muninnhuginn | Just like buses, or coppers...

Two immensely watchable and beautiful films in a row. That doesn't often happen.

Last night I sat down and watched A Mighty Wind. I was, despite also whizzing through Judgment on Janus, pretty much spellbound in that part--sometimes the greater part--of my attention that was not occupied by the novel. It's the perfect documentary save that it's fiction. It had those moments that one can imagine the real documentary maker either dreads or longs for when their subject goes off "script", worrying about the lethal potentialities of floral displays, admitting to being involved in witchcraft (oh, those witches' hats, same design, but the braid trim just not quite matching through the coven). These details, and the extra opportunity within the structure of documentary to wring out that extra grain or painful, hilarious truth is what made the film for me. A straight fiction would probably have ended with the generally high note of the reunion gig: it's the documentiarist's (if that isn't a word it ought to be, dammit!) way to take one more peek and do the not unexpectedly deflating what happened next. A straight fiction would not linger apparently innocently a second longer over some trivial detail--one of the Folksmen staring at himself in the dressing room mirror, adjusting his jacket, uncomfortably, twitchily--before hitting us with the same transformed Folks(wo)man of the aftermath. And the music: it was so perfect and so perfectly... off. I know those songs, no I don't, but I felt I ought, even when wincing. It's one to buy and watch scene by scene to pick up on the, inevitably missed on first viewing, nuances. And, yes, I think I love Christopher Guest.

Tonight it was Anita and Me. Couldn't be more different a film, but... again it was music which cemented it together and brought it to life. The early seventies soundtrack, just at the fringes of my musical memories, carried the narrative, underpinned and dismantled the action.

I have to confess that I find Meera Syal, as she projects herself on TV, a little painful, but I'd heard extracts of Anita and Me on the radio and knew it was better than I'd been expecting. I think the film surpasses the book (but maybe I should read the whole of it before making that a final judgment). It was filmed with the attention to detail that characterised A Mighty Wind with the same comic but also enlightening and moving effect: her father tells Meena to look at the view, and we see, down the end of the back alley, the fields and trees of an almost idyllic countryside, but cut across in the middle ground with a washing line, its two large pairs of knickers fluttering dead centre. There was so much potential for cliché--the trendy vicar who eventually heads off on the hippy trail to India--but, whilst teetering on the edge the fall into the predictable never quite came--Mark Williams made the same vicar a rounded enough presence that he transcended the stereotype. Most characters were given the chance to surprise and to become broader because of that: Cathy Burke's obnoxious, racist Mrs Rutter, has the kindness to try to mend the split between Anita and Meena, even if it is voiced as a challenge to Mrs Kumar's snobbery and also has an element of foisting some responsibility for caring for her family onto an otherwise despised neighbour (she acquires a dog called Nigger) just prior to deserting it. The tensions and threats that lurked and then became more obviously expressed and they form part of Meena's awakening. The childhood bugaboo lurking in the grounds of the big house (kind of a Garden of Eden for the two girls into which Anita brings sex and an end to the idyll) is not a threat but an eventual saviour; the boys in the street and the adored older girl are the assailants of an innocent visitor (or maybe not so innocent, tho' it's not his race that is his sin, maybe, but the fact that he's part of the construction company that builds the motorway) to the Kumars. Yes, some of the comedy is obvious--the arrival of the replacement vicar, a black man to replace the "hippy"--but the whole is greater than these elements. Maybe another one for the DVD list.