The Master (2012)

Regarding Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will be Blood as one of my favorite films, I was eager to watch The Master. I tried not to read about the film beforehand, which was good (it kept me from thinking about scientologists all the time). It's a peculiar film, I must say, uneven, but interesting - difficult not because of how the film is structured, or because of the events it portrays, but difficult, I thought, because it is quite challenging to discern what themes propel the story. But, in the end, it's a good film, though it might not hold up against There Will be Blood.

Post-war USA. The war has ended. Freddie (brilliant Joaquin Phoenix), a GI serving in the army, makes booze out of torpedos, coconut water and other tasty fluids. We know almost nothing about what happened to him during the war, except that there is something haunting him, maybe. Anderson dodges the story about war trauma we've seen in many films. The trauma, whatever it is, is in Freddie's entire body language, his face, his smile, his eyes, but it remains entirely engimatic. He is a drifter, 'booze'-maker, trouble-maker. He lands a job, loses it, lands a new one, gets into trouble. Then he ends up on a boat, gets drunk, and gets to meet the strange 'captain'. The captain, the master, likes Freddie's booze-blends and invites him to be a part of his 'experiments'. It turns out that this man is a leader of a sect selling a hodgepodge of spiritual and biological 'philosophies'. Freddie submits to the master, following the group, believing, not quite believing, rebelling sometimes, submitting again. The master and Freddie - Paul Thomas Anderson brilliantly evokes a form of erotic, violent and repressive closeness.

So what is this film about? Quasi-spirituality? A society gone made, keeping up an appearance of sanity? Traumas? Collective traumas? Submission? All of this, I think, and perhaps most of all we see a story about losing oneself, losing oneself in appearances, rituals, grand-sounding ideas and collective cheering -- the void. Anderson opts for a solution much more complicated than the conventional narrative about how a movements starts off, how it wins some followers and then, its bitter downfall. This is a knotty story that is as much about the relationship between the two men as it is about the movement. Some reviewers complain about lack of character development. For my own part, that was what I found brave about The Master - it doesn't try to fool us into rosy tales about moral growth; instead, the film trudges on in its uncompromising exploration of what it means to be truly lost. 

(One stylistic aspect of The Master I particularly enjoyed was the way it went from one frame to the next in ways that sometimes were very drastic: you were taken to an altogether new place and time, without further explanation of the new situation.)

All over me (1997)

I think of Hal Hartley a few times while watching All over me (dir. Alex Sichel) even though the everyday never becomes as outlandish as it does in a Hartley movie. But yeah, the lines are understated, and the film keeps a languid pace (which I like). The soundtrack hints at what kind of movie this is: Babes in toyland, Sleater-Kinney and Ani DiFranco. Good music. In one of the best scenes, Patti Smith's Pissing in the River has a prominent role. As a film about young adults and their angst this is a quite decent film, a decent film about repressed desire and homophobia as well. And Hell's kitchen looked gritty, I liked how the locations became a very important part of the film's very core. The downside of the film is the story about a crime and how the characters all had to deal with it in their own way (one of the main character's boyfriend was involved). To me, this twist of the story felt quit unnecessary.

The Poll Diaries (2010)

WWI is about to break out. Oda is a youngster goes to live with her father in Estonia. The father is a doctor who conducts suspicous  experiments (Oda's sweet gift to daddy: a two-headed foetus). The doctor represents the class of upper-class Germans living in Estonia, which was still a part of the Russian empire. We also sense a political movement growing stronger, pushing for independence. Oda wants to be a writer (but she also has scientific skills) and she feels alienated from the family's shielded-off life with many secrets boiling under the surface. In a barn, she encounters an anarchist hiding from the authorities. She decides not to tell anyone about him being there, instead set on helping him.

The problem with The Poll Diaries (dir. Chris Krause) is that it tries to be too many things at the same time in a way that we've seen - and suffered - so many times before. The director tries to manufacture a historical drama, but being very eager not to forget about the Human Part. So here we are, with a big story about a nation and change - and also a story about an adolescent living in a country she does not know, trying to find herself through helping an outsider. It gets too emotional, too tense, too elegiac. Too much everything. Still: a few good scenes, decent cinematography and yes, this film actually made me interested in learning more about the history of Estonia.

Venus (2005)

Some films are creepy and beautiful and funny. Venus (dir. Roger Michell) is an example. Peter O'toole is the actor who can't get women out of his mind. His craving for women is obsessive and self-indulgent: he'd do anything for a moment of attention by a good-looking female. His gay actor friend has sent for a relative to take care of some chores in the household. He imagines that the young lady will prepare grand food for him and discuss Edith Wharton when she is not making him dinner. When she arrives, this fancy evaporates. She is more interested in eating crisps and going out for parties. Peter O'Toole's womanizer of course makes advances, and she goes along with it, as a sort of play-act, a game in which they both win.

This film could be truly horrible. All characters are self-obsessed but at the same time, they are interpreted with a sort of tenderness that focuses on the way life bends in unexpected directions. What I liked about the film was perhaps that it examines old age with little sentimentality, but it is not cynical either. It shows how people change all the time, also after they turn 70, but that no person will change from an asshole into an angel, that self-indulgence does not go away magically only to be exchanged for a clear vision of life.

Peter O'Toole is marvellous and so are the other actors, especially Leslie Phillips who plays O'Tool's pal. In one touching scene, we see the two men dancing togehter in, I think, a quite desolate-looking church. Even though both men are rather unsympathetic, we immediately understand that their friendship and love is deep. One aspect of Venus that caught my attention was how embodied these elderly men were, and how rare it is in films that men have a multi-dimensional bodily presence (action heroes with their bulging muscles - no). The weakest part of the film is how the girl is presented. We learn that she relates to Maurice in a way that oscillates between pity, manipulation and tenderness. But still, she is trapped in the way Maurice sees her and she doesn't really get an independent position - she remains the woman who struggles against the man, sometime humoring him, sometimes playing with him. At the same time that gender kept being blurry here (the film does not go along with the image that womanizers 'love women - a lot') there was still something fishy here.

Bicycle Thieves (1948)

I re-watched Bicycle Thieves (dir. de Sica) and the second time around it was even better than the first time. A gritty social realist movie about a society driven by dog-eat-dog. Post-war Rome. A man looks for a job, but the job he finds requires that he has a bike. A bike is expensive, but he acquires one and starts to work. His bike is stolen after a little while, and together with his young son, he tries to catch the thief. No luck. The man's miserable state worsens as he tries to steal a bike himself, and has to deal with being pointed out as a thief. The man's odyssey takes him to a crowded marked, a church and a restaurant. de Sica focuses as much on the life of the streets as the story, which makes this film a thrillingly bustling affair. In one of the best scenes, the father decides that they should sit down in a restaurant and celebrate for a bit. In the table next to them, a rich bunch of people gobbles food and the small kid longingly gazes at their abundance of tasty food. Bicycles thieves is a restrained film. There is little sentimentality or attempts at humor. The dramatic events are not dramatic in the ordinary sense, where we are eager to see whether the looming catastrophy will actualize. In this film, there are plenty of situations that have a particular open-endedness to them, the kind of open-endedness that characterize human encounters. We never quite know what will happen next; it's not the kind of film that builds on straight narrative moves. Bicycle Thieves is about humiliation, but also about defiance and single-mindedness, perhaps. The man won't give up: he runs through the street, and it is hard not to care about his quest, or about the boy who witnesses his father's humiliation, and how is dragged along in the city on this impossible mission. - - - Lots of times, I thought about how this film is such a great inspiration for other good directors, the Dardenne brothers in particular, just think about Rosetta's anxious battle against unemployment and how the Dardenne brothers conjure up her stubborn defiance. Both films never adopt the quasi-neutral, almost disdainful gaze some forms of documentary-like cinema is plagued by: every second of both films is characterized by moral engagements. Moral engagement never preaches, it shows, evokes, brings forth.

Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle (1987)

One thing I particularly like about the Rohmer films I've seen so far - Four Adventures of Reinette and Mirabelle included - is their understated, casual and, especially, light tone. Clearly, Rohmer is a philosophical director interested in topics like fate, coincidence, truth and many other things. But he is also a director with a rare attention towards the everyday, the everyday sense of talking, moving and encountering. In his films, things happen, but I rarely feel that I am lured into conventional Movie Enchantment. His films don't work like that, they don't revel in lush storytelling in which one gets the sense of stepping into a world of movie magic. And I like the fact that Rohmer is different in this sense, that his films are often so humble in tone. OK, the present film is no masterpiece, but it wasn't bad either. Mirabelle rides the bike in the countrysides but suddenly the bike breaks down with a flat tyre. A country girl, Reinette, passes by and helps her with the bike (the scenes about fixing the bike could be included in a Dardenne bros movie any day) and they quickly become friends. Mirabelle stays over and Reinette tells her about the blue hour, which is in reality a minute - if it is real - of silence during dawn. A minute of complete silence. The girls set the alarm clock and go out to experience this moment, but they don't, and Reinette is very disappointed. --- Somehow, I liked how this situation with the blue hour was depicted. I don't know what it was about, if it was about anything, but I liked how it all played out, how serenity suddenly turned into disappointment, how their pespectives changed, nature being what it always was. The best moments are during the beginning of the film. Reinette takes Mirabelle for a walk in the village. They talk to the neighbors, inquiring them about what they do and then it starts to rain. A magical, slice-of-life scene that doesn't try to much. ---  The end of the film? I wasn't so thrilled about it. The jokes appeared crude and their quirkiness didn't appeal to me at all.

Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)

It's strange when a film strikes you as very un-American and at the same time very American. Beasts of the Southern Wild (dir. Benh Zeitlin), a dreamy, imaginative film about people living on the edge of society, is precisely like that. It conjures up familiar themes that thousands of Hollywood movies have explored: where is the place that you call home and how can you return there? But another dimension of the film does not fit niecely with this feel-good message about community - Beasts of the Southern Wild tells a story that has nothing to do with the American dream; the people in the film does not want to live in normal, urban society. They live beyond the levies of New Orleans, a place that the authorities find unfit for inhabitants, as it is easily flooded. But the characters in the film - all of them poor people - do not want to leave. They fish, they take care of their animals, they socialize, they party, they go to school, they live. When they are forced to, because of a big storm, they are herded into an institutionalized world in which they are mere numbers, 'cases', to be governed. This might make it sound like a very political film and in some sense, it is. But it is also a film about a child and her relationship to her father. Its a rare portrait, tender, with very few gender stereotypes.

Is poverty romanticized? Somehow, I did not think it did, even though there are a few familiar characterizations - but what is not that common, is the film's depiction of poor people living in a surrounding that is not urban. How often do we see that in mainstream films? (but yes, it does tap into the tradition of portraying outsiders as more in tune with their world than the rest of society.) This is not a film attempting to present a realistic portrait of a class of poor people. It's not the socio-economic analysis that stood out for me (even though the way the society inside the levies was portrayed in a way Foucault would have liked): the film is an evocative, dreamy excavation of a child's perspective, a child's imagination and fears. I liked almost all of the more surreal scenes, the one involving strange animals, both dangerous and comforting, and the scene in the dream-like boat where people danced to a very haunting piece of music. In these scenes, the dreamy blended in with a sense of reality in a very nice way. Some have complained that Zeitlin has drawn too much on Terrence Malick, but for my own part, I would say that this was a better film than Malick's recent Tree of Life. Nature also has a central place in Beasts of the Southern Wild, but I actually think that Zeitlin renders nature with far more dimension than Malick does. In this film, nature is a source of wonder and beauty, but the beauty of the film is the beauty of mud and grass and the perspective changes abruptly from beauty to danger.

There were some flaws however. I felt that the film did fall apart to some extent towards the end, as the focus was on the Return. Here, simply too many familiar elements were used, too much bombastic music tried to make me Feel, and I sometimes started to feel what I sometimes feel when I watch American indie movies: overwhelmed, but I also feel a bit tricked. Sometimes, things simply get to cute - but this does not take away the fact that Beasts of the Southern Wild is a fierce film which mostly is not at all manipulative or cheesy.