Sügisball (2007)

Sügisball (Autumn ball) might be the only Estonian movie I have seen in my life. There are certainly some things that speak for this movie. The first thing is that a large part of the soundtrack consists of songs by one of my favorite bands, German doom-jazzers Bohren & der club of gore. I didn't know this when I sat down to watch it. The other major accomplishment of Sügisball is the use of urban wasteland. There are hazy images of nocturnal big city streets, and the settings consisting of endless rows of drab apartment blocks create a dramatic backdrop for what goes on in the movie.
The third strength is that it has one really funny joke. I won't spoil it for you. 
A single mother and her little girl who is addressed by men in gray overcoats / an architect who has doubts about his life / a drunken author who has doubts about his life / a doorman who finds his job demeaning. 
A big flaw of Öunpuu's movie is that it clings to a cliché that is employed in too many films that strive to be contender for the Arthouse movie of the year. "The characters long for close relationships but nobody understands them." Boo-hoo. The problem is not that this is too bleak or too depressing - the problem is that we've seen this before, many times, and even then, it was too one-dimensional, too stereotypical, too faux-existentialist. I mean, how many TIMES can you show a drunken man throwing some wine glasses on the floor because he is so FRUSTRATED with life and so filled with destructive ENERGY?
Why are these people so unhappy? We don't know.
Öunpuu sometimes manages to arrange a nice scene of an urban landscape or bright street lights - but in this movie, he is not a great interpreter of human relationships. And then I DON'T say that every movie should be about relationships. But Sügisball tries hard to be the kind of movie that provides stark images of alienation, fear, hopelessness. Etc.
And Please, directors, hear me out: SPARE ME from on-screen philosophizing about profound questions concerning the meaning of life and human happiness. Make a movie instead.

My own private Idaho (1991)

Keanu Reeves is expressive like a log. That is only too evident when watching any of his movies, including Gus van Sant's exploration of the life of boy prostitutes, My own private Idaho. Teen idol River Phoenix is slightly better, but not much. Luckily, this film is not about believable on-sceen appearances of the actors. The acting creates an effect of alienation (of course, Udo Kier has to act perform a little song in heavy German accent!), and so does the dialogue, partly performed in Shakespearian English (segments of the dialogue are from Henry IV). Sometimes these verfremdungseffekts work, and sometimes they don't. It's an uneven film, heavily marked by its time. (Why do I say this? Will I say it in twenty years?) But most of the small little experiments contribute to what becomes an offbeat, quite beautiful meditation on drifters. And yes - the "drifter" is romantizised to a sometimes ridiculous extent ("The road will never end", duh). It's always like that. But the interesting thing is that van Sant brings some unusual themes into the movies. The bromance, here, is explicitly homoerotic.
As a mood film, this is not bad. As a story about unrequited (?) love, it works too.
Clearly, this is a very influential movie. One sees traces of it in lots of contemporary indie movies.

A special day (1977)

My recollection of A special day, a film by Ettore Scola about the encounter of a housewife and a homosexual radio announcer, is that it is an almost flawless film. Watching it for the second time, I realize it isn't. There are lots of things to praise. The use of sound in the film is one of the things that make this an exciting film. The setting of the story is the day during which Hitler and other leading men of the Nazi party join hands with their Italian ally in a big parade in Rome. The story takes place in a Roman apartment building. Antonietta, a bored housewife, begins the big day by making sure the rest of the family make it to the parade on time. She remains at home. Somewhere in the house, there is a radio. It is the blaring, squaky radio we here on the soundtrack; reporters talk about the events, patriotic songs are played. These low-quality radio sounds accompany the story of the film and constitute an important layer of its atmosphere. There is no additional soundtrack.
What I didn't remember about A special day (or what I didn't notice the first time around) is that the dialogue is sometimes too psychologically explicit. We learn stuff about the characters that should have been shown more subtly, rather than blurted out in talky dialogue.
But for the most part, this is an awesome film about what it is like to be seen as a useless human being in a society preoccupied with strength and manliness. It's a film about loneliness and sudden bursts of emotion.

Criss cross (1949)

It's Sunday and I watch a movie that is completely nonsensical but not boring to the extent that I wouldn't finish it. I've never heard of Robert Siodmack. Apparently, he's the one to blame for the run-of-the-mill thriller Criss Cross. There are two good things about this movie. There is a scene during the first half of the movie that takes place in a bar. A jazz band is jamming. They are playing really good, driven stuff. Our hero is standing away from the dancing crowd. He looks at the girl he was once married to. She sits alone at a table. That's a great scene. The other good thing is the end. Usually, a cynical movie paves way for an ending that softens some of the hard edges of the film. This one doesn't. And, wait a minute, Burt Lancaster is not bad.

The firemen's ball (1967)

It's hard not to interpret the The firemen's ball as a subversive movie. Even though this movie is about the fire department of some small town in which the 86:th birthday of one retired fire chief is celebrated with a big ball, it is easy to pick up political themes. Most of all, it's a fun film about shabby facades, greed and the impossibility of seeing things for what they really are. Actually, this is a wonderfully funny film. Milos Foreman does a great job in presenting these old-timers who have worked in the fire department all their lives and now they want to honor their colleague, whatever it takes. There is to be a lottery, a beauty contest, and the beauty queen is to hand over the present (which is, of course, a hatchet). Everything goes to hell, but the most important task for the old-timers is to make it seem like everything is in order. The segment of the film in which a jury comprising elderly gentlemen do their best to compile a beauty contest line-up is a comic gem.

Flickan (2009)

If you are interested in Swedish cinema beyond Stieg Larsson adaptations, Beck and god damn Kurt Wallander, Turku is not the best place in the world for being up to date with recent releases. That's why I was lucky to find Flickan at the local alternative DVD rental shop (the only one that is not part of a big chain). Most reviewers praised the cinematography of this movie. That's understandable. It is very, very pretty, but also, perhaps, a tad bit conventional (zooming in a flower against a blurry backdrop to create a dramatic, melancholy effect). Overall, it's a strong film. It revolves around a nine year old girl, whose parents have travelled to Africa. Her aunt comes to look after her, but the girl gets tired of her partying and carelessness and finds a way to get rid of her. For the rest of the film, we see the girl alone, with her older, sex-obsessed friends and with a boy her own age. Fredrik Edfeldt is successful in his attempt to describe a kid's world. There are many scenes that are a bit hard to watch because they rub our faces into the embarrassing, physical or the cruel. I don't mean to say this is a film that exploits those feelings, rather, there is stuff here that rings true in a way that is hard to fend off. In several scenes, the girl meets her older friend's father. The man always tells her to sing and dance for him. She is embarrassed and humiliated but does it anyway. When she meets him in a mall, she automatically starts performing her little number. The man cruelly interrupts her, telling her people might find her nuts.
No, Edfeldt does not create an idealized picture of childhood. He presents children as beings no less complex than adults are. This is a real strenght.

Ten (2002)

Ten is not Abbas Kiarostami's best film. But it sure is a good film that plays with the form of documentary to create a sudued piece of fiction. The film is divided into - surprise! - ten sequences. In each one of them, we follow the same female driver along with the passenger she happens to have in her car; sometimes it's a woman she has given a lift, and sometimes it's her little Emperor-ish son. If you have any preconceptions about Iranian life, some of them will be shattered by this movie. The women portrayed in the movie do not comprise one homogenous group. Rather, they embody different attitudes towards society, men, what it is like to be a woman. The opening scene is perfectly chosen. The driver has a verbal fight with her son. He accuses her of everything, and she defends herself by critiquing her former husband, and society. The camera rarely (never?) moves from the boy's agitated body language. It's an emotionally poignant seene that creates a kind of suffocating effect, in a good way.
As a viewer, I feel trapped in the car along with these people. The minimalist idea of the film is well executed. I barely think about not seeing anything in the entire movie except the front seat of a car. The makes us strangely aware of the connection between what we hear and what we see. In many scenes, we only see one of the interlocutors, and we can only imagine what the other looks like when she talks. Of course, you might give this a political interpretation.

Rocco and his brothers (1960)

At 00:00 I thought: I guess Visconti made a few good movies, let's try this. At 01:30 I was totally fed up. Mostly with roguish men. A bunch of brothers who move from the South to the northern City / moral hardening / a screeching, pudgy matron with an quasi-Oedipal relationship to all her sons / a girl who chooses first one of the brothers for her lover, then another one. I see nothing interesting about this film. Not the story, not its style. I turned the thing off and went to bed, leaving the hord of brothers behind, trapped on that scrappy VHS tape. If you consider watching this movie, have a look at the plot keywords at IMDB: "prostitute", "widow", "boxer", "murder". In this case, it's an apt description of what this movie is about.

The death of mister Lazarescu (2005)

I've been looking forward to watching The death of mister Lazarescu (2005) for a long time. Now that I've seen it, I am satisfied to say that it lived up to all my expectations. Even though the story is depressing as hell the film represents a raw kind of dark comedy. The film takes off with images of mister Lazarescu, an elderly, lonely man who lives with his cats. He downs some drinks and calls the ambulance to tell them he is sick and needs to get to the hospital. He receives some help from his neighbors (who reproach him for letting his cats pee in the stairwell) and then, finally, an ambulance arrives. But the events that follow bring little hope for mister Lazarescu. He is shuttled from hospital to hospital, rejected on various grounds, there is no place for him, he fails to conform to the doctor's legalistic definition of what it means to go into surgery "voluntarily". This is a brutal film about bureaucracy, depersonalization and institutionalization. For most characters in the film - not all - Lazarescu is just another drunk the treatment of whom society cannot afford. When the ambulance personnel bring him to yet another hospital, he is met with the standard question: "You have been drinking?" And, later on: "This man has peed his pants?" What makes this film so great is that it is sober (no pun intended). It's a film about society and work. But this is not a lecture in sociology. Puiu's characters are not built like representatives of their societal role & function (that might be justified in some films, I'd say, but Puiu's film takes another path).
Puiu has made a film that is good in several ways. Even though there are not many obvious experiments to be found here in terms of cinematography etc., the style of sometimes wobbly hand-held camera fits its style. Puiu follows mister Lazarescu's journey in and out of consciousness, dismissals, how he is sometimes tended to, how night turns into morning, with an admirable palette of perspectives and atmospheres. There is no big statement about humanity being either this way or that way. It's a film where cynicism is described as cynicism and, even more interestingly, where those doctors and nurses who are not cynical are NOT depicted as heroic, quasi-celestial beings. It's a down-to-earth film that is evident both in its treatment of cruelty and goodness. This might be a quite rare thing, actually - because goodness tends to be transformed into either naivety or some inexplicable spurt of altruistic action.

The ending of the movie, which I won't spoil, is a moment of sheer brilliance. As is the rest of the film.

Journey to Italy (1954)

So, Roberto Rosselini again! Journey to Italy is a considerably better film than Rome open city, which I reviewed some weeks ago. However, the story seems nothing out of the ordinary. Alex and his wife Catherine are travelling in Italy to sort out some inheritance business. Their relationship is bristling with negative tension and they both seem to be estranged from each other and the rest of the world. But where Rome open city felt strangely sloppy, this is a very integrated film. Most scenes take a surprising turn because the emphasis lies on unexpected things - a bustling crowd, a herd of intriguing museum statues, a herd of cows. In one of the scenes that made an impression on me, Alex, who is mostly a stone-faced man, is overwhelmed by a craving for a drink. He goes to the kitchen to ask for something, but the Italien maid does not understand him. Their lack of a common language expresses a sudden burst of energy in this otherwise quite elusive and hard-to-read man.
One impressive aspect of Rossellini's film is the way dialogue is employed. I realized how much "smart" dialogue can be used in a really stiff way, where every line is supposed to contribute to some complex Plot that you will understand if you think really hard. Here, dialogue is not used in order to convey information nor do the characters churn out witticisms for the audience to quote. Rossellini gives lots of space to ambiguity and in that he shows more interest in his characters than what I am used to seeing in most films. And he allows for repetition. Many seens bear a striking resemblance to each other - we see patterns, things happening again and again, variations - and it is from this that we learn to know the characters and the world they inhabit (or the world that they react to).

Point break (1991)

There are few actors who reach up to the standard set by the late Mr. Swayze. In Point break (1991), a surfer-crime-drama movie directed by Catheryn Bigelow, he meets his match. His acting skills in this film are almost exceeded by another Giant in the history of cinema, by his younger, promising colleague, K. Reeves. What a presence! What subtlety! I must say Point break is one of those rare pieces of film making - nourishment for the soul - to really find its way straight into the heart of the viewer. An FBI agent called Johnny Utah (Reeves) attempts to catch a gang of bank robbers. He has reason to suspect they are surfers. He hits the beach to dissolve this mystery. By necessity, he has to learn the art of surfing. On the beach, he meets Bodhi (what an apt name for this spiritual surfer!) who is a fearless surfer but also something of a philosopher. The moment they meet, it is obvious that this is the seed of an impossible love story that might never reach its fulfillment. The interaction between Mr. Swayze and Mr. Reeves is simply heart-wrenching, "seeing one's rare magnificence in someone else", identification, repulsion, impossible desire. The chemistry between them - it's friction that defies words.
Ms. Bigelow has created an existential tour-de-force about conscience and the depth of male companionship and the impossible situations - tragedies, even - that life confronts us with. As Bigelow herself confessed: like no other movie, it captured the Zeitgeist. Point break is a work with deep philosophical and spiritual roots; a film about what it means to be human. One reviewer places it firmly within a history of heroism from Aristotle to Nietzsche - and he also suggests it's a film to be understood from a Hegelian perspective (the dialectic of master and servant), which makes perfect sense once you give some thought to the relationship between Johnny and Bodhi. "The master prefers death to a life without honor and beauty, a life of mere survival."
Mr. Swayze, with his rare gift for embodying complex characters, lends this piece of human drama a multifaceted face. Not only does Swayze impress us with a convincing physical edge; agile, at ease, on top of the situation - he also has an intuitive understanding for his character's haunted psyche. Bigelow's film, and Swayze's character in particular, offers a meditation on the eternal questions about freedom, fate and the bonds of society. As one reviewer put it: the films that comprise Bigelow's ouvre cannot be dismissed as mere action flicks, "entertainment", her films embody Ideas.
To mention but one memorable line: "If you wanna go to the ultimate, you gotta pay the ultimate price, is not tragic dying doing what you love" And another: "Fear leads to hesitation. Hesitation causes your worst fears to come true." And another: "I know Johnny. I know you want me so bad it's like acid in your mouth. But, not this time."
Like no other film, Point break explores the complexity of human desire.
"Yo Johnny! I see you in the next life!"

Uzak (2002)

Yusuf goes to Istambul looking for a job on a ship. He lives with his cousin Mahmut, a cynical photographer who seems to enjoy watching Tv more than anything else. Mahmut does not seem happy about having a guest in his home. He broods over his ex-wife. He watches Stalker when Yusuf is in the room, just to put on some porn when his cousin ambles off. They have a strained relationship. The prospect of getting a job is not really good for Yusuf, so he walks around on the streets, and bothers Mahmud with his presence in the apartment. To a great extent, this is a film about space. The title, Uzak, means distance. Yusuf's and Mahmut's relationship is not so much unraveled by words, but rather we see what they feel about each other in how they react to shared space; damp socks on a radiator, traces of cigarette ash, an empty corridor. The presence of the other is, for the most part, mediated through the belongings of the other. But none of them seems really at home in Mahmut's apartment. We also see these two characters on their own, in cafés, checking out women, walking. And the urban locations seem no less bleak than Mahmut's tidy apartment.

There are many scenes that have a perfect set up and atmosphere - along with a quiet sense of humour. In one of them, Mahmut takes Yusuf with him on a trip on which he is supposed to work. They drive by a scenic little village with fluffy sheep on a hill. At first, Mahmut deliberates over whether they should stop so he could take a picture, but then he says in a gruff voice, "I don't bother". There are several scenes involving smoking. We see Yusuf smoking on Mahmut's balcony. He listens to the wind-chimes and gazes out over the city.
Uzak overstates nothing. It's a good film in that relies on the medium. People don't have to mull their feelings over in psychologically explicit dialogue. (The scenes involving half-stalking female strangers might approximate the overstated) The images of snow-laden Istambul are very beautiful and for the most part, Ceylan's use of long shots work. After I finished watching Uzak I realized there was no music except for the sounds of the specific locations of the film.

2:37 (2006)

Gus van Sant's Elephant is a fantastic movie, but 2:37 proves that copies of its style and content might not turn out as good. Thematically, these films are similar; alienated youth, high school numbness. But the director Murali Thalluri tries to emulate van Sant's film stylistically as well. Kids walking through dwindling corridors are filmed from behind, classical music, some ambient noise, the same moment filmed through the eyes of several different people. That's a bit embarrassing. But what is worse is that 2:37 is so focused on portraying problems that it almost stops being a film. It's more a sociology report, or, perhaps more to the point, an attempt at awareness raising. The characters have little life of their own beyond the problem that comes to define them (we've seen the gay kid who is portrayed as being just a gay kid in films before and, well, it's sad.) It's not a really bad film but one thing really bothered me, and that was the inclusion of quasi-documentary interviews. Those were totally redundant, provided us with excessive explanatory backgrounds and was a cheap way of creating "authenticity". And one might argue that some scenes in it are unnecessarily graphic.

The hurt locker (2009)

In sleazy newspaper articles, journalists always say the same things about Kathryn Bigelow. That she is not a typical female director, that she is "one of the boys". These journalists seem to think that a typical female director makes movies about romance & shopping. Naturally, Bigelow and The hurt locker are everywhere right now. But it's actually a good, intense film that in no way gives praise to "our boys" or "our war". It's a film the politics of which remain ambiguous. There are some stereotypes and some mannerisms in the dialogue have a paper doll ring but that didn't bother me too much. The film follows three soldiers who defuse and sometimes detonate home-made bombs, IED:s. It's a film in which the differences between the characters are nicely played out. In almost all scenes, we get several pictures of what it means to be a "professional", a soldier, a man. It turns out that war means different things to these three main characters. It's perhaps an unusual film in that danger is not an excuse for action, but rather a topic that is explored most of all through the ways the characters react to situations.
What struck me was that this is a film that doesn't really have a "narrative". The New York Times calls it "a series of set pieces". It's more a meditation on boredom, excitation and addiction than an attempt to build a story. And, mind you, it is not "a film about war". It's more specific than that.
What was a happy surprise for me was how The hurt locker goes beyond the orchestrated elegance of conventional war movies. The soundtrack sometimes consists of almost jarring sounds, the camera is sometimes hand-held and the pictures at times grainy. These are all effects that work.
It's not the worst film to win an Oscar.
Maybe I should watch ... Point break.

Pane e tulipani (2000)

Bruno Ganz, Bruno Ganz! Bruno Ganz! He played Hitler in Der Untergang, a writer in Eternity and a day, he played Jonathan i Herzog's Nosferatu and he played another Jonathan in that great Wim Wenders movie, Der Amerikanische Freund. In Pane e tulipani (2000) Ganz is a waiter, Fernando, who offers accomodation to a houswife, Rosalba, who is left behind in a bus tour but who decides to go to Venice because she has never been there before. The film revolves around the relationship between Rosalba and Fernando but there is also the storyline with a "private eye" who is sent to Venice by Rosalba's chauvinistic husband. Pane e tulipane is a colorful comedy with quirky characters and nice music. I like it because it has a tone of its own, toying with surreal elements and dream sequences. As a romantic comedy, it lacks some of the overused conventions of the genre and that makes it rather special. One of the main characters is an anarchist florist. And there's accordion music. Need I say more?

Miehen työ (2007)

A Finnish film is incomplete without awkward silences, naturalistic naked bodies, suicide attempts and/or death, heavy drinking, men whom nobody understands. Miehen työ (2007) boasts all these ingredients. And more of the same. Yes, there are hints of a tongue in cheek, yes, certain moments are relieved by black humor but hell, this is such a traditional Finnish movie it's almost ridiculous.
During the first twenty minutes of Miehen työ, I couldn't stop thinking about L'adversaire. A man, Juha, is made redundant from his robust factory job. He feels his wife can't bear to hear it, so he acts as if he goes off to work every morning. He comes to take up a job that he cannot talk to his wife about. He offers women "services". The rest of the film is dedicated either to embarrassing or terrible moments between Juha and his customers, his increasingly difficult relationships with his buddies and, finally, the dramatically charged revelation.
Miehen työ could have been an interesting film had it focused on that which the title promises. "Miehen työ", "a man's work", is a concept connected with expectations about what a real man is supposed to do and, even as importantly, how he is to relate to his work. A real man wears a stained overall or a greasy suit. A real man has the stamina to make gruesome sacrifices (like Juha). A real man dies a little while at work. A real man toils and asks no questions.
Juha impersonates this ideal about male sacrifice in greates detail. His new job might be "untypical" and he finds it degrading. Just as degrading as he finds telling his family about having been sacked from his job. The film tries hard, real hard, to show us how disgusting some women are and how natural it is that he finds them repulsive. But he has to keep up appearances to prove that even he, a prostitute for Christ's sake!, remains true to the ideal. Stern-faced and white-collared, he commits himself to whatever service these women ask him for. In the face of the moment of revelation, he simply tries to reassure his wife: "I did it for you!" But this kind of exploration into the darker sides of Finnish work morale seems like an excuse to explore even seedier stuff. This theme is almost completely overshadowed by the Drama - and because of this, Miehen työ remains one of those conventional Finnish movies in which every man tries to kill himself and every woman is a nagging bitch.
Indeed, we don't know much about the wife. She is just that nagging bitch at home with the kids. You guessed it, she is mentally instable. Juha's job enrages her. But why? The director of the film, Aleksi Salmenperä, is not interested in looking into that question. It's funnier to create a poignant scene involving a hammer and an ankle joint.
Miehen työ revolves around male shame. But is Salmenperä really clear about the role of shame in Juha's life? Why is unemployment something beyond an economically strained existence - why is it considered shameful? What, exactly, is the film's perspective on Juha's failure in being a "breadwinner"? I am sure (I hope) he doesn't want to say that shame is the reaction of a person who has failed in sacrifice-as-responsibility - I mean: either there is sacrifice or there is shame.

"Tommi Korpela risteyttää Jeesuksen ja Speden loistavassa tulkinnassaan nurkkaan ahdistetusta miehestä, jonka uhrauksia vaimo ei ymmärrä oikein." Thank you and good night.

The Rain People (1969)

If the protagonist of The Rain People were a man on the run from a dark past involving some girl called Doris, instead of being a pregnant woman who has doubts about family life with her husband, The Rain People could have been a Wim Wenders movie. But it's not. It's an early Francis Ford Coppola direction. The script of this movie must've been minimal. The plot isn't exactly bustling with action, which is all good. We are introduced to Natalie, as the woman is called, on the road, talking to her husband on a pay phone. We know next to nothing about her. She picks up a hitchhiker, a youngish man with an unsettling nickname, Killer. The guy turns out to be an ex-footballer who got a severe blow in the head during a game. He's got a thousand dollars in his pocket but nowhere to go. Natalie doesn't really know what to do. Unwilling to make any commitments, she makes it clear to him that she wants to continue her journey alone. But it turns out it's not that easy.
This might not be a movie that gave me plenty to think about. But as character drama & aesthetically satisfying mood piece, it works OK. Coppola doesn't sentimentalize. He has made a film that despite of the rawness of several scenes is imbued with a gentle fondness for the characters. After having watched one dreadful hour of Vicki Christina Barcelona* yesterday, Coppola's movie actually feels comparatively feminist. This is a film about why women are expected to commit and different ways of rebelling against that. Like many other American movies, The rain people is about the big car-on-the-open-road-going-west quest for Freedom. But it isn't the worst film about that subject. It evades some clichés (does that have anything to do with the fact that the protagonist is a woman?). Actually, this is a film that is neither cynical nor idealistic. It just shows how hard to be indifferent and how easy it is to have impossible hopes and make bad choices.

* A redeeming fact about the movie might be that it's not only the women that are portrayed as bimbos. Men are, too. It's a horribly misanthropic film. Afterwards you wish to call some guy in the White house or the Kremlin and ask them to fire off all the nuclear weapons they've got. I'm surprised how unimpressed I am with that perspective.

On the waterfront (1954)

Elia Kazan was a snitch for McCarthy. On the waterfront is his explanation for being one. The film surely presents one grim portrait of corrupted union bosses and members who are willing to do most anything to promote their own selfish interests. That's the idea. And it's about a troubled young man, ex-prize fighter, who undergoes some sort of moral conversion, a girl with Florence Nightingale syndrome who investigates the murder of her dead brother Joey (played by "a pretty and blond artisan" according to a contemporary review) and a Catholic priest who is worried about the moral state of the community. I am not surprised that even the Vatican has recommended On the waterfront as a film that commends proper values. No, this is not a good movie. Yes, the only colors in this film are black and white and then I don't mean monochromes. The outdoor scenes of the harbor and people who work there are good but everything else is fairly disappointing stuff.
If you're interested in Kazan, watch A streetcar named desire.

Crash (1996)

Another Wednesday movie with the philosophers. Not too many of us this time. Cronenberg's film is a bit tricky to watch. Almost 70 % of the film is taken up by the characters', well, fucking. But I suppose Cronenberg didn't want his movie to be entertaining in a conventional sense (interesting plot, psychological depth). As a matter of fact it's, on a certain level, a very boring film. There's lots of repetition, and if it weren't, I guess Cronenberg wouldn't have brought home the point. With the exception of some exhilarating scenes involving apocalyptic-looking urban landscapes and streets, this is mostly a film about the relation between body, body, car. A TV director survives a car crash. He becomes involved with some people who are into car accidents - sexually, that is. He tries it out for himself, and there's something that makes him crave for yet another car crash. Watching it, participating it, feeling the bodily bruises. The question that I ask myself while watching Crash is what kind of thrill these car crashes represent to these people. Actually, there is a question whether these blank-faced people can be satisfied or thrilled or excited. (What does the ending mean? The circle is closed?) Everything in this film is dead and dull, simmering in blue creepy light. Fitting. Every character seems strangely disengaged & numb throughout the film. Erotic zombies feeding on each other's corpses but only mediated by metal and rubber. What do they want? Death?
What surprised me afterwards while talking about the film is how many comic scenes there actually are. While watching it, I didn't really feel like laughing, except once (a scene involving a robotic Swedish voice).
Crash made me think about lots of things. Desire machines, most of all. Bodies that are bodies no more, but just pieces of machinery, just like those cars, reduced to some strange flows of flat urges. But maybe that is a hard reading to make because, for all the humping bodies and body parts, it's quite hard to see any desire expressed by these characters (sorry...bodies).