling out of his swim trunks who refuses to even acknowledge that fellow pool-users may just possibly have the same right to the unobstructed use of the lane as he does. i have yet to decide whether similar situations involving the cute yuppie-types with the well-toned muscles and chiselled cheekbones are any less irksome. My gut feeling is that if anything, they are more galling, not less, because one expects that all that culture and refinement ought to have made some kind of difference - and i am not talking about skincare and manicures.
i hate to generalise, but the truth is that nine times out of ten, these inconsiderate people are men. Now my friends will attest that usually, i like men: i find them easier to relate to than women, more open-hearted and less petty, more willing to just let things slide when you want to let them slide. At work, the people i most enjoy hanging out with are all men. Yet for some mysterious reason, swimming pools seem to bring out the worst in the male species. My current theory is that the watery environs of the swimming pool evoke memories of that epic first battle that every human male has to go through to even get a shot at life: put a man in a swimming pool and everyone else morphs magically into a rival sperm competing in The Great Darwinian Race for survival. He cannot help but be a boor.
Assuming that there is a biological basis for such boorish behaviour, the natural question is: can it be corrected by education, or is it just one of those things that we pray to have the serenity to accept? Can nature be improved by nurture?
Well, there is only one way to find out. i propose that all schools should mount a comprehensive educational programme to teach swimming-pool etiquette to all students, girls as well as boys. This should of course include a full-scale longitudinal study that tracks these students well into their adult years, preferably to the point at which they would have developed the said beer-bellies (or in the case of the women, thunder thighs). Such research would be, i believe, a first for our local schools, and would doubtless earn us glowing accolades from educational psychologists the world over.
In the meantime, though, i'd better find me a sugar-daddy to fund a private lap-pool for my exclusive personal use.
deopan shitan
In my first year of university, i was forced to study Anglo-Saxon poetry - 'The Wanderer', 'The Seafarer', 'The Dream of the Rood'. Of all this, i remember nothing except the Anglo-Saxon word for 'deep': deopan. And the only reason i remember this is because of the panic i felt in the week prior to my first-year exams, when i realised that the combination of too-much-partying and too-much-mooning-around had left me sinking in the academic equivalent of a stinking cesspit. That was when i coined the phrase, 'deopan shitan' - dog-Anglo-Saxon for 'deep shit'.
Talking to a friend yesterday, i suddenly recalled this phrase, together with another scatalogical term i use to describe my theory on why unhappiness cannot be measured, and why all unhappy people feel they must be the unhappiest people on earth, regardless of the nature or scale of their problems. The theory is based on the metaphor of being stuck in a 'piece'a shit' (for maximum effect, this phrase should be muttered, slowly and with feeling emphasis, in a deep bass voice): When you're in a piece'a shit, all you can see is shit, and you cannot tell how big the piece of shit really is. Only outsiders are able to compare the relative sizes of different pieces of shit and give you the necessary sense of perspective to deal with your problems.
To quantitatively assess the size of a piece of shit, to tell the sufferer exactly how big (or small) it is so that he will have a better idea of what needs to be done to extricate himself from it, and then to assist in the extrication process: that's what friends are for.
tunnel vision
There is something about being on MRT trains that changes Singaporeans from the busy, go-getting rat-racers they usually are, into passive, apathetic
passengers who seem content to just settle in the first tiny spot they find in the first carriage they step into, staring glassily into the mid-distance. There probably isn't much else to do on a train, and given that most train journeys are relatively short, there isn't very much impetus for people to move to find a more comfortable spot, even if they are standing uncomfortably in a crowded carriage next to a relatively emptier one.
Only sheer fatigue can propel a person out of this unthinking stasis, forcing her to weave her way down through the carriages in seach of a seat on which to rest her tired body. Exhausted, she finds herself pushing past groups of people who stand rooted in their individual little untidy spots, faces set blankly against the curious gaze of strangers. They make no attempt to give way to this strange anomaly of movement, too tired be polite, walking grimly down the corridor towards the front of the train.
Upon reaching the front carriage, she sees to her disappointment that the empty seats she had glimpsed from the previous carriage have been cordoned off for the train operator. Slumped against a corner, she looks up at the dark panel of glass at the end of the carriage, and is suddenly aware of an other, different world outside the plastic orange airconditioned one in which she and the other passengers are ensconced. This other world is dark, grey, all hard lines and precisely-engineered curves - a self-contained world that admits no light except the pale yellow of the train's headlights and the ghostly blue of the subway lamps. Yet it is almost impossible to imagine ghosts in this subterranean place - ghosts need history, need a storied past, live on the murmured echoes of human voices; and this place has no past, no stories, only concrete walls and the rush of cold wind as the train hurtles past.
In his radioplay-turned-novel "Neverwhere", Neil Gaiman creates an entire parallel city called 'London Below', located in the bowels of the London Underground, peopled by earls who hold court at Earl's Court Station, and medieval monks in black hooded robes at Blackfriar's Station. And travelling on the noisy, clanking London Tube, with its stations strewn with torn magazines and discarded drink cans and inhabited by families of furry grey mice, it is easy to picture such a quirkily alternative world. The Tube is large - it contains multitudes. Not so with the MRT in Singapore. Perhaps Romance and Efficiency simply don't make good bedfellows. Perhaps people simply do not feel enough about the MRT for it to accumulate a real history of its own - history being an amorphous concept that incorporates the subjective as well as the objective, feelings and reactions as well as people, places and events. In London, the Tube is responsible for raising the blood pressures of countless commuters who have to put up with broken promises in the form of delays, breakdowns, and strikes almost as a matter of course. In Singapore, by contrast, the MRT delivers exactly what it promises, and thus most people never even give it a second thought.
It is probably too easy to draw a parallel between the onward rush of an MRT train and our nation's relentless push towards progress. MRT trains are designed to move in both directions, and depending on the direction in which you are facing, the train can be said to be moving either forward or backward. To the foolishly sentimental who think that a sense of history is integral to a nation's identity, who are always looking backwards to a past of crumbling shophouses, leaking zinc roofs in shabby kampongs, and squat red-brick libraries, our progress may seem like regress. Yet, all one really has to do is to stand at the right end of the train, and to look through that narrow pane of darkened glass into the tunnelled world outside, to know that there is only one way to go. And there is no looking back.
