Matthew d’Ancona’s culture: Ralph Fiennes as Odysseus, and the importance of forgetting

Returning from the Trojan war after 20 years, Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes, superb) is washed up on the shore of Ithaca and tended back to health by the swineherd Eumaeus (Claudio Santamaria). What has become of the kingdom in which he is now taken for a wretched pauper?

His queen Penelope (Juliette Binoche) is besieged by suitors, led by Antinous (Marwan Kenzari), but keeps them at bay, promising to remarry when she has completed weaving a shroud – secretly unpicking her work at night. Binoche, who has previously appeared with Fiennes in Wuthering Heights (1992) and The English Patient (1996), is mesmerising; her love for her absent husband matched by rage at the limbo into which she has been consigned, and a fierce instinct to protect their son Telemachus (Charlie Plummer).

Fiennes trained for five arduous months to build a sinewy physique that conveys both primal strength and the terrible price paid by the warrior. His description of Troy as a city that “could not be conquered, only destroyed” echoes the remark of a US officer in Vietnam during the devastation of Huế in 1968. Scarcely able to speak of these horrors, Odysseus occupies what Fiennes describes as an “undecided space”.

It has taken 30 years for Pasolini (no relation to Pier Paolo, but, confusingly, the grandnephew of Luchino Visconti) to bring this project to fruition. In his screenplay, co-written with John Collee and the late Edward Bond, the gods are entirely absent, as are the Cyclops, Sirens and Circe. 

As Pasolini explained at the preview I attended, his intention was not to simulate the Bronze Age Grecian world, but to dramatise universal predicaments of the soul and the emotions. This pared-down version of books 13 to 23 of the Odyssey – drawing upon Emily Wilson’s magnificent 2017 translation – is myth as a gaunt psychological exploration of trauma, loss and reconciliation rather than a visually spectacular entanglement between the human and the magical. 

Acts of terrible brutality are required of Odysseus to restore order to Ithaca. But his deeper need is to achieve reconciliation with his beloved queen and – hardest of all – to find with her a way of both remembering and forgetting.

Black Mirror
(Netflix)

Since Charlie Brooker’s anthology series made its debut on Channel 4 in 2011, he has transformed the borderlands between the digital world and human consciousness into a dramatic canvas – following, with consistent success and rich comedy, in the intellectual footsteps of William Gibson, but in the televisual format pioneered in Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.

The seventh season is also one of the best, full of ingenious premises, great performances and, for the obsessive, Easter egg references to past storylines. In the first of six episodes, “Common People”, schoolteacher Amanda (Rashida Jones) is diagnosed with a brain tumour – but, thanks to “a revolution in neurological science” by the tech company Rivermind, is given the chance to back up the damaged areas on a computer which she accesses with implanted “synthetic receiver tissue”. 

The catch? She must remain geographically within the “coverage area” – and she and husband Mike (Chris O’Dowd) must cough up the subscription fee of $300 a month. Soon, they are offered the upgraded service of Rivermind Plus, for an additional $800. If they don’t, Amanda will involuntarily read out adverts at unpredictable moments. What, in the new digital gig economy, can Mike do to find the extra cash?

I also loved ‘Hotel Reverie’, in which Hollywood actress Brandy Friday (Issa Rae) is uploaded into a digital recreation of a 1940s movie classic starring screen icon Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin) as Clara Ryce-Lechere. There is a glitch in the system and Dorothy – a digital avatar – starts to acquire agency, even as Brandy develops romantic feelings for her.

Best of all is ‘Eulogy’ with Paul Giamatti as Phillip, invited by an AI Guide (Patsy Ferran) to contribute to the funeral memorial of his long-lost love Carol by stepping into old photographs (in one of which ‘Fools Gold’ by the Stone Roses is playing on the party turntable). Not surprisingly, Giamatti extracts authentic emotion from this entirely artificial digital context.

‘Plaything’, starring Peter Capaldi, is intimately entangled with the interactive film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018), and coincides with the real-life release of a game called ‘Thronglets’ which you can download via mobile app stores. And the seventh episode, ‘USS Callister: Into Infinity” is a feature-length sequel to ‘USS Callister’ in season four. 

There is no sign at all of Brooker’s imagination drying up. But then why would it? The digital world that he satirises and explores is, after all, only getting stranger.

Your Friends & Neighbors
(Apple TV+)

Andrew “Coop” Cooper (John Hamm) is fired from his job as a high-rolling hedge funder and, after dispiriting efforts to find new employment, resorts to crime. His multi-millionaire neighbours in Westmont Village, New York, live in houses “filled with expensive shit that would never be missed”. So – he rationalises – why not just take it?

Of course, there is a gap between theory and practice. For a start, he must find an obliging fence: Lu (Randy Danson) who sits in the back-office of a down-at-heel pawn shop and gets Coop’s measure immediately (“Rich guy loses his big job, has liquidity problems, turns to petty crime”). 

He also chances upon insider help from one of the housekeepers, Elena (Aimee Carrero), who knows from her fellow workers which family is going to be away when, and where the good stuff is kept. She, too, has Coop’s number – “the shit that you complain about – most people would kill for”.

Ten years after Mad Men ended, Hamm makes a pleasing return to a lead televisual role in this six-episode drama. Like Don Draper, Coop has a mouvementé private life: his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) is now with a former basketball star turned gym entrepreneur, Nick (Mark Tallman); he is having a secret affair with Sam (Olivia Munn); his kids Tori (Isabel Gravitt) and Hunter (Donovan Colan) are annoyed by him. Unlike Don, he is open about the absurdities of his predicament.

After the mystical meditations of The White Lotus season three upon the malaise of the wealthy, Your Friends & Neighbors dissects their foibles with a broader comedy, overlain by Coop’s witty noir narration (“I know what you’re thinking. The pool is a metaphor. But it was also very fucking real and very fucking cold”). Already renewed – and deservedly so.

One to One: John & Yoko
(selected cinemas)

After the Beatles but before the Dakota, John Lennon and Yoko Ono lived in a modest two-room apartment on Bank Street in New York’s West Village. They enjoyed the company of bohemians, radicals and Beat legend Allen Ginsberg. They sought a fresh start. 

Lennon declared himself a “revolutionary artist”, and joined forces with Jerry Rubin, co-founder of the Youth International Party, or “Yippies”. Ono pursued her conceptual art, not least the acquisition of thousands of flies, which proved a logistical challenge for her assistants – an entertaining thread in the movie.

By narrowing their focus with such discipline to 1971-2, co-directors Kevin Macdonald and Sam Rice-Edwards capture with depth, imagination and intensity a moment in the life of the couple. The television at the end of the Lennons’ bed was always on, and the movie is interspersed with contemporary clips: The Waltons, a Tupperware ad, the Attica prison riot, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Nixon declaring his love of “square” music, Tony the Tiger. “I just like TV,” said Lennon. But it was also his portal into the teeming multiplicities of modern life – a medium for passive consumption that, paradoxically, energised him. What would he have made of the Internet?

He and Ono believed their phones were being tapped by the FBI (they were) and, as a counter-measure, recorded all their calls. This provides Macdonald and Rice-Edwards with an audio treasure trove – including such gems as manager Allen Klein doing his best to feign enthusiasm for Lennon’s political projects, including a concert tour to raise money for prisoners’ bail.

The heart of this wonderful movie is the benefit gig coordinated by the couple at Madison Square Garden on August 30, 1972, to raise money for the shockingly treated children at Willowbrook State School on Staten Island: their neglect and misery highlighted in a television report by Geraldo Rivera. 

Restored by their son, Sean Ono Lennon, the music is a revelation: powerful, rigorously performed, full of hope and self-assurance. There are terrific renditions of Come Together, Imagine, New York City, Instant Karma! (We All Shine On) and more.

Lennon’s two full-length concerts that day were the last he gave after leaving the Beatles. In one phone recording, drummer Jim Keltner urges him to think about his safety in public appearances. Lennon replies, with a chuckle: “I’m not about to get myself shot.”

What They Found
(iPlayer)

“How could you, looking at all this death, keep going?” So recalled Sergeant Mike Lewis of his work filming the scenes at Belsen that he and others recorded in 1945, working for the British Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU). The horrors of the Nazi camps were, as he put it, “death by administration”.

In his first documentary, Sam Mendes has drawn on audio interviews with Lewis and Sergeant Bill Lawrie and silent film footage in the Imperial War Museum’s archive. With a running time of only 36 minutes, What They Found encapsulates the opening of the gates of hell; the aphasia of the soldiers who beheld the dead and the survivors (Lawrie: “they were what was left of people – shells”); and the fundamental challenge that the mass graves posed to everything they believed in and believed possible.

“Why in Germany? What was there about the Germans that made them do this?” said Lewis. “The discovery came to me. It was a horrifying discovery. [It was] not only the Germans: any race was capable of it. Anybody, given the circumstances of Germany, could achieve this”. This was what the late Martin Amis, after visiting Auschwitz, called “species-shame”.

More than 52,000 people, mostly Jewish, died at Belsen. Almost 70 years since Allain Resnais’ pioneering documentary Night and Fog and 40 since Claude Lanzmann’s monumental Shoah, it is depressing to note that ignorance and outright denial of the Holocaust are sharply on the rise. A third of young adults in the UK are unable to name a single location where the greatest crime in history was committed; a fifth of US citizens aged between 18 and 29 believe the Holocaust is a myth. We need many more documentaries such as Mendes’s, shown to as many people as possible.