Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)

Distant Voices, Still Lives (dir. Terence Davies) is a musical, of sorts - a very peculiar one - that takes place in Liverpool during the forties and the fifties and it is also one of the most moving films I've seen in a while. Before you click yourself away from here (a musical!), let me tell you this is not the run-of-the-mill chirpy romance in which music provides a sense of comfort and escapism. Distant Voices, Still Lives has collected the saddest music in the world - this is music of nostalgia and commemoration. Or no, this is a film in which even the most cheerful little melody is transformed into a hymn about memories and losses.

When you think about family tale you think about epic narratives with many characters and where one generation's fate is contrasted with another generation's. Davies' approach is different. He skips the grand scope and opts for something altogether more impressionistic and fractured. The material of the movie is taken from the director's own life. In the first section, the theme is fear. There is the fear that a violent partiarch evokes and there is the war-time fear. The second part mostly takes place in pubs. Family members gather and sing, thinking about their pasts, but also doubting their future lives.

Colors are mostly toned down to hushed sepias, and I must say this does not strike me as a cheap effect. The fluid camera-work is structured around space so that time also is fluid, we see a hallway, the camera moves, and suddenly we are thrown ten years ahead. Films about memories abound. Actually showing how we remember things - in the sense where memory sometimes blurs with imagination - is a much rarer achievement, and Davies' film operates so well because it is not pretentious; instead of being engrossed in knotty mental paradoxes and warps, the film reminds us of how memories are also emotions.

The film centers on activities that are rarely expressive in the normal sense (where a character's typical behavior is revealed or established in a couple of quick scenes). Instead, Davies lets us see the daily activities of the family members. A woman washes a window, a group gathers on a porch and a small celebration takes place in a pub. There are weddings and funerals, life goes on. But Davies also shows how the ordinary is broken up and torn apart: like few other movies, Distant Voices, Still Lives conjures up a sense of terror and violence that have a horrendous explosive force. (Some of the scenes have a nightmarish quality and in some of them, inexplicable uncanniness is intermingled with something perfectly ordinary - look at that scene with "uncle Ted"!)

Every frame of this film felt real - I mean, it's quite surprising that it does, given how fond the director is of family portrait-styled images. Not in the sense of factual correspondence, but in the sense that this is a work of engagement; the characters are not treated with contempt or with a shallow need of generalization.The film shows lives coming together and drifting apart, and through all this, there is the music, the singing - I've never experienced singing that is at the same time so mundane and so heartbreaking. There is no hint of contrived cynicism in how the music shapes the film. Distant Voices, Still Lives contains an affection for life itself that never falters.

I'vegotonewordtosaytoyou, or three: WATCH THIS MOVIE!!!

Few of Us (1996)

Let's be honest. This film tried my patience.
That's a psychological remark, and it says nothing about whether Few of Us (dir. Sharunas Bartas) was a good film.
What happens when you take away almost every element of what is usually considered a fiction movie? In the best case, you are immersed and you develop a new form of attention. In the worst case, the film gets so static that it stops to mean anything. In the case of Few of Us, I'm not quite sure what category it falls into. I can't say that I was overwhelmed by it, nor can I say that the film was pretentious and dull.
If you like film by Bela Tarr, this might be your cup of tea.
Bartas works with grand landscapes, but these landscapes are never beautiful in a traditional national geographics-sense. The film takes place, I think, in Siberia. What little there is of human interaction, it is left mysterious. A young woman arrives in a helicopter. She arrives in a small village in the woods. It is not clear what the purpose of her visit is. We see her sitting in a room, smoking, with an elderly man. We also see her at a party. There is music. And then there's a fight, a knife, and violence. The woman leaves. She has a lover, it turns out.
The film contains almost no linguistic exchange. We see glances, faces, how people feel the presence of one another in a room.
Then there are images of nature where human beings and animals are almost swallowed up by the incomprehensibly vast landscape. The camera is static, and often it requires some attention to perceive any movement at all in the frames. You don't quite get the feeling of Herzogian themes (nature is unruly and grim) but nature seems completely autonomous from humans. Humans are small, nature is majestic. The composition of the frames, movement and non-movement, never compels the viewer to indulge in nature. There is nothing to indulge in. The only way I can depict the approach of Bartas is to say that the camera lingers so that we notice every aspect of the terrain, the lighting, the shapes, the tiny, tiny hints of movement.
The people the young woman meet are poor. Several times, I worried that Bartas exoticizes them, turning them into mute, harried creatures whom it is impossible to understand. One example where I got this feeling is in the mid part of the film, where we see an extreme close-up of the elderly man's face. The eyes blink. But we see no expressions. I don't sense any Levinasian gesture in that picture. The only thing I see is the man's face transforming into a landscape, just as incomprehensibly vast as the Siberian woods and mountains. But what kind of perspective is this, what kind of approach, what kind of attitude?
Few of Us may be taciturn (except for the sound of hooting birds, splashing water and galloping horses, even a few moments of non-diegetic music - sound is used impressively!) but my problem with it was that it never lets me in - I have no issue with the pace or the static camera, but what kind of world does Bartas want to invite us into? Even depicting the atmosphere of the film is difficult.
So called "contemplative movies" have been accused of exemplifying a general flight from the political - the world is stripped down, cleansed of the kind of tensions that everyday life is filled with. Generally, I find this charge quite ridiculous, but in the case of Few of Us, this argument actually started spinning in my mind. So far, non-conclusively.
I visited Jakobstad a few years ago. There, of all places, I bought a copy of Corridor, another film by Bartas. I haven't watched it yet, but now I feel quite up to it.

The Sundowners (1960)

Fred Zinnermann's The Sundowners is the perfect Sunday afternoon movie: a cozy film opting for character development rather than a winding story. However, you have to stomach a bunch of Americans emulating Australian dialects - this is a Hollywood production set in the vast lands of Australia. The film explores the clash between nomadic forms of life and the urge to settle down. This clash takes place within a family. Paddy is a sheep drover and his wife Ida would like nothing more than to buy a farm and lead a quiet life there. The son is on Ida's side. Paddy tries to take on the role of authoritative Patriarch, but all along, we know that his heart his not in it. Paddy takes a job as a sheep-shearer and in lengthy, fine-looking scenes the film explores the details of everyday life. When they have earned a little money, Paddy spends it on booze and gambling. The son starts to race a horse so that they earn enough to buy the farm. The merit of the film is that it never leaves this sense of the ordinary but at the same time it shows a type of dramatic conflict that is never really articulated. I am never completely sure what Paddy's nomadic desire is all about and the film captures well the kind of stunted conversations family members often have where serious matters are dealt-with with off-hand gestures so as to reduce the tense, but the tense is still there, it just moves to another level. It focuses on the tensions of family life without leaning on the big Revelation or the big Fight. Instead, it shows a sort of quiet affection between the characters in a way I think is quite unusual in this type of Hollywood setting.

Well, I don't know - I really liked this movie. It's beautifully filmed and it doesn't try to be more than it is: a story about what one considers important. What is more, Robert Mitchum is great as the unruly wanderer. His acting rarely falls into stereotypes. His character all along has a sort of tenderness that he also tries to repress, trying to convince himself that he is the ragged wanderer. In other movies, much of the material of The Sundowners would turn into schmaltz. But here, even the sheep-shearing contest turns into an existential journey with Mitchum sweating like a pig.

But OK OK maybe I was seduced by the film in problematic ways. I does romanticize Australian outback life a great deal (even though it also shows its hardships). But I couldn't resist the drastic shifts the film is toying with: a jolly seen is turned into unsettling ones. Some reviewers complain that the film is too haphazard and that too much random stuff is going on. Well, that is precisely what I liked! (At the same time I know that some of the things that takes place happen too quickly, and I know that if I were to show the film to one of my friends, with whom I always have deep disagreements about movies, would exclaim: BUT THEY ARE SO STUPID! Well, sometimes people are.)

Ivan the Terrible (1944)

It's hard to tell whether the first part of Ivan the Terrible (dir. Eisenstein) is to be considered as a Stalinist propaganda film or whether it provides a critical account of power. And the interesting question is, of course, what this kind of judgment could be based on, what kind of judgment one is making when one says "this is a propaganda film rather than ..." Apparently, the Soviet élite enjoyed it. Regardless of what the answer is, Ivan the Terrible is a film full of cinematic pomp. It starts off with the coronation of Ivan - he is to become the all-powerful Tsar. Interestingly, it takes a good while before we even see Ivan's face. Instead, we see all the glory of the ceremony: the clothes, the attributes of power. But it becomes clear that Ivan's power is challenged by the rich boyars who, when Ivan is lying on his death bed after a battle, immediately start plotting about the follower. It seems as if this type of plotting makes Ivan the leader he is (we see this pattern twice): he rises from his death bed and makes some drastic changes in the administration; traitors are kicked out and men of the people are hired. Ivan is a dramatic and paranoid man. Eisenstein always films Ivan as if he is an entirely different creature than the rest, his pointed beard and dramatic posturing underlining the Tsar as performativity dependent on external attributes but also as some kind of strange inner power. And the ornate costumes! I have rarely seen a movie where so much focus lays on the costumes (Jarman's Wittgenstein comes to mind); in some scenes, the extreme costumes take up entire rooms, making the people within them almost disappear.What is more, don't forget to admire the eerie and artificial-looking set design - brilliant (for example - look at how the doors are often so small that the characters look like giants). The viewer is thrown into a messy world where angles and Eisenstein's play with distance create an unnerving claustrophobic space.

My Dinner with Andre (1981)

I can't really explain it, but I had really high expectations about Louis Malle's My Dinner with Andre. It's not really that I'm a great fan of Malle (I have seen only two or three movies of his) but I've read somewhere that My Dinner with Andre is a masterpiece in the genre of films where conversations drive the film forward. Well, even though this is by no means a bad films, it's not a particularly good one either, except for a couple of scenes. The film reminded me about another film in which existential problems are discussed in a very obvious, even blunt way - Richard Linklater's Waking Life. The problem with both films is that their attempt to excavate the mind through conversation never succeeds in actually putting into display any of the tension that real conversations contain. I might have been more forgiving, had the writing of the script been more developed or whether there hadn't been such moments of almost embarrassingly affront clashes of Two Life Principles. And what is more, intellectual-sounding discussions about the meaning of art.

Almost the entire movie is set within an upscale N.Y. restaurant. Two friends are talking about the big questions of life. One is a experimental theater director and the other is an actor. The two men are very different. For the first half of the film, the director muses about art, spontaneity, mysticism and what not. He has been traveling and tells his friend one story after another about what he has experienced. Obviously, he is self-indulgent (I am not sure whether this is the film's perspective).  The other guy hums and nods and looks at his friends with a weary smile. It turns out he has a more practical point of view. He wants to enjoy ordinary life, the comfort of his partner and an electric blanket. For the director, this is not what life is about. Life is about Presence. Well, you know, those peculiar moments.

What I liked about the movie was its simplicity and quietness. It starts on a street outside the restaurant and it ends with a few quick frames of a taxi. In the restaurant, the camera looms over the two friends, sometimes filming them so that one of them is seen through a mirror (the best scenes involve a strange waiter who throws condescending glances at the two patrons). The film tries to create the sense of real time - that everything takes place in one unbroken temporal chunk. This works pretty well, even though the whole thing is unnecessarily underlined at the very end (when the director wants us to feel that we, like the two characters, have forgotten all about time). Ebert, whose reviews I always enjoy reading, wrote that My Dinner with André is devoid of clichés. When it comes to style, I would agree with him, at least partially. But I felt that the role of conversation was not that original after all and constantly felt that the result of what might have been a long and winding writing or improvisation process was cramped, rather than the spontaneous flow of back-and-forth that conversation usually is (and I get the sense that the team wants to catch hold of that kind of flow) - that Malle and his actors tried so hard to get to the core of things that the existential relevance was lost on the way, at least in many segments of the film. One example that made me sigh was the Wally, the actor who cherishes the small joys of ordinary life is also presented as a man who elevates science - in contrast with his friend the director who throws himself into life's deep crevices without concern for how he will be brought back. Plain reason vs. Transcendence. My reaction: yawn. But then again, the intentionally rambling aspect of the conversation might be taken in another way than as intellectually unsatisfying: two friends who are too much in love with talk and who get lost in each other's stories or their own goofy existentialism. (My question: who is it that annoys me, the film or the characters?)

I want to make this clear: the major problem I had was not that My Dinner with Andre was a slice of life film that turned out too stagey. Stagey can be good (I think about the version of Uncle Vanya I watched a while ago and how much I enjoyed its fine treatment of theater-as-film-as-theater). Yes it had the mood but it was so full of itself! (For a comparison: another movie with a great mood (a sort of tenderness) and which had some flaws in that direction but worked much, much better: Smoke)

As a matter of fact, I'm a bit mad at myself for not liking this film more. I will watch it again sometimes, and maybe I will realize I my initial judgment was too harsh?

Double Indemnity (1944)

Dames with shady intentions and gullible gentlemen - even though this is a blueprint of most film noir movies, Double Indemnity is a classic that set the standard for the genre (in good and bad ways): it's elegant, atmospheric and it creates that peculiar and haunting mystique that L.A. has in these movies (driving around in cars always plays an important role) - even nature always looks artificial, bathing in white light or sinister shadows. And, of course, Raymond Chandler's writing ("I'm rotten to the heart...") provided a hard-boiled edge. Wilder is a master director and Barbara Stanwyck is not bad as the femme fatale. The title refers to a technicality in the insurance company business and it is for sure not the plot that keeps Double Indemnity interesting (even though it has its good suspense moments where you are anxious to see what will happen next). The weakest aspect of it may be the, as I saw it, very typical use of flashbacks. But maybe I say this because I have watched too many crime movies from the same era in which a dire male voice belonging to a man who slopes in a chair in some office presents his present situation and how his destiny was shaped. When you think about it - how many film noir movies have you seen which are narrated by the alluring dame?

The story: Insurance company man gets involved in a murder plot: by a cover-up, money will be paid by the insurance company. It's a dame, of course, that makes him complicit in a crime. The film suggests that people are driven by sex, money or professional honor. But as some reviewers have pointed out: the mystery of the film is that these characters do not seem interested in what on the surface drives them. I think that is correct and it opens up an interesting tangle of questions: how should the coldness of the two main characters be understood? One possibility would be to interpret the film on a par with Cronenberg's Crash, as a film about boredom and excitement and thrill as flight. Everything, eventually, will go to hell. This is a world of doom and gloom (if you look for one example of fatalism in film noir, this is a good bet). Once again, I cannot resist to make a comment about the misogyny in many noir movies: the guy is a victim of the circumstances and his own drives, while the women will turn their own lives into hell by trying to manipulate others: the temptress will be destroyed, perhaps, like in this film, with the sordid farewell by a man who holds a gun: "goodbye, baby". But the woman's destiny is only an aspect of the male protagonist's grandiose path towards final destruction (one reviewer snarls - I don't know whether it is a joke - that at least women get to enjoy seeing other women who has a lot of power for a little while). This is the formula: one manipulates, the other is being manipulated. We've seen it before: the dame acts innocent, performs the role of the little girl in need of a male protector, while she is as a matter of fact pursuing her own agenda. Or could another possibility be that the femme fatale and her counterpart, the clueless male victim of her seduction, be interpreted as a dark story about heterosexuality as a game the logic of which is the dynamic of a surface and a secret that is all the time hinted at and glossed over only to re-appear in more fatal and dangerous ways. I don't know to what extent this makes better sense of Wilder's film, but I think this casts some light on heterosexuality. And if one continues on that line of thought, the attempt to reveal a fundamental set of primary drives (the woman's and the man's) is bound to fail (a very different perspective is to ask what is going on when a person is giving in to a temptation).

Interestingly, there is also something else going on beyond the conventional crime story. One interpretation of the film is that the ending scene reveals the deep love between the insurance company man and his boss who has been trying to solve the mystery. Sadly, this dimension is not explored that much.

Duck Soup (1933)

I am quite ashamed of the fact that I have never seen a Marx brothers movie before - until now. My reason is perhaps that when I was a kid I used to hang out with my neighbors who spend idle and endless afternoons with extremely boring old comedies from the silent movie era. So - I wasn't particularly thrilled about watching Duck Soup (which is not even a silent film). Perhaps this is because of my low expectations, but I am surprised about how much I enjoyed it. Even though most of the gags were not that funny, I liked the anarchic joy of messing stuff up - there was a kind of vitality about it all which had perhaps little to do with making particular points about politics or war. The story seems quite hard to spend many words on (I must say the satire of seriousness in politics works quite well), but what caught my attention was Duck Soup's approach to comedy as an inspired and rambling form of deconstruction - it all falls apart, in a good and edifying way.

Good-Bye, Dragon Inn (2003)

Ming-liang Tsai is known for his slow and aesthetically driven movies. I must admit that Good-bye, Dragon Inn was exhausting at times, but in the end, it is clearly a movie I would encourage you to watch; as in other movies in which there is no narrative to speak of, no clear center of a story that goes from a to b, you are really forced to watch as the images are not defined in the sense that it is self-evident what you should be paying attention to. Nonetheless, I was not able to suppress the question: what purpose does this extreme slowness (Tarkovsky's movies pale in comparison) serve? How is it connected with the themes of the film? The setting is a movie theater. It becomes clear that this cinema is about to close its doors. We see a woman working in the cinema, which seems almost deserted. The static camera (tilted at a strange angle) follows her routines: heating a snack, walking down a corridor etc.. The cinema is still showing movies, but only a couple of people show up. It's raining outside, and the rain is leaking into the roof. Sometimes, all you can here is the gentle sound of the rain. Good-bye Dragon Inn patiently sits down besides or behind the neck of these last movie-goers (one of whom seems more interested in flirting with men, another pair crying while watching the movie). I am not sure whether this is a wistful homage to a dying social institution, or whether the cinema is portrayed as a place that is bound to die out. Maybe the answer is: both.

Only a very few lines are spoken in the film. Ming-liang Tsai strips down cinema to its bare bones, at the same time he is showing patrons in a huge non-crowded room looking at bustling scenes on a screen - they are in fact watching a sword-fighting movie. This juxtaposition between film as engrossing viewing pleasure, as a flight, as a place for lonely contemplation, as diversion and as attention works pretty well, and I never thought that the result gets too self-conscious (we are not watching a Godard movie) but the risk is there. The eerie beauty of the film is rooted in everyday things, but at the same time the whole place is somehow cut off from reality (the entire film takes place within the cinema theater). I don't know whether I have seen any film in which the place of movie-watching is as nakedly exposed as in this film, where desperation intermingles with sadness and loneliness - and nostalgia (Aki Kaurismäki would perhaps like this stylized movie about the pleasure and strangeness of cinema).

So how does this work? I mean, the odds are small against a film that has no story, where the camera remains static and where we now next to nothing about the people we see. It still works. It's wrong to say Good-bye Dragon Inn is more style than content, but it is impossible not to mention its colors and its grasp of movement (even if these movements themselves remain at a snail's pace). If you've watched films by Wong Kar-Wai you know what I'm talking about (their cinematic sensibilities are somewhat similar).

Did I mention this is a funny movie? You might not believe it, but somehow, it is. If you've experience the dreadful company of popcorn-munching movie-goers, maybe you will get the kinds of jokes the film quietly deals in.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

The Grapes of Wrath is an extremely important film and if there was one director who could pull off an adaptation of Steinbeck's novel onto the big screen, it was John Ford -  a director not particularly famous for his leftist sympathies. This film, however, has its heart to the left. It's hard to imagine this film project would have been realized ten years afterwards; even though some aspects of the books are toned down, the film's message and vision is still uncompromising in its outcry against dispossession of the poor - The Grapes of Wrath is one of the very few American movies that in an unsentimental way tackles issues about social justice and capitalism. What can I say, it was a harsh world then and it's a harsh world now - Ford's movie has a lot of things to say and reveal about our world and the economic system that human relations are intermingling with and that structures people's lives.

The story is simple and merciless. Tom Joad is on a parole from prison (he has killed a man in a drunken fight) but when he arrives home, the village seems deserted. Instead, he finds the local preacher, or the man who used to be a preacher. We learn that the family has been chased away from their land by the banks and the big landowners. They are going to the California to pick oranges and the film follows the Joads' from camp to camp, increasingly pessimistic about their future. Everybody is looking for a job, and this is something that is both a result of and a means for capitalist manipulations. 

Directors like John Ford may be known for their films about independent, self-made man. The American dream, harsh but true. The Grapes of Wrath is story teaching us about fragility and an overwhelming system. The America that comes to life here is not the land of freedom and fantasy and endless exploration: its a land that has a history of violence, where borders are staked out again and again, and where land = property. Ford does not portray evil capitalists, but he shows how society is torn up with people representing different roles and where many institutions have a shady place (such as the police and the state authorities). He focuses on people who are dependent on each other (in good and bad ways), people who succumb and who try to survive in a society that pushes them away, or invites them only in order to throw them out again. What's the answer? Instead of the run-of-the-mill sentimental individualism, The Grape of Wrath invites us to think about collective action and political and defiant organization (the film ends with a - OK it is too overwrought and calculating - political speech that makes the message pretty clear).

I should also mention the role of landscapes in the film. They are not reduced to a beautiful backdrop, a relaxing scenery to relax the eye in an otherwise tough story. Ford conjures up a world, a world of both promise and horror, violence and solidarity. The style is direct, but it also contains a form of subdued poetic side, and it is the poetry that speaks both of sadness and of rage. 

Hævnen (2010)

What drives people to revenge? This seems to be the central question of Susanne Bier's recent film Hævnen (In a Better World). Even though serious moral questions are placed at the core, this is not a completely satisfying film (would I have liked it better as a novel? Maybe.). Two conflicts play out, one in Denmark, and one in a refugee camp (in Darfur?) and the point seems to be to shed some light on violence, how violence is sparked or how it could be rejected. Bier refrains from providing one overarching idea. Instead, one could say that she tests our reactions (I am inspired by this reading of the film.) A prominent temptation is to present moral problems as given questions to which universal answers are to be provided: "is it right to....?" Well, is it or is it not? When these type of questions are set up, one starts to imagine a situation as comprising a bunch of facts. Then the task is to churn out the optimal solution in accordance with a principle or a standard. Moral problems then seem identical with problems in engineering, it's just that principles mess things up with their fact-value fuzziness. (If you read moral philosophy, you are bound to bump into this understanding of what moral problems are.)

In my opinion, Bier does not open up that kind of approach. One of the stories are about two boys who have made up their minds to blow up a man's car. They have both witnessed the man hitting their father, twice. One of the boys start to question the plan, but the other boy insists that they have to go through with it. And so they do, and irrevocably bad things are about to happen. Was it right to do it or does the film instead show that revenge is always bad? That would be to simplify what is going on.

In many films, vengeance is portrayed as an unstoppable force, an ineluctable expression of human nature. A temporary equilibrium might be reached, but these films always hint at the inevitable moral functioning of human beings. - This is not at all Bier's point of view; some of the best scenes involve the tension between the two boys. One of them tries to talk the other out of it, to make him change perspectives. The boy persists, and persuades his friend to be complicit in the crime. One of the boys is blinded by rage (we learn that this rage is deeply rooted in him). The other boy loses his clear-sighted reaction. - - It is important that these descriptions in terms of 'blinded by' or 'clear-sighted' is my own reaction - it is not a matter of neutral judgments.

The problem with Hævnen is that too often, it resorts to conventional, soapy drama where one tense situation is followed by another, one problematic relation is put on top of another. For this reason, many aspects are dealt with superficially. The scenes in the refugee camp, for example, risk being swallowed up by the moral drama in Denmark, so that this story about vengeance and medical ethics is reduced to a mere shadow of the central story about the two boys and their plot. And this type of juxtaposition also comes close to the pitfall the film otherwise stays clear of: vengeance is a part of human nature, it is a universal phenomenon and no good intentions can stop these destructive chains (Bier's attempt to portray reconciliation is not that convincing as it follows too many film conventions - the whole thing appears half-hearted).

Darling (1965)

John Schlesinger's Darling is, if anything, a moralistic story. And my hunch is that his moralism has a misogynist aspect. The main character - played by an icy Julie Christie - is a girl who knows what she wants, at least in one sense. She wants to be famous, she wants to succeed, she wants to get to the top. She seduces a string of men, leaves one after another behind, and when she ends up at the top, married to an elderly Italian aristocrat, it's quite boring up there, at the top. The old story: fame&wealth do not add up to much if one has lost whatever makes life worth living. If this was all there was to the film, it could have been an insufferably self-important affair (even though, of course, a bunch of good movies have been made about this theme - Jack Clayton's Room at The Top comes to mind).

It's just that Darling is a quite good film after all. It shares the light touch of other British films of the era, the snappy dialogs, great pacing brusque cinematography. You know, everything that A Taste of Honey had going for it. Darling inhabits its spaces just fine, and those spaces are not limited to sassy parties, decadent beaches or fancy apartments (but these abound!), but Schlesinger also has his own eye for ordinary life, even within this crazy-luxurious world, so that even those places have an air of drabness. The ending scene, located at a scabby-looking airport, works just great.  

I, You, He, She (1974)

Even though it was a film I barely feel I could say anything intelligent about, Chantal Akerman's I, You, He, She turned out to be a quite haunting movie experience, even though the film's point partially eludes me (and many scenes seem unnecessary, especially in the beginning of the film where nudity is used in an extremely tiresome way). It starts with a girl (played by Akerman herself) in a room. The room is furnished with a mattress, a bureau and a chair. And a mirror. The girl has trapped herself in the room. As one scene ends and the next begins, a voice-over tells about the girl, but these are bare facts that we can see ourselves. The narration and the images are not as out of sync as they are in Marguerite Duras' India Song, but they are not altogether congruous either. It's an interesting technique that makes the whole thing full of tension. The girl shifts positions. She eats sugar. She writes a letter. She is trapped in the room. Then, suddenly - and within this film this is a dramatic turn of events - the girl leaves the apartment. We see a grim-looking junction (I've noticed a few Belgian directors' fondness for that type of ugliness - what's going on?). The girl is picked up by a truck-driver. They go to a bar, and they continue the journey. The truck-driver talks about his life. He is bored with his family, but at least he can meet a woman in his car whenever he feels like it. The girl gets out of the car. She knocks on a door, and is let into an apartment. We realize that the person who opens the door is her girlfriend. Although the girl is told she cannot stay, the two end up in bed. // The film is shot in gritty surroundings, using a sharp b/w palette. Sometimes the images are grainy. Like in Jeanne Dielman, actions typically play out in real time. It's harder to say anything about what the film tries to say. We see the girl doing almost everything compulsively (eating, writing, moving stuff around, drinking, having sex) and even when she is at rest, she looks restless. When she is in her department, she looks like a person who has decided to give up on the world. Time seems to have stopped, become irrelevant; days seem to go by, weeks even. Then she leaves (and it feels like a dramatic thing when she does), but inside that truck, or in the bar, she looks lost, and with the man, she does what she is told, and she is quiet, listening to the man's horrible story. She is not welcome at her girlfriend's place, but somehow, she is allowed to stay, and she does, eating sandwiches, being the one who is fed. How should this, along with the prolonged intimate scene, be interpreted?

According to Wikipedia, Akerman was upset when a gay film festival screened this film. Reportedly, she said that she would never allow any of her films to be shown on a gay film festival. Having seen I, You, He, She that declaration astounds me.

Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

I can imagine that some would say that Grave of the Fireflies (dir. Isao Takahata), an animated film about the horrors of WWII that has now become a classic, is sentimental and that it relies too much on metaphor. I did not react that way. Instead, I would say that beauty was not used to relieve the horror shown within the film, beauty was not mere decorum. The story is set at the end of the war. Japan is bombed and people suffer. The main characters, two children, are orphaned and they have to find somewhere to live and food to eat. Grave of the Fireflies follow them from a relative's home to a desolate bomb shelter by the river. The animation (which a film like Waltz with Bashir is somewhat indebted to) works brilliantly to capture the children's world of gloom but also moments of magic. Strangely, Takahata insisted that the film was not anti-war. This is extremely hard to understand, considering the film's extremely bleak exploration of the ruins of Japan during the war. The film - at least as I interpreted it - also focused on the accusations and false images of heroism that war breeds. The message? No heroism, just people who survive or do not survive.

Beyond the Hills (2012)

Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days was a  rollercoaster of a film: it gripped me by the guts and didn't let go. His latest film, Beyond the Hills, may not be as direct and strong. It is also more complex, and mostly I think this complexity deepens the film. That said, Beyond the Hill is a challenging movie, one which I do not regret having seen. Clearly, Mungiu is a director that has things to say. Here, he explores a story in which religious frenzy, a non-existent welfare state and a sad love story are complicit factors in the film's evolving tragedy - no easy solutions wait around the corner and there is no comforting consolation that everything will be alright in the end. Mungiu's approach is harsh and it remains harsh, but that doesn't mean he is cynical.

Alina comes back from Germany to go visit her friend/lover Voichita who lives in a small monastery. They both grew up in the same orphanage. Alina has resolved to take Voichita with her away from the monastery, so that they could live together. Voichita oscillates between different solutions and as the story progresses, they both live in the monastery. Alina is seen as an outsider, a threat to the order. That is also what she becomes. One horrible thing after another happens, not as a result of one action, or one person's malice. Things get out of hand, and Alina gets desperate. And desperation is also the theme here, and people's responses to it. Voichita pleads for her friend: they must take care of her in the monastery, they must let her stay and they must help her, because nobody else will, they cannot throw her out on the street. In this way, the film connects several aspects of a situation that goes from bad to worse. Mungiu looks at how decisions and attitudes evolve within a bigger context, a context of insecurity and vulnerability. I don't think the film bashes religion itself. Rather, the monastery is placed in a specific society, a specific state of poverty and social problems. It seems quite true to the film to emphasize its character of tragedy: Mungiu takes a step back and looks at the big picture, how a truly sad chain of events unfolds from a messy background story involving many levels of lack of support but also attempts to help and understand.   

Mungius combines wide-angle shots of the grim landscape surrounding the convent with the much more crammed images of urban life - and in a similar way, the film shifts from silence to the piercing noise of the city. His steady attention works just as well when he focuses on the ordinary life of the nuns as when he takes his characters to the labyrinthine hospital. Nothing is romanticized, there are no spaces of relief. This makes the film quite exhausting, and I must admit that in some scenes towards the end we see more than we should see and not just the life of the characters but also this viewer's capacity to digest the harsh violence on display starts to deteriorate. I no longer know what to think about what is going on: would I really call all this a matter of good-hearted yet clueless attempts to 'help'? Well - - -. My thoughts start to poke around in darkness. But on the other hand, the very last scenes are terribly well crafted and powerful. I would say that what makes Beyond the Hills a good film is that instead of accusing, it poses a series of important questions about the meaning of responsibility and the different ways we are weighed down by a requirement to act.

Marianne and Juliane (1981)

While eagerly looking forward to watching Margarethe von Trotta's film about Hannah Arendt, I notice that I have recorded another film of hers, Marianne and Juliane, from TV. The film has von Trotta's trademark descreet, subdued look. No overly melodramatic scenes, no exaggeration. But the content itself is far from descreet. Two sisters, two visions of political change. The film's Marianne is based on Gudrun Ensslin of the RAF. To what extent Juliane resembles Ensslin's real life sister I don't know. von Trotta shifts from images of the girls' adolescent years to their grown-up lives. There is a constant tension between the sisters. Both sisters are politically active. Juliane is a feminist journalist. Marianne works for a leftist group - she becomes known as a terrorist. They accuse each other of haven gotten it all wrong. In this, the film depicts a deep split within the political left, between reformism and radicalism. When Marianne has gone underground, Juliane is entrusted with her child. Juliane decides she cannot take care of the child and he is sent to a foster family. Juliane wants to keep her distance from Marianne, who is caught by the police. Juliane's immediate reaction is to visit her in jail. von Trotta focuses on the type of relationship in which hostility is just a layer, where there is also understanding and the necessity of communication. The best part of the film shows the massive security procedures and paranoia within the prison. Juliane cannot stop caring about Marianne, even when she's dead; she makes up her mind to prove that Marianne did not commit suicide.

A problem with the film is its oscillation between psychological portrait and an investigation of a particular historical period and its political rifts (one of the themes von Trotta hints at is the way the Nazi regime keeps having an impact, keeps hauting, keeps injuring). This oscillation is never resolved and in my opinion, this is something that makes the film less acute than it could have been. For example, Marianne's death is not presented as a political question about the possibility of her having been murdered, but, rather, the mystery surrounding Marianne's death is mostly seen through Juliane's personal agony. Or is that my sloppy interpretation? On the other hand, the film shows how Juliane's quest for truth has a political dimension and that it is symptomatic that a journalist rejects Juliane's pleads to make the case visible by snarling 'that stuff is not interesting anymore, now we focus on the energy crisis instead'. I have mixed feelings about Marianne and Juliane. I would not say that von Trotta's approach is detached, but somehow I was mystified as to what the major mission of the film is supposed to be - why was a great part of the film about Juliane's early rebelliousness, and Marianne's "good girl"-behavior? Was this based on the real Ensslin sisters or was it von Trotta's own attempt to make a specific point about the relation between two political/existential attitudes? It is noteworthy that Juliane is presented much more vividly throughout the film, while some of the scenes with Marianne remains stereotypes and more than one of her lines, especially during the beginning of the film, seem almost cartoonish. Perhaps the problem is that too many problems and themes are brought into the film (sisterhood, the nature of political violence, feminism and autonomy, the legacy of Nazism, etc. - truly big topics), so that none of them are really explored at depth?

Dillinger Is Dead (1969)

It's hard to describe what goes on in Dillinger Is Dead (dir. Marco Ferreri), one of the weirdest films I'v seen in a good while, with a straight face. Yeah.... it's about this guy - in his day-job, he designs gas masks - who makes a late-nite dinner at home, he listens to some otherworldly pop music on the radio and then he eats and watches a couple of home movies and meanwhile he, um, fixes up an old gun he accidentally found in a messy closet. And every now and then, he goes into the bedroom to check on his wife (which means do cruel things to her) who sleeps deeply after having taken a few sleeping pills. No story. No obvious character development. No logical denouement. Or maybe, yeah, in some sense. I watched Dillinger Is Dead late at night. The house was asleep. My head was spinning after a long day. This was the perfect setting for this strange little film. I will readily confess that at times, this is an awfully boring film. Hell, you are watching a guy making dinner and disassembling a gun! But I continued watching, and somehow, I was pulled into this dreamy world of druggy pop music (good choices of tunes) and tasteless yet fascinatingly odd home interior design. At the same time, I am completely aware that the director is an asshole who throws in a bunch of frames with nakes woman parts just for the titillation of it. Ferreri directs like an Antonioni who has kept his penchant for good-looking alienation (the first minutes could be a scene in Red Desert), but who has thrown all notions of radical politics (at least I don't see any) and 'good taste' into the bin-bag. The film is over the top, it is a bit pervy and it makes the oddest choices. In some ways, Dillinger Is Dead is beyond good and bad. It is what it is. In other ways, that I say that might reveal a personal flaw of character. I could, as one reviewer put it, say that this is a film about 'corrupt responses to a corrupt world'. I could also say that it is a sexist and self-indulgent heap of trash. Another reviewer says that the film is a direct cinematic translation of Marcuse's ideas about late industrial society. Well, maybe. Along with a gun that the gas mask designer paints red, with white polka dots.

Eyes Without a Face (1959)

Plastic surgeons are creepy. Everyone knows that, and Eyes Without a Face (dir. G. Franju) confirms it. If you are looking for a horror movie with no cheap effect - this might be a good pick. Prof. Genessier has specialized in transferring tissue from one person to another. We learn that his daughter's face was demolished in a car crash and the professor himself drove the car. The professor now tries to apply his skills on his daughter (most of the time, we see her wearing a mask) - the living tissue, of course, comes from somewhere. Eyes Without a Face plays with open cards. This is not really a suspense movie. From a very early stage, you know what is going on and how things will play out. Young girls will be picked up (by the prof's lover - his only guinea pig on whom the experiment succeeded; her face is handsome, yet there is something scary about it) and lured into the prof's laboratory, and they will probably not survive. This does not make the film less interesting; what holds my attention throughout the film is the eerie question of what it means to have a face - I mean, what would it mean to imagine that you would have a different face, somebody else's face? Franju's film may not be a philosophical tract on a par with Levinas, but for me, it worked well enough - it's a genuinely creepy film, and it takes some thinking to settle on what is so uncanny or dreadful about all this. It's not that we haven't seen cruel and mad scientists before, but Professor Genessier is not ravingly mad; the camera focuses on his methodical work, the sweat on his brow, his worried gaze. Perhaps it is the absence of typical horror movie conventions that makes this a good film (Franju knows how to handle weird camera angles!), it's lack of suspense, instead playing on a form of ambiguous seeing (when we cannot stop thinking about what is under that mask)? (Horror as seeing what was there all the time, underneath...)

Äta sova dö (2012)

Gabriela Pichler's first film, Äta sova dö, is immensely impressive. It's an important film and as a film it is very tight, very simple and uses a loose tableaux technique perfectly, with no ambition of creating a Great Narrative. The main characters are Raša and her father. She works at a factory where salad is packed into plastic boxes. But the economic crisis has hit Sweden and there will be layoffs. Raša is made redundant even though she does her utmost to keep the job: why do they fire her when they know that she is an efficient worker? The union is powerless and the union representative is made redundant himself. Pichler's depiction of Raša and her father, their common struggler for subsistence, reminds me of the Dardenne brothers - in the same spirit as the brothers, Pichler has made a movie that is both minimalist and deeply engaging; a film that opens your eyes and makes you think, feel, react, look. It's the kind of movie in which every small little detail matters, everything is a matter of life and death.

When you what Äta sova dö you get the sense that these scenes are partly improvisations. Pichler has a good ear for how people speak, how they act when nothing much is going on but when there is still lots of tension in the air. In several scenes, Raša and other villagers attend a course offered by the unemployment office. Pichler focuses on the dreary faces around the table, how they are forced to listen to a woman who doesn't believe in her own words, but who in a seemingly well-meaning way tries to do her job. Even the funny scenes never has the function of diversion. The humor is grim, and it strikes your heart in a way that has little to do with a moment of respite.

Raša is depicted as a person with a strong will. She doggedly tries to do the best of the situation. Sometimes she does not think ahead, but she moves on. Pichler does not reduce her in any way, she is not treated with gender stereotypes - she just is. The same goes for Raša's relation to her father, or the friendship between her and a boy from the village. Nermina Lukač who plays Raša is absolutely stunning.

Against all odds Äta sova dö is an extremely hopeful film - I mean, considering this is a film about unemployment and a society of bureaucratic helplessness, this is not at all self-evident. But the kind of hope Pichler and her characters offer has nothing to do with the "optimistic" official story about entrepreneurship and you-can-be-what-you-want. This film places defiance at the core of what it means to be alive; the desire to work is not reduced to an endless adaptability - work is seen not as a rosy path of self-realization but as the daily struggle of making do. And in contrast to the official blabber about the dignity of work, Äta sova dö combines its grounded hopefulness with class politics and critique of work society, the society in which even a hobby might prove that you may be a good worker, or the society in which you are useless as a worker even though you have the skills to do something well.

The Help (2011)

I watched The Help when it was broadcast on TV and even though the film is perhaps not a disaster (I mean, it is well meaning to some extent, whatever that means), it does not have the guts to deal with the topic it has chosen: racism. The question here of course becomes how a director is to navigate when depicting racism during the sixties in the South - self-righteous images of how everything has gotten much, much better abound, and it is tempting to please the audience with a story about sound and safe social development. Even though the theme is relevant (and contemporary - this is a film about domestic labor), and some of the characters hold up OK, the film gives in to so many temptations, some of them quite unforgivable. One thing that disturbed me was the use of humor as a safety net once things get too serious or bleak - let's throw in a joke so that the audience can relax for a while. And many of the jokes tend to be of the kind that makes one wonder what the agenda of the film really is (how is it funny that a black woman imagines that a white man might shoot her?) Another thing was the film's quite self-important presentation of its white do-good leading role, Skeeter, the girl who wants to be a journalist and who sets out to interview maids who work for white folk about racism, labor and family life. The film takes place in 1964 but the film does not distinguish itself in its image of the political upheavals that took place then. In the end, The Help choses the path of Uplifting Story, the kind where you are supposed to feel edified and uplifted afterwards and nobody is to feel ashamed or offended. Even though some scenes do reveal some interesting aspects of rage and/or resilience, the film never takes time to explore - it is to busy to churn out quite stereotypical image of southern racists and stoical oppressed people. Hopefully, there will be other, better films about domestic labor and racism. Sadly, The Help keeps haunting my mind and I didn't realize how outrageous it was until I started thinking about it afterwards, mulling over some of the "jokes" and "uplifting turns".

Je ne suis pas là pour être aimé (2005)

Jean-Claude is about fifty years old and he is not happy. He leads a lonely life, visiting his elderly father every Sunday (they play Monopoly and have a hard time enduring one another's company) and going through the horrible work routine - he is a court official whose job it is to evict people from their homes or seize their property. From his office, he sees a tango studio. He decides to attend a class himself. There he meets Francoise who is about to get married and whose pushy mother and sister have everything planned for her. Not here to be loved (dir.: Stephane Brizé) may not be an extra-ordinary film and the theme it tackles breaks no new ground. Then again, this is a good little slice of life drama that does not try to much; it focuses on the types of human problems most of us encounter: loneliness, distance between parent and child, the difficulty of love. Patrick Chesnais who plays Jean-Claude is perfect as this dreary man who is at a loss of what to do with his life. The film succeeds in the small details - an awkward encounter in a car, an evasive glance, an apartment that looks lived-in but still desolate somehow - and it never resorts to the worst kind of will-they-or-won't-they type of relationship drama schmaltz. As a film about the fear of openness, the fear to reveal who one really is, Not here to be loved is a good and unsentimental attempt to show the tension between ingrained habits and new possibilities that one has to deal with somehow.  - - I am happy that this type of simple films are still done.