And my favourite film of 2012 is...

2012 began with a great film and ended with a great film.

In January, Steve McQueen's Shame was released in the UK. I can't begin to describe the impact this film has had on me, months later and it still haunts my imagination. The story of a sex addicted drone (Michael Fassbender) and his mentally unstable sister (Carey Mulligan) was treated with such sensitivity and compassion that it became almost unbearable to watch. For me, one of the greatest pieces of pure cinema occurs in this film: an extended tracking shot of Fassbender jogging through a nocturnal city, desperately trying to sweat out of his system his distorted, contradictory passions. Technically, the most amazing tracking shot since Touch of Evil and Raging Bull. Existentially, the most poetic summary of the contemporary predicament.

In December, I saw Amour - Michael Haneke's penetrating examination of old age, sickness and death. There's not an ounce of sentimental fat on this film. The story of an elderly husband who cares for his wife is told with a fierce tenderness and humanity. Every frame of this film has a painterly quality. Every emotion on the screen is delivered with gamma knife precision. Cinema for adults only.

And so, there is no favourite film this year. For me, Shame and Amour both take the top spot. They share the laurel crown.

And my other favourites:

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master - Anderson is the new Kubrick. Joaquin Pheonix gave a performace of such feral rawness and strangeness that it tore up the screen.

Leos Carax's Holy Motors - it is demented, punk, exotic and completely mesmerising. People use the word "surreal" about things that are merely strange. But this film is surreal. Holy Motors takes its place alongside Dali and Bunuel as a surrealist work of art.

Sam Mendes' Skyfall - this Bond movie looked a million dollars and that was thanks to the remarkable cinematographer, Roger Deakins. It was tense and exciting, until the anti-climactic final scenes (big Scottish pile in the Highlands blows up...yawn). It also had the campest villain in any multiplex film I can recall. Javier Bardem channelling Kenneth Williams and Augusto Pinochet.

Gareth Evans' The Raid - kickass entertaiment.

Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill - the gangsta movie reinvented.

So what were your top five films of 2012?

Bee keeping, Quantum mechanics and love

Constellations is seventy minutes long. No interval. Most “scenes” are brief. Blink and you’ll miss some of them. The stage is bare apart from white helium balloons, heavenly spheres or molecular models, that float above the action. Two actors (Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall) are on stage throughout.

Constellations is a boy meets girl love story – a metaphysical romcom with dark metastases. A love story about the infinite, shifting possibilities of love. This is a theatrical chamber piece written with intellectual dexterity and played with inventive commitment.

Marianne, a vivacious quantum physicist at Sussex University, and Roland, a blokeish beekeeper, meet at barbeque. There’s a bit of awkward flirting. She makes a joke that bombs and any possibility of romance ends there. But then the meeting is played out again in a parallel universe. Slight variations in the original meeting – the turn of a phrase, the language of their bodies – result in new outcomes. Another universe. Another meeting. Exponential results. And so on, until we see their love for each other take shape.

The defining moments of their relationship are played out in these parallel universes. The theoretical existence of a multiverse, that our lives and deaths can be played out in any number of ways, is what excites motor mouthed Marianne. For Roland, struggling to keep up with his girlfriend’s lessons in quantum mechanics, the three different kinds of bees, each with their specific purpose in the hive, provide him with a key to understanding the purpose of life. “If only we could understand why it is that we’re here and what it is that we’re meant to spend our lives doing.” The word “God” punctuates the play as a challenge to positivistic ways of thinking.

Constellations is thought provoking and stylish, but it's not as clever as it would like us to believe it is. The playwright, Nick Payne, can’t quite make up his mind whether he wants to engage our hearts or our minds. In the end, he does neither.

What this production does have are the two perfectly pitched, charismatic performances of Hawkins and Spall. Their relationship fizzes on stage with authenticity and tenderness. They remind us that love, in all its complex variations, is the atomic matter that makes us who we are. Love is the driving force of the universe.



Constellations by Nick Payne is currently playing at the Duke of Yorks Theatre, London.

What was my favourite album of 2012?

Some music is so exquisitely beautiful that it acts as a healing balm to all that is bruised and hurting within us. Some music embracing the this-ness of life, a never ending happening, swells the chambers of the heart. And then there is music with a radiant clarity, a transfiguring power, that forces you to your knees before the mystery of creation. Bill Fay’s remarkable album, Life is People, possesses all of the above.

In the early 1970’s Fay released two critically acclaimed albums that made little impression on the listening public. He was a voice crying in the wilderness of the music business. Having fallen out of favour with the accountants at Decca, Fay became a lapsed singer-songwriter. He made ends meet by working in parks, shops and by cleaning factories.

However, some of his followers remained faithful to his memory and treasured their vinyl copy of his 1971 masterpiece Time of the Last Persecution. His fans, including Nick Cave, Marc Almond and Julian Cope, never lost faith and waited for his return from exile. This finally happened in 2007 when the US indie band, Wilco (who performed a cover of Fay’s Be not so Fearful), persuaded Fay to step on stage with them.

Now, forty years after his last studio album, Fay has returned from the wilderness of his personal Lent. In his cupped hands he carries a music that is fragile and poetic, birdsong with a broken wing. This music has a prophetic pitch. It sings of the soul of man. It draws tears.



Strings, Gospel choirs, piano, electric guitars combine with Fay’s rich, bass voice to produce an album of musical conviction and integrity. Dense, lush arrangements (Cosmic Concerto) are balanced with a spare, compelling intimacy (Jesus, Etc.). Fay’s unpretentious lyrics have a Blakean quality – adult experience expressed with a childlike innocence and purity.

These songs chart Fay’s search for the voice of the Holy One, a voice that is so often drowned out by the ferocious chatter within us and the white noise of a technologically oversaturated culture where oases of repose are hard to find. Life is People has the feel of a contemporary psalter, a collection of deeply-felt songs recording exile, redemption and thanksgiving: Thank you, Lord, for the love you’ve shown me/ your Son on the Cross is ever before me.

There are miracles in the strangest of places, Fay declares, there are miracles everywhere you go. A couple of weeks ago, I had never heard of Bill Fay. Danny Watson, a father who has a son in the choir at Brentwood Cathedral, recommended this album to me. I know Danny has a great love and knowledge of popular music so I thought it was worth taking his recommendation seriously. I’m glad I did and I’m indebted to him for introducing me to Bill Fay.

Listening to Life is People for the first time was a kind of miraculous cure. It was as if some unexpected, buffeting power caught me unawares and knocked me sideways. I had been deaf for so long, without realising it, and now could hear again. I could hear “the still, sad music of humanity” and had been given a note with which to sing new songs to the Lord. Yes, there are miracles in the strangest places, even in Brentwood Cathedral Clergy House.

Life is People is a masterpiece. Listen all you that have ears!

And my other favourites of 2012:

Channel Orange by Frank Ocean
Blunderbuss by Jack White
Devotion by Jessie Ware
Is your Love Big Enough? by Lianne la Havas
An Awesome Wave by Alt-J

Amour

Michael Haneke makes films for adults who want to be treated as intelligent. The commercial function of mainstream cinema to feed docile audiences with pureed cliché and sentiment in the name of entertainment are anathema to him. His films are unashamedly cerebral and severe. They are tough experiences - film making in the “High Morbid Manner”. They press one’s face (at times, with sadistic force) against some aspect of reality, pinning the viewer to the glorious and basest features of his nature, until, tapping the canvas, he is forced to submit to the reality.

Haneke’s interest is the fragility of the human enterprise and an individual’s vulnerability before the demands of living. In the face of violence (Funny Games) or an obsessive relationship (The Piano Teacher), when living under the surveillance camera (Hidden) or the brutality of provincial totalitarianism (The White Ribbon), what moral response is appropriate? His cinematic answers are tenebrous.

Like previous films, Amour is concerned with the vulnerability of the human situation – in this case, the ageing process and the degradations that some of the elderly will face as their bodies and minds begin to fail them. In such circumstances, what does love look like? What does it cost? What, if anything, remains of love?

Haneke places our mortal natures on the dissection table and, using the sharpest visual imaging, picks them clean until the whites of our bones are laid bare. The process of sickness, deterioration and death are recorded with mimetic detail. It is designed to make your skin crawl. “Death subtends life, or underlies life,” the pathologist F Gonzales-Crussi writes, “and the action of time consists in peeling away successive layers so as to render death ever more visible.” The relentless erosion caused by suffering and death appals our Western liberal sensitivities. Our attempts to preserve ourselves from suffering are shown to be futile - no one escapes death. We would prefer decay and corruption to be hidden from public view, behind a hospital ward curtain. But our familiarity with suffering and death also provide us with a brutal clarity about what it is to be alive.



Amour is about an elderly married couple, Georges and Anne (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva). They are classical musicians who live in a chic Parisian apartment, designed around their cultural interests: books, paintings and a grand piano. The passage of time has matured and softened their love for each other. This is expressed in small acts of physical tenderness and a stability found in shared experiences. When Anne has a stroke, leaving her paralysed, George chooses to care for her at home. The film follows the decline of her mental and physical faculties over the weeks and months and George’s response to her deterioration.

In Haneke’s film, Funny Games, two delinquent, violent youths invade the home of a family and torture them with “games” that are anything but funny. The theme of invasion of a home occurs again in Amour, where George and Anne’s home is invaded by sickness and death. It is chilling to watch the mechanical bed being fitted in the bedroom, every bedside table top being annexed by boxes of medication and other medical detritus. Their home is violated by these objects and slowly transformed into a mausoleum. Mortality plays funny games with them.

In all of this, Haneke finds moments of tenderness – the calming experience of a caress, the care with which a lovingly prepared meal is spoon fed, the intimacy of sharing childhood memories that cement their love. Old age and a long marriage are portrayed as beautiful things. But Haneke articulates this without sacrificing the psychological complexity of his characters. We see how generosity of intention and violent energies can coexist in the same nature; the fact that individuals can live lonely, even desperate lives, within otherwise mutually sustaining relationships. “You are a monster sometimes. You are also kind” Anne says to George.

Trintignant and Riva perfectly capture the fundamental splits, dualities and twinnings at the heart of George and Anne’s marriage. Both in their eighties, these actors produce performances that are perfectly pitched. By making themselves completely vulnerable before the camera, they make emotional and physical disintegration, sublime. It is deeply moving to see acting of such depth and honesty.

Amour makes so much other film-making look crass and adolescent. It does what all great art does - it tells us something about the ineffable business of being alive. That may not always be something we want to consider, but when we do, we grow and mature in ways that are beyond our imagining. We leave behind consoling deceptions and illusions – we become adults.

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master

It feels as if the film ends mid sentence. The words The Master appear as they did at the beginning of the film. The credits roll. It’s an ending but not as an audience normally experiences it. In a packed Leicester Square cinema, the audience sat momentarily frozen, unsure how to respond. There was a communal sense of bewilderment at the beauty and strangeness of what we had just seen.



The friend I went with admitted to getting bored three quarters of the way through and wanted there to be more “ordinary” characters. He described it as “a mood piece...think, late Kandinsky.” I don’t disagree with his reflex review (and the need to find analogies with other artists and artistic forms) but, twenty four hours later and having allowed my initial responses to settle, I think there might be more to say:

1. You are not going to see a better performance on screen this year than Joaquin Pheonix’s war-damaged ex-sailor, Freddie Quell. This is acting of such feral ferocity and rawness that it shreds the “method acting” handbook and takes film performance into another territory. This is not acting, this is possession. In his portrayal of Quell, Pheonix exposes the terrible damage to the soul caused by the lacerating shrapnel of life – a failed romance, the horrors of war, existential rootlessness, Godlessness. Quell is a man in spiritual and psychological tatters.

Pheonix's Quell is a portrait of an outsider – a man to whom life has become something alien and he an alien to it – but without any existential romanticism. Though terribly damaged, Quell clings to a scintilla of hope: that he is loveable, that someone might love him. Your cinema ticket is worth every penny just to see how Pheonix conveys longing and hurt in his wounded-animal eyes.

2. There is not a frame in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film that is not beautiful. It has a numinous quality. Shot in 70mm format and designed with meticulous attention to period detail, The Master definitively answers the question of whether a film can be a work of art with a resolute, “Yes, of course, it can and this is such a work of art.” The Master is an aesthetic treasure that will be looked at, studied and commented on in decades to come.

3. Contrary to internet reports The Master has very little to say about Scientology or the dubious motives of those who found religious movements. The Master is a bromance but not of the comforting sort we have become accustomed to. This is a bromance with barbs and thorns that cut and nick. Philip Seymour Hoffman’s Lancaster Dodd, the founder of a religious movement called The Cause, uses Quell as a guinea pig for his experiments in spiritual “processing.” He claims to be able to heal Quell. For the damaged Quell, this promise is attractive. He sees Lancaster Dodd’s new religion as the way to restore some sort of psychic stability in his life. This is not a friendship based on affection but one based on the different needs of the two men. The need of the charlatan to believe his own lies and to have his lies believed. The need of the outsider to find a way inside the city walls. The Master is an oblique study in neediness.

4. There are no simple narrative arcs or easily comprehensible character motivations. The film is a frustrating watch and for this reason comes close to reality as we experience it, where so much is hidden from our immediate understanding and slips our conceptual grasp. So much of who we are remains a mystery, at once, fascinating and terrifying. If people find The Master boring and frustrating, it is because, in one sense, it is exactly that. Anderson refuses to pander to the audience’s need for the security of conventional story-telling. Instead, he delivers something that is closer to a parable or tone poem where depths of meaning are released with every viewing.

5. Why should you go and see The Master? Joaquin Pheonix, Philip Seymour Hoffman and the uncompromising originality of the writer-director, Paul Thomas Anderson.

Ben Johnson, Carl Lewis and the Olympic gods

Few people who were watching the BBC coverage of the 1988 Olympics will forget the evening of Tuesday 27 September. The suave sports presenter, Des Lynam, was given, on air, a bulletin from the Agence France-Presse, an international news agency. He read it with the solemnity of someone broadcasting a declaration of war to the nation: “I’ve just been handed a piece of paper here that, if it’s right, it’ll be the most dramatic story of these Olympics, or perhaps any others.”

The story was that Ben Johnson, who had three days earlier won the 100 m final with a world record time of 9.79 seconds and defeated his nemesis, Carl Lewis, had tested positive for the anabolic steroid, Stanozolol. The image of the pumped hulk, Johnson, crossing the finishing line, his finger pointing to the Olympian gods, was overnight replaced by that of a man destroyed by his own hubris. The Furies, “those who beneath the earth punish whosoever has sworn a false oath” according to Homer, gathered around Ben Johnson. This athlete had sworn to the Olympian ideals of honesty and fair play while injecting steroids in locker rooms. For this, he would be punished. He would be stripped of every medal, title and world record. He would be cast out into the dark. He would become a thing of shame.



Richard Moore revisits the events of the Seoul Olympic 100m final in his book The Dirtiest Race in History with a forensic, impartial eye. Moore avoids lazy portrayals of Johnson as the panto villain of the piece and Carl Lewis as the handsome prince with wings on his ankles. A simple, moralistic reading of these men would not do justice to the complexity of their stories, characters and bitter rivalry.

Ben Johnson was all muscular aggression, ripping up the blocks on the “B” of the “BANG!” of the starting gun. Carl Lewis, on the other hand, was grace and beauty, a human gazelle. Johnson, the poor Jamaican immigrant, was embraced by the people of Canada as a national hero. In America, the middle-class Lewis was admired rather loved for his athletic ability. He was unable to woo the romantic heart of the American people. Johnson was the stutterer, Lewis the honey tongued one. Johnson, the lothario. Lewis, the suspected homosexual. And what brought these two very different men together was a 100m strip of racing track.

Moore humanises these athletic titans, unpicking their complexities and dissecting the hatred at the heart of their relationship. It is this which makes The Dirtiest Race in History read like a psychological thriller. You know the ending but that doesn't stop this book from being a page-turner. Actually, the ending of Moore's account is where the author finally encounters the elusive Carl Lewis at the opening of a London Nike store. It is a brilliant conclusion to the book.

Moore also successfully brings to life the shady managers and ambitious coaches who will stop at nothing to give their athlete the edge on their competitors. There are the unethical doctors and dubious friends, the megalomaniac sports executives and greedy hangers on. Moore exposes a mafia cesspool of greed, double-dealing and syringes.

But there are also the good guys, such as Don Catlin, “the father of drug-testing in sports” according to the New York Times and Manfred Donike, the German chemist, who patiently found more reliable ways to detect steroid use and create an “endrocine profile,” the science which strives to keep sport “clean”. They prove to be the heroes of the story and those who carried the torch for the nobility of sporting endeavour. It is thanks to men such as these that the London Olympic Games 2012 remained relatively drug free and the world could marvel at the speed, strength and stamina of its participants.

The Dirtiest Race in History, Richard Moore, Bloomsbury 2012

Joey Barton, Morrissey and the teenage me

Back in the day, Eric Cantona was the philosopher king with his gnomic musings on sardines and seagulls. In recent years philosopher footballers have been thin on the ground. Until now that is. There is a new pretender, an unlikely heir to the cod-philosophy throne: a tattooed boy from Birkenhead (actually Huyton, Merseyside) called Joey Barton, presently on loan from Queens Park Rangers to Olympique de Marseille.

Depending on your point of view, Barton is a sweet and tender hooligan who can’t control his fists or a refreshing voice on the football scene who eschews Neanderthal soundbites in favour of speaking his mind and mixing it up with a quotation from Virgil or Nietzsche. His musings range from Gary Lineker to Lucian Freud via Isambard Kingdom Brunel. There’s nothing David Beckham about Joey Barton – nothing photo-shopped, manicured or groomed. Barton is old style, George Orwell working class: the lad from the council estate who got hold of a library card and got clever and lippy. Joey Barton has over 1.6 million Twitter followers hanging on his every unpredictable word.

I’ve taken an interest in Barton because he is interested in The Smiths and their lead singer, Morrissey. Barton’s Twitter biography reads Yes, we may be hidden by rags but we have something they’ll never have... These are lyrics from The Smiths song Hand in Glove, that soaring anthem to working class nobility. The song was all rage and vitality, romanticism and self-loathing. It was the clarion call the doomed youth of Thatcher’s Britain had been waiting for or that was how it felt at the time.

I still remember the first time I heard John Peel play Hand in Glove and how pop music suddenly seemed important – important in the way that Shakespeare and Rembrandt are important. Culturally important. The idea that Culture and pop music might cohabit was a kind of revelation to my teenage mind.

I remember climbing on to the shoulders of a friend as Hand in Glove was played at a gig in The Venue, Leicester Square and having to take the following day off school because I’d lost my voice and my ears were still ringing. I still have the twelve inch, Rough Trade vinyl (and the wonderful B-side Jeane) with the cover photo of some handsome devil mooning at the world. Hand in glove, the sun shines out of our behinds...It was 1983. I was 17. Hand in Glove was a thing of beauty and youthful joy.

From that moment on, I went to every gig The Smiths played in London. I bought every single, every album, learnt every lyric off by heart – I can still spot a Smiths lyric from a hundred miles. I watched A Taste of Honey and read Saturday Night and Sunday Morning because I read in the NME that these were Morrissey’s inspiration. I bought gladioli and hair gel and made compilation tapes of favourite Smiths songs which I took with me to university. It was great to be a Smiths fan in the 1980’s. I am proud to admit that the music of The Smiths became the romantic soundtrack to a chunk of my reckless teenage years.

For me, Hand in Glove has become the equivalent of Marcel Proust’s madeleine. Every time I hear the mouth accordion opening, every time I stumble across words from the song, my involuntary memory ignites and, to paraphrase Proust, the vicissitudes of life become indifferent to me and life’s disasters innocuous. I wonder if Joey Barton enjoys the same experience?