Flying Blind

For a city packed with film-makers, there seem to be surprisingly few films on commercial release that are set in Bristol. It does well on TV – Casualty, Skins, Mistresses, Being Human and Teachers are just a few of the programmes filmed here. But on the silver screen, Bristol is a rare sight. Especially films that are about the people who live here, that use its varied muddle of urban landscapes – films that engage fully with the city in the way that, say, Woody Allen does with New York or Paris. Of course, Bristol is not a capital, and perhaps none of the UK's other cities feature that often on film either. But Bristol is packed with great locations – from historic cobbled streets and winding hillside steps to striking industrial leftovers on the harbourside, from brightly coloured rows of houses and faded Georgian grandeur to bombed out ruins, from tower-block high pieces of street art to views out of the city to the Mendips.

Perhaps, then, that's why Flying Blind is proving so popular at the local Watershed cinema that they've extended its run. This film is Bristol born and bred, funded by the then Bristol-based iFeatures scheme run by Creative England. It tells the story of 40-something-year-old Frankie, an aerospace engineer who works on military drones at Filton. She begins a passionate affair with a 24-year-old French-Algerian student, Kahil – but suspicions about who he really is and what his motivations are soon creep in. Director Katarzyna Kilmkiewicz juxtaposes Frankie's Clifton Georgian flat, all high ceilings and sash windows, perched up on the edge of the Avon Gorge with Kahil's small room in a shared terrace house in Easton, overshadowed by the motorway flyover.

It's a promising plot. Its characters seemed plausible Bristolians; its setting in the world of engineering apt. Helen McCrory and Najib Oudghiri turn in strong performances, and there's plenty of Bristol scenery at which to raise a smile of recognition. But ultimately this film failed to take off: it lacked daring and depth, the conclusion managing the feat of being both inevitable and unclear.

Suspicion and intimacy are two of the main themes. Frankie and Kahil's fiery relationship soon becomes fraught when he's labelled a 'person of interest' by MI5, with possible terrorist links. Frankie begins to ask questions about his identity and motives: her heart trusts him but every time she lets her head follow, a new doubt arises. Her father and work colleagues start to interfere: these characters are used to represent the contemporary Western fear that terrorists live among us, and to highlight a seam of Islamophobia. What does Kahil really want from Frankie: is this a story of lust and love or of power and politics?

And Frankie may well wonder. She discovers Kahil's not really a student as he claimed, but a taxi driver. That his visa has run out and he's living in Bristol illegally. He looks at extremist websites - to keep up with the news, he claims. There are torture scars on his body. She finds guns in the bathroom of his shared house. Would, Frankie is asked, a 24-year-old really be interested in a woman of her age? In an outburst of anger, Kahil demands how Frankie can justify helping to create drones which will kill innocent civilians. 

Complex questions of morality and social responsibility lurk underneath the twists and turns of this thriller. But somehow the film just isn't up to addressing them. Kahil's behaviour, as we see it, would be enough to make anyone suspicious. His background has nothing to do with that. The audience is constantly and deliberately steered towards the conclusion that Kahil must be a terrorist, but at the same time we are berated for falling back on a stereotype based in fear, ignorance and a sense of guilt. The ending, too, reinforces the stereotype of the career woman who tries to have it all: fly too high, and your wings will be burned.

BBC Proms 2013

The BBC Proms 2013 season was announced today. There's far too much to write about in one blog post but there are a few that have caught my eye. The big headlines are, of course, the Wagner Ring Cycle from Daniel Barenboim (pity the standing Prommers!) and Marin Alsop conducting the Last Night of the Proms. Of course, she's a conductor first and foremost - not a 'female conductor' – but I still think it's worth shouting an 'encore' for the first time that a woman has taken the helm of the Last Night.

So, where to begin? Well, featuring a newly-commissioned fanfare as the season opener seems to be becoming a new Proms tradition, with a BBC Music Magazine commission from Mark-Anthony Turnage starting last year's season, and a Proms commission from Judith Weir getting 2011's concert series underway. This year Julian Anderson does the honours. Mahler from the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and Jonathan Nott should be terrific, if their recordings are anything to go by; there's the inimitable Mitsuko Uchida in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto; Edward Gardner is conducting an intriguing looking programme intertwining Lutoslawski and Holst; and Jeffrey Skidmore and Ex Cathedra bring Stockhausen's 'Welt-Parlament' from Mittwoch aus 'Licht' to the Proms following the world premiere of the whole unlikely opera last year in Birmingham.

Mark-Anthony Turnage's response to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is paired with the work itself; and the Late-night Prom from the Monteverdi Choir and John Eliot Gardiner features the uplifting Ascension and Easter Oratorios. And my inner child jumps for joy at the thought of The Big Proms Bear Hunt celebrating Michael Rosen's wonderful book.

First balloon of the year

Birdcage Walk, Clifton

Bristol from the Underfall Yard

Bristol, as seen from the Underfall Yard. It's at the opposite end of the harbour from the centre, where the river was years ago damned to create the Floating Harbour. An overfall system, where water spilled over the top of the damn didn't work too well, apparently, so an underfall sluice system was created – hence the name. Today, boats are still built there, and it's an interesting to stroll through, and admire the colourful Cliftonwood hillside.

Tender is the Night

Finally, after months of stop-start reading, I have finished Tender is the Night, F Scott Fitzgerald's final novel. Why, I wonder, has it taken so long for me to complete it when it's such a good book? The tragic stories of Dick and Nicole Diver are hard to forget, the writing is lyrical, intelligent and full of poetic description. Perhaps it's the shifting timeframes that make it hard to grasp, and the amount of imagination the reader has to use to fill in the narrative gaps. I found that reading it in short bursts, sometimes re-reading the pages that I'd ended with before, helped in keeping up the energy needed to get the most out of Fitzgerald's prose. So perhaps in the end it's no bad thing that it's taken such a long time to read, but I can't help feeling that I might have missed out on the general sweep of the novel. Did anyone else have the same problem reading it?

Shakespeare, the puppets... and a dog

Shakespeare has been flavour of the week so far. Two plays, four couples muddled in love; puppets, musicians, actors and even a dog. In Midsummer Night's Dream, put on in a production by Bristol Old Vic director Tom Morris and Handspring Puppet Company – the team behind War Horse – magical creatures, potent love spells and otherworldly forces entwine themselves around two pairs of lovers, Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius.

There were all sorts of puppets used here. Each lover had a miniature puppet version of themselves, in the same clothing. The true nature of these superfluous items was never revealed: were the puppets the souls or companions of the lovers? Who controlled whom? At times it turned the actors into doll-carrying children – surely not what Morris was aiming for? Oberon and Titania, the Fairy King and Queen, were fragmented creatures, represented by statue-like masks held up high. Haughty and commanding, half-disembodied, half-real, half-imagined, this was an effective idea. As was the spirit Puck, assembled from assorted bits of bric-a-brac and a choir of ever-changing voices. And in the mechanicals, it was Bottom that was unforgettable, though not necessarily for a reason you want to remember. There was, well, quite a lot of bottom.

It was over the river to the Tobacco Factory for the Two Gentlemen of Verona, thought to be Shakespeare's first play. In this comedy we meet two best friends, Valentine and Proteus, in Verona on the eve of former's departure to Milan. In love with gentle Julia, Proteus at first remains behind as Valentine heads off on his adventure. But when he too is sent off to Milan his declarations of fidelity to Julia are soon forgotten. Proteus falls for Valentine's new-found love, Silvia, and so betrays his friend in a bid to win her for himself.

The Tobacco Factory's talented troupe of actors, some of whom appear year after year in this Shakespeare series, brought out all the comedy in the text – and added some more. Despite these extra lines sweeping away some of the less palatable moments of female doormat behaviour written by the Bard, the audience is still left in a quandry. We're clearly intended to see it as a happy ending but this is only reached after Proteus has attempted to rape Silvia and, forgiving his friend for all his misdemeanours, Valentine has offered her to him. Blinded by love Proteus might have been, but it's hard to forgive him so quickly.

I can't forget, of course, the dog. Crab, played by Bristol canine Lollio, won over the audience, padding about stage, befriending the front row and displaying superb comic timing. Not bad for someone that came into the profession at the grand old age of nine (ie 63). As the theatre manager in the film Shakespeare in Love pointed out, all audiences want is 'comedy, love and a bit with a dog'.

Bits and bobs

Hello again. There's been a short break in blog service these past few weeks. I've not just been idle, though, honest. Here are a couple of blogs I've written for work, on a gorgeous production of Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen at Welsh National Opera, and a slightly disappointing performance of Bach's John Passion from La Nuova Musica at St George's Bristol.

I've also been busy writing a feature for the May issue of BBC Music Magazine inspired by a film coming out in the UK this week, A Late Quartet:

A beautiful image

A beautiful image, from 1874. Charles Albert Chomley was a passenger on the SS Great Britain, Brunel's iron ship which voyaged around the world 32 times. Variously an ocean liner, carrier of emigrants and cargo ship in its working life, she carried hundred upon hundred of sea-goers; she knew well the Atlantic, Cape Horn, San Francisco, Australia. Passengers spent day after day after day at sea. Perhaps it honed their poetic skills. Chomley wrote of the icebergs at Cape Horn that when the sun shone through them it was like 'a volcano of glass throwing out showers of diamonds'.

Wisdom from John Ruskin

Light Show

On a grey February morning, with summer a pale memory, the Hayward Gallery’s Light Show seemed like, well, a ray of sunshine. It’s an exhibition exploring light as art, in the hands of artists from the 1960s onwards. Sold out for that entire day, the concept clearly has wide appeal, even if, like me, many visitors might be unsure what to expect. It wasn't an exhibition that made me feel or moved me, but it played on a more instinctive, almost childlike reaction to light – 'Ooh, sparkly' was my kneejerk response to the first exhibit. This is a show that dazzles, beguiles and intrigues. And I've never seen so many young children at an art exhibition, flitting from bright light to bright light, drawn like moths to a flame, oblivious to the 'do not touch' signs, their parents running after them in a bid to stop them burning their fingers.

Cylinder II by Leo Villareal, that first exhibit, was a tall column of strands of LED lights flickering in ever-changing, never-repeating patterns. The brightness was mesmerising. Similarly, in the darkened room of Anthony McCal’s You and I, Horizontal, I was gripped by how this ‘solid-light’ creation, a projection through haze, gave the light a physical presence. Adults and children alike were trying to touch, feel, grasp the light, unable to believe it wasn't, in a tangible sense, real. 

A light splodge on the floor, like paint, and a glass spinning on a motorised cake stand were low points for me. But Katie Paterson’s recreation of moonlight with an artificial bulb was wonderfully imaginative, the light strangely soothing. And the tardis-like Reality Show (Silver) in which the gallery-goer steps into a phone booth to see an endlessly reflecting empty vortex below, but not their own reflection, cleverly played on the show's recurring theme of reality – are we even really here?

Perhaps, though, the best moment came at the end: Olafur Eliasson’s Model for a timeless garden. Stepping past a black curtain into a darkened room illuminated by strobe lighting, you could see 27 fountains along one wall. The constant flickering of the strobe seemed to freeze the individual droplets, as if the arches, spouts and curlicues of water were made out of the finest crystal. It was like stepping into some enchanted realm, where nothing is quite what it seems. Magical.

Little Hands Clapping

A few posts back I wrote about a book by the author Dan Rhodes, called This is Life. I've just finished his novel Little Hands Clapping, another first-rate read, and in some ways the yin to This is Life's yang. Stop reading now if you don't want plot spoilers: the way Rhodes deals his hand, revealing one carefully-chosen card at a time, means that it's not until a good way through the book that the nature of the game is revealed. If I don't give away some details, there'll be nothing to say.

Mesmerisingly macabre, the story centres around an unusual museum in a small German city. An old man is the caretaker, his life of silence and solitude punctuated only by clearing up the remains of the successful suicides that take place in the museum. Yes, suicides. For where This if Life was centred around a contemporary art project celebrating what it means to be alive, Little Hands Clapping takes as its theme what it means to die, what it means to choose to die. Of course, the museum isn't intended to encourage suicide, rather its good-hearted but deluded owner hopes it will offer a reason to live to those who have lost hope. It's a strange premise, but strangely not depressing thanks to the wonderfully bizarre characters, including two breathtakingly beautiful young lovers and a lovestruck baker's son, whose euphonium playing is ineffably moving. There's a fable-like quality to the stories that unfold, as if they had taken place in a realm removed from ours, as if they'd been told, repeated over the years until they were written down in Rhodes's simple, clear prose. Sometimes this lends an air of detachment to the gruesome events: as a reader I began to accept even the most unexpected, horrific twists and turns. It's certainly not a book for the squeamish. But, just as Rhodes deftly steers you to a happy ending in This is Life, Little Hands Clapping gathers pace towards a conclusion that seems to tell the truth about and celebrate the joy of being alive.