Henry fool (1997)

My friend T showed me a couple of films by Hal Hartley a long time ago. I was immediately enthralled by the scruffy style of the films – lo-fi, to say the least. Henry Fool is based on the same no-budget formula. Here, too, Hartley works with a minimum of actors, settings and so on, but the film is admittedly a lot more developed than those from the early 90’s. Henry fool is a charming film. As a parody of art about Great Artists, it is both amusing and provocative; it is a commentary on cultural politics. But a big flaw is the last half of the film, which has far too much superfluous material for its own good. There are too many twists. Simon is a garbage man. He is the quiet type, bullied by the local wannabe-gangstas. His wry sister hangs around at home, taking care of their depressed mother. One day, a poet, Henry, moves into their basement (which is equipped with an anciently glowing hearth). Or at least he tells everybody he is a poet. Henry pursues Simone to choose the path of the artists, which he does, at first with little success. Simon is blamed for having peddling pornography to children – but the opinion on his work changes… The settings of Henry fool are everyday locations. A squalid yard, The World of Donuts, a library, a train stop, an anonymous dinner table. Beneath the poker-faced surface hides a poignant story about art and non-art, about social acceptance and political bullshit. The best scenes are those where little happens. A young scoundrel hands out flyers that encourages to voters to vote for a politician who saves America. Hartley’s treatment of moral panic in a culture of class differences and collective mumbo-jumbo about “revitalizing America” is utterly brilliant and funny. Henry fool, the poet, is a walking representation of quasi-culture: the resemblance of depth which has no connection to anything serious. Henry fool is a striking example of a culture that makes a division between Being Deep, Being a Poet and leading a normal, respectable, quiet life. --- In Henry Fool, each and every character fail to live up to the dream of suburbia. We even get to see Camille Paglia in an amusing cameo. It is the deadpan humor that makes Henry fool such a good film, despite the disappointing last 30 minutes.  

Alexandra (2007)

Alexandr Sokurov being one of my favourite directors, I expected Alexandra to be something special. Well, it turned out it was, sort of, but for all its originality, I would still not say Alexandra is a very good film. Even though thematically, this is a peculiar film, I constantly felt that the material could have been developed in a far more ingenious way. Something kept bugging me, though I have a hard time defining exactly what it was. The story: Alexandra, an elderly woman (played by a famous opera performerGalina Vishnevskaya), goes to a military camp in Chechnya to visit her son. She talks to him about various things, she explores the dusty and ramshackle surroundings. Sokurov undoubtedly has a way with portraying tenderness where we don’t expect to find it. How often do we see images of a tattooed soldier combing his grandmother’s hair? Not too often (the only film that comes to mind is Claire Denis’ Beau travail). This is what makes the film fascinating. Alexandra has very little to do with the stereotypical picture of Alpha-male soldiers doing everything to impress each other by means of bravura and sex stories. Alexandra is another world in comparison to most depictions of the army. Sokurov evokes untraditional images of the soldier: the frail boy, the everyday routines, curious looks without further intentions, innocence. The physical and spiritual authority of Alexandra is equally unconventional. She is not your typical grandmother figure.

The drab cinematography (the use of harsh light and almost-monochrome colors) works fine, there are a few striking scenes, and the angle is, as I said, very fresh. Well, on the other hand, the dialogue was, overall, an embarrassing and pompous affair.  The point of several turns in the story leaves me in the dark. Alexandra goes to the marketplace. She intends to buy cigarettes and biscuits for some soldiers. She ends up visiting one lady’s apartment. They have repellent tea, and it is as if they have always known each other. There is hostility in the way Alexandra is treated by the people she meets outside the base, but it is not brought to the surface. That’s why the apartment scene puzzled me. What was the intention? Well, there is something that worries me here; that the war seems so far away. The soldiers go away on missions, but still, we see very little of it, despite the devastation of the town. But maybe that’s the point? Instead of squadrons of soldiers on the front, we see grandmother and grandson climb into an armored vehicle. The grandson lets his grandmother try the Kalashnikov. It’s so easy, she remarks. We can feel her shudder of unease. Alexandra is our key to the military base. We see it through her eyes. We experience the smells, the taste of food, the bothering heat, the way she does. To her, all this is new. So – what we see in this film is an outsider’s perspective, an outsider for whom this is not everyday business. This may be an important point of view. 

OK – Let’s be honest. Maybe the reason why I’m feeling uncomfortable is that somewhere in this film, there are hints of bigger notions about Russia, Mother. That I kept thinking about it is perhaps only due to the fact that I’ve read Sokurov’s description of his own film. But the more I think about this film, I want to re-watch it to see whether perhaps some of my judgments were perhaps hasty.

Ikiru (1952)

To be busy is not the same as really devoting oneself to what one does. This is what Kiekegaard talks about in Purity of heart and it is what Kurasawa shows in his somewhat messy film Ikiru. In the first part of the film, we see how a group of town residents make an appeal to the authorities. They want a playground. The site is flooded with water and something is to be done. Watanabe is one of the bureaucrats that make a business like this one something to be shuffled from office to office. Whose responsibility is it to take care of the sewage? Someone else's clearly. Watanabe learns that he has cancer. The rest of the film is a variation of The Death of Ivan Illich. Watanabe gradually comes to understand that his life has been empty, that he has been busy without doing anything important. Now, he tries to make up for the years he has lost on petty trifles. At first, he tries to have as much fun as possible, he even buys himself a sporty hat. Well, it starts to feel hollow. A colleague from work accompanies him on walks and seem to be someone who could be his friend. His son and daughter-in-law are shocked to see him with a much younger woman. There are a few misunderstandings and their friendship is partly destroyed. Watanabe returns to work. Now, he is a changed man; no longer conforming to being the conventional bureacrat, he makes the process of building a playground get started - and the job is finished. In the last part of the film, Watanabe's colleagues dissect the man's last effort during the drunken funeral. Some of them insist that he is not to be praised for the finishing of the project. Others claim that Watanabe was brave enough to reject the constricted professional role. The last 30 minutes of the film contain several superfluous flashbacks, but this does not take away my fascination with looking at Kurasawa's extreme close-ups of drunken faces.

Ikiru might live up to most of our expectations about what a film about a dying bureacrat might look like. Still, in many respects, it is a good film that comprises a few surprisingly strong scenes. In one of them, a piano player performes a tune while the bar bustles in a melancholy way. In another eerie scene, Watanabe and his colleague sit quietly at a café table. Suddenly, the colleague grabs a toy bunny from her bag. The toy bunny dances on the table - it is a joy to see Watanabe's priceless facial expression.  

Another year (2010)

Bittersweet is perhaps the word that best describes the atmosphere of most of Mike Leigh’s movies. Temporal, is another. Like few other directors, Mike Leigh has a sensitive awareness about what time does with people. His characters carry the weight of the past, but the story is also moving toward the future. The resolutions of his films rarely give us a complete idea about what their future lives will look like. Leigh works with situations that have an appearance of hope, but darker undercurrents are always present somehow. Another year follows a bunch of characters in late middle age during a year. Tom and Gerri (oh yes, there are jokes about their names), happily married, invite their friend Mary for dinner. Mary drinks too much, and at the end of the evening, she embarrassingly blurts out the romantic failures of her lives. Gerri and Tom seem to have seen this happening before. They know their friend; they know what she is like. They are not condescending to her, but they exchange meaningful glances among themselves. This is a typical segment of the film. There is no straightforward narrative. Leigh is more interested in interaction between people. How bitterness is expressed among friends, what disappointment can look like, the impossibility to share another’s joy. At some points, I felt that the acting was a bit over the top. But this is no major complaint. Most of the time, Leigh captures a sense of quiet human disaster, but also, as a contrast, relationships that seem so loving that it is hard to imagine that anything could disturb them. Another year is about what we become, how our lives turn out, what we take ourselves to be. Tom and Gerri seem happy with their lives, their work, each other. Their friend Mary, on the other hand, keeps convincing them that she is having a blast. Of course she doesn’t. In every moment, we see how she is deluding herself, and that there is no easy way out of this delusion. She is lonely, but she is also desperately clinging to people. She simply doesn’t seem to know what sort of life she wants. The friendship between the spouses and Mary contains several tensions. Tom and Gerri are too well-behaved to turn down their unconsciously unhappy friend. On the other hand, they set limits to what kind of bullshit they are prepared to take. Mary’s perspective on Tom and Gerri seems equally conflictual. Another year is a somber movie, with intermittent moments of dark humor. I must confess I was quite moved by it. Mike Leigh is not fascinated with the gruesome or the evil – rather, what makes his film special is their attempt to depict goodness, devotion and reconciliation. By the way: middle-aged women are rarely allowed much space on the screen. This is a film with several compelling characters that are not twenty year old college girls.

127 hours (2010)

Danny Boyle's 127 hours is a movie I would not really recommend to anyone. As an adventure story, it comprises some dispenseful moments of claustrophobia and fear. But those moments loose their force because of the way the film rely on conventional flashbacks and predictable patterns of presenting fear and despair. The most positive aspect of the movie is perhaps that the main character, we might just as well say the only character, is surprisingly unsympathetic. Aaron Ralson is what one might call a spoiled brat. He indulges in adventures, not thinking about anyone else, never caring enough to let anyone know where he goes. That, of course, proves to be disastrous. Intentional or not, Ralson does not become any more sympathetic along the way. We just spend a couple of hours with him. Danny Boyle may have created an entertaining movie from material that on the surface looks very unpromising: a man stuck between a boulder and a canyon wall. But this film lacks the imagination or the insight to create a story beyond a conventional adventure.

The squid and the whale (2005)

The marriage of Bernard and Joan is coming to an end. They are both writers. Bernard is having a spell of writer's block, while Joan is being published in The New Yorker. The divorce is a bitter one, and it affects the kids, Walt and Frank. Walt takes his dad's side. quoting the Author's judgments on kafkaesque Kafka and Dicken's best works. Frank, the younger brother, is sent off to tennis classes with Ivan. Walt and Frank seem just as unhappy as their parents. Walt cannot decide whether he desires his girlfriend or not, and Frank, about twelve years old, likes to booze at home. Bernard encourages Frank to be ambitious. To pursue the career of tennis instructor, just like Ivan, is not "serious work". Bernard shares some pieces of advice to Walt as well. While young, he should not settle down, but try out the girls. The squid and the whale can boast great performances. Jeff Daniels is absolutely hilarious as the self-absorbed father. The look on his face while he plays an ever-serious game of ping-pong with Frank is priceless. The nervous movements of the camera, bright colors and subdued music provide the right backdrop for this kind of quietly intelligent story. I said it is an intelligent film - that means it doesn't feel the need to brag about its intelligence. In just a few minutes, it is as if we know the characters, their flaws, their peculiar tics. This could of course have been a cheap way to create Universal Feelings towards Troubled Adolescence, but that is not what is going on. Rather than going for the big dramas, Noah Baumbach, director, opts for awkward silences and embarrassing lines (as when Bernard, in a late scene, is having a heart attack, but even as he is carried off on a stretcher, he makes a one-liner about Godard). There are many comic scenes in the films, but there are no gags. The squid and the whale shares many characteristics with similarly themed independent films, but that does not take away its merits. The sadness it evokes rarely has the ring of artificiality. The plot may follow the path we have got used to by now, the Sundance path, but it treats the material in an affectionate, lucid way. That it is a good film is further shown by the way I liked it much better the second time than the first. This time around, as the turns of the story were familiar to me, I admired the details of the scenes, and highly enjoyed them.

Life is sweet (1990)

There is something in Mike Leigh’s films that compels me to feel and think. Leigh’s films might not be as political as Ken Loach’s, but all of his films contain a sense of hope that can be interpreted in political terms. That he would patronize his characters is something I can’t take seriously. For Leigh, nothing is simple. But he is not interested in the obscure either; very little in his films appeals to a sense of extravagant aesthetics. Actually, one might say that all his work follows the principle: "Nothing is hidden." 

Leigh’s films revolve around the business of everyday life. This is true for Life is sweet, too, even though there are plenty of scenes that dabble more in black comedy than kitchen sink realism. Life is sweet humorously dissects what it means to dream, or what it means to be quite happy in one’s present situation. Some of its characters are tragic because their dreams have remained private indulging of possibilities that will never see the test of reality. This goes for Aubrey, a weird man who has decided to open a French restaurant in a London suburb. An evening that begins with neat (over-the-top) decoration and great expectations ends in drunken catastrophe. Andy is a family man who is bored with his job. He dreams of a different life. His pal comes up with a plan that seems promising, but just for the two of them: a hot-dog van. Nicola, Andy’s daughter, is a rebel who doesn’t have much of a cause. She doesn’t quite know what to do with herself. Most of the time, we see her slouching around the house, complaining. She feels nothing but contempt for the world. She can’t even dream. Andy’s wife Wendy, on the other hand, seems happy with her life. She married young, but seems not to regret it. Through an ever-present laugh, she endures the company of eccentrics, and has a way of handling loony characters. Nicola’s sister, Natalie, exudes earthbound gentleness. Despite her parents’ initial protests, she chose to work as a plumber. Natalie is the realist, but she doesn’t have the cynicism we sometimes connect with realism. – 

All this makes for a gentle and heart-warming film about human relationships. With its many hideous examples of late 80s sense of "style", the film never creates a romantic image of its scruffy characters. Life is sweet may not be a cinematic masterpiece, but Leigh’s perspective on life and love is, I would say, refreshing in its dedication to forgiveness and reconciliation.

Boiled bacon consomme, yummy.

A woman is a woman (1961)

I was surprised to learn that I was less annoyed with A woman is a woman than several other Godard films. One impression remains, however. It is something that mars all of Godard's early films (I haven't seen his later work, from the seventies onward). It is the depiction of women. Godard may be interested in pastiche. Godard may be interested in style. Godard may be interested in cheeky references. But in every single movie, we see the same type of chic female body trotting from frame to frame, pouting with her lips, uttering "I despise you" to some male whose destiny it is to lose everything. A woman is a woman is less doom-ridden than some other films. Instead, it is a light-hearted film with lots of quirky one-liners and confused dialogue. A pastiche of musicals and comedies, it revels in inspired non-sense. And Godard's usual bag of tricks. In one of the funniest scenes, we see Angela perform a strip show - that is what she does. The camera pans from her to the ogling of the audience. The ogling eyes belong to weary men are all dressed in trenchcoats. Somehow, the result is quite hilarious. The film follows the romance and non-romance of Angela and Émile. Angela dreams of having a baby but her partner is reluctant. You will not be shocked to hear that they have a quirky relationship. Godard's camera tracks the movements in their lush aprartment. Lamps are carried around while a piece of whimsical dialogue is locuted, bicycles are a means of transportation in the elegantly lit rooms. A woman is a woman is of course no less self-conscious than any of Godard's movies. As the rest of his oevre it is fun to watch but it leaves me absolutely cold, except for the scene I already mentioned, which was a strike of genious. "Even the lightest of Godard’s films is touched with a political consciousness and sensitivity to the modern female condition lacking in the works of most of his Nouvelle Vague compatriots." Well, I don't know about that.

His Girl Friday (1940)

When compared to many modern comedies, the representation of gender in His girl Friday can be argued to be less stereotypical than the majority of films produced in Hollywood today. The film portrays the messy relationship of two newspaper men, Hildy and Walter. They are a divorced couple. Hildy goes to Walter’s office to tell him about her plans to remarry. She wants to live a “woman’s life”, being the traditional housewife. Her prospective husband is a boring insurance type.Walter still loves her, and he knows that is not the life for her. Soon enough, we realize that Hildy is still in love with Walter, too, and that she is not ready to give up her career for making Christmas cookies. In this film, love and work are not seen as two conflicting areas. Walter loves Hildy for what she is, including her work. The depiction of work is not romanticized. Walter is depicted as an amoral person who happens to pursue a good cause. The newspaper business is all about writing the exclusive story and selling more papers. Stylistically, His girl Friday is in its own league. The pacing is hectic and there is always at least three synchronic conversations fighting to get your attention. With that much going on, watching the film is an exhausting – yet funny – experience. The performances in the film are all great, keeping up the black humor of the film.  

Red desert (1964)

Antonioni knew exactly what he was doing when he directed Red desert. Aesthetically, it is convincing. Actually, it is a marvelous, chillingly dazzling work of dystopian art. It is evident that the relation between the different aspects of the films is meticulously worked through. The soundtrack, a very retrofuturistic affair, is thrilling, as is the dynamic and expressive use of colors. One might depict the film as Playtime’s tragic twin sister. Both Antonioni and Tati depict the alienation of modern life in. Tati transforms modernity into impossible landscapes, eerie machines and people who simply don’t fit into this world of mechanisms. Antonioni’s film starts with panning camera movements. We see indistinct, blurry images of gray, industrial landscapes. Then: billowing, yellow smoke from a smokestack. The color contrast is mind-blowing: the sharpness of yellow against the backdrop of a grey sky. The sound we hear is a persistent industrial fizz. Humans are introduced into the scenery. There is a strike. A woman in a green coat looks at a group of strikers. One man encourages a blackleg to get out from the factory. The camera follows the woman in green. She buys a sandwich from a man. She looks confused, maybe scared. A gasp of breath is contrasted with the numb fizz. While she eats the sandwich, the camera tracks the paths of sickly landscape. The next scene takes place in the factory. It is quite a shock to be transported from the dirt of the previous scenes into the neat and tidy engineering section of the factory. Here, no dirt is tolerated. A snipped of conversation is heard. We learn that workers are hard to find for some work abroad. Machines are hollering. The sound almost drowns the words spoken. Also here, there are unexpected explosions of color. This shows somehow that not even the factory can be sorted into one piece of reality. A few scenes later on, the camera explores the woman’s sterile apartment. Her son’s room is cluttered with colorful robots. Their mechanic eyes shimmer in the dark. The visual expression is stunning.

Red desert takes places in the land of Dystopia, among desolate industrial landscape, billowing smoke and ramshackle “cottages” by a dead-looking sea. Even the characters’ homes lack every trace of warmth and intimacy. The world of Red desert is narrated from Giuliana’s perspective. She is the woman in green, wife of Ugo, a lukewarm factory manager. Giuliana has an affair. Or at least, there is a certain man in her life who thinks she is having one. Giuliana is the only character who reacts to the decay of the surrounding world in a strong way. In one scene, she is walking in a drab-looking alley with the man who pursues her. Suddenly, her gaze is frozen. Eerie music underlines a sense of fear. A man is sitting beside a cart with eggs. She stares at the man. The image is blurred. (This is the kind of thing Fassbinder is so in love with: the fear embedded in ordinary life) It’s a stunning moment, a very short moment, but it is executed masterfully to create the intended effect.

Of course, Giuliana is depicted as emotionally fragile, on the verge of a breakdown. One could criticize the film for its stereotypical characterization of women, always more sensitive than men. On the other hand, we are not to take a psychological interest in Giuliana. With its formalized language, the film encourages us not to. She is a product of society, as are the men that surround her. Every bit of surrounding in the film can at the same time be interpreted as a state of mind – and the other way around. As a result, all characters are paper-thin. Even though Antonioni’s film has a relation to Marxist critique of alienating relations, there is no – at least I don’t see it – dialectic movement here. This does not mean there is no tension within the film. There are moments when the deadening rhythm of small talk and business is broken. As I said, there are also moments of visual and aural disruption. The world, which these characters inhabit, is presented as a static one. Eruptions of frantic energy (a quasi-sexual orgy among a circle of friends), make up yet another side of alienation; feverish emotion is no less estranged than neutral and businesslike demeanor. Viewing the closing scenes, very little has happened, with regard to story.

It is difficult not to be immersed in the world evoked by the film. The film has an enormous pull. With the exception of some minor flaws, this is a fantastic film.