Where are we right now – part two
Ah for a bookshop in a world of conflict
Demonstrators take over a Cinema
Kidnapped off a street by demonstrators calling for juries to end and democracy begin at a famous film festival, producer Larry Linsteeg joins the marchers who dragged him into a cinema demanding one view one vote.
Watching this on TV from a Renne flat, a former KGB agent with a film idea to hock at Renne, panics over the occupation chaos thinking he’ll get the blame.
Out of Competition – a novel for Cannes?
This is not Cannes. Or the Cannes Film Festival. Let me say that upfront. It’s Renne-Sur-Mer, a far better film festival by the way, a film festival not many get to see because they are blinded by the tinsel razzle-dazzle of Cannes’ annual event, or so it seems.
I documented a year in Renne-Sur-Mer’s historical progress when some unfortunate things happened. It was sad and bit funny at times. But was it fair to portray Renne in such a, well, dubious light. I can say I documented what happened. You work it out. What year was it. You know I can’t remember but it wasn’t that long ago in the future. Here’s ten pages to give you an idea of how chaotic festivals can be when the wheels fly off.
Grifter Jack’s arrival at the Renne Film Festival
Smiley Jack Kimmelon begins his Big Grift in Renne-Sur-Mer.
The entrance mural – done
This trapezium presents itself in a phone photo as the opposite of reality, the upper and lower perimeters coming together on the right side not expanding apart. Some cameras just don’t get it, or maybe some camera users simply don’t get it.
The Nude Truth
2025 Cannes Film Festival management banned nudity on the red carpet and in the festival environs.
2023, Semolina Pynes, a character in Out of Competition attending another festival on the Riviera, took on the vexed subject:
Review: “Out of Competition” by Lew Collins
by Austin Williams, Director of The Future Cities Project
It is fifty years since Spielberg’s movie, Jaws, first reached the big screen. It was described by film critic, Mark Kermode as a “genre-defining blockbuster that changed the face of modern cinema.” Indeed, a new theatre production, The Shark Is Broken, reflecting on the making of that movie is playing in UK theatres today. Lew Collins’ new book “Out of Competition” makes a few nods to the film – one of the characters is proposing yet another remake of the Jaws franchise – and to film-making per se, in a novel of intrigue, murder, and protest set in the murky world of international-finance in the film industry. Within the first chapter, a motor-boat driver is killed by a real shark falling from a promotional helicopter stunt. And so it begins.
The story is told in chronological order, day by day, over the course of a Film Festival in the south of France. A central protagonist Larry Linsteeg, a failing Hollywood film producer, kicks things off and within the first few pages we see him manhandled in a street in the south of France and bundled into a rowdy, radical, pro-democracy meeting. He’d been on his way to close a film-deal, and this opening chapter is fast-paced, and scripted in a manner of a Tarantino-esque film-edit. And equally confusing.
This book has been acclaimed as the 2023 Kenneth Patchen Award-winner (a prize celebrated by the Journal of Experimental Fiction). The author, Lew Collins relocated to France several years ago and his love of the country and especially its language comes across in the text that mixes French language freely into the dialogue. Maybe it’s a little too much for this GCSE-level reader. I found myself reaching for the Google Translate app across several paragraphs (but perhaps that says more about me than the average reader).
Adding to the need for concentration while reading this book, a number of characters appear with few flags or signature and we are confronted by a growing cast in rapid succession: a dodgy Russian oligarch, a film correspondent, a freelance photographer, a chief inspector, an ex-KGB agent with a heart condition, an outgoing festival director, critics, journalists, billionaires and showgirls. Along the way, there is a disappearance and a murder; there are Chinese kickboxers, Japanese artists and leftist demonstrators. It’s a lot for the reader to take in, and it is clearly a strain in the author’s character-naming inventiveness; culminating in Semolina Pynes, the out-of-her-depth, lead actress; or Zena Zatters, the festival gofer. Where characterisations are made, they are a little laboured, for example, sign-posting the “LA-based American audiovisual expert and putative film producer” or describing the oligarch’s boat as “a three hundred and twenty foot welded steel and aluminium moulded fibre-glass… ocean-going, part-solar-powered ship cruiser.”
That said, the story settles, and intrigue ensues. With so many characters, they rise and fall, appear and disappear all too easily and it is hard to relate to the characters in sufficient depth. But the pace is cinematic. Indeed, the filmic ambitions of the novel seem to have drawn characters from movie references: I pictured Rollergirl in Boogie Nights, or Alain Delon in La Piscine, and one can imagine a script for the big screen that emphasises the “homage“, as they say in France, towards updated Bogart detective noir. Maybe even a hint of Get Shorty… about a loan shark after all.
“Out of Competition” by Lew Collins, Jef Books, 2024. pp407.
“Was Life Simpler Back Then?” Vol. 3. Brittle realities-1.
As 1979 progressed, I kept producing my ten minutes long film every Monday, while RTHK’s new deputy director, Stuart W., was planning a new programme he wanted us all eventually to make for him at RTHK, a one hour weekly magazine, Here and Now, which would go to air in September.
One week I was led by a news report involving my recent past down to some warehouses on the western wharves, the godowns as they’re called, where boatloads of Vietnamese war refugees from South Vietnam arrived one after another. The arrivals were housed in pretty dire circumstances, and you smelt the distress immediately you walked onto the wharf.
Boats would come into harbour by themselves or be towed or ushered there by British patrol boats, where they would tie up to begin the process overseen by representatives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) who would deal case by case of their plight as being “refugees” from post-war-torn South Vietnam, each hoping the UNHCR office in Hong Kong would resettle them in a third country.
Getting from where they were into Hong Kong was hard, waiting for resettlement often harder. When boats arrived in the British Colony few local people were understanding. Many Hong Kongers thought most of these boats did not come across the South China Sea from Vietnam, but were refugee-scammers who after entering China by land then somehow found a boat to get across the water from China to Hong Kong. Some in Hong Kong thought some arrivals might even be Chinese mainlanders who wanted to get into Hong Kong posing by posing as Vietnamese.
Deep background to this is the 99 year 1898 signed ‘unequal’ treaty signed between Britain and Qing China, leasing mainland Chinese territory to the British, who had already acquired the island of Hong Kong ‘in perpetuity’ from the Qing empire in 1842 after the Chinese lost the First Opium War. Britain said it needed a land ring of protection for the island, so leased some of southern China’s land to the north of Hong Kong Island.
The treaty lasting 99 years was an insult mainland Chinese would never forget, forced on China in an age of extreme duress when China was a weakened nation facing internal troubles and watching foreigners set up ‘concessions’ on Chinese soil.
China wanted to end the occupation of Hong Kong in 1997 an expiry date that for them was non-negotiable
There I was at a steaming godown in July. I had seen a news program where a familiar face and voice had spoken up.
I walked around and eventually found her and with the camera rolling, after she launched into her story, I asked: Do you remember me at the Pingshang border point a year ago. For a second her eyes darted away from mine but then they came back: ‘It was my sister.’
I didn’t push the point. She did end up in my film but I didn’t want to make a case out of it. I had no case to make. And to my relief I found out later that she found refuge in Canada
Swimanög 