Rutheless (1948)

Edgar Ulmer’s Detour is one of the best noir movies I’ve seen. Ruthless may not fit the noir book of rules (not every clause at least), but it is a cynical, disillusioned film that fits the times. Ruthless is a film about business, the kind of unstoppable force of social and economic progression that has no logic, no real purpose and will show no mercy to attain its ephemeral ends. I suppose this film, cloaked as a tale about moral destruction, is an example of how strikingly anti-business an American movie can get. Because Ulmer, in this movie, has nothing good to say about business. Through flashbacks, the life of Horace Vendig, businessman, is narrated. The women of Vendig’s life, men too, are used as instruments to manipulate and possess. Vendig’s motivation is never explained. He is a force, not a human being. Welcome to the American nightmare. Ruthless is a film that offers no solution of consolation. As in many noir tales, what we have here is simply a story about things going from bad to worse, along a path paved with misery and destruction. I must confess there is something about the utter dullness of Ruthless that I appreciated – maybe this is the right way to craft a movie based on this particular subject matter. No titillation, no entertainment, no nothing: expressionless, unimaginative acting, dull cinematography, static lines. Greed is not exciting. It is boring as hell, just as the system that propulses it. Cheers to you for making films like this, Mr Ulmer!

The flight of the red balloon (2007)

There’s a surge of interest in “contemplative cinema”. I am not at all comfortable with the concept. I become all the more suspicious when I watch Flight of the red balloon, a pretty, yet timid, piece of slice-of-life. I’ve heard about Hou Hsiao-hsien, but this is the first time I see one of his movies. What didn’t work for me in the movie was its too overt use of cinematography, symbolism and “calming” music. To me, the film lacks the edginess it would need to keep it from becoming tepid. I can’t say I was bored by it, but some scenes annoyed me, being too pretty, lacking substance and a sense of cinematic urgency. Sure, I see where his style is coming from. I recognize the romantic sense of everyday life as present in Wong Kar-Wai’s oeuvre, and there are bits of pieces of Kieslowski, even Bresson, here, too. The title refers to red balloons. The red balloon is all over the place. It’s present in a slew of scenes, it’s talked about, it’s shown in a film-in-film, it’s even included in the music. If there is one example of overloading an image, this is it. I didn’t like the god damn balloon in the very first scene in the movie. It didn’t get better. The film, however, features some decent scenes as well. A young boy, Simon, lives with his mother in a crammed apartment. The new babysitter, Song, has just arrived. In the best moments of the film, we see the mother, the son or Song moving around in the apartment, going about their everyday business, perhaps angrily arguing with a bothersome neighbor. The balloon-free, music-free scenes, which are not so loaded with Meaning, are, to me, the best ones. They have a quiet sense of life passing by, everyday conflicts, mundane conversations.  I have to add I was a bit worried that Juliette Binoche would destroy this movie. I was surprised to see she performed her repulsive role with a, in the context of the film, liberating amount of gusto. The visual expression of the film is certainly pleasing to the eye (saturated colors, mesmerizing urban perspectives, reflecting images & shapes, a pattern of color scales) but regardless of this I could not stop feeling that the director was somehow trying too hard to make a serene movie.

Reassemblage (1983)

I watched T. Trinh Minh Ha's Reassemblage without much previous knowledge about the director or the film. That proved to be a good thing and a bad thing. A voiceover guides us through the film. The words spoken are elusive, poetic strikes against colonialist thinking and seeing. Reassemblage is not traditional narration. It is not a film with a story. Rather, the film appears to be a questioning of the gaze of the documentary. Trinh Minh Ha points out the risks of exoticizing the Other. She is not, she says, making a film about Senegal. Trinh Minh Ha places one image of "objectivity" next to another; the ethnologist falling asleep beside his tape recorder while the locals perform music; the invention of underdevelopment; needs are created, so that help then is needed, too; the ethnographic "insider's" perspective - to spend two weeks in one place. She doesn't attempt to convey a completely different approach, not an alternative story; she wants to disentangle exoticizing tendencies. This is disassemblage and reassemblage of images and sounds.

The film comprises images of women, Senegalese women. They work, they feed children, they dance. This is not the image of Africa (Africa, Africa - yes no) as we are used to see it. The film confronts us with our own expectations (Trinh Minh Ha's own, too?) about "Africa" and these poor, "underdeveloped women". The film, sometimes, goes along, showing images of carcasses and naked female breasts. But it always subverts. Instead of poverty, we see happy faces, activity.

What I didn't know when I sat down to watch the film is that Trinh Minh Ha's film was part of an ethnographic research project.  When realizing that, I could no longer interpret the film as a fight between the Film maker and the Scientist. At least it is not so easy. To some extent, Reassemblage is a film about connection and disconnection, contextualization and decontextualization. As much as I like this film - its brilliant use of sound and image - I don't know if I share Trinh Minh Ha's reservations as to a film being "about" something, that all we can do is to "speak near by". In every scene, she shows how the film is not "about". Being "about", in her view, seems to be synonymous with objectification and false claims to reality. It is evident that Trinh Minh Ha wants to make no such claims. But what exactly is she so afraid of here? Would she say there can be no images that do not distort? Is there no true or right account? - What I intend to say is that it is not clear what she would see as the contrast to the exoticizing gaze.

Testament of Orpheus (1960)

Here we have yet another film that revolves around Art. Regrettably, this is not Naked Lunch.

Testament of Orpheus might be the first film by Jean Cocteau I've seen. Throughout the film, the only thing I could think of was Jean Genet's film A song of love. These two have some things in common; a romantic, dreamy expression, only I must say I hold the second film to be far better than Testament of Orpheus. It is also clear that some of Fellini's films may have been inspired by this one (8 ½). The film's oscillation between grandiose commentary about art and a lofty story about mythical creatures did not convince me at all. The only thing I really learned from this film is that David Lynch has apparently put some of its scenes to use in his own productions. The symbolism in Lynch's films can be blamed for being overly cheap, but it is never as downright trite as the stuff Cocteau comes up with here. There is always some sort of openness and sense of mystery in how Lynch employs what may, by some, be considered as "symbolic". Cocteau's musings on art tend to be both banal and sentimental. I must say this is a very, very pretentious film - and a terrible one.

Naked lunch (1991)

As much as films about Artists and Creativity tend to irritate and bore me – DAMN IT, Naked Lunch is a funny, disturbing film, one of the fewest films about "creativity" I can actually stand. Clearly, I have a thing for perversely talking typewriters. Even though I don’t like all of his films, David Cronenberg’s interest in metamorphoses and corporeality tend to make for good movies.  As you know, the film is based on Burroughs’s famous novel. Our hero is William Lee, exterminator. We learn that the powder that kills the bugs is not only good for that particular purpose – Will and his wife use the powder as a drug. At a drunken party, they play the Wilhelm Tell game. Will aims a gun at an object on his wife’s head, accidentally killing her. William is approached by a giant bug. We learn about “Interzone”, some kind of North African country. William goes there – or is that where his druggy hallucinations take him – to write some kind of report. Under the influence of drugs, he starts to write a novel. The typewriter he uses is not a dead tool. It’s a communicating creature. So – there we are, in a strange country, where American men (and some women) hunt boy toys, where eerie talking bugs lurk around the corner, and where there is a scheming corporation that William is destined to get in contact with. Nothing is quite what it seems here. Naked lunch builds layers and layers of dread and paranoia. But it does so humorously, almost gently. Even some of the grotesque machine-bugs are gentle. That I have no idea what this is all about doesn’t worry me one bit. I wasn’t really looking for hints about Burroughs’s life and pals. I enjoyed Naked lunch immensely. Even the slightly predictable free jazz soundtrack works just marvelously. I also like the sleazy feel of the sets and the brown desaturated color scale of the cinematography. Every little detail of Naked lunch is just right, even the cheesiest bit of quasi-sexual (always very queer) imagery (you see some literary eroticism going on here … for sure). Sleazy entertainment! "Exterminate all rational thought. That is the conclusion I have come to."

La Chinoise (1967)

My mixed feeling for Jean-Luc Godard's films always make for interesting viewing experiences. Excruciatingly irritating as they may be, I still, somehow, like watching them. Aesthetically, Godard is never a let-down. This is particularly true for La Chinoise, Godard's political film about a marxist-leninist-maoist revolutionary group - a comedy of sorts.

Most of the events in La Chinoise are located in one apartment. Every small detail of the sets has been arranged according to Godard's ideas about mood and style: quotes are painted on walls, furniture are used sparingly - and bright colors are used everywhere. The six main characters in the film represent different classes of society. As a parody of certain traits of ideological mumbo-jumbo, it would work fine. But I'm not sure what is intended as parody, and what isn't.

Let's start with the things I admire in this film. Godard is not afraid of experiments and being playful. In this film, he builds layer upon layer of sounds, colors and words. In many cases, it's fun to watch these chaotic scenes comprising slogans, quotes, music, images, overwhelming color scales and quirky acting. As a collage film: congrats to you, Mr Godard. Godard's mix of mockumentary, cartoons, stylized "lectures" is endearing, sometimes mind-blowingly sharp - while some scenes are terribly flat and simply irritating (the "love" story). As a political film, the peculiar mix of demagogic rhetoric and dove-eyed youth is certainly not without interest; perhaps Godard's film is a believable portrait of French leftist movements during the 60's, along with complicated schisms among its participants.

But if this is to be a political film, then I must say it is a mess. Godard praises the revolutionary force of naivité - naivité stands against the faux-progressive "older" forces who are not brave enough to embrace the openness of revolutionary struggle. The use of violence in the film is depicted in a typically ambiguous way: at least something happens, anything can happen, even though the persons killed happen to be the wrong people. As a film about political violence, I really cannot recommend this. Godard is too chic, too much in love with his own quirks to focus on anything essential that would really hit hard. (That said, I consider one of the film's best scenes the one in which Veronique talks to a philosophy colleague on a train - if the film had been focused on this conversation, something more interesting might have come up.)

To sum up: I don't have anyting against Godard's stylized approach to counter-culture storytelling. The problem is that Godard, in my opinion, has very little insightful to say about the world. However revolutionary his films are, in terms of surface-level aesthetics, I never feel that Godard encourage me to look at the world in a new or unexpected way. For that reason, there is the worrying hunch that his films are empty gestures, small teases, references intended as intellectual gags. - And it is in this sense that I would say that if Godard thinks of himself as a revolutionary film-maker (I know too little to know if he does/did), then I must say that I don't really see the force in his films that would make him one. What I mean is that I very rarely feel that Godard's play with artificiality has the power of revelation, or disenchantment. I just don't get it: what does he want me to see? “Vague ideas must be confronted with clear images,” sums up the film quite well.

Taste of cherry (1997)

A middle-aged man, Mr. Madii, has decided to commit suicide. However, he needs some help. Madii drives around in his car in the wastelands outside Tehran to find somebody who can help him. He talks to laborers, a young man drafted in the army, a seminary student and a man employed in a museum. He tells them about what he is about to do. He offers them money. But the first people he asks refuse his offer. He is getting increasingly desperate. Taste of cherry is very much a Abbas Kiarostami-film. The quasi-documentary feel is there, the naturalistic dialogue works all right – and the landscape of the film is simply stunning. Still, I feel this is a less successful movie than, for example, The Wind Will Carry Us. Regardless of its slow pacing and naturalism, Taste of cherry has some weak moments, where the dialogue and film language verge on the pathetically pompous. The themes of the film, suicide and the meaning of life are sometimes dealt with in a heavy-handed way. As much as these moments bother me, this is a good film, a moving film. The main character is surrounded by an air of mystery. We know he wants to die. We know he interrupts his interlocutors in a way that signals that he doesn’t really care. He wants to settle the deal. Other than this, we don’t know much. Why this man wants to die, we do not know (there are some very small hints, but in no way are they conclusive). For the first twenty minutes we just see the man slowly driving around in his car, gazing at men. Yes, in fact, it seemed as if this was a cruising hunt, as Madii asked men if they were lonely, if they wanted to take a ride with him, etc.

Nature plays a major part in this film. One might even say that it is a specific perception of nature that the ending scenes revolve around. Nature is not romanticized. Even though one of the characters, who also wanted to commit suicide, talk about the life-inducing experience of eating mulberries, there are other, less traditional, images of nature: a burly machine is shoveling stone, swirling dust, winding roads in a rocky landscape, a town scene in the twilight of the early morning hours. Every frame is filled with a melancholy sense of life, of being alive. Kiarostami underscores this feeling with a masterful combination of sound and images of nature. 

As for the very last images of the film: well, I really don’t know. To me, it didn’t work. I didn’t get the point. I felt it was an unnecessary distancing gesture – what for?

Heading south (2005)

Laurent Cantet is a director I tend to appreciate. I liked The Class, and Human resources is a striking film. So, I sat down to watch Heading south with some positive expectations. The film takes place in the late 70’s. We are presented to a group of women who spend their vacation(s) in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Soon, we grasp why they are there. These middle-aged women have hooked up with local youngsters, with whom they have sexual relationships. It is clear that the boys are exoticized to an almost extreme degree in the eyes of these women: one line that is repeated, over and over again, “it is different here”. Their tourist resort is to be kept as a safe haven, tending to their needs and emotions. “You know money is not a problem.” 

The boys are not “professional” prostitutes (it seems) but at the same time, they are compensated for their “services”. This is of course one of the very few movies to depict female sex tourism. Cantet has perhaps not made a cinematic masterpiece (as a film, this is nothing special, really) but it is more than satisfying in attempting to put these women’s activities in a global perspective of race, class and gender. The three women all offer different perspectives on this kind of half-monetary relationship. Ellen (played with wit and ingenuity by Charlotte Rampling) is the cynic who appears to see through romantic dreams (but it turns out she is not as honest to herself as she thinks she is). Her friend Sue adopts a more playful attitude. Enjoy it while it lasts. Brenda, on the other hand, seems to have fallen romantically for her Haitian “friend”. What these characters have in common is self-delusion. They tend to see themselves as liberators for these boys, to whom they offer passports. The film could have dedicated a larger part of the story to the boys’ perspective. The information we obtain about their lives – a girlfriend, a worried mother, lethal threats – sheds little light on how they experience their everyday life with these women. What I would have wished for is a more direct way to address political issues.  It’s there, all right (especially in all scenes, in which the waiter Albert takes part), but it could have been dealt with in detail – instead of looking at the competition between two self-indulged women. But Cantet’s film is surprisingly low-key, and it has its merits. 

Laurent Cantent is one of the few directors that takes an interest in work/labor. This theme has been recurrent in all his film, and he deals with it in a very non-preachy way. 

Le Silence de la Mer (1949)

The German occupation of France, WWII: A German officer called von Ebrennac is lodged with a French family consisting of an elderly man and his young niece. The man and the niece defiantly refuse to talk to the German. But the German talks. First, hesitatingly, and then freer; it turns out he is no raving Nazi, but a lover of culture, a composer whose feelings about the war are ambiguous. It seems as if he does not understand his hosts and their contempt for him. He cannot stop talking about how much he loves France, and French culture (but not the modern part of it). Germany, to him, is Bach’s turf, not Hitler’s. Vivaciously, he imagines the alliance of two cultures. During a visit in Paris, he goes through some sort of spiritual conversion, in that he sees the reality of occupation: raving Nazis against the backdrop of Famous Monuments.

Le Silence de la Mer (dir. Jean-Pierre Melville) suffers from a few flaws, yet it is still a good film. The problem is that it overstates its case. The German is made too one-dimensional; a romantic whose perspective is destined to be shattered by reality. Of course, this is a good description, but the question is how it is made honest, so that rough edges are not glossed over. The silent Frenchmen are also overly simplified, but their silence is expressive enough to keep up tension.  But another problem is a very problematic depiction of secret love. We hear a man’s voice, the elderly Frenchman’s. He talks about the burgeoning feelings for the German shown by the niece. But she is silent throughout the film. A pretty face, a white neck, twitching, busy hands, whose movements are interpreted by another. Melville evokes the different ways in which we are silent, how silence changes from hostility to intimacy.

With Dutch angles, extreme close-ups and over-lighted sets, Melville transcends conventional film-making. Melville works with the medium, and tries to capture an atmosphere. The minimalism of the film could be the work of Bresson. Most events take place in one single room, where a clock is always ticking. Some scenes are really striking. For a film with so much talk in it, it is interesting to note that it is not the German’s monologues that keep this film going. The monologues are heavy with words, and they do not always work.

Of course, the political surrounding of the film should not be forgotten. The manuscript is based on a book written as a part of the French resistance movement during the war. The book, at the time, was very famous. Still, it is interesting to learn that the film was a commercial success. I think this has still to be one of the best films by Jean-Pierre Melville I’ve seen so far. To be honest, I’m not crazy about his crime films. To me, this film was much more interesting than his tongue-in-cheek crime flicks.