Tous les Matins du Monde (1991)

I am glad that obscure French movies are still broadcast on Finnish telly. Tous les Matins du Monde (dir. A Corneau) is an enchanting film - visually at least. It tells the story of a viola da gamba player during late 17th century. He is a stubborn man who won't be convinced to go play for the king. He lives with his two daughters. At night, his wife's ghost visit him. One day, a young man turns up by the hut in which he plays his music. The boy wants him to be his teacher. The man, of course, turns the boy down, he tolerates no changes or compromises in his life. More things happen. At the center of the film: music. Is this yet another film that elevates the artist's creativity? Yes and no. This is as much a film about the younger man as the older man. The younger man ages, gets disillusioned. Yes - the film trades in a familiar trope: the purity (even ascetism?) of art. But to its defense one can say that Tous les Matins du Monde is a strikingly beautiful film, and that some of the tragic scenes are quite well worked out. (In some cases, I felt that the film overdid its style, by trying to emulate baroque paintings too obviously.) If this is considered a puffed up costume drama, I must admit I like it. Plus: I like music from the baroque period. The film's portrayal of women? There are a few very problematic scenes in there: the sorrowful girl; the man of the world. A quiet little film.

Friday Night (2002)

You may scoff at the idea of a Claire Denis' film about a one night stand. Friday Night is that film, and it is a bloody good one. Mind you, this is not chatty psychology or teary-eyed romance - this is not Before the sunset. Denis works with a minimal plot and a restless camera that will never even for a second lull us into the mechanics of conventional sex fantasies. Laure is about to move to her lover. She intends to have dinner at a friend's house, but because of a strike, the traffic jam is endless. Paris is at a stanstill. Authorities encourage drivers to pick up hitch hikers. The first half of the film is dominated by this traffic situation. The roars of engines, bokeh light effects, arguments and fights, Laure's fiddling with the radio. In the second part of the film, Laure has offered a man, Jean, a ride, and already from very early on, there is a tension there. There is some confusion but they end up in a hotel. You can guess the rest. But this is far from a pornographic account of a sexual encounter. Denis' opts for the enigmatic, blurry, fragmentary. It is a film where details stand out: a leg, a fork, a weird fantasy scene, a dreamy light. Denis masterfully builds up the film so that it is never uninteresting or unintelligible. This is remarkable because we know next to nothing about the two characters - and they barely speak - and there is barely any music in the film (and no explicit scenes)! -- Agnès Godard, cinematographer, turns this film into something utterly unique; every angle, panning movement and frame bears a heavy set of signification. -- This is a film to be watched several times. American reviewers were dissapointed in the uncharismatic actors who never managed to 'set the screen ablaze'. I wonder what kind of movie they expected to watch.
To the credit of this film, one can say that it plays very little by the rules of binary gender roles and stereotypes. Friday night opts for something else, it makes bodies look new, unexplored. This is precisely what all film should do, but very rarely does. Dickon Hinchcliffe's (Tindersticks) sparse score works magic.
So far, every movie I have seen by Claire Denis has blown me away. She knows how to make movies that are very independent in relation to the written story. She works with images.

Tuya's Marriage (2006)

Tuya's Marriage (dir. Wang Quan'an) is a visually striking film set in the mongolian countryside. Don't be fooled to think that the film is an expression of totalitarian pomp because it is a Chinese production. Tuya's husband is injured. Tuya is a shephered and right from the start, we are given the impression that she is tough. After hurting her back in an accident, Tuya makes a decision: she has to find a new husband who can take care of her, the other husband and their children. The rest of the film depict Tuya's suitors - there are plenty of them. Don't expect a romantic comedy. Be prepared for an ethnographic exploration of a milieu - hard labor, the steppe, gender roles, quietly absurd scenes. The virtue of Tuya's marriage is that it makes no attempt to make the mongolian countryside look exotic. A few times, I thought that the film could just as well have taken place on my parents' island. The film's beauty is not of the grandiose kind. The film, instead, captures the beauty of everyday life, without sentimentalizing the barren steppe. I was also happy to see that Tuya's loyalty to her husband is not depicted as the loyalty of a Woman; she is just a human being who won't let her friend wither away in some anonymous place. Tuya is not reduced into the gloriously laborious Strong Woman. She might be brave, but she is also angry, sad, bitter. 

Tree of Life (2011)

Terrence Malick is famous for his visually lavish style and his struggle to give the relationship between nature and humans a cinematic form. In Tree of life, he develops these characteristics in an extreme way, focusing on some sort of tension (I can't even spell out the nature of this tension, sorry). The film tells the story about the creation of Earth while at the same time being a family melodrama. How does he go through with that? This viewer is not convinced he manages to tie the threads together. I was left with the feeling that the director has a pretty specific idea he wants us to take home with us, be impressed with, shaken by. Even though it was fairly easy to guess what kinds of ideas he was occupied with (g/o/od & evil), the film did not succeed in making these ideas real. For me, Tree of life felt overblown and pretentious rather than ambitious. The cosmic perspective did not shed much light on the family story, despite the cinematographic attempt to make the cosmic Rivers and Movements part of the everyday life of a suburban family. In this way, the film was a failure. I kept thinking of what made Melancholia a much better film. I do understand that Malick's film is supposed to be a celebration of the beauty and the mystery of life, rubbing elbows with the tragedies that life contains. But the cosmic framework did not make me feel particularly celebratory. Instead, I thought about National geographic and ruminated on another eternal question: 'so what IS kitsch?' (answer: the ending sequence of Tree of life). I felt like a bad person as I was feeling my legs break into a restless dance towards the celestial, exalted end: my restless legs told me that the director tried to rub Religion into my face and that this stubborn heathen's heart remained unmoved.

Malick sets out to explore Eternity, Life, Meaning, Death, Love (etc.). In my opinion, his images often took shelter in the sentimental or the consolatory (esp. the last scene). His film did not work on the level of awe-inspiring Perspective, envisioning the genesis of the Earth and life on earth. in contrast with, for example, a film such as 2001: A Space Odyssey. Cheap metaphors very used - or maybe it was the treatment that made them feel cheap (a flickering flame, planting a tree).  The whispered voice-over drove me nuts. Listening to the characters' breathy philosophizing, I couldn't think about the religious dimension for a second, I simply remained irritated throughout the film. The questions asked by the film are legitimate: what the hell are we? What are we doing? What is the meaning of all this? The film, I felt, didn't care for the particularity of this type of question (even though one thread of the film was the parents who grieve the loss of a child), instead settling for the Grand Perspective in which humanity, along with all other forms of life, is rolled into one big glowing ball - earth.

The temporally more restricted scenes had a more direct and - for this viewer - honest feel (but sometimes the director dwells too much on things he knows will have a resonance with the viewer). Kids at play, church services, an unsettling experience, a father who teaches discipline. Interestingly, there is very little dialogue beyond the voice-over. This is a brave move. There is also very little to go by in terms of ordinary storytelling. The scenes are not temporally or dramatically ordered. It is emotion that ties them together - this,  I think, works rather well. The relation between a father, a mother and their sons. The father undergoes a gruesome form of change. The mother remains an elusive, feminine character. She is passive and ethereal and does not quite belong to reality (what to make of this? I am afraid that Malick is quite fond of showing off ethereal females from the point of view of a man's memory - cf. Thin red line). The kids react to their father's rash temper in several different ways. Here, Malick manages to focus on details. In a magnificent scene, the father sits down to eat with his family. Everything gets on his nerves. One of the kids speaks back to the father who tells the kids to be quiet but blabbers on himself (the kid whispers 'be quiet'). Daddy goes ballistic. A number of emotions are crystallized into this one scene: it is as if the scene stands for itself, rather than being a mere instance of Cosmic Drama.

I also liked the scene in which Sean Penn's character, an architect (the older version of a restless, unhappy kid), wanders through empty urban locations with hollow eyes. These scenes are haunting - endless space and shapes suddenly become very evocative, strange, dazzling - scary; everything that the cosmic scenes did not manage to conjure up.

The film's major flaw was, in my view, precisely what it is usually given praise for: the visuals. Grand landscapes, wide screens, huge perspectives --- drifting sunshine over suburban lawns, close-ups, extra-ordinary panning. For me, it was too much of everything, too spectacular - and in a sad way - impersonal and hollow (except in some view in the middle (the attic!) and the shots of the city).

In a Lonely Place (1950)

It is unclear whether In a lonely place (dir. Nicholas Ray) can be called film noir. It's not important anyway. A cynical script writer, Dixon Steele - Humphrey Bogart - is accused of having murdered a girl he invited into his apartment to read a script. His neighbor helps him out & falls for him - only to gradually start to doubt who he really is. The film has some similarities with Sunset blvrd, especially given how open-ended both films are in their treatment of characters who deceive themselves and others. Even though there is clearly a mystery to be solved here (who killed the girl) the film is not really about that at all. Steele is known to have treated women badly. In a very tense scene, we see him and the neighbor in a car. Steele speeds and bumps into another car - and beats up the guy who drives it. Everything is about to explode. This is what the film is like almost all the time, on the verge of explosion. Steele's innocence/guilt is a riddle for us to take issue with. We see him through the neighbor's eyes, and we hear accounts of him given by those involved in the investigation of the murder. What baffles this viewer is how neutrally the emotionless and even callous Steele is treated. No scene, not even the violent ones, make statements or try to elicit a reaction. The only thing one sees looming at the horizon is - doom.

The film presents a typical image of masculinity. The male star remains an enigma. Even when he explodes, we never see him. We start to suspect that there is nothing to see. We get the impression of an 'honest' man who flatters nobody, who is not afraid of scenes at the dinner party. A guy who is ruthless and doesn't care - and this is precisely what seems to make him attractive to the lady. Steele broods in the dark and he insults people in broad daylight - does the film make him into 'an existential hero'?

Anyway - this is a good film.

Little Red Flowers (2006)

Little Red Flowers (dir. Zhang Yuan) is, I suppose, a critique of totalitarianism and especially a totalitarian form of discipline. A parent takes his son to a kindergarten. It's the kind of kindergarten where the kids stay for a long time, not meeting their parents very often. The film is set, it appears, in the 1960's. The film doesn't tackle the subject of ideology directly. Instead, we see a small boy who is doing everything wrong: he is crying, he cannot dress himself, he pees in the bed, he won't submit to the kindergarten teachers. The children are awarded with small flowers if they are "good". This kid is not, and he is often punished. The film ends with a sense of disillusion: the whole society is like the kindergarten. Even though this is not a perfect film in any way, it was interesting to see the ways in which children conform or don't conform with the attempts to make them compliant and dilligent citizens. It was also interesting to see how every function of life was made a part of routinization: pooping, eating, sleeping, dressing, answering. (Of course, this is a dimension of every child's life almost - but this was a radical example.) -- Not sure how Chinese censors reacted to this film; was it ever distributed in China?

Sunset blvd. (1950)

Watching Sunset blvd (dir. Billy Wilder), I couldn't stop thinking about Fassbinder's Veronica Voss. In my mind, the two films were almost completely inseparable. In reality, of course, this is not the case, even though both films feature a scary ageing film diva living in seclusion. In the present film, we are introduced to Norma, a silent film star who is now living in a weird-looking mansion with her stiff butler (but of course there is a s-s-s-ecret...) Max. It so happens that a b-movie writer turns up at her doorstep. The star needs somebody to keep up the illusions. The poor writer is happy to indulge in luxury (and thereby he upholds an illusion of his own). It also turns out that the butler (played by silent film director Erich von Stroheim - brilliantly!) is not who he appears to be, and there we have a third example of self deception. In a typical noir fashion, Sunset blvd has a cynical and hard-boiled voice, but it also has a sad heart that makes the film ambiguous. We have the usual fatalistic drill, but also something that points in another direction, so that we ask ourselves how people become like this, how deep illusions can go.

Every now and then, I tried to imagine what a film about a male Norma would look like. The focus of the film may not be Norma's wrinkles, but her being stuck in a world that no longer exists. We are led to believe that no beauty tranformation in the world can make her eligible for a contemporary place in the sun. She has lost it. Gender issues are of course still present, especially in the way the relationship between the actress and the writer is developed: for him, dependency is humiliating; he is sometimes presented as a male prostitute, contented with being precisely that, enjoying the easy life. But the emphasis is rarely placed on gender here, even though we have the typical "femme fatale" who puts a man under her spell. Illusion and disillision - the main themes of the film (I don't know what to say about possible meta-filmic ideas in Sunset blvd.).

Vampyr (1932)

Carl Th. Dreyer's films are always interesting (sometimes brilliant) and this is the case also with regard to Vampyr. Although formally a sound film, it has the aesthetics of a silent movie. Lines are rare, and they are never really important for the plot (if you want to learn basic German skills from this film, you can pick up useful phrases such as "ich bin verdammt!"). I was extremely tired while watching the film. My mind drifted in and out, as I awoke & fell asleep to the churning rhythm of the film. Vampyr is clearly not Dreyer's best film. It is, however, pretty entertaining to watch an early vampire film with plenty of doom & gloom. The film boasts some unnerving visual effects, including the gaze of a corpse and a strange facial transformation (signalling: this is the Cursed). In a lengthy scene, the camera creates a very claustrophobic image of a mill's machinery. We don't really get to know much about the nature of vampires, except that they are somehow connected with a larger web of evil forces (or at least there are hints of this). -- The plot of Vampyr is pretty ramshackle; nothing much to write home about. The visuals and the dreamy (or nightmarish) atmosphere, however, make the film worth watching. Shadows and weird lighting prove to be far more evocative than gorey monsters.

This must be the place (2011)

Sorrentino again! In This Must be the Place, Sean Penn plays an ageing rock musician (who talks with a lisp, and wears granny glasses), Cheyenne, who initially seems to sleepwalk through his Dubliner life. I couldn't stop thinking of him as a kind of Robert Smith-copy; a person a bit out of step with the present. In the film, Cheyenne undergoes some form of inner change, but it is up to the viewer to decide what change this really is. It is interesting that even though Sorrentino paints with broad streaks (big hallucinatory moment, deadpan jokes, breathtaking locations) he hardly ever drums a specific idea into the viewer's mind. To me, this is a virtue, even though some segments of the film become too disparate and open-ended. The part that deals with Cheyenne's attempt to find the Nazi who tormented his father did not work very well, in my opinion.

What we have here is the familiar story about an alienated rock star, but this picture is drawn into its most surreal corner and the film never dwells on celebrity. In the beginning of the film, he lives in a mansion, spending his days on frozen pizza dinners or contemplating whether he should sell his tesco shares. He hangs out with a teenage fan and also her mother (or that's who I think this woman is). His relationship with his wife is uncomplicated. The death of his father brings him to the US, and the film takes a different turn. Some reviewers have mentioned about Wim Wenders, and yes, as Cheyenne travels to America Wenders' colorful landscapes clearly haunt the film. There is even a blunt reference to Wenders through the appearance of Harry Dean Stanton (yeah!) as a man obsessed with his invention of a suitcase with wheels. But what the film - thankfully - lacks is Wenders' sentimentality. In one of the film's stand-out scenes, Cheyenne has ended up in the home of a young widowed woman and her child. The child puts a guitar on Cheyenne's lap and tells him about this Arcade fire song. No, it's Talking heads, Cheyenne insists. The man plays a quiet guitar melody and the boy sings. It was a heart-warming, gentle moment which had nothing to do with calculation (I think). Byrne himself appears in the film - in a most wonderful way.  

Both here and in Il divo, Sorrentino never lets go of the human as embodied. He has a better sense of small bodily quirks than almost any other contemporary director. I think this is what makes his characters interesting - that they are full-blown beings (their history and so on seem to have only a secondary interest for Sorrentino, and maybe this is why the Nazi hunt part of the film is a bit out of place). For this reason, the contrast between Cheyenne, who is presented as a stranger to/in the world, and his wife Jane, is quite stunning to watch.

This Must be the Place is the kind of film that I wanted to watch again as the end credits were rolling. It's a beautiul film with plenty of funny details.

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (2011)

I am a viewer who is rarely troubled by a film's story being confusing. If I don't understand the windings of a plot, I easily settle with the thought that the idea is not to "understand" in the sense of getting a perspicuous representation of what is going on. This may of course make me patient with the seemingly random turns of some narartives, but other times, I am unnecessarily lazy. I don't know what to think about the myriad events that make up the mysterious Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I can't say I was engaged by it on the level of "solving a puzzle" - even though the film clearly required an attentive viewer with an interest in comprehending the story - but for me, it was not the "complicatedness" that made this an outstanding film. However, I do think that this is a film that benefits from a second viewing. Alfredsson and his crew groove on details, and it takes time to pay attention to all of that. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is NOT James Bond (confession: I haven't seen any James Bond film whatsoever.) It's a slow-paced, detailed drama about human relations and institutions during the heat of the cold war.

I was worried I would be bored by this drab, European spy movie (based on a novel by le Carré), only to be surprised how intrigued I was by this cold and clinical film. Tomas Alfredsson directed the film and he made a glorious job creating the anonymous settings of the film. The whole thing is brilliantly enigmatic, from the characters, to the locations and the cinematography (sometimes a grainy quality of the images conjures up the sense of absolute clandestince presence). It may be mad to say this, but Tinker... was a pleasure to watch.

The story revolves around the betrayals stemming from an event in which an English spy in Hungary tries to track down a mole. In the sinewy narrative unraveling, we are introduced to a group of English Intelligence service officers (and ex-spies) who all look on each other with a suspicous eye. The tension of the film: spies spying on spies and the notion of "being on our side" becomes very unclear. Through flash-backs and one of the main character's investigation work, the mystery of the mole is gradually resolved. The world Alfredsson creates is one of paranoia, betrayed love and super-secret dealings.  

I am convinced that the film would have been a completely conventional affair, had Alfredsson opted for a more straightforward presentation of the story, or had he chosen to make a "thriller" instead of the present low-key drama. The merits of Tinker..., tackling a difficult theme in a completely innovative way, could be compared to Sorrentino's Il divo, even though Alfredsson's movie is far less lavish. In both films, the director makes the character a part of the locations, and the locations express the characters. This is a useful dialectic form.

The actors are mostly great (with some embarrassing exceptions). Gary Oldman is GREAT.

L'avventura (1961)

L'avventura is so Antonioni. This is a positive and a negative thing. I found myself irritated about watching yet another film about alienated rich people babbling emptily and ambiguously about life and Nothingness. On the other hand, L'avventura is a well-crafted, at times haunting film with very good scenes. The story is simple. A group of young-ish people go on a merry cruise. They quibble about stuff and something seems weird early on (for example, a girl, Anna, lies about seeing sharks, making everybody afraid). They make a halt on an island. When they are about to leave, they notice that Anna is nowhere to be found. As they go looking for her, the camera indulges in the craggy, desolated landscape of the island. They don't find the girl, and have to leave the island. Sandro, Anna's playboy-ish boyfriend, hooks up with Claudia, who was also on the trip. They continue looking for their friend, but at the same time, they initiate a love affair. The film follows their erratic scout-abouts in small towns and luxurious hotels. They have arguments, meet other people and we are hardly given the impression that they are a happy couple. Anna drifts in and out of their consciousness.

Let's start with the things I didn't like about L'avventura. It's a film with many weak or unfocused scenes. This could indeed be a good aspect, and sometimes it works: the story just trods on, not being too preoccupied with "making sense". But there were moments where I simply lost contact with and interest in the film: the images just drifted past me. Another problem is how Antonioni conjures up a sense of existential emptiness, sometimes overdoing his case by layers of non-significance: soulless dialogue is combined with images of people who seems to be shells of real human beings. At some point I started to think: what contrast could there be in this film to anomie and misery? I sometimes felt drained in Antonioni's world of cynics and rich people, looking at gorgeous girls and sleek men. At its worst, both the characters and the film itself remains flat and very, very pretentious. But in some scenes, I am moved and intrigued by the sense of dread that is Antonioni's expertise. Interestingly, I thought that the conventional first segments of the film was the least interesting. As the film started to fall apart, I was more and more impressed by Antonioni's attentive eye for surroundings and space.

In one scene, Sandro and Claudio stand beside the strings of a church bell. They ring the bells and the camera pans on the strings and out on the eerie landscape. It's a typically beautiful scene. There are two twin scenes of women chased and ogled by hords of men. These scenes, too, are unnerving and very to the point (here Antonioni's fancy for good-looking girls are place in a self-critical light, almost).

L'avventura is not a mystery film. Anna's disappearance is not a mystery, but rather a riddle, or a symptom. We never know what happened to her. But thinking about it, one comes to take different stances toward the events of the film. This was a very successful move by Antonioni.