Swimming and seals before Saoirse

I won't pretend I swam from the Forty Foot this time - no-one did, on the three days I returned to Dublin Bay with daily dipper Catherine; each time Sandycove itself was filled with what one regular called 'visitors',  refugees from the rougher headland so close.

This time I came with the sea socks and gloves I'd inherited via Cally (who loved it here but was this time enjoying warmer waters on Capri 'but without the kick' of the cold water - still not too bad in early October, but the accoutrements meant I could stay in for longer).

The second day was the sunniest. We met an old man with his faithful dog, who was crazymad for the water but had to wait while his master went for a swim, drying off being a problem. No tying up was necessary. The few amiable turnstones who putter around among the regular swimmers had multiplied into a colony more or less keeping to themselves, but unperturbed by my coming closer.

Egrets are especially abundant along the Bay, especially at Booterstown. But this lone one near the Forty Foot that day struck a poetic chord.

On the third day, having got my Zoom classes of the week out of the way, I decided to join Catherine and her distinguished friends for an afternoon matinee screening of The Outrun at Dun Laoghaire's multiplex. We took our swim first, and I walked to Sandycove from Dun Laoghaire DART station.  It was a darker day, but with the sea still fascinating in different lights as I passed the Casement statue

and rocks with cormorants on them, Howth in the distance

to Sandycove. I think there might be a seal in this pic from the previous day

but certainly they were around at even higher tide. The ocular proof is feeble, but palpable.

As I was swimming out of the cove to make it to the set of steps on the other side, I heard three women further out shrieking with laughter. Catherine later discovered that one had felt something under her. Seaweed? A dead body? A big fish? The two seals were playing and swimming around them. 

You'll know, if you've seen The Outrun already, how well this ties in with the film (the above image appears early on, when the protagonist narrator tells us about kelpies). Ronan's character Rona, based on the author of the book of the same title, Amy Liptrot, goes back to her native Orkney to try and recalibrate after major alcohol problems and London rehab. She returns first to her parents' farm, works as an RSPB volunteer and then after a brief relapse seeks an even more isolated island. Early on we see her marvelling at the seals, and at a group of women swimming (Liptrot apparently makes a cameo appearance among them), whom she watches shyly from the shore. 

But it's not until a decisive moment that she ventures into the water - on Christmas Day, I think - comes close to the seals, and the smiles and joy that have been so long withheld through the film's first two thirds immediately surface.

It seemed so serendipitous that all both Catherine and I feel about the necessity of our regular bathes tied in to this epiphany in the film. In a radio interview Ronan told the presenter how she had to act the trepidation of her character at cold-water immersion; she learned to swim as a child in the river Slaney.

I won't write more about the film except to say that while some have found it a bit too long, I think the length is necessary for us to be immersed in Rona's purgatory before the healing can truly begin. And of course Ronan, an actor so loved by the camera with her clairvoyant eyes and her perfect modulations of mood, registers everything. I couldn't fault it.

This has been an especially, or maybe I should just say typically, rich visit to Dublin. Central was J's first exhibition in the new Europa Experience Visitor Centre's gallery, 100 panels by as many artists expressing various aspects of Europe in the Heart of Ireland, curated by the wonderful people of the Hamilton Gallery in Sligo.

But everything else has been unforgettable, too: Irish National Opera's one-off concert performance of Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict at the National Concert Hall on Tuesday,  and Teaċ Daṁsa's Nobodaddy, genius inspiration of Michael Keegan-Dolan, preceded by the launch of the big Brian Maguire exhibition. La Grande Illusion, at the Hugh Lane Gallery a mere five minutes away. 

Irish arts firing on all fronts...

Films before the fall

Or, to be precise, what we watched over the Christmas period before I was hospitalised: two outright masterpieces, two American indie slices of life (one admittedly very out of the ordinary). Netflix justifies its existence by funding the Mexican master Alfonso Cuarón's Roma. Cuarón had already carved his place in cinema history with the sexy-sad Y Tu Mamá También, but I'm sure he feels for a number of reasons that Roma is his magnum opus (by the way, though I couldn't care less about the Oscars, I think it's absurd that a film like this is shovelled into the 'Best in a foreign language' category when it's surely a winner on any level).

In it, he manages so many things, above all to turn the intensely felt experience of his childhood, with incidents carried over wholesale, into the most poetic movie-making, a perfect balance of subjective and objective, and to celebrate the hitherto unsung life of a native Mexican, the much-loved family maid Cleo, a Mixtec woman from the village of Tepelmeme in the state of Oaxaca: in real life it's Liboria Rodriguez, who has seen the film several times and always cries, but for the children, not for herself, and the actor is Yaliza Aparicio, who had no previous film or stage experience and who even featured on the cover of Mexican Vogue - a first, shamefully... Netflix released this lovely photo of 'Libo' and Cuarón as they are now.

How well we get to know the family home in the (then) shabby-genteel Roma district of Mexico City, with its garage runway, always covered in dog poo, ill negotiated by the fraught father and mother when they try and drive their cars up to the door. It soon emerges that all is not well between husband and wife.

How shocked we are by the student uprising which ended in slaughter, seen from the windows of a furniture department; this is a realisation of a newspaper clipping which the 10-year-old Cuarón saw, and had explained to him by his communist uncle. 'My little middle-class bubble burst,' he says. 'I realized there was a way bigger bubble, one that was more complex'.

Also compelling (though what isn't, in this film) are the scene showing the government's military training of young men in a very specific martial art - very expensive to film because the extras all had to be taught the discipline - 

and by the heart-in-mouth single take where Cleo saves two of the children from drowning (young Alfonso was one of them, in reality).  

I wouldn't have noticed had I not read an article in a film magazine while I was in hospital that the camera starts by looking downwards and that gradually more sky is introduced into the final scenes, looking upwards; but this, I'm sure, is something one registers unconsciously. There's so much detail in every frame, though, that I regretted not seeing Roma on a big screen, and look forward to correcting that.

Just as great an achievement, in its own oblique but often very funny way (yes, a German comedy, or rather tragicomedy), though the deliberately blanched cinematography is hard to adjust to, is Toni Erdmann,  directed, written and co-produced by genius Maren Ade.

Now that Bergman is no longer with us, and Lars von Trier seems to have lost his way after his amazing earlier films - though I did like Melancholia, if 'like' is the right word, and I don't have the courage to see whether the sexually explicit and violent later works actually have a moral compass and a singular touch, as The Idiots ultimately did - Ade must take the palm for getting layered, complex performances out of two remarkable actors.

The title refers to the bewigged, false-teethed alter ego of sad clown Winifried (Peter Simonischek, whom I want to see in Shakespeare); but Sandra Hüller as his career-driven daughter Ines is just as compelling, and has a harder job winning our sympathy - though she does, in spades, and there's a sensational rendition of a Whitney Houston song which marks a turning-point in the film.

Even the outcome of the last scene is held in the balance, and the later stages are totally unpredictable. Let's just say that Toni/Winifried's last stunt, within the compass of the film, has to do with the costume in the poster.

What you get in two films about American life are a truthful performance from the luminous and versatile Saoirse Ronan in Ladybird, about a not-much-more-than-averagely-rebellious teenage girl slyly subverting what she can of small-town life

and slightly stylised, but nevertheless brilliant ones in a classy take on the true-life tragicomedy of a skating queen

from Margot Robbie (curiously turning up as Gloriana vs Saoirse's Stuart in what sounds like a turgidly-scripted Mary, Queen of Scots; surely Josie Rourke should have known to adapt Schiller's Mary Stuart rather than go for a stilted new screenplay) as well as an idol of mine, Alison Janney, who will forever be the surprisingly sexy, always sassy C. J. Cregg in The West Wing but excels here as the Mother from Hell,

and Sebastian Stan as Tonya's psychopath boyfriend/husband.

Small beer, perhaps, by the side of the two diamonds, but both beautifully crafted and acted gems. By the way, I was about to pass another evening in hospital by going to see Mary Poppins Returns in the amazing Medicinema of Chelsea & Westminster, but I was discharged two hours earlier; my 'second musketeer' pal in the bed opposite went instead with his granddaughter, and (as he told me when I popped in to see him on Tuesday) was surprised by how good it was. As I'm still awaiting the op, I'm entitled to revisit and was going to see The Favourite on Thursday evening, but that was one of my bad days so I stayed home. Outings need to be carefully spaced at the moment, though I'm proud to have made, and reviewed, two events this week: Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades at the Royal Opera on Sunday afternoon, and Bang on a Can's Friday night cornucopia at Kings Place.

Exile

There's no escaping the issue; nor should there be, when every personal story of Syrian refugees helps us to understand that it could be us, that we could be these human beings. In terms of reading, I wasn't trying to avoid the subject, but nor was I actively seeking it out in two of the three books I read in close succession, both of which turned out to locate the present in the near or distant past, adding to an understanding that being an exile, a refugee, an emigrant/immigrant is such a constant part of the human condition (the third book, incidentally, was Diana Darke's My House in Damascus, which gives an equally distressing picture of how everything falls apart over time for those who decide to stay. I hope I'll find time to write about that soon).

Most Europeans of my generation are so lucky never to have experienced it, but surely we all know someone who has, and most of us come, way back, from somewhere else (on my mother's side of the family, my first known ancestor was Jean de Paris, a Huguenot fleeing to London after the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572).

Mark Mazower's Salonica: City of Ghosts is, for much of its duration, a portrait of a city that no longer exists - a special case in Europe where Jews, Muslims and Orthodox Christians co-existed peacefully - always with a few isolated exceptions - from 1430 to the early 20th century. So this is a book first heartening, then deeply distressing. The stance of the early Ottomans - described by Mazower as akin to the central Asian attitude of the Grand Khan Mongha, for whom the religions of the Empire were 'like the five fingers of the same hand' - had already come as a pleasant surprise to the Archbishop of Salonica, Gregory Palamas, when he had been held captive in 1355. According to Mazower, Palamas found that

Prominent Turks were eager to discuss the relationship of the two faiths with him and the emir organised a debate between him and Christian converts to Islam. 'We believe in your prophet, why don't you believe in ours?' Muslims asked him more than once.

Which takes us back to the fundamentals of Mohammed's original teachings (I've long been meaning to try and sum up here, for myself as much as anyone else, what Karen Armstrong's Islam: A Short History reveals on that front - 'all is one', in short). Pictured below: an Ottoman family in the house known as 'Las encantadas', with its row of caryatids long since vanished

But the point here is to move on to the arrival of the Sefardim looking for a new home after their expulsion from Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. They were more welcome here than in Christian Europe. And despite the official separation of Muslims and non-Muslims, placed in a position of inferiority by what they had to wear, the boundaries in professions quickly became fluid: 'young Muslim boys served as apprentices to Christian shoe-makers; Jewish and Muslim hamals and casual labourers scoured the docks together for work'. And in places of worship, too: Muslim guardians would watch over Christian shrines even where the building had been converted.

So, essentially, Salonica remained until the early 1900s, when the Ottoman Empire crumbled and nationalism rather than religion became the basis for Greeks and Young Turks alike. The First World War pulled things further apart; what endless fires had brought about, temporary tented settlements for those who had lost their homes (one such pictured above outside the walls of the fire-ravaged city), became real in a much larger sense with the almost unbelievable, rigid exchange of Muslims and Orthodox Greeks between Turkey and Greece in 1923-4. !8,000 Muslims were uprooted and removed from the fabric of the city. The picture below is of a mother and child waiting in Salonica to make the onward journey to Thrace.

What finished off Salonica as 'open city' was, of course, the German genocide of the Jews. Christian citizens tried to stop the deportations, or at the very least sympathised as the victims were led to the trains; in a few weeks of 1943, one-fifth of the population was 'disappeared'. Less admirable was the ready appropriation of the deserted shops and houses, and the difficulty of restitution to the few who returned.

Mazower's tale is of a city, not of individuals - despite countless examples of human nature's extraordinary adaptability and survival - while to read George Prochnik's The Impossible Exile is to learn about one ambiguous and mostly very unhappy refugee. Was Stefan Zweig doomed to kill himself (and, much more troublingly, to persuade his younger second wife to join him in death) from the moment he was dispossessed of the Viennese milieu which seems to have been the only one in which he could thrive.

Zweig was a determined, eloquent internationalist - a true humanist European, or rather citoyen du monde - who thought he could settle anywhere but ended up desperately unable to adapt outside Austria. The book's strengths are also its weaknesses - a determination not to give a chronological biography, to leap back and forth in time, which can make for confusion but also gradually pieces together the mystery posed by the beginning: how could Stefan and Lotte end up in Petrapolis, old German-feeling town in the hills above Rio de Janeiro?

There are moments of suspense along the way. The last couple of years read like the final quarter of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, where our heroine seems to be happy, not necessarily heading towards disaster, but keeps taking wrong turns (and right ones, too). Zweig was prone, ever so eloquently, to romanticise new places as paradise - he certainly did so in the case of Brazil - only to be defeated by inner despair, even emptiness. Perhaps the real tragedy was that, for all his vision of what nations should share in common, he had no real grounding in what was only a dream. And his sense of self was being eroded all the time. Prochnik, himself the son of Viennese refugees, writes:

If only a third of European Jewry survived Hitler, only a tiny fraction of those who did escape made it out with their former identities and sense of humanity intact. Zweig's life on the run draws me in in part for the way it presents, as in a tableau vivant, archetypal stages of refugee experience shared by others fleeing a state turned murderous. His story is particularly revealing for what it says about the predicaments of exile that aren't resolved when freedom is regained.

Archetypal, and yet different from other exiles. Zweig came from a fabulously wealthy family, moved among the high literary movers and shakers of the world. What, he asked, did he have in common all the other Jews 'thrown together for persecution'? Prochnik continues:

At least, he writes, their ancestors in medieval times knew what they were suffering for: their shared 'faith and their laws'. But the Jews of the 20th century were no longer a community and had not been one for a long time. They had no law. They did not want to speak Hebrew together. Only exile swept them all together, like dirt in the street: 'bankers from their grand homes in Berlin, synagogue servers from the Orthodox communities, Parisian professors of philosophy, Romanian cabbies, layers out of the dead and Nobel prize winners, operatic divas, women hired as mourners at funerals, writers and distillers, men of property and men of none, the great and small, observant Jews and followers of the Enlightenment.' In a heartfelt cry, Zweig apostrophized: 'Why I? Why you? How do you and I who do not know each other, who speak different languages, whose thinking takes different forms and who have nothing in common happen to be here together?' If Shylock's famous question - 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' - was intended to show that Jews share a common humanity with all mankind, Zweig approached the injustice of anti-Semitism by revealing the total absence of common ground between the Jews themselves.

Yet others found it, adapted and thrived. Was Zweig too aloof, too fond of talking about universal values but too weak to put them into practice by really getting to know his fellow men from all walks of life? Not for us to judge, who never went through this upheaval - one compounded by shame that the language in which he wrote was appropriated by a destructive regime. Below: Zweig and his mother, who died in Vienna just before the Anschuss, at the home of friends in Vence.

Whateve the answer, it is a complex tragedy. Prochnik is good on paradoxes, on the dismantled vision of the Viennese coffee-house, in his troubled concern for poor Lotte (he is bad, by the way, in the only sphere I know, the musical one, where he tells us that Zweig's adaptation for Strauss was of Jonson's Volpone, with a new title of Die scheigsame Frau, The Silent Woman; of course the original play is Epicoene, or The Silent Woman). The main thing is that I want to go on and read more from Zweig's restless pen, not least his biographies reflecting back on himself of Marie Antoinette, Erasmus and Montaigne.

Finally, a story not of exile but of the pros and cons of emigration told with a complex flow of similarities and differences between home and abroad, John Crowley's film Brooklyn. I've given up on Colm Toibin; I hated The Master as a novel a million miles away from the style of its subject, Henry James - David Lodge's Author, Author is much better in my opinion - and the dialogue taken from the book as rendered by Nick Hornby doesn't strike me as anything special. It's a beautifully crafted but over-clean tale of the 1950s - Todd Haynes's Carol evokes what feels like a much more real world, albeit with less moving portrayals of the central figures - yet the lead performance of Saoirse Ronan is one of the most remarkable star turns I've ever seen on screen.

She lights up within, right from the start; it's the sort of face that makes you want to burst into tears, and I did weep quite a lot. While her character in the book has been described as passive, and Ronan's Christian name rhymes, she tells us, with 'inertia', Eilis, the role she plays, has incredible vitality and strength as well as vulnerabiity. In fact I saw immediately in Ronan the ideal incarnation of Natasha Rostova in War and Peace - a very different character, but one who needs that same incandescence. Someone make another version with her in it before she gets too old (she's 21, but would be convincing as the 13-year-old Natasha, which Morag Hood in the old BBC version wasn't). Interesting that both my friend Simon and I thought of Audrey Hepburn, Natasha in the American film I haven't dared to see - I've braved the BBC serialisation and, though rushed, it's not as bad as I feared - because although our Saoirse looks nothing like her, and isn't obviously beautiful in the conventional sense, she's equally mesmerising on the screen.

The men are very watchable and sympathetic, too, compounding the symmetries; there's the puppylicious Emory Cohen as her American-Italian true love

and Domnhall Gleeson as the Irish 'quiet man', who achieves the difficult job of partly wrenching us, as well as the heroine, temporarily away from Brooklyn affiliations.

Mother and sister are sympathetically portrayed, too; there's not a false note in any performance, so that you buy the more sentimental moments. But the point is, as Prince Andrey says of the young Natasha, that 'there's something special about that girl'. Everyone should go - it's a film which I could take my mother to see - and be spellbound by Ronan's ever-changing face on the big screen.