On the Record review – chilling exposé on #MeToo and the music industry

‘If you are a rape survivor, you are a crime scene. Your life is a crime scene.” The speaker is the remarkable Drew Dixon, the supremely articulate and charismatic woman whose story is the keynote of this powerful documentary, from Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, about sexual violence and misogyny in the music business – and also about the way the experiences of women of colour have tended to be marginalised and erased from the #MeToo conversation.

In the 90s, Dixon became a top executive at Def Jam records in New York, reporting to the hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons. Her flair for spotting and nurturing talent meant that Dixon played a major but unacknowledged part in shaping the hip-hop scene at that time. But she tells how one night in 1995, Russell Simmons invited her up to his apartment, on the pretext that he was going to play her a demo, and raped her. From that moment, says Dixon, she shut down emotionally. But her ordeal was to continue: she was later sexually harassed at Arista Records by its CEO, LA Reid, who impeded her career because she refused to submit to his demands.

After years of silence, Dixon spoke out about Simmons to the New York Times in 2017, and other African-American women recounted sickeningly similar experiences, including writer Sil Lai Abrams and movie producer Jenny Lumet, both interviewed here. (Simmons denies these claims – which would make his solemn pronouncements on veganism and yoga look entirely grotesque – and has moved to Bali, Indonesia where there is spiritual balm and no extradition treaty with the United States. Reid responded to Dixon’s accusations by saying: “If I have ever said anything capable of being misinterpreted, I apologise unreservedly.”)

The film is forthright and intelligent on the difficulties and complexities involved in the discussion. It notes that despite the flagrant sexist imagery in the hip-hop music videos of the time, the genre did not invent sexism – illustrated by some wince-inducing clips of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Tom Jones. And the survivors felt an almost tragic loyalty to a scene that was under the shadow of white condescension. Dixon – with some courage – says this was partly why she stayed quiet for so long: “For 22 years, I took it for the team. I didn’t want to let the culture down.”

There is a chilling resonance with the Harvey Weinstein case: not simply the recognisable details that emerge from the women’s testimonies but the way Simmons encouraged a gratitude-stricken cult of personality to grow around him. But there is also a chilling non-resonance with Weinstein: no legal action was brought, and the women did not get their day in court, without which there might not be complete closure. Yet speaking out goes a long way.

The County review – a fierce fight for justice in the Icelandic highlands

The spirit of Elia Kazan lives on in this tough community drama from Icelandic film-maker Grímur Hákonarson, who won golden plaudits for his 2015 picture Rams, about two sheep-farming brothers, which struck a clever tonal balance between comedy and tragedy.

The County is dourer than that, though from the same world of self-reliant and pugnacious souls who have made their way in life against tough odds, thriving in solitude and hardship amid a vast, remote, beautiful landscape. The action centres on farmers: Inga (Arndís Hrönn Egilsdóttir) who is married to moody, careworn Reynir (Hinrik Ólafsson).

Their life is hard. They are fighting against mounting debts and must work harder and harder to stay afloat. Hákonarson shrewdly begins with a classic farming scene, which for Britons is like something from James Herriot: a calving that Inga handles herself without any outside help, using chains attached to the hooves, steadily, competently pulling. It’s a scene that crystallises her approach to work: calm, professional and with an uncorroded sense that focused effort will be rewarded.

Reynir’s worldview is bleaker. Like his wife, he has become embittered by his farm’s relationship with the all-powerful local co-operative and its political adjunct, the Agrarian party. They’re signed up to the co-op, like all the farmers thereabouts, and this body gives them a safe captive market for their milk and meat, a discount store and loans. But in return the farmers have to buy everything from the co-op itself, at inflated prices. The co-op has become an exploitative racket, a Carnegie-style company store, led by its sinister, desiccated chairman, Eyjólfur (Sigurður Sigurjónsson), who runs a menacing, Stasi-mafia organisation against any farmer who dares go outside the union – using a key informant who betrays his neighbours.

This is a film about the clash of old and new. Inga takes on the co-op, armed with her personal rage and her conviction that the times are a-changing. Farmers don’t need the co-op, she thinks – and she believes that the big international corporations can help her. She can buy materials from Amazon and sell her milk direct to the public via the internet, and she uses Facebook to publicise her campaign against the co-op’s restraint of trade.

Whatever objections everyone else might have to Facebook, Inga is glad of it. Other farmers are fainthearted about standing up to the co-op, but Facebook’s got her back. The mainstream media also take an interest in this maverick woman, and the menfolk are deeply irritated by her. Her fightback involves a moment weirdly like the climax of Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake, and there is less political irony in the comparison than first appears.

There’s something else, too. Egilsdóttir’s excellent performance as Inga shows us that, as the gruelling action continues, she looks younger and younger, just when you might expect her to become grizzled and aged by this nasty battle against a local bigwig. It is as if this struggle has given her a new vitality, which wasn’t provided by back-breaking 24/7 work to pay off a crippling mortgage. Her enemies threaten her with bankruptcy. But this threat, so far from scaring her, does the opposite.

Egilsdóttir portrays a woman who is thrilled, not just by the principled confrontation with these local bullies but the prospect of just being rid of everything. So she goes bust – and loses everything – so what? Watching this film, we can see how her farm and all its cumbersome expensive equipment and outbuildings are just a burden to her, and work itself (that sacred shrine to which she was otherwise loyally ready to sacrifice her entire life) is a meaningless treadmill that she has found a heroic and spectacular way to jettison.

The climactic scene at a town-hall gathering is maybe a little contrived, yet Egilsdóttir carries the drama, and her overwhelming feeling of relief makes sense of that gigantic landscape. At last, it is a world to be free in.

Moffie review – swooning eroticism in apartheid South Africa

Oliver Hermanus delivered a gut punch in 2011 with his powerful film Skoonheid, or Beauty. Now he has directed a fiercely engaged, complex drama of sexual identity and suppressed yearning in apartheid-era South Africa – a film with a humid intensity. It is also a war movie about a country at war with itself, with its neighbours and with the whole world. Hermanus and his co-writer, Jack Sidey, have adapted the novel by André Carl van der Merwe, entitled Moffie – the (still very much unreclaimed) Afrikaans word for “faggot”.

Kai Luke Brummer plays Nicholas van der Swart, a white South African teenager in 1981 who has to do two years’ national service. This means grisly basic training and then a terrifying “border tour” – young trainees must move upcountry to engage the enemy in a real shooting war. Angola and the Soviet-backed MPLA (immortalised in the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK) loom on the border of the South West Africa territory – now Namibia – and are used as an ever-present bogeyman to keep South Africa’s young white manhood in a permanent state of aggressive paranoid readiness and to provide an ideological anti-communist rationale for apartheid itself. Young van der Swart suppresses his fear at this vicious dehumanising experience and also his own gay sexuality, because “moffies” are treated as the enemy within and could expect to be beaten and brutalised.

Hermanus creates some grimly compelling scenes as Nicholas arrives at the training camp after a gruesome train journey, during which the young proto-squaddies indulge in racist insults at black men on station platforms. The drill sergeant is a traditional figure here, and Hilton Pelser’s performance as the monstrous Sergeant Brand measures up in sadism and abuse. Hermanus shows how, from the very first, Brand displays his own mysterious enthusiasm for homophobic abuse, screaming into the young men’s flinching faces his sneering questions about their alleged interest in each other’s bodies. In the camp, furtive glances in the showers and lavatories mean more, and the stakes are much higher. The same is true for Nicholas’s emotional connection with fellow trainee, Dylan (Ryan de Villiers).
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Nicholas’s family background is what further complicates the dynamic. Despite his soft “English” looks, he has an Afrikaans name, but he has to explain he has taken the surname of his more robust stepfather after what appears to have been his parents’ divorce. His father (whose photograph Nicholas poignantly carries with him to the camp, almost like that of a sweetheart) is a gentle soul who, in an excruciating act of misjudged manliness, has given Nicholas a porn magazine to take to the camp with him. And it is his father who is to be at the centre of an enigmatic, superbly filmed and rather shocking “flashback” scene of Nicholas’s childhood, when he and his family were horribly humiliated at a holiday resort.

There is, arguably, a complication with regards to race. The story of a young white man seeing military action in the service of the apartheid regime, finding comradeship with other white men and never for one moment questioning what he is doing might look now like a tragic or pathetic story of naivety. (One of them, Sachs, played by Matthew Vey, offers some limited leftist talk of Mao and Che in a bar.) But, in this context, it is the gay white man, not the black man, who has victim status. Perhaps it is a stretch to find their intersectional common cause.

As with Claire Denis in her 1999 film Beau Travail, a reworking of the homoeroticism of Billy Budd in the context of the French Foreign Legion, Hermanus responds directly to the beauty of male bodies. This, too, is a complicated reaction. Most of the time the physicality on display is intimidating and violent, and yet it can also be a swooning epiphany of carefree beauty, more beautiful, in some forbidden and unknowable way, because of the violence.

We are accustomed to talk about toxic masculinity – and of course the masculinity of this film is mostly very toxic. But then, almost like a reflective object being turned a fraction of an inch to catch the light, the masculinity becomes non-toxic; it becomes supercharged with beauty and eroticism and tenderness.

The Elephant Man review – David Lynch's tragic tale of compassion

This beautiful, measured and rather atypical movie by David Lynch from 1980 is now on re-release, written for the screen by Lynch with Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren. It tells the story of John Merrick, the “Elephant Man”, a Victorian-era person with disfigurements who was rescued from a cruel fairground show by the concerned physician Frederick Treves and established as a fashionable figure in London society, despite nagging fears that Merrick had simply become a grander and more acceptable form of freak attraction.

John Hurt, in complex and intricate prosthetics, plays Merrick with an unforgettably distinctive, gentle, quavering voice. Anthony Hopkins is Treves, the muscular Victorian man of science who rescues him; John Gielgud is the stern hospital chief Mr Carr-Gomm who becomes an advocate for Merrick, as does the no-nonsense matron, robustly played by Wendy Hiller. Anne Bancroft plays the stage star Madge Kendal, who takes a kindly interest.

The film is different from the stage play of the same name, in which David Bowie played Merrick in 1980-81, as did Bradley Cooper in the recent London revival with a voice clearly inspired by Hurt. The play suggests a daring sexual tension in Kendal’s interest in Merrick, whereas the film imagines extended episodes in which a corrupt hospital porter (played by Michael Elphick) is being paid by pub drinkers to let them come and gawp at the terrified patient. At the time, I remember thinking that Treves’ rescuing of Merrick was like Nicholas Nickleby stepping in to prevent Smike being beaten in the legendary Royal Shakespeare Company stage adaptation in 1979.

Lynch’s film was celebrated and spoofed in its time, not least in Richard Curtis’s comedy The Tall Guy, the plot of which featured a gobsmackingly tasteless musical version of The Elephant Man in which Jeff Goldblum took the lead. (Once you realise Lynch’s movie was produced by Mel Brooks, you can’t help thinking about his Young Frankenstein.) Nowadays, the context for its representation of disability has changed and the actor Adam Pearson, who has a similar condition to Merrick’s, has condemned the practice of “cripping up”.

It has to be said that Lynch’s Elephant Man, while not exactly sentimental, takes a determinedly un-alienated attitude to Merrick’s image: rational, compassionate and very different from his approach to what might be called body-nonconformity in Eraserhead in which the keynote is clearly one of horror. There is far more empathy in The Elephant Man, especially in the moving scene in which Treves brings Carr-Gomm to see Merrick for the first time – and poor Merrick is at first hardly able to speak and then astonishes both men by reciting the 23rd Psalm from memory. It is always moving later, when Merrick asks Treves: “Can you cure me?” and, on getting a candid reply, says quietly: “I thought not …”

Lynch’s depiction of Victorian London is strong, because it is not fetishised or Hollywood-ised in the usual way but simply uses existing city locations (which in 1980 were still a very good match). And Lynch, with his editor Anne V Coates, subverts the usual narrative rhythm by ending a scene on a line or moment that might normally be considered a climactic point – giving the proceedings a persistent dream logic. It is while Merrick is being exhibited on the European tour that Lynch explores the idea of something other than ordinary sympathy for him, showing us him in Tod Browning-esque relationship with other circus folk and approaching a mysterious epiphany about the universe unavailable, perhaps, to other people. The two aspects of this approach may not be entirely resolved, but it is an absorbing and satisfying drama, and Hurt’s Merrick is very powerful.

Picasso and Paper: the doodling genius who loved a scrap – review

Wherever he went, whatever he did, Picasso left a paper trail of sketchbooks, studies, oils and gouaches, pencil and ink, crayon and charcoal drawings, prints (woodcuts and linocuts, lithographs, etchings, engravings) and other works on laid and wove papers, Japanese papers, watermarked Arches paper, embossed papers, newspaper, wallpaper, hotel headed notepaper, menu cards, wrapping paper, napkins and any old scraps and bits of card that came to hand. He accumulated paper, squirrelled it away, and never threw anything out. He was a hoarder.

Every kind of paper has its qualities – even the most disposable, or the nastiest wallpaper pattern. All of which Picasso was alert to, a connoisseur of the cheap and mass produced as well as the handmade and the specialised, as he folded, glued together, cut and tore, basted in ink and washes, drew on and rubbed into. Paper for him was a medium (just as was paint, clay or plaster) to be manipulated. And as he worked he was always finding, losing and refinding his subjects, whether it was a fish or a faun, a woman or a guitar, a portrait or a skull. The multiple transformations he performed in his art evidence his unnerving vitality, his recklessness and confidence, his altogether too-muchness.

Picasso and sculpture, Picasso and photography, Picasso and the theatre, Picasso and ceramics, Picasso and Matisse, Picasso’s Picassos … is there no end to the ways in which the artist has been re-examined, in exhibition after exhibition, study after study, both during his long career and even more since his death aged 91, in 1973? And let’s not forget the biopics, the Guernica souvenir key-rings or the car that bears his name. You might imagine that the artist would be buried under all that evaluation, all that adulation, all those analyses, not just of his work but also of his personal life, all those relationships, all that cruelty and monstrousness and machismo and all the ephemeral junk, never mind all that art. And now Picasso and Paper, filling the Royal Academy galleries.

All that said, there is always more to be said, so much to look at. What this exhibition provides is but one more overview, whose backbone is his entire career, a rehearsal of movements and moments that takes us from his very earliest cut-out paper figures of a characterful, squat little terrier and a dove, made when he was eight or nine, to a skull-like self-portrait, drawn the year before he died. Hanging alone on a white wall, an urgent hurry of black-and-white crayon, it looks back at us at us and everything we’ve encountered through room after room, filled with both major and minor developments in his art.
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Somewhere along the way those earliest, cut-out little creatures return, in scissored paper shapes cut by an adult: a cuttlefish, a feather, light bulbs and a fishing float, and nasty little paper faces and skulls whose eyes and mouths have been burned through the paper, most likely with the tip of a lighted cigarette. He made these last, gruesome shreds in Paris in 1942. They stop me short, a sort of human litter, a deathly confetti.

The variety of the works here, their registers and application, range through all the periods of Picasso’s development. Each section of the show is accompanied by key paintings and sculptures of their times. A life-sized reproduction Les Demoiselles d’Avignon takes the place of the real thing, while the scale of Guernica (itself a kind of drawing as much as it is a painting) is indicated by Dora Maar’s series of black-and-white photographs of the painting in progress, wedged at an angle in the big loft space where Picasso painted it. Picasso filled 16 notebooks, as well as making innumerable individual studies, in his preparation of Les Demoiselles, and Guernica was subject to almost as much preparation and revision. We are apt to forget how much thinking went on in the lead up to many of his paintings and sculptures.

He took his own photographs too, notably here of the huddled buildings on the lower river Ebro, one of the formative places where he began to develop the idea of cubism. As much as cubism is rich with the atmosphere of Paris bars, a glass of wine and the newspaper and the urban everyday, it was also the product of the tightly packed jumbled buildings in Horta de Ebro, in Cadaqués and the high Pyrenean village of Gósol. Cubism was also an art of collage and bricolage, the found and the invented coming together.

While each section of the exhibition alights on a major theme – cubism and neo-classicism and surrealism, with Picasso’s relationship with Marie-Thérèse Walter, the war years and his later re-engagement with Manet and Delacroix – the pleasures of the exhibition are in individual works, in all their variety of touches and tempos. The wonderful tiny card and string guitars, delicate confections made with twine and card sewn on to a discarded pharmaceutical packet, those little cut-outs, drawings of mad faces, a plaster cast of a crumpled sheet of paper, like a gigantic mollusc or a loaf, the overdrawings he did on Vogue fashion spreads and pin-up shots, cartoonish figures and the closely observed all come together here; it is clear that drawing and its manipulations of edges and spaces, volume and flatness is at the heart of everything for Picasso. Even his poems are drawn as much as written. He couldn’t seem to stop himself.

There is a story that once, in a cafe in the south of France, the patron asked if Picasso might do a little doodle, on a paper tablecloth or the menu as a memento. The artist shrugged and said he’d just like to pay for the meal – he didn’t want to buy the restaurant.