When I was on my semester abroad at the University of Massachusetts, I studied under an apoplectic old lefty by the name of Milton Cantor. He loved Brits, which meant I generally escaped his rants against contemporary American apathy and ignorance, leaving me free to sit back and watch the show. One of his best set-pieces saw him inveigh against villains, war criminals, and other assorted twentieth century tyrants. “I’m sure they were nice to their wives, or their dogs,” he screamed at us, before listing their crimes.

In other words, the fact that violent thugs might be nice to their families is neither surprising nor interesting. Yet when it comes to the American gangster genre, this is what is supposed to fascinate us. From The Godfather to The Sopranos (which I endured for the first and last time on Friday), American film-makers have found success by exploring the inner-world of the gangster.

This is what makes Gomorrah such a refreshing change. The key word is squalor. It’s everywhere, from the gangsters being gunned down in the (albeit rather predictable) opening scene, to the drab shots of Campania and its disturbingly bleak housing projects which provide the setting for the film. All of this is a far cry from our romantic notions of the Italian south, and even a couple of minutes set in Venice do nothing to relieve the gloom. Then there’s the southern Italian dialect, a harsh babble which seems a million miles away from the sensuous tongue which dominates in the north.

Gomorrah is actually based on a piece of non-fiction, one so explosive that its author was forced underground following threats from the mob, and the plot is sometimes tricky to follow. It’s an ensemble piece, following five different stories in the style of Traffic or Babel, but without the childish need to bring everything together. As we’re so conditioned to expect the ingenious plot device that will explain everything, though, it perhaps becomes harder to appreciate the sustained micro-level intensity of the action.   

The film follows five narratives: A haute-couture tailor defying the mob by teaching Chinese immigrants his trade; a pubescent Cristiano Ronaldo lookalike lured into gang action; a young waste-management expert having a crisis of conscience as a result of his work with the Mafia; and a middleman who delivers money to imprisoned gang members’ families. The best thread, however, features Marco and Ciro, two wannabe gangsters schooled in the North American tradition, with fatal delusions of grandeur. In a particularly startling scene, we see them in their underwear, having successfully raided a Comorrah arms-cache, testing out their weapons on an abandoned and grim stretch of water.

Gomorrah won’t be to everyone’s taste. It’s long and sometimes hard to follow and unremittingly squalid, the only musical diversion provided by a visit to a strip-club or a passing car pumping techno. But it tells the simple truth about organized crime, one that is made clear even before statistics come up on screen before the credits to explain the truth behind the fiction (4000 people killed in the last thirty years by the Comorrah; some of their money has been invested in the rebuilding of the Twin Towers). No matter the inner life of gangstas, organized crime is awful, destructive, and anything but romantic. As the people of Naples march against the Mafia, it’s worth applauding the makers of Gomorrah for reminding us of these simple truths.

For a film that deals with the politics of sexuality, Gus van Sant’s Milk is surprisingly schmaltzy. Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk as a beatific martyr rather than a crafty politician; the emphasis is on the warmth and joy of San Francisco’s gay community rather than on the difficult and unfortunate choices hoisted on that embattled minority. It’s as if Gus van Sant took a decision to take less risks with this one – particularly when contrasted with a film like Elephant – coming to the conclusion that above all else the gay rights struggle needed to be popularized, to be as potent a box-office hit as Lord of the Rings. As a result, and despite it being a very enjoyable film, I left the cinema with the nagging feeling that the really gritty questions had been left out. 

The rights Milk fights for are basic ones – equal housing and employment rights, preventing supporters of gay rights from being removed from schools. Today it seems astonishing – at least in the west – that people still needed to fight for these things as recently as the late-1970s. One could still make a strong case that homophobia is a far more threatening prejudice than Islamophobia or anti-Semitism. But the struggle has moved on from basic freedoms to issues of total equality with heterosexuals – most significantly demands for the right to marry and to have children. These can be called normalization issues, and they testify to a dramatic cultural shift in how the gay community perceives itself, one well worth examining, particularly in the saccharine light of a film like Milk.
 
Harvey Milk himself is depicted as a (mostly) monogamous guy, going through a series of painful but faithful relationships. In reality, his love-life was more complicated. Randy Shilts, the author of the biography The Mayor of Castro Street, quotes Milk as follows, “As homosexuals, we can’t depend on the heterosexual model. We grow up with the heterosexual model, but we don’t have to follow it. We should be developing our own lifestyle. There’s no reason you can’t love more than one person at a time.” By proposing an alternative model for conducting romantic relationships, Milk is suggesting something radical about homosexuality, and arguably something far more challenging to the traditional heterosexual world than two men fucking each other. 

This sentiment is supported by Martin Amis (writing in the 1980s): “the straight world expects the gay man to follow its own sexual master-mould. And he doesn’t. Homosexuality isn’t a version of heterosexuality. It is something else again…The consoling idea of the quietly monogamous gay couple is an indolent and sentimental myth. With a large number of exceptions, and all sorts of varieties of degree, it just isn’t like that. Friendship, companionship, fellowship – these are paramount; but pairing-and-bonding on the wedlock model is our own dated fiction. Gay lovers seldom maintain any sexual interest in each other for more than a year or two. The relationship may remain ‘focal’, may well be lifelong, yet the sex soon reverts to the ‘distributive’.” Today, however, gay rights focus on the model of the quiet monogamous couple, married with children. What happened? How did the radical world of 1970s gay activism end up focusing its efforts on aping a number of dubious straight institutions? 

I hope it’s not too cynical to suggest that the answer lies with AIDS, whose tragic arrival came three years after the assassination of Harvey Milk. This argument has been most potently phrased by the inimitably belligerent David Kepesh in Philip Roth’s seminal The Dying Animal: “Though now even gays want to get married. Church wedding. Two, three hundred witnesses. And wait till they see what becomes of the desire that got them into being gay in the first place. I expected more from those guys, but it turns out there’s no realism in them either. Though I suppose it has to do with AIDS. The Fall and Rise of the Condom is the sexual story of the second half of the twentieth century. The condom came back. And with the condom, the return of all that got blown out in the sixties. What man can say he enjoys sex with a condom the way he does without? What’s really in it for him? That’s why the organs of digestion have, in our time, come to vie for supremacy as a sexual orifice. To get rid of the condom, they have to have a steady partner, therefore they marry. The gays are militant: they want marriage and they want openly to join the army and be accepted.”

Reality has forced normalization on the gay community. Put simply, the risks of a libertine life have become too great. Increasingly, it seems that gays seek to hunker down and reproduce like the rest of us. And this evolution has been matched in an evolution in homophobia, a trend surely reflected in Kepesh’s little rant, and perhaps – I confess – in this piece as well. Liberal, red-blooded heterosexual males increasingly hold the gay community to different standards. Like Kepesh, they expect more of them. Despite AIDS, gay men still seem to have more sex than most straight men could ever dream of. When they don’t live up to this promiscuous stereotype, though, we are disappointed. For we are looking for them to show us the way out of our predicament.

Are these expectations homophobic? Are we holding the gay community to different standards? Is there something remiss in idealistically looking towards the radical horniness hinted at on the fringes of Milk? Or is it a nostalgic fantasy in the first place? More questions; fewer answers. Milk, though, does little to further the conversation, preferring the model offered by Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, the sainthood of its subject, rather than making Harvey Milk a living, breathing participant in the twenty-first century’s difficult sexual debates.

The Baader-Meinhof Complex is a compelling story chaotically told. This is a shame. The historical material beats anything John Grisham could come up with, while the subject matter is of immediate relevance to the post-9/11 generation. The film, however, makes little contribution to the vitriolic conversation about the causes of terrorism. Instead, it meanders in its own confusion. The first half is well paced and exciting, with impressive recreations of the 1970s. Then the film drops down a gear, as the RAF leadership find themselves in prison, before the story trickles towards its limp climax.

It would have been better had the filmmakers made a decision. They could have focused on the plot and the authenticity of it all, or on the political/moral questions the story arouses. This is not to say that they should have presented a simple dichotomy between the ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ schools of thought regarding the causes of political violence. Still, we need to be told more about the background of the Baader-Meinhof gang, not to mention the motivations of their adversaries. The predictably brilliant Bruno Ganz plays Horst Herold, the Ephraim Halevy-esque chief of the Federal German police. He demands that his staff try and understand what motivates the terrorists, the injustices that drive their violent actions. But this is all we have. His empathy does nothing to lessen his forensic commitment to smoking the RAF out (we first see him plotting to narrow down the suspects by working out which citiziens pay their bills by cash), and other than a tantalising speech we are told nothing of what difference knowing the terrorists’ motivations would make, either in the short or long-term. 

What about the presentation of the Baader-Meinhof gang? At times, violence seems to be its own justification, action its own meaning. The complexities of the world are reduced to a simplistic demand for opposition. In an absurdly shot sequence, our anti-heroes train with the PFLP in the Jordanian desert, where their hosts are insulted by their sexual libertarianism, which is reflected in their wasteful promiscuity with bullets. Any notion of the long battle – a strategic fight – is lost. The Baader-Meinhof seem to be a generation driven by a nihilistic frustration at the world’s injustices, at a time when – ironically – a little more realism might have proven more effective.

The question of the relationship between generations is the one that most intrigued me about the story. Conventional wisdom tells us that the RAF, who were mostly born towards the later years of the Third Reich, were angered that so many former Nazis took up senior positions in West Germany (the final kidnapping victim in the movie is a former SS officer), and understood anti-imperialism to be a kind of final stage of the Denazification process. The daughter of Ulrike Meinhof, the bourgeoisie journalist turned revolutionary founder of the RAF, disputes this. “This is one of the myths that sympathisers go on and on about. The communist RAF did not care about the Nazi past at all.”

It’s interesting that Rohl assumes that the Denazification explanation is primarily peddled by sympathisers. It would surely be remiss to ignore the legacy of the Nazi era when explaining the Baader-Meinhof story. This, I think, is less an explanation for the militancy with which the RAF went about their work (some have – pace the controversial Daniel Goldhagen – suggested they represented a peculiarly German form of violent expression), than the reaction by the authorities. Throughout the film, the legacy of the police state hangs over everything, with West Germany desperate to demonstrate the strength its democracy. By the end, though, its far from clear that they’ve managed to do so, particularly when you consider that the RAF were ultimately responsible for 34 deaths, small fry for our generation.  

One writer argues that Germans are uncomfortable discussing the RAF era, just as the Germans of the 1960s and early 1970s were uncomfortable talking about the Nazis. If this is so, it is unclear that The Baader-Meinhof Complex will do much to improve the conversation. There has been the predictable outcry at the choice of ‘sexy’ and ‘glamorous’ actors to portray the RAF (would people prefer fatties with warts?), as if chuckling at a bare-breasted blonde discussing revolutionary politics with a new recruit in the bath would make us any more sympathetic when she later on blows up civilians. But this is an aside. The Baader-Meinhof Complex is scrupulous in one respect only: failing to place the events depicted in the context of post-war history. If the filmmakers had any pretences beyond a scruffy thriller, this is a disappointing failure.

Revolutionary Road is a horror movie. It’s no coincidence, I think, that the tragic protagonists of the film – Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio) and April Wheeler (Kate Winslet) – live in a house at the very edge of their suburban anti-idyll, slanted on a hill. They are on the edge of the woods; at one point we see April through the window-pane at twilight, dressed in white, having just returned from roaming wildly through the trees. It is a gorgeous and frightening image, enhanced by the constantly creepy score. This is an “everyday” drama that had me on the edge of my seat, terrified at the inevitable, violent conclusion. A film where the sadness is offset by the importance of the ideas being examined, and how they pertain to every single one of us.

Frank and April are a married couple on the cusp of their thirties, living on Revolutionary Road in a suburb of New York in the 1950s. Frank commutes every day to his job as a glorified salesman in the city. April stays at home, tending to the two young children. They met years earlier, when they were both full of hopes and dreams and visions of the future. Frank had the air of a bohemian revolutionary about him; April harboured ambitions of becoming an actress.

All these hopes came to an end on Revolutionary Road, which is the film’s departure point. Frank and April are caught in a malaise, the malaise, and they do not know how to escape it. Paris, perhaps? Or spontaneous copulation in the kitchen? Maybe if Frank gets a promotion at work everything will be alright? Is love tearing them apart, or were they obviously never meant to be together in the first place. “You’re just some guy who made me laugh at a party once,” April tells him in the midst of one of her violent emotional storms. We are horrified at being able to peek behind the curtains, horrified at the possibility that so much terror can be generated from such banal quarters.

When I saw it, I was the youngest person in the cinema. Around me sat lots of thirty-something couples, perhaps a little like Frank and April, their smugness soon giving way to fear at the unfolding horror. Revolutionary Road is set in a specific place and time, but still resonates strongly for this generation. The malaise remains a definitive feature of post-modern society, where stories like the Wheelers’ are not necessarily aberrations. We can run off to the suburbs, yes, but there is more chance that the gnawing doubts will reach us there. For we are a generation exposed to the terror and futility of choice like no other.

I don’t think I’m ruining anything by letting slip that the Wheelers don’t make it to Paris. I also don’t think I’m going out on a limb by suggesting that it wouldn’t have made a difference if they had. That’s the tragedy of the malaise: you diagnose it as a problem with your job or your location, and you run off to Paris, India, or Zion. But the real problem is an inward one, which means it can only be solved alone. This is why the Wheelers’ problems are compounded – they are stuck in a relationship from which there is no escape. As I mentioned above, some have suggested that they are a couple who are obviously meant to be together. I think this is unfair – couples are no more meant not to be together than they are meant to be together – but it becomes clear soon from the outset that they are going to drag each other down.

This is how the Bloomsbury Belle puts it (she is referring to the book, but the point holds for the film): “Richard Yates pointed out that the book is not so much the overt criticism of suburbia that people saw it as. Perhaps it’s better read, instead, as a critique of the common criticism of suburbia. In other words, as a critique of the common failure to answer to ourselves for our own disappointments, as opposed to displacing them to the situation we find ourselves in. Situation is important too, but I think you have to have the imagination to transform your original surroundings, otherwise there’ll always be some “beyond” you’re hankering for.” The tragedy is that people will walk away from the film and reduce it to its historical context, or to the specifics of the Wheelers’ relationship, or to their failure to seize control of their lives while they still had a chance. There are many ideas in Revolutionary Road, displayed intelligently despite the impending horror; ideas that coagulate as lessons. This is something rare in contemporary cinema, and we would do well to heed them.

People are right to be itchy about how outsiders portray them. Rebuke will always go down better if it’s delivered by someone who cares about the recipient. If we’re not convinced that the outsider cares about us, we’re unlikely to listen to them, no matter how reasonable their feedback. As an Israeli, I know this all too well. We take criticism like water off a duck’s back; insecure in our standing in the world, we are dismissive of those who question our behaviour, whether friend or foe.

What about India? The world has only begun to give her the attention she deserves since the economic liberalization of the 1990s. Increased interest inevitably leads to increased sensitivity, of which the reaction to Slumdog Millionaire is a case in point. Directed by Danny Boyle, this magnificent homage to the ethos (if not the substance) of Bollywood is obviously an “outsider’s” production. As a result, it has come under attack. 

There are two fronts to this assault: Boyle is either too brutal or too sentimental. The byword for the brutality is Dickensian, a lazy piece of shorthand which increasingly makes Kafkaesque look positively underused. Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan, perhaps smarting from having his right hand depicted in the movie (and to sign the autograph of a shit-drenched street-urchin, noch), gets all defensive: “If Slumdog Millionaire projects India as Third World dirty belly developing nation and causes pain and disgust among nationalists and patriots, let it be known that a murky underbelly exists and thrives even in the most developed nations.” This kind of logic is all too familiar: why complain about our depravations when you’ve got your own? Did he not see Trainspotting?

Boyle isn’t trying to make a political point about India’s problems; he’s just trying to do them cinematic justice. Unfortunately, though, there’s no pleasing some people. For if he’s not dragging India’s image through the grime of the Dharavi slums, he’s sentimentalizing its poverty. This is Gautaman Bhaskara’s complaint: “Poverty is celebrated: destitution, squalor, beggar mafia and prostitution stare at us from the frames – magnified to distortion, glorified silly and used as tools of titillation to please the smug white world.” Mr Bhaskara has read a bit too much Edward Said. It’s true that the film attempts to show joy amidst the poverty, the colour and the aspiration, the dignity despite it all. Are social ills only to be represented with handheld cameras on grey, rainy days? Does anyone really think that an audience would leave Slumdog Millionaire thinking that Indian poverty was anything other than a curse to be eradicated? Should Boyle make a movie set only in the 6-Star hotels of Gurgaon?

What about sentimentality? This kind of lazy accusation makes the Indian poor untouchable in more ways than one, as somehow incapable of being anything other than hapless victims, their story always forced on them, never self-made. It’s true that the film’s rags-to-riches trajectory recalls the Republic ideals of something like Forrest Gump, and the rampant materialism of Indian society (from top to bottom) is rarely questioned, at least not seriously. I think, though, that this needs to be understood as Boyle’s homage to the genre. The film is structured like a masala epic, with gangsters, dances, quiz-shows, and more. The innovation, if that is not over-stating the case, is to depict it all without shirking from the reality of contemporary Indian society, a slice of realist escapism reminiscent of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance.  

I wonder if the good people of Edinburgh hurled the same abuse at Boyle for Trainspotting. Perhaps. The point is that he isn’t pretending to be an insider. He had never visited the country before shooting the film, and has tried at every stage to be sensitive to the material he’s portraying. There are problems, particularly in the absurd detour to Agra. Can the Taj really be seen from the railway tracks? Are tourists really that dumb? But the car-jacking scene rings true. Dour observers have argued that the exchange regarding the “real India/real America” (police brutality swapped for a hundred dollar bill) is delivered without irony, but this isn’t the case. It’s a deliberate piece of pastiche, a laugh gained at our (the western audience’s) expense.

Remember, one third of the film’s dialogue is in Hindi. The hero and victim is a Muslim, a fact that has gone curiously under-reported, particularly in the aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks. These are not the usual features of an Oscar-nominated blockbuster. The cinematography, always breathtaking, is a non-stop advertisement for the country, even if it does – during the fights – get a bit too much like 28 Days Later (Zombies marching through the slums of Mumbai – now there’s a thought!). The quiz-show framing device also works well, a kind of twenty-first century Arabian Nights, allowing for a surprising number of twists and turns, never predictable. There’s even room for a touch of Scarface at the end.

Slumdog Millionaire does not pretend to be a piece of gritty realism, nor is it an overtly political work. The outrage in some quarters to its release is unnecessary. Like DJ Premier sampling the jazz greats, it’s made me want to go back and give pure Bollywood cinema another chance. In a year in which an Indian author won the Booker prize with another rag-to-riches story, it’s yet another reminder of just how potent Indian soft power is, even if the subject matter is shocking. Slumdog Millionaire is cinema at its most respectful, providing hope that art may yet improve the conversation between cultures. Go see it…

Waltz with Bashir opens with wild dogs peltering down Rothschild Boulevard, on an unseasonably windy Tel Aviv night. It’s instantly unsettling, this dream sequence, and I was more agitated than usual by the latecomers whispering in the aisle. Then we cut to our hero, Ari Folman himself, sipping a twilight pint with his friend in a cosy pub, transported to the port to emphasise the effect of the stormy sea cascading outside. Soon, we learn, Folman wants to try and remember what he did during the First Lebanon War, how he’s connected.

Shooting and Crying is the phrase given to the Israeli tendency to take part in brutal acts of violence, to wailingly bemoan the fact afterwards, and then to carry on shooting. It’s a derogatory description of the Israeli preference for psychoanalytic reflection over political action, embodied by Golda Meit’s famous complaint to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat: “We can forgive you for killing our sons. But we will never forgive you for making us kill yours.”

Waltz with Bashir has rightly received praise from a diverse range of sources, and came close to winning the Palmes D’Or at Cannes this year. It’s an extraordinary film, one of the best war movies ever made, blurring the line between documentary and fictional narrative, while at the same time showing just how potent a medium animation can be. It’s also – and perhaps this is what’s really unsettling – deeply beautiful. The pursuit of a teenage rocket-launcher in an orchard appears like an image drawn from a Greek epic; a soldier spraying bullets like a maniac on a Beirut street looks like the loveliest thing in the world. I suppose this is what one friend was getting at when he said he didn’t like the fact that it was a cartoon. I understand his concerns – the cartoon is firmly established in our consciousness as a diversion for children – but by the end it’s clear that only animation could have helped Folman with his remembering.

Folman is trying to remember what happened: by talking to his comrades, and with the aid of psychologists, he is able to get closer to the truth of his experiences. He has stated explicitly that Waltz with Bashir is not intended as a political film, and – given the central place of Sabra & Shatila in the Arab-Israeli propaganda war – this is a brave statement indeed. So while the atrocitities of Israel and its Phalangist allies dominate the film, it would be a mistake to see Waltz with Bashir as some kind of national mea culpa. Folman is happy to leave that task to the op-ed writers and agitators. Instead, he has unapologetically made a film for the perpetrators and the bystanders, a kind of banality of evil for the twenty-first century.

Pyschological experiments have shown that people find it harder to recall details of violent events than quotidian ones. At the start of the film, aside from the waiting on the beach and the furloughs home, Folman remembers nothing of his soldier days in Lebanon. Painstakingly, he manages to unravel the truth, all the way to the camps of Sabra & Shatila, where the most notorious (although by no means the only) massacre of the war took place. The audience knows what is coming from the beginning; this doesn’t make the finale any less startling or wrenching. At the very end, Folman makes a brief switch to the live footage that previously served as inspiration for the animated sketches. His explanation for this is that he didn’t want audiences going away without having a real-life sense of what the camps looked like after the slaughter. A responsible finale, or the justifications of a filmmaker who doesn’t quite have the courage of his convictions, who isn’t quite able to see his vision through to the very end? It’s hard to say.

Sitting in the cinema in silence, I felt I had a small sense of what it must have been like to be a German watching Schindler’s List in Berlin. The Lebanon War was an unmitigated disaster, the Israeli overreaction par excellence, resulting in 20,000 civilian casualties and the steady erosion of Israeli deterrence over the following years. Folman has shown our folly in a remarkable new light, and at the same time has breathed new life into the war movie genre. Following Beaufort, Israel can once again take dubious pride in being able to make the best war movies around. The depressing implications of this don’t need to be spelled out. Just go and see Waltz with Bashir, traipse silently home afterwards, and – if you can – try and remember.