What influence does the time have on our response to cinema? I ask because the strangeness of A Headless Woman was compounded by seeing it at midday, when the mind feels at its most woken and conventional. A later viewing might have helped me to feel less prosaic. Darkness outside. The subconscious clocking in for its shift. These conditions are better suited to Lucrecia Martel’s artful, involving yet ultimately elusive film.

Set in Salta, her native province of Argentina, it concerns a middle-aged woman, Veronica, who hits something while driving along a deserted road. In stopping suddenly she bumps her head and enters a curiously disassociated state, cut adrift from memory, attachments, even sense of self. Or at least she thinks she has hit something. And the bump may be responsible for those symptoms, which anyway are increasingly open to doubt. Veronica, played by Maria Onetto with a dignified kind of bewilderment, struggles to cope with these uncertainties; has personal, professional and sexual contact with people without appearing to know why; then slips back into the stream of life, as if what had briefly felt strange were in fact normal. Which perhaps it is.

There are two mysteries here: (a) what happened on the road and (b) the film-maker’s intentions, both puzzles being illustrated by one particular image, emotive and teasingly deployed. After the incident a dog is shown lying in the road, although it is not clear if Veronica has noticed. Previously seen in the company of some boys, the dog appears to confirm and explain the collision, for our benefit at least. But as Veronica sits behind the wheel, dazed and unsure of what to do, one notices a child’s handprint on the glass beside her. Was it there before or is this the first time have we been shown the window from that angle? Not for the last time I doubted my powers of observation. Then, as Veronica sets off again, the first handprint is joined by a second. Is the director playing games with us or has some change in the light taken place, developing the prints like a photograph? Either way, there is an innocent explanation, given that she has just said goodbye to friends and their children outside a swimming pool, the little crowd milling round her car. Except that one of the boys seen playing with the dog is later found to be missing, in which case the prints might be his, a poignant trace of the impact, a different order of culpability. But would such perfect contact have been made by a glancing blow, palms pressed flat against the glass? And why does Veronica, and everyone else who examines the car, fail to notice them?

That is not a plot spoiler – there is little in the way of plot to spoil.  And nothing is really clarified or resolved. Seizing on this, the critics, largely enthusiastic about the film, have had fun trying to work out what it signifies. Being dentists, Veronica and her husband are well off by local standards, part of a middle class set with comfortable lives. As a result, her apparent ability to shrug off the accident has been interpreted as bourgeois indifference, even callousness, towards the poor, the boy having been an urchin, we understand, foul-mouthed and streetwise. In support of this view, her apparent recovery is triggered or signalled by the simple expedient of dying her hair, one’s conscience cosmetic like a facial or perm. ‘Is that your natural colour?’ someone asks, one of those throw-away remarks freighted with subtext, with connotation. What is more, the absence of a corpse, together with a police contact’s ignorance of the missing boy, takes us back to The Disappeared, who perished in their thousands under the former military regime, a reign of terror colluded in by ‘the haves’. From this angle, Martel is pursuing a political agenda, one that is coded to make it hard for us, or in fear of reprisals.

But this is a work of art, not propaganda, and a single reading of its complexities feels reductive, one-dimensional. Veronica’s dilemma following the accident might be anyone’s, irrespective of class. Guilt, wishful thinking, a willingness to be reassured: these are human attributes that comment on our shared condition. Likewise her disassociated state after the accident, which says something about identity. It is striking, almost comical, how her loss of memory goes unnoticed by the people she knows. They finish her sentences; anticipate what she is going to do; explain relationships by acting them out. Being close to others is to be created by them. We are what they take us to be, the self socially construed.

Coincidentally, or by a cute piece of programming, the Borderline Festival is also screening Blow Up, Antonioni’s head-scratcher from 1966 which features a body, and by implication a murder, that might or might not have been. The parallels are obvious, but not to be overdone. The context for that earlier exercise in bemusement was the vogue, new to popular culture, for taking drugs which questioned the nature of perception. The Headless Woman, a more oblique if less ground-breaking film, confronts a deeper unease and ambiguity. Sober or high, how do we know that what we experience is real? Through a chance event Veronica is gifted a vision of her life shorn of its surface meaning so that nothing about the world and one’s place in it seems straightforward or secure. In token of this, the diminutive by which everyone knows her is Vero. Nearly two thirds of Argentinians have some degree of Italian descent and ‘vero’ can be translated from that language as ‘true’. The name, once affirming the fact of herself, becomes ironic, in other words, the nature of who we are revealed to be fluid, contingent, unknowable. Yet Martel’s female protagonist, like some everywoman suffering on our behalf, reverts to being a mannequin or avatar, the role created for her by the world. Class loyalty or existential bind, what else can she do? When hair has been dyed so often, who knows what is natural.

The first great age of animation was associated with comic violence, talking animals and other effects that were impossible to achieve with actors, however feudal their contracts. In front of a camera is where the dramas that reflected our lives took place, whether epic or small scale. Latterly, however, cinema has fallen under the spell of computer games and developments in CGI are blurring the dividing line between what is real and what is digital. Sensing an opportunity, animators are moving onto ground vacated by the mainstream to bring us visions of ourselves that are no less playful and visually inventive than before but deal with subjects that are more directly and intensely human.

These thoughts are inspired by My Life as a Courgette, an honest, poignant, funny exploration of childhood under pressure in the modern age. The film centres around Icare, a nine-year-old boy who goes by the pet name of the film’s title. The only child of a one-parent family, he accidentally causes the death of his alcoholic mother and is taken by Raymond, the policeman in charge of his case, to a children’s home in the country. There he encounters bullying at first, but stands up for himself and before long is accepted into this dysfunctional but quaintly idyllic society. A new girl arrives, Camille, with whom Courgette falls sweetly, abjectly in love. Her aunt (the only villain in the piece, a chavvy update of Cruella De Vil) wants to foster her for the money, and a battle of wits ensues between the children and this two-faced trollop. The ending is happy, of course, but far from rose-tinted. Not everyone gets a new home. And when the lucky ones find they have rooms of their own any pleasure on their behalf is tinged with regret. The dormitory they have left behind was a little commune, what it lacked in privacy being made up for in closeness and common cause. The good fortune we seek for ourselves always seems to involve separation. It was also a place where girls and boys had less need to be kept apart. In entering their single rooms, the two friends rehearse the great schism of puberty, with no guarantee their attachment will survive.

Swiss director Claude Barras uses the technique known as stop-motion to animate his little people, each only ten inches tall. The buildings and scenery resemble a picture book, while Raymond’s car is a box you can imagine his feet propelling. This is a child’s view of the world that connects with our innocence – not entirely lost, whatever we may feel. The horrors that have been experienced by Courgette and his friends and the behavioural issues they suffer from are sensitively dealt with, the film celebrating the group’s resilience, concern for each other and ability to adjust. Their rib-digging worldliness as well, sex a comic and subversive fascination. As for the adults, Camille’s aunt aside, their characters are sympathetic without being idealised – Raymond in particular, whose sorrow is visible in his resin face before, tenderly, we learn of its cause.

One experiences any work of art in a context which influences the view that is taken. In the current climate, I am given to wonder about the world unfolding in front of my eyes. An orphanage with fewer than ten kids; authority figures who can be trusted; outcomes that promise happiness for some, if not all: this version of life is hard to recognise. Perhaps such places exist in France, its public provision more resilient than ours, albeit at issue in the current election. In austerity Britain, with children’s services in crisis and abuse scandals mounting, such institutional kindness stretches belief. Is the film true-to-life, then, a heart-warming report from a gentler jurisdiction; is it intended to make us feel good about something most people find difficult to contemplate; or should it be seen as a political message, a call to cherish our humanity, embattled as it is on every side?

As a postscript, not unconnected with these musings, I wonder about the title. This suggests a cutesy tale of anthropomorphic vegetables, which inclined me to give the film a miss at first. It might help if the original, Ma Vie de Courgette, was translated into English without the ‘a’. Perhaps then the version issued in the United States would have been spared being called My Life as a Zucchini. But I doubt it, given that the voices have also been dubbed. Why do that? The French children bring their characters to life and sound loyal to the setting of the story, subtitles being a small price to pay for access to a different take on the world. But American audiences are assumed to want only what is familiar and easily digestible. As Donald Trump, the spokesman for that insularity, would say, or rather tweet: How sad!

The trouble with Michel Houellebecq, apart from his transfer to Arsenal, is never knowing whether to play him out wide or centrally as a striker. No, wait a minute, that’s Danny Wellbeck. Forgive me, I’ll start again.

The trouble with Michel Houellebecq is summed up by the cover of Atomised, the English translation of his second novel Les Particules élémentaires. It features a young woman wearing only a pair of briefs, the book’s title acting as a bikini top. One imagines the designer fiddling with the letters until any trace of nipple is obscured, a perfect example of the mismatch between hardware and software, of technology wasted on culture. Compare this with the cover of the French edition which depicts two half-seen men sitting on either side of a lit but empty space. Very philosophical. Perhaps the trouble lies not with the author but with us, the British, and our Page Three approach to novels of ideas.

However, that does not get Houellebecq entirely off the hook. Atomised is full of the most explicit, if clinical sex and although all that fucking and sucking serves a purpose it seems to have more than one eye on titillation for its own sake, on notoriety – and who knows, on sales. It is one reason why the book is likely to alienate women, reading at times like the seamiest of male fantasies with lovers improbably compliant while apologising for their inadequacies. True, the couplings are joyless and unerotic like most pornography and this supports Houellebecq’s more serious design, to nail the libido as humanity’s big distraction, the cause of our discontent, a literally fatal flaw. And yes, I do mean literally. He is the most mordant of moralists, filled with loathing for his species and civilization. But still the rutting continues, long after any point about its aridity has been proved; and I cannot help but feel he is trying to have it both ways, like a tabloid editor printing filth in order to appear scandalised.

The structure of the novel also rankles. We get a detailed insight into its protagonists’ lives, including a blow job by blow job account of their dealings with women, while the final section has more in common with Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Yet the narrative voice is undifferentiated even though the types of knowledge and perspective required in each case are poles apart. At this point the escape clause of post-modernism will no doubt be invoked. Rule-breaking and playfulness make anything permissible and who cares about point of view any more? Sadly, perhaps, I do – less on any technical or stylistic grounds than because a lack of attendance to such things undermines the other claims a writer might have to seriousness.

And Houellebecq has plenty. He is angry, uncompromising, original and most creditably of all ambitious. Taking as one’s subject the final crisis of mankind and the next stage in our evolution puts most modern fiction to shame not only with how far it is prepared to reach but also with its claims for the form. There is almost as much science as sex, my ignorance so profound I do not know if it is genuine or made up. And for all my quibbles about its narrator, that final section changes entirely one’s reading of what came before . I do not need to share the author’s apparent misanthropy. I might question or even pity his state of mind. But the fact remains I have rarely finished a book so invigorated by the novel’s capacity to reflect – no, remake the world.

People read, not only in real life but in novels too. What does their choice of reading tell us about a character and about the writer who put that book in their hands?

This question occurred to me as I made my way through Of the Farm, an early and lesser known work by John Updike. Discovered in a second-hand shop, my copy is from an American paperback edition whose trashy cover mis-sells – or debunks – the urbane prose within. Updike’s narrator is Joey Robinson, a divorced, thirty-something advertising executive visiting his widowed mother on the family farm. His purpose is partly to see how she is managing on her own and partly to introduce her to his new wife, Peggy, and stepson Richard. Over the weekend of their stay a number of tensions reveal themselves: the mutual resentment between the two women; Joey’s guilt regarding his own children and doubts concerning his change of spouse; the burden to him and his father of the farm, whose purchase was Mrs Robinson’s idea; the old lady’s ill-health and what will happen to the property when she dies; Joey’s attempts to bond with Richard: the list is not exhaustive, but indicates the complexity of the psychological landscape which Updike unfolds.

As is often the case, however, these figures struggle to escape from their creator’s wordy and encyclopaedic shadow. Scribblers beware: that is the risk of a first-person narrative. Joey is as a know-all, a one-man factory of metaphor and so comically pompous about sex we are inclined to deride or disbelieve his character. But the same is true of the supporting cast. Joey’s mother cites Plato and knows her theology. Even the minister at their local church sermonises like a Harvard professor. And Richard is a kind of mini-me, improbably knowing and mature. Only Peggy stays close to, if not precisely within, the borders of the role allotted to her, which given the over-endowment of the others is hardly a compliment. At one point Joey and his mother discuss whether she is stupid. I have seen, and often been, stupid and believe me when I say Peggy does not even come close. But then Updike’s women tend to be defined less by their temperament or intellect than by their biology. The eyes through which we see them being male, her physical attributes (including, in this case, bleeding and cramps) are pored over with an attention to detail intended to suggest fascination but bordering on prurience.

How odd, then that into this over-powered ménage with its New World geography and neuroses should stumble the unlikely figure of P. G. Wodehouse. Well, not Plum himself but one of his novels. Joey, looking on Richard’s behalf for the science fiction of his youth, finds some old Thorne Smiths and Wodehouses. This moment stands out as one of the most truthful in the book, the incident, allowed to speak for itself, allowing us to imagine an entire history for the Robinsons in their ill-chosen retreat. The library composed of two authors suggests limited resources and tastes, the consolations of literature needing the extra spice of a collecting bug to justify the house room and expense. Perhaps, like an encyclopaedia paid for in instalments, they were bought from a travelling salesman pandering to the cultural shame of the poorly-read. As objects the books exude a kind of radium, taking Joey back to the long, uneventful summers of his youth before a driving licence provided the means of escape. And the fact that as many of them are lying down as standing up alludes to the passing of that dutiful interest in the written word and to a decline in standards of an old woman growing old alone. This depth-from-simplicity contributes more to our understanding than all of Joey’s Updikean musings. As William Carlos Williams said: no ideas but in things.

Adding layers to our engagement with the text, the question of how the Robinsons came by their modest library is matched by quizzing Updike’s own acquaintance with the books. Thorne Smith was an American who wrote comical ghost stories. He died in 1934, two years after our author was born. Things had a longer shelf-life in those days and Topper or The Jovial Ghosts may have been all the rage in the Updike family home. My father owned some so they must have crossed the Atlantic – as Wodehouse certainly did in the other direction. Were they next to the Smiths and devoured in the same precociously bookish childhood, a memory drawn on for Of the Farm; or did Updike encounter them while he studied in Oxford? And which book is it that Joey picks up and starts reading? Allusion is made to the stealing of a pig and this suggests one of the Blandings stories, in which the Earl’s beloved Empress is always being coveted by some felonious bounder. To his surprise Joey finds himself laughing, another moment of insight in which, their choices and mannerisms having always been derided, some merit is glimpsed in a parent’s tastes. Later Richard picks up the Wodehouse and starts reading, the whole cycle beginning again, his adoption of Joey as a father deftly implied.

Physical description. Intensity of feeling. The world-shattering importance of ordinary lives. Updike could be so good at these things that when the intellectuallism intrudes it feels like an insult to his subject and his audience, like an operatic voice drowning a popular song. In this case, however, a certain amount of redemption is at hand. The prose of the last few pages, as the visit nears its end and the tensions that separate the protagonists come to a head, is more in scale with their humanity and achieves what all great fiction is able to do, establish a connection with people far removed from the reader’s own experience. He had that gift, Updike, to which his other talents were not always conducive or kind.