6 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Thursday12 September 2019

ARTS

Katie Gavin

and Josette

Maskin at

Village

Underground

—Marilyn Kingwill

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

Singer Katie Gavin was moved to tears at

Los Angeles trio Muna’s show, the first

of two in London. They were prompted

by sustained cheering from the audi-

ence after the song “I Know a Place”, the

band’s 2016 anthem about creating safe

spaces for LGBTQ+ people.

Gavin and her bandmates, guitarists

Josette Maskin and Naomi McPherson,

describe themselves as queer-

identifying. Once that might have trans-

lated into transgressive or noisy music,

a challenge to norms. Indeed, Gavin ini-

tially wanted to start a riot grrrl band

when Muna formed in 2013. But the

three musicians have ended up in a

more mainstream place, a musical safe

space drawn from 1980s pop, soft-rock

and electropop that treats any sexuality

as a person’s norm.

They are touring their new album

Saves the World. The title is semi-ironic,

Gavin explained from the Village

Underground stage. Her autobiographi-

cal lyrics are about anxieties and vul-

nerabilities, not manifestos for saving

the world. But the personal, in her view,

is political. The first step towards

making everything else better is by

being, she went on to say, “the best ver-

sion of yourself, the writer of your life”.

The self-help lingo underscored the

essential (and characteristically Ameri-

can) optimism at the core of Muna’s

tales of self-harming thoughts and

destructive relationships. Songs were

dominated by big colourful choruses, an

upbeat response to whatever tumultu-

ous circumstances were being described

by Gavin in the verses. Meanwhile,

Maskin and McPherson’s jangly,

nuanced guitars were edgy only in the

sense that they occasionally echoed U2’s

The Edge.

“Navy Blue” palliated a break-up with

feathery Fleetwood Mac riffs. “Crying on

the Bathroom Floor” conducted its exca-

vation of emotional masochism amid

shimmering electro-pop. At times too

smooth on record — as though being the

best version of yourself did not require

serious conflict or unknotting — it was

given added force on stage, where a

drummer and bass player joined the trio.

Empowerment anthem “Number

One Fan” was more forthright. The

sharper side of Gavin’s lyrics, such as the

cycles of abusive behaviour described in

“Taken”, came into stronger focus. “It’s

Gonna Be Okay, Baby” ended the set in a

warm chug of guitars and Gavin’s assur-

ances to her younger self that all will be

fine when she gets older. No matter how

many tears are shed along the way,

Muna’s songs insist on happy endings.

whereismuna.com

Upbeat songs born of pain and tears

P O P

Muna

Village Underground, London

aaaee

T

here’ll always be an Eng-

land while there are screens

showing pipe-dreamt pic-

tures of its past.Downton

Abbey, on large screen as

on small, is an elegiac delirium about an

age of consenting feudalism. Is there,

can there be, was there ever such an age?

Masters upstairs; servants down-

stairs; ancestries fathoms deep. In Julian

Fellowes’s screenplay, as in his televi-

sion scripts, nothing has changed in four

centuries since Elizabeth I; with the

accessorising hope that nothing will

really change up to and including Eliza-

beth II. (The Crown, the Anglophilic

screen’s other modern superhit, says

exactly that.)

“Bigging up” a TV series to make a

movie usually means taking its charac-

ters around the world: Venice, Hong

Kong, Rio. SinceDownton Abbey’s main

character is Downton Abbey, the moun-

tains must visit Muhammad. Cue King

George V and Queen Mary bestowing a

royal visit. Cue fanfares of full-orchestral

music, with composer John Lunn swig-

ging the Château Elgar. Cue scatter-

brainedbons motsfrom Maggie Smith,

hostly anguish from Lord Hugh Bonnev-

ille and Lady Liz McGovern, and excited

bibble-babble from the servants.

Not a Marxist in sight below stairs. As

if to make up for that, Fellowes bungs in

a republican would-be assassin — a man

hoping the film’s Anglo-Irish romantic

lead (Allen Leech as a Downton scion-

by-marriage) will help him commit reg-

icide. The murder plot quickens our

pulse. But history has told us the out-

come. Soon it’s back to the comfort-

blanket crises. What to serve for din-

dins? Who’s pinching the teaspoons? Is

there honey still for tea?

It’s quite daring in the circs to have a

brief gay subplot, late on, in which a

servant visits an illegal AC/DC dance-

and-drink joint. Consenting feudalism

was fine, except for those who wouldn’t

or couldn’t accept its oppressive small

print. In the New Elizabethan age — God

bless our Queen — the small print’s iniq-

uities have been made bigger, plainer

and more scrutable. Now we all can find

them, read them and, if disposed, defy

or nullify them. Timedo hange. Isn’tc

unchanging history a nightmare more

than a dream?

We are not just in the eye of war’s

storm in the documentaryFor Sama.

We are in the ears, nose, throat and

pores. We are in the heart and brain. We

are everywhere: not least in the soul of

Waad al-Kateab, the mother and film-

maker whose daughter and dedicatee is

named in the title.

The Syrian war has gone on so long it

has produced something worse than

compassion fatigue. Passion fatigue.

Not just our pity for the victims but our

keenly felt rage at the oppressors and

their allies (condemnation of the Rus-

sians being a main motif here) has

started to be crushed by the tanks

of longevity.

This harrowing film restores our

responsiveness. Al-Kateab films every-

thing: from the quiet, day-to-day

domestic anxieties of a mum with a

child and married lover — a multitask-

ing doctor/activist in ravaged Aleppo,

who later becomes her husband — to the

chaos and carnage, day-to-day also, of

shelled streets, houses, hospitals...

The diary-form movie takes us from

2011 to 2016. The director, a business

degree student turned self-appointed

war journalist, makes no pretence of

invisibility. Her camera is a cranky,

often demonised presence: “Are you

filming? Film this!” screams a mother

holding a freshly slain child. So is al-

Kateab herself. An artist painted into

her own “Guernica”, she is omnipresent.

But she can also erase herself in order to

foreground horrors and tragedies she

wants to save from oblivion.

Two young brothers sob over a

slaughtered third, brought to the hospi-

tal in that ghostly, recurring procession

we come to know of survivors and slain:

white-caked figures — dust, dust and

more dust — performing somePagliacci

from Purgatory. One hospital crumbles

after another. Tyres are burnt in streets

so that through the smoke “the Russians

can’t see where to bomb.” Rivers are

fished for corpses.

Finally come the ceasefire and exo-

dus. Yet in minutes “They’re shooting at

the ambulances. We have to go back!” It

hardly bears thinking about. But that’s

the siren cry of response fatigue.For

Sama nsures wee will o on thinkingg

about it; and feeling it; and in some

ghostly, ghastly way living it.

Hustlers s based on a true story, buti

it’s hard to believe a moment of it. The

arc of the tale may be true. The minute-

by-minute screen spectacle is another

matter. What real person looks like

Jennifer Lopez, starrily OTT as a pole-/

lap-dancer traversing the years from

America’s turn-of-millennium yuppie

heyday — so good for business — to the

2008 meltdown. Lopez is a phenome-

non. Without clothes she is Miss Carnal

Amplitude; with clothes she is an

engulfing mass of swishing fur.

In the post-Lehman months and

years, she and her more toned-down fel-

low dancer Constance Wu go crooked to

beat the system. No more twirling and

writhing in X-rated clubs. They “fish”

their clients from the richer reaches of

Civvy Stream and use drug cocktails to

stun them into credit-card compliance.

The ketamine-plus formula, explains

someone, “erases your memory, then

makes you happy.”

Can you take it to watch this movie? In

a vain bid to outclassShowgirls, there are

cataracts of classical music. We get

through most of Chopin’sÉtudes. Direc-

tor Lorene Scafaria evidently thought

that low-grade sex and crime could be

done as high-classSturm und Drang. It

can’t. Unless you’re Martin Scorsese in a

purple streak.

Fancy a northern Macedonian film

about beekeeping? “You will, Oscar, you

will,” I am tempted to say. The Academy

Award for Best Foreign Language Film,

honouringHoneyland, would notch a

new record for embracing brave esoter-

ica. The “heroine” of Ljubomir Stefanov

and Tamara Kotevska’s semi-drama-

tised documentary is fiftyish Hatidze, a

mountain-dweller, apiarist and single

daughter to a dying, half-blind mum.

Skinny and arch-backed, Hatidze has

a bulbous hooked nose and terrible

teeth (too much honey?). But, yes, she is

beautiful. Crazed devotionalism keeps

gleaming from her eyes. She adores her

mother. She adores her bees, whose nec-

tar factories buzz away inside every-

thing from rock crevices to tree stumps.

Heedless of hurt, she wears scant pro-

tection and thrives and survives. In con-

trast a terrain-invading gypsy family gets

stung horrifically when it cack-handedly

tries its own bee-keeping. That brings

ruin, temporarily we hope, to Hatidze. “I

have no bees! They killed all my bees.”

Mum: “May God burn their livers!”

The film has a lunatic fixity of gaze.

There are gorgeous, spectacular land-

scapes quaking with wind, susurrant

with life or honeyed (yes) with after-

noon light. Even lives of barbarous

hardship have their beauties. Which

doesn’t mean this movie stints on those

lives’ cruel exactions; nor on the bleak

assaults of bereavement for a lonely

woman counting her companionships.

Upstairs, downstairs and in my lady’s cinema

Left: from left,

Lesley Nicol,

Sophie McSher,

Jim Carter and

Phyllis Logan in

‘Downton Abbey’.

Below: Waad and

Sama al-Kateab in

‘For Sama’. Below

left: Jennifer Lopez

and Constance Wu

in ‘Hustlers’

FILM

Nigel

Andrews

Downton Abbey

Michael Engler

AAAEE

For Sama

Waad al-Kateab, Edward Watts

AAAAA

Hustlers

Lorene Scafaria

AAEEE

Honeyland

Tamara Kotevska, Ljubomir Stefanov

AAAAE