Tag: writer

The Rise & Fall Of Comrade Zylo (Shkelqimi Dhe Renia E Shokut Zylo)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Comrade Demka (Donald Shehu) just can’t say no. It’s 1971, and he’s strongly in demand as a political speechwriter. As fast as he can churn out speeches, it seems, he’s asked to write more. His wife Zenepja (Xhoana Karaj) is fed up with him working all the time, feels he’s wasting his talent and anyway would rather he spent more time with her. And then, there’s Comrade Zylo (Aleks Seitaj), appropriating speeches Demka has written for others, such as the one on the tedious-sounding ‘Innovative Developing Elements in the spread of our culture throughout Albania’.

Watching Zylo read one of Demka’s speech through the circular windows of the auditorium doors, Demka listens to the praise for Zylo pouring from the mouth of Zylo’s wife Adila (Enisa Hysa). She’s impressed by the words her husband has written, unaware that Demka, not Zylo, actually wrote them. She’s less impressed, along with most of the audience, with the speech of committee chair Comrade Q (Petrit Malaj) – which Demka also wrote, on a tight deadline – going down rather less well. At the after-speech dance (with a traditional and very conservative Albanian folk band) she dances and flirts with Demka.

Q meanwhile, is less than happy, feeling that Demka could have written better for him. No sooner has he stormed off than Zylo, who clearly knows a good thing when he sees it, is asking Demka to come and work for him. He introduces Demka to one of his sons, the composer Diogenio (Samuel Vargu). Also in Zylo;’s circle are the playwright of The Storm Is Defeated, Adem Adashi (Amos Muji Zaharia), and his wife, the singer Cleopatra (Jorida Meta).

Zylo becomes obsessed with the potential effect of socialism on West Africa, and wants Demka to write him a speech for an upcoming conference there. The pair of them go to Africa on a delegation, accompanied by Cleopatra. There’s clearly something going on between Zylo and Cleopatra. No-one in the party pays any attention to the delegation, which proves something of a non-event. Except that it’s the beginning of the end for the career of Comrade Zylo.

The whole thing oscillates between a bureaucratic drama with Comrade Q, Zylo and various factions vying against each other to get ahead, an existentialist drama in which Demko struggles to write to deadline, a domestic drama in which Demko’s wife thinks he’s a great writer wasting his time on political speeches, and the occasionally very funny scene of satire about life in an Eastern Bloc socialist state.

Perhaps the best scene occurs when during a visit to a village, Zylo gets drunk at a gathering convened in his honour and starts talking about all men being equal, that they shouldn’t oppress their women like tyrants, and so forth. He starts waving his pistol about (not with the intent of discharging it, except maybe to put a bullet in the ceiling) while everyone around him is getting increasingly worried. He’s speaking out for an equality which can’t possibly exist under the current bureaucratic, socialist system, with its Party hierarchy, and it’s as if everyone is aware of the existing pecking order but him, the person in charge.

Overall, this is a film likely to make more sense or to appeal to those who have experienced life under a totalitarian leftist regime than those of us who haven’t.

The Rise & Fall Of Comrade Zylo premiered in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

About Us But Not About Us

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

[dropca[]A[/dropcap]n older man meets a younger man in a restaurant. Both are gay. The older man, Eric (Romnick Sarmenta), has recently lost his longtime partner Marcus (who we never see… well, not exactly) while the younger man Lance (Elijah Canlas) knew Marcus as his writing tutor, both elder men working as professors at the English language faculty of the university at which Lance is a student.

As the narrative plays out in real time, it moves through a number of difficult areas. Lance was having problems at home; specifically, being beaten by his stepfather, so Eric intervened by letting Lance stay at his place, bringing upon the pair rumours that they were lovers (although everything in the restaurant conversation suggests those rumours to be unfounded). It later transpires that Lance has written his first novel. When Lance presents the manuscript to Eric, Eric accuses Lance of plagiarism after reading the first few pages when Lance walks offscreen for a minute or two to take a toilet break.

Director Lana deploys a variety of theatrical and cinematic tricks in order to make the piece work. He has thought a lot about where to place the camera, and what each specific shot contributes to the whole. He deploys some bravura cinematic tricks. A clever combination of blocking, camera positioning and Lance cleaning his spectacles lenses allows Lance to temporarily transform into Marcus; a similar setup allows Eric talking to Lance to transform into Marcus talking to Lance, all acheived without lap dissolves, traditional flashback techniques, different actors or prosthetics makeup.

Whereas Hitchcock undertook Rope (1948) as a kind of stunt, which still delivered as a thriller, About Us But Not About Us doesn’t have any such genre trappings. It’s fundamentally a film about two people talking over a meal in a restaurant, something Hitch would have decried as “photographs of people talking”. To be fair, it does contain some bravura cinematic tricks, but somehow those look like trickery rather than enhancing the tale of the characters and making the audience feel for their plight. I, for one, didn’t really care about what the characters were going through. Unlike Rope, the film lacks Hitch’s understanding of the psychology of audiences.

Although no masks are worn, the pair are only allowed a 90 minutes because of the restaurant’s post-COVID policies and characters make references to the pandemic throughout. That’s not the subject of the film per se, but it’s good that it at least acknowledges the pandemic in passing when so many movies seem to want to pretend it never happened, that it’s business as usual. Whatever my other opinions of the film, this, at least, is something in its favour.

About Us But Not About Us premieres in the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The World After Us (Le monde après nous)

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

The conditions that made Paris such a hub for writers in the early 20th century — cheap flats, strong communities, endless time to put pen to paper — have been more or less swept away by the powers of gentrification. Faced with paying €1,200 in rent every single month, Labidi (Aurélien Gabrielli) is forced to come up with some unusual schemes, like low-key insurance fraud and cycling for Deliveroo, in order to meet the bills.

He is a promising young French-Tunisian writer with an award-winning short story under his belt. His agent secures him a meeting with a top literary firm, who enjoy the first three chapters of his Algerian-war focused novel. With only six months to finish the book, this decision is rather complicated by his romance with Elisa (Louise Chevilotte), who he picks up in true Frenchman-style on a Lyonnaise terrasse by asking for a cigarette. He didn’t smoke before; he will now.

She’s a younger penniless student while his home is in Paris; making the move to one of the world’s most expensive places — drained of the usual romantic clichés of walking along the seine or staring at the Eiffel Tower — difficult for the young, loved-up couple, who can barely rely on their working-class parents for help. The resultant film explores the pressures of being an artist in an increasingly capitalist world, existing without a connection to one’s roots, and trying to stay in love amidst the maelstrom of modern life. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but neatly packaged in a smart, bittersweet yet ultimately optimistic package.

With a light, unaffected style with simple yet effective editing, The World After Us effortlessly brings to mind the films of François Truffaut, especially Antoine and Colette, as well as recent ‘novelistic’ French-speaking films like the work of Xavier Dolan, Being 17 and Next Year. While the New Wave is often parodied for its pretensions, it was filled with great humour; effectively communicated here when Labidi interviews for a job at a high-end optician. The comedy diffuses the self-seriousness of similar writer stories, rounding out Labidi as a man who feels like he actually exists off-screen.

As a portrait of a young man as a writer, a genre often tackled in French literature and cinema, The World After Us, partly based on director Louda Ben Salah-Cazanas’s own life, seems unconcerned with the weight of history, using its tightly-written characters and a condensation of time to easily absorb us into Labidi’s life. Aurélien Gabrielli carries his character with a deceptive simplicity, first appearing like a passive sponge before slowly turning into the hero of his own story without exhibiting any stereotypical or groan-worthy moments of growth. Accompanied by a few choice needle drops — “Knights of White Satin”, “Remember Me’ — The World After Us expertly sweeps us through these six months in a smooth 84 minutes. More novella than novel, this is a lovely slice of Francophone auto-fiction.

The World After Us plays in the Panorama strand of the Berlinale, running between 1st-5th March.