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As Thatcher Lay Dying

Pollybee

I cant forgive her for the milk, no I cant. I will agree that for a woman to be dead and dying like her is a shame on this earth, but that she taken that milk from them children is nigh a disgrace and I said so and will always. It does seem a long time back now but well I remember and always will, the noise it made, the children crying and wailing and her not caring, unblinking and stoney in her hard-set face, she did it a-purpose and I daresay even it made her happy, there I said it.

Blair

I knew she was going, for ere I looked in her face and her not able to say a word she did always say with her eyes what was not spoke. Maggie my mother was a good woman and she would not unagree when I say she was a bold one too. I heard what she said. I heard what she asked for tho she didnt say it and I did what she asked for too and I am proud to say so. She was ere my mother.

Davameron

Him coming here sniffing her body saying mother dear like as if he owned her and her legacy on this earth was him not me, well he can believe it for all he wants, he durn't carry on for her like I said I would have did and do carry on to do. And he is not her son for him to act so high and mighty, all the while smelling her and rubbing against her dying body for warmth and for to take on her smell, I could kill him and it would not be a crime.

Pollybee

It is the money makes me sick, it could make me cry when I commence to think about it. Her dead barely a week and all the carry-on and fighting, you would reckon Blair and Gideon was married to her if it did not sound so disappealing. There was no money before she took to dying, barely money to feed anyone but now I am wanted to believe she will have a coffin for ten million. I told them I do not figure where a person is to find ten million, when men this ways have barely seventy and three to their name and them asked to swell the fund for her coffin who did not care for them and even hated them, she would be laughing now.

Gideon

I told them not no more than what I knowed and it was ten million I said, and I have it here and I will not suffer to see her in a coffin for less or I would rather see her in dirt like a poor whore woman such as I have used. Maggie my mother was a saint and as she said her funeral will cause them to scream well so be it I am prepared. I have my sums all done and it does work.

Davameron

Everyone does despise Gideon the poor fool and I believe my mother Maggie too would have if she had even stood to look upon him once. Him striding in always with his pencil and paper, he cannot even work out his own money but now for her because she is dead he is saying ten million a coffin, well, I was minded to laugh aloud, it is so foolish. I said alright and if you say ten million, ten million it will be, but know that everyone will curse you for it, but he didnt care, he is too occupied thinking about goats and such.

Blair

My mother is a Tory.

Mr Johnson

I have set the village bell to stop on that day she goes to earth, and I mean it to be so. In this life she did always as she did please and so it shall be when she goes and I will not countenance other-wise.

Maggie



And now I look upon them as they scrabble in the ground, poor worms that go and tend to earth not looking up but busying themselves with burrowing more and more. I laugh now because as I decided it would be it now is and this farmyard that I did inherit and have left is now as I had wanted. Poor Blair, he always did want for love. He could not see so far as his brother who I will allow is not so lively-minded but ere did pursue what he wanted to the end. Both, they do not see me now but they fight and they cry and they call upon theirselves to honour me more one than the other, while in the village people crawl to work and die for lack of bread. I laughed then and do now but louder.

Ed

I know that all will listen to me when I say I misliked her but she was a woman and I do not want to offend anyone and nor should nobody, and I will not suffer for singing on the day she goes to ground for it is a disgrace.

Davameron



I look at Ed and again he is mumbling something while he rocks backward and forward and dribbling almost on his knee, she would laugh at him now that dares not utter her name for fear and yet she hated and disdained him. No-one will listen to Ed for he does not talk loud and he is confused in his mind and ever was.

Gideon

It will be a party almost when we will say farewell to Maggie tho they told us not to and not at such cost well I do not care and I will kiss my goat because I do not care.

Cannes 2013 - An Excitable Preview

In May I will be going to the Cannes Film Festival for the second time, and I feel just as excited as I was the first time. If you care about arthouse cinema - about world cinema, and independent cinema; fuck, if you use the word cinema rather than movies, I'd say - then Cannes means something to you. For me, Cannes represents the sometimes uneasy tension that exists in cinema, between high glamour - the glitz of films, the starriness and sex appeal of actors - and high art. It manages to find that balance, every year: shiny premieres, hot stars, alongside a drab film from Romania about four miserable friends eating brown bread. The credibility of the festival rests on conjugating bold, brave cinema - in standing up for the craft of film, for its intransigence, its political dimension, its dreamlike quality and poetry - with more populist fare. Since the start of the 90s - the era that saw an explosion in what we think of as 'indie' cinema -  Soderbergh, Tarantino and the Coen Brothers have all won the top prize. But so, in that time, have Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Cristian Mungiu and Laurent Cantet, for wildly different films.

I think of the festival as a political bastion, a place that recognises anti-establishment views and promotes a liberal, inclusive politics: it stands up to dictatorships, offering a home for dissenting film-makers (like Lou Ye or Jafar Panahi) who are at risk of being oppressed. The origins of the festival lie in anti-fascist sentiment that led in 1947 to the creation of a programme celebrating a great liberating, universal art-form. The festival believes, truly, in the power of film to do good, and to be a form of art for all. This is one of the reasons I could shiver from head to toe with excitement when considering that I'll be climbing the steps of the Palais myself this year.

I'm thrilled to be writing about film, once more, for my great friends at Pajiba.com. I'm given so much liberty to write about films in the way I want by the wonderful, discerning, inspiring people who work for and read the site, and I hope to write some interesting stuff about some films that might not otherwise get much publicity. Pajiba is a wry, sharp-tongued website that is full of heart and passion for the things it loves - a real community site, embracing the arts it talks about. I couldn't have a better home.

So, onto the films that I hope to see this year. It's now just a week until the line-up is revealed, so what better time to speculate wildly about the films that could be showing at the festival? Last year was a good vintage, which suffered from the inclusion of a few films not quite up to scratch and the lack of Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, which was not ready in time. This year, there's a great deal of films whizzing about, jostling each other for a coveted position in the official selection. Here are the films I hope to see, mixed in with a few I think I probably will see on the list.

Several films by women could help the festival to combat the scandal it weathered last year when no female directors were selected in the official line-up. Catherine Breillat with Abus de Faiblesse starring Isabelle Huppert, and Claire Denis with Les Salauds, are in with a good shot I would say, and are reliable, old hands. In terms of newer directors, the festival could give a boost to a young director like Rebecca Zlotowski, who has Grand Central coming out, featuring the great Tahar Rahim. Depending on whether her film is ready or not, we could be seeing Night Moves by Kelly Reichardt. Both Night Moves and Grand Central, with their environmentalist themes, could capture political currents quite nicely, and both offer stars for the red carpet. It would also be super sweet to see Pascale Ferran's new film, Bird People, featuring Anais Demoustier and Josh Charles; this is Ferran's first film since 2007, and sounds rather promising. Otherwise, there aren't many certainties at Cannes, but I'd say that with a starring role for Emma Watson, you can bet your bottom euro that Sofia Coppola will get a call for The Bling Ring.

In other certainties: sod it, I'm going to call Jimmy Picard by Arnaud Desplechin and Only God Forgives, by Nicolas Winding Refn. Desplechin is a great director and his film stars an amazing pairing of Mathieu Amalric and Benicio del Toro. Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive, a couple of years back, rubbed a fair bit of its hipster aura off on Cannes, and I think they'll be anxious to welcome Gosling back, hopefully to replicate his suit-and-glasses-and-no-shirt look from last time, which we all so enjoyed. I also think we'll see the new James Gray film, starring Marion Cotillard and the great Joaquin Phoenix. Cotillard is French and internationally famous, which screams Cannes, plus Gray has presented two films here before, so he has form. Additionally, the festival may want to apologise for putting him on the notoriously fractious jury of 2009, presided over by Huppert, which reportedly fought constantly over Lars Von Trier's Antichrist.

Has an English film director made a film this year? Yes! Steve McQueen's Twelve Years A Slave, starring Chiwetel Ejiofor and Michael Fassbender, will be hoping to 'do a Django' - by which I mean, 'be successful at the box' office, not 'accurately portray slavery on film'. That's it for English films. Mike Leigh is on holiday and I don't think Terence Davies' Sunset Song is ready.

From Africa, we can expect to see 'Gris-Gris' by Mahamet-Saleh Haroun, following 2010's A Screaming Man, which won the Jury Prize. That might be it from Africa.

'The Americas' may give up a bit of Malick, the new Jarmusch, perhaps Scorsese (with The Wolf of Wall Street) and the Coen Brothers (Inside Llewyn Davies). Xavier Dolan, the upsettingly young and gifted Canadian master, is reportedly putting the finishing touches to his film Tom A La Ferme - and if he doesn't get selected to the main competition after getting overlooked for Laurence Anyways last year, I cannot wait to hear the hissy fit he throws. He really tore into the selectors last year, which you would not imagine is a good way to endear yourself to the festival; but Dolan is aware of his gifts and knows that he has already earned a place among the more experienced directors here.

From Asia, I'd love to see Hou Hsiao-Hsien's The Assassin, and new films by Hirokazu Koreeda and Tsai Ming-Liang. Koreeda's I Wish is possibly the loveliest film I've seen in recent years, and he has come to Cannes a couple of times before. Asgar Farhadi should be in with a shout for The Past, starring Tahar Rahim (Best Actor at Cannes for A Prophet), and we could also get the new film by Ari Folman (the director of Waltz With Bashir). I also hope we'll get to see the new film by Corneliu Porumboiu, whose Police, Adjective was a masterclass in controlled, forensic cinema.

I wonder if there'll be any surprises. I haven't considered the possibility of Thierry Fremaux selecting a critic-baiting film à la The Paperboy - which reminds me: Lee Daniels' new film, The Butler, may be ready in time. Starring Vanessa Redgrave, Terrence Howard, Oprah, Lenny Kravitz and Mariah Carey, and centring on the life Eugene Allen, butler to eight presidents at the White House, this is sure to be a... classy and well-conceived work of art.

Do please log on to the venerable Pajiba from May 15th onwards, when I will be reviewing some or perhaps all of these films, should my powers of prognostication be vindicated.

Django Chained

When I was seventeen, an old woman was invited to speak to my class about her life as a survivor of the Holocaust. She was sent to Auschwitz when she was a little older than us, she told us; she revealed the tattooed number on her arm. She told us about her escape from the camp - an extraordinary story of determination and outrageous good fortune in evading her captors. What made many people in my class queasy -  I remember a long discussion about it in the playground afterwards - was that this woman told us she had been saved by God; she had prayed to Him over and over as she fled, and He had heard her prayer and rescued her, helped her along as she fled. It seemed astonishing that she might not reflect on the people God chose not to help. She did not explain why her life might be deemed more valuable or worthy of saving than that of 6 million other Jews. Looking back now, I still feel awkward about her testimony, but I understand how this narrative might be comforting, possibly even necessary to her, to help explain how come she survived and provide her with solace as she recalled the terrors she witnessed. I am clear however that no one person deserves to be saved more than any other.

I write this as a preface to this piece on Django Unchained, which I saw and was horrified by yesterday evening, because the danger of fictional narratives slotted into historical horrors - the Holocaust; Slavery - is that they dehumanise the events, and the creator of the fiction is at risk of playing God, of saving one person at the expense of all others. This is what ends up happening in Django Unchained, in which Tarantino/God decides to play with actual historical events - as he did in Inglourious Basterds when he killed Hitler and enacted the revenge of one Jewish woman on her Nazi nemesis - and create a Special man who is able to escape enslavement and visit punishment on his persecutors. What makes Django (Jamie Foxx) so special that he, unlike millions of other black people, is able to escape? Well, Tarantino, since it serves the purposes of the entertainment he has crafted.  We'll come back to this; for now I'll just highlight the moral dubiousness of telling one broadly positive story of retribution, against the current of history, as it minimises the horrors of slavery and tramples on the lives of actual people who died and were brutalised during that chapter of history.

Another problem Tarantino faces, and does not succeed in defusing, also stems from the difficulty of creating a fiction within actual events. Essentially, when you set a story in 'the time of Slavery' - Quentin is a little vague on this - you create a dilemma of moral equivalence. Your baddies already exist: we know this, since they are Baddies of History. You don't need to create your villains at all, or seek to comprehend their motives or give them back-stories or a character: we know from History that they were evil, since Slavery is an evil. Steven Spielberg had Nazi villains in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: they're easy to identify because they wear swastikas, and they make great villains because you can kill as many of them as you like and you'll always be in the right. It is a laziness of fiction to create characters who are completely villainous and not investigate their motives or consider them as people. We know that Nazi people weren't all born evil but, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt had it, were almost functionaries of evil, who did not consider their actions: she called this the banality of evil, because it is capable of infecting all of us. This, Tarantino does not for a moment consider when it comes to taking out members of the Ku Klux Klan in the new entertainment he has devised: how much more fun it is to see them as stupid, senselessly evil people, and take them all out in one go. (In this, Tarantino follows the lead of the Coen Brothers who also created some spectacularly thick Klansmen in O Brother Where Art Thou; how the predominantly white audience laughed in each case as the black person escaped death by lynching and some of the Klan died!)

Moral equivalence rears its ugly head because Tarantino, as he has grown older, is looking for ever more valid stories within which to frame his brutal revenge fantasies. No longer for him the cartoonish violence of his early days in which mindless fighting and gore existed in their own right, as a device or effect to thrill or amuse: we must now be urging someone on whose combat is morally sanctioned by history. This gives Tarantino all the licence he needs to unleash a bloodbath. The problem he confronts in this new Inglourious Basterds/Django Unchained phase, is that there is a psychological imbalance: we have to consider the fictional violence on the same scale as we consider the actual violence - for instance, the torture of Broomhilda (Kerry Washington). Things that actually did happen - such as the branding of black people for punishment or to signify white ownership - exists in a film where several people die in a funny way. (Which was the funniest death for you? I'd say the death of Cora, the sister of the character played by Leonardo di Caprio, who gets blasted away in one blissful shot. Least funny death: a black man getting torn apart by dogs) There are good deaths and bad deaths. This means that the actual events become lost, and a due consideration of events, which would seem to be a moral obligation here, never happens.


Tarantino never pauses for a minute to consider the moral implications of what he is doing. Why should he? It's an entertainment. But for those of us who aren't entertained by murder, there is a nagging problem of ethical responsibility. In one scene, Django and his companion, the bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), pause before shooting a man who is wanted by a local sheriff. Django cannot bear to kill him, since he is ploughing his land in the company of his son. Schultz explains that the man is bad for a little while, and Django picks up his gun again and shoots the man who, some distance away from the camera, falls down dead; as Tarantino cuts away from the scene, we hear the voice of the man's son, saying 'Dad?'  End of scene. It's a ghastly scene for many reasons: first of all, because of Tarantino's laziness in cutting away from the action after the death. Presumably Django and his partner have to then go and pick up the body of this man in front of his child, and take him away to the sheriff to collect their money; I suppose it wouldn't be entertaining to be shown the grief of a child as his father is murdered and then taken away by strangers. Far simpler to cut the scene. Secondly, the scene is ghastly because of the distance at which Tarantino films the man dying: he is so far away, there is never the slightest pretence of engaging with him as a human: this participates in the same moral dubiousness as the cutting of the scene just after the murder. Thirdly, we know that people with a price on their head are wanted dead or alive: why could Django and Schultz not go to the man, with their guns, overpower him, and collect their fee for a live person rather than a dead one? Because a shooting is always more entertaining, more viscerally and dramatically pleasing, less attached to human complications. Tarantino, over and over, makes a faint case for murder and then just does it, because it pleases him.

There is much more that is disturbing in the film: the passive female character Broomhilda who exists for her beauty and whom we only ever see being tortured or saved; the use of the N-word, which never seeks to defend or question itself but is supposed to dull an audience into submission; the toadying Uncle Tom character played by Samuel L. Jackson for laughs as a sort of servile, racist Uriah Heep. (I'm mostly considering the disturbing politics of the film here, but I will add as an aside that it is also often extremely boring, with Tarantino giving in to his perverse propensity for  long scenes of fancy-but-witless dialogue. The film's qualities, such as they are, lie in the technical mastery in the first half-hour of the film, some great shots and editing, and terrific lighting and costumes. Tarantino has also given his actors licence to grandstand as much as they like, and there is a lot of playing to the gallery from Samuel L. Jackson and from Di Caprio and Waltz, both liberally twirling their moustaches and enunciating their scenes of verbal sparring as if they were am-dram actors doing Wilde. Only Jamie Foxx seems to be attempting to inhabit an actual character.)

If Tarantino is seeking to gain narrative revenge for slavery, why does he not free a fuckload more slaves in his story than he actually does? Django is freed, because he is our hero; likewise his passive wife Broomhilda, whom he rescues because the fairytale narrative demands it. But other slaves we see during Django's quest are constantly left in their positions of subjugation. Towards the end of the movie, as Django cleverly outwits and escapes his captors (played by three men plus Tarantino in a winking, wouldn't-it-be-cool-if cameo), three other black men are shown gazing at him in wonder. They are notionally free since Django has killed the white men and opened their cage, so in terms of plot they are able to escape; instead they remain in their cage, staring bog-eyed at Django's prowess as he rides away on his horse. Their place is inside the cage; his is outside. At the start of the film, Schultz saves Django and leaves five other black men to fend for themselves and certainly be recaptured instantly by white men with weapons and money. We don't care about these men. Their story is not interesting.

Django is interesting, though, because he is a black superman. Why? Because he has been created so by two white men: one is Tarantino, who wrote the story so as to give Django his redemptive arc. The other is Schultz, the white fairy godmother who gives Django the magic powers (On you I bestow literacy! And cool clothes! And guns! And this piece of paper that means nothing now but which will save your life after I have died!) to save himself and rescue his sleeping beauty, his Brunnhilde, from her fairytale ring of fire. This is obviously disgusting. I seriously doubt that a German bounty hunter in the deep south in 'the time of slavery' (late 1860s, I suppose? Alexandre Dumas is supposed to be still alive), would be so racially enlightened in the first place as to help out a black man. But the problem of a good white man giving a black man his powers to escape other, bad, white men, does not seem to occur to Tarantino. Essentially he is enslaving Django, his own character, all over again, imprisoning him as a passive white-enabled product within the confines of the entertainment he has concocted. Before Schultz appears, Django does not exist as a character. Waltz names him - by calling out his name, which distinguishes him from the other black characters with whom he is silently chained up - and then pays for him (but in a good way). He then asks Django to act as his slave for the time being. Crucially, Django seemed to have no plan to rescue his wife before he met Schultz; he certainly didn't have the determination or wherewithal we see at the end of the film. With the white man's help, having heard the story of Siegfried and Brunnhilde from the erudite white man, he is able to devise a plan to rescue his girl. Sorry, I mean, the white man devises the plan. This forms the narrative of the film. Towards the end, the white man will sacrifice himself - as Jiminy Cricket does for his poor illiterate Pinocchio when he jumps with him into the sea - and grant him the power to become a super-man. At this point of the film, Django, who has been getting cooler and more powerful throughout, fully assumes his super-man character: he is Neo from the Matrix after he has realised he is The One. The piece of paper in Django's pocket which saves his life, after Schultz has died, is one last magic flicker from the fairy godmother, helping our hero to reverse his own story, totally against the pattern of Slavery, and exact revenge on the bad guys. The kindly white man is an aberration in itself in the context of this story and this chapter of History, but it is even more offensive as a trope in the film.

But Tarantino will not leave it. Django is a super-man more deserving of being saved. He says it himself towards the end of the film when he says to the bad white guys as he kills them, "I'm that one nigger in ten thousand". No he isn't. He's that one black man in 12 million.

Of Parks & Recreation's Sweetness

When I was thirteen, my English teacher incurred the wrath of my class by daring to discuss the theories on comedy of a scholar - possibly T.G.A. Nelson? - who posited that all humour is based on humiliation, on the way a comedic situation asserts the superiority of the person laughing, at the expense of someone else. We laugh, he said (she said), because we’re mostly relieved at not being the person in the comical situation; laughter asserts our dominance, and makes us feel better about ourselves. I think we were studying Brecht’s ‘Caucasian Chalk Circle’ at the time, and my teacher tied this theory of comedy in to Brecht’s determination not to give his audiences the satisfaction of the catharsis of comedy: in other words, he ensured that by underlining the artifice of the play we’re watching, he deprives the audience of that satisfying sense of relief and superiority that comedy can bring, and reminds us of the inherent awfulness of the world, of which we are part.

This is all a rather roundabout way of prefacing a critique of Parks & Recreation, the beloved NBC sitcom - beloved not just by my friends and basically all decent people, but also, to an extent, by me. I enjoy the show, and yet I’m constantly left hungry by it, feeling somewhat dissatisfied, as if there have been missed opportunities for the programme to strike harder, and be more bold. In many senses, the programme is bold, and strong: formally, it goes beyond traditional sitcom material by having a likable protagonist generally succeeding in her endeavours, and it furthermore surrounds her quite brilliantly by a cast of believable characters in the fictional but perfectly realised small town of Pawnee. The show also innovates in the narrative threads running through it, since it has a running story backing up each episode’s occurrences, so that we’re watching as much for the conclusion of the storyline as for the jokes - F.R.I.E.N.D.S did this somewhat with the Ross & Rachel thing, and The Office mastered it brilliantly with the love affair between Tim and Dawn, against the rise and fall of David Brent.

Very briefly, for people who don’t know what I’m harping on about: Parks & Recreation tells the story of Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler), a small-town official in the Parks & Recreation department of the municipality of Pawnee. Over the course of the programme, she strives to get a horrible pit in the town converted into a beautiful park, put on a summer fair, and rise through the ranks of the town to become City Councillor. In the last season of the show, her campaign to be elected Councillor, pitting her as the plucky David to the rich boy Goliath of Bobby Newport (played by Paul Rudd), formed the essential narrative of the programme. Surrounded by her misfit but adorable acolytes as a kind of ragged campaign team, Leslie does her best to ensure that she, who loves her town so well and has served it passionately for years, will be its political representative. The season culminates in the election for City Councillor. Spoiler: she wins. 

Catching up on the final episodes of the season in the last few days - perhaps reminded to do so in the wake of Poehler’s divorce from Will Arnett - I’ve been, as I said above, somehow disappointed by the programme. I think it stems from the failure of the show to adhere to the Humiliation Rules of comedy, as briefly discussed above. Essentially, from the end of season 2 onwards, Leslie Knope ceased to be presented as a clucking do-gooder who serially ballses everything up, and began to be shown as, in fact, ruthlessly competent and able. While this is interesting in itself - and makes P&R unique in offering a strong, bold female role model - it basically removes conflict from the programme, strips it of the edge, the nastiness perhaps, that would make it properly great. The show is still very funny; it has great gag writers and an incredibly talented cast - but it has come to be lacking in any sort of bite.

The show originated as a kind of version of The [American] Office, with Knope playing the Michael Scott role - i.e. the adorable, underqualified buffoon of a little department. The American version of the Office had already, in my view, dulled the edges of the English Office by failing to make the central character dislikable enough: in the British version, the comedy arises, amongst other things, from David Brent’s pretending to like his colleagues, and wanting to be loved by them, when in truth he is so callous and rapacious that he would not hesitate for a moment to betray them for his own profit. What made the English Office so great was the fundamental despair behind these characters’ lives: the petty niggles of the office, the mundane jobs and stupid nights out, all punctuating the misery of these people in their day-to-day existence. Tim, the central character in the first season, is a borderline tragic character because his trajectory mirrors that of David Brent, as he fools himself that the best thing to do is stay on in this grotesque company that he loathes: the comedy resonates because each laugh is matched by its own tragic equivalent, like a dark shadow in a mirror.

Parks & Recreation does not have anything like this: we know, oh how we know because it is constantly spelled out, that everything is going to turn out OK, better than OK, awesome, wonderful, for Leslie and her joyous troupe of hangers-on. Leslie doesn’t hate Pawnee as someone might hate a small-minded, dull town (hello Slough), but loves it; her colleagues don’t resent working for her, they love it, and they love her. It’s like watching an episode of Fawlty Towers in which Basil Fawlty manages to apologise to the Germans for mocking them with his funny walk, thanks to the tireless help of the adoring Polly and Sybil and Manuel, who rallied round and took time out from their weekend off, to help him mend the situation, because at heart he’s lovable and they want to see him succeed. In another episode, Basil adorably gets the wrong wall put in at the hotel, which creates a problem for customers and nearly destroys the building - but it doesn’t last long because Mr O’Reilly the builder is winningly convinced to come round and sort the wall out, and Sybil forgives Basil for his slip-up, because she loves him so much.

Comedy requires an edge; it needs bite, it needs, I’m afraid to say, an undercurrent of nastiness, a sense that the comedy arises from something other than love and goodness. Without this dark silhouette behind each gesture, informing each character, the comedy is simply a basket of kittens: enjoyable and lovely, but otherwise comforting the audience into a cute and cuddly - and fallacious in the catharsis it provides - sense that everything is right in the world, and good will win out.

I contrast this programme with other shows I love more - with Party Down, for instance, which shares a cast member with Parks & Recreation, Adam Scott. In Party Down, Scott plays a character who has fallen from a great height, and who is so disillusioned with his lot and his life that he can only seek solace in a fully sexual relationship with another cynical soul, played by Lizzy Caplan. Their sexual, romantic chemistry forms the backbone of the show. In Parks & Recreation, Scott also plays someone who has fallen from a great height, and is now reduced to being a small-time official in a little town - except that he comes to love his existence, and his chaste relationship with Leslie becomes a main storyline.

Chaste. Parks & Recreation never fully gives us a sense of the sexuality of its characters; it is made up of cute declarations and sweet pairings: I miss the sense I had in Party Down that Adam Scott wants to tear Casey’s clothes off. Sex, like comedy, is there to distract us from misery and ward off the sense of our own mortality. In Parks & Recreation, people are always making out or winkingly touching each other’s arses, like schoolchildren. In Community, a show I think I prefer to Parks & Recreation, there exists a real sense of sexuality, of a rejection of the cute and adorable in favour of the real, the honest: the revelation at the end of the first season that Jeff has been having sex with Britta, registers the show in a real, adult world where the characters surprise the audience by not adhering to expected patterns. In Community, the characters are thrown together and gradually bond and come to appreciate each other, but there is always an underlying irritation - something that suggests the fragility of their ties, the sense that it could all implode; there is always something grating slightly under the surface of the friendships; a tension. The tension is sexual between certain characters, social between others, where much is made of race, class, education, etc.

Parks & Recreation had all of these things, at one point, and then abandoned them: Ron Swanson, the character who stands for everything that Leslie is against, for conservative, anti-government America, who is furthermore shown to have a hilariously zesty sexual rapport with his former wife, gradually gets co-opted into the all-for-one narrative. Guess what comes to be revealed under his grouchy exterior? Guess also what lies under the cynical exterior of April, the teenage office assistant? Or under the flippant exterior of Tom Haverford, the ne’er-do-well middle manager? Make that a full round of hearts of gold, barman. I think the reason I've enjoyed the appearance in this season of Kathryn Hahn, playing the campaign manager for Leslie's opponent, is that she provided a heartening sense of menace: she is a confident, brash woman who doesn't hesitate to go in for the kill. She basically has contempt for her own candidate and for Leslie, feels herself to be above the petty politics, and enjoys toying with these people she considers to be her intellectual inferiors. She is also brazenly sexual, as witnessed by her forthright advances to Chris (Rob Lowe) in the penultimate episode. In having the incredible genius that is Kathryn Hahn play the  dastardly mirror image of Adam Scott - uncommitted, not passionate, self-interested, vituperative - the show somehow injected some oomph into proceedings. But the underlying tone of the show remains the same slightly dispiriting embrace of cute goodness.

Did I mention I enjoy the show? I still love the programme; it’s vibrant, charming, well-acted and written, ambitious and intelligent; but I find it more and more to be lacking in the sort of tension, the driving impulse of some kind of melancholy or ennui, the bite of nastiness that might reveal true character in some of its protagonists, that would raise it to true greatness.

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia

Every now and then something comes along that is so undeniably great, that is moreover so rightly convinced of its own greatness, so certain of its glittering brilliance in every regard, that no-one has any option but to kneel down in its path and salute it. You might consider the opening notes of Pet Sounds, for instance, in which Brian Wilson clearly stakes a claim to be considered as one of the greats: the light, melancholy notes leading up to the big boom of drums, followed by the great choral surge of the refrain 'wouldn't it be nice': there is nothing hesitant or shy or small here. Or you might think of the look in Roger Federer's eyes during his great run of victories at Wimbledon - he was unassailable, fully committed to his performance, and certain of his dominance.

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia, the latest film by Nuri Bilge Ceylan, is similarly assured: from the first wondrous opening shots, the spectator knows that s/he is in the presence of something truly good, that will be unquestionably powerful and right. In the opening pre-credits scene, the camera pans forward to a dusty roadside garage, dimly lit at night in the Turkish countryside somewhere; it steals up to the building and gradually focuses in on a little room through a grimy window, revealing three men sitting down, playing cards; one of the men eventually rises and comes to look out through the window, and the camera, still positioned there, picks out his lined grey face and wild eyes in close-up before pulling back once more to show him standing at the window from a further distance. In a second shot, he comes outside to feed a dog tethered to a post, and a lorry passes on the road in front of the garage. Credits.

The credits imply that some sort of action prefiguring the rest of the narrative has taken place. The subsequent shots -which are when the true greatness of the film is made clear -reveal that an investigation is taking place, as policemen, a prosecutor and a doctor try to find the location of a buried corpse. The first shot after the credits is a long distance vista of a hilly countryside at night, into which gradually some light steals, and moves along with further light in its wake; at a distance you think it might be a train, but it is revealed to be a line of cars, whose headlights illuminate the countryside around them, and who come to a halt near the point of filming. Using the light from the headlights, still, Ceylan films the policemen, the doctor and the prosecutor asking whether this spot is the location of the body. With them is a criminal, uncertain where he buried the cadaver. After a long scene in Ceylan's unblinking camera, in the yellow light of cars against a dusky backdrop of fields, the men set off once again, and the next shot is of five men in a small car: a chief policeman, his second in command, the prosecutor, the doctor, and the criminal. The four officials distract themselves from the case by talking about buffalo yoghurt and its availability in their neighbourhood, in a revealing, gently amusing conversation which points their characters to perfection, while the camera pans ever so slowly from the front of the car to reveal the wild, exhausted, beautiful face of the criminal, silently sitting in the penumbra of the back seat, in total quiet and misery.

In these five shots, which have lasted maybe twenty or twenty-five minutes, Ceylan shows of what he is capable. We perceive that he wants things and characters to reveal themselves slowly, without artifice; that his grasp of character places people as small players in a wide world that has no certainties for them to clutch onto; that his tale is at once funny and deeply sad and troubling, and that while it is a story based in a real world with real causes and consequences to its actions, Ceylan's modus operandi is the fable. In his delicate, brilliantly conceived microcosm of society (the policeman, the prosecutor, the doctor, the criminal), Ceylan owes a clear debt to Chekhov, but he tells his fable in a manner of his own, somewhere between wry, absurd, kitchen-sink and macabre. We also see from these opening shots the sheer beauty of his composition: this is a gorgeously cinematic film which consistently produces gasp-inducing frames of great beauty.

The investigation is now afoot, and to say more about the plot (which is as engrossing as any thriller) or the interactions between its chief actors (which are beautifully observed, and which show the character of the players in revealing glimpses into their lives) would be to spoil the many rich delights of this great human tapestry. The chief thread running through the work, though, is essentially to do with the problem of perception: in an ongoing, fascinating discussion between the doctor (the voice of logic and reason) and the prosecutor (the voice of doubt), we see Ceylan attempting to figure out ways in which to comprehend the mysteries of our world. The film asks whether there can be answers to everything, whether we can truly know or understand each other.

In the midst of this - and remember that this is a very male film, in a male society - a scene occurs in which kindness and beauty, in the figure of a young girl bringing drinks and food to the men at night, disarm everyone and remind the men of the power of loveliness in the world. Filming the girl's beautiful face in the light of her oil lamp against the thick night, and the silent, enraptured men in close-up, bathed in that light also as they accept the food in wonder, Ceylan manages a scene of perfect, sublime grace.

Once Upon A Time In Anatolia

I'm just creating this blog so as to have a link to put in an email. Full review of this wonderful masterpiece coming up soon.