Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Blog Page 381

Review: Kali Uchis’ ‘Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞’

Mila Ottevanger
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Review: Kali Uchis’ ‘Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞’

As any even casual listener of Kali Uchis (born Karly-Marina Loaiza) will know, she has simply never dropped a bad song. And I’m not ashamed to admit I’m going into this review biased – I’ve had all her singles on repeat since she first released them. No one who has Kali Uchis on their radar can just listen and move on. She lives in your head, demanding to be played.

Her most recent album, Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) ∞ does not disappoint in this respect, or any other. She smoothly glides between genres, from dark jams whose instrumentals bring to mind Portishead’s Dummy like ‘vaya con dios’, which seamlessly melt into the Bond theme-esque sweeps of sound on ‘que te pedí’, to the reggaetón which influences some of the later tracks in particular. Uchis’ voice is at its best, by turns powerful, flighty, and lyrical.

Uchis is clearly at home on this album, something she’s made clear in interviews, while satisfyingly slapping down implications that its Spanish lyrics will put people off. Her adoring fanbase has allowed her to release a record almost entirely in Spanish with security that her listeners will kiss the ground she walks on – even anglophone ones, traditionally averse to listening in other languages. But she has also had the time to establish her sound, which she plays with brilliantly on this album. Traditional bops like ‘la luz(Fín)’ are more lowkey, while catchy songs like ‘no eres tu(soy yo)’ would not be out of place on Isolation, her presciently named 2018 album, which was crammed with memorable tracks clamouring for attention. Sin Miedo keeps a satisfying sense of continuity, but Uchis is not afraid to branch out even in explicitly reggaetón-influenced tracks such as this ‘no eres tu(soy yo)’ and ‘te pongo mal(prendelo)’. Over these two tracks alone she collaborates with artists of the genre such as Jhay Cortez and Jowell & Randy. In ‘de nadie’ and the final track ‘ángel sin cielo’, she hops on the slowed and reverb train and essentially duets with herself, manipulating her voice down to the point that on my first listen I had to check who the featuring artist was. But it was her – genius. 

Not every song is one I’d go back to on their own or stick on a playlist, often little snippets setting the scene or an exercise in an unexpected technique – opener ‘la luna enamorada’ and closer ‘ángel sin cielo’ come to mind as ones I probably wouldn’t revisit over any others – but as part of the experience of the album as a whole, they work absolutely flawlessly. When listening to the whole record (which I have done [unspecified amount of] times already) I wouldn’t skip over them for anything. Even the ‘filler’ or more conceptual, shorter tracks are wonderfully done and a crucial part of the full experience, couching the slightly catchier songs in a cushion of short, interesting experiments: ‘que te pedí’, despite being short, is a showstopper. Sequencing has been minutely paid attention to, logically done in a way which does not remove any joy or unexpected delights, but that gradually moves from genre to genre in a way which changes enough for interest, but makes a whole lot of sense. 

To sum up, Kali Uchis’ sophomore album is a well-crafted, long-awaited, interesting, satisfying step in an artistic journey – one that artfully balances change and continuity. 

   

Image: COUGHS

It was All a Dream: Escapism and Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

Emily Broughton
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It was All a Dream: Escapism and Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

After months of isolation, Zoom calls, and Amazon deliveries, it is no wonder that people want to escape the ‘new normal’. The anxiety and boredom that comes with being trapped inside can be alleviated in a number of ways, but my personal favourite is through dreams.

Whether you are dreaming in sleep or during the day, this form of escapism can transport you to the furthest reaches of the earth and the darkest depths of the ocean. But can dreaming do more harm than good?

We all know what it is like to be immersed in a new novel or TV show: the world outside fades away until you are left with your imagination. It can be incredibly jarring when you are ripped out of this fiction and forced to face the real world. Dreams seem to straddle this boundary between fiction and reality, often informed by real life or perhaps made to help us cope with it.

Edgar Allan Poe recognises this in his poem ‘A Dream within a Dream’. The dreamer is so caught up in his mind that he struggles to grasp reality. He is shown standing on a wind-swept beach desperately trying to hold onto grains of sand. But no matter what he does the sand continues to creep through his fingers. It is not clear whether the grains represent passing time, the dreamer’s grip on reality, or something entirely different, but their formlessness prompts him to ask a very important question: “Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”

Although this isn’t a particularly practical question, in the real world it has been posed and investigated through the works of many artists. In the 1999 movie The Matrix, for instance, we are shown what can happen when someone completely loses touch with reality. Rather than being used as a cliched ending, the idea that everything is simply a dream is placed at the crux of the movie. In this dystopian world, humanity has been reduced to an energy source, living batteries used by the machines that have taken over the earth. In order to hide from this horrible truth, they live inside a computer-generated world that looks much like our own. In this movie mundane life is the comforting fantasy from a horrific fantasy. Before the protagonist Neo discovers the truth for himself, the audience is given clues that suggest his world is all a dream. The man he seeks, the man who can enlighten him, is Morpheus, named after the Greek god of dreams and sleep. Much like this deity, he has the power to leave people sleeping in blissful ignorance or wake them up.

However, it is the intertextual references to Lewis Carrol’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland that suggest that Neo’s so-called ‘reality’ is a childish dream. Neo is told to follow the white rabbit, wake up from wonderland and see how far down the rabbit hole goes.This image of the rabbit hole is particularly powerful and recurs in many discussions about dreams. In Carrol’s book itself no one knows just how far down it goes. When Alice falls, she goes “down and down”, falling for so long that she wonders if it will ever end, after many hours even believing that she “must be getting somewhere near the centre of the earth”. In common parlance, “down the rabbit hole” has come to mean losing touch with reality when engrossed in an all-consuming idea. It is inextricably linked to nonsense, dreams and fantasy itself.

What we are seeing is art commenting on itself. Cinema and literature, in particular, are regularly used as a form of escapism. When they begin to reveal dreams within dreams, they show us how easily reality and fiction can be confused in our minds. Although The Matrix and Alice in Wonderland are themselves works of fiction, they force us not only to consider Edgar Allan Poe’s question but to ask another one as well: if “all that we see or seem” is but a dream, do we really want to wake up and discover the truth?

Artwork by Rachel Jung

Playing video games good for you, Oxford study says

Issy Kenney-Herbert
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Playing video games good for you, Oxford study says

New research from Oxford University has delivered a new take on video games: time spent playing games could positively impact mental health.  Professor Andrew Pryzybylski, Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute and lead author of the study said: “If you play Animal Crossing for four hours a day, every single day, you’re likely to say you feel significantly happier than someone who doesn’t.” 

The conclusion of the study is not that all video games are “good for you” or that “all players benefit’” Professor Pryzbylski argues that his research should be a first step in carrying out a proper scientific study of the impact of gaming on players and their effects over time; he is keen to see more studies follow. 

The new study uses anonymised data from the gaming industry data on the actual play time for popular video games rather than self-reported “guesstimate” that have been used in previous studies. These logs were then linked to a survey in which the players answered questions about their well-being. A total of 3,274 gamers took part.

Professor Pryzbylski said this investigation marks a new direction: “Previous research has relied mainly on self-report surveys to study the relationship between play and well-being. Without objective data from games companies, those proposing advice to parents or policymakers have done so without the benefit of a robust evidence base.”

The Oxford Internet Institute research concentrated on the popular video games Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville and Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Both are online ‘social’ games, where players engage with others at remote locations, and neither fall into the ‘violent’ category. 

According to the report, “Policymakers urgently require reliable, robust, and credible evidence that illuminates the influences video game may have on global mental health. However, the most important source of data, the objective behaviours of players, are not used in scientific research.”

“It’s fine to have an opinion about video games,” says Professor Pryzybylski. “But, without research, you cannot know if this is a real thing of just your own ‘facts’. You can have your own opinion but you cannot have your own facts.”

Review: Simulacrum

Rosa Chalfen
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Review: Simulacrum

Written and directed by Helena Aeberli and Riana Modi, Simulacrum is the first play on the Oxford drama scene specifically designed for online production, and its focus on the radical power of technology fits in expertly with the form. The play chronicles a medical trial in which the consciousness of a recently deceased Julia (Cosima Aslangul) is uploaded to the Internet, enabling her to communicate with her family and friends. As the trial develops, Julia’s grasp of the real world is gradually erased; the play thus descends into a terrifying examination of the limits of human existence that drives its audience right to the edge of comfort. 

Simulacrum – a term defined as ‘an unsatisfactory imitation or substitute’ – is an apt title for this new breed of student drama, the ‘webcam play’. Can an online play live up to its real-life counterparts, or is it doomed to be an unsatisfactory imitation of ‘normal’ plays? 

Written and directed by Helena Aeberli and Riana Modi, Simulacrum is the first play on the Oxford drama scene specifically designed for online production, and its focus on the radical power of technology fits in expertly with the form. The play chronicles a medical trial in which the consciousness of a recently deceased Julia (Cosima Aslangul) is uploaded to the Internet, enabling her to communicate with her family and friends. As the trial develops, Julia’s grasp of the real world is gradually erased; the play thus descends into a terrifying examination of the limits of human existence that drives its audience right to the edge of comfort. 

Simulacrum interweaves a huge range of topical themes, exploring everything from death to religious extremism in a concise one hundred minutes. In a coronavirus-ridden world, the fraught online relationships between Julia and her family seem particularly poignant – the description of Julia’s strange world as a ‘bubble’ evokes confused government advice, and her best friend’s exclamation that “I wish I could give you my hand, I wish I could!” will ring true to anyone who has suffered through endless Zoom calls and FaceTimes with loved ones. Yet references to the pandemic are pleasingly subtle, adding to the play’s tensions rather than becoming its epicentre. 

Aeberli and Modi’s script is beautifully written, replete with poetic metaphors that echo in the audience’s ears long after they are spoken. Aslangul, the play’s focal point, plays Julia with a deep intensity that becomes intensely disturbing. Her perfect performance shuts down any doubts the audience might have about online acting—it’s incredible how much emotional change can be expressed through a web cam, and makes one eagerly anticipate Aslangul’s real life debut. Other stand out performances include Georgina Dettmer as Doctor Emma Greenways, whose sweetness constantly threatens to tip into creepiness, and Elise Busset as Julia’s disillusioned best friend Claire.

In a world forced online and devoid of physical contact, Simulacrum draws together all our doubts and anxieties about the mysteries of this ‘unprecedented’ existence. As the play’s protagonist puts it, “I am the simulacrum now…and this is how we see the world”. If Simulacrum is the new way we see the world, then perhaps the world isn’t so bad after all. 

Image credit: Daisy Leeson.

Who’s who: Ai Weiwei

Jennifer Zhou
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Who’s who: Ai Weiwei

On the 3rd of April 2011, the inhabitants of Chaoyang district in northern Beijing woke up to a strange spectacle. A team of twenty policemen, dressed in plainclothes but armed to the teeth, were placing cordons around an empty building. Power to the neighbourhood had been cut off. In breathless darkness, the residents watched as officers advanced through the doorway, returning minutes later with laptops and a hard drive. Miles away in the Beijing Capital Airport, the building’s owner—a towering, shaggy-haired man in his fifties—was being forced, handcuffed, into the back of a squad car.

It looked like a scene straight out of a movie. Indeed, over the following days as news of the arrest broke across China, headlines would try to paint it in the cinematic colours of a nationalist propaganda film: the police triumphant, the public enemy detained, the state saved once again from the threat of sinister treason. But the deserted building in Chaoyang was no criminal lair—it was an art studio. And the man arrested at the airport, far from being a hardened felon, was Ai Weiwei: filmmaker, visual artist, and one of the most outspoken political dissidents in China.

To understand Ai’s history, it is vital to understand his childhood. He was born in 1957, one of a generation of children growing up amidst the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution. His father, the writer Gao Ying, had been imprisoned by the Nationalist government for Leftist activism. Now that Mao’s Communist Party had taken power, Gao—in a twist of events that even among the extreme politics of the time seemed cruelly ironic—was accused of being a Rightist and exiled to a labour camp in distant Xinjiang. It was here, amongst a community of outcasts, pariahs and political prisoners, that Ai grew up.

When his father was finally released, Ai attended the Beijing Film Academy and became one of the first members of ‘The Stars’, a group of rebel artists who wanted to reintroduce art as a method of self-expression instead of a tool of the state. In 1981 he moved to New York, where he led an impressively eclectic life: dropping out of Parsons after six months, rubbing shoulders with names like Warhol and Ginsberg, and becoming so adept at blackjack that he was chauffeured to casinos in a stretch limo each week. His first solo show, ‘Old Shoes, Safe Sex’, was shown in New York in 1988.

Five years later, Ai returned to Beijing. The Cultural Revolution had ended, but Ai’s continuing defiance of Party rule showed clearly in his artwork. A photo series published in the early 90s depicts him leaping across the frame, naked and contorted into ridiculous poses. Ai titled it “grass mud horse covering the middle”—a name which in spoken Mandarin sounds like a slur about mothers and the Communist Party. His later work is even more scathing: his most celebrated pieces include surveillance cameras wrought from marble, Han Dynasty vases defaced with Coke logos, and a series of porcelain shards bearing the words “free speech” which piece together to form a fractured map of China.

Ai is famous for his eccentricity. In the face of a puritanically conformist society, his art showcases a bold, transgressive individualism: his 1999 exhibition in Shanghai, for instance, was simply titled “F**k off”. Ai’s larger-than-life personality and fiercely anti-government works have earned him a global cult following. His Twitter account has 375,000 followers—impressive, considering Twitter is technically blocked in China—and his studio, Fake Culture Development Ltd, became a local landmark before it was shut down. In 2011, following his arrest, ArtReview named him “the most powerful artist in the world.”

The official reason given for his arrest was tax evasion, but it ignited such a media firestorm that Ai was released just three months later. Since then, he has fled to Cambridge, UK, where he now lives with his family. Over the last three decades, he has made global headlines, become a national fugitive, and even had his life adapted into a play at the Hampstead Theatre. Ai, however, still seems surprised by his own fame. “The secret police told me,” he said to Smithsonian, “everybody can see it but you, that you’re so influential.”

Ai’s career has been both prolific and diverse. It has taken him from laying bricks in Xinjiang to opening galleries in Europe, from casinos to prisons to political exile. His most recent creations include an exhibition on surveillance, a documentary about the refugee crisis, and an installation of repurposed explosive devices due to be displayed at the Imperial War Museum. Whatever he makes next—sculpture or video, photograph series or performance art—we can be sure that it will ignite the popular imagination for years afterwards.

All I Want for Oxmas…

Jill Cushen
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All I Want for Oxmas…

All I want for Oxmas is my two front teeth. And a vaccine, and a foreign holiday, and a live gig, and a night in a crowded club… Forget the teeth, all I want for Oxmas is normality, or whatever we consider normality to be: that’s not a lot to ask for, surely! 

2020 has been a year of unprecedented change, forcing many of us to re-evaluate various aspects of our lives. But after a year devoid of traditional cultural experiences, are we craving a return to what we deemed to be culturally satisfying, or have our priorities changed? Film, television, and music have always been a form of escapism, providing a source of comfort in our hectic lives. This year has been no different, except that our lives have been less hectic and more terrifyingly confusing. 

The natural disasters and political turmoil which marred the commencement of the new decade were merely the tip of the iceberg for what was to come in 2020. Culturally, however, the year began as it always does: the Grammy Awards and the Oscars. Billie Eilish’s Grammy triumph, taking home four of the most coveted prizes and  setting a new record for the youngest solo artist to win album of the year, and Parasite making history as the first foreign language film to bag the title of Best Motion Picture both seem like a lifetime ago, and, to be frank, largely insignificant considering the circumstances we are living in. 

Back in March, our cultural calendars looked pretty bare, but 2020 was certainly not lacking in influential movements. Slouchy tracksuit bottoms and oversized hoodies stole the runway, replacing the oversized Victorian sleeves and chunky boots paired with floral dresses, styles which were predicted as 2020’s major fashion trends. With the release of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, gaming was reinstated as the go-to past time for many people, allowing them to create and roam in a world free from any threatening virus or anything frightening (bar the odd spider). Streaming services such as Netflix and Prime Video have found an essential and lasting place in the cultural sphere. Few would have guessed that the release of Frozen II on Disney+ would have, despite its title, quenched our Covid woes for an evening, replacing them with an evening of cosy family fun and sing-alongs. 

The dramatic changes induced by the pandemic rippled through all areas of society, and likewise we saw some cultural institutions buffeted by storms. The fall of Ellen DeGeneres was disheartening, being such a modern icon and forward thinker. Her catchphrase “be kind” is tinged with irony following the emergence of allegations about bullying and intimidation behind the scenes of her eponymous show. These reports shed a new light on celebrities and the slow pace of Covid-life meant that we have more time to mull over such developments, making us less willing to accept things the way they are. In September, E! announced that Keeping Up with the Kardashians would end after fourteen years and twenty seasons. The pandemic has provided us with some much needed perspective. Our interest in the lives of the Kardashian-Jenner clan is dwindling and people are less willing to tolerate Kim expressing her gratitude over being able to celebrate her 40th birthday with a “humble” party  on a private tropical island, while the rest of us probably won’t  step foot on an aeroplane for the foreseeable future. 

A standout moment on social media this year was a painful cover of John Lennon’s ‘Imagine’. Actress Gal Gadot and her crew of celebrities attempted a rendition of the song which was randomly compiled, pummelled and punctured, much like our hopes and dreams for 2020. What was inspiring about the video, though, was the group’s collective vulnerability. It was thrown together, but its chaos is entertaining: they weren’t concerned with making a musical debut, but were simply having a bit of fun, another thing which 2020 needed to be injected with, in large doses. Many predicted that over the course of the decade the importance and influence of social media would start to fade, but throughout the pandemic, social media has been a lifeline, diminishing our sense of isolation from the world and connecting people. Whether we were joining Florence Pugh for a sourdough cook-a-long or Joe Wicks for a workout, social media has allowed us to reconnect, a connection we have forged through a shared crisis. 

The Covid culture shock has been significant but the pandemic has not eradicated culture, it has simply transformed it, and continues to do so. Numerous aspects of culture serve to entertain us and enrich our lives, and rarely before have we needed it so much, but the sector has been devastated by the effects of Covid-19, leaving us to consider whether a return to cultural normality is feasible. Will we appreciate these after our first cinema trip or live performance, though? We may very easily slip back into taking the sector for granted. Some things will never change. The idea of a two-hour commute to work may never seem attractive again, but the BBC’s Glastonbury Experience will never replace the real thing: watching Miley Cyrus rocking on a screen in your sitting room can’t top the constant pounding in your chest and the lingering smell of spilt beer for a weekend. 

When the crystal ball was dusted off in January 2020, The Atlantic predicted that the next decade would “look very different from what most people expect.” Little did we know how true that statement would be. The transition from the 10s to the 20s felt like a cultural shift, looking back on the past ten years and towards to the coming decade, reminiscing on everything that has changed, and looking forward to what the next few years had in store. After one of the strangest years in living history, time feels like a mysterious concept. Predicting how the next decade will unfold is inconceivable given the rate of unforeseen change in 2020. Anticipating what will happen next week is futile, never mind next year. That crystal ball has been obscured in uncertainties. Life has become so unpredictable, and maybe that’s exactly what we needed: predictability is boring.

Forgive me, Katherine Mansfield, for I have sinned.

Ben Jureidini
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Forgive me, Katherine Mansfield, for I have sinned.

Forgive me, Katherine Mansfield, for I have sinned. I thought I was being very clever, is all; I thought I was re-inventing the wheel, re-writing the short story. Katherine Mansfield, if I had not, sitting on the sofa in my great-aunt’s living room, surrounded by statuettes of frogs, read a letter from Flannery O’Connor to [English professor], I would have submitted for publication to this very paper an article suggesting your work to be a phenomenological rendering of both Einsteinian space-time and Sartre’s bad faith. Whilst I cannot imagine this being too devasting to your legacy, it would have been slander on a level worthy, perhaps, of incarceration. I have no business talking about Einstein, Katherine Mansfield!

I understand that this apology may require some context. Born into the New Zealand social elite of 1888, Katherine Mansfield would go on to rub shoulders with the English literary elite. Granted, this shoulder-rubbing occasionally tended towards shoulder shoving – “I thought her cheap and she thought me priggish,” wrote Virginia Woolf – but Mansfield’s impact on literature is undeniable: “and yet we were both compelled to meet simply to talk about writing.” Woolf, incidentally, was somewhat hung up on Mansfield’s smell: “I mean she could permeate one with her quality; and if one felt this cheap scent in it, it reeked in one’s nostrils.” Olfactory oddities aside, Mansfield’s “quality” was pretty much exclusively dedicated to short stories. It was her mastery of this genre that meant Mansfield was the topic of a Hilary Term essay on ‘The Modernist Short Story’ – it was either this or Dubliners and, having groped my way through Ulysses that Christmas the prospect of reading any more Joyce was offensive on a cellular level. The question I chose, priggishly, was ‘Discuss the Presentation of Space and/or Time.’ I apologise, Katherine Mansfield, I really do. The essay I would go on to write, and, reader, the article I had drafted and readied for this very publication, would, I see now, have Mansfield, alongside pretty much every other writer of fiction, willing to cross both space and time in order to beat me around the head with a copy of Crime and Punishment. Having read Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and Other Stories, I took these two seminal texts and, through some pretentious undergraduate alchemy, managed to come out with:

In light of Joseph Frank’s argument that short stories are organised through spatial form, whereby webs of patterned images construct meaning rather than logical, coherent, and temporal plot movement, and WJT Mitchell’s notion of ‘spatiality’, whereby the short story is structured around the space of the world, the space of temporal moments, and the spatial ‘map of the possible hypotheses for the structures of meaning a text might contain’, it becomes clear that Mansfield associates this sense of existential liminality with her depictions of space.

Try reading that in one breath, I dare you. It most definitely does not become clear. With a sentence as bloated as an Aldi three-bird roast dinner, and with equal literary merit, this theorisation, problematisation, and various other thumbscrew-like -isation words, sucks every ounce of emotion, every ounce of bliss, from Mansfield’s work, reducing her to academic jargon and what I’m sure is a painful misunderstanding of theoretical physics. I confess this was the main thrust of what used to be this article. I confess I went into that tutorial thinking I’d pretty much sussed the short story. I confess I stood by the phrase ‘existential liminality’. This is where Flannery O’Connor comes in.

A titan of the form herself, O’Connor received a letter from an English professor who, having discussed “A Good Man is Hard to Find” with his undergraduate class, wrote to the author with some questions:

“Bailey, we further believe, identifies himself with the Misfit and so plays two roles in the imaginary last half of the story. But we cannot, after great effort, determine the point at which reality fades into illusion or reverie. Does the accident literally occur, or is it part of Bailey’s dream? Please believe me when I say we are not seeking an easy way out of our difficulty.”

O’Connor, to her credit, replied: “The interpretation,” she wrote, “of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intention as it could get to be.” Her writing, she tells the professor, is not an academic exercise in abnormal psychology. She cautions against reducing fiction to a “research problem”, for which “any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious”. “Where feeling for a story is absent,” she warns us, “theory will not supply it.” Joseph Frank’s spatial form, WJT Mitchell’s spatiality, Sartre’s existentialism, nor Einstein’s whatever are necessary to describe why Mansfield’s stories are so enchanting. Mansfield herself already has.

Can you ever forgive me, Katherine Mansfield? let me try to make some kind of amends for this disfigurement of your work. There is an abundance of theory on what makes a short story a short story: it is not, apparently, by virtue of not being long. I really, really hope, however, that spatiality and spatial form are all that describe the form. The clue, I think lies in the titles of these collections: and other stories. These are not novels, cannibalistic behemoths culminating, apparently, in Joyce’s Ulysses, but stories. Like a bundle of fairy stories, these brief descriptions of a journey, or a moment, or a party, are ephemeral, to be read in one sitting. Mansfield’s stories are not comforting by any means, they are often disturbing, following a character coming to terms with the realisation that the world might be a nastier place than they once thought. This process of learning, of confronting ageing, heartbreak, and death for the first time, of understanding that wolves and men lurk in the shadows of seaside villages, is a pre-cursor to Angela Carter’s bombastic The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories. Whilst these tales are more overtly rooted in fairy stories, albeit it with the x-rated content magnified, they look back to Mansfield’s portrayal of a Cinderella silently terrified of the ball that marks her first step into adulthood, or two (step)sisters coming to terms with what meaning life has after the death of their father.

The phrase Bliss and Other Stories reminds us to view our own experiences as just that, to look at the ephemeral moments in our lives as tiny fairy stories. Try it, as an experiment: Making Toast and Other Stories, The Trip to the GP and Other Stories, Sitting on the Sofa for Eight Hours Straight because it’s Illegal to Leave the House and Other Stories. Garden parties, train journeys, sitting in the park being a bit sad, Mansfield turns moments into miniature fairy tales. She is, naturally, aware that this can’t always work: the heart-wrenching Miss Brill is a six-page silent breakdown as an elderly woman realises her life is not a play; there is no script, and no one is watching. But there is something to be said for imbuing moments of your life with the watercolour intensity of a short story rather than the dodgy physics of a research problem: sometimes you really can be the main character. Do it for Katherine Mansfield.

La vita davanti a sé: Sex, death and Sophia Loren

Kiri Ley
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La vita davanti a sé: Sex, death and Sophia Loren

Long time, no see! Sophia Loren, Italian star of ‘60s classics such as 1963’s Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow and 1964’s Marriage Italian Style, commands the screen in her son, Edoard Ponti’s new Neflix film, La vita davanti a sé (The Life Ahead) after a decade’s well-earnt rest from the camera.

It is clever casting. Loren is a renowned sex symbol, but her acting career has approached the female body and issues of sexuality with nuance. In the anthological Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow she portrayed an overrun, working-class, Neopolitan mother of many (many, many) children; an elegant member of the Milanese bourgeoisie engaging in a marital affair; and a Roman prostitute, all in the same film, but her Academy-Award winning performance came in a lesser-known, grittier release several years beforehand.

La Ciociara (1960 ‘Two Women’) centres on the rape of a Roman businesswoman and her teenage daughter. They flee to the mother’s rural home from the bombing of Rome in the Second World War, to find that violation rather than refuge awaits them there.

So Loren has depth. Her profile spans female sensuality, yes, but also the fierce protectiveness of motherhood and the brutality of trauma.

All these elements unite perfectly in her depiction of Madame Rosa, an Auschwitz survivor and retired prostitute, in Edoard Ponti’s adaptation of Romain Gary’s 1975 novel, La vie devant soi. A photograph of the iconic young Loren features in La vita davanti a sé, but Loren’s weary, wise Madame is far more arresting.

La vita davanti a sé is streaming on Netflix after Covid concerns prevented its release in cinemas. Ponti’s decision to shift the French story to an Italian setting and context is an interesting and risky one. Holocaust survival is a more frequent theme in French artistic culture than it is in Italy. La vie devant soi was first adapted as a French film, Madame Rosa (1977, d. Moshé Mizrahi), and these resonances continue in the recent Italian release.

But the shift works. As does the concept of Madame Rosa’s creche for the children of local prostitutes, transferred from post-war Paris to Bari, a coastal town in the southern Italian region of Puglia.

The film is a meeting of traumas rather than the retelling of the aftermath of a singular experience. Madame Rosa’s presumed PTSD from her imprisonment, accompanied by a decline into old age (perhaps Alzheimer’s), is preceded and juxtaposed by joint protagonist, Momo’s, history.

Newcomer Ibrahima Gueye is spectacular as the Senegalese orphan who turns to drug-dealing for a sense of autonomy and community after being shunted through the Italian care(less) system. His mother, another prostitute, is implied to have been murdered by Momo’s father after she decided to stop her sex-work.

We are not kept in the dark about these tragedies, but La vita davanti a sé’s timeline tracks the period of reconstruction following loss, rather than the dreadful grind towards crisis. It draws here on the key principle of Trauma Studies: that trauma is first processed, and therefore experienced, after the event has occurred. The understanding that Madame Rosa and Momo build together after a rocky start embodies Cathy Caruth’s message that history ‘[…] is never simply one’s own […] history is precisely the way we are implicated in each other’s traumas’. The same statement could, in fact, be applied to La Ciociara.

It would make sense, then, that Ponti’s creation is heavily Freudian. Lost and rediscovered parents crop up all over the place. Momo has lost his mother, but finds an alternative in Madame Rosa; as does Iosif, the child of another prostitute who endures a long separation from his mother before she comes back for him; Lola is a prostitute who is reunited with her estranged father after he asks to meet his grandchild, Babu. It is through allowing Momo to finally be a child that, ironically, the parent-child roles are reversed and Momo cares for Madame Rosa in her decline.

That’s not all. Sex and death structure the film, with its framework provided by prostitution and the looming threat of Madame Rosa’s demise. Madame Rosa retreats to tunnels underneath her apartment block in order to reflect, using them as a safe space. Ponti suggests that the character feels most secure in her subconscious, the place where most of us fear to go.

These structural Freudian elements are elegant: but some other features are overdone. It seems too much of a coincidence that (the presumably Jewish) Dr. Cohen bears more than a passing physical resemblance to Sigmund Freud. Momo’s subconscious desire for affection and protection is symbolised by a CGI lioness; in the leagues of computer-generated clumsiness, it is second only to Katniss Everdeen’s horrific baby closing Mockingjay: Part Two.

La vita davanti a sé’s strength lies not in its subtlety, however, but in its simplicity. The cast shines brighter for being small. At a time when the future is particularly uncertain, and the longer-term psychiatric effects of Covid-19 are receiving more media coverage, the film’s emphasis on trauma, and on that which lies ahead, strikes home. Covid does not feature at all in the film, so it is an interesting overanalysis to point out that the two protagonists are elderly (Madame Rosa) and Black (Momo) respectively, representing two of the demographics most at risk of contracting the virus.

We close on the image of a pathway and the tones of Laura Pausini’s song, ‘Io sì’: ‘Non lo so, io, che destino è il tuo’, ‘I do not know what your future is’.

Cheesy? Absolutely. True? Completely. As is the major take-away: that we are by nature connected, and we cannot help but rely on each other as we go on surviving.

The HAPPIEST SEASON to be queer

Lily Sheldon
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The HAPPIEST SEASON to be queer

With Christmas comes family and with family comes movies. It’s that time to cuddle up cosy on the sofa and watch yet another Reese Witherspoon or Emma Thompson Christmas movie and wonder how they are still churning out Santa-centric plotlines after so many years on the big screen. These movies are classic because they hit home right when we’re in our homes drawing on themes of family, fights, food and friends. But the most common, most cringe worthy and most nostalgic theme, is that of romantic love. 

But romantic love for who?

Love Actually, the most famous of Christmas films, presents us with ten different “complex” romantic love stories. You have your hopeless romantic in Colin Firth, you have your interracial relationship in Kiera Knightley and Chiwetel Ejiofor, you have your nostalgic young love story in Thomas Brodie-Sangster and we mustn’t be forget your inappropriate arsehole who we love anyway romantic in Hugh Grant. The movie, supposedly, presents us with ten different pairings from all walks of life. Accept, of course, from those walks of life happen to not be *gasps* heterosexual.

The invisibility of LGBTQ+ romance stories in Christmas movies is another theme which links them all together. Whether it’s Kate Winslet’s straight romance in The Holiday or Emilia Clarke’ in Last Christmas, a non-straight person would be lucky if they saw themselves portrayed as an extra trailing behind Reese Witherspoon when she’s running away from a various cheating boyfriend in one of the classics. We have been living in a cinematic reality where it has been deemed more palatable to watch an oversized, magical elf-man who grew up in the north pole come home for Christmas for the first time and fall in love with Zoe Deschanel, then it is to see a same sex couple as the protagonists in a romantic festive story.

That is until the release of Happiest Season this Christmas. Happiest Season takes place in Pittsburgh. The plot revolves around Harper Caldwell, played by Mackenzie Davis, bringing home her girlfriend Abby Holland, played by Kristen Stewart, for Christmas. Abby is considering proposing to Harper this holiday season. It sounds pretty typical so far: romance, food, family… until Abby learns that Harper has not yet come out to her family. And so Abby spends Christmas at Harper’s being shoved back into the closet, only this time it’s a closet situated in her girlfriend’s childhood bedroom.

The movie taps into the complexities of being in a homosexual relationship at a heterosexual holiday time of year. Christmas is about family, but when your family doesn’t know who you really are it’s about deceit and the choice between self-acceptance at the potential cost of familial love or continuously spinning lies that you’ve wanted for so many years to be true.

Unlike much of cinema, the Happiest Season does not settle for having an overtly, stereotypically gay couple as the side characters, but it rather depicts a lipstick lesbian (femme presenting) romance. Much like Santana and Brittany in Glee or George in the show ‘Feel Good’, Happiest season is expanding the representation of Lesbianism to mean something more than the ‘Butch’ archetype. Movies like Happiest Season and TV shows like Feel Good are additionally challenging the determinist idea that people are stuck with, and know for sure about their sexuality from a young age. Instead it introduces the concept of sexuality being a spectrum, with Harper in Happiest Season and George in Feel Good growing up liking boys and then getting serious with a girl. The movie therefore introduces a protagonist who is flexible in their sexuality, a direct challange to the older generation’s fixed conventions.

Christmas time serves as a daunting, periodic reminder for us to think about who we were “Last Christmas” and who we have become this Christmas against the static backdrop of a family Christmas dinner. We are therefore forced into reflection over what we’re doing with our lives and who we’re doing in our lives. There is a reason that so many movies and TV shows either premier, end or centre around Christmas. In Emma Thompson’s film Last Christmas this translates as Katarina reassessing her attitudes towards her job and life. In the coming of age movie Let It Snow a range of teenagers have to confront their romantic intrigues. Life queries at Christmas dominate cinema and have traditionally promoted the conventions of nostalgic hetero-sexual nuclear family dynamics. Happiest Season is working to change that convention. 

Cinema has always served as a type of socialisation, guidance to our subconscious as to what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour and what is acceptable and unacceptable love. Therefore, Kristen Stewart has certainly outdone herself in re-guiding our subconscious away from the Team Edward or Team Jacob dichotomy and towards an organic twenty first century romance that many need to be exposed to. Thank the gay gods that she is no longer entertaining that scary vampire-werewolf Twilight romantic triangle but is in fact engaging in something which, in cinematic history, has been seen as far more scary and unnatural then kissing a werewolf: a lesbian relationship.

Perhaps, after watching Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis’ love story develop, that 16 year old girl questioning her sexuality in Liverpool will not ask Santa to be straight for Christmas for the tenth time in a row. But, instead, with Kristen Stewart’s side-parting in her subconscious, will rather ask Santa for something just a bit more scientifically sound, something just a bit more achievable, something that is love, actually.

A Worm on What If

Anna Roberts
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A Worm on What If

A little worm slimes its way through the grass and the bracken, and looks up to the sky. Learned in the classics and, indeed, abreast of current ‘pop cultural’ events, his little brain cycles around his slimy head. A delicate chain bobs around his neck (his neck being the whole length of his body, which is just one long neck really); he bought it after watching Normal Worms. Maybe if he looked like worm-Connell, he imagines, things would have been different. Maybe worm-Sharon wouldn’t have left him for worm-Darren. But, he reflects, there is no point in ruminating on the what-ifs. After all, worm-Darren will have to put up with worm-Sharon’s obsession with true crime documentaries now, not him. Still, though, what if?

What if, when the leaves turn green in the spring they brought with them a scent of fresh apple, and the dappled light through the green leaves was apple-dappled green? Wouldn’t the stream that ran through the rocks that your grandparents showed you, with the stones that hop across like a passage to Fairyland, smell beautiful if it was apple-dappled in the growing light of a pregnant spring? If the beams of great Phoebus lit up apple-green leaves and when the moon rose the smell lingered like a beautiful pre-Covid breath on the air, wouldn’t you look back on the apple-green spring days and covet them in your head when you were forty-years-old and tired? 

And what if, when Orpheus went to the underworld, the age-old ague of uncertainty had not plagued him because he could smell, so very close to the surface of the world, the apple-green smell of Persephone? Wouldn’t the nights (apple-scent lingering but fading) feel far safer if his lover was not, as she is as we speak right now, in hell?  

But what if, when every year at apple-time (as spring would come to be known) the apple-smell appeared, everyone would feel sick and would moan at the apple-smell and the dappled-appled light? Would people sneeze and would their noses drip when the apple-smell stung their eyes? Would we curse those apple-smelled months and wish the dappled light of the green-leaf springtime were un-appled? 

Such is the nature of a haunting what-if. Conjecture is the bane of a life lived in the world: we must, like Orpheus, live in a now that is dappled by the strength of what is. 

The worm shakes his slimy little head. ‘But what do I know?’ he asks, and utters the age-old maxim: 

‘I’m just a worm’.

Artwork by Amir Pichhadze
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