cantleman@yahoo.co.uk

I'm confused as to why people would still give the pleasant peasant fables of Zhang Yimou house-room now we're offered a view of intense, complex, and contemporary Chinese cinema like this. I adored the extreme negativity of this film's most repetitive moments: Xiao Ji getting slapped about the face ("having a good time?" "yes" "having a good time?" "yes" "having a good time?" "yes" "having a good time?" "yes"...) or trying repeatedly to drive up a slight slope on his motorbike. The very repeatability of film seems to highlight the way that only this silly, essentially boring medium gets at what's going on when stuff happens, in capitalist China as well as at home...

Well, I don't have anything to say about this film that's as intelligent as Margarita Nikolaevna's comments, which you should read.

A whole interconnected body of work appeared at the end of the twentieth century which seemed to want to deal with 'the problem of London'--with the fact that, while London had been the most modern city on the planet for a terrible length of time, it had never arrived at any conscousness of the nature of its own modernity. I'll name some of these works---Iain Sinclair's _Lights out for the Territory_, Allan Moore's masterpiece, _From Hell_ (which this film understands, I think, much more deeply than the Hughes Brothers'), the pics of Mark Atkins, Peter Ackroyd's _Hawksmoor_, Michael Moorcock's _King of the City_, the job Bill Drummond did on the M25---but Patrick Keiller's film is the most magnificently negative and observant of all of these. Of course it enters into a dialogue with Benjamin's marvelous theorising about how Paris was the Capital of the 19th Century, but if you haven't seen it you should be warned that there's a real humour and humanity here which we're accustomed not to find in serious documentary: eg. the great joke of the mysterious guy in the shopping-centre reading Benjamin.... Oh, yeah, now I wait in the Ikea caff, piling meatball upon meatball, and waiting for the fullfilment and suppression of flat-pack...

First of all, the supposed obscurity or the film. The first bit, 'The Book of Mary', is a short directed by Godard's partner and long-time collaborator, Anne-Marie Mieville. Its main connection with 'Hail Mary' is that the girl, Mary, is called Mary... Oh, and that the two films are always shown together.

Watching 'Hail Mary' while the religionists are fighting one of their wars, I find it embarrassing to admit I noticed, but: there's nothing obscure about the film; it's a dead straight retelling of all that bible stuff. A lot of the film's pleasure is recognition: oh, that was The Annunciation! Look, Jesus has run off to the Temple! Of course, Eve and her Czech emigre lover don't have anything to do with Mary and Joseph, but as soon as you realise that it's him, rather than her, who's important, it becomes clear: Oh, yeah, he's that 'voice crying in the wilderness', making ways straight, etc, John the Baptist! This is where the problems start. Visually, the film's amazing: nudes, lakescapes, sunrises, moons--transcendent images are rarely so alluring. But when religious ideas are 'updated'--the baptist as a prophet of computers and Rubik Cubes; Gabriel as air-travel--they just seem arbitrary, and the attempt to preserve their transcendent qualities plays itself out as farce. By the end, despite the technical accomplishment, I'm left thinking Godard's accidentally remade Life of Brian.

Worth seeing for the glimpse of Binoche, though, while she's still the sexiest hen about, and before The New Bridge Lovers turned her face into a bourgoise fetish.