Straight Outta Crouch End

In May of this year, I left the screening room in Cannes where I had just seen L'atelier, a film by Laurent Cantet, feeling full of vigour and excitement. I had seen a film whose brilliance I longed to write about: I wanted to give voice to my feelings of elation as it had begun to dawn on me what Cantet was up to in his sharp, gleaming, deceptive movie. The film is about a writer of thrillers who mentors teenagers in a creative writing workshop in the south of France over the summer. The youths are from all sorts of backgrounds, and have enrolled in the course for a number of reasons: the idea is that together they will write a crime novel set in their own town of La Ciotat, drawing on its culture and history.  To begin with, the writer, Olivia, engages her charges in a series of conversations about the crime that will occur in their book, which gets them onto the wider topic of violence, where it stems from, and what might cause someone to kill. The youngsters, being contemporary...

Once, on a beach in Brighton a few years ago, to tease me, my friends started adding up all the money I have wasted over my lifelong career as a loser-of-things, breaker-of-things, forgetter-of-things. I've lost cash, for instance by putting it down in a shop while I packed my things, and then leaving it there; or simply by losing my wallet (we'll estimate my losses of wallets at a conservative ten, with an average of, say, 11 pounds in them each time = £110). I've lost bank cards. I've lost or broken my mobile phone at least eight times: let's estimate a minimum of £50 to replace an insured phone, over £100 to replace a non-insured phone. I've lost clothes; keys to my house (£10 for every new set of keys I've had to have made = £100); train tickets, passports, bills, books, CDs, a laptop, an iPod. Factoring in bills I have forgotten to pay, which have then accrued interest over a number of years, and other miscellaneous objects, what my friends had begun ...

I’ve only wanted to stop living twice. In between these times, my life has seemed worthwhile, beautiful even, comfortable often too. But on those two occasions everything in my mind went so dark—I entered such a whorl of clashing thoughts that clanged together and pained me—that I didn’t know my existence properly, and hoped for it to end. In my twenties one night when I had been crying in my bedroom for hours, I sat up with a strange resolution, and walked in a sort of stupor into the kitchen. So many tears had dried around my eyes, which ached as I wiped the last few away. I looked in a cupboard and found some painkillers, and carried them over to the kitchen table with a glass of water. I got a piece of paper and a pen and laid them out ceremonially. It’s difficult now, such an upheaval, to try and get my mind back into the state that I was in; so hard to stand next to that person sitting alone at 4 a.m., and ask him what he was thinking. I know that I found it almost impossible...

Nocturama, Bertrand Bonello's potent and wildly adventurous drama about a group of young people who orchestrate a series of attacks in Paris, has ended up on Netflix following a predictably fraught battle to be released anywhere at all. It is one of the great films of the year, raising and answering questions touched on by current events and other films of 2017; its politics are disquieting in their vamping nihilism, yet they also seem to chime with the state of the world around us. How does the film fit in the world as we see it today? I'd like to compare it to a few other films in order to tease out its singularity of purpose. Nocturama is a film of French youth - and it is a film about French youth and violence, which aligns it thematically with Celine Sciamma's Girlhood (2014) and Houda Benyamina's Divines (2016), as well as Laurent Cantet's equally prescient and lithe The Workshop (2017). All four films address youth as a terrain of political displacement, ...

Twice a year when I was a boy my mother would bounce me out of school for the morning and take me into Paris on the train to see an old man who would make me take all my clothes off and cup my dick and balls. My paediatrician (for this was the old man I humorously painted as a sex pervert in the previous sentence!), would run other tests besides: height, weight, and a series of X-rays designed to see if my bone age had increased at all since the last visit. My height and weight would then be tracked on a graph, where they ran comically under the average for a boy of my age, and the X-rays would be checked by the doctor just before the genital check-up. The cock and balls test - which took the form of a humiliating weighing-by-hand - was intended to see if my puberty was anywhere around the corner. (It never was.) The doctor would then ask me if I was eating enough, and my mother would ask him for a rough estimate as to what height I might reach as an adult; the doctor would then give a...

On the popular social media website Twitter.com I mused yesterday that the hair of David Lynch deserves to earn more plaudits. If you look up reviews of his films, by such critics as Anthony Lane or Peter Bradshaw, you will note with bafflement that the subject of Lynch's perfectly coiffed locks is never addressed, when of course this is one of the most important things about him. The comments soon drew a hitherto un-guessed-at swell of fervent replies from the denizens of Film Twitter, chiming in with their agreement about the wonders of Lynch's follicles. "It's like the sea, it's like ice cream," offered one tweeter on the subject of Lynch's hair. "He has damn rock star and I love it/want it," said another. "When he runs his fingers through his quiff in The Life of Art it doesn't even look sticky," swooned a third. "What *does* Lynch use in his hair," pondered a serious critic, adding: "It doesn't seem stiff a...

Follow Lin-Manuel Miranda on Twitter Go to a meat restaurant and dare some male friends to order the big meat platter too if they're man enough, the one with all the ribs and wings Sit my not-quite-3-year-old son down for a chat about how the world is actually quite a terrible and terrifying place, and I'm not sure what I'm doing, and he has to understand that I'm making it all up as I go along, and I don't have the answers, he can't rely on me, he has to question everything, do you hear me, everything Have another crack at Infinite Jest Do my work commute on my knees, arriving at 10.47 with bloodied trousers and a winning smile Go on Carpool Karaoke and do Hotline Bling, and then find out that Drake is a surprise guest, and then do One Dance and high-five each other See my complete Grindr interactions hacked and uploaded onto an easily accessible Tumblr with amusing captions for the photos 100 press-ups in a London park, very early in the morning, abov...

To say that Jackie is a camp classic in the making isn't to say that it's a bad film. It's even, at times, a very good film, particularly in its formal mastery which extends to the composition, camerawork, palette and score. But the qualities in Jackie are precisely what prevent it from being trash, thereby making it camp. The film's artifice and mannerisms, its purposeful vulgarity and body horror, its quotable bon mots, its impish delight in tearing down institutions, and last but not least the huge female performance at its centre, make it, at least in this viewer's eyes, a bona fide gay trip. Jackie is a film about a woman struggling to keep alive her public image and uphold the carefully constructed idea of the American fairytale. Jackie Kennedy's turmoil in the days after the assassination of JFK, then, becomes almost a pretext for a revisionist disquisition on femininity, sexuality, motherhood. The film does not pretend to show the real woman: rather...

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(This is a reprint of the second newsletter I sent. You can subscribe to it here: https://tinyletter.com/CasparSalmon) What do we mean by 'good' acting? It's a subject that you could write a whole book on, and PERHAPS I DAMN WILL, but in the meantime here are a few thoughts. Acting is easy, and everyone can do it. It's obvious to say, but every time you tell a lie you are acting, and even your day to day behaviour, while truthful, contains elements of performance. You choose to heighten certain words, to pause, to exaggerate, to use your body language for emphasis, in order to make your character manifest. Once, when I was at school, a boy in my class changed his walk almost from one day to the next. He had a boyish walk and changed it to a perfectly ridiculous, would-be cool saunter, which came with a stride that was too long and stretched his legs to visibly preposterous effect. But I suppose he wanted to convey something. This is to say that everyone makes a bi...

(This is a reprint of the the first newsletter I sent out. You can subscribe to it here: https://tinyletter.com/CasparSalmon) I grew up in the same town as Isabelle Huppert. Ville d'Avray is a serenely pretty, slightly colourless place in the Parisian suburbs, between Paris and the more rarefied Versailles. Ville d'Avray joins Versailles by a quiet road that wends past lakes and through the forest, finally opening out onto grand tree-lined boulevards that lead to the Chateau. To get to Paris from Ville d'Avray, you drive through the heights of St. Cloud, where Marine Le Pen grew up in a private residence, and wind down to where the Seine circumscribes the city. Ville d'Avray was memorialised in painting by Corot in the 1860s and on film by Serge Bourguignon in the 1960s, in his film Les dimanches de Ville d'Avray. The town is quiet, a little haven from the lights of Paris, and its inhabitants are wealthy, white, educated, bourgeois, presumably right-wing. Walking ...