Be kind rewind (2008)

Be Kind Rewind (M Gondry) may not be a work of cinematic genius. Yet, as a homage to cinema culture and bad movie-making, this film proved to be a lot more entertaining than I expected it to be. If you have nothing against quaint feel-good movies, then you might not grumble. The central location of the film is a dingy-looking store that rents outdated VHS. There's a situation: the store faces eviction due to overdue rent. The customers are of the more eccentric (but loyal) stripe and the owner is out of town on business so a younger guy is entrusted with the challenge of looking after the place. The storyline follows these eccentrics on all sides of the counter and of course there is a mishap and some real acts of Imagination take place (having to do with "re-enactment"). Be kind rewind defends the small businesses on the obscure street corners and the people who work for them. The overly sugared ending is excused; I actually found this movie kind of cute. There are silly jokes, diversions and much ado about nothing, but that was the charm of it. 

The White Reindeer (1952)

A 1952 horror movie about a women who transforms herself into a reindeer? Well, from this description, you might expect a cheesy B-movie rather than a lyrical, low-key film about  abandonment, fear and nature. Erik Blomberg's The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura) is something of a hidden gem. Pirita is a young woman courted by Aslak. In the beginning of the film, we see them racing in a snow-covered landscape. However, an ominous tune has already changed the perspective and one expects something dreadful to happen. The couple is married and in a later scene, we see the woman herding a single reindeer but suddenly she sees a bigger herd, and her husband is one of the herders. That scenes is a moment when something deep takes place, but it is hard to spell out what. This is a film in which things and tensions are alluded to, hinted at rather than being dissected or clearly displayed. Something worries Pirita. One rather dull interpretation is to point out the sexual tensions between Pirita and Aslak: the film shows some advances by Pirita which are not returned.I n one of the most important scenes of the film she visits a shaman who says that he knows why she is there: he says that he can make a love potion if she sacrifices the first things she sees when she goes back, he brags about his prowess and beats his drum. All of the sudden, the camera focuses on Pirita's eyes; the drumming now continues on its own and the drum breaks. The husband goes away and as a present Pirita is offered a white reindeer. When Pirita goes back from the shaman, she sacrificed the reindeer. As the white reindeer returns in the movie, we know that it is a manifestation of Pirita's elusive and perhaps scary power. The herdsmen are convinced that the white reindeer is a witch, and they try to catch it. Interestingly, the film never settles on the nature of Pirita's power. A sense of mystery is preserved throughout.

The cinematography of Valkoinen peura is gorgeous and dynamic; the snowy landscapes is paired with shadowy huts and glaring moonlight. The reindeer are an important element of the film as it focuses on a form of life centered around these animals; the characters' relation to the animals cover a wide range and the film zones in on an ambiguity that seems to characterize the characters' attitudes to their fellow beings: reverence is paired with a desire to dominate (this ambiguity comes to the fore in the shape of the white reindeer which is a desirable catch because of its rarity). Mirjami Kuosmanen (who also wrote the story?) is great as Pirita; her acting is fierce and fragile at the same time and it is thanks to the acting that the subtlety and mystery of the film is maintained. In the end, I don't quite know what is so sinister about Pirita. A minus is the music which is at times a bit too "cinematic" and also too intrusive. Perhaps sinister is not the right word - Valkoinen peura is a bottom a film about loneliness. Pirita is abandoned by her husband when he goes to herd reindeer and the film repeatedly shows her fear of rejection and abandonment. The horror evoked by the transformation and Pirita's elusive power intermingles with a deep sadness.

The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)

Wes Anderson's films are instantaneously recognizable. From the first frame onwards, you can see his obsession with symmetry, his meticulously arranged settings - plenty of conceit and careful execution - and as the film progresses one is thrown into sad, yet heartfelt worlds that almost always feel like a past that never happened, a past we've dreamed up. For better or worse, The Grand Budapest Hotel is very much a Wes Anderson film; one could say it manifests some of his strengths as well as some of his more annoying tendencies. It might not be one of his best films but the quiet, sly humor and the nostalgic backwards-gazing is fascinating to admire on the big screen. However, as the ending title rolled I couldn't stop feeling that there was something flat about this tirelessly choreographed movie. Arguably, none of Anderson's films offer deep psychological portraits. This is not my complaint. Its just that this time around, the well-crafted world starts to appear paper-thin or predictable in a clock-work sort of way.

The story is narrated in a tricky series of stories and the main character, one could say, is a distinguished hotel situated in an imaginary country. This hotel has a glorious past and as the film opens, its heyday is long past. The story looks back upon some tumultuous events that took place as the history of the hotel took a downwards turn. Anderson focuses on a moment of transition and that moment is embodied by the elegant and utterly refined concierge of the hotel, M Gustave (Ralph Fiennes is obviously the man for the part), to whom one splendid guest has bequeathed a precious painting. Anderson taps into what appears to be mode of classic-era comedy to capture the state of upheaval that ensues. There are love stories, family feuds, rogues, astonishing-looking cakes and adventurous escapes.

Anderson mixes over-the-top orchestrated shots with slapstick and a very American style of dialogue (w-i-t-t-y). Here's my verdict: this film is good at conveying an atmosphere, a dreamland, a dream of a dream of a dream of a fantasy. Yet for all its stylized images of a dreamed-up past, this movie is not deep enough to give me a new perspective on what nostalgia is, what kind of point of view it is. Some reviewers have praised the movie for its tensions: that the real, troubled world seems to intrude on the perfected scenery and the stylized acting. After all, the film is about a fascist-like regime that bursts into the elegance and refinement of the world Anderson conjures up. But what perhaps is most troubling is that the image one gets of this fascist regime is that it is vulgar, that it disrupts a noble and fine community of good-hearted illusions and sophisticated folly. These fascists are, instead, rendered as brutes. In my opinion, this is about the worst interpretation of fascism one can end up with (even though it is far from uncommon): fascism is "barbarian". 

The Damned (1970)

Nazism, sexuality, capitalism - the old rule is exchanged for a new system of values. These are the building blocks of Visconti's The Damned, a film that starts out as an interesting exploration of class society only to end in a hodgepodge of Nazi uniforms, violence, sex and incestuous relations. Some of this is, I suspect, added most of all for shock value. But Visconti also seems to have something he wants to say about sexuality and a historical situation - it's just not that clear what it is. The only thing we see is various eruptions of repressed Desire. Sexuality, in this film, seems to come from a dark place. The conclusion is not, I think, that Visconti sets out to capture the wickedness of "perverse" sexuality. The film has very little of moralism to it. What we see is rather a world that under its sterile surface is boiling with repressed urges. To be honest, I found The Damned to be an extremely failure in this respect: I did not at all understand what kind of perspective the film takes on repression, and how it hangs together with the disciplinary system of Nazism (or capitalism). At the center of the film we have the steel dynasty. There is the question of who will manage the company in the future. The film opens with a grand party and here we see some important tensions among the business "family" having to do with the relation to the nazi power elite. Mostly, the central events take place within the persons associated with the firm and how the lineage of power is continued and disrupted. The only scene that really stands out from this is the very lengthy portrayal of the night of the long knives in which we see member of the SA having a drunken party only to be massacred by the SS (some of the main characters are involved in this killing spree). What works best in this confusing film is perhaps the settings, darkly lit, stylized, sinister; decaying elegance. The other good thing is Ingrid Thulin who plays the mother whose partner is scheming to change the power system and whose son has some - um - tendencies of his own. 

Wuthering heights (2011)

Andrea Arnold caught my attention by her almost-brilliant Fish tank, a vital, yet dark, story about youth and despair. Wuthering heights sticks to the same theme, and the vitality is there. But the films are still very different. When Arnold takes on Emily Bronté she does it sensuously, evoking place more than psychology - well, as a matter of fact, psychology is here reduced to a state of gruesome longing, the impossible love story and - you expected it - the wretchedness of the world. This longing is placed in an equally gruesome surrounding; there's wind, there's merciless earth and there's dirt. Rather than being an excuse for having the characters parade in nice costumes and prattle on about Romance, Arnold takes her Wuthering heights to a much more desolate place, a place that lodges no more that pain and a dizzy sense of attraction. The camera restlessly jumps and twitches, nearly never composing traditional images of faces or landscapes as a backdrop. Nothing is pretty. The characters crawl along Yorkshire moors or they sit glumly in dark corners. It's hard to describe how achingly beautiful these raw images of nature are, you must look for yourself.  Heathcliffe is rendered as a black man and racism appears as one aspect of the hostile world in which the two lovers grow up. Arnold focuses on these relationships, often violent (where the violence tends to have an ambiguous role) and obsessive, without sentimentality. The erotic currents of the story is emphasized but nothing is spelled out; this is a world in which there are BIG emotions but they are never pinned down. This is the strength of the movie - how emotions are rooted in the moor, the wind, the dirt, the crags, the ominous quip of birds, sudden sunlight. Heavy on atmosphere? Yes, but in an exhilarating way, a way that changes one's perception. Not many films do.

The last part of the film, in which the almost-siblings are grown-up, one of them married, turns out to be somewhat disappointing. The story churns and churns and nothing much is added. This is precisely the point, but it is hard to make something out of it as a viewer. In particular, I found the insertion of a song by Mumford and sons in the very end to be extremely ill-chosen. That song was a million miles from everything this movie stands for.

Apocalypse Now (1979)

I re-watched Apocalypse Now and realized I remembered most of it rather clearly - except for the end. For some curious reason, I always forget how movies and books end. It also turned out that I found the end to be the weakest part; Marlon Brando's rendition of Mr Kurtz was not convincing - he repetitiously uttered the word 'horror' in a way that was supposed to be close-to-Conrad but I was unable to see that in him, the HORROR - instead, what I saw was the pretentiousness of Coppola, and perhaps Brando. I understood Coppola's attempt to bring forth the Voice and to hide his face in shadows, but somehow what I started to pay attention to was Coppola's techniques instead of being gripped by by the strangeness of the scenes. (I didn't have this problem when reading Conrad's novella.) Otherwise, Apocalypse Now in a successful way transforms Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness into a gloomy and surreal story about the Vietnam war. What Conrad etches with exact, yet strangely dreamy, words, Coppola conjures up with hallucinatory images and music (I am not sure whether it was a wise idea to give such a central role to the Doors song).

Like the narrator of Heart of Darkness, the main character of Apocalypse now remains anonymous; Martin Sheen was the right person for this role. Even though there are some scenes that allows for some psychological depth and background, the film doesn't really revolve around him. It's more that we see the world through his eyes. He's the man who is commissioned to look for Kurtz, a high-ranked military man, a renegade colonel who has lately dedicated himself to "bad methods". The guy is called Willard and the film takes him through the madness and despair of war. There are no heroes and no just cause. He is sent on his mission but most of all he is fascinated by this Kurtz. In scene after scene, the camera lingers on his almost blank, yet somehow bewildered face. Willard mostly occupies the place of witness: he sees deranged officers (insistent on surfing close to the battle field), disintegrating American camps along the river, jumpy soldiers shooting people who are only trying to protect a puppy. Are these scenes thrilling to watch? Not in the least, I would say. In the end of the movie, he witnesses what has happened to Kurtz. But this is also a story about transformation perhaps; a story about becoming-Kurtz, getting entry into the world and vision of Kurtz before even meeting him. Unlike critics like Roger Ebert, I have a hard time understanding the story - and Kurtz - as some kind of existential witnessing of the darkest truth of being, the cruel and merciless state of nature, "the madness at the heart of human nature" as a blogger puts it. At the same time, it's difficult to describe the film as a war movie. Maybe there are hints in the movie of such a story about the Primordial Conflict; didn't the film end with a ritualistic Killing of the Father-kind of thing? This is Coppola's problem, then.

A hard-boiled voice-over accompanies the dread of the images but the voice - it's not even clear whose voice it is, but probably the protagonist's - does not provide us with a safe level of explanation. Saturated colors and shadows are used to create the ominous or straight-out menacing atmosphere. Coppola doesn't introduce these elements gradually. Already from the get-go, we are introduced into a world of madness and colonialism. From the start to the finish, this is the logic of "drop the bomb, exterminate them all!" Nightmare all the way, from the first within-the-head-hallucinations/memories onward; Coppola never stops to throw in a breather or a consoling little love story or a moment of comic relief. And, most importantly, there is no preserved dignity; there is no character who represents Morality in Hard Times.

The Devil, Probably (1977)

How does ome make a movie about the entire culture being an endless cesspool or an inexhaustible abyss? Robert Bresson, 70 years at the time, gave it a shot in one of his last films, The Devil Probably, a film exploring youth culture and existential pain. This is Bresson at his most Joy Division, his gloomiest view on human life and civilization: religion, capitalism, activism, love - everything is false, or rotten, he seems to say. Robotic mannerisms abound. All is vanity & nothing new under ze sun. The world is a garbage heap and documentary (?) images of environmental disaster are inserted. Oil spills, nuclear weapons, a seal clubbed to death. As some reviewers have pointed out, the film also represents Bresson's attempt to be, well it is hard to say it but here it comes, - chic. The swaggering & lethargic protagonist, Charles, is a young nihilist who sees no reason to NOT kill himself. His friends are a group of cynical kids who sometimes opt for political pranks, sometimes for their private little world of love games. Bresson turns these young people into deadpan almost-zombies, lolling around Paris, playing drums, chatterboxing and bickering in political meetings. Charles himself has the air of existential (anti-)hero, and here's what worries me about the film. He finds death sublime and the world bores the shit out of him. "My sickness is seeing clearly" he declares. But the very end perhaps punctuates any inclination to see anything heroic in this death-longing cynical youth.

 - - - What I found striking - and worrisome - was how little the film itself distances itself from the perspective of its protagonist. The risk is that Bresson's own perspective simply takes the cynicism to the next level, and places the main character as an emblem of contemporary culture. So, he seems to say that there is something true to this cynicism. What is also problematic is that Bresson almost tries to make this cynicsm a bit cool, a bit hip - it is supposed to look good. I might not overstate my case if I call the film a French Zabriskie point, only much more austere and fragmented. Bresson even brings in some bleak humor into it all (I diddn't know he had it in him): a box of chocolates thrown on the street, a repudiation of psychoanalysis and then a sort of cosmic joke that puts an end to our dear protagonist. When critics' talk about The Devil, Probably as a "deep, uncopromising, compelling drama" I am not at all sure whether I agree (even though it is, of course, a film I did not regret watching and it has good things in it.)

 - - - In the end, maybe I find I hired a Contract Killer to be a more reasonable film about what it means to be tired of life. Also based on how he directed his actors and how he stripped down the settings to stylized skeletons, I guess Kaurismäki must have seen The Devil, Probably.

The Earth is a Sinful Song (1973)

If it were not for the beautiful landscapes featuring in The Earth is a Sinful Song (dir. R Mollberg), I would probably not have been managed to sit through this film so revered in Finnish film history. Scarcely any stereotype about Finnish life is evaded. Excessive nudity: check. There is no end to people being killed: check. Hard drinkin': yep. Elusive nature: check. Saunas: check. Gloomy silence: c-h-e-c-k. Hard times, poor times: check. The story is set in Lapland during the late forties. A lively and independent girl falls for a reindeer cowboy, gets pregnant and well the relationship is not exactly a case of rosy bliss. Mollberg approaches this story with rough cinematograpy, amateur actors and plenty of haunting images of nature. Nautralistic scenes of animal slaughterings are coupled with just as naturalistic scenes of human encounters, often faltering or hard-boiled. The best parts of the film follow the daily life in the village, the social dramas accompanying the preparation of food, a troublesome calving process, or a visit by a frenzied (and scary) preacher. But usually Mollberg settles for the gruesome. The message is a simple one: life is tough as hell and people are mostly corrupt but life goes on and on and on in its basic flow of food, sex and chores. Life is squalor but there's also beauty. So why did I find this film hard to watch? I constantly felt that Mollberg was entirely preoccupied with etching an image, the image of this hard, unsavory life that other aspects of life were not at all detected. I also thought that the aesthetic expression of the film augmented this idea of life and that the naturalism used by Mollberg in this way became a sort of programmatic stance rather than working as an explorative and open-ended mode of looking at life.

Like Father, Like Son (2013)

Hirokazu Koreeda is one of the contemporary directors I have plenty of respect for; his films show a tender attention to ordinary life and the general mood is that of hope and openness. Like Father, Like Son is a characteristic film in many ways - Koreeda has made several films about family life - but still, it had some surprising flaws. Whereas other Koreeda films are only loosly tied to a story, in this film, the story comes to be central in a way I find problematic. Two families receive the news that their children have been switched in the hospital when the children were born. The parents, coming from very different social backgrounds, start to contemplate "switching back" and this brings several deep-going conflicts to the surface. We never really get an understanding for why such an arrangement occurs as a possibility on the radar, it just does. This is perhaps the major flaw. The story is also unnecessarily centered on dramatic turns and peaks (not exactly tear-wringing clashes and resolutions but still - more on the conventional side), and this is not at all characteristic for Koreeda's films. What still speaks for the film is its examination of class and how class is constructed in how people relate to place. One example of this is an arranged meeting between the two families. The place is some sort of fast food parlor with a section for toys. The parents of one of the kids remain distant and awkward; they have good manners and try to keep things 'polite'. The father of the other kid talks and plays with the rambunctious kids; he moves about while the other parents shyly watching him. Koreeda shows a keen interest for this kind of situation and it is in these quiet, understated moments where nothing particular happens that the film is at its best.

The question about biological kinship is treated delicately and sympathetically: the point seems to be that concerns about biological kinship arise within a social setting in which the question already has a certain point, it comes from a certain place, it is expressed within tensions and conflicts; there is no fundamental level at play here. In this case, the conflicts revolve around the father who works too much and who is disappointed about his 'unambitious' kid. This observations are good but the problem in the film - which was, by the way, beautifully filmed - was that it tended to play on the obvious. More than before, Koreeda appeared to be in the business of 'making points'. And in my view, that's never a good thing. Still, what I liked about Like Father, Like Son is the way people's interaction is highlighted in a way that is the opposite of cynical. It is as if Koreeda always has an eye for the openings, the possibilities, the way a problem may not be ineluctable.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970)

To say the truth, I am not crazy about political parodies/dystopian political dramas like Costa-Gavras' Z. It's just something about these movies that fail to move me. Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri) is a film like this: I think I can guess at what the parody is supposed to be about and the meandering, swirling aesthetics is enjoyable but still - the film didn't make much of an impression on me. The story contains no mysteries and no thriller-like suspension; instead already from the get-go we know the main character, a high-rank police inspector, to be an arrogant killer. He kills, but nobody would accuse him of anything, so he just goes on with his business. The film follows this megalomaniac police inspector in his quest to prove that he can do ANYTHING. He's above the law - he IS the law! He intentionally scatters evidence all around him, but nobody would take it as evidence. What I liked about the film was how it played around with the concept of proof and evidence: what does it mean to see something as a proof if nobody would take it as such, if nobody would even pay any attention to it? A second meaning of proof also emerges when we realizes that the inspector is trying to prove something to himself; he doesn't seem that cock-sure, after all, or there are strange cracks in his demanor. It is as if the main character is bearing a cloak of invisibility, like Gyges, but he is constantly trying to test people's attention, to make them catch sight of the cloak. Unsurprisingly, there are a few scenes in which leftists are accused of the crimes committed by the authority. Some of these are rather funny, while other are just .... predictable. Investigations .... is soaked with cheesy details: silk ties, grimacing faces, over-the-top music (by Ennio Morricone). Even the lines are wildly stylized: "Repression is civilization!" The lust for power and control on display is dressed in an almost Deleuzian form of machinic desire: frantic and productive and excessive. The entire society starts to appear like a machinic fantasy, a fansty about control but also a fantasy about revelation.

Syndromes and a Century (2006)

All of the films by Apichatpong Weerasethakul I've seen have been absolutely brilliant, characterized by an unusual unruly approach to the logic of cinema. Syndromes and a Century is no exception. As always, it's quite a challenge to even describe what the film is about. Weerasethakul's films defy the idea that a film should move from A to B in a steady, intelligible progression in which the viewer should be able to pick out the main dramatical turning points. Syndromes and a Century, or his other films (the ones I've seen) aren't like that. Traditional narratives are almost entirely eschewed, even though he usually still manages to provide surprisingly touching moments of interpersonal encounters (which you might not expect from the description "experimental film"). The films' movement consists of leaps, and it is often not that clear where the leaps take us and what they mean.

In the first section of Syndromes and a Century, the setting is rural Thailand and the main characters comprise a few people working in or visiting a hospital. There are love problems, a medical check-up and some rather odd, but still strangely everyday, conversations, some of which takes place between a monk and a dentist. Then we see the same, or almost the same, scenes played out in other settings, in a future time, or alternative time. One may want to see the film as rooted in a Buddhist tangle of concepts and such concepts also appear in the story itself. But when those themes are taken up explicitly it takes place between people who relates to them in various ways.

In the middle of these conversations and repetitions there are raptures and even more elusive scenes. In one of them, the camera whirls around a steamy hospital boiler room. The camera gravitates towards an open pipe, and lingers there for many minutes while a score of monotonous noise music churns and churns. It's a marvelous scene, even though I have almost no clue what is going on. In this latter section of the film I cannot help thinking about Kubrick. The camera has an icy, Kubrickian feel - and meticulous visual composition - in its evocative exploration of the white, eerie hospital. Even though this film doesn't stop overwhelming me, I constantly have a very hard time pinpointing what atmosphere the scenes exude; this film induces a multitude of feelings and there is no safe pattern at all to fall back on. Weerasethakul's penchant for playfulness doesn't at all end up self-indulgent: rather, I get the impression of a director who is endlessly interested in the strangeness of the surrounding world and the mysterious ways in which we humans move about. If it is something that his movies do exude, it is wonder.

Syndromes and a Century is said to be based on the director's own life, along with his parents' recollection of the past. And well, if you think about it as a film about memories, a more open-ended and mesmerizing account of what memories are is offered than most other films, working with an impoverished set of "flashbacks", succeed in doing: here, memory is connected with meditation, longing, dream, fantasy and utopia/dystopia. The idea, so fondly embraced by most movies, about a steady and self-evident "now" is completely disrupted. The fine thing about the very end of the film is that I still have no idea where the film is, where it has taken us, even though I do get a very specific sense of place.