In the Crosswind

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In the Crosswind, Martti Heide, Laura Peterson, Tarmo Song

Laura Peterson & Tarmo Song, In the Crosswind

If ever a movie deserved to be called an art film, this 2014 Estonian film is it (trailer). Director Martti Heide’s full-length debut chronicles Stalin’s 1941 sudden overnight deportation of 40,000 citizens of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to forced labor camps in Siberia. Families were separated, people worked in slave-labor conditions, food was minimal, and many starved. No food was provided for children.

The story, based on a real-life diary, follows the experiences of Erna, a young wife and mother (played by Laura Peterson) desperate to reunite with her husband Heldur (Tarmo Song) and return home. While the story is perhaps typical for people in such brutal circumstances, the way of filming it is not. Heide took months sometimes to set up his shots, which are filmed in long, unedited, silent takes (with a soundtrack of gunshots, trains, creaking cartwheels, and so on added later). But the people do not move. Nor is there dialog. Peterson narrates in voice-over the entries from Erna’s diary, as a series of letters to Heldur.

Instead of action, the camera weaves among the actors, as they stand frozen in position. In an early scene, it circles Erna and Heldur embracing among the passengers waiting to be herded aboard a train, then moves on through the crowd. Then it finds Erna again, leaning out of the cattle car door, looking for Heldur, who stands in the distance. Watching this movie is like examining a series of richly detailed still photographs. Remarkable.

The technique symbolically mimics the way life stood still for the refugees. While it results in a slowly unfolding story, for me, the film was very powerful. Only when Erna is at home, in the beginning scenes and in reverie, do people move in a conventional way. To paraphrase what one refugee said, the Soviet Union might have my body, but my heart (what animates me) is still in Estonia.

IMDb reviewers give it a 7.9 out of 10.0 rating. It was a selection of the Trenton International Film Festival.

**Chum

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cocktail

(photo: wikipedia.org)

By Jeff Somers – By the time I finished this 2013 book I felt like I had a very bad hangover and my tongue had been used as an ashtray. Practically nothing seems to hold this group of nine friends together except drinking and smoking, and the quantity of alcohol consumed explains many of the difficulties they encounter.

Written in the stripped-down modern style, the book is unencumbered by information about jobs, personal histories, and life outside the interactions among various pairings of these friends. With alternate chapters told by different members of this seriously dysfunctional group, the book starts with a hilarious wedding scene in which first the bride, then the groom, lock themselves in the venue bathroom, refusing to come out and carry on with the proceedings. Subsequent chapters skip backward and forward in time to before the wedding and some months after. Nevertheless, Somers guides the reader well, and I was never confused about when events took place or who narrated them.

Much of the narrative focuses on two characters—bad boy Tom and good guy Henry—as much of the plot focuses on the trials of the newly married or to-be married couple, Bick and Mary. The book is full of snarky dialog that’s at first amusing, as in this conversation between Tom and Henry on the wedding day. . Henry speaks first:

“How long you give them?” I asked.
Tom sat forward immediately, as if he’d been thinking about the very subject. “Well, let’s be logical. Bick drinks, and Mary doesn’t like it when he does. Mary drinks but doesn’t think she has a problem, when she very obviously does. Mary is jealous and controlling. On the other hand, Bick is snide and weak, while Mare is easily annoyed and shallow.”
“Be fair,” I admonished, “They’re both shallow.”
“Fine. Put all that together, and I don’t give them a day over seventy years. Eighty years, tops.”

Ultimately, though, the constant put-downs are just sad. As I neared the end, I started to wonder whether Tom and Henry are actually two sides of the same person and could think of only one scene where that wouldn’t work. Both were described as present in scenes, just as multiple sides of other characters’ personalities were present, waiting to break out—usually after a couple of cocktails.

While the novel starts strong and with good humor, the excessive alcohol use, which damaged existing relationships and prevented the strengthening of new ones was, in the end, a downer. Back-of-the-book copy calls it “the story of love, liquor, and death.” That would be one actual death and the death of friendship too.

Somers writes a popular series of futuristic violence featuring his character Avery Cates, and Amazon readers who liked this book tended to be fans of that series. I am still puzzling over this reader comment: “Ultimately I felt disappointed that what was revealed was more or less the point of the whole book.”

Seymour: An Introduction

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Seymour Bernstein

Seymour Bernstein

This documentary (trailer), filled with beautiful music, is an étude of acclaimed concert pianist Seymour Bernstein and a joy, start to finish. Bernstein retired so he could pour his musical ideas into the vessels of his students. And not just musical ideas; his philosophy is that having access to emotion in music encourages access to emotion and satisfaction in other aspects of life. We see him providing pianists of all ages with just the right amount of subtle guidance to dramatically elevate their performances, encourage them to compose as well as play, and, apparently, achieve harmony in life in general.

Scenes take place in the one-room apartment he’s had for 40 years on the upper East Side of Manhattan, near Central Park, in various venues where former students interviewed him, NYU Master Classes, in the piano testing room of Steinway New York, and finally, its main floor rotunda, where he plays a concert to an audience of former students, colleagues, and fans. The interactions with students, former students, and other musicians are revealing, and none more so than his conversations with the film’s director, actor Ethan Hawke.

Hawke met Bernstein serendipitously at a dinner and discovered in him a person with whom he could discuss the anxieties of performance, and the disconnect between good work and success and Bernstein, with what seems to be characteristic generosity, shared his insights. He certainly did not reach his current eminence without his own challenges. When he was young, his father would say, “I have three daughters and a pianist,” which felt like a rejection of him as a son and pained him mightily.

As a young man, he served in the U.S. Army in Korea and teamed up with a talented violinist and a tenor and, despite their commanding officer’s skepticism, put on a concert for the troops—most of whom had never heard “serious” or classical music before. “They wouldn’t let us off the stage,” Bernstein says with glee, even 60 years later. The concert was so successful a tour of front-line camps was arranged. The memory is also bitter, because Bernstein remembers the war dead, and the pain of seeing those body bags has hardly faded.

Except for these memories, the movie is strongly up-beat, with a man doing what he loves and people (students, audiences, moviegoers) responding to his skill and passion. As Detroit News critic Tom Long says, “The great joy of the film, whether you know piano or not, is watching Bernstein teach.” This is a man you will be glad you got to know. The film ends with a typically modest and inspiring Bernstein statement: “I never thought that, with my two hands, I could touch the sky.”

Rotten Tomatoes critics give it a 100% rating and audiences 89%.

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White Writing Black Writing White

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At my writer’s group this week, we touched on the issues that arise when we try to write a character of a different race (or gender, or and so on). Coincidentally, a thoughtful essay by Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda “Where Writers Go Wrong in Imagining the Lives of Others” is included in an early edition of LitHub. (If you’re interested in “the best of the literary Internet,” you may want to sign up for this e-publication, a new joint creation of Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. It looks promising.)

Rankine and Loffreda explore the difficulties inherent in any effort to imagine the lives of people who have had vastly different life experiences and social conditioning than one’s own. Most of their argument applies to white authors writing about people of color, but could apply to other fundamental differences of the sort that influence not only how people see the world but how the world sees them. (This last point is why stories about people who “pass” are so powerful. They know who they are, but no one else does, and they would be treated very differently if they did.)

Many white writers, the authors say, believe “it is against the nature of art itself to place limits on who or what I can imagine,” as if imagination “is not created by same web and matrix of history and culture” that made the writer. The result is an unconscious racial subjectivity that has the power to wound, to do damage, irrespective of whatever benign motivations the writer may have. There are risks. At the same time, they say, writers of color may pull their punches, unwilling to negotiate territory, develop characters, and explore situations outside whatever conventions the literary establishment endorses.

Nat Turner, slave

Nat Turner captured by Mr. Benjamin Phipps, a local farmer (graphic: en.wikipedia.org)

Writing authentically and deeply even about characters one presumably knows best (people “like me”) is a difficult endeavor. Writers who want to create characters of a vastly different point of view should ask themselves some basic questions, they say: why do I want to write such a character and to what purpose? Not can I and how can I? In other words, is the choice to write this character worth the risk of, essentially, getting it wrong and causing harm? What is needed, they say, is to expand the limits of imagination, even if escaping them is impossible, because “history is not an act of the imagination.” At the same time, as James Baldwin once observed, race is “our common history.”

A Slate article written in response to reviewers’ qualms about Michael Chabon’s 2012 novel Telegraph Avenue (a book I much liked, by the way), offers a somewhat different perspective. Among the book’s principal characters are the proprietors—one black and one white—of a used record store located on “the ragged fault line where the urban plates of Berkeley and Oakland subducted.” Writing a black character in this setting is both appropriate and necessary, enabling an exploration of (among many other issues) the community divide and the shifting forces of gentrification, answering the “why” and “to what purpose” questions posed by Rankine and Loffreda.

The Slate piece, which is by Tanner Colby, reviews the history of this continuing debate, which crested with publication of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, told from the point of view of the eponymous former slave. For some years after the criticisms of Styron, white authors shied away from writing black characters, and Rankine and Loffreda agree that issues of “race” and “racism” frequently become entangled. Colby has a cynical view of such critiques: “If you convince white people that they’re not qualified to tackle race, if you scare them away from the issue, if you give them the slightest excuse to ignore it, they will be more than happy to ignore it. For as long as you’ll let them.”

My takeaway from this is that authors who write across racial/gender/other lines need to be hyperaware of the need to push beyond the limits of their own understanding of the world. I suspect that with practice, identifying one’s blind spots comes easier.

****Go Like Hell

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Ford, Le Mans, auto racing

Legendary Ford GT40 (photo: SamH for English language Wikipedia, Creative Commons license)

By A. J. Baime, read by Jones Allen. Perhaps an overcorrection to the glacial pace of the last book I listened to, Go Like Hell: Ford, Ferrari, and Their Battle for Speed and Glory at Le Mans, as they waged classic duels of machine and driver in the French countryside.

There’s just enough biography of Henry Ford II (the Deuce) and Enzo Ferrari to understand the motivations of these two rivals, willing to stake their fortunes, their companies’ futures, and (all too often) their drivers’ lives on this grueling competition. The Deuce believed—correctly—that supremacy in the racing circuit would lead to sales of Ford cars. The components that had to be developed to survive the 24-hour race at Le Mans were testaments to product reliability as well as power, and many advances originally developed for racing vehicles—such as independent suspensions, high-performance tires, disc brakes, and push-button starters—have found their way into passenger cars.

For Enzo Ferrari, whose interest in consumer cars was always secondary to racing, the point was being the world’s best and proving it in the world’s most prestigious and dangerous sports car race, Le Mans. If you’re at all familiar with auto racing’s “golden age,” the big names are all here: Carroll Shelby, A. J. Foyt, Dan Gurney, Phil Hill, John Surtees, Ken Miles, Bruce McLaren, and an upstart kid from Nazareth, Pennsylvania, who took the pole position in the Indianapolis 500 the year I saw the race, Mario Andretti. To get an idea of the speeds they achieve, Baime noted that at top speed they complete the 100-yard distance of a football field in one second.

This was a fast, fun read that shifts between Dearborn, Shelby’s racing car development team working for Ford in Southern California, and Ferrari’s workshop in Maranello, Italy. For a Detroit girl like me, whose grandfather, father, and many uncles worked for the Ford Motor Company, it was a thrill a minute! But even for people who don’t get goosebumps when they hear those Formula One engines roar, Baime’s cinematic recreation of the classic Le Mans races of 1965, 66, and 67, with all their frustrations, excitement, and tragedy is a spectacular true story.

Times have changed, and these past battles have faded. But, hope is on the horizon. According to a 5/22/15 Jordan Golson story in Wired, new rules under consideration “could make Formula One exciting again.” Yea to that!

A movie of Go Like Hell, starring Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, has been “in development” for some time. Meanwhile, there are two classics below.

****Death of A Spy

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Central Asia

Nakhcivan (photo: wikimedia)

By Dan Mayland – Met this author at a conference and thought I’d give one of his books a test-drive. Quite engaging. Glad I read it. Especially intriguing was the setting—countries near and around the Caspian Sea: cities in Azerbaijan and its remote state Nakhchivan, Tbilisi (Georgia), and Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan). Any book with maps at the front tells me the author has taken care to keep readers oriented. Sometimes it where you are really matters.

The protagonist, the likeable Mark Sava, a former CIA station chief in Azerbaijan is living in Kyrgyzstan, running a spies-for-hire business, when a former mentor and colleague is found dead in Tbilisi. This is something he has to take care of and should be an easy deal—contact the family, get the body on the way back to the States, “do this right,” he tells his wife. But once in the dead man’s hotel room, Sava knows something is seriously wrong. This was a hit, one whose roots are somewhere in his own past.

Soon his errand of mercy blossoms into a full-blown catastrophe involving Russian spies, a mysterious new Nakhchivan airfield, Sava’s former lover, and security officials from Azerbaijan who must stay a step ahead of their country’s own deteriorating politics.

Mayland has spent considerable time in the region where his Mark Sava thrillers are set (this is the fourth). His website includes “extras,” more maps and photos of places featured in this book. His dedication to authenticity has been rewarded by glowing reviews and Amazon best-seller status in the espionage category in both the US and UK.

Woman in Gold

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Klimt, Woman in Gold

Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt (photo: wikimedia)

In Woman in Gold (trailer), Helen Mirren, chameleon-like, inhabits the body and personality of Maria Altmann, niece and heir of a prominent Jewish family in pre-WWII Vienna. The family’s best-known member today is Maria’s aunt Adele, whose portrait Gustav Klimt painted in 1907.

The painting was appropriated during the Nazi era and for many years hung in the Austrian state’s famous Belvedere Gallery, as “the Mona Lisa of Vienna.”

After her sister’s death, Maria finds correspondence suggesting the painting was perhaps not left to the government of Austria in her aunt’s will, as it claimed, and therefore not rightfully Austrian property. She hires a family friend’s son, Randol Schoenberg (played by Ryan Reynolds), a young down-on-his-luck Los Angeles attorney, to look into the matter. Schoenberg, grandson of the composer—another refugee from Nazified Austria—is out of touch with his family’s past and slow to recognize the significance of Maria’s quest.

Initially unwilling to take on the case, he is gradually drawn into it. Their bureaucratic battles with stonewalling Austrian officials soon unite the pair, and they are joined by a crusading Austrian journalist, Hubertus Czernin. Formidable legal and bureaucratic hurdles stand in the way of Maria being reuniting with the painting—“When you look at this painting, you see a work of art,” Marie tells a reunification commission, “I see my aunt.”

The story is another in a long line of mostly not happy stories of stolen art works in World War II, brought to renewed public awareness by movies and books like The Monuments Men and Pictures at an Exhibition. The opportunity to reunite beloved works of art and their owners is rapidly disappearing, yet this beautifully filmed movie, directed by Simon Curtis, shows the importance of continuing these efforts.

Because this film is based on a true story, and I for one remembered how it ends, a certain inevitability about the outcome guides the plot. Perhaps this is what has caused reviewers (not me!) to find it dull, though they find the actors captivating. The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes critics rating is a paltry 49%, but audiences were more in my camp, giving a rating of 88%. As a result of the audience reception, the film’s distributor announced yesterday that it will greatly expand its national distribution. If you like stories that touch on beauty, truth, and justice, you will like it, too!

Wolf Halls

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Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel

(photo: Vicki Weisfeld)

A lot of Wolf Hall for one weekend–the Royal Shakespeare Company’s version on stage at the Winter Garden Theatre on Saturday, and on Sunday, the first episode of the BBC’s 6-part television version. Author Hilary Mantel, who won the Man Booker Prize for both Wolf Hall and part II of her Tudor trilogy, Bring Up the Bodies (on stage later this spring), edited and reportedly likes both rather similar versions.

Having enjoyed these books, I felt well prepared for their intricate power politics, not to mention the confusing English naming conventions, in which the Duke of Norfolk is sometimes called “Norfolk” and sometimes by his given name, Thomas Howard (all anyone needs to know is that in any Henry VIII story, Norfolk is never a good guy). But the theater audience was on the ball, got the jokes, followed the plot, and enjoyed the show terrifically. I know I did. Of course, Mantel’s narratives (combined, almost 950 pages) were stripped down for both stage and tv, yet the essentials powerfully remained.

On stage, the leads were Ben Miles as Thomas Cromwell, Nathaniel Parker (Henry VIII), and Lydia Leonard (Anne Boleyn). Miles’s Cromwell comes on slowly, but strongly. After his mentor Cardinal Wolsey is exiled, he finds a place at Henry’s court by following the advice “Stand in his light until he can’t help but notice you.” But Cromwell is the son of a blacksmith, and the nobility never let him forget it.

He makes himself indispensable at every turn, particularly when it comes to the King’s Great Matter: having his 24-year marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled so that he is free to marry Anne Boleyn—partly out of lust and partly in the quest for a male heir. Here’s where the politics get dicey. England and Catherine are Catholic, and the Pope won’t agree to ending the marriage. Henry’s rupture with Rome over this issue led to formation of the Church of England, with him at its head. The split occurred in the intellectual context of the Protestant Reformation, supported by Anne. For some, this was heresy, and heretics risked burning.

Catherine won’t agree to an annulment, in large part because it would make her daughter Mary a bastard. Anne presses for her daughter Elizabeth to head the line of succession. Eventually, Henry tires of Anne’s badgering and . . . oh, wait. That’s Bring Up the Bodies, coming to theaters later this spring and to tv later in the series.

Meanwhile, in the television version, accomplished actor Mark Rylance is Cromwell, skinny Damian Lewis, wearing a hugely padded costume, is Henry VIII, and Claire Foy is Anne Boleyn. In only an hour, the seeds of the controversy are laid, and we haven’t heard much from Catherine, Henry, and Anne yet. Rylance, too, is a taciturn Cromwell, though you have the impression he misses nothing.

In the theatrical version, the costumes are lush, but the set was beyond minimal, no time for shifting setting in the fast-paced scene-changes. Yet I didn’t feel deprived. This minimalism allowed the drama to dominate. Switching to the tv version, it’s obvious how much time is spent walking from room to room and place to place when sets are involved. Both versions: time well spent.

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Crime Scene 101

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Television and the movies notoriously overstate the tools (especially the electronic ones) at a criminal investigator’s command, to the extent juries have developed increased expectations about the availability of forensic evidence. (Here’s a fascinating study of the “CSI Effect,” suggesting prosecutors and judges need to up their game.) At the same time, many writers of crime thrillers strive to accurately portray crime scene investigations and to make their fictional detectives follow more careful procedures than often occurs in real life.

crime scene investigation

(photo: U.S. Army, Europe, creative commons license)

Forensic investigator Geoff Symon recently talked to crime authors about evidence. He began by dividing it into two categories:

  • direct evidence, which means eye-witness accounts, with all their well-documented weaknesses and
  • circumstantial evidence, which is everything else.

Symon emphasized that circumstantial evidence is still evidence, and when a tv lawyer pooh-poohs a case, saying “it’s only circumstantial,” that’s not necessarily a weakness. In truth, unless there is a reliable eye-witness, all cases are circumstantial. Fingerprints, hairs, fibers, and blood and DNA other than the victim’s are all circumstantial evidence, and the accumulation of evidence of this type, when put together in a convincing narrative, can become absolutely compelling. Circumstantial evidence can relate to a particular category of people (say, all those with blood type AB negative or having a carpet with a particular kind of fiber), or to a particular individual (fingerprints or DNA).

Says Adam Plantinga in 400 Things Cops Know says “People watch crime shows on TV so they think the police can get readable prints off just about anything—human skin, stucco walls, quesadillas,” but “only a few surfaces are conducive to the retrieval of fingerprints.” Slick surfaces, like noncoated glass, glossy paper, and aluminum are best, he says.

Two additional considerations are avoiding contamination of the crime scene and maintaining the chain of evidence. No longer do hordes of people enter the room where a body lays, tromp around in their own shoes, and depart. (In the notorious 1954 murder of Marilyn Sheppard, “Police officers, relatives, press, and neighbors [were allowed to] troop through the house.” Subsequently, this case was a basis for the movie and tv series, The Fugitive.)

Today’s investigators recognize that “whenever you leave a room you take something with you and you leave something behind,” Symon said. Thus, the importance of hair coverings, gloves, booties, and hazmat-looking suits. Cross-contamination of the crime scene was vital to the defense of O.J. Simpson. First investigators on the scene, therefore, have a particular responsibility to document it accurately with photos, video, sketches, and notes, knowing it may be contaminated subsequently.

Similarly, the chain of custody for evidence is an essential part of “preserving” the crime scene evidence. Unless a piece of evidence has been carefully tagged, and each subsequent person who handled and tested it has signed for it, criminal prosecutors cannot claim that a trace of DNA , a hair, or other physical evidence is the same bit gathered at the crime scene and not somehow introduced subsequently.

Symon and other forensic investigators help authors by describing “reality.” The challenge for the author is to subvert reality in a believable way so their story’s plot can unfold. While in real life, procedural mess-ups may mean perpetrators are never be brought to justice, this often suits the author’s fictional purposes very well.

**The Paying Guests

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London townhouse

(photo: Zoe Rimmer, creative commons license)

By Sarah Waters, read by Juliet Stevenson. Usually I enjoy being read to, but this is a book that might have been a better experience in the print version. NPR’s Julia Keller called it a “bewitching” tale of a young woman who falls in love with a married person, with all the well-known probability of a bad ending which that act entails. It didn’t bewitch me, alas. (It didn’t help that some of the reviews I read contained significant spoilers.)

It’s 1922 London, and to make ends meet, Frances Wray and her mother must take in lodgers—“paying guests”—after the family’s father died and both sons were killed in the Great War, leaving the two women with little more than a big house. Their constant petty economies dampen Frances’s spirits, and the young couple of a slightly lower class that moves in upstairs alternately energizes and mystifies her.

Says Keller, “Waters is a master of the slow build,” and I would second that, so much so that it isn’t until the book is nearly half-over and after some dark foreshadowing that the story picks up any steam (and it does get tastefully steamy, never fear). Subsequently, the consequences of a dramatic act of desperation begins to suffocate Frances in significant moral dilemmas, but, ultimately, the story unravels too slowly its last third or so.

If I’d been reading this, rather than listening to it, I could have whipped past some of its more lugubrious and repetitive dialog, along the lines of “Oh, Frances, what will we do?” No doubt this is a matter of personal taste, but I would have preferred some more doing in the book’s 21.5 hours (576 pages) and a little less wondering about it.