Solaris (1972)

Re-watching Tarkovsky’s films never fail to be a rewarding experience. All of his films are rich enough so that new thoughts keep occurring in my mind on every single viewing (discussing them with others help). Solaris is one of his best films. This is not to say that it lacks weak moments. As an aesthetic experience, Solaris is, I would say, very hard to criticize. But when one starts to disentangle its themes and point of view, it’s easy to come upon bad solutions, half-thought material and unnecessary vagueness. What is the main thrust of Solaris? Is it a critique of contemporary (Soviet) scientific ideals that turn nature into an anthropomorphic mirror? Is it a story about love and conscience? Or is it, rather, a film about consciousness and memory? Or are we taking metaphysics here, we are all trapped in Illusion, we are all inhabitants on the space station of the film? Or ... God?

Well, all of these themes are present. The relation between them is not always clear, and this makes, in my opinion, interpretation quite difficult. Kris Kelvin, a psychologist, is sent to a space station that circles around a planet, Solaris. Solaris is covered with a mysterious sea. The sea has a strange influence over the crew on the space station, some of whom have disappeared, some have committed suicide and some are on the verge of insanity. As Kelvin boards the space station, he learns that it is haunted by “visitors”, materializations of memories. Thus, he finds his dead wife, Hari, in his room. Throughout the film, it is unclear how we are to view Hari. In many senses, the film asks us to see her as a human being; she is a human being in the light of Kelvin’s concern for her. On the other hand, we are challenged to view her as a manifestation of the allure of science, the utmost mirror of human desire. Is Hari a representation of Kelvin’s bad conscience or is she a human being? The film, the ending in particular, doesn’t really provide an answer. All I can say is that the film sometimes fall into the trap of muddled dichotomies between Love versus Science but other moments it does not work with dichotomies like that at all.

What is most confusing of all is how to understand the very ending of the film. Is it a tragedy - or a story about redemption? I am torn between different intepretations here.

The sci-fi part of Solaris is not very important. Yes, the story is based on Stanislav Lem’s novel. The novel is not very good. The film is far better than the book. But what makes the film so appealing is not the sum of narrative twists and turns.

What is interesting about the film is not the “science fiction”. And maybe it is the wrong approach to talk about Tarkovsky’s films in terms of being “interesting”. He is a religious director, rather than a philosophical director – what I mean by this is just that if we want to understand what drives the films, the religious themes are all-important, the level of “thoughts” and “ideas” less so. There are many, many stunning scenes in Solaris. In one of them, we see a car drive through a futuristic landscape. Dissonant, eerie noise/music enhance the feeling of uncertainty. Where are we going next? Those moments of uncertainty, of the unknown, are what has made me return to Solaris over the years. On the level of aesthetics, Tarkovsky is a good interpreter of something that appears as absolutely Other/Unknown (the sea on Solaris). When transformed into ideas (science tames & domesticizes the Unknown, turning it into an alluring, but dangerous mirror – the Unknown strikes back) the film is less convincing. 

PS: Don't watch Soderbergh's version. It's crap.

Riten (1969)

Riten is one of Bergman's lesser known film. The story is Kafkaesque: three acors are interviewed by by a judge. A multitude of conflicts mar the relationship among the actors. The crime they are accused of is having made an obscene play. Although this is a hodgepodge of Bergmanian themes - weird sexuality, the conflicts of matrimony, religious quandary, mental breakdowns - this is far from his most successful film. Bergman works with eerie angles, minimal sets, explicit sexual scenes and, you know, a general sense of the unhinged experimentation. In one sense Riten is fun to watch because it lacks the restrain and traditional we expect from Bergman. This is .... something else. For a while, I played with the idea that Bergman might have made a parody of the typical Bergman film. But then I was reminded that Bergman is perhaps the least person we expect to indulge in self-mocking. Bergman is rumoured to have called the film an act of fury directed at those critiquing his work - if we take this in mind, to say that the film is tongue-in-cheek is an understatement (what happens in the very last scene). We know that Bergman is quite capable of making comedies. If this is a comedy, it is a rather black one. The Rite explores the role of art in society. The main point seems to be that art always is an autonomous sphere, and that it has to be that way. When think about Bergman, and how Bergmand talked about art, the only thing this film does to me is to put a big grin on my face: it is so OVERBLOWN.

The Island (1960)

Films such as The Man from Arran and Nanook of the North make great pains to show the hard life of Primitive Society; ceaseless toil, brute necessity, life/death. The Island is, in some ways, an exception. Arguably, the director, Kaneto Shindo, did say that the film was intended to show work as an eternal struggle against nature. But in contrast with the two films I mentioned, work, here, is portrayed from what I would call a religious perspective. The film never idealizes hardship. We see the contrast of the life on an island, and the life in the town, but this contrast bears no trace of judgment. The director does not say that work in the old days was honest and uncomplicated – far from it. Work is not a mere “struggle” against some physical obstacle. The perspective on nature in The Island is much richer than that. Nature is not just a passive object; it is a part in a relation.

The two protagonists, a man and a woman, work with the discipline, but also the solemnity of ritual. Together with their two children, they live on an island. They are the island’s only inhabitants. The film silently follows their routines. Summer, winter, spring, summer. They fetch water for their crops with a row-boat. The water, carried in buckets, is laboriously dragged along a dangerous-looking track that leads to the top of the hill. The water is then meticulously distributed. The camera patiently waits for the water to absorb into the soil. One scene in the middle of the film contains a shocking disruption of the calmness; the episode, in tandem with a few other ones in the film, has the effect of a jolt in the viewer’s mind. There is no dialogue in the entire film. 

The slightly mournful score of the film is a perfect match with the quiet unfolding of routines and errands. The music captures the sense of repetition in the protagonists’ life. Yet this is not dull repetition, but the repetitive sequence of two persons going up the hill is transformed into an adventure every time we see the event taking place (and we see it almost in real time…). Some little detail is always different. Sometimes the camera tracks the events of nature; the movement of the sea; a crab’s lazy movements on the beach, the struggle of a fish, the blossoming of a tree, the sound of rain. That the director manages to breathe so much life into the images is simply impressive. It is not surprising that every scene is carefully arranged, so that there is a fluid transition of movement and stasis, of the island and the town, of long shots and close-up of faces (these actors are very good at conveying a wide range of emotions with a very, very restrained facial expressions and overall demeanor). The Island is a breathtakingly beautiful film.

Murder, my sweet (1944)

In many noir films, the connection to German expressionism is very clear. Murder, My Sweet revives the shadowy & seedy landscapes of a Doktor Mabuse. Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, private investigator, is the classical hard-boiled cop whom the world of Vice and Crime try to win over. The femme fatale is not lacking. She is blond, she is stern - she gets any man she sets her eyes on. For all its delicate twists and turns, Murder, my sweet is nothing out of the ordinary. It is a good noir film with some eerie moments (just the type of wackiness every noir film should contain). The dialogue is crisp and no-nonsense. – And the air of paranoia and doom looms heavy, just as it should.

Somewhere (2010)

A million films revolve around the existential agony of the beautiful and rich. In some ways, Sofia Coppola's Somewhere is one of these film. This is a problem. Boo-hoo, how hard it is to rich, how painful it is to find pleasure in a world where everything is not for sale. Then the moment of soul-searching, the moment of Epiphany, is due. How shallow is the affluent life & love is all that counts, really. Well, uh-huh. Coppola's film still has many merits. Few other directors share her knack for depicting locations, locations in which not much happens, people just ... hang around. As her other film, Somewhere is an investigation of boredom in its many form. A few examples: moviestar watches a lengthy pole dance appearance in his hotel suite. The sound of dexterous hands against the metal pole. After the show, the pole dancers queitly fold the poles and walk away. (In a scene a while later, we see an unnerving resemblance with the pole-dancers in the movie star's daughter's ice-skating performance and her father's bland response.) Movie star sits in a make-up room, about to be transformed for a movie appearance. His face is covered with a thick layer of white grease. For many minutes, we see him sitting still, only the nostrils are moving. Movies star & movie star's eleven-year old daughter kill time with a game of Guitar hero. It's in scenes like this, with very little dialogue, or no dialogue at all, that the strenght of the movie lies. I repeat my overall impression of Coppola's ouevre: when it comes to atmosphere, she is the master. Somewhere is a good film. It is not a perfect film, far from it. At some moments, redemption seems too close at hand. Forgiveness becomes clichéd. But the clichés never have the upper hand. The movie is most of all a quiet and subdued affair. Drama is played out is what remains unstated, and not in lengthy, quasi-philosophical dialogue. That is something the world should be thankful for. What we need least of all right now is quasi-philosophical mumbo-jumbo uttered by animated actors. I prefer Coppola's subtlety a million times to that.

Citizen Kane (1941)

I re-watched Citizen Kane. This time, I didn't sleep through half the film. Actually, this Orson Welles classic almost lives up to its reputation. A more observant viewer would perhaps be able to see more depth in it than I managed to do. My expectations of the film were not let down, except for one aspect: I didn't know it was so melancholy film. Cynical - yes. But not melancholy. Maybe that is the flip-side of cynicism, teary images of a castle filled with expensive garbage.

Seconds (1966)

More Rock Hudson on the blog! It is a good thing that I knew nothing of the film beforehand. Anyway, Seconds is a nasty little sci-fi/horror movie that mocks a certain idea of "freedom" along with the dream of "starting all over" (for a certain amounts of dollars). An elderly man lives a humdrum life with his wife. He is contacted by a friend who .... couldn't possibly be alive. The man is lured to go to a shady agency. The agency, who looks like something from Kafka's brewery, promises "a new start" - and a fake death. After some intricate bodily transformation in the form of plasic surgery, Tony the artist is born. He is already established in business (somehow), he's got an apartment, a valet, and soon also a girlfriend. Is he happy? No. Can he begin again, a new start would probably help?

I would not be surprised if Seconds taught David Lynch a trick or two. Some moments of it could have been snatched from Eraserhead. Of course, many European film-makers were doing similar things as Frankenheimer, who uses twisted angles, eerie settings and extreme close-up to create an atmosphere of dread and disorientation.

I must confess I liked Seconds quite a bit, even though the backbone of the plot has been recycled many, many times on the big screen. As a critique of consumerism, the film is both funny and frightening (but don't expect it to be "deep"). And, as I said, the treatment of "freedom" is equally disturbing and amusing. The main character is free from all external burdens, yet he is not happy, or the things the agency presents as external burdens may not be that at all. But most of all, this is a film about the face: look at the elderly man's haggard face in the first very scenes, and then look at Rock Hudson's hollow eyes in the latter part of the movie. Those faces unsettled me, for sure.

Lone Star (1996)

Far more than a crime story, Lone Star is a mood. Lone Star evokes the secrets of a society of racism and chauvinism; it conjures up unwanted ghosts, histories that are known to all but intentionally forgotten or ignored. The past haunts the present, but the present is also connected with the possibility of a future.

Even though some sentimental moments could have been removed from the film (hey, John Sayles wrote the script for Dolph Lundgren's masterpiece Men of War), this is mostly a good film, perhaps because of the way it deals with historical continuity. The story unfolds in fluid camera movements, which augments the sense of continuity in a very nice way. Flashbacks have a tendency to present things every intelligent viewer could work out in her own mind, but here, there are moments where flashbacks are used without a feeling of redundance. This has everything to do with how the film treats its subject: racism.  The past is a part of the lives of the people in the film, the difficulties they have, a community of segregation and transgressions. The film is set in small town in the south, by the Mexican border. A human skull is found. But unlike the progression of most conventional movies, this initial scene does not function as an instigation of a mystery. Rather than offering us a puzzle, Sayles is interested in the psychosocial dynamics of the town and its residents. What I appreciate about Lone Star is its refusal of overstatements. Although Sayles investigates difficult social issues, he sets out to map them, rather than mine the landscape for emotional thrills. In the hands of a less talented director, the script for this film could have been a piece of sensationalist trash.