Fill the Void (2012)

I watched Fill the Void (dir. Rama Burshtein) on a rainy night at the Sodankylä film festival. Perhaps this testifies to my flawed attention, but in my view, the film was overly ambiguous, and not ambiguous in the sort of way that opens up for several readings. In this case, the ambiguousness made it hard to relate to the film. Obviously, the director sees a certain urgency in a story she wants to tell. But I was never sure what this urgency was.

The story is set in Tel Aviv among a group of ultra orthodox Hasidic Jews. From what I've read, the aspiration of the director was to make a film about this group of people from the inside. I suppose that this does not exclude the possibility of a critical perspective, and this is what makes the film interesting. If anything, Fill the Void reminds us that no culture is uniform. If it criticizes certain cultural patterns, how should this be understood, should it be understood as a distinction between the religious and the cultural, or as a distinction between limiting cultural norms and a craving for independence? To be honest, I'm not sure at all, some things would speak in favor of the opposite of the latter: faith is also a way of life, not an inner conviction. The central character is Shira, 18 years old, an age at which you are expected to get married, and marriages are arranged. Everything changes when Shira's sister dies. The sister had a husband and a child. The widower is under press to re-marry, and some grief-stricken family members see Shira as a suitable match. Shira herself seems to repress her feelings; the only thing she says is that she wants to do the right thing. And it is here that my confusion appears. Is the film supposed to be a love story, so that Shira has fallen for her sister's husband, or are we to think that Shira would rather not marry the guy, but complies with the conventions to act the role of the dutiful daughter, thus repressing her desire to marry someone she loves? In part, we get to see things from the other party's perspective, the man Shira would marry tries to elicit her "real feelings" and maybe this makes my own thoughts trail off into familiar Romance Story territory (in which the usual path is to show women who are not clear about who they are, they need a male perspective). But the ending of the film thwarts this interpretation.

Fill the Void is a film that tries hard to evoke emotions, feelings that do rarely come to the surface, feelings that can only be hinted at. Ambivalence is all over, and it is painful for the characters to bear. In this, the film is rather successful, especially in how it focuses on the awkward meetings between two people who have been chosen to be a good match for each other. On the downside, the film is at times too overblown, so wrapped up within these mixed emotions that it is hard to navigate - where exactly are we heading? The excessive use of certain stylistic devices (shallow focus, soft edges, close-ups, emotional music) also felt a bit contrived.

Wadjda (2012)

If I got it right, Wadjda (dir. Haifaa Al-Mansour) is the first film entirely shot in Saudi Arabia. And the director is a woman. What is more, Wadjda is clearly a feminist film about gender and power. Despite some unfortunate choices where the crew opts for conventional narrative solutions, this is a powerful film with a strong story told by means of simple and effective cinematic devices (one reference could be Samira Makhmalbaf's The Apple, a similarly sympathetic and focused film). Wadjda is a kid whose big dream is to buy a bike. Her mother consider it out of the question: a girl would never ride a bike. Wadjda is stubborn. She enrolls in a Quran competition where she can win a decent amount of money to buy the bike herself. The film follows Wadjda's struggles with a conservative society. There are no good and bad people here, just people being afraid of being different, or opening themselves to others. These fears are disclosed not through some extra-ordinary events but in the day-to-day life comprising family struggles, urban living and the school system. The merit of the film is, as I said, it's simplicity. It follows the sneaker-clad Wadjda on her way to school, on her interaction with other pupils, with her friend Abdullah or with her mother. Her unwillingness to comply with collective patterns rarely gets a sugar-coated heroic tone - she is a person who reacts and acts (the Dardenne brothers' Rosetta comes to mind). Many scenes contain an interesting ambiguousness, such as a very moving scene in which Wadjda is reading a section from the Quran, a section she has chosen herself; this scene contains no stereotypical critique of religion as being conservative as such. Another aspect I liked about the film is its close attention to the urban surrounding in which Wadjda spends her day-to-day life. The film abounds with urban non-places as well as images of hectic street life. And this all is interesting because of the film's content. The city is both a place of limitation where certain things are forbidden but it is also shown as a space for play, creativity and defiance.

Goodbye, How Are You? (2009)

I watched Goodbye, How Are You (dir. Boris Mitic), a film comprising 25 (or how many were they?) sardonic jokes, or maybe aphorism would be a better word, and my constant reaction was that I did not get the point. These jokes were grim, sarcastic, dark - I could sometimes get a glimpse of what was supposed to be subversive or funny, but the film remained elusive to me. The film takes on many themes - history, wars, violence - and it often lands in the absurd, the skewed. A voice-over drones on, telling us these stories while the images shown often juxtapose the journalistic with the almost surreal. As a collage, this works well, and it is perhaps a film I should give another chance.

Play (2011)

In my opinion, Ruben Östlund is perhaps the most interesting movie director making films in Sweden today. His films explore social situations and the viewer is put in an as uncomfortable position as the protagonists, but this is not to say that Östlund makes some kind of social pornography of the type that we are supposed to take a lot of pleasure in looking at other's misery. One of the recurring themes in Östlund's movies is how fear is handled in encounters between people. He investigates how fear is transformed into a persistent will to make everything all right, to act as if nothing happened, as if the uncomfortable things can be mastered somehow. These topics are also apparent in Östlund's latest movie, Play. It is a difficult movie but not in the sense that it is difficult to follow the story or that it contains a lot of violence. It's difficult to watch because it forces you to think about what all of these situations mean, how you react to them - Östlund's films feel personal in how they seem aimed not at an idealized, statistical audience ("this is what people normally want to see"). He puts some acute questions in front of you, and it is your responsibility to think about what you see. But like Michael Haneke, I am not always sure whether Östlund's films express a moral clarity. As you can probably guess, his films have an open-ended character. They never conclude in clear-cut solutions or narrative resolutions.

Some reviewers and debaters accused Play of being racist. Even though I can see where that worry is coming from, I don't feel that does justice to the film. The question is there, however, what does race mean in the film, in what way is being black important or not important here? But this is not the only questions. There is also another story, a story about reactions that have a racist structure to them that the film reveals as an aspect of a tangled situation.

Through a very sophisticated series of techniques that play on psychological responses, a group of boys makes another group of boys handle over all of their valuable. It all starts with the first group telling one boy that he has just the same kind of mobile phone that has been stolen from another boy's brother. Can he prove that he didn't steal it? The boys bribe, play good cop/bad cop, they talk and persuade, they use force and elicit fear. Among themselves, they are not at all a coherent group. One of them is beaten up for acting differently. The other group of course try to flee from the situation, they try to make all of this end so that they can continue their day in the normal way. Their actions express insecurity, and this is exploited. The other boys persist. Slowly, some of their resistance starts to wither away. They get tired. They submit. They react spontaneously in ways that make them play along. The situation is a perpetual state of social bribery. At one point, they all "cooperate", but in the next scene, it is back to the mix of resistance and lack of defiance.The black kids play with racial stereotypes: the gangsta, the dangerous black, the unruly youth, the victim. The other gang are confounded, they don't know what to do.

The digital camera remains static. It is usually placed far from the actors. We see the situation playing out against the backdrop of urban non-places: a shopping mall, a tram, a train station and in one scene the group has ended up seemingly in the middle of nowhere. I think of Östlund's short film about a robbery, another one, in which he uses a security camera, or the style of a security camera. Östlund juxtaposes the apparent neutrality - the observational camera - of the image with its almost violent non-neutrality - these images are in no way neutral. My own reaction oscillates. Is this a mere artistic trick or does it have a good point?

Some have interpreted the film as a movie about political correctness. One plays along because one fears that otherwise one will be complicit in racism. I think this makes sense. But the film also ties in with Ruben Östlund's other films - in what way do people react to oppression or threats by a form of passivity, so that the only wish is to get it over with, the wish that the others will simply disappear? Play and his film The Involuntary explores what happens when somebody reacts to a difficult situation by being paralyzed. 

I don't think Östlund's film makes any statement about race or black people. What he does, I think, is to look at the fears that a racist society gives rise to, and that these fears have many sides. Here, racism is connected with the fear of meeting the other, of looking her in the eyes, treating the other as a human being rather than "a black kid who probably wants to make trouble". In this sense, racism is not just some unfounded conceptions or stereotypes - it is also intermingled with attitudes, the concrete encounter and what it makes us into.

While I write this, I realize that I will probably say different things about this movie in a few months. It's a film that has to be re-thought, digested. I should also mention that the film has many problems. Its smartness is one - it creates a tangle which creates a sort of mirroring effect - one responds with the same kind of insecurity and fear that the characters express - and this effect is so contrived and calculated that it no longer can morally have the effect of self-reflection. Another problem involves some specific scenes, especially towards the end, where Östlund tries to bring home the point about behavior that seems 'decent' but that just makes things even worse - here things gets too obvious, too schemed.