Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

We first meet Shuggie Bain as a 16-year-old in 1992, living alone in a dirty bedsit on the Southside of Glasgow and working on a supermarket deli counter where his boss overlooks lapses in hygiene because underage labour is cheap. This debut novel tells us how he got here.

Back to 1981 and Agnes Bain is leaning from the window of the high-rise council block where she, her second husband and her three children live “all crammed together in her mammy’s flat”. Agnes is drinking, smoking, playing cards and betting the housekeeping money with three friends, “their respite from ironing in front of the telly and heating tins of beans for ungrateful weans”. The evening degenerates until “Big Shug Bain” returns from driving his taxi and takes the other women home, returning hours later; she knows what he has been doing because that’s how her own relationship with him began. Alone, Agnes remembers an early holiday together in Blackpool, Shug dragging her up the stairs of a cheap B&B by her hair when she was too drunk to walk, raping her and then offering to take her dancing the next night.

This is a story about poverty, addiction and abuse. Agnes descends through the degrading stages of alcoholism, ever more vulnerable to ever more predatory men, her only constant relationships with her children, whose knowledge of her disintegration is therefore intimate. The oldest, Catherine, marries in her late teens to get away from her mother and moves to South Africa. Alexander, “Leek”, a gifted artist who carries around with him a two-year-old letter offering him a university place, stays to try to teach Shuggie how to “act normal” – ie, appear to conform to the norms of working-class Glaswegian masculinity, which does not come naturally. He also stays in faltering hope of saving Agnes, until one day she throws him out, leaving young teenage Shuggie as her sole carer and witness.

Shug senior moves the family from the urban flat to the post-industrial wasteland of a pit village, a vague and hopeless gesture towards removing Agnes from her suppliers and companions, but the landscapes of despair left by mine closures promote nothing but sickness. “The land had been turned inside out,” Stuart writes. “The black slag hills stretched for miles like the waves of a petrified sea.” Shuggie attends school in Pithead just enough to be bullied – not because of his mother’s drinking, which is common enough, but because he doesn’t move like a boy, doesn’t like football, can’t hide his fascination for hairdressing, dolls and My Little Ponies.

Reading Shuggie Bain cannot but be a grim experience. Shuggie and Leek learn to undress Agnes after a night out, to look away from her bruised thighs and gouged breasts, to catch vomit and wipe bile. This is a world with no vocabulary for sexual consent; men do what they do and women and boys like it or lump it. Agency flickers and goes out; Catherine gets away, but Stuart signals that this offstage escape to 1980s South Africa is only participation in another form of oppression. There’s heroism in Agnes’s commitment to self-presentation and domestic order, holding on to her lipstick and tights as her liver packs up, making sure the house is immaculate before the next rapist stops by; and something sadder than heroism in Shuggie’s passion for his disintegrating mother, which is not a choice but a fact. Children love their carers – that’s how abuse works.

Shuggie Bain comes from a deep understanding of the relationship between a child and a substance-abusing parent, showing a world rarely portrayed in literary fiction, and to that extent it’s admirable and important. I had qualms, about Shuggie’s precocity and particularly about the depiction of women, who are all scrawny or flabby, wearing too much makeup or not enough, and whose clothes are always wrong – “tight leggings” suggest loose morals while “baggy leggings” show slovenliness. Stuart’s prose is baroque, rich in adjectives with a habit of pointing out what he’s just shown. These things are partly a matter of taste and training, but sometimes impatience with the heavy-handed prose interrupted my interest in Shuggie and Agnes.

Sarah Moss in The Guardian

Matthias and Maxime

Xavier Dolan’s unstoppably garrulous, sweet-natured new movie is a coming-of-age film, or possibly a coming-of-thirtysomethinghood film. Or perhaps it’s a portrait of a bunch of friends for whom things would never be the same again after that summer. It is not exactly a sexual awakening tale because the sexuality in question never really went to sleep. But it is a love story.

It is a personal film about a group of friends in French-speaking Canada. One is Maxime (played by Dolan), a young guy with a skin-pigmentation disorder whose career prospects have been hindered by looking after his troubled mother (hilariously played by Anne Dorval, in effect reprising her ferocious turn in Dolan’s 2014 film Mommy). We get some barnstorming arguments between Dolan and Dorval, complete with a sobbing, mirror-punching retreat to the bathroom. But now Max is going travelling in Australia, and handing over mum-care to his aunt.

Meanwhile, Max’s circle of friends are all vaguely disturbed by the imminence of his departure and what it means. Handsome, clean-cut Matthias (Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas) is in a straight relationship and trying to climb up the ladder in his law firm. Things change when his annoying sister Erika, a would-be movie director, makes a short film and persuades Matthias and Maxime to be in it – and they have to kiss. The experience, expected to be laughed off, actually affects both men deeply and revives long-dormant feelings.

In a sense, the film is about the symptoms, direct and indirect, of this new confusion and excitement. Matthias and Maxime’s new secret affects their friends’ hive-mind without anyone quite acknowledging or grasping it, resulting in a monumentally violent argument about the rules of charades. (And could it be that in real life, Dolan was the one making the short films that challenged his friends’ identities?)

There are, naturally, some cinephile references in Dolan’s film, including a pretty high-minded reference to watching Denys Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions on shrooms – though my own opinion on that movie is that there aren’t enough shrooms in the world. Weirdly, Max is fooled by the ancient prank of the voicemail message made to sound like someone has answered the phone. So he evidently hasn’t seen Terminator, where that gag features. He also appears to be the last person alive with a Hotmail address.

Max is desperately keen to get away to Australia and Dolan – who is an excellent actor – shows how he is scared of his feelings, scared of a Bedford Falls-type imprisonment, clinging to his hard-won freedom from his mother. But he can’t make the trip without a letter of recommendation from Matthias’s father, for whom he did a work-placement scheme. Dolan shows how excruciating it is for him to keep phoning Matthias’s dad’s secretary, in his awful English, chasing up this contentious bit of paper.

As ever, Dolan’s creative motor runs on dialogue: people talking, talking, talking. Sex is the one thing that stops the flow. He gets his camera intimately close to his actors’ faces: a wide shot, or a thoughtful tableau, is relatively rare. His movies, for me, have become increasingly watchable, accessible and enjoyable because the feelings involved are increasingly real and deeply felt. There is such tenderness and gentleness in this film.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

Dead Pigs

A breezily westernised style of Chinese movie is on offer in this 2018 debut feature from Chinese-American film-maker Cathy Yan, who two years later went to Hollywood to direct Birds of Prey, starring Margot Robbie. Dead Pigs is an ensemble dramedy set in Shanghai that satirises – in a distinctly lenient way – the commercialism eating away at China’s heart. It is inspired by a real-life incident in which thousands of dead pigs were found in the city’s Huangpu river, dumped by poverty-stricken farmers who couldn’t pay the disposal fees; the pig symbolism reminded me a tiny bit of Alan Bennett’s A Private Function.

Candy Wang (Vivian Wu) is a beauty salon owner who lives in her parents’ rickety old house, the only one standing in a rubble-strewn waste ground, because she is holding out against offers from a property company called Golden Happiness; it wants to build a bizarre Vegas-style development there based on Barcelona, complete with a tacky replica of the Sagrada Família. Her brother Old Wang (Haoyu Yang) is in dire financial trouble after borrowing money from gangsters to fund his absurd “investment portfolio” in pigs, which have all died. Old Wang’s son Zhen (Mason Lee) is a hard-up waiter who pretends to his dad he’s doing well; he befriends wealthy Instagram-style princess Xia Xia (Meng Li) and soon finds out how lonely and unhappy she really is. Meanwhile, Golden Happiness have hired a smooth American architect called Sean (David Rysdahl), whose US qualifications are phoney: he has been recruited by another American, Angie (Zazie Beetz), for sideline work as a model for promo events, pretending to be an American celeb or reality TV star.

The movie zings and pinballs around, ricocheting within its ironic pattern of coincidences, and those dead pigs keep bobbing metaphorically up, reported by TV news broadcasts – always a cheesy and unconvincing storytelling technique. Dead Pigs is an unassuming topical entertainment (rather different from the movies of its executive producer Jia Zhangke), but diverting and well-acted.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian

This Is Not a Burial, It’s a Resurrection

This is an extraordinary and otherworldly feature film from the tiny landlocked kingdom of Lesotho in southern Africa. It is the tale of a rebel spirit: an elderly woman who opposes government plans to flood her village, making way for a dam. It’s a film about resistance and resilience, but director Lemohang Jeremiah Mosese is coolly unsentimental and realistic about the inevitable march of capitalism and construction. Weaving in ideas around displacement, collective identity and history, this film takes on almost mythic qualities.

Some of the actors are non-professionals, but the central role is performed by Mary Twala, who appeared in Idris Elba’s Nelson Mandela biopic Long Walk to Freedom. She plays Mantoa, an 80-year-old widow whose son – her last remaining relative – is killed in a mining accident in neighbouring South Africa. (The film isn’t about poverty, but it’s present in every frame.) Feeling ready to die, Mantoa is making arrangements to be buried in the village graveyard when she hears of the dam project; villagers are to be forcibly resettled in the city. Mantoa decides to put stop to it. She has nothing left to live for, and in a sense this gives her real power. She doesn’t care about offending the pastor, or if people think she’s a witch; she is bent on being buried with her family.

This is a severe, uncompromising film; it’s more like a series of images strung together, each framed exactingly, like a painting. At the centre of it all is Twala, often silent, her expression fixed in determination – no words needed. Mosese has said that to avoid cliche he wrote the character as a man then switched the name to female. And Twala gives a tremendous performance, intimate yet epic. This Is Not a Burial is the first film from Lesotho to be entered into the Oscars race for best international feature. Sadly, Twala did not live to share in the success; she died in July last year.

Cath Clarke in The Guardian

So long, my son

Wang Xiaoshuai navigates an ocean of sadness in this film. It can finally be watched only through a blur of tears and with a terrible, futile need to reach into the screen and hug the two ageing lead characters. So Long, My Son is an epic generational drama of two families in China, from the 1980s to the present day; directed and shot with clarity and calm, audaciously structured in terms of flashback and flashforward – and acted superbly.

There is also touch of melodrama in it, if such a thing can be said to exist in the unshowy walking pace of Wang’s storytelling style, with some influences from classic Japanese family drama perhaps, and gestures of soap-operatic melancholy, largely in the repeated (and unexpected) use of the plaintive tune Auld Lang Syne. This is a film that doesn’t signpost its relevant facts very emphatically and you have to stay alert for shifts in the timeline, and for important details that are only revealed later. But, once you have mentally readjusted away from traditional linear expectations, this movie opens up like a flower.

It is about the terrible burden of grief, rage and guilt, and the greater burden of forgiveness; it is also about an emotional wound that only gets worse with the years. That wound has been inflicted on two levels: by the ordinary, arbitrary heartbreak of life and by the malign agencies of the Chinese state, with its draconian one-child policy to control population and boost economic growth, begun in the late 70s and not completely abandoned until 2015.

Liyun (Yong Mei) and Yaojun (Wang Jingchun) are an obedient, hardworking married couple in the big city with an eight-year-old boy Xingxing. Their best friends are fellow factory hands Haiyan (Liya Ai) and her husband, who have an eight-year-old son of their own, Haohao; their kids are best friends. But, when Liyun gets pregnant with an (illicit) second child, she discovers just how much of an apparatchik party-zealot her friend and neighbour Haiyan actually is. She reports Liyun to the authorities and gets her dragged off to the hospital for an abortion she doesn’t want, while Yaojun impotently rages at the government and at himself for failing to stand up for Liyun. And then Haohao boisterously chivvies and bullies Xingxing into going swimming at a dangerous reservoir with the other, wilder neighbourhood kids, despite Xingxing’s timid complaints that he can’t swim. The catastrophic result (all the more painful for never being explicitly shown) inflicts a crippling psychic blow to all four adults and to Haohao, who is to grow up with a need to go into the medical profession and save lives.

As the new millennium dawns, fate provides a new twist to the suppressed guilt suffered by Haiyan and her family by making them wealthy in the new Chinese world of adventure. Meanwhile, wretched, lonely Liyun and Yaojun move away, to a remote coastal town where they adopt a boy, Xing (Roy Wang), who senses that he is second-best and becomes a tearaway delinquent, breaking his adoptive parents’ already shattered hearts. Moreover, Haohao’s glamorous aunt Moli (Xi Qi) forms a tendresse for Yaojun, which creates its own refinement of pain.

At the centre of the film are the wonderfully compassionate and tender performances from Yong Mei and Wang Jingchun as the ageing, lonely pair whose unexpressed agony, by the end of this film, feels unbearably intimate. For me, the tragedy of their relationship is revealed in the closing act when they return to their hometown, grey old little country mice that they now are, silently goggling at all the glitzy new buildings and video ad hoardings – signs of that commercial triumph that the one-child policy was there to deliver.

Yaojun appears to wave cheerily at something outside the car. It turns out to be a statue of Mao waving, almost dwarfed amid the steel and glass, and Yaojun turns his placid smile at his wife as if to explain: that is what I was waving back to, you see? Isn’t it silly? And how absurd to shed a tear now after all this time?

Apart from everything else, this film reveals a terrible, simple truth: those who have endured the terrible agony of losing a child are not a separate tribe (that is: separate from the luckier ones) destined or earmarked for tragedy from the beginning. Neither are they people who have endured this blow in return for the expectation of some mysterious compensatory gift from the cosmos. Their fate is arbitrary and they are just like us; our current happiness used to be theirs.

So Long, My Son is a piercingly, profoundly moving picture that peels and exposes the senses.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian