bullhead (2011)

Michaël R. Roskam's Bullhead explores the connection between masculinity and industrial breeding of animals. But even though the film takes a critical perspective on masculinity and the construction of masculinity there are some scenes that I would argue fall into the trap of male self-sentimentality, where being male in the non-conformist way is reduced to a form of tragedy. Despite being an interesting take on gender and animals, the problem with Bullhead is that it scoops to much material into a small film that would have required much more coherence and focus. The story wobbles unsteadily between the story of Jacky, pumped up guy whose innermost desire seems to be being a real man, and the story about the shady business of farming that he is involved in (the animals are pumped up as well, with illegal substances - in many telling scenes we see a resemblance between Jacky's physique and the cattle). It tries too hard to be a crimi-drama, without having the time to fully excavate the criminal underworld that it tells about. The film follows Jacky's attempt to understand his past and deal with his foes, but also on the level of psychological drama, there are some weak points (Jacky himself is a man of few words, mostly we see him making business deals or taking T, admiring his own bull-like body). We never see Jacky in his day-to-day work with the cattle. - - It is a tough film, and the image it conjures up of Belgium is not exactly beaming with a friendly light. Bullshead's Belgium: concrete, ugly roads, seedy clubs, industry, hard people, political hostilities.   

Death of a salesman (1985)

Work can become the biggest illusion of one's life, or it can manifest all kinds of delusional thinking, lies and rotten&impossible projects. Work can take on a life of its own, becoming a lofty dream about what life should be that has nothing to do with living with other people or doing good. This is work as an abstract striving, to be number one.

Death of a salesman (dir. Volker Schlöndorff) creates a vivid image of a man living in his own world, dreaming his lonely dreams about the successful life, being the perfect salesman. In reality, this man, Willy as he is called, is lost, on the verge of alzheimer's, and has lost touch with his family, nursing an antagonistic relation to his son, the one who could have become a brilliant football player. After a bunch of years on the road, his boss can no longer afford to pay him a salary, so he lives on commissions only. He's a shattered man, and were it not for his can-do wife and his kind neighbor, he would have ended up in poverty a long time ago. Dustin Hoffman's performance may be severely theatrical, but it is fascinating to see him veer from anger and humiliation to incoherent nostalgic mumbling. The two sons have come home for a while. One whose career is somewhat pleasing to the father, even though - a bum, quite successful. The other is getting old, 34!, and has not dedicated his life to anything specific. Death of a salesman revolves around the tragedy of appearances. Appearances will always, at some point, wither away to reveal an ugly truth or a scary lacuna. What do these people want? Well, instead of didactically leading his characters to the light, Arthur Miller, who originally wrote the play, show how relationships are sedimented and how change comes to seem more and more impossible as people's perception of themselves get increasingly rigid.
 

Drive (2011)

80's aesthetics, Chromatics, late nite driving, brutal violence. Drive (dir. Nicolas Winding Refn) is a tough film with arthouse sensibilities. The main character - driver, for the movies and for people with shady agendas - remains elusive and taciturn, and throughout the movie, he has this weird look on his face. The driver meets a girl whose husband returns from jail. The ex-con is in trouble and the driver's love for the girl and her kid makes him help the man - and ends up in a mess. The question is whether Drive is a mere stylistic exercise. Well, maybe it is, but it is a good-looking one, with eerie atmosphere and great cinematography. The violence, however, is gratuitous and could have been left out completely. But honestly: as a trashy thriller movie, Drive is far superior to its explosion and action-centered peers. I mean, even as a person rarely bemused by action-flicks, I have to admit that the driving scenes - augmented by slick music - are shamelessly impressive, mostly because they stay quiet, focusing on grim-looking L.A: non-places, parking lots, the urban desert. Drive's slow and icy aesthetics borrows one or two things from Cronenberg's Crash. Sadly, the film loses its grip after about half of its running time, only to continue on the path of ultra-violence and mobster tough-guy dialogue.

Room at the top (1959)

Love or money? We've seen millions of films on these theme, some of which are pretty good, other again floundering in the sentimental and schmaltzy lane. Room at the top (Jack Clayton) belongs in the first category. It offers no tidy solutions. Instead, it offers bad choices, deluded thinking and a bleak view on life. Joe lands a job in a small town where everybody knows each other. It's after the war, and the scars of the war are still visible, also in the geography (Joe's home was bombed and the surrounding area is now in the state of garbage heap). Joe is from the working class, and it is his intention to get the hell outta there. This, he thinks, he will do through winning a young girl's heart - to get into her daddy's purse. He is determined enough, no hesitation there - until it's too late. At the same time, he dates a French girl, a few years older than him, who has a dirty reputation. This is the kind of film in which cruelty is an aspect of almost every relation - from business relations to relations between lovers. The message seems to be: self-deception feeds on itself, creating an even deeper level of self-deception, from which it is hard to get away. It is also a film in which society is seen as strongly divided into classes, even though some people try to conjure up "a different age". Money talks, bullshit walks and the taste of first love is sweet but mostly rotten. Room at the top is an angry film about a world of disenchantment and YOU should watch it.

Autumn leaves (1956)

A lonely woman, a hard-workin' typist, meets a lonely - and younger - man. Despite a few moments of hesitation (is she ready to settle down?) she eventually marries him and everything looks bright. It turns out the man is lying his way through life - he has been married, and his wife, well, she ended up with his father, something that has 'slipped' his mind, only to be revealed, violently. The wife tries to sort things out. She still loves her. The man goes crazy after a big revelation in the dark psychosexual regions. Autumn leaves (dir. Robert Aldrich) is a melodrama and also a film about psychiatry. It is unclear whether the image of medicalized psychology is positive or not; all we see is: it works. Electric shocks make a man sane and even love survives. At the same time, the young man's way of repressing and forgetting the truth is not something that one shakes off easily. Autumn leaves is a raunchier than the most obvious form of love-oozing drama, darker, too. We never quite know how to interpret the ending scene. Are these people deluded? The question this film asks is: what is the difference between love and need? In what way do we need the people we love? In what ways can that need be perverted, or is it perverted already? The woman becomes a mother for the young man, and this is hardly something Aldrich treats as a neutral fact. Somebody called the film an oedipal nightmare and I tend to agree. This is a rough film packaged in Nat King Cole's croon - if one wanted to, one could say that Autumn leaves treats the run-of-the-mill romance in a tone of parania. The two protagonists' fears mingle, and what we end up with is not so glossy as one might first think.

Joan Crawford looks great.

Affliction (1997)

What happens when directors attempt to make a serious film about the evil that Men do? The result is often a sentimental, self-sentimental even, account of the Eternal Nature of Men, men who long for .... but who ... . One could say that Affliction (Paul Schrader again!) shares one or two traits with that genre (the conclusion of the film is very much in line with conventional ideas about the ways in which masculinity is doomed, but trapped in an unchanging loop of violence and cruelty), but not in a way that would overshadow the multiple reasons why this is a good film. Let's start with the style. Set in a wintry landscape, a small town in New Hampshire, the god-forsaken countryside that we know but never get tired of, the film moves patiently into a nightmare that never ends. The camera never loses its patience, the music makes the atmosphere even more harrowing (though it sometimes borders on the overly dramatic). Nick Nolte & James Coburn - diabolic.

Nolte plays the police officer, Wade, whose life turns from bad to worse. He wants custody of his daughter even though he cannot socialize with her without making the situation unbearable. He thinks he digs up some serious Bad Stuff, looking for what he thinks is a murderer. When he goes to visit his parents with his girlfriend, they find that the father has been to drunk even to acknowledge that the mother is dead. Wade sets out to take care of it all: to fix custody of his daughter, to fix a god damn toothache, to get clear about who killed that union man - and to take care of his father. - - OK, in some respects, this is a familiar story: cop loses it, reality -> twisted fantasies. But what could have become a cliche is handled extremely well here, so that even I at least is immersed in this strange landscape that reminds me of both Twin peaks and the equally excellent moral drama A simply plan. We see Nolte's character and we see a man in whom all levees are about to break. He does this kind of thing a million times better than for example Jack Nicholson would do. I wouldn't say he is subtle, but somehow, this explosive energy is real.

The merit of the film is that it goes through with dealing with many themes at the same time. It is the story about a man on the brink of hysteria, but also a town on the brink of destruction. It is a story about trauma but also about the way bad relations are multiplied. As if this were not enough, there is a philosophizing voiceover - an intruder into the quiet pace of the film, a perspective stamped on the images with the air of 'this is the truth'. Voice-overs almost never contribut something important and nor does it here.  

What is captivating here is the way Nolte's Wade drifts further away from reality and is more and more one with his toothache. The world is synonymous with his toothache. The past blurs with the present and the elderly father's grin is just the same as in Wade's memories. Wade might be the most world-weary existence captured on film.

The thing is, that in the end, Affliction exudes sadness, not sentimentality.

25 Watts (2001)

25 Watts (JP Rebella, P Stoll) oscillates between A tu mama bien and a strange Jarmusch movie. At its wost, it conjures up the spirit of Slacker movie, the kind of thing in which young men express their alienation and sex drive. We get to follow three kids in Montevideo during 24 hours of slacktivities. They work, get laid, get drunk, get high - precisely the kind of activities we expect from a movie about teenage boys, which makes the whole affair a bit predictable. The film is shot in black and white and the dialogue is rough and erratic, something that sets it apart from the 1000 other movies on this theme. But the style of dialogue mostly follows the American prototype: talk about Fate, bullshit about girls, cool jokes. What works, most of the time, is the frame composition. A hamster scurries around its little cage while the humans engage in a strange romantic moment (involving dog food). The camera focuses on the small, everyday things and this is what makes this viewer pay attention. Dialogue-driven as this film is, you make expect profound lines about Youth and Life. Well - this is more the kind of movie in which infinitely lazy youths fight about who is to answer to door bell.

It's Winter (2006)

Rafi Pitts' It's Winter, a visually stunning film about the impossibility of returning home, puts you in its landscape so firmly that you practically can breathe the air of the chilly winter on the screen, feeling your lungs hurt and your throat stiffen. Cam you imagine Reed desert in Iran? Well, then you can pretty much envisage what this film is like. Yes, there is alienation and yes there is a correspondence between the internal and the external. Mostly, these metaphorical landscapes do not become too blunt and for that we can give our thanks to the cinematographer, who has a marvellous grasp of colors and texture. A grim-looking landscape of industry and infrastructure turns into a journey of the soul. In this film, we have to guess at much of what is going on. The story and the characters remain quite mysterious. A man leaves his daughter and wife to go abroad. Another man heads out into the big city, looking for a job. He meets a friend and lands a job, but a miserable job without pay doesn't make anyone thrive. He meets a woman and they get married. It turns out that ----. Well, I won't spoil it. The film problematizes what it is to find a home within an impossible, barren world. Even though I was moved by many things in this film, I kept worrying about the gender perspective, especially since the female main character remains a mystery - or let's be fair; a bigger mystery than the male characters. This is the kind of film in which women are passive victims, and the men's activity are ruined by bad fate. But this of course also means that the film takes a critical perspective on power and powerlessness. The dream of a man 'looking for something better', is brutally crushed. Independence and manly freedom - these are dangerous ideals that make people miserable. Here, everyone is powerless, mute, almost lifeless. The little life we see is the friendship/love between two men. But also here, the wintry landscape seems to eat up the space for human relations. It's winter is a miserable, yet extremely beautiful, film.

House by the River (1950)

House by the River may not belong to Fritz Lang's best work, but the ghoulish and secretive sets and the lighting alone make the film, a non-suspense thriller, worth watching. The sets consist of a gruesome-looking river (in which all kinds of gory stuff float by) and a spooky, windling house. It is as if also every tree and rock are immersed in the human tragedy; everything is sinister-looking. This is a film in which the crime is known to the viewer. We know whodunnit and why. So how on earth does the plot move onwards? Well - the story is this: a swinish man spies on the maid of the house, who is walking down the stairs. The man appears from the shadows, attempting to seduce the woman. She screams - he strangles. The man makes his kind but timid brother an accomplice in the crime by talking him - half forcing him to - dump her body into the river. Soon enough, the crime is revealed, the question is just on whom the blame will be placed. The moral question is whether the brother will rat or whether he will keep his mouth shut. Will the brother reveal himself, or will he go further into darkness? As a tale about moral responsibility - well, I wasn't completely convinced but it is of course interesting to think about what the brother becomes when meekly helping the killer. The funniest part of the film is the choice to make the killer an author - an author with writer's block; an author in desperate need of a good story with which a book can be sold. So - one can perhaps interpret the film as poking fun at the degradation of art into sensationalism amd publicity-hunting. 

Bringing up baby (1938)

I found myself laughing out loud at Bringing up baby (dir. Howard Hawks), a screwball comedy of the hysterical sort, in which people are talking at the same time and everything is a mess. Looking at the story, I am a bit worried: what did I find so funny in this rather sexist movie about how love, in the end, is somehow imbued with repulsion and incomprehensible attraction? And believe me, the image of love presented here is truly wacky, but strangely familiar: the attraction between the two sexes can never be spelled out - it goes beyond social relations and psychological compatibility. Or maybe this is a wrong-headed interpretation? The story begins with a not so happy couple involved in scientific toil, overshadowing their romantic life. The girl wants to dedicate her life to science, not to family life. The man, a humble and disoriented paleontologist (Cary Grant in spectacles, I guess that was supposed to be funny), is on a mission to secure a missing dinosaur bone and a donation - but then this extremely annoying, airheaded girl comes in his way, and in her company is ... a leopard! The girl turns his life into a misery but we know how it will end. - - - The humor in this sizzling film, except for the kind of gags we all know if we have seen a couple of silly comedies in our life, and which are, to be honest, nothing to write home about, is built around Audrey Hepburn's outrageous character - she is excess, she is will power, she is a force of nature. I wonder what Zizek would say about her and this unstoppable film about, you know, desire as a lacuna in the midst of symbolic representations. Or something to that effect. If your nerves handle this movie, you are up for anything.

All about Eve (1950)

Conservative political times - radical films. All about Eve  (Mankiewicz) bustles with dark secrets and surprises - not much physical action takes place, but it is evident that this film beats any modern thriller in terms of suspense. And this is not even a thriller! Eve is a fan who would do anything to meet her favorite actor, whose play she sees every night. The actor's friend takes a liking to the girl and invites her to see Margo, the star. Eve appears to be a modest and decent girl with a tragic history and even the great Margo's heart throbs for the poor girl, who becomes her servant. But Eve has some plans of her own... All about Eve registers the scheming and gossip of the theatre world, and it picks out the most cynical character to narrate the story: the poisonous words of theater critic Addison throw us into this rotten congregation of friends and foes. Bette Davis is brilliant as Margo, the star, the pro, the diva - unruly and foul-mouthed. Everything, down to the smallest gesture is Grand. A cloud of smoke surrounds her and nobody bitches the way she does: '....I hate men.' It's hard to know whether one should love or hate Margo, whose position is threatened by the mousy, innocent-looking girl. And Margo knows how to strike back. The character of Eve might not be believable all the way, but it is interesting to see her face change as she transforms into (is revealed as) a ... sociopath. -- What I love about All about Eve is that it is a women's film in the best sense of the word. Women are the main characters; interesting, complex, tough. The guys remain in the background, props for the real drama acted out among these brutal ladies. Where women are mostly reduced to objects of desire on the big screen, in this movie the two leading ladies rebel against the notions of what a good woman should be. And when it comes to romance this is a rare film as it is so utterly uninterested in sex - sex is portrayed as a boring means to an end kind of thing. Another reason to adore this movie is the snappy dialogue that slashes first and thinks afterward; rarely have I seen such a funny account of the pungent relations of the theater elite. Sometimes films about actors become much to navel-gazing and meta, but this film doesn't, I think, have that problem because it is EXTREMELY navel-gazing! Even though one might complain that it is messy and that it centers too much around being clever, this film is dazzling enough to keep this viewer fascinated. 

My beast friend (2006)

An antiques dealer makes a bet with his colleague that he has a friend. This is something the colleage has every reason to doubt, as the man is a craggy personality, a social catastrophy, who doesn't seem to care about other people. But of course he does, at heart. He meets the cabdriver Bruno on whose services he relies - but friendship is no service. My beast friend may be a pretty predictable feel-good film about the value of friendship but at least Daniel Auteuil makes a decent performance as Francois, a man who is completely blind in relation to himself. The problem with this kind of movie is that it sugarcoats something that is a real tragedy in human life: loneliness and the attempt to get away from it. One can also say that it is a laudable thing that a film delves into the theme of friendship: what is it to 'get' friends? What does one mean when one says that one has lots of friends? The film doesn't really dig deep, instead opting for the usual complication-solution route. The moral of the film is a heartwarming message: you cannot acquisit friends like you buy a vase. If one chose to interpret the film charitably, one could say it is about the eternal philosophical question on whether virtue can be taught or whether virtuous behavior is some different kind of quality. Bruno, the cab driver, tries to teach Francois some important lessons about life, what it means to attend to another human being. Can anybody teach somebody that? (It seems this kind of language would fit the film.)