L'Argent (1983)

L' Argent is considered to be Bresson's last great movie. And yes, it is very much a Bresson movie: it has Bresson's economical, even serene, approach to film, acting without emotional expression and it contains themes that are familiar to people having watched his earlier movies (including letters). The story of L'Argent (based on a short story by Tolstoy) seems to have a sort of inevitability to it - it is a story about evil surfacing through a series of coincidences which have a disastrous effect. The film begins with two boys trying to buy a frame with a forged note (one of them acts from the need to pay back some money he owes to a friend), and then the note is knowingly passed on to other hands, among them a fuel trucker, who ends up in court, where he is not believed, loses his job, turns into an acomplice in a robbery, ends up in jail - where he learns that his wife leaves him. From there, things get no better. He is released from prison and then goes on what can be called a killing spree. Being asked to justify one of the murders, he calmly states: I enjoyed it.

No character in the film is seen mulling over alternative paths of action. People act with a sort of disastrous immediacy (made all the more striking in the hands of Bresson's dispassionate actors) - if you are familiar with Pickpocket, you know what this sort of destructive choreography might look like from Bresson's point of view. Bresson shows how different actions have an effect on each other, creating a situation in which goodness does not appear as a possibility - there is deceit, lies and violence. It is tempting to describe the story of L'Argent as an innocent man who, through unfortunate external circumstances and no ill will of his own, becomes another man. Somehow, this seems wrong-headed. Maybe it is the circumstances that makes me think about this (watching Bresson on Good Friday): L'Argent seems to be about original sin and evil as lack - a downward spiral changed only by a sudden change of direction, a sort of radical grace

I must admit that my feelings about this films were a bit mixed. Altough I do admire Bresson's approach to film-making, along with his harshness with regard to ideas, I did at times find myself at a loss of what to make of L'Argent, a film where Bresson very ingenuosly tells a story that only partially happens in the frames. What kind of inevitability does the film depict? Or should it be called inevitability, from what perspective? I do not crave more input about the inner workings of the main character, the fuel trucker. That would make for a completely different, and non-Bressonian, film. It's just that the chain of events move so quickly that I sometimes lose track of what is going on, and this risks making me care less - one gruesome thing happens, and then another, just as inexplicable. Watching the first part of the movie, I started to think that this would be a film about the power of money, but after a while, that stopped making sense as a more overarching theme. But heeellooo, the film is, as a matter of fact, called "Money". At leat this is another take on the destructive impact of money than I've seen before, even though it is of course possible to make connections to a film like Greed - but there seems to be a distinction in terms of fundamental ideas about what an obsession about money does, what kind of havoc it wreaks, and what kind of world it corrupts (or were we already corrupted? When is money a motivation, when is it a symbol for something else for Bresson?).

The theme may be tough to the extent that I have a hard time not attempting to domesticize or putting a false meaning into this chain of events which do not seem to reveal an inner meaning? So maybe the problem is not the film, but the problem is in me, in my limited capacity to understanding Bresson's perspective (and also this time, I have the feeling I'm getting it wrong by talking about 'capacities'!)

If I would think some more about this film, I would perhaps try to elucidate why the story seems to fall neither within the category of causes (it is what it is, it drives) or reasons (trying to make sense of why somebody did what he did) - Bresson seems to evoke an altogether different point of view, and it is this I have trouble grasping. Which leads me to an important question: what does it mean to say that one does not grasp a religious perspective? It is not as if there is something very specific my thoughts are unable to reach, as in the case where I have trouble understanding how the machine of a car works or why Molly chose to invest her money in this type of stock rather than that one. What I want to say is that I feel like I can't decide whether I should say L'Argent is a flawed film, or whether I should say it is a film which I do not understand. Or to state my worry in a blunt way: couldn't the kind of unintelligibility and distance that L'Argent presents to us (forces on us?), where we are not allowed to make judgments, or try out intepretations, evoke a hazardous perspective: YOU SIMPLY CANNOT UNDERSTAND! But that is not really what I would like to say either (as if the contrast we have is: we make judgments or things are unintelligible - hm). L'Argent made me think about some questions in the philosophy of religion I haven't been thinking about in a long time, questions that I have no clear answer to, but questions which are pressing nonetheless.

(Religious themes in films, books etc. are often treated as dangerous because they risk making a work of art didactic or that its openness is closed down. Bresson's film, and this one in particular, is a counter-example; one could talk about openness, but not in the sense that everything is possible, that the work of art exists in an autonomous sphere in which our super-free interpretations keep swirling around in a state of easy co-existence.)

This is a film I should watch again, as I realize that I missed many details when I watched it the first time.

Bashu, the little stranger (1990)

Bashu, the Little Stranger (Bahram Beizai) turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The story follows a young boy from the south of Iran. He is orphaned in the Iran-Iraq war and flees to the north. He ends up in a small village. Perching in a wide field, he first encounters Nai and her two kids. They are first suspicous (among other things, they have no common language), and he is afraid. Gradually, however, he becomes a part of their family. The villige treats the boy with hostility - the film depicts a cruel form of racism. I liked several things about this film. Stylistically, it was a wonderful film comprising long, languid takes of nature and ordinary chores (the scene on the bazaar was extremely well crafted, very simple but very striking). The film's treatment of the relation between the boy and Nai appealed to me in particular. The boy becomes a part of her life, and she cannot help taking care of him, of taking responsibility, of seeing him as somebody to help and shelter. Trust is often seen as a process where people prove themselves dependable (trust as reliance). In this film, it is perhaps tempting to say that trust is earned, but that would be misleading. Nai grows to trust the boy, and the boy grows to trust Nai, and this is an interdependent form of trust which is not at all about proving oneself worthy. Here, we rather see how the villagers or Nai's absent husband presents a temptation: the boy is a burden, is there any reason that he should be there at all? Does Nai really have any obligation to look after him? We see how this temptation is dangerous, but also how it loses its power and how that perspective slips away.

Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

Wes Anderson makes good-looking and quirky movies about, well, people who do not walk along the common route of life, or people on a quest for oddballsy reconciliation. Even though I like his style, I appreciate his sense of humor, I like his visual world, and perhaps even more importantly, his cheerful-melancholy take on outsiders with a Mission, I can't really say that any of his movies have really resonated deeply with me, or what it would mean to say that his movies could do that. But they are inventive, touching films nonetheless. Moonrise Kingdom looks good, it sounds good (Hank Williams - all the time!) and this sad story about coming-of-age is as off-beat and subdued as ever. But somehow, when I was watching the film I came to feel that the whole thing is so self-aware, so concerned with how it appears that nothing much is left. It's a sweet story about two kids (who are labeled as problem children) running away from the strange society in which they live, and away from aloof and sad adults, hoping for a life in the woods. Or at least, they hope for a summer away from the normal routines and restrictions. They bring camping gear, a few books, records and a cat. But in the middle of the film the ideas seem to have run out, and the rest of the material, to me, is too detached - the whole thing stops being a magical adventure and actually becomes a tad bit boring as I get lost within quasi-action scenes. Moonrise kingdom is something of a one trick pony, however with a truly marvellous use of artifice. But yeah, it's not a bad film, and there are some scenes which got through to me with a strange and tender interpretation of how humans interact with each other. I called it self-conscious, but then again, I never felt that it is contrived or false. Plus, the wonderful ranger telling us about the history and geography of the islands on which the story is set. And - do I need to point it out? - Bill Murray is Bill Murray.

Nobody Knows (2004)

A bunch of kids are left at home while their mother goes off to work. She is gone for several weeks, and then she comes back for a few days, indulging the kids with presents and funny games (or coming home drunk, encouraging her sleepy kids to eat sushi in the middle of the night). After that, she doesn't come home at all. The kids don't go to school. They are told not to leave the apartment, but of course, it's impossible to live that way, so soon enough, they venture out on adventures of their own. The arc of the film is that of tragedy,  but the film rarely leaves the kids' own world - the story is told from their point of view, immersed in their world, in their understanding, or lack of understanding.

Hirokazu Kore-eda is a director with a voice and an eye of his own. I've written about several of his films here, and they all have made an impression on me, and from them I've learnt much about the possibilities of film-making. An important aspect of Kore-eda's films is their attentiveness to how we experience the world with all of our senses - his movies evoke smells, touch and sounds. The stories he tells are situated in a Japan that is not romanticized. Street junctions and non-places are usually given a prominent role - it is often in this kind of mileu that the characthers' lives play out. This is the case here as well. The cramped, solitary, increasingly messy apartment is contrasted with the bustling world outside: streets, a grocery shop (where a kind clerk gives them something to eat now and then) and a park with real flowers and soil.

Nobody knows does not seek out the sensational. The tragedy of the story never flies in your face - what we see is rather hints of despair, loneliness and disorientation. The abandoned kids are not presented as mere victims. Instead, Kore-eda conjures up their desperate attempts to fend for themselves, to make do, to survive. Gradually, they become aware of their gruesome situation - but to an equal extent, this is a narrative about phantasy, about dreams and ways to escape. What is most striking is left for the viewer to ponder on her own: why did things turn out this way? Why did nobody intervene, why did no grown-ups acknowledge the severity and impossibility of the situation? This may be a political film about lack of responsibility, but Kore-eda chooses subdued images rather than a shrieking appeal to THIS IS A TRUE STORY!!! In this way, moralism is dodged and the film is all the more troubling as a result. Even though the camera sticks close to the kids, their small adventures or their idle moments, Kore-eda's approach is not suffocating or intrusive (he is not Ken Clark). The main character, Akira, the kid who, in being a few years older than the others, has to take care of and protect his siblings, is a character who remains quite mysterious. We see his sadness, his worries and his caring manouvres, but the director stays at a distance from him. This is not to say that the film creates no understanding of the kids. What I mean is rather that Kore-eda is not interested in an all-encompassing psychological perspective. This makes his film-making unique: he treats kids as human beings, not as stereotypes equipped with one-dimensional characteristics or a bundle of cute quirks.

Amour (2012)

Some directors have a fabulous insight into film as a form of art where every new topic requires a re-thinking of what it means to craft moving images. Haneke is one of these directors. I would grant him this, even though some of his films choose a remarkably skewed angle of what it is to be human. In Amour, however, Haneke has left some of his cynical attitude behind. The title contains no irony. This is actually a film about love. And what a film! I remember a Finnish-Swedish reviewer writing that most films revolve around themes that do not really concern us that much: space trips, and what not. Amour is about something we all experience, something that we all have to deal with, something that we all have to think about: death.

It's not a flawless film, but Haneke's study of a married couple who grapple with sickness is powerful and moving. He shows their tender interaction, their day-to-day life where the husband tends to the wife, whose illness quickly gets worse, and how he interacts with their slightly alienated daughter (icy performance by a great Isabelle Huppert). Hanake confines the story to their serene, but clearly lived-in apartment (everyday objects are often focused on: a chair, a piece of clothing, a cup). The world outside is reduced to sounds, a hallway (in which an imporant and uncanny dream sequence takes place) and two birds. And, importantly, in one of the very first scenes, we see the couple arriving home after a night out. They notice that somebody has tried to force open the lock of the door. The story is pretty clear from the get-go. The progression is clear. After her first stroke (the second one is not shown) the wife is operated, and is half-paralyzed. The man bathes, feeds, talks to his wife. A nurse comes to look after the woman, but the man accuses her for mistreatment. The man does what he can as his wife gradually slips away from him, but sometimes we see signs of life as they are able to sing together, or repeat words - here, Haneke makes clear how small things matter, how life is also the ability to drink a cup of water, or respond to touch, or the traquilizing effect of words. The film follows the dread the man goes through as he decides what must be done. This is shown without sentimentality. It is hard to watch - the nakedness of the scenes, the intimacy, is something I rarely see, and this makes Amour different from a run-of-the-mill sickness drama. Intimacy, here, shifts from being distressing to being beautiful, and here Haneke, as he always does, confronts me with the important question of what it means to see, to look, or to look away, or to suspect that one sees too much, or that one shouldn't look, that this is something between two people and not for others to see (what does it mean to watch the decline of a human being.

Here I also disagree with one disgruntled reviewer: the film is not, as I see it, a story about how love is tested. No - there is no question here whether the man loves his wife. In the film, it is evident that these people have lived an entire life together, and that it is impossible to undertand what we see in the film without acknowledging this temporal dimension, which we do not see directly. What we do so however is that the husband sometimes fall from love, that he grows to be more and more unhinged, how he shows remorse, and sadness, but this is all one aspect of love. This was, in my opinion, the strength of the film - it is a work of art that actually believes in love. At the same time, it does not make the two main characters perfect, or particularly likeable. They are sometimes cruel, or self-indulgent. In this way, the film conjures up an absolute perspective without being black-and-white. Also - I wouldn't say that the film is mainly a way to desperately elicit a particular emotional response from the viewer. I never felt the way von Trier's Dancer in the dark made me feel, that emotions are isolated from any context, so that I respond in a way that I have a hard time relating to, or articulating - in other words, in the one case, I felt manipulated, and in the other case, I didn't, even though I did respond strongly to it, and found it hard to watch at times.

There are some scenes I wasn't sure what to make of, the scene involving the pigeon towards the very end being one of them. Here, Haneke leaves things open in a way that has an impact on the entire interpretation of the film, and this is, I would argue, an example of weak judgment on his part. The scene is very Haneke, and it shows an aspect of Haneke's art I have problems with: whereas a sense of openness in how we can understand something works to a great effect in other places of the film, here it feels that the openness is more teasing, or provocative, than thoughtful. Here I had a feeling that my imagination is tested in a way I would not like it to be tested or, let's put it like this, Haneke introduces hints of possibilities I would not like to go to far into, but it is hard not to.

But, all in all, a great film, impressive acting and meticulous and elegant cinematography (how sterile, or unsettling, white light floods the apartment - sunlight is rarely seen.).

Naked (1993)

Mike Leigh is one of the directors I've been following through the years with keen interest. Generally, his films have had both the force to move me and to tell me something important. Naked, however, is not his strongest production. Throughout the film, I had the feeling that the bleakness of the story does not add up to anything - as a viewer, my eyes are rubbed into a cynical world with just a hint of resolution, but what resolution, at what price? The main character, a truly unsympathetic man, rapes his girlfriend and travels down to London, where he goes to see his ex, who lives with other people in a house. He's not the perfect guest. Stuff happens. He ends up on the street. He talkes to security guard. He delivers 'deep' prattle about meaninglessness, the universe and that kind of stuff. He is mysteriously taken in by every woman he sees. EVERY woman in the film falls for this asshole. I am puzzled: what does Leight want to say about these women who are treated badly, but who falls for the guy nonetheless? And what would resolution be in this case? We see no hint of change, really. Things are what they are, but people realize that they have to live with each other. Perhaps. To state my worries openly: is this yet another film in which an entire society - in this case post-thatcherian UK - is embodied by an angry young man, whose anger is made intelligible because it symbolizes a fucked-up class society? Why do so many directors, especially those with a sympathetic leftist background, fall prey to this very stereotypical image of masculine anger as justified and always something that should be understood within a larger perspective - whereas women remain figures that are mere victims or mere punch-bags? (One reviewer puts it this way, and I find it symptomatic: "Johnny's unkempt irascibility seems to have been selected by nature as an expedient defense mechanism." M-hm-m. Nature, right? (I had to look up the meaning of 'irascible'.) The reviewer goes on to write: "And the remainder of the characters are essentially well-wrought foils that tease out Johnny's dizzying mercurialness." Though I agree with this, I would argue this to be the film's major flaw: we are locked into Johnny's universe, and this makes it hard to catch sight of who he really is. To articulate my problem in yet another way: Johnny becomes a hero, an intellectual truth-teller who walks through hell, is hell, and the film tells us: there is no comfort, this is what life is! It's what we have become! But once again: what kind of universe is Leigh building, what does he want us to see, to feel, to think? // That said, the brooking, dark images, grim gray-blue light, of an almost post-apocalyptic London are not easily forgotten. Here, Leigh works brilliantly as he plods through hell and misery - or takes a moment to let Johnny converse with a very, very angry and confused Scot.

The Awful Truth (1937)

The re-marriage comedies from the 30's tend to be a thousand times more enjoyable than a run-of-the-mill romantic comedy made in 2013. The Awful Truth (dir. Leo McCarey) is an example: it's witty, it's sharp, gender roles are not black-and-white. The film starts with a couple who decides to get a divorce. So they meet new people, etc., etc., and they gradually find out that they still like each other, there is some confusion etc., etc., but things will of course be all right. I don't mean to say that this film is spectacular, but it is a rather nice depiction of how a couple learn something about themselves through learning about a mistake they are about to make. The director's approach to self-deception is delightfully earnest, and doesn't feel preachy (or I didn't think so). The excellent pacing, spontaneous feel of the acting and general good mood of the film made me forgive standard fare characters (cabaret artists, tycoons) and a rather predictable framing of the story. And well, what can one say: there's something about dogs and screwball comedies.

There Will Be Blood (2007)

I watched There will be Blood when it came out and I was enthralled by its general vibe. I mean: I really liked it and thinking back on the movie, I remembered certain things about it: the scenes portraying oil drilling mostly, the music, the cinematography. The second time around, I wasn't as convinced that this is a good movie at all - as a matter of fact, I felt a bit embarrassed that I was tricked, fooled by Paul Thomas Anderson's grasp of style. I was struck by how unclear the film is, how it is hard to pin down what it tries to say. We have this elusive main character, Plainview the oil man and his maybe-son. What drives them? How is his cruelty to be understood? I was confused, rather than overwhelmed.

Watching it for the first time, I thought this is one of the best images of the Entrepreneur ever produced: that, ultimately, it is impossible to say anything about the idolized entrepreneur other than that he is Driven by some strange force, that he embodies Will power and that he will never ever give up, no matter what obstacle he comes across. When the entrepreneur is elevated, it is ruthlessness and violence that is elevated - it doesn't mater what the aim is, what the goal is - the entrepreneur never stops working and when he does, there is nothing in his work that fills him with joy (when work is over, life is over, but work itself is nothing but an obsession). The only thing that the entrepreneur ends up with is a sense of loneliness and isolation: this is the world he has built for himself, a world 'of his own hands', but this is just a form of self-deception about having created something. I still think there is something to Paul Thomas Anderson's approach here, that we know so little about what motivates Plainview - we just see him work, bargain, force his way ahead - is a merit, rather than a weakness. Or, at least, half of me thinks like this and that therefore the end of the film, where we see Plainview's success as misery, is intelligible. Plainview's demonic strivings is a good representation to keep in mind when one reads the business pages of a newspaper and comes across 257356889 attempts to defend the charity-loving, prudent entrepreneur who from early childhood on knew that he would become something important. In this film, the entrepreneurial ideal is madness.

OK - so Plainview is and remains a cipher. But Paul Thomas Anderson does not manage to create a Lawrence of Arabia. Plainview's elusiveness never haunts me, it just mystifies.

One interesting disagreement about this film that was evident when I discussed it with friends concerns how the progression of the story is be understood. Should one say that the film evokes 'good capitalism', which would be the work of ones own hands, the self-made man's gruelling toil, and then 'bad capitalism' no longer connected with work in a fundamental sense. For my own part, I think the tendency from the get-go is that even hard labor has something sinister to it (one of the brilliant moves of the film is the first 15 minutes - no dialogue at all). In one of the very first few scenes, Plainview gets hurt. A few moments afterwards, he is holding a glimmering stone and something about the scenes makes me think about Greed. We see Plainview go from silver mining to the oil business. He works hard, and the kid that he raises as his son accompanies him everywhere he goes, as a 'business partner'. They travel around, making villagers sell land leases to them, taking advantage of their ignorance. Derricks are set up, the oil wells pour out the the good stuff and business begins to pay off. Accidents happen, but work is unceasing: Plainview sits in a shed, watching the men work while drinking whisky.

In a way, Anderson's depiction of capitalism is fairly typical: the tone of the film is that of elation and violence. Capitalism is presented as an unstoppable force were human beings have a minor role, their own shady psychology rendered a question of minor importance. I mean, this type of description is very common: capitalism is presented as a mix of enthusiasm and destruction (cf Marshall Berman and others). The problem with this image is that it makes too much of the idea that capitalism is a form of force of nature - its aspect of unceasing activity is here muddled so that one starts to think about many things at the same time: modernization, labor processes, that capitalism has no other end than making profits, that capitalism turns everything into instruments etc etc. From this it is too tempting to evoke the superforce that one does not quite know how to approach: shouldn't one also say that ruthlessness and capitalistic enthusiasm is admirable because how it has the power to change the world? Isn't that exhilarating? I mean, this as a temptation, and my suggestion is that There will be Blood is not so far from this sort of ambiguous image of unstoppable capitalism. One could say that the problem is that the film contains a form of pessimism in which capitalism and figures like Plainview are seen as figures that mould history, the outcome being necessarily tragic (so the argument turns into this: capitalism and evangelic Christianity shape American history and the result is a big, fat fraud - hm, that is ---- really deep.).

Then there are plenty of stuff that just don't work very well. The second time I watched the film, I was embarrassed about the plot about the 'religious' guy, and the points the film made about his similarity with Plainview. (In one of the worst scenes of the film, Eli the preacher makes Plainview 'confess his sins' - the scene says nothing it all, it just evokes, something something.) They are both relentless men, but we understand no more about their connection that they are both men of strong wills, men who are prepared to use power and humiliation, men who will not be stopped. But in this, they both become caricatures. What confrontations like these leave me with is no more than a contrived and overwrought bit of cinema, too conscious of itself and less conscious of where it is going.

Colossal Youth (2006)

You hear about a director and feel a strong urge to watch one of their movie. At the same time: reading about a film beforehand is something I try to avoid; I like a film to overwhelm me (or underwhelm me) without being disturbed by thoughts about how the film has been received and understood among critics. Colossal Youth is a film like that - I am happy that I did not read many words about it, and that while watching it, I had no ready interpretation or description to fall back on, no "this is that kind of movie"-type of judgement. I am also happy about the fact that I had people to discuss the film with afterwards: to watch movies is just as much digesting what one has just seen.

I must confess that Colossal Youth is unlike anything I've seen before. But this is interesting: it is a film that reveals quite little about the characters. We get no tidy image of who these people are. The places we see are presented in very specific frames, rather than through grand and conspicuous panoramas. Even the temporal order of events is quite hazy. And having said this, I'd still want to say that Colossal Youth striked me as a very personal film. The film remains mysterious and the people remain quite enigmatic throughout, but I feel engaged by what Costa presents to me, he encourages to stay in my seat, keep calm, and really, really, look and listen. It's a film that requires patience but I never felt that Costa is the kind of director chosing the snail's pace just for the sake of style. I have a hard time imagining colossal youth could have been made in any other way. The static long takes of the film do not aesthetize - we see what we see, and everything is important (just look at the sparse use of color!). (Sounds are equally important: even though we never see anybody working, we hear work, we hear activity, but what we see is people talking, idling away time, longing for another life).

Colossal Youth comprises a series of encounters. A man, Ventura, goes to meet people, some of which he calls his children. It remains unclear whether they are his children. They talk to him. They watch telly. They eat. They smoke. They drink beer. They sit in parks. They tell stories about life. Ventura tries to make his friend write a letter to his wife, a love poem, a wish for a better life. We learn that many of these people are immigrants from Cap Verde. They live in bad housing. Some houses are about to be torn down, or have been demolished. Ventura goes to look at an apartment where all his children could live. These scenes have an almost dream-like character: the sterile whiteness of the uninhabited spaces, the many rooms and the placid real estate agent. It is things like this that matter: where you live, how you live, how you survive. And scenes like these ones also remind us of Costa's singular technique that has very little to do with social realism in the traditional sense.

Costa does not trade in cheap contrasts between the society of the middle class and the society of the outsiders, of the invisible. We see the reality of these people, and that's enough. Their sense of isolation does not need to be emphasized through images of people who live in lavish luxury. The question the film poses is harder than that, we really have to think and judge: in what ways are these people disconnected, how did it happen, how is this state sustained? Costa's use of space to make us understand the character's world is economical, but it works: we look at how people move, how they sit, slope, and we notice the surroundings in a way that is never relegated to a mere backdrop. This is just as much a film about place and space as it is a film the entire cinematography of which is an exploration of space. The film makes us attend to glaringly white walls, derelic staircases, a naked table, the numb light from a lamp, the strange atmosphere of a museum, the vivid colors of nature, even urban nature. But most of all - these locations are not mere geographical points, they are attached emotionally, as spaces of desolation, eviction and suspension, spaces where nothing happens, or when a memory starts to unfold, or space as a space for dreaming, hoping - but also where hope is muted into something else.

Zabriskie point (1970)

Antonioni is generally a director that I like. One might say that he trades in the europa-chic - that he makes alienation look quite appealing in films such as The Night, The Eclipse and Avventura. Not to mention Blow-Up. Red desert is a very typical film about the world falling apart in hollow human beings and dead surroundings, but it seemed like a less fashion-sensitive film than the others. I expected Zabriskie Point to be a similiarly alienation-chic movie as most of the other Antonioni movies. And it was, but in an even worse way, and in a way that really is a grotesquely familiar image of the disgruntled European director going to the US and A to make a cynical movie. Here we have American kids in the late sixties, enamored with counterculture politics and alternative lifestyles in a country of advertisement, business and repulsive urban architecture. From the get-go, we know that this is Hell. We are thrown into a student organization meeting. The sound is jarring. People are shouting slogans, others are smoking, or looking bored, or doing something else - just a bunch of diverse people ending up in the same 'movement'. It's hard to hear what they say, and it's easy to guess that it doesn't really matter anyways. There is a riot of some sort, and we see a man who seems to shoot a cop, but it isn't really him. He steals an airplane and in the desert he meets a girl with a buick and they fall in love (add quotatin marks) and they hang out in the desert and then the guy paints the airplane in bright colors and the girl goes to her business meeting but she's not interested in that so she leaves the building and then she stands outside, imagining that the building explodes. THE END. Some of my friends interpreted the film as providing an image of back-to-nature-bliss, exodus from civilization, the Nomadic transformatory non-people turning into animals. Well, I can see the sense in that, but for my own part I saw the film as an attempt to depict a deadlock. There is nowhere to go. The city is hell. It's hell up in the air. And the desert is boring (this is sex as immense joyless tedium) and business is hell. Everything is hollow and desolate, shallow and narcissistic. People talk and look like robots. There were things I liked about Zabriskie point, aspects that were not too self-occupied and self-important. Antonioni has always had a brilliant way of treating architecture and design as an important dimension of the characters' life. As one reviewer put it: Antonioni transforms his own time into sci-fi. And that always works. This also goes for Zabriskie point which renders American urban streets, cluttered with ugly buildings and signs, more hellish than I've seen anywhere else. I find Antonioni's message quite sympathetic: the rebel is just the shadow form of the commercial idiot, but that message is drummed into my mind in a too cynical way, leaving me with no greater understanding of anything, just a vague feeling: this whole lot sucks, it really does. - - - Ending verdict: good visuals, depressing story - good use of sounds & music at times.

The Tiger's Tail (2006)

I am quite surprised that I watched The Tiger's Tail (dir. J Boorman) to the end. It's not a very good movie, the acting was embarrassing at times, and the plot was contrived to say the least. A businessman in Dublin is stalked by his twin brother who just looks like him and snatches his successful life from him. Existential drama? No. Comedy? No. Crime story? Not really. Satire about the rich and wealthy whose inner demons turn into real doppelgänger, the underclass coming to haunt the capitalist? Well, maybe, but well, that would be quite a far-fetched reading of the film even though this is a film trying to explain how success is not really the road to happiness (the businessman's son reads Marx and his wife is bored with him and his business goes to hell anyways). - -- - Even some attempts at Irish accents fail.

On the Beach (1959)

Inadvertently, Stanley Kramer's On the Beach is marred with the same type of problems that most apocalyptic movies are plagued by: they tend to be characterized by the specific fears of the time that a viewer who watches the movie when some years have passed by will look at it with a bemused grin: oh yeah, how paranoid people were! The problem is, then, that this type of movie does not conjure up a specific fear in a way that is intelligible if you are not immersed in a specific historical situation. I've seen worse examples than On the Beach, but I must admit that there were moments when I adopted a sociological perspective (how did people think about a looming catastrophy during the first years of the cold war?), unable to watch the movie from a more open-minded point of view. But then again, the film has some merits in its attempts to show people trying to grasp what it means to live in a world about to end. It's the grief-stricken moments that I remember best, even though there were some unnecessarily sentimental scenes. Quite beautifully, the film showed people holding on to each other, grieving the lack of a common future: the film presents life as shared, rather than individual, which is quite interesting when considering how human existence is presented in other movies about the apocalypse (an exception: Last Night). This is not a film about life as mere life. The story of On the Beach is simple and grim: radioactive dust is about to put an end to life on earth. The war is over, and people live in the one place (Australia) not yet affected by this world-wide catastrophy. But everyone knows it's only a matter of time, and the story of the film is not at all an Independence Day-type of film in which heroic squadrons are Saving the Planet. This is a film where we know that there is no hope, and the story tells us about the differences in reactions to this fact. The thing that made me hesitant about the entire project was how it oscillated between a story that we were encouraged to read concretely, as a story about the apocalypse, and a level of the story in which we were to adopt a more metaphorical perspective, in which the film revolved around life being what it is: finite, fragile, but beautiful nonetheless. - - - - My major worry: do we really need the apocalypse to understand that we do not live forever and that human possibilities are not to be wasted? One may of course suggest that this reaction appears to me due to a lack of understanding or sensibility for the kind of fear that the atomic bomb actually gave rise to. Problem #2: the music. Hearing "Waltzing Mathilda" in a thousand different variations drove me almost to the brink of madness.