Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)

I decided to watch a film starring Catherine Deneuve. Obviously, Les parapluies de Cherbourg is considered a classic. I didn't know much anything about it, so I was initially a bit flabbergasted by its form - oddball musical. Do they sing all the time? Yes they do. And those quite ordinary-sounding lines are not usually what you expect from musical numbers and those numbers are hardly "songs" anyway. As I am not a fan of musicals I wondered whether I could sit through this. I could, and, for all my suspicion, I enjoyed it! The story is pure melodrama, of course. Girl meets boy. Girl is pregnant while boy is sent off to war. Girl meets another man. Etc. I liked this film because it was unexpectedly weird. Jacques Demy plays with colors and contrasts and he (along with set designers & the cinematographer & maybe even choreographer) is really successful at that. For example, bright & extravagant pastel colors lend an almost surreal feel to the interiors which makes the effect of the icy blueness of some of the outdoors scenes or the desaturated grayness of the images towards the end of the movie even more striking. Props and locations are used in a really inventive way to create what ultimately becomes a sort of shaky fantasy world (Jaques Tati's Mon Oncle comes to mind). Everyday objects are allowed a role that is very unusual in conventional movies - I think of things such as wallpapers, tea pots, covers.
Everything about this film has the ring of artificiality. It's artificial to the extent that I start to look for political subtext, but maybe that is going too far. Anyway, I'd like to watch some Douglas Sirk movie soon if only I can get hold of one.
I finally decided that this is a good film when even the ending frame was ambiguous in plenty of ways. I expected something more conventional. All in all, there are tons of amusing details to marvel at (ordering white wine when fleeing one's misery in a debaucherous drinking binge).

Modigliani (2004)S

Sometimes, it gives one a certain sense of inner satisfaction to have one's prejudiced opionions confirmed. In other words, I sat down with a greasy dinner to watch a film about an Italian painter called Amedeo Modigliani. The film is called, surprise, surpise, Modigliani and it was everything I expected it to be. I've seen many films about self-centered artists before, but this about takes the biscuit. Yes, it was about drinking & pride & women & artistic poverty & mental asylums & old masters & hallucinatory fever dreams. Of course, several moments of gun-waving were included. What else. Sorry, forgot. Toiling to finish THE MASTERPIECE.

It had melodramatic lighting and lots of smarmy music. I am not exaggerating, even the lighting was terrible. In a film like this, it is only appropriate to have all actors speak English with a horrendous "European" accent. (Except the flashbacks of Modigliani's childhood - for authenticity value, the actors spoke Italian) The funniest thing about the film is that Gertrude Stein is of course played by a woman who does everything to hammer home the point that Stein was a VERY MASCULINE WOMAN.

But really. This kind of movie is a bit fascinating, after all. Not because of its content, which is conventional, but because of the strange & overwrought way in which it is done. It is not supposed to be comedy, but for all that, the dialogue is so bombastic and corny that most anything these "artistic spirits" say showcase the art of accidental comedy. Actually, if this film would have been just a tad bit more trashy (and it WAS trashy) then I might have actually liked it.

You guessed it; I didn't finish this film either. But I watched half of it. Modigliani is, of course, one not-so-honorable example of the not-so-honorable Europudding type of production.

A question to which I have no answer is why there are so many films about art and artists, but almost none of them is any good. The only examples I can think of, where a film about some sort of artist/writer is not a piece of self-indulgent crap, are Jane Campion's Angel at my table, the film about Truman Capote and, a third one, Derek Jarman's Caravaggio.

Adama Meshuga'at (2006)

The setting of Sweet mud (2006) is a kibbutz in Israel during the 70's. The theme seemed interesting and I tried to watch it. I haven't seen that many Israelian movies, so that was one more reason for trying it out. But actually, I couldn't finish it. The cinematography was sweetly nostalgic, but the story was not. So what do we learn about life in the kibbutz? Well, mostly that it was a place for weirdos who deceive themselves in thinking that they represent an openminded and democractic lifestyle. The fact that one of the first scenes involved a boy witnessing a man's sexual feelings for a cow is quite revealing as to what kind of picture of kibbutz life the film tries to sell off.

Muraren (2002)

Stefan Jarl has made many good documentaries (the Mods-trilogy, the film about Ricky Bruch, another one about Bo Widerberg etc.). Muraren is 95 minutes of Thommy Berggren, actor, talking about his father, his working-class background, and some episodes from the world of theatre and cinema. The scene in which he recalls how he wouldn't listen to Ingmar Bergman's directions ("Ni ska sitta som på dagis!") is hilarious (for some reason most anything that relates to Ingmar B in real life is hilarious, even when, especially when, Ingmar B tells the stories himself). It's a good documentary.

(Speaking of Thommy Berggren: Elvira Madigan is one of those films I hated while watching it but now I cannot really remember why.)

Le goût des autres (2000)

Agnès Jaoui's film The taste of others is a relatively conventional psychological relationship drama that by connecting a bunch of stories about middle aged people attempts to drum the alienation of modern man into our heads. But this film has one character, a businessman, that is hard not to suffer with. His name is Castella and he falls in love with his personal English teacher, who is an actor. Castella is completely out of step with what is considered to be high culture. He does not seem to understand what is embarrassing and what is not. He is a mess, but somehow he is also a person that undergoes important changes. But beyond this character, this movie is not very interesting, even though the themes of it (self-understanding & understanding others, change) are promising. It's very, very French.

Grbavica (2006)

*spoiler*
Grbavica tells the story of a hard-working woman and her daughter in Sarajevo. The daughter's school group is about to go on a trip. Those of the students whose fathers died as "martyrs" in the war are allowed a discount. Sara, the girl, is angry at her mother for not sending the certificate that would grant her the discount. It turns out that Sara's mother was raped.
Grbavica treats its subject without sentimentality. The style of the film is very restrained (there is hardly any music in the movie, for example) and most of the takes are long. Some storylines are perhaps not developed as much as they could have been (or there are too many strands). The theme - violence - permeats most of the storylines and the film presents people for whom the past haunts their day-to-day life.
Jasmila Zbanic made an important movie.

Caché (2005)

Caché, directed by Michael Haneke, is a deeply unsettling movie that gives rise to many questions but provides few answers. But what would a Haneke film be, if it wasn't unsettling? 
The very first images of the movie make us question what it is we see, and from whose perspective the images are shot. The camera is static. Nothing seems to happen. We see a back yard. It turns out we watch a video tape sent to a French married couple (played by Daniel Auteuil & Juliette Binoche, big names). The house on the images is their house. He works as a TV journalist, she works (I think) in a publishing company. The tape is an enigma to its receivers. What is the intention? More "gifts" are sent. Threatening drawings, more tapes. One tape shows the house where the man, Georges, grew up. The next tape contains an unknown urban landscape, and a drab corridor. Another person is drawn into the story. Georges' parents intended to adopt a boy, Majid, whose Algerian parents worked for them (before they were killed). We learn that there is something fishy about George's childhood memories. He thinks that this person send him the tapes. 

If the script for this film were handled by another director, this could have become a run-of-the-mill thriller. This is not to say that Haneke dispenses with mystery & shock. On the contrary; there are a few scenes that have the force and suddenness to throw you out of your chair. But this is, as always, also a film about ideas. And what ideas you see expressed in the movie will not be self-evident.

I don't really want to say anything about what is the final verdict as to the mystery of the tapes. Caché connects different themes. Guilt (collective guilt, even), colonialism, paranoia, trust/distrust and the tensions of a relationship. Most of all, it is a self-conscious movie about images that writes the viewer into the story. Everything hangs on what you see (what you think you see) in these images. Right from the start, we are challenged to re-think and re-value the images we just saw. In this sense, it is just as much a film about the viewer as it is about the trust, distrust and paranoia of its characters.
Caché starts with the disquieting realization of the main characters that they are watched. This seemingly anonymous gaze, represented by the static camera (that seems to be the gaze of nobody), poses a mysterious threat to their lives. But Haneke is not satisfied with this point about being watched. He goes on to explore the other part of the relation: what it is to see, to witness, to peep, to notice something, to react to what one sees. Haneke's film does not revolve around one form of watching; it discusses variations of seeing, showing in what ways the various forms of seeing & watching are connected with actions, confessions, secrets, responsibility, memories, trust, distrust etc..
It's a good film because of it's openness, I would say. There are relatively few grand statements here. As I see it, Haneke is not a cynic director with a simple, sceptic message ("I fooled ya all, fuckaz, you thought you knew, but you didn't! Ha!"). His intention(s) seem deeper than that. He makes us realize what it means that we makes mistakes, or what it means that I come to distrust my eyes, or what it means to be confronted with an image that changes everything what one has seen before.

As I tried to say: it is a film that can be read on many levels. It's not a film that you finish with a sigh of relief. But that is a strenght of the film. One reason why it is fun to read reviews of this film, and films similar to it, is that the reviewer's description will reveal what expectations s/he has about the film (even films in general) and what role she assigns to herself as a viewer. Read this blog post by Roger Ebert, for example.

There is no soundtrack music in Caché. This is yet another example of why a film DOES NOT NEED to be puffed up with glossy strings or the latest indie hit.

La grande illusion (1937)

I guess La grande illusion, directed by Jean Renoir, represents what middle aged film writers (who go to Sodankylä every year to discuss Godard over a glass of whine) would refer to as the tradition in film of European humanism. I won't take issue with that description even if it is boring to read film writers who appeal to this tradition, lamenting the string of "cynical movies" that have appeared lately. 
The story takes place during WW1. Two French aviators, of different class background, are captured by Germans and imprisoned. The film is, at first, a surprisingly upbeat depiction of life in a prison camp, where the French prisoners eat good food and even arrange a cabaret - that is, when they are not trying to escape by digging tunnels. Many scenes have the ring of comedy. For some reason, I didn't expect that. I imagined that this film would somehow resemble Bresson's austere prison movie. Well, it didn't. This is a film where a group of French officers sing the Marseilles in order to divert attention from an escape plan.
What I realized only after finishing the movie is that these "comedy scenes" of the first part of the film actually have a point, possibly even a political one.
La grande illusion features a few interesting characters. One of them is the commandant, Rauffenstein (played by the famous director Erich von Stroheim) who inhabits his position in the army even though he finds his job contemptible (vulgar, even). A dramatic scene is the one in which the commandant sees it necessary to shoot a French aristocrat, one of the aviators, who sacrifices himself for the escape of two other men. It is evident that the German man is reluctant to shoot the French man: he sees him much as a man as himself, a man for whom the present society might not have a place, and it is hard for him to see the French prisoner as somebody he is obliged to shoot. There is even a deathbed scenes in which the relationship between these two men once again is laden with a notion of common (yet differing) life and destiny. The end of the scene (I think) has Rauffenstein, clouded by deep melancholy, destroying the only flower there is in the place...
If I watch this film again, I will perhaps be able to perceive these themes of aristocracy & class in a richer way. Another important theme that I would pay closer attention to during a second viewing is the critique of duty (the film seems to perceive duty as an almost immoral perspective).

8 ½ (1963)

When I watch 8½ by Fellini, I am reminded of why spontaneous reactions don't necessarily determine whether a film is good or bad. As a matter of fact, this film bugged the shit out of me. Almost every scene irritated me and when I was beginning to hope that it would soon be over, another repetitive, loud twist followed. On a psychological level, I really hated this movie (I waited for the end just as badly as I waited for the closing credits of Kundun - which is top of my list of worst movies ever made). Is this a rambling film? YES IT IS! But I am still glad that I didn't stop watching it.
So, Fellini's film follows the ambling consciousness of a chauvinistic & self-obsessed, yet completely blank-seeming, director, Guido, who is intent on making a movie. If he is only to come by an idea. The film is a presentation of non-ideas, stream-of-consciousness, fantasy sequences, memories, etc. Scenes drift in and out of each other, and it does not really matter what is reality and what is not. A hord of women surrounds the great Guido, all of them, for some unexplicable reason, strangely attracted to this boring man.
What I am trying to say is that this film might be interesting because it is so artificial, but it was certainly not enjoyable for me to watch. For me, the most outrageous scenes (involving space ships and the most quiet ones were the best. I am willing to acknowledge 8½ as a rather successful parody of the self-indulged auteur, the film industry and cosmopolitan European life. And, sure, it was a rather entertaining questioning of what a movie should be. But that dimension of the film has aged a great deal, and is not really revolutionary when watching it today.
The problem is that I cannot really settle on any description. Is it as self-indulged as the main character? Is it sexist? Is it shallow? I don't know.

Andrei Rublev (1966)

Most of Andrei Rublev is filmed in black & white. Only the last scenes are in color. The transition from black and white to color is a marvelous thing to watch. I think I haven't seen another film that uses colors with such a startling effect (another Tarkovsky film is a competitor). The last scenes show the icons painted by Andrei Rublev, and last of all, The Trinity. The colors are so bright that they almost hurt the eyes. It's a stunning scene. 
The film traces the story of the 15th century iconographer Andrei Rublev, who, in the film, is engaged for a project by an artist called Theophanus. He is to go to Moscow. He goes there with a younger apprentice, Foma. Along the way, we learn more about Andrei's outlook on art and what kind of man he is (but this is not a biography: this is more a film about ideas). Andrei and a few other men work in a church in Vladimir. Andrei has doubts about the projects. He is to paint pictures that have a certain function. He doesn't want to paint devils with smoke coming out of their ears. Tartars invade Vladimir. The place is in ruins. After saving a girl from being raped by a Tartar and killing a man, Andei takes a vow of silence and gives up painting. Things change, however, when a boy is hired to construct a church bell because he claims that his father told him the secret of the craft before he passed away.  
Andrei Rublev is an enigmatic film. It's fairly easy to describe the major themes: the relation between religious art and craftsmanship, is one. The impact historical events (in this case: vulgar power politics and brutality) have on art is another. A third one is how the creation of art in the film is described in both secular, moral and religious terms.  It is clear that the film provides images of art as a vocation that is maimed by compromise and political repression but also by moral corruption. But what it means to compromise does not have anything to do with the artist's absolute right to his work of art. Rather, the film revolves around what it means to have a pure or impure relation to art and crafts.
For all this, there is lots and lots I don't know what to think about. Does this film make any claims about the historical events that take place in the film? Is there any statement here about "the essence of Russia"? What, exactly, is it about the successful completion of the church bell building project that moves Andrei ("blind faith"?)? 
Andrei Rublev features all of the things we associate with Tarkovsky: long takes, careful composition of frames, and, most of all, nature is evoked not as a background of and for events but rather as something that characters are a part of and interact with. I'm not sure if it goes for all of his film, but in Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky's cinematographer uses movement of the camera in a very ingenious way (the initial scene with the air balloon, the invasion of the Tartars, some of the scenes within the Vladimir church). 

In many ways, this is an unusually structured film. It consists of small vignettes that are not always obviously connected. Andrei himself is absent in many of them. For a great portion of the film, he is silent (because of his vow). Not even once do we see him paint.

Alice in den Städten (1974)

So it's Wim Wenders again. This time I watch one of his better movies - Alice in den Städten. Yes, it's a road movie. A man travels across the US. We see him in hotels, watching TV, being bored, scribbling, frustratedly smashing a TV. At the New York airport, he runs into a German woman and her child. Philip, the man, is a German writer, a disenchanted drifter (you guessed it!), who is bored with the US and A. The writer and the little family end up in a hotel together. The woman misses her flight and Philip is to take care of Alice, who is then to meet her mother in Amsterdam. She doesn't show up. The only plan the duo comes up with is to track down Alice's grandmother. The problem is only that Alice cannot recall her name, nor the city in which she dwells. 
It is not so much Wender's endless ploddings into fear & existentialism that interest me. That is mostly rather silly & pretentious stuff (ja! Angst vor der Angst!). Nor do I really care about the symmetries or asymmetries between Wenders' depiction of USA and old Europe.
First of all, I like the grainy black & white cinematography. Wenders creates some really poetic and startling images of urband & rural landscapes, trolleys, cars, houses. Nothing much happens, but there is a huge surge in those images all the same. Many scenes contain very little dialogue. It takes a good director to create scenes like that. A less careful director would have ended up with something much more boring.
In one scene, we see Alice & Philip at a café. He orders coffee. She wants something, too. He snarls back that if she wants anything, she should order it. She has a large portion of ice-cream. The camera hovers over their quietness and discomfort, cutting to a frame of a kid drinking lemonade. The kid sits next to a juxebox. The jukebox blares an old Canned heat song. The jukebox is decorated with the "Stereo". The metal letters are kitschy and ugly. Suddenly, Alice blurts out that her grandmother doesn't live in this city after all.
Philip is not sympathetic and not repulsive either. The same goes for the kid. They have to deal with each other's company and that involves several moments of strain and irritation, but also moments of shared experience. I enjoy this film most when Wenders does not make his characters into philosophizing dolls but rather lets the dialogue drift in different directions in a day-to-day way.
Towards the end of the film, I heard a woman sing a familiar snippet of tune. It was, of course, Sibylle Baier (who made a gorgeous album, on which one of the songs is called "Wim").

Män kan inte våldtas (1978)

Jörn Donner's adaptation of Märta Tikkanen's feminist classic Män kan inte våldtas might not be a masterpiece, but it is all right. My biggest disappointment with it is its focus. Yes, there are some important feminist points here (which I remember from the book) that Donner's film has not left out, but except those few moments, this is less a political tract than a thriller. It's about Eva, a librarian, who goes out to celebrate with her colleague. At the restaurant, they meet a man. The man invites her to his apartment. He rapes her. The rest of the film is about the revenge she plans to take on his action. What is so disappointing about the film is that the essential question of the book, "can men be raped?" gets very little space in Donner's take on the story. Instead, we see Eva stalking the man who raped her. She puts on a wig and tries to obtain details about his life.
Some of these scenes are successful in conveying what Eva goes through. There is one scene in particular that I liked. She has visited an ex, a lawyer, and stolen his gun. Eva goes to a garbage heap to practice with the gun. We see Eva's face and birds restlessly circling over the garbage heap. The quietness of the early morning is disturbed by the sharp sounds of the shooting. A garbage truck arrives at the place and in a long shot we see an endless string of garbage being poured out over the heap. It's a beautiful scene.
As I said, this is not a completely uninteresting film. I could help but notice that some parts of the dialogue seem pretty archaic ("do women have to become men in order to create a career for themselves?"), while others are highly relevant today (certain images of male and female sexuality that are still used as arguments in debates about rape). 
One peculiar aspect of this, and other Donner films, is that both Finnish-Swedish and Swedish actors are used.

Precious (2009)

Precious was, in a way, a strange mix of film styles. Some scenes were brutal and dark, others veered towards the comic and the absurd, while others again appealed to "human drama" (the kind that is supposed to be invigorating for the soul) and stories that have "human interest". That a film contains changes in atmosphere and style need not be a problem, but in this case it was. Precious was a slightly confusing experience, as the different styles did not seem to be intentionally disparate: this lack of coherent style did not shed light on anything, nor did the different "parts" communicate among themselves. This is not to say that Precious was a bad film. It just wasn't a very thought-out one (or if it was, its play with style was too subtle for this viewer). I can add that some tricks were familiar. It's not unusual to see a character dealing with a tough situation and it is so tough for her that she escapes into a dream world of her own. This is conventional stuff. The issues I had with Precious is that I had a hard time swallowing both the dark parts and the more upbeat stuff. I had a feeling somewhere in the back of my head that I might be tricked and that I'd better watch out.
Precious tells the story about a black teenager who is sexually abused at home and when she gets pregnant for the second time, she is suspended from school. She joins an alternative schooling program. It's a bleak story.
The scenes I liked best were sort of in between: these were scenes in which Precious (the girl) interacted with people who were not monsters but more complex beings, such as a social worker (played by Mariah Carey, whom I did not recognize).
I have a hard time expressing what I found problematic. Maybe Precious tries to hard to be "authentic" and maybe it paints with too broad streaks when introducing more positive elements into Precious' life. And while the closing credits have faded out, I try not to think about Oprah. But I do. The fact that quite a few critics call this film "inspiring" and that it "engages our empathy" might reveal something of my predicament here.

The straight story (1999)

I want to put on 501's/suspenders/my best flannel shirt & move to Iowa or Wisconsin to become a tractor driver.
This desire is not lessened when watching David Lynch's offbeat drama about redemption, The Straight story. It's said to be the Lynch film that is not really a Lynch film. I don't agree with this. He works with themes that other films take up as well, but tend to remain in the background.
The story: a 73-year old man, Alvin, suddenly learns that his brother Lyle has suffered a stroke. He hasn't talked to his brother for a long time (one thing that shows this is a good film is that the circumstances are not clear). They live in different states. He can't drive a car because his eyes are too bad. He wants to go there himself. So, he pimps up his lawnmower, which is transformed into a vehicle of transformation. Not a fast one, though, and it is in this faux-slow motion that we see the main characters of the film: the road, corn fields, clouds. There are also a few encounters with other people, strangers, along the road. But in this film, Lynch is not determined to expose the nightmare lurking under the surface of small town harmony, rather, he depicts the people that Alvin meets as genuinely friendly.
In one brilliant scene, the camera slooowly pans from the road, to the clouds, and just as slooowly tracks back to the road again. Damn! it works in just the offbeat way that Lynch is getting at. Angelo Badalementi's soundtrack only adds to the beauty of these outdoors scenes.
Perhaps there are dimensions in this film that should make me mad. There is one scene in which committment to family becomes ridiculously saccharine. But that is only one scene. With the exception of that scene, The Straight story is a good film about bad conscience and wanting to change things that appear unchangeable.
The straight story proves the point that goodness is not uninteresting as a theme in art. But Lynch doen't focus on the ACT of reconciliation. In the last scene, Lyle and Alvin sit quietly on the porch. There is no need for words.

Birth of a nation (1915)

What do you say about a film that attempts to say that Ku Klux Klan saved America from degeneration and chaos, along with pseudo-democracy in the hands of primitive blacks and evil mulattos? Birth of a nation is the most racist movie I've seen, ever. Its whole structure builds upon a racist agenda: depicting whites as the saviors of civilization and blacks as the threat to enlightened culture. The racism of the film is bafflingly consistent (in its own terms) and Griffith creates an entire ideology of race. This is undisguised racism that is not mollified or softened in any way.

The only decent black people in the film are those who stand up for their former slave owners, the "faithful souls". The most evil creatures on earth are mulattos, who emulate the intelligence of whites, but who are nonetheless ruled by dark instincts and violent sexuality. Mulattos, we are told, are sneaky, and their innermost desire is to deride the virtue of whites and to violate white women's virginal sexuality. The civil war tore America out of the old ways, and only Ku Klux Klan restored order and stability, in which each race goes back to its given roles.

This film is bad in plenty of way. It is melodramatic and almost all scenes are totally outrageous. A black man assaults a white girl! (Or that is what we are supposed to think) A mulatto, sister/wife of a black politician, suddenly bursts into ecstatic dance! The idyllic family life of pre-war South! Ku Klux Klan members form a holy army to fight for their Nation! The north and the south are reconciled when northerners are called back to reason by their gut reactions (we can't marry off our daughters to black men) and stop being foolish "rebels", "carpetbaggers"! And so on, and so on.

But The birth of a nation is still an interesting film to watch. It developed filmmaking in lots of ways and technically it is a very enjoyable film. Its use of color tinting is quite radical and works very well as a technique to embellish some parts of the story as well as to create variety in atmosphere. Its use of editing (intercuts) & cinematography is also very interesting. The pictures often have an eerie rhytm adapted to the significance of a segment within the overall story.

The temptation when watching a film like this one, a demonstration of blunt racism, is to think that Griffith was merely uneducated, a man trapped in his own times. Now, we are tempted to think, we know better than to be racist.
Here, you might say two things: Griffith made a square-edged film that is less sneaky than many other films that display a more secret racist agenda. To most viewers today, Griffith's movie is obviously racist. But the risk is that it is taken too lightly, that it is dismissed as obviously stupid. Well: think about things like revenge and what it is to say that a country has reached a state of harmony. This is not things that belong to an uneducated past. These structures of thinking are present in contemporary political debate and disentangling these structures is not always easy.