This was 30 January: Call it #1

We went by bus to see the new Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu movie ‘Biutiful’ at the Ritzy in Brixton last night.

You get a film that begins at the end and holds you - for what ? - 147minutes is it?  It holds you not least because you want to get an explanation of the opening sequence. There is a dead owl lying on the snow in a birch forest and Javier Bardem is talking to a younger man about the sounds made by the wind and by the sea. The vertical stripes of the trees are stark against the white ground, dividing the two men by space and – it turns out – by time.

The film is set in Barcelona but it’s not the Barcelona seen by tourists: unless you were there that day in the Plaça de Cataluña when the cops were chasing the African street-vendors away down Las Ramblas and into the old town. Distractions: we keep seeing a pair of immense industrial chimneys pumping smoke into the winter sky – I didn’t notice those either when I was there. Through the smoke and gathering gloom there recurs the silhouette of the never-to-be-completed Sagrada Família, seeming so appropriate to the story of Uxbal, a dying man trying to ensure a viable future for his own sacred family. He knows he has to put his affairs in order, but the real drama exists in the inevitable fragility of every move he makes to arrange anything for a future from which he will be absent. Even his efforts to ameliorate conditions in the present seem doomed. Events in the film grew so intense and battering it was only near the end that I managed to remember the name of Gaudí.

I must recommend this film but it’s a grim one. The corruption is all around and unfolds in layers; it’s not just the cop on the take or the cancer building inside Uxbal. His wife and his brother both take from him too. The African and Chinese immigrant workers are exploited by everyone and by each other. Uxbal and his brother Tito exhume the embalmed body of the long-dead father whom Uxbal never knew because he died far away in Mexico, a youthful refugee from Franco. The father’s body is surprisingly well-preserved from corruption of a different sort but will now be cremated anyway. Selling the father’s burial niche to a developer provides much-needed funds but who can Uxbal trust to hold them?

Buses? We took the159 from Streatham to Lambeth Town Hall and the 250 back. Thanks to all for the old gits’ Freedom Pass!