Daily Archives: Tuesday, February 16, 2016

  • Floating Skyscrapers

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Plynace wiezowce

    Tomasz Wasilewski (2013)

     The writer-director Tomasz Wasilewski has described Floating Skyscrapers as Poland’s ‘first LGBT film’ although it’s the second that I’ve seen, after In the Name Of, in the space of two months.   Wasilewski’s movie (his second feature) is about a swimmer discovering his homosexuality.  It opened in London at the end of the week that began with the diver Tom Daley announcing on YouTube that he’s in a relationship with a man (Dustin Lance Black, who wrote Milk) so Floating Skyscrapers might be thought highly topical.  Greg Louganis, perhaps the greatest of all divers, was one of the first male sports stars to come out as gay – in the 1980s – but doing so is still unusual enough for the subject to make for potentially strong drama.  Wasilewski, however, isn’t interested in this.  He doesn’t make clear how high-ranking a swimmer the protagonist – Jakub, known as Kuba – is.  He doesn’t indicate what the other swimmers whom Kuba trains with think about his sexuality – except for the one who occasionally has sex with him in the toilets before Kuba starts the relationship with a young man called Michal that’s at the centre of Floating Skyscrapers.

    Michal isn’t part of Kuba’s training squad although the two of them end up in the water together more than once.  Wasilewski appears to have chosen a swimming context for its visual possibilities – to show unclothed, well-toned bodies and to suggest Kuba’s psychological situation:  he swims deeper underwater than any of his competitors.  The images that Wasilewski creates to suggest sexual repression and to reflect Kuba’s state of mind are mostly familiar.  After an opening sequence in which you hear but see nothing of what’s going on behind closed cubicle doors at the aquatic centre, Kuba is shown doing exactly what the priest in In the Name Of ­did in the early stages – pushing himself hard on a run through a forest of huge trees.   An underground car park is a recurring significant location (it’s where Michal is eventually murdered by a group of brutal homophobes).  There are also shots from inside a car, travelling fast – in the traffic lane that it must stay in – towards an inevitable destination   The larger physical landscape of the film is one of the most unlovely of the year – concrete buildings and bridges, which are empty of people as well as god-forsaken.  In spite of references to extreme summer heat, the weather is never good and there’s unsurprising meteorological turbulence, including a strategically placed storm.   Although Poland isn’t spoken of in the same homophobic breath as Russia, Wasilewski suggests that it’s no fun being gay there.  The world of Floating Skyscrapers – on dry land anyway – is one of existential bleakness.

    The claim that Wasilewski has made for his film may well be true in terms of physical and sexual explicitness but Kuba – for all that Mateusz Banasiuk plays him admirably – isn’t anything like as interesting a character as Andrzej Chyra’s Father Adam in In the Name Of.   It’s hard to see Kuba’s situation as typical of a young gay man’s in Poland today.  He lives with his mother Ewa (Katarzyna Herman) and his girlfriend Sylwia (Marta Nieradkiewicz) in Ewa’s apartment, and the mother – who hates the girlfriend – appears to desire Kuba sexually.  When Ewa finds out that her son’s gay, Wasilewski gives her both the time-honoured lines for such an occasion:  ‘How could you do this to me?’ and ‘It’s my fault’.  Since the mother evidently likes looking at her son’s bare torso and has him massage her when she takes a bath, these clichés undoubtedly mean more than they often do:  but is Wasilewski using the extreme character of Ewa to make the old-fashioned suggestion that it’s always a mother who’s responsible for a son’s homosexuality?  Michal’s mother knows he’s gay and is sympathetic.  When Michal tells his father at a family meal, the shock revelation is swallowed up in other family conversation – with the mother taking the lead in ignoring what Michal has said.  Talking with her in her car afterwards, Michal asks, ‘Why did Father say nothing?’ when he would surely be putting the question, ‘Why did you try to change the subject?’

    Floating Skyscrapers is thoroughly misogynistic:  there are moments and images which suggest that Tomasz Wasilewski has it in for Kuba’s hapless girlfriend as much as for the manhood-eating mother.  More than once, he frames Sylwia against a mural of butterflies and the camera is static.   (This brings to mind The Collector with the sexual roles reversed.)  The relationship between Kuba and Sylwia is nevertheless the most interesting one in the film.  His determination to reassure her, and himself, that he’s heterosexual in some of their lovemaking is convincing – and Marta Nieradkiewicz makes Sylwia’s determination to hold on to Kuba, even when she knows he’s gay, unhappily believable too.   At the end, Kuba is massaging Sylwia in the bath, rather than Ewa from beside it, but Wasilewski manoeuvres the couple into these final pictures of proximity and separateness by clumsy means.  I assumed that Sylwia’s claim that she’s pregnant with Kuba’s child was true but I didn’t understand why, when Ewa demands that he therefore stay put with her and Sylwia, Kuba was bound to capitulate and to tell Michal their relationship was over.  (It feels like a copout that Kuba doesn’t find out what happens to Michal.)  I understood even less why the mother would see this as a way of holding on to her son – when it also guarantees that Sylwia, who Ewa’s wanted rid of from the start, remains part of the household.

    Poland is a variously successful sporting nation but you don’t think of it as a producer of swimming talent.  (There’s been just one Polish Olympic gold medallist in the pool in the last century.)   Since Kuba not only drinks but smokes cigarettes as well as soft drugs, you feel you understand why.   Wasilewski is negligent in constructing the sporting world of the film, in spite of its importance in the protagonist’s life (he’s been training at the pool since he was a young child).   The coaches say vague things like, to a group including Kuba, ‘Only one of you will go forward’ and you wonder to what.  There’s never any conversation among the swimmers and no reaction, other than in a brief follow-up conversation with a coach, to Kuba’s packing in a crucial race when leading it.  The title has nothing to do with the swimming pool but refers to something Michal did as a child – as his father reminds him shortly before his son is murdered.  The boy used to look out of the windows of the family home up at the tall buildings outside, narrowing his eyes until the image went blurry and they became ‘floating skyscrapers’.  The film’s certificate draws attention to ‘strong sex and nudity’ and there’s a fair amount of both but there’s no warning that you’ll see a man being beaten graphically to death.

    10 December 2013

     

  • Fire in Babylon

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Stevan Riley (2010)

    To sharpen his account of the transformation of the West Indies Test eleven from a collection of delightful but defeatable ‘Calypso cricketers’ into a team of merciless world-beaters, Stevan Riley ignores a fair amount of earlier cricketing history.   He does the same in order to emphasise the political significance of the West Indies’ victories against England – the victories, in other words, of men whose ancestors were slaves over those whose colonialist antecedents introduced the game of cricket to the Caribbean islands.  It’s true that the West Indies didn’t win a Test series in Australia until 1979-80 but they had beaten Australia 2-1 in the 1965 home series.   The first Test matches I can remember from childhood were those between England and the West Indies in 1963.  My recollection of these was that the visitors won but anyone watching Fire in Babylon without any prior knowledge would assume that the West Indies’ 1976 drubbing of England in England was a first.  In fact, the West Indies beat England at home as early as 1934-35 and won their first series in England in 1950 – then again in 1963, 1966 and 1973.  Although this is understandable dramatic licence on Riley’s part, it’s poor documentary practice.  What’s more, the racial aspect of the material is so resonant that the story he tells simply doesn’t need this kind of obfuscation in order to exert its power.

    That 1976 Test series in England certainly was crucial.   The West Indies had lost 5-1 to Australia in the series there at the turn of the year.  England was captained by a white South African, Tony Greig, who declared, notoriously, just before the series in England began, that he intended to make the West Indies ‘grovel’.  It’s clear from Riley’s interviews with players such as Clive Lloyd, Vivian Richards, Gordon Greenidge and Michael Holding that they and their teammates were highly politically sensitised.  They were aware of widespread prejudice among the white British against West Indian immigrants to the country (Gordon Greenidge had personal experience of this:  he had lived in England since his mid-teens); of the racial stereotypes underlying the ‘Calypso cricketers’ tag; of the forthright political positions and impact of black American athletes like Muhammad Ali, Tommy Smith and John Carlos; of Bob Marley’s music and Rastafarian philosophy.  Although there are passing references in the narrative to Frank Worrell, Gary Sobers and Wes Hall, Riley doesn’t make clear what they achieved (except that Worrell was the first black man to captain the West Indies).   His decision to de-emphasise the team’s cricketing success up to 1976 not only rewrites sporting history but obscures the fact that Clive Lloyd’s team were evidently motivated by the persistence – in spite of cricketing success – of received ideas about ‘lazy’ Caribbeans.

    For someone like me, never that interested in cricket but brought up in a family who seemed to believe that the Marylebone Cricket Club was prejudiced chiefly against Yorkshiremen, the variety and extent of racism on display in Fire in Babylon is a revelation.  Footage of the grey-haired, white-skinned members of the MCC sitting round a table doesn’t need any words to express the political predispositions of cricket’s powers-that-were in the 1970s, and well beyond.   (At least the arrival of Kerry Packer on the international cricket scene meant, according to Riley, that the top West Indian players started to be paid according to their talents.)  The racist abuse the West Indies received from Australian crowds and players is shocking, even if it’s not surprising; and the non-cricketer contributors to the film, including Bunny Wailer, express justified resentment.  Although I instinctively reacted against these men’s certainties (and, as usual, found a little calypso music went a long way), it’s hard to argue with them.

    In spite of the powerful political basis of the story, there’s a lot of melodramatic sporting cliché in the interviews in Fire in Babylon and I quickly tired of clips of aggressive fast bowling.  (The West Indies fast bowler Charlie Griffiths was, in the early 1960s, surely no less controversial than his successors in the team during the following decade.  And I suspect it wouldn’t been too difficult to put together similar montages with accompanying this-is-war commentary from Ashes Tests.)  The batsmen are something else, though, and it’s fitting that Viv Richards, the epitome of the enduring success of the West Indies from 1976 to 1991, comes across as the soul of the team – in terms of athletic grace and panache, and of political awareness and responsibility.  The anger in Richards’ eyes at certain moments of the interviews eloquently expresses the ‘fire’ of the film’s title.   His refusal of the ‘blank cheque’ offer to play for a rebel West Indies team in South Africa in 1983 and 1984 caps his heroism.  In contrast, Colin Croft is pretty shocking when he claims – twenty-five years on – not to be able to see the difference between signing up for Packer’s World Series Cricket and for the rebel squad in apartheid South Africa.

    It’s not surprising that Stevan Riley doesn’t explore why West Indies teams of more recent years have never consistently scaled the heights of those captained by Lloyd and Richards (for the vast majority of the Tests of the period); but it would have been interesting to know their thoughts – and those of Greenidge, Holding, Croft and other contributors like Deryck Murray, Andy Roberts and Joel Garner – on the subject.   Fire in Babylon is far from a great documentary but it has a great subject, as well as a particular resonance now that Caribbean sporting prowess is epitomised not by cricketers but by Usain Bolt and the other top Jamaican sprinters.  In his interview, the Barbadian academic Hilary Beckles notes that West Indies cricket is the sole sporting context in which players from the different Caribbean islands come together as a unified team.  It’s Beckles too who, towards the end of Fire in Babylon, reminds us that, between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s, cricket was the first internationally competitive activity for which the region became the undisputed best in the world.

    3 April 2013

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