Written on the wind (1956)

Of course I've heard about Douglas Sirk. Most critics talk about his films as having not only kitsch value, but they are said to represent an unusual form of subversive critique of the American lifestyle. Watching Written on the wind, I can only agree and join the voices of praise. Sirk is funny. Sirk is witty. Sirk is cheeeesy. The film contains more than enough of veiled sexual imagery and exaggerated artifice. In one of the leading roles, we see an excellent Rock Hudson. He plays to poor kid who hangs out with the son of an oil millionaire. While his best friend is a carefree playboy, Hudson plays the man set on becoming the next big name in oil business. But of course this is not what the film is about. What we have here are several messy love triangles, the heads and tails of which we cannot always be certain. There are ... many undercurrents. These romantic ailments are set in a world of oil derricks, popular bars and huge mansions. I hope I will watch many more Sirk movies soon.

Silent running (1971)

Silent Running is a hippie version of 2001: A space odyssey, a prequel to Stars Wars and well, A VERY BAD MOVIE. If this were a parody of the hippie movement, I would have some mercy. But I suspect it isn't. But this film undoubtedly has some entertainment value because of the retrofuturistic technology and the embarrassing scenes of nursing an ailing robot. If there was an award for the most awkward use of music in any film of the history of sound film, the award would go to this film. Congratulations.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966)

Truffaut's classic sci-fi film Fahrenheit 451 is, as we all know, set in an eerie fascist country where books are prohibited and where firemen patrol people's houses in search for hidden books. The film's dingy futurist look is splendid. The images are humorous and chilling at the same time (I didn't expect the film to be funny but I suspect this is mostly due to reasons unintended by Truffaut). As an intellectual effort, I'm less convinced. It's a silly little film, but a nice-looking one.

The Temptation of St Tony (2009)

I'm not familiar with the character of St Anthony. This might or might not have limited my understanding of The Temptation of St Tony, a surreal journey into the heart of darkness directed by Estonian Öunpuu (who has featured in this blog before). Yes, this is the story about temptation, but in a very twisted way (is it the good that tempts the evil?). Öunpuu knows how to use the medium, that is for sure. Even though the first scenes left me with an impression of exaggered darkness, the last hour of the film, with its abundance of warped images, was more appealing to me. Tony is a middle manager. His boss tells him that he has to fire some people. He submits. His girlfriend cheats on him. He accepts this, too. The character of Tony is a walking void. He is not evil in the same sense as most of the other character. He simply doesn't seem to act in the situation he is in. When he acts, his entire being is awkward. It is as if he never knows what he is saying and how he should say things. This is the most concrete part of the film. Then I have said nothing about a quasi-fascist club, munching on a corpse and skating in what seems to be the world of the dead.

As a film about raw capitalism, this is a film that focuses on the life of the ambiguity of figures and corporeality. In one scene, we see a "sophisticated" dinner party. Suddenly, the chat stops. A haggard man stands outside the enormous window. It is as if the room stops breathing. The man doesn't move. Nobody reacts. Tony is the only one to do something. He seems to assume that the man is an alcoholic, so he offers his bottle of wine. The man takes it, pours out the content, and puts it in the plastic bag in which we see other empty bottles.

If you are interested in this movie, expect the style to be more interesting than the content. This is a film about the visual. Even though many scenes are beguiling, everything does not work on all levels. The reason why I was not fully convinced by the film's aesthetic language is that it overstates it's references; you see Andersson here (an almost tender scene about Tony's confrontation with fence-makers, "You say we are not real??"), Tarkovsky (Stalker's dog!) there, and wait, here we have an ode to Béla Tarr (the drab, yet evocative, surroundings). And without David Lynch, some scenes would not be what they are now (the scene at the club echoes Fire Walk With Me).

But yet, somehow, this is a mesmerizing film.

Basquiat (1996)

Films about artists tend to be pretentious and dull. Even though Basquiat doesn't belong to the worst category of the mentioned type of films, it's not a masterpiece either. What disappointed me about the film is it's recycling of almost every theme that we expect from a film about an artists. The artist has a troubled relationship with his girl. The artists turns out to be a genius, sometimes a misunderstood genius. The artist has a conflictual attitude towards the conventional world of artists and art dealers. However, there's a few unexpected elements here that made me sit through the entire film. Unlike most films about art, this film (for obvious reasons) discusses the widespread racism in art circles. What this shows us is that as soon as art starts to be about the artist or the role of an artist, we are already situated in yawn city. I'm not sure this point is something the director (Schnabel) would acknowledge, but the film is clear enough.

And it is hard NOT to like any performance by Dennis Hopper.

Bad day at black rock (1955)

I'm not sure HOW Bad day at black rock slipped through the fingers of the censors, but apparently, it did. Or maybe I am just over-interpreting it, but the story seems to be quite politically controversial from the point of view of post-WW2 50's in the US. I know the film is about a thousand other things, but one dimension here seems to be the hatered agains Japanese people during and after the war, even those Japanese people living in the US (as you remember, internment camps were erected). But what do I know: perhaps this was discussed during the fifties? Some have read the film as an allegory for contemporary Hollywood blacklistings (not far-fetched).

The story in the film: a man arrives by train in a shabby-looking town in the middle of the desert. Right from the start, he is treated with hostility by the locals, ranch-owners, thugs, hotel-owners - all with a very masculine demeanour. They suspect he is in the business of poking his nose into local affairs. It turns out that the man wants to contact a certain Japanese farmer. And here the trouble begins.

The story of the film is told with due economy. Some scenes get a bit heavy on words in the sense that the film becomes too stagey. But most of the time, the actors manage to create just the right atmosphere of antagonism and a secret that is not to be revealed. The downside of the film is that it is badly structured, so that some things are obvious at the wrong time, and that, for this reason, a necessary level of suspense fails to develop.

The Match Factory Girl (1990)

Aki Kaurismäki's films consist mostly of silences (he has also made a silent film). For the first 20 minutes of The Match Factory Girl, we hear no spoken words, but other sounds unravel the life-world of Iiris, a young girl who lives with her parents. We hear the rumbling sounds in the factory she works in. Snippets of news are presented (it's 1989 and the world is in turmoil). The first word we hear by a character, in this case Iiris, is, if I remember correctly, "a beer". These drawn-out silences are heavy with sadness, but Kaurismäki is also evoking proletarian gloom from a humorous point of view.

OK, so the story here is flooding with dead-pan humour and tongue-in-cheek miserabilism. Iiris has a lousy job. Iiris' parents are oppressive. When Iiris meets a man, he tells her, after one night together, that he has no intentions whatsoever of initiating a relationship. But Iiris is pregnant. He is not interested in having a child. An appointment at the doctor's. Iiris rests in a hospital bed. Her dad enters the room, utters a sentence of dour and insulting words, and equally dismissively, places an apple on the table next to her bed.

It's easy to describe the film: it's a blunt, dark, humorous fairytale. All scenes are extremely austere, in terms of dialogue, camera angle, composition - even set design.  One person at an internet discussion board called this film "a Finnish Jeanne Dielman". To me, that is a very apt, yet quite surprising comparison. Akerman's and Kaurismäki's vision of urban drabness have many similarities, and their sense for meticiously composing every frame can be seen as related as well. Or maybe because these two belong among my favorite movies. Unlike Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, diegetic music plays a big role in Kaurismäki's work. There is tango, rock n roll schmaltz. The scene in which Iiris, whose parents threw her out, sits in her brother's bachelor's pad, gazing at a pool table and listening to the jukebox (!) is simply heartbreaking. And FYI: The world can't have enough of Olavi Virta.

Un dimanche à la campagne (1984)

A lazy day in the country side. An artist expects his son's family to come and visit him and his housekeeper. They do come. The sons' kids run around. The parents dutifully scold them for misbehaving. The artist languidly chats with his son and his son's wife about ordinary things. While most of the grown-ups are asleep, the artist's daugther arrive in a fancy automobile (this is the 1910s). Her arrival puts a sudden end to the tranquility we've seen so far. The daughter is admired by everybody. Will she stay for dinner?

This sounds like a meagre plot. It's not. Or: the plot is not so important. Nothing out of the ordinary happens in the movie, the story of which spans a few short hours. A family is spending leisurly time together. Most things have an air of rituals that have existed a long time, comments that are uttered against a background we are not completely aware of. On some level, they seem to be a happy family (even though this is put in a somewhat new light as the daughter arrives from Paris, a favorite child of the father). This is not the type of movie that hints at dark secrets or never-ending neurotic preoccupations. Yes, there is friction, but it is not the kind of friction that threatens the possibility of communication. What Bernard Tavernier tells us about is rather an unspoken sense of disappointment or an equally unspoken feeling of having disappointed somebody else.

One could say that this film is just as idle as its lazy surroundings. Proust could have written the script. In one eerie scene, we see the family having dinner. Need I say that nothing spectacular happens (they praise the food, one kid brags about having experienced the state of drunkenness) The strange thing is that the picture fades out to a black screen quite a few times so that we expect a new scene to begin. It doesn't. The dinner scene goes on and on, and just as in some moments in Proust's book, we gain a sense of time having freezed. This is the eternity that everyday life sometimes can lull us into (which need not be a sign of false consciousness).

The film's aesthetic builds around a hazy yellowish green that permeats almost every scene (in an exquisite way, I might never have seen such greens!), and produces a dream-like quality. Of course, the dialogue reveals some personal things about the characters (how the son has a complicated relation to giving up art or how the father quietly scornes the son's having changed his name), but mostly, we hear small talk, irritating repetitions, idle chatter. Actually, except for the artist's glamorous daughter, Irene, and her father, who has sunken into a nostalgic form of sadness, most of the characters are dull, respectable, in line with what is expected of them. In the hands of a less imaginative director, this would make for a boring film as well, but instead, we have a film that without a trace of bitterness or glacial irony attempts to give a fair picture of the dull life of the rich.

All this works very well, save for the, in my view, unnecessary ending scene. A Sunday In the Country will perhaps not change your life, but it is a charming little film nonetheless - or one might even say that it is a beautiful film about the magic patterns of everyday life. Some have compared Tavarnier's film to Yoshiro Ozu. To me, that makes sense: both have eyes and ears for life beyond the dramatic or the poignant.

Grand Canyon (1991)

Excavating my library of VHS:s, I find many movies that I've seen a long time ago that I remember having liked, but the only thing I can actually recall is some sort of atmosphere. What I remember about Grand Canyon is its slow pace and depiction of the urban jungle where almost any situation can take a dangerous turn. Re-watching it, this proved to be a quite apt description. What I didn't remember is the many clichés, the horrible music and a "social" agenda that is so rediculously over-stated that this film is, at times, rather embarrassing to watch. There are, however, some nice scenes, too. In one of them, we see a father teaching his son to drive a car. The boy is not really focusing on the driving. He talks to his father about family problems. The father is nervous. They end up in a messy traffic hub. The boy is supposed to make a left turn. Red light. We see the boy's impatience and the anxious expression on his father's face. It's time to press the speed pedal. But another car swooshes by and the boy reacts too slowly. A severe car accident is avoided in the last second. In this scene, the director, Lawrence Kasdan, makes the best of the actors and the surrounding. The scene is simple, but it works. It is not too talky, there's music (I think), but it's discreet. Here, Kasdan has discovered the exact pitch for conveying a sense of, first, foreboding and, later, a real and very concrete sense of fear.

But Mr. Kasdan; if I were you, I would have sued Paul Haggis' (director of Crash) ass. As a matter of fact, Grand Canyon is a thousand times better than Crash. At its best, it really has something to say about urban fear. Which Crash doesn't.

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964)

Having seen only of Pasolini's ... works (which I regret having seen, it was awful) I did not quite know what to expect from The Gospel According to St. Matthew. That the film patiently, without eerie digressions, follows the events & words of the gospel itself makes reviewing no easier. The film's restraint surprised me. I expected Jesus to preach Das Capital, foam dripping out from his mouth, a few Roman sadists lurking around the corner. But it wasn't like that. Yes, the emphasis of Jesus preaching was on social justice, but whether that should be ascribed to the film or the gospel of Matthew I am too unenlightened heathen to say.

The scenes containing preaching were perhaps the least interesting ones, except for one quality. In most films about Jesus, the way the preaching scenes are filmed tend to be very predictable: Jesus in the centre, people standing around him in an orderly, quiet way. Pasolini makes all crowds bustle (true to the spirit of neo-reaolism, perhaps). He works with long shots that capture the movement and disorganization of the crowd. What is quite mesmerizing is that the crowd is never transformed into one entire wobbly, anonymous body. The crowd consists of people, the camera focusing on a group of people, a face, a piece of cloth. The crowd comes to life as something else than a dumb, beastly organism ruled by some demagogue (yes, Pasolini was a marxist, which might be of importance here). One can perceive this pattern throughout the film.

Another very successful element of The Gospel is the use of music. The soundtrack (sensitively mixed so that it is somehow on a par with sounds of people and nature) is a bold mix of African folk music, American blues/gospel, Bach and choir music. The sometimes dramatic pieces of music don't stifle the scenes, they bring out something new in what we see.

Actually, The Gospel According to St. Matthew is a good film. Undoubtedly, also a religious one. I.e.: his is NOT Mel Gibson.

PS: The history on philosophers on film is, I think, not a very extensive one. Here, we see Giorgio Agamben acting as one of the disciples!

Things to do in Denver when you're dead (1995)

Things to do in Denver when you're dead is the type of neo-noir that is somehow fun to watch but upon re-watching it you're quite not sure whether you've seen it before, because which neo-noir doesn't have:
a) sickly neon lights
b) a plot driven by men and women are reduced to lovers
c) people end up dead in every second scene
d) a poker-faced Andy Garcia
e) poetic imagery revolving around food
f) a drab place (like Denver)
g) a few lurid jokes
h) mafia talk
i) sleazy diners
j) silly names
k) Steve Buscemi in a minor role, Christopher Walken in another.
l) one ... more .... job (just one more)

The Snapper (1993)

The Snapper was released in 1993 and that's exactly what it looks like. It's a movie where everything looks kind of scruffy, kind of worn-down, kind of homey. That's what's so charming about it. A re-make in Hollywood would certainly be impossible: the reason why I love The Snapper is that you get to see Colim Meaney wearing ugly jumpers and that nobody looks as if they have had five nose jobs. Meaney is a good actor (I want to watch The Van again!) - sometimes. Here, he is heart-wrenching as a father who learns something about himself. If there were more films like The Snapper, the world would be a better place. Better beer, too. And philosophical wonder on a par with "how come a dog can have so much shit in it" you will surely fail to find anywhere else...

Playtime (1967)

In Playtime, Jacques Tati has constructed yet another world of never-ending mazes and technological monstrosities. This film inhabits a planet of its own. Welcome to Tativille (which cost a fortune to build). Well, if you've seen some of Tati's own productions, you'll know what you are in for. There is no "plot", no "characters" (only one or two have actual names) and no "dialogue" (mostly blurry English) - but it does have world. Most of the time, you'll find yourself busy: just to keep track of what goes on in these medium/long shots takes some effort. A lot goes on, all the time, everywhere (don't forget the blood pressure medication). Playtime is a giant torrent of people, vehicles and eerie noises. This torrent is systematic and perspicuous at first, but towards the end of the film, the order is abolished.

I'm surprised how contemporary Tati's futurist vision feels - Tati could have been the architect of my work place: gray/white/black, steel and glass; endless corridors; every place look like the place next to it, and so on, and so forth. A non-place, a passage, something to travel through, if you have some business there. The people populating Playtime do seem to have "business", at least for a while. But the world of business, errands and intentionality gradually fall apart, and we end up with a joyous and anarchic sense of disintegration. 

Mr Hulot - and his umbrella - is the anonymous "hero" of the film (you might recognize him from Mon Oncle). Mr Hulot wreaks havoc. Mr Hulot is hailed by people who seem to know him. Mr Hulot walks from place to place, without seemingly really going anywhere. Do we here him utter any words? Maybe a quiet "yes" or "hello". Mr Hulot is slapstick humor at its classiest.

I know too little about Tati to say anything about the politics about the film. What I know is this: Tati is a far more observant interpreter of the anonymity of modern space than a bunch of conservatives and marxists alike. Like some contemporary critics of modernity, Tati shows us a world in which an airport is hardly distinguishable from a cafe or an office building. Often, it takes some initial work to figure out where the characters are located. Hell - that is an apartment! Wow, it sure looks like .... everything else! Everything looks the same. The diference is that Tati is never whiny. His rendition of modern standardization and technical "progress" never fail to be surprising, moving and disturbing. In Tati's world, humans are never totally immersed in the steel&glass dystopia/utopia; he shows the enormous humorous potential of human reactions of confusion and reverie in the face of escalators, beeping buttons, skyscrapers - and the total indifferent shown by these glorious inventions. Walls are knocked down, doors are bumped into, invisible doors are closed, chairs are messed with, elevators are accidentally boarded, ceilings are ripped apart, floors are destroyed - etc, etc. The interesting thing is that what this surrounding IS will be shown over and over again in a multitude of ways in how people interact with it. Totally indifferent, and yet ---.

I guess Deleuze might have been a fan of this film. Like Deleuze's Anti-Oedipus, Tati places his hopes in disorder, but also in a change of perspective: humans are no longer humans, but a sort of weird appendage to machines. It's just that people are not the slaves of machines. They don't adapt. They don't fit. Nothing fits. The point is that new matches and mismatches emerge all the time, so that new situations appear, but not "situations" in the familiar sense of the word, where a situation has a clear direction. What makes me think of Deleuze (and maybe some marxist situationists, too) is the film's merry purposelessness. For Tati, like for Deleuze, the world is not "going" anywhere. Mr Hulot makes his way through the city - and the city makes its way through Mr Hulot. (If you want to watch a deeply anti-foucaldian film - watch this.) For the first 30 minutes, I thought that Playtime would be a grave attack on urban alienation. Instead, it turned out to be a film about our notorious ways to always inhabit the world, to always make the world our own, no matter how standardized and clinical it appears to be. 

Playtime is a mess. But a wonderful one at that. It's one of the most strangely optimistic films I've seen in a long time.

Days of Being Wild (1990)

In Days of Being Wild, the ever-recurring themes of a Wong Kar Wai movie are already present. It's a film about obsessive love, obsessions that spread like a disease, love that doesn't leave its prey in peace but feeds on the heart. Usually, Wong Kar Wai is quite successful in exporing this dark side of "love", but here, it seems to me that only a handful of scenes evoke the appropriate quiet & implicit maelstrom of emotion. Most of the scene baths in a mysterious darkness. Most scenes are composed so that an eerie light is situated somewhere on the edge of the frame. In one scene, we see a girl talking to a police officer doing the night shift. They wander through dark alleys and talk about what goes on in their lives. This is a very good scene. It work just the way it should. I wouldn't consider it an insult to say that Wong Kar Wai makes mood films. It's just that in this film, he doesn't really have the skill to strike the right note. Too many scenes appear unfocused and the conversations seem idle and unncessary. In the best Wong Kar Wai films, every word functions as a dagger. Here, those moments are few.

(One interesting aspect of the film is how it is one of the male characters that is eroticized to an extent that is very unusual in mainstream films, where it is usually female characters that are treated in this way.)

Fucking Åmål (1998)

The human faculty of judgement is fickle and unreliable. That was my point of departure as I, a while ago, sat down to re-watch Lucas Moodysson's Fucking Åmål, a film I first saw at the age of 18. 12 years later, I am still impressed by the smooth treatment of the story, the dedication to the characters and a good ear for how kids talk (plus: how hapless adults talk when they try to convince themselves that they mean what they say). The film has just the right kind of restless intensity. No LOL:s, no obvious jokes. Fucking Åmål still strikes me as a good attempt to depict the oppressive habitus of small-town life. Of course, Fucking Åmål has its "feel good"-moments, the application of the blueprint of what a movie about rebellious youth should look like. But Moodysson's film rarely feels like an adaptation of the rule book. It is a likeable film that never patronizes its young characters. Immaturity is never glossed over (this is actually a film in which kids don't talk like small business CEOs), nor is the characters' joy and hope portrayed as the cute yet capricious feelings of people too inexperienced to become jaded and world-weary.

By the way, films where teenagers play the main roles often tend to be written off as less insightful than films about older characters. This is a misconception. I'm not saying this is Shakespeare, it isn't. But it is too easy to fixate a pre-conceived idea on a film like this one. Another misconeption is that adult film-makers cannot make movies about teenagers without becoming creepy voyeurs capitalizing on the innocent lives and lusts of the young ones. Moodysson is no voyeur.

Wittgenstein (1992)

 Few films about philosophers or philosophy have ever been made. OK, made philosophers are not blockbuster material. Iris hardly counts. Wittgenstein does. Derek Jarman was a director that sometimes made films that were interesting rather than good, but somehow, I have always liked his work. If you know the slightest bit of fact about Jarman's filmography, you will know that Wittgenstein cannot be an example of conventional docu-drama. It's not. Instead, Ludwig W is thrown into a bustling, yet stripped-down, milieu of aristocrat young men, Austrian family members and --- an Über Gewissheit-framed creature from Mars. The film builds on Wittgenstein's life, and if you've read his books, or read some biography about him, you will recognize most of what is said here. Yet, if there are many familiar things that the philosopher can rest her head on while watching Wittgenstein, the style proves all the more striking. This could have been a theatre play. The background is black. The set design is made up of colorful, striking objects. So is the clothing; remarkably lavish and colorful, extravagantly over the top, no single piece of garment displayed in the present film fails to make an impression on the viewer's eye. Except, of course, Wittgenstein's unchanging drab outfit (but no tie!), that mirrors his overall psychological tendencies towards the ascetic.

Wittgenstein employs an eerie sense of humor that is hard to explain. The philosopher whose philosophy was transported from the strict arena of logic to the rough ground of everyday life, is characterized as a person with very mixed attitudes towards "the everyday" in his own life; tired of his aristocratic surroundings, he dreamt of "a simpler life" of work and honesty (not only for himself, but also for his lover). This striving is depicted with a warm, gentle form of humor. Wittgenstein is less a film about this particular philosopher's thoughts than it is a humorous account of an ever-problematic relation between the thinking life, a life of work and a life of leisure and play. In one of the funniest scenes, Wittgenstein is interviewed by a Soviet bureaucrat. Wittgenstein has set his mind on going to the USSR to be - a manual worker. Of course, that doesn't happen. A recurring theme in the film is the idealized image of work within the mind of an aristocrat (even the über-aristocrat Russell seems to take a more sober attitude).

Like Wittgenstein's philosophy (and love of musicals and detective stories) Jarman does not eshew what to most people appears silly. But that particular silliness augments one important quality of the film: its tenderness.

Actually, I found the film to be a rather moving portrait of Wittgenstein. Moving, because it doesn't deal in "genius cult" but rather strips Wittgenstein down to very humane forms of fear, doubt and loneliness.

No matter how much Bertrand Russell's work bore me in real life - I absolutely adore Bertie the character in this film. Plus: Tilda Swinton is (unsurprisingly) making magic with her sheer presence. Ergo: YOU should watch it.

The Wind Will Carry Us (1999)

A man drives a big car through a herd of sheep. The man is hollering, "hello, hello" into his ancient mobile phone. The car trudges up a hill. The man steps out of the car and starts talking in the phone with his employer. Everything is wrong. His project is stuck. Gently, he kicks a turtle that happens to walk by. The camera focuses on the turtle. The car drives away. The camera zooms in the turtle again. The turtle starts to abscond from the camera.

This is one of the brilliant scenes from Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us, a slightly absurd study of frustration and human encounters. A group of men, we are not sure of their profession, arrive in a village. Something is to be done. The only man we see in-camera, a slightly dour middleaged man, mostly trods along aimlessly in the village, talking to people, asking for milk, asking about the old lady who is rumoured to be dying. Why is he inquiring about the lady all the time? Eventually, it is clear that they are to document a mourning ceremony, if only the woman were to die...

Nothing much happens in the film. We see almost the same scene repeating over and over again, ritualistically. The man drives up the hill, and down the hill again. Make no mistake: Kiarostami does not bore us. His film, one might call it a comedy, is full of life. Of course, I am not a speak of the languages spoken of the film, so should not really say this, but from the contexts, it seems as if language is used very fluidly here, not as a conveyor of information, but as a part of the life people are living, the way the understand one another, or don't.

Winter Light (1963)

So you like Bergman? You like to watch sonorous people sit in a dimly-lit room, talking about the silence of God? OK, I admit: Winter Light is one of my favorite movies. I've watched it as many as ten times. But still, everytime I re-watch it, I think about new things, as new details become the focus of my attention.

The film opens with a church service. This segment is long, but rich in detail. Here, all characters in the story are presented. The pastor, Tomas (excellent, excellent Gunnar Björnstrand), preaches as if he had said all these words too many times before. It is clear that they mean next to nothing to him. The organist coughs and attempts to muster up the energy to finish his business. Most of the church-goers seem bored, or distracted. After the service, Tomas talk to his colleagues. He has to go through with yet another service in the evening, because the other pastor is busy driving his new car. Tomas has caught a cold. He is grumpy but a string of people has unfinished business with him. A fisherman's wife talks about her troubled husband. Tomas' on/off girlfriend Märta, who is a schoolteacher, gets on his nerves with her well-meaning attempts to nurse and take care of him.

This is what happens in the first 30 minutes of the film. The main themes, dis/belief and human frailty, have already been introduced. Winter Light treats its subject matter with care and depth (not without an ounce of irony, of course, this is Bergman). We see the kind of twists and turns in a relationship that we can get a glimpse of talking to somebody for several hours. Therefore, it is not surprising that the story takes place during less than one day. In scene after scene, characters go through minor tribulations, but there are also outbursts of emotion and pangs of honesty. None of this feels contrived. One could perhaps criticize Bergman for writing theatrical lines, but the content of the film still rings true. Bergman hits a spot. Masterfully, the film portrays moments of extreme intimacy and the harsh words uttered in a situation the end of which is impossible to guess. All of these scenes are somehow open-ended, in the sense that they point at a life that the characters will lead afterwards (the film itself ends very abruptly, in a scene full of contradiction and mixed emotion). This open-endedness has, however, nothing to do with vagueness. The reason why Winter Light is so good is that it wrestles with a cluster of questions in a way that strikes me as absolutely serious (yet, not losing a strike of dark comedy out of sight). This is not to say that the film is theoretical or abstract. The opposite is rather the case.

As a film about belief, this is a well-made, non-dogmatic affair. Bergman does not, I think, argue for or against anything. Belief (or the lack of it) is far from an abstractt theory about how the world is. Bergman connects questions about religion and questions about human relations. As Tomas says several times: God is quiet, but his own world is contaminated with human blabber and mundane trifles. Gradually, we see that Tomas' obsession with God's silence is an expression for his lack of commitment to human relations. People bore him. People disgust him. Their physicality repels him. Tomas, like every other (or almost every) character of the film is extremely complicated, and this is what drives the film onwards: the inner conflicts within and between people. Bergman makes nothing to lull us into a conviction that these conflicts can be resolved in a specific way. He wants simply to explore what these conflicts are about.

Aesthetically, the film is a peculiar affair. Sven Nykvist makes the film bath in harsh, merciless daylight. There are almost no shadows. This makes the faces so often placed in the foreground, appear all the more naked. There are no traces of mystery, or forced beauty. Non-diegetic music is thankfully non-existent. The sounds of the film are used very efficiently. In one particularly dramatic (not melodramatic) scene, the only sound we hear is the white noise from streaming water.

Of course, I could go on and on writing about this film. What I want to say last is that Ingrid Thulin makes a harrowing performance as a masochistic/unsure/self-loathing/dependent/strong schoolteacher. Every single second with Thulin in the movie contains so much expression that it is almost hard to watch. The strenght of Thulin's face matches Dreyer's Jeanne d'Arc.

Some call this film a symbolic treatment of theological dogmas - other calls it a buster keaton movie made by Bresson. This is a proof of how many dimensions Winter Light has. Yes, it is dark comedy. Yes, it is a film about religion, one of the best, even. And still: it is also one of the boldest portraits of what it means to be unable to love.

Palindromes (2004)

Todd Solondz' Happiness might not have been the #1 masterpiece of cinema of the last century, but it contained a bunch of really funny, unnerving scenes. The same is true for Palindromes, which I watched in the middle of the night a while ago. My bleary eyes appreciated the pastel-eerie aesthetic of the film. A much weirder film than Happiness, Palindromes takes an offbeat trip in the ever changing bodily shape of "Aviva" (who is played by eight different actors). Aviva, whomever s/he is, lives in a world of strangeness and abuse, flag-waving religious people, sex-crazed men and odd sects. Aviva travels the landscape of childhood / adolescence. Despite occasional acquaintances, Aviva is alone in the world. We recognize Aviva no matter what shape s/he takes. What struck a note with me here was the tone of the film. We see lots of gruesome things happen, but all of it is unraveled in a quiet and melancholy way. Were it not for this way of handling its topic, Palindromes would probably have been an almost unwatchable film. In this way, Palindromes becomes less a provocation, than a sad meditation on insecurity and life as a teen.