Villains of the year

I'm not talking Putin, Assad or lesser monsters of the daylight horror world, but three dreamhaunters of my reading and filmwatching year. Two gave me nightmares during an otherwise jolly Christmas in the bosom of our Lacock friends.

My compulsive pageturner was Fyodor Sologub's 1907 comic shocker The Little [perhaps better Petty] Demon, charting the descent into madness of a wretched provincial schoolmaster, Ardalyon Borisovich Peredonov, all envy, paranoia and hunger for the mortification of young flesh by the birch (top image, incidentally, is Boris Grigoriev's of Gogol's The Government Inspector as I couldn't find anything closer to this particular source). Peredonov's hopes for promotion through the agency of a distant, elderly princess - shades of The Queen of Spades - are exposed as ridiculous from the start, and their failure accelerates an already slippery slide.

Whereas Giulio Andreotti, seven times Italian prime minister and the all too real yet ungraspable subject of Il Divo, Paolo Sorrentino's previous masterpiece before La Grande Bellezza, went right at the top of the tree and stayed there, God knows how, for far too long.

The inscrutable devil died only this year. He was the spider at the heart of the mafia web investigated by Peter Robb in Midnight in Sicily, so we knew a little about the circumstances before seeing the film, which might well confuse you if your grasp of labyrinthine Italian politics is forgivably loose. Yes, I need to see Il Divo again, but I'm not sure the density is really a problem when the basic issue of compromised political ambition is so clear. In any case Sorrentino makes a virtue of necessity by giving a host of red print - sometimes speeding up with deliberate absurdity - around murder victims and courtiers (all of whom have nicknames, like mafia henchmen).

The two cardinal virtues here are the bewilderingly beautiful cinematography - every frame a gem of perfect lighting and composition - and the flummoxing impersonation of Andreotti, 'Il Divo' himself, by Tony Servillo. What a gulf separates Servillo's performance here from his melancholy-mocking ageing playboy in La Grande Bellezza; but what a payoff in the virtuoso monologue where his Andreotti rises from impassivity to hysterical fury in trying to argue the right reason - keeping Italy together - for the wrong deeds (mass murder). He's even allowed a measure of sympathy in the scenes with his wife Livia. But the inner decline is inevitable.

And that's what seems to connect Peredonov and Andreotti with the truly horrifying Cathy Ames, negative pole of  John Steinbeck's strange and wondrous family saga East of Eden. Steinbeck leaves us in no doubt of what we're in for before we even meet her in the eighth chapter. 'I believe there are monsters born into the world to human parents', it begins, and a little later on: 'it is my belief that Cathy Ames was born with the tendencies, or lack of them, which drove and forced her all of her life. Some balance wheel was misweighted, some gear out of ratio. She was not like other people, never was from birth'.

Which explanation doesn't stop us hating Cathy or fearing what she's going to do next. The implosion here is much longer, over years, but it comes all the same. Peredonov and Cathy can't really be called tragic, for they have no perception of the path to their own downfall. Like Andreotti, with whom there's more room for doubt, they lack understanding of any human needs other than their own dreadful imperatives; they know nothing of compassion or even - again, not clear with the enigma of Andreotti - guilt. And so, as both authors make us abundantly aware, there is no complexity in their characters, only in the nature of the responses they cause: horrified fascination in Cathy's case, except from a few supremely moral individuals, and mirth at Peredonov's antics, tragic because there's a complimentary failure to understand the mental illness which leads to murder..

Yet both Sologub and Steinbeck make the banality of evil very compelling -  and in Sologub's case very funny, as in the manifestations of Peredonov's paranoia in the maltreated white cat he's afraid will report him to the police and the antics of the nedotykomka, the dirty little laughing creature rendered by Ronald Wilks as 'little demon', making two in his not always felicitous translation.  I came across the wacky Russian artist Dobuzhinsky's rendering of the nedotykomka in the novel below on a fascinating Russian website devoted to Sologub.

There are, of course, 'good' characters in both novels, even if the society of The Little Demon is mostly very shallow; it has a peculiar parallel plot in which a girlish schoolboy becomes involved in a queasy erotic game with one of three capricious sisters (a transferred homosexual fantasy on the author's part, perhaps?). Steinbeck's chronicle, on the other hand, is one of the richest and most nuanced novels I've ever read - I might even compare it to War and Peace. I can't frankly see the point of the film (Jo Van Fleet pictured up top in the middle with James Dean, and below), which as I understand it launches in two thirds of the way through the family history.

The recurring cycle is what counts. There are characters who comprehend the good but still veer to the bad; there are lyrical descriptions of the beautiful and occasionally ferocious Californian landscapes in which they're placed. And the Biblical parallels move quickly way beyond the schematic. It's certainly the most powerful book I've read this year, Steinbeck himself my fondest rediscovery for a very long time (hell, I never did get to blog about the enchanting road book Travels with Charley). He seems so very modern in his ecological concerns. So it's The Log from The Sea of Cortez, his diary of a journey with the polymathic marine biologist who inspired the loveable hero of Cannery Row and Sweet Sunday, which I ought to read next, or soon.

The beauty of a rake

Jep Gambardella has reached the age of 65 and, though he may now prefer to talk to women rather than have sex with them, still loves a great party in the sybaritic high life of Rome. Increasingly, though, loss and mortality catch up with him. If the subject is a familiar one for a more elegiac kind of moviemaking, the way it's told by Paolo Sorrentino in La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty) constantly surprises.

There's the stupendous cinematography, of course: scene after scene of stunning colour, composition and richness - when I was looking for images, I found myself fulminating about how many great situations were missing - beautifully fused with a heady mix of music (delighted to hear Arvo Pärt's 'My heart's in the Highlands'). But above all there's a finely shaded script which turns melancholy into humour. Much of this is carried by our Jep, the still handsome and versatile Toni Servillo who can change an expression at his big party, in a giddying sequence near the beginning of the film, from one of smug cock of the roost

to desolation.

Later his speech to an insecure, self-praising friend should become a cult scene of cinema. The other star of La Grande Bellezza is Rome itself, putting Sorrentino's work up there with Rossellini's Roma, città aperta and Fellini's La Strada, two of Pope Francis's favourites as I mentioned in the last post (Roma is a lesser, but intriguing, film which I haven't seen since student days, when I didn't quite know what to make of it). Of course I loved it that so many of the places I strode on my noon to evening walk the last time I was there feature: the streets, cloisters and gardens around Santa Sabina on the beloved Aventine, the miraculous false perspectives of Borromini's little passageway in the Palazzo Spada, the low-level walk along the Tiber's edge to the Castel Sant'Angelo. But they're never there as window dressing. The scene which really moved me to tears was when Jep and his sad-eyed new friend Ramona (Sabrina Ferilli)

are given a night tour of the great palaces by a man who has all the keys, thanks to his association with principesse. That truly is supernaturally beautiful.

Agreeing with Emma Simmond's Arts Desk review which inspired me to go see it, I found only one flaw: that at what turned out to be the three-quarter mark - and I hadn't checked how long the film was due to last - there seemed to be a failure of pace. Sure, it's a leisurely meditation, but J was also feeling a slight sense of ennui at that point too. It recovers as the centre of gravity moves from the profane to the sacred in the figure of a mysterious, hundred-and-something saintly nun: far-fetched only if you haven't succumbed to the stranger side (by which I don't mean the St Peter's experience) of Roman religiosity.

And in any case, what would you cut? It's all suffused with that grand beauty which our hero says has too often eluded him in a meandering existence. The original trailer, though of course I want it to show more, captures the two poles of the protagonist's existence rather well.

Glad we saw this in the cinema (in the company of a sparse and totally silent crowd). The other I wanted to go see, again courtesy of a five-star Arts Desk review, but which we've had to be content with borrowing from LoveFilm and watched last night, is Pablo Berger's Blancanieves, Spanish silent re-telling of the Snow White story set in the 1920s (and conceived before The Artist, which I still haven't seen).

What a magnificent piece of story-telling, again full of visual riches in every tableau (superb cinematography by Kiko de la Rica). There's a distancing here which prevents much emotional involvement, but it's flawless as a stylistic exercise with, again, stupendous performances, especially from Maribel Verdú as a truly wicked stepmother

and Macarena Garcia as the teethy-smiling lady toreador our Snow White, Carmen, becomes following a life-saving encounter with circus people. Plus a winning debut from a nine year old with no previous experience as the young Carmencita and an enormous, camera-friendly cockerel. No point in my cataloguing the riches and spoiling the surprises: see it, marvel at the aptness of Alfonso de Vilalloga's non-stop score and succumb to the enchantment.

To conclude, first a statistic which I hope will raise a gentle smile: did you know that six out of seven dwarfs aren't Happy? And I leave you with a 39-second trailer for Blancanieves, rapid images accompanied by a touch of theremin - for the evil one, of course - followed by flamenco 1920s style.

8/10 Still in the right area, here's my Arts Desk tribute to Patrice Chéreau, a fitfully great film-maker and an even greater opera director, who died yesterday of lung cancer at the too young age of 68. I have some catching up to do now on his filmography.