​Paweł Pawlikowski won an Oscar (Best Foreign Language Film) for Ida. And this year, he won Best Director for Cold War at the Cannes Film Festival. The latter award has greater resonance in this household and so we embarked on a Google search to find a showing within travelling distance and ended up, yesterday, in Oxford.
 
It is the first week of the Michaelmas term, and the streets and restaurants were crowded with freshers and their proud parents. But Screen 2 of the imposing new Curzon cinema was deserted apart two women of a certain age who whispered throughout the film in what we think was Polish, and probably was, because this film is set primarily in Poland during the Soviet era and it blends the personal and the political, the poetic and the prosaic in a quite mesmerizing manner.
 
Cold War is a musical, a love story and a political chronicle. It takes place over the course of a couple of decades, half a dozen ‘chapters’, and is punctuated throughout by music, which points to the cultural and political changes against which the doomed and destructive love affair takes place, moving inexorably to its conclusion through a series of scenes, spots of time, which illustrate the two hearts, four eyes of the affair and the film.
 
Paris is contrasted with Warsaw; Rock Around the Clock with the faux-folk of the Polish peasantry; the passion of the lovers with the ever-present politics - “I’m ratting on you” she tells him. “Is you or is you ain’t my baby?” asks the soundtrack.
 
The Best Director award is justified by any of so many delights. The ravishing, high contrast black and white. The square format. The meticulous framing.
 
But his greatest triumph is to draw out of his actors extraordinary performances. Tomasz Kot as the chain-smoking musician Wiktor and, particularly, Joanna Kulig as the ‘mountain girl’ Zula are superb in a New Wave kinda way, which is appropriate of course. And as each chapter addresses another spot of time, the suffering, the melancholy, of the intervening years are immediately and powerfully present.

The brevity of each scene, the short span of the movie as a whole (90 minutes), is not merely exquisite. The conciseness, succinctness, is perfection.
 
I doubt I shall see a more beautiful film this year. And certainly nothing more poignant than the dedication, at the end, in lower case out of black, bottom right of the screen: “to my parents”.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I’ve been re-syncing about 100GB of shows and the process has thrown up some fascinating stuff which I had forgotten I had and not played for some time. Currently, it’s the sound track from Zabriski Point – some of Jerry’s most inspired noodling.

A SPECTRE is haunting Europe, and probably the rest of the world. It is, of course, the spectre of James Bond.
 
I sat through this cinematic smash (Smersh?) hit, this latest sprouting of the Broccoli franchise yesterday afternoon, even though (or, rather, because) I had far too much work to do. I confess I did not go with any great expectations, being a fan neither of the original books nor of the movies, although I accept that the humour of the cinematographic treatments has mitigated to some extent the casually misogynistic and racially patronising tone of Fleming’s novels.
 
I didn’t see any of the previous Daniel Craig outings, so this visit was something of a revelation and, when I offered a tentative critique of the film’s mores on the walk home, Jill cut me off. “For Christ’s sake” she said, “it’s a Bond movie”.
 
Of course it is. And it has its moments, notably a stunning opening tracking shot which lasts for about five minutes without a cut. It is a tour de force, dramatic and dynamic, but it does not set the tone for the next two and a quarter hours.
 
What does is the epigraph. The dead are alive it announces, reversed out of funereal black.
 
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.
 
In the form of Daniel Craig, Bond is very much alive and, as a nod to the contemporary, the evil Blofeld is not now concerned with blowing up the world but putting it and everyone on the planet under surveillance.
 
There is a movie in here somewhere, something along the lines of a macro-The Conversation. But it sinks without trace like an Aston Martin in the Tiber. For Christ’s sake, it’s a Bond movie.
 
Which means we get the action sequences, the love interest, the mandatory torture scene, the random changes of scene and costume, the smashed cars and helicopters, the technological wizardry, the full Bond monty. We get the occasional apparent profundity – “a licence to kill is also a licence not to kill” – which informs us of the essential decency of the traditional British spook-cum-assassin. And we also get the stereotypes, the clichés and the conventions. Pretty much all of them.
 
It’s the equivalent of going to see a rock band performing nothing but their greatest hits note for note. But if that’s your bag …
 
For me, the final hour especially was tediously repetitive and the final twists predictable. But the saving grace was Ben Whishaw as Q, who actually made me laugh out loud. And, coincidentally, we were watching Ben again later last night in London Spy on the Beeb. It's by Tom Robb Smith, who wrote Child 44.
 
Apart from inhabiting the same genre, this could not have been more different. It was atmospheric and intriguing, it was carefully calibrated. It was a spy story but, primarily in this first episode, it was a love story. It was beautifully shot, beautifully acted, beautifully scripted. In other words, everything that SPECTRE is not.

​But no-one at SPECTRE will give a damn about that.
 
For Christ’s sake, it’s a Bond movie. The dead are alive.

I never saw Hendrix. I don’t know why. I was going to a great many gigs during his London period, listened in awe to his early albums, and cried the night I heard he had passed as I came out of a showing of Zabriskie Point, the soundtrack to which featured the other great guitar hero of the times, Jerry Garcia.

The closest I came – physically – to Jimi was a brief period a couple of years later, when I worked in a short-lived advertising agency which had taken over a couple of floors of the house opposite Claridge’s in which he lived and died. And today, amongst the pictures of Dylan and Sartre and Ted Williams on the walls of my office, is a wonderful portrait of Hendrix taken by Bill Zygmant a few days before he died. (You can find out more about Bill and his sensational photographs at www.billzygmant.co.uk.)

I remember that balmy 1970 night outside the cinema in Leicester Square. I was with a university comrade called Phil Geddes, who was subsequently blown up by the IRA in 1983 outside Harrods. We discussed not the movie we had just seen but the importance of Hendrix. The discussion, I recall, focused on the political importance of the man and his music, and the role of rock music in the struggle. At the time, I would have placed more importance on the overtly political bands and on those, such as the Airplane, which were revolutionary both lyrically and musically. And maybe I was a little dismissive of the playing of the guitar upside down, the flames, the smashing of amps and speakers ( I’m pretty conservative at heart)..

I would have been wrong.

But I suspect that is why I did not see Hendrix live. Instead of seeing him, I was probably attending a gig by Edgar Broughton, or analysing each line of A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, or organising a demonstration against Enoch Powell or writing an article about the Greek junta.

All worthy activities, but none of them as fulfilling, in retrospect, as seeing  Hendrix in person. 

My loss.

Today’s listening: Winterland, 12 October 1968. An extraordinary 15 minute Red House is the highlight of one of the great improvisatory gigs of the time.