Black Death, swampy commune

Black Death is a low budget Brit-flick by Bristol-born director Christopher Smith, starring Sean Bean. It is almost entirely derivative and yet manages to be really quite entertaining, and even makes a cogent point or two about dogmatic religious observance. Set in England during the worst years of the bubonic plague, Bean plays a bishop’s envoy who is sent to a remote community in the middle of a swamp to apprehend the surely heretical leader of said community for churlishly refusing to let his brethren get buboed. Must be the Devil’s work!

The film begins at a monastery where a novice monk is procured to act as a guide, and we follow Bean, novice and a gnarly crew of mercenaries as they trek across plague-ravaged countryside, then cross the swamp in question to find that, initially at least, life amongst the disease-free proto-hippy commune seems rather lovely. Or is it? No, of course it isn’t, otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a film. But neither are things as simple as you might expect – this is no Wicker Man type scenario – and Smith invites us to wonder whose dogmatic observance of strange rituals is the most harmful.

Black Death does not so much have cinematic touchstones as organ donors: the bleached, earthy hues of the cinematography and even some of the scenery chosen for backdrops are Lord of the Rings carbon copies; the method of imprisonment chosen is right out of The Deer Hunter; and then there are the more obvious comparisons with the gruelling Witchfinder General and 80s adaptation of The Name of the Rose.

But as unoriginal as it may be, I enjoyed the way Black Death didn’t pull its punches in pursuit of its central theme, and there are some really strong performances from the main players: with the possible exception of the rather blubbery and irritating monk, fine actors all. Stir in some tasty battle scenes and you have an eminently watchable film. And did I mention that Tim McInnerny also features, better known as Percy from Blackadder?

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised at enjoying Black Death so much: I hadn’t realised until writing this, but Smith’s last film was Triangle, a genuinely spooky and effective portrayal of one woman’s personal hell, which achieves a queasy effectiveness by being set on an apparently abandoned cruise liner in the Bermuda Triangle and by incorporating Memento-esque loopiness.

As a footnote, the me that is entranced, childlike, by entirely random, meaningless associations (the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon effect) was delighted to discover that not only does this post follow a completely unrelated one about a novel called The Black Book, but the female lead in Black Death, Carice van Houten, was also the star of Paul Verhoeven’s WW2 romp called, you guessed it: Black Book. Marvellous.

Black Book, big ideas

Orhan Pamuk’s The Black Book is a sad, serious novel centring on intensive, lengthy exploration of two or three Very Big Ideas. It is beautifully written, without doubt; lyrical and poetic; and brings to life its setting – Istanbul – in a different and striking way on every page. I think this is a good example:

When Galip became aware that the darkness was slowly being dispelled, the city itself seemed to retain the night for a long time like the dark side of a distant planet. Some time later he thought, as he shivered with the cold, that the light that reflected off the chimney smoke, the walls of the mosque, and the piles of concrete did not originate from somewhere outside of the city but leaked out from somewhere within it. Just as on the surface of a planet that was still being formed, it felt as if the uneven pieces of the city buried under concrete, stone, wood, plexiglass, and domes might slowly part and the flame-coloured light of the mysterious underground seep through the darkness.

The story of the novel, such as there is one, tells of a young lawyer – Galip – and his quest to understand why his wife has suddenly and mysteriously left him. The journey, both an actual journey round and round the streets of Istanbul, and a figurative journey of self-discovery, has as its main character Galip’s cousin, a famous newspaper columnist with a distinctly philosophical bent.

Every other chapter of the book is one of the cousin’s columns, and as the pages turn the ‘real’ life of Galip’s investigation becomes ever more closely intertwined with the people, places, ideas and events described in the columns. Even Galip and his cousin themselves begin to merge into one.

This is a novel first about identity and second about the mutable nature of reality. What does it mean to ‘be oneself’? If we spend enough time – whether as individuals or even as a nation – imitating another, do we cease to exist? How does writing shape and influence the world around us? What do objects signify? Do you need to really know someone to love them?

I found The Black Book quite heavy-going at times. In common with Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Pamuk includes myriad shorter stories within the overarching tale, whether told in the cousin’s columns or by the people that Galip meets (or even by Galip himself). While the overall effect achieved by this nested structure is impressive – demonstrating the fundamental interconnectedness of the fictive and factual worlds, bridged as they are by ideas – it doesn’t make for an easy read.

With this said there’s a very satisfying point, which for me occurred about two-thirds of the way through, where Pamuk’s ambition becomes clearer, and after that I found myself pacing hungrily through the later chapters in anticipation of the conclusion. This is, let’s just say, a novel in which the author is willing to push his central proposition – inconstancy of identity – to its logical conclusion.