In his latest film, We Have a Pope (originally called Habemus Papam), Moretti, who has won a Palme d’Or at Cannes for previous work, tells the story of a cardinal who is elected to the papacy and, in the course of the summons to the Vatican balcony to greet the crowd, has a nervous attack and is unable to fulfill his duty to God or his people. Moretti conceived the film with this image in mind: the Pope-elect sandwiched between the earthly weight of the global faithful and their expectations and the spiritual weight of God’s message.  
      
Speaking to me through an interpreter, Moretti explains: “The whole film was born of that idea, of a pope who is a few metres from the balcony, which faces on to the world… and he just cannot go on. I wanted to convey that sense of being inadequate, in private and in public, of not being at the height of expectations – not all the time, but some of the time.” During filming Moretti showed the script to Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, who spoke approvingly of it. Moretti, an atheist, is keen to stress that he did so not in order to seek the cardinal’s blessing, but out of curiosity as to how he would judge it.

The film certainly pokes fun, but a gentle ribbing is all it amounts to. We witness Australian cardinals, new in town and keen to escape the papal conclave (which is maintained throughout the Pope’s period of soul-searching), to view the latest Caravaggio exhibition and drink low-froth cappuccinos. A Swiss Guard with a liking for Mercedes Sosa bolero is enlisted to stand in for the Pontiff.  

In a cultural milieu that seems to promote bunga bunga-type television presenters and buffone popular comedy, Moretti is perhaps conditioned into parsimony with his choice of humour. One interviewer quotes him as saying: ”I like a type of comedy that subtracts. My type of comedy does not overdo things.” Moretti illustrated for the interviewer by placing crockery, glasses and ashtrays in a pile. “This is traditional Italian comedy,” he said, “putting everything in and overdoing things.” After dispersing the objects he proclaimed: “This is my comedy.”

Moretti does lapse into obdurate, bunch-shouldered silence when I push him for themes in his comedic set pieces, although his severity itself has something slightly hammy about it. One senses that this would be the worst thing you could say to him; his cinema has always been obsessed with the flaws of all things Italian, from his Caiman film, which simultaneously attacks the Italian film industry (a frequent target) and the original caimano, Berlusconi. The director released the film weeks before the parliamentary elections in 2006 and it reportedly swayed the vote, with Berlusconi losing by a narrow margin.

Moretti’s films have been described as extensions of commedia all’italiana (more or less Italian film comedy in the style you would expect it) and, as Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli point out in The Cinema of Nanni Moretti: “The most distinctive component of Moretti’s humour is its ‘disenchanted, reflexive and sad’ irony, which contrasts with … commedia all’italiana, and can more appropriately be described as derisive, as seeking the complicity of the audience and at times even as coarse.”

Moretti’s exposure to the coarseness of this Italian genre has clearly informed his irony and taught him personal restraint. But when we meet his Italian-ness it is as apparent as his departed prime minister’s: flamboyance in relief.  

Concrete themes are thin on the ground for a director who specialises in postmodernism. Discussing the scenes where the Pope wanders around Rome like a lost soul searching for redemption, Moretti says: “There are parts of the movie that we wanted to show without being too literal about it. They were showing but were left for people to see. When I show the Pope roaming the city among ordinary people, I don’t want to explain. It could be a hint to the Catholic Church about something – to open itself to worlds which are different from its own.

“Likewise, without wanting to be too heavy-handed about it, I wanted to show a psychoanalyst, who is atheist and slightly deranged, who all of a sudden finds himself interacting with these 80-year-old cardinals.”

The film’s climactic scene has the cardinals (imprisoned within the Vatican for their interminable conclave, while the errant Pope wanders the streets) taking part in a volleyball tournament orchestrated by the psychoanalyst. The teams are divided by continents, and at one stage the analyst tries to elect captains based on the cardinals who received best odds for election in the Italian newspapers. Of course, the scene has an irreverent aspect which might cloy with some Catholics, but it also is one of crowning, music-led choreography, mirroring the “musical” scenes in previous Moretti pictures Aprile and Sweet Dreams. The scene was filmed in a cortile interno, or inner courtyard, of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. Moretti says: “There is a weight to the scenes that I can express with the use of the ‘musical’ device, as well as elsewhere in the film when we listen to the music of Mercedes Sosa when the radio plays in the Pope’s quarters. I felt here the cardinals were in a sense liberated. I liked the clash between this deranged psychoanalyst and these 80-year-old cardinals who are like children. The cardinals find themselves without a guide because they witness the breakdown of the Pope, and through the actions of this silly psychoanalyst they managed to forget for an instance the crisis they are living through.”   
    
The film also shows the Pope experimenting with psychoanalysis to cope with his crisis. Moretti, who often appears in his own films, plays the analyst, a role which contains autobiographical aspects. Moretti often includes such self-referential roles for himself, sometimes appearing as a director, a tactic which has been compared to Federico Fellini’s 8½ or Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt. Coincidentally Michel Piccoli, the star alongside Brigitte Bardot in Contempt 48 years ago, plays the Pope in this film, in a role he has been acclaimed for.

In We Have a Pope, Moretti the analyst feels compassion for the Pope’s plight. “Everyone always tells me: ‘As an analyst, you are the best.’ My wife is also an analyst, and she can’t deal with it.” The Pope and the analyst sit down for a session surrounded by all the cardinals, rather like a scene in his compatriot Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor, before a put-upon assistant tells Moretti: “The idea of the subconscious is absolutely contrary to the teachings of the Church.” I ask Moretti if he believes that psychoanalysis and Catholicism are compatible. “Let’s be clear: this is first and foremost a funny scene,” he says. “We are trying to make the audience understand that the Pope is clashing with a representative of a world that was alien to the Catholic faith. I just wanted to show that the Catholic Church traditionally is closed to new things and would have to make an enormous effort in order to meet somewhere in the middle with the world of psychoanalysis.”

Moretti took care with his portrayal of the Vatican’s interior. “In juxtaposition with the previous American representations of the Vatican, I wanted to represent it as less baroque and more austere,” he says, “because in a way it was fairer, more true to life. Often films that feature the Vatican use palazzos that are of successive periods and tend to be more over the top. We also made a façade of the front of St Peter’s, which was constructed in Cinecittà [Rome’s famous film studios].”

I ask with trepidation if I can see a photograph of the façade. Moretti considers my request, looks crossly into the corner of the room and produces a card for his personal film company with a flourish. The motherly translator smiles at me encouragingly. Perhaps not all journalists get this card. Mr Awkward is lowering his hackles.

There is a scene in Hype Williams’ film Belly that illustrates his style. Nas, DMX and another friend arrive at DMX’s house after robbing a nightclub. DMX retires to his beige pool table while Nas and his accomplice sit back in the vaulted, white New York loft, in their patent black low-slung pants and scalpeled fades. “I loved this nigga’s crib man. It always reminded me of what I wanted to have, eventually. A phat new crib like his shit? One day…” narrates Nas in his husky teen-octave as they squeak into their cream armchairs. And then they slap on Gummo. You know, Gummo, that fucking weird Harmony Korine film that you always vowed to watch after he did Kids but looked a bit too oddball in the posters to actually invest in. “Your rabbit smells like pussy” screams an eleven-year-old onscreen to at a boy in pink cardboard bunny ears.  The scene jarrs in the sleek white crib, the crew edge uncomfortably on their nice leather seats, and Hype Williams’ double-edged sword cuts sharp into the room.
 
Hype Williams was the richest 29-year old in rap at the turn of the millennium. He might have invented – had Third Eye not got there before in 1993 - the term bling, but basically coloured it in, inventing the Maybach/Cristal/Cessna concept, with stubbornly maverick twist; energising the image that hip hop had, putting it on a global platform and spawning the bugbear of every conscious rapper since – the MTV rap video.

Born in 1970 in Hollis in Queens, New York, the son of a Honduran and an African-American, he went to school with Run-DMC and LL Cool J, and began shooting minor promotional videos for Russell Simmons’ label Def Jam after graduating from tea boy. As a 14-year-old he would watch The Godfather once a week, alongside Scarface, Once Upon a Time in America and 2001: Space Odyssey. He drew his inspiration from Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jules Verne, J.R. Tolkien and The Chronicles of Narnia.

His pictorial style is focused on colour. His emphasis on light is key – his depictions of olives, lip-gloss primaries like poppy red and indigo were key in giving hip hop a new-found MTV-era profile. His video for Missy Elliot’s ‘The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]‘ is perhaps his most seminal, and illustrated his double-edge angle. He dressed an already overweight and seemingly-unmarketable Elliot in an inflatable bin bag: Elliot remembers meeting with Hype to discuss the outfit: “He told me he wanted to make me look like the Michelin Man. I was like, ‘Excuse me?’ And he was like, ‘Trust me. It’s going to be hot.’” The results were historic. Elliot’s unforgettable teak-purple lips tease you through the fish-eye as she manoeuvres the bubbling air pockets in her trash bag outfit like she was negotiating a rogue body inside the plastic. The trick was to turn Elliot’s weakness into her strength – the hardbody aesthetics of MTV rap chicks turned on its head.

Another important video in Hype William’s catalogue was his ‘Woo-Hah!! Got You All In Check’ clip for Busta Rhymes. Here Busta looks like his baseball coat is a strait-jacket he’s trying to escape from, as he chest-beats and hyperacts in a low-rider on a neon avenue, the manic energy infecting across the screen. Williams used wide-screen and fish-eye, as he explains: “For Busta I used wide-angle lenses because he is very animated, a very extreme artist, and I was able to exaggerate his already exaggerated movements.  And Missy Elliott for her ‘The Rain [Supa Dupa Fly]’ video.  I was such a fan of all these big French filmmakers and all the Grace Jones projects that redefined the black woman on film and in music that I wanted Missy to have an identity like Grace Jones’s.  Something very new and very different and very European.  When we did her wide-angle stuff, we nailed a specific look for her, and that was really her launchpad.  We made those videos look exactly how we felt about the performances in the songs.”

Hype has his role in some of the side-stories of the bling era. In 1999, he was the prophet of P Diddy’s demise in his ‘Hate Me Now’ video. Diddy and Nas both appeared crucified in the mini-epic – Diddy wanted the scene cut – it wasn’t – later that year Diddy was arrested and Nas’s manager attacked in what spelled a big downslide in Combs’s career.

Downslide was the term that could be loosely applied to the entire industry about that time. In 2000, Williams was described by The Face at The Millennium Dome, where he was coordinating a fashion shoot “While dinner is in transit, Jay-Z appears with a five-man entourage. The diamonds around Jay’s neck shimmer in rainbow shades under the show lights.  Hype rolls up his sleeves and begins thrusting his arms enthusiastically as he explains to Jay, who is due to open the show the next day, what will be expected of him.  Curiously, Hype’s regular soft, measured speech has given way to a rasping, round-the-way vernacular: ‘Niggas be like rhymin’ they rhymes,’ he growls, ‘knowhamsayin? I know you wit dat.’

“The pair retreat into a corner of the auditorium for a quiet word, though it doesn’t stay quiet for long.  ‘Yo Ab!’ Hype bellows over to his right-hand man, Abdur.  ‘Did you get that brochure for the yacht?’  He’s obviously about to acquire the ultimate Big Willie status symbol and is keen to share the news with play king Jay.”

The rainbow shaded diamonds, the yacht brochures, would in a few years all fade into post-credit crunch oblivion for an industry, which along with the rest of the music biz, saw the bottom fall out of its finances with the advent of free download. Videos no longer got million dollar budgets and online saw less people watching MTV.

“Spurred by economic woes and technological advances, younger directors are forging a new hip-hop video aesthetic, using HD cameras and impromptu settings” announced Spin magazine in 2009. “Some financially strapped artists exploit the new directors’ ingenuity to replicate the glossy look of movies or TV shows (or old Diddy clips)”. Diddy clips! Here was Williams’ work, the froth of the champagne wave, spat back out at him by the newbies who were taking his boys’ place on the rap stage. 

Aligned with this development was a remarked change in the quality of Williams’ output. A biting piece in The Village Voice called Williams “incredibly bland”; his approach to Kanye West’s ‘All Of The Lights’ video, was replete with “medium shots of Kanye, Rihanna, and Kid Cudi performing and Kanye on top of a cop car. The viewer’s left waiting for it all to come together; instead, it congeals into a mess.” Williams had varied his output to include feature films, fashion magazine cover shoots [his emphasis on colour and lighting shows how he always approached his videos as a photographer] and commercials [including ‘that’ Gap advert: ‘Gap Khaki Soul’], telling interviewers that he was sick of the restrictive medium of the music video.

As the years went on, the recurring question ‘what was the favourite cut that you did?’ always met with the response: ‘Can It Be All So Simple’ by the Wu-Tang Clan. The video is a pure Staten Island kitchen sink drama, with a sliding camera filming Raekwon detailing the tribulations of life in the New York outer boroughs, boroughs Williams knew. As he says: “I always saw superstardom in my friends. To me they had to be the same size in their music and performance ability as Madonna, Bruce Springsteen, Billy Idol.” Through him, they became that. After the excess implodes, Hype remembers the good old days – like Gladys Knight in that favourite Wu-Tang track. Can it be that it was all so simple then.

The exhibition of two such wildly differing painters as Cy Twombly and Nicolas Poussin has incited outrage and interest on the London art scene. Poussin was the 17^th Century Classical painter, Twombly was the 20^th and 21^st century painter in the Abstract Expressionist style. Both painters took heavy inspiration from Classical themes, and produced a collection of work, which, while the titles may be similar, have dramatically and at times shockingly different outcomes.

The basis for this juxtaposition, in the eyes of curator Nicholas Cullinan, is the influence Rome had on both their careers. Both painters arrived at the city aged 30, 323 years apart. The showings of the two painters contain shared antique visions of Venus, Pan, Parnassus and Apollo, and the exhibition is divided into sections covering Arcadia, Bacchanalia and the Four Seasons, which both artists attempted aged 64.

The 323 years that separate these two painters have make for some highly unusual wall-sharing. Whilst Twombly’s works are spreads of light colour on white with scrawled logos and a spare, unfinished look, Poussin’s renditions of Classical and Biblical themes became even more formalized than those of his heroes from the early Italian Renaissance.

Nicolas Poussin was born in 1594 in Normandy. In 1624 he travelled to Rome and as a young artist worked in the studio of Domenichino, the Baroque painter from the Carracci school, who influenced him with his lucid composition and cool colouring. After an early coup with a commission for an altarpiece in St Peter’s, he succumbed to a serious illness and thenceforth adhered to his Classical rejection of the Baroque style - in favour of more measured style on a smaller scale for high-brow patrons from the bourgeoisie. In Peter and Linda Murray’s Dictionary of Art and Artists Poussin’s late style is described as: “Essays in solid geometry, with facial expressions eliminated and immobile figures…they are the logical exposition of his theories: a picture must contain the maximum of moral content expressed in a composition which shall convey its intellectual content.”

Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia, a place he would proudly remember had “more columns … than in all ancient Rome and Greece”. His parents first discovered his talent for drawing when he reproduced a Picasso painting on the cover of a monograph they had given him for his twelfth birthday. He became friends with figures like Robert Rauschenberg, travelling with him to Europe and North Africa in 1952. By 1957 he went to Rome and quickly adopted Classical themes in his painting before marrying an Italian heiress who was the sister of a wealthy patron of the arts in the city. He lived out much of his life in the city in a palazzo near the Farnese where he worked at a happy seclusion from the Abstract Expressionists he had left behind in New York. His real fame would only come in 1987 when an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery opened the floodgates for widespread critical acclaim. 

The first room of the exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery does not quite convey the full dissonance of the works displayed: we are greeted with two curving octagons by Twombly which contain a sea in whipping, vivid hunter green slashes and whites, both threateningly alive when compared to the pastoral calm of the Poussin works – a mellow-coloured Roman road with reclining peasants and another low-lit piece, The Arcadian Shepherds. The shepherds in this piece are uncovering an hidden tomb bearing  the inscription: ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’ . The rustic idyll of these shepherds, and the clashing spray of the Twombly octagons, are both challenged by this reminder of mortality.    

What immediately proceeds is an assault on the senses. The carefully sculptural forms of Poussin with their immediately perceptible rigidities of form are shattered by the white noise of Arcadia with its scribbling on white paper. More successful is the ‘Pan and the Bacchanalia’ section, where we see a liver-coloured smear from Twombly that seems part wine, part excreta mirror the excesses of Bacchus. On the opposite wall we see the same subject handled with a corresponding formality by Poussin. The effect is a tension release.

The final work by Twombly is his The Four Seasons, 1960-1964. This room is a pleasure after the rigours of such an exhibition, and fittingly my favourite was autumn. The mellow fruitfulness [he was a big fan of Keats] is well captured, with a hint of a deeper arterial sap also on the palette. Catch this show while you can, even if you choose to ignore the comparisons and enjoy each artist in his own right.

Why do I have to introduce John Cage? His name should be a salver-balanced card of introduction into the high esteem of any lover of the arts, the equivalent of Jackson Pollock, Marcel Duchamp and Mark Rothko. And yet music never made it quite as far in the 20th century, at least in classical terms, and the world should sit back and ask itself why. In his book, Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen, David Stubbs notes that the jarring polyphony of Béla Bartók and György Ligeti was used by Stanley Kubrick to illustrate the high horror of his closing scenes in The Shining; how the atonal school of Japanese music gagaku was used by the ad men to soundtrack migrane in headache commercials. His point is that unlike modern art, modern classical music can be highly distressing through its all-absorbing, immersive presence. We can shut our eyes, but we can’t close our ears.

Cage was a polymath who outside modern classical also embraced the fields of music criticism, printmaking and painting. His most identifiable technique was to incorporate the use of chance, or aleatoric devices in the composition of his music. He composed Concerto For Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra in late 1950 using for the first time, dice to determine the outcome of his work. Later he would programme early computers to throw dice for him. The New Yorker critic Alex Ross, in his book The Rest is Noise paints Cage as a skilled publicist who “browsed through the literature of Zen Buddhism which supplied him with an all-accepting, ‘whatever happens will happen’ approach…”        

His supposed “whatever happens will happen” approach is contradicted by his visual work, that I saw flanked by his east London followers in the Waterloo recently. One particularly delineated bow of thread, neat against a mottled page, brought to mind Ted Hughes’ description of Marianne Moore’s conversation: “…a needle / Unresting – darning incessantly / Chain-mail with crewel-work flowers / Birds and fish of the reef / In phosphor-bronze wire”. It is this tension, between the flesh of creation and Cage’s meanness of execution, that can lead us to re-examine Cage’s ‘unassailable’ (as the catalogue boldly refers to him) reputation, through the prism of his drawings.

Cage was born in Los Angeles in 1912, but by the 1940s moved to New York and throughout his life there associated with and drew inspiration from visual artists like Pollock, Rothko and Robert Rauschenberg. He would often cross the street to avoid a drunken Pollock on his way through Lower East Side, but would draw a more fruitful association with Rauschenberg. The artist’s plain white canvasses so impressed Cage in 1951 that he decided to create a musical equivalent: 4’33”. This was four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, performed first by pianist David Tudor, who would walk to a piano, open the lid, and sit immobile except for to open and close the lid at the start and end of each movement. There is a work similar to Rauschenberg’s in Cage’s current exhibition: On The Surface [number 22].

The floor was teeming with visitors, all visibly Cage fans – eager for a taste of the legend’s work. The difference, highlighted in Stubbs’ book, between 20^th century art and 20^th classical music is the former’s ability to subsist as ‘an Original’ – ie ‘a Hockney Original’. John Cage died in 1992, and since then no ad originem performance of his music is of course possible. So we are left with the drawings. His colours are much more successful than his thin mean lines – one piece, New River Watercolors, Series I has the taste of washed-out earth sediment in its chicory background and algae trails, to be then revived with a rich marine swoop, and sealed with a light red ring.

The overall feeling of the exhibition is spare and minimalist, with muddled black lines making us think of the hundreds of layers in his Williams Mix, his pioneering experiment with spliced acoustic tape that combined ‘city’, ‘country’ and ‘small’ sounds among many others. He uses pastels in square collages, but even these soft colours have an edge of metal to them, and splinter of the theory that underpinned his every move. 

Interviewed by the American art historian Irving Sandler, Cage said how he felt about the intensity and excitement of Jackson Pollock: “Oh, none of those aspects interested me. I wanted to change my way of seeing, not my way of feeling. I’m perfectly happy about my feelings…I don’t want to disturb my feelings, and above all, I don’t want someone else to disturb my feelings.” It is this thought, this stickler’s adherence to “chaotic” theory, the dice, the Zen, that led Cage to leave undisturbed the biggest chaos of all: his emotional subconscious. This would have been the biggest madness of all, one he wanted to leave undisturbed, while the computer threw dice up above.

The crossed purposes of Estevez and Martin Sheen – who had been asked by Ethel Kennedy to get the site razed – characterize their typical, contradictory father-son relations. On the one hand Sheen – Catholic, honourable, cultish – is a perfect role model. On the other, that same success – and here his connections on the LA City Council – have caused serious headaches for his son, whose own truly billboard moment came in 1988.

The Way is Estevez’s latest directorial release, starring his father. It tells the story of a father [Sheen] who loses his son [Estevez] and walks the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage in a journey of grief and posthumous father-son bonding. When I put it to Estevez that in it he has reconstructed his own value to his father, he smiles benignly, unpiqued: “You know what? I’ve written my own eulogy. That never crossed my mind.”

When we meet in the Soho Hotel in London Estevez is every inch the laminate movie star. Anxious waiting room exchanges about uncooperative A-listers and frantic PR exhortations ‘not to mention Charlie’ had prepared me for the worst, and the ‘he’s much …-er in real life’ maxim did not apply. Embalmed-smooth cheek bones, eyes like two blue marbles, glossed chestnut ‘do and an anonymous navy ensemble completed my introduction to the high life.

Estevez, best known for his 80s movies The Breakfast Club, Young Guns and St Elmo’s Fire, could have had a different career if it hadn’t been for a man called David Blum. He was the author of an infamous article in June 10, 1985 issue of New York magazine called ‘Hollywood’s Brat Pack’. This coined the future identity of a group of actors that would be their millstone. Catty descriptions of Estevez and co [Rob Lowe, Sean Penn, Judd Nelson] roaring around LA in open-top jeeps abounded – one typical story has a young Estevez mocking a porn star for thinking that passing the bar exam qualifies you for making drinks.

Estevez’s take on his youth is different – he describes a nomadic existence. In 1976, during the Philippines monsoon season a young Estevez went to stay with his father for Apocalypse Now: “It was madness, I was 14 years old, in the Philippines, unsupervised, unleashed, I was wreaking havoc. The fact that my parents allowed Laurence Fishbourne and I to get in a Jeepney and go to Manila for the weekend, check into a hotel…You know this is during martial law – President Marcos – and there we were, two 14 year-old boys, on a weekend in Manila like a couple of sailors on leave… It was madness – I drank a lot, lost my virginity – it was dreadful. That was the Philippines. At one point some of the crew members pulled my mother aside and said ‘Get your children outta here’ and so I did – I got out – and the following year my father got sick – and I went back. Yeah it was strange…”

The Way sees Sheen play Tom, a Californian optician who is playing a round of golf when he receives news of his son’s death in the Pyrenees. He then travels to St. Jean Pied de Port, France to identify Daniel [Estevez]’s remains. He chooses to cremate the body and complete the Camino his son was on, whilst sprinkling his remains along the journey. On the Camino, he picks up a selection of lost souls seeking salvation – namely Sarah, Jack and Joost. Sarah is a cynical Canadian recovering from an abusive relationship and a traumatic abortion, Joost is a clownish Dutchman seeking to lose weight and save his marriage, whilst Jack is an insufferably verbose Irish writer seeking to recover from writer’s block. Tom suffers these fools in silence, until one memorable drunken outburst. Here Tom’s anger at his bereavement bubbles over and the steel behind Sheen’s benevolent exterior shows, as he lashes Joost for being a Dutch druggie and Jack for being a credit card-funded sham artist.

The dialogue is cleverly written [when Estevez is not inserting ‘have a nice day’ platitudes into the mouths of peremptory Basque waiters] – he explains: “I try to write dialogue that I thought was real, and I was writing for very smart, quick-witted characters. Tom doesn’t suffer fools, but he is more thoughtful than some of the other characters – that again has to do with his age. I wanted the three other pilgrims to be emblematic of parts of Daniel – and for him to become emblematic to Sarah, Jack and Joost in many ways that he could never be to his own son. He would learn more about his son in death than he ever did in life. And ultimately what I wanted to create as a dynamic was the Wizard of Oz – Joost is the cowardly lion, Sarah is the tin man, and Jack is the scarecrow. Instead of Oz, they’re off to Santiago de Compostela.”

On the actor’s wrist is a multicoloured rosary. I ask him if he is a Catholic like his father: “I’m in the middle of my journey – of discovering what it is and how I connect to it. But I’ll tell you something – after and during filming The Way I stopped using the word coincidence. There were too many events that happened that were just providential. They were miracles. The crew were like ‘woah’ there is some strange eerie glow around you and we seem to have this charmed shoot – and you got to a point where you couldn’t deny it.

“For instance, in northern Spain it rains the whole time – it rained twice. We were warned that shooting between September and November we would probably be delayed and we would never make our schedule, and the two days it rained we were shooting interiors. There were just things that would happen that were…they were gifts. A train would pull up in the middle of a shot and 40 tourists would get off and they would walk through it and the Assistant Director was losing his mind, screaming and yelling, and I would say, ‘Hang on, this is a gift. How do we utilize this?’”

“My son went on the Camino in 2003, met a young lady in Burgos and fell in love. They got married in the town itself.” The cathedral? “No, in the Casa Rural where they actually met, just outside the town” he ends, with careful humility.

 Estevez, who has been married to Paula Abdul, engaged to Demi Moore and been Tom Cruise’s best man has been on a learning curve since that article in New York magazine. He is arrogant, sure, who wouldn’t be – yet other less typical attributes on show are a dope-glazed way of trailing sentence endings, and his famous laugh – however when we meet there is a varnish, subliminal yet apparent in his every move, that dilutes his effect like he is talking through a medium.

A way of understanding him is his relationship with his father. Martin Sheen, with serious roles in films like The Departed and Apocalypse Now has cemented his place among the serious actors of his generation. Estevez can emerge as a comedy figure, best known for his spoofs in Men at Work [which he directed] and his funny act as a jock in The Breakfast Club. At the same time he is, as eldest son, very close to his father, in looks and in their attitudes of matured responsibility. The Charlie Sheen debacle may have seen Estevez grow in that respect, in his own way outpacing the man who won three Golden Globes and TV’s highest salary.

He mentions he likes Almodovar, and I ask him about a line the director uses in one of his films: ‘Success has no taste or smell, and once you get used to it, it’s as if it didn’t exist’. “Pedro said that? I don’t know how I feel about that. I’m not sure if you ever get used to it. It’s something you can taste, and it is tangible, when it goes away, when it returns… I’ll get back to you.”

CERT 15, 101 MINS

Watching Jean-Luc Godard’s latest film is a difficult experience. The bombardment of images, dislocated as a shattered glass, with vestigial English subtitles and monologues about geometry, European politics and Balzac do not make for an easy couple of hours.

Two quotations were doing the rounds among the New Wave director-critics of the early 1950s like Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and Rohmer. The first was introduced by Alexandre Astruc, quoting Orson Welles in a work that coined the film essay genre: “What interests me in the cinema is abstraction.” Another came from Paul Valéry after the Second World War: “Now we know that all civilisation is mortal.”

This film essay uses images of Greek statues smiling implacably above the sea, as they do in Godard’s Mépris. In Mépris, these gods strike at the hubris of the Hollywood film industry. Film Socialisme is, in a way, about hubris, the decay of Europe as a culture, the failure of federation.

The images are formidable. The opening and oft-returned-to frames of the wake of the cruise ship (where the first part is set) are beautiful, cut with the tacky, grainily captured shots of the nightclubs and malls contained within this gigantic cruiser and the dislocated characters living in this floating state, surrounded by the shifting beauty of the sea. The action moves to a service station in the second part (Godard’s Hail Mary, which was condemned by Pope John Paul II, was also set in one) – a no man’s land in France off a motorway. Here, a black camerawoman ponders the meaning of Europe. “What is Europe?” she asks. “A German composer? A French writer? Italian singers? Nozze di Fiiiigaro!”

Again we see collections of ideas – a nubile French teenage girl stands in a garage and says: “My tongue sticks out, it goes in the mud. It’s done. I’ve created the image.” There is a touching scene when a six-yearold boy softly feels his way up his mother’s legs as she is washing plates. He feels her behind, eyes scrunched shut, and turns her around and feels the contours of her face. The scene is lovingly tender when he breaks with the nonsequitur: “What are these many eyes that watch in the night?”

We see the staple of literary references (“Jean-Luc pecks at books like a hen pecks in a garden,” says his friend Luc Mollet). Here, we have Balzac: tellingly his Illusions perdues (“if you make fun of Balzac, I’ll kill you,” shouts the sixyear-old) – and Gide. Negative photography is used as in Alphaville and the colourful dividing texts are reminiscent of Pierrot le Fou. Towards the end of his career the famous actors, the Belmondos and the Delons, were replaced by lesser figures. Here, we have Patti Smith, appearing in a very secondary role. In one shot she traipses through a departure lounge playing a guitar.

There is a lasting image of a woman framed by the rose and aquatint dusk, hair blowing over the deck, transposed with the strident voice of a dictator. This reminds us of Werner Herzog, of his showing us Vietnam napalm firestorms set over a Carlos Gardel tango, the “soundlessly collateral and incompatible” elements of life that Louis MacNeice writes about in his poem “Snow”. Themes such as these have little ground to make roots, however, as the movie jolts on, encompassing too many cultures (Odessa, Athens, Egypt, Barcelona) and too many ideas to ever draw his essay into a successful conclusion.

In an interview in Les Inrockuptibles about the film Godard said: “The technological world we live in today owes everything to Greece. Who invented logic? Aristotle – if this and then that, then this. Logic. This is what the dominant powers use all day… As a consequence, today, everyone owes Greece money. Greece could ask the contemporary world one thousand billion in royalties, and it would be logical to pay them” – a very fresh perspective on the current Greek crisis.

The film’s dense, oblique structure harks back to the the first cinematic work Godard created, 59 years ago – his fledgling review for the eighth issue of the Cahiers du Cinéma was also seen as dense and hard to follow by his contemporaries. But what must be said about this perhaps unlikeable film is that it is undeniably provoking: intellectual in an old-fashioned, engagé way. And visually – as a Bedouin tethers a dappled mule with a television on its back – it’s as brilliant as anything out this year.

There is a similar scenario in Armadillo, at the climax of a night op, where a Danish platoon is hemmed in by Taliban fighters in Helmland. Ølby, a Danish soldier empties his magazine into a ditch ten a three metres away where four Taliban are hiding. He then follows it up with a grenade. A few minutes later he goes and checks the damage, and sees survivors. He then fires, by his own estimate, 30-40 shots into them. These decisions earned him a Gold Horse medal, and the Danish Army a media hate swarm once the film was premiered at Cannes in May last year.

Armadillo is a documentary about Danish soldiers fighting in Afghanistan. It chronicles the boredom, fear, hierarchy and sepia machismo of the military experience – often shot in a treated, slate-green colour with incredible bravery by the embedded crew – when shots sound on patrol the camera swings wildly to the ground we all feel the random panic of guerilla war.

Janus Metz, the film’s Danish director won Grand Prix, Semaine de la Critique prize at Cannes for this, his first feature-length documentary. Commenting on the film he said he sought to find out “how perceptions of masculinity, the good, the bad, the civilized and the barbaric are reflected in action and how these concepts are adapted in this ‘coming of age’.

What’s interesting is what this last concept means to a Danish soldier in this film. Becoming barbaric, as these Viking progeny do, seems to be the prerequisite of coming of age in the 21^st Century context. The soldiers exchange anatomical descriptions of their mutilated enemy, sketch coups de grace with cute finger gestures and tongue-clicks, and rear about their camp on motorbikes as the dust rises, meeting the smoke of the campfire and the whoops of emancipated tech-gen kids ‘going primal’.

Aside these Lord of the Flies moments, the story describes meetings with Afghan farmers and their children, who are universally hostile in that strained and silent manner that strangers in a foreign land communicate. The foreign soldiers kill their cows, plough up crops and destroy buildings, and can offer them nothing but occasional cash and slit throats if they betray the Taliban to them. 

The protagonist, Mads, is a vulnerable, hyena-faced young private, whose domestic scenes with his family at home are filmed with great tact, as are the mobile, expressive anxieties that light up his face on frequent occasions in his deployment. Then there is Ølby, the cherubic alpha male private who shouts and wrestles his way to the top of the pecking order and is lead in scenes of Vietnam film-style maleness – back-flipping off bridges into water on a sunny afternoon to a chilly, etherized score.

Much has been made of the photography and treatment techniques in the film, which critics have compared to the Dogme 95 movement and Apocalypse Now. The film is similar in format to Restrepo, an American documentary on US troops fighting in the highly dangerous Korangal Valley in Afghanistan

Some have said that the film blurs the line between film and documentary merely through its treatment – that the olive-filtered shots of the Afghan countryside, and the halcyon scenes of off-duty fun are too coloured-in to be strictly real.

By June 2010 Janus Metz calculated that 300-400 articles had been written in the Danish media about Armadillo – the Danish minister of defence, Gitte Lillelund Bech watched the film after its premiere and the controversial final engagement prompted an investigation from government which ultimately cleared the soldiers from any wrongdoing.

The most permanent scenes in the film are the battle scenes – specifically the night op engagement [actually occurring at dawn] where the absorptive matt green effects on the fields and [surprisingly lush] hedgerows create an atmosphere a little like Saving Private Ryan. Something that becomes apparent is the incredibly arbitrary process of command – trying to organize anything cogent in the ditch of a ploughed field – with or without radios – is clearly almost impossible, especially when the enemy is in small numbers and dressed like any other farmer. Tolstoy makes the same point in War and Peace about the Battle of Austerlitz – that the physical task of coordinating the movements of a large number of men in a canvass as broad as a battle field is an impossible one.

A lasting image from the film is that of a soldier, filmed seconds after he has been shot. His blacked-up face is punctuated with his grey-pink tongue flicking through his teeth, as his eyes jolt as wildly as a shot bird’s wings – another reminder of the animal that emerges during war.

CERT 12A, 113 MINS

In Farewell, director-turnedactor Emir Kusturica plays a turncoat KGB analyst disillusioned with life inside the Soviet bloc. Kusturica has a thing against despot regimes. In 1993 the Serbian challenged Vojislav Šešelj, then leader of the ultra-nationalist Radical party and currently on trial for war crimes, to a duel in the heart of Belgrade. The time would be high noon, the weapon could be of his choosing. Šešelj refused, saying he didn’t want to be “accused of the murder of an artist”.

‘Artist’ is right. Emir Kusturica has tried his hand variously as director (winning two Palme d’Or at Cannes), Slav-punk guitarist, and actor (he was nominated for a Golden Globe in The Widow of Saint-Pierre). His co-star in this movie, Guillaume Canet, is also perhaps better known as a director, for both Tell No One and Little White Lies.

The spy genre seems to be alive and kicking again, with films like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, starring Gary Oldman, and Bond 23 set for release in the next year, and the enduring popularity of the Spooks series. Recently, however, the film industry has promoted gadget-heavy schlock instead of classic Cold War subterfuge.

This film sees a more technical, Le Carré-esque version of the formula. The action is set mainly in Moscow, beginning when low-level French engineer Pierre is accosted in his car by Kusturica’s KGB analyst, Grigoriev, and passed a list of highly-placed US government figures working for the Soviet cause. Pierre at first dismisses the approach, but is then informed of its importance by his seniors, who pester him for more juice. A bond is thus established between Grigoriev and Pierre. The latter is the malleable, slightly hopeless cadet to Grigoriev’s Russian bear. Both protagonists’ home lives are portrayed in detail – Grigoriev comes home to berate his son Igor for insulting Brezhnev at Communist Youth, while the boy just wants to listen to Queen on his tape deck. Meanwhile, Pierre’s more bourgeois surroundings are thrown into turmoil now that he is a spy. He pores over spacecraft diagrams and French submarine trajectories with his wife, who, unimpressed, remains adamant, saying: “J’ai épousé un ingénieur, pas James Bond.”

Grigoriev is an incurable Francophile. On one of his trips home he asks Pierre to bring him some Léo Ferré tapes and a book of French poetry, as well as a “Johnny Walkman” (Sony Walkman) and some “Keen” (more Queen for his son).

The happier moments of the pair are framed in golden-greens of the Russian summer. They voice the classic spy genre lament of “being lost in lies” and bound through France and Russia’s shared chauvinism. Kusturica is the stand-out star of the film, the man who likes to discharge guns before breakfast comfortably inhabiting this slovenly, male Russian soul. But winter arrives and the plot turns bleaker, and strains begin to show in the film.

The main problem is the jump from mundane domestic strife to personal portrayals of Reagan, depicted at home in the White House watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and rueing the demise of his acting days. This double intimacy doesn’t quite work, and the scenes of high office feel artificial and, at worst, ridiculous. Willem Dafoe is very underused as an omniscient CIA director (a version of the notorious William J Casey), yet he gives us a last-gasp plot twist worthy of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

Another defect is the lack of real nuance in the scenes. Kusturica, for all his suitability, plays a cliché of a Russian. His rough sex scene in the KGB archives seems rote, likewise the moment, when batting off prison guards, he vaults the prison visitor divide to embrace his son.

A nice touch is the insertion of a Alfred de Vigny poem, “La mort du loup”. The film begins with a shot of a wolf and later has Grigoriev reciting the middle of the poem under interrogation, comparing the wolf’s cubs to his own, waiting for him outside the prison as he is hunted.

Malcolm Gladwell once said:  ”I’veread The Spy Who Came in from the Cold once every five years since I was 15. I only started to understand it the third time.” The film suffers occasionally from the same problem – the story’s twists are labyrinthine, and perhaps the most enlivening moments are provided by the moments of personal interaction and sharing – mainly between Pierre and Grigoriev.

Farewell is classic Cold War spy genre fare, although here it seeks to delve into the ordinary family lives affected by the affairs of state. It is this counterpoint that overloads the structure of an otherwise solid, enjoyable film.

There is an interesting scene in The Messenger when a soldier is faced with a woman he is trying to seduce. He has recently told her about the death of her husband in Iraq. The soldier is Staff Sgt Will Montgomery (Ben Foster), a member of the US Army’s Casualty Notification Team, the squad of officials given the task of breaking the news of their loved one’s demise to parents or next of kin. The bereaved wife asks him if he has ever lost anyone. He lists people he has lost – comrades in war, a mother, a father to drink-driving – and with every one pushes closer to her, bullying her into a connection of grief in a painfully ambiguous scene.

In total, more than 90 major films and documentaries have emerged about the Iraq conflicts since Operation Desert Storm in 1990. One covered the tension of bomb disposal units (The Hurt Locker, which some said should have been pipped by The Messenger at the 2009 Oscars), another covers action at its height: Matt Damon’s Green Zone.

This film’s theme has been reflected in recent weeks’ news. Rubén Mejía, one of the men who emerged alive after helping to kill Bin Laden, reportedly had his home visited shortly afterwards by soldiers bearing a US flag in recognition. His family feared the worse and began to cry. Best intentions and all that.

This film takes on a more domestic hue. It is in some parts a study of the shock of bereavement and in others a study of the emotional handicaps created by war that make it impossible for a veteran to reintegrate. We witness countless scenes of notifications on doorsteps – pregnant wives doubling up with difficulty, the mother slapping the officer in the face, middle-aged men vomiting, Steve Buscemi playing a father again attacking Montgomery on hearing the news (Montgomery reacts by squaring up to him). The process of bereavement often includes indifference and anger and attacks our own ideals of being noble in the face of grief. Another ambiguous moment occurs when Olivia (Samantha Morton) – Montgomery’s target – tells him about how she feels about her just-dead husband. She loved him and then he began to treat her and her son badly so she stopped loving him – “and now he’s dead I love him again”.

The film’s opening scenes cover a meeting between Captain Stone (Woody Harrelson), the presiding Casualty Notification Officer inducting Montgomery. Montgomery protests: “I’ve never received grief counselling, let alone given it… I’m not religious.” Harrelson butts in: “Well, you’re just there for the notification – not God, not heaven.” Montgomery sees things a little differently: after his second notification he takes it upon himself to play guardian angel. He protects Olivia at the mall after a confrontation with recruiting soldiers, observes her husband’s funeral from afar – contravening his boss’s “do not touch a NOK [next of kin]” notification rule in the most figurative sense.

Harrelson rides around the East Coast with Foster, jaw clenched, eyes bulging, a very funny buffon type in the first scenes. They get lost on the way to a notification: “First of all, men don’t ask for directions,” he says. “Much less soldiers. Much less soldiers on a Casualty Notification Mission… This is zero-defect mission, a pure hit-and-get operation.” Harrelson then reveals an endearing, needy side. with late-night unsolicited calls to Montgomery (“You got IM [Instant Messaging]?”) and wild exaggerations in bars as to his service in Desert Storm.

Bobby Bukowski’s cinematography (the director is first-timer Oren Moverman) has been compared to a 1970s artefact, with slow zooms and easy sense of ambience. The notification process has been a filmic tableau for some time. A few years back in Saving Private Ryan we saw a housewife in elegant collapse on her porch hearing the news that her three sons had died (the recipients in this film are more vituperative). In the Mel Gibson Vietnam film We Were Soldiers there is a scene when the army takes to informing wives of their husband’s deaths via a telegram delivered by taxi. One wife is outraged and tells the cabbie to give her all the telegrams which she resolves to deliver herself.

One key scene in The Messenger occurs when Montgomery moves on the widow in her kitchen. The synaptic procession of emotions, running from romantic need, to rejection, to shame, to concealed anger, are drawn excellently in the quiet room by Foster, the pair manoeuvering in careful choreography.

The film finds a rich seam in its focus on these unwilling messengers. The burden of grief is as present on the shoulders (and in the set, aggressive faces) of these annunciatory presences as it is once the weight has been conveyed; that heavy, rootless spirit that lives in everyone from time to time.

Junior Byles – Beat Down Babylon (B), Label: Upsetter, Released: 1971. This is the record that Lord Koos, a local sound system operator, played when police raided a sound clash at the Carib night club in Cricklewood Broadway in the infamous ‘Battle of Burtons’ in 1974. Dennis Bovell, the UK reggae punk legend was also playing that night and later remembered, in Lloyd Bradley’s book Bass Culture: “[The police were] all wearing coats so you can’t see their numbers, and there was two on each step all the way down…they beat the shit out of the clientele as they were going down. They arrested forty-two people, and all those who didn’t have visible bruises they let go.”

Bovell was convicted at the Old Bailey of causing an affray and lost over a year of his life behind bars before his case was thrown out on appeal. However out of that real siege a more permanent image of the black struggle in the UK emerged: the final scene of Babylon. Here Aswad’s Brinsley Forde, fleeing justice after stabbing a Deptford racist, chants vexed redemptions songs to a hiving party as the boys in blue batter down the front door.

The November 7 1980 issue of Time Out featured Trevor Laird and Brinsley Forde staring bleak out from the cover. They were stars in revolutionary new film which charted a week in the life of a crew of south London kids following a sound system and was to prove a crucial piece of documentary evidence as to how Afro-Caribbean communities in London lived beneath the media radar. The film benefitted from actors and a screenplay [Martin Stellman] from the Quadrophenia stable and future Oscar-winner in the bud Chris Menges [The Killing Fields, The Mission] as director of photography.

Its opening scene has been sampled by Dizzee Rascal and Shy FX and the film generally in Jungle, Dancehall and even Big Beat [hey this film is 30 years old].

One particular anecdote reveals how unlensed life in Babylon life really was – the scene when Forde’s character Blue is chased by police onto Deptford High Street – which had to be re-shot when a pony bolted down the street mid-scene. A pony! Standard practice in Deptford in the 1970s, apparently,[and even now] where rag-and-bone trade totters would leave their nags grazing outside their tower blocks.

The totters controlled Deptford and had to be paid off for use of the alleys where the crew filmed. The film was sensation to the black community in south London, were kids from Streatham, Lewisham and Brixton would clamour to be part of the extended sound clash scenes, where Jah Shaka, the real-life internationally notorious sound system was to ‘clash’ against incumbent Ital Lion.

Speaking to me from his home near Canterbury, the film’s director Franco Rosso, 68, is mellowing at a comfortable remove from the Streatham badlands where he conceived Babylon. He was brought to London aged eight by his parents, Fiat workers from Turin, and soon felt the rough edge of London’s immigrant welcome mat. Regular fights in his Battersea comprehensive [at the time the Messina brothers provoked regular headlines with their Soho prostitution rings – hence every Italian’s mother was a prostitute] lead to an increased empathy with black immigrants, the next to cop grief in London’s post-war palette.

He soon fell into making black culture films – one about the Mangrove Nine case about police harassment in Notting Hill in 1970, in which Darcus Howe was a defendant, and other films for Horace Ové [director of a predecessor of Babylon – Pressure].

Speaking of where his empathies lie, Rosso says: “It was a lot easier for us than West Indians or Indians or any people of colour, because we were white so you could in fact hide and disappear into the background. If you kept quiet, nobody knew. Whereas of course when West Indians came along they were very easily picked off because of their colour. Because of that there was a lot of identification with characters in the film.”

I mention a recent article in Prospect magazine entitled Master Class in Victimhood, where a black journalist claims cites victim-casting and self-pity are the most corrosive elements in low black school grades, and he agrees: “I saw something similar with The Archbishop of York [Dr John Sentamu] who made a speech for Black History Month, and it really struck a chord with me. He was telling black kids not to use their colour as an excuse, as so often happens these days, and to get on with their lives and focus.”

The line between documentary and film was often blurry in Babylon, never more, remember Rosso, when they were filming the sound clash scenes: “ Jah Shaka didn’t want to do it at first – we kept having to remind him – you know, it’s not for real you know, this is a drama – ‘cause he wanted to win. “Nah…I cyan’t do it man…” and all this nonsense – but he was business man at the end of the day, he knew that if he didn’t do it he would miss out on something that would give him quite a lot of exposure. I used to bump into him quite a lot afterwards, and even a couple of years ago in Soho. And he’s always convinced that you’ve made money on it and he’s missed his cut!”

Arguably the film is made by Menges’s photography, from the Taxi Driver jaded kitsch of the Soho arcade scenes [shot through an Old Compton Street letter box while the prostitute upstairs was paid off for the hour] to the roving camera of the sensitive engagement party scene, to a post-dance lilac dawn over Deptford set against a piss-darkened tower block walkway.

But it was the real-life inspired closer that killed it. The tested strategy of casting a musician as lead in reggae films – Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace in Rockers, Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come [which Rosso cites as Babylon’s main inspiration] – comes correct again with Forde’s thrumming song and its content, with the added percussion of the police sledge hammer, mezzo piano.

Beginning the interview, Rosso can barely suppress a splutter when I tell him that I wasn’t born when the film came out, back at that premiere where the kids in Bristol slashed the seats. Three decades later, Rosso is planning a sequel. The picture will have black writers, a black director, and a black DOP [unless Menges comes back]. The music, this time round, will be grime.

Last week Rosso had arranged to see his son, a Goldsmiths art student. “He couldn’t make it – he was going to a talk by Linton Kwesi Johnson…” says Rosso, himself a graduate of south London art school and documentarist of that taciturn dub poet. Full circle.