Pico Iyer is the author of seven works of non-fiction (including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul), and two novels, Cuba and the Night and Abandon. His most recent book, The Open Road, describes thirty years of talks and travels with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
FilmInFocus asked Iyer to select five cities he enjoyed visiting on the big screen.
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2046
Hong Kong
Wong Kar-wai has, since Chungking Express, been the poet laureate of the new urban mishmash, in which tenses elide, cultures collide and the result, in his moody urban vision, is romance. I love the Oriental Hotel in which the action of this film unfolds — a site in the imagination, in effect, though I recognize it on the back-streets of many an Asian city — and I love the way he takes the road-trip movies of Wim Wenders, and replaces dislocation with connection, whimsy with obsession, however fleeting.
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The Buena Vista Social Club
Havana
No city I have visited is more ravishing, layered, complex and intriguingly contradictory than Havana, and, though plenty of films have caught its light-and-shadow (Strawberry and Chocolate, Before Night Falls, I am Cuba), none has quite found its dilapidated beauty, the wonky way in which it dances, as Wim Wenders did in this innocent-seeming documentary. Music, spirit, imagination are all that have kept the crumbling island afloat for the past forty or more years, and if you want to see how that miraculous process works (I tell my friends), please see this film.
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Mystic River
Boston
I lived in Boston for four years, and came to grow ever more impatient with the glossy images of Harvard Yard, the postcard pictures of Back Bay redbricks, with which we try to comfort (or to blind) ourselves, and to tame those realities that unsettle us. It took Clint Eastwood, and his magisterial, contemplative gaze, to find a Boston that I recognize, gritty, worn-down and compromised, and to play out in it a Greek tragedy that any Harvard professor should recognize. Eastwood so illuminated the truth of Boston that it's easy to imagine that he opened up the city for the king of juiced-up urban landscapes, Martin Scorsese, to come in and make his Miltonic Departed, claiming in Boston all the intensities and dramatic power that it's not always easy to see closer to home.
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City of God
Rio de Janeiro
Fernando Meirelles gave us Rio, terrifyingly, irresistibly, consumingly, in this movie, but he also showed us the global city as it is everywhere — Johannesburg, Mumbai, Mexico City, Jakarta. That is how, as he revealed also in The Constant Gardener, he caught not just his home country, but the shadow side of countries everywhere, the places we screen out, our unlegislated and often repressed sub-conscious. City of God begat Tsotsi and the new urban movies of our young century.
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Monsoon Wedding
Delhi
I saw Mira Nair's knowing, piercing, jubilant film the day after I flew out of Delhi — and felt I'd never left. Never have I seen a film-maker capture, with such easy, natural precision, the complexities, and the tangled warmth and chaos and cruelty, of my parents' India, offering us the middle-class companion-piece to the unhoused sorrow of Salaam Bombay (the only film to reduce my Bombay-raised father to tears). And in her last film, The Namesake, she took her novelistic gift even deeper by giving us the immigrant experience with a sense of nuance and poignancy and human shading that no novel I have read has begun to match.
Wong Kar-wai, Wenders, Eastwood, Meirelles and Nair excite and exhilarate me because they not only alight on particular cities in their movies, but also light up the entire planet. In that sense, they both give us the unknown and give back to us the world we know. I'm tempted to believe they're helping to hymn the new century into life.
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